The thinking people are the biggest nightmare for any ruling system in the Third World. Therefore, all plans start by drowning this people in their small worries, so they have no time to think about the important question: Why is this happening to us? And the more important question: What to do?

Yes, a modern social contract or ongoing renewed wars! The idea of the social contract indicates that this contract moved individuals from a primitive state to an organized society. The social contract moved individuals from the original natural state (instinct) when humans lived by nature, without a ruling authority or laws and duties towards society, authority, or state.

The social contract theory is a political philosophical idea based on the assumption that individuals voluntarily give up some of their natural freedoms and agree to a social contract to establish an organized society and ruling authority, in exchange for protection, order, and preservation of basic rights. This explains the origin of the legitimacy of the state and political authority based on individuals’ consent, instead of divine delegation. It is the implicit agreement among members of society about defining their relationships with each other and with the state they live in.

In Lebanon, there are no longer headlines, articles, numbers, discussions, analyses, interviews, or disputes except about wars, bombings, battles, victims, displaced persons, refugees, funerals, cemeteries, and quarrels between the state and corrupt, armed, lawless political parties and organizations, or what remains of them, for example but not limited to accountability and justice as the foundation of the kingdom, as it is said… or the foundation of the state in truth.

In May 2024, the Lebanese government announced a decision to grant the “International Criminal Court” jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute serious crimes committed on Lebanese territory since October 7, 2023, but the government retracted the decision after just over a month due to internal and external pressures!

In November 2024, more than 20 human rights organizations, including “Human Rights Watch,” called on Lebanon and other UN member states to hold a special session at the “United Nations Human Rights Council” to establish an international investigation mechanism into all human rights violations committed by all parties involved in conflicts and wars in Lebanon.

August 2024 marked four years since the Beirut port explosion, which killed at least 220 people, injured more than 7,000, and caused severe property damage. Lebanese authorities have not held anyone accountable to date, due to “incentives” in the traditional Lebanese way… intimidation and excessive force by some… and illegal weapons that exceed in quantity and quality the legal state weapons combined.

On January 17, 2024, the Lebanese Public Prosecutor Sabouh Suleiman suspended an arrest warrant against former Public Works Minister Youssef Fenianos, which had been issued by Judge Tarek Bitar in September 2021. The suspension came months after the Court of Cassation suspended an arrest warrant against another suspect, former Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil, and these matters have been dormant in the corridors of power or rather in the labyrinths of the deep political, military, and security party-state.

Also, throughout last year and before and after, victims’ families and local and international human rights organizations continued to demand an independent and impartial international investigation into the explosion by the UN Human Rights Council. Yes, an independent and impartial international investigation into the explosion unlike any other since World War I and II, except for the Japanese Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions, in the worst and most horrific event humanity has faced in the history of wars, old and modern!

On December 10 of last year, two days after the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its allies in Syria, then Lebanese Interior Minister in the “patchwork” government Bassam Mawlawi announced that only 9 Lebanese previously detained in Syrian prisons had returned to Lebanon. A wise man says, Your Excellency the Minister: the heroism of a person at this stage is to remain alive, honorable, and not lose his mind!

Meanwhile, the former Lebanese Interior Minister, or perhaps he did not know, being a seasoned security man, that families of about 17,000 people kidnapped or “disappeared” during and after the bloody Lebanese civil war between 1975 and 1990 are still waiting to obtain information about the fate of their loved ones, whose pictures and memories still fill the walls of their homes or those of their relatives… filling the walls of memory that bleed blood and tears… the memory that still bleeds to this moment… as society cannot be put in a freezer… and the story continues!