There are actions that come to us from outside human societies, yet they foretell that something bad is about to happen. For instance, it was said that elephants in Sri Lanka and Thailand migrated to the mountains and highlands of the two countries before the Indian Ocean tsunami struck. It is said that elephants hear low-frequency sound waves or feel ground vibrations before humans do. Similar cases are cited, such as cats hiding before earthquakes, or birds leaving their nests on the eve of volcanic eruptions...

In Lebanon, there are signs of this kind, although their source is human society, not the animal world. There are 'parties, forces, and personalities' whose frequent appearances in the media, excessive issuance of statements and press releases, and holding of press conferences indicate nothing but an impending disaster that is about to happen or is intended to happen.

According to many previous experiences, the voice of those groups resounds when the country is in a difficult situation, while some want to deal with it from outside the elected institutions, entrusting its fate either to non-Lebanese forces or to Lebanese forces that are rebellious against legitimacy and its institutions. This necessarily entails cursing the state, branding its symbols as traitors, its decisions as shameful, and sometimes explicit threats of civil war.

Thus, hastily, these 'parties, forces, and personalities' are awakened from their slumber, and they throw in their lot by issuing a statement or expressing a position, pouring oil on inflamed situations, before sinking again into deep sleep.

The fact is that these are groups characterized, at least since the 1975 war, by a few traits that explain and complement each other:

Since then, they have attached themselves to larger forces, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Syrian and Iraqi Ba'ath parties, and most recently Hezbollah. These forces, which supply them with funding, weapons, offices, and services, allowing them to survive, share only a few ideologies with those 'doctrinaire' groups.

As for the desire of the patron forces to breathe life into the subordinate groups, it is because the latter possess a well-known and familiar name, a legal status, or what might be considered historical legitimacy in some narrow environment. However, as soon as the subordinates show any sign understood as objection or differentiation, the patron oppresses them and may kill prominent individuals in their ranks, without the victim's family daring to name the killer.

But they are also groups that have been pushed, or have pushed themselves, outside the questions of time. Most of their popular bases have abandoned them and sided with their own communal and sectarian blocs, while their big patrons, especially the former Syrian regime and Hezbollah, have dealt them successive deadly blows. Most importantly, they have been afflicted, or have afflicted themselves, with a schizophrenia that splits their ideas and separates them from all reality. Among these groups, the Communists, whose origins date back to the 1920s, often speak as if they are unaware of the fall of the Soviet bloc, missing that the world's workers no longer use hammers and its peasants have stopped using sickles. As for the Syrian Social Nationalists, founded in 1932, their bet on flattened skulls and Cyprus's belonging to the 'nation' as a path to success is pitiable, yesterday and today. Not to mention the swastika, the leadership, and the leader who told them they had a power that, if exercised, would change the face of history, but since then they have only done assassinations and farcical coup attempts. And then there are Nasserist remnants waiting for the defeat of the Tripartite Aggression, and Ba'athists waving the Mother of Battles or the hero of the two Octobers...

And all of these have very rarely won an electoral seat, and whoever among them did win was granted the seat by one of the powerful patrons.

For their part, these groups are not of the kind that reviews or modifies and changes in emulation of Western socialist parties that adopted the market economy, or Western conservative parties that adopted liberal social agendas. Their museum-like quality increases, and in parallel, their clinging to survival increases, because their survival instinct feeds on the existence of leaders, offices, resources, and party symbols, in addition to the organization's name. Thus, continued existence becomes an end in itself, even if the original reason for existence has faded. In the final analysis, the reason for existence that matters is nothing but the possession of absolute truth, in a way that is not affected by facts and does not lack proof.

As for this diminution, it multiplies the need of those groups to seek shelter, care, and protection from the larger forces that secure for their followers the conditions for persisting in defying times and realities.

But the tear that seems patched here bursts open there, and so schisms rage through those groups and shatter them, as we see today, and nothing remains to unite them except hostility toward Lebanon, which afforded them a degree of freedom they had not known in any of the countries where they existed.

For they were formed and crystallized on the love of intervention, guidance, power, and militarization, and these are values that reject freedom and see in it a threat. The astonishing thing here is that these groups, which used to present themselves, influenced by those values, as a source of alternative states, have become used as nails in the machinery of undermining existing states and spreading absolute chaos.