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The goal of "stopping the war" is no longer a question that can be resolved politically. Something meaningful could have been done before we reached a state of full escalation, but after the tipping point the outcome is now entirely driven by military and geopolitical dynamics.
Lebanese activists are ineffective not only because their tactics are mismatched to the current context, but also because their goals don't match the current state of affairs.
They fall into the same pattern of proposing poorly grounded strategies for forcing either HA or Israel to halt the conflict, without having any credible leverage over either actor. All we get out of it is a never ending cycle of maximalist rhetoric followed by lamentations.
The shrinking of political opportunities during war time doesn't imply that the organizational work that ought to have been carried out during peace time is rendered useless.
Building a broadly legible coalition that can articulate a position that rejects the competing narratives of the belligerents and can develop coherent and organized expressions of this position is difficult but important.
It may not stop the war but lays the groundwork for post-war action. More importantly, it creates the organizational basis for more immediate achievable objectives: minimizing the suffering of the displaced and defusing inter-sectarian hostility.
@Nizhsn I feel like the type of people who start parties and get involved in them are kind of geeky about politics (wonks or people who know who Kautsky was) and end up catering to similar people who are 1) a small group relative to society at large and
@Nizhsn 2) so opinionated they make ideological coherence difficult. This is a tension I'm not actually sure how to resolve but my intuition is that rigid ideological coherence increases barrier to entry while ideological underdetermination reduces the cost of exit
@Nizhsn (my personal experience is with Marxists who periodically self-immolate over minor disagreements but I feel like something similar obtains among more moderate people).
@Nizhsn In a sense I'm curious about whether it's possible to get my 20 year old cousin who has never heard of social democracy but is in the LF as a result of his social circle to even begin to consider the questions that would drive him towards any ideologically coherent party.
@Nizhsn And if not, if that means were doomed to endless permutations of the same (increasingly burned out) people who were in my 2012 Mahdi Amel reading group.
@Nizhsn I agree with your claim that that an alliance of 2/3 strong parties would be more impactful than a large coalition of small political actors. I guess my hope would be that the urgency of the humanitarian crisis and (maybe) broad agreement over a rejection of military hegemony ...
@Nizhsn and Israeli aggression (which I understand some people think is contradictory) might create the conditions for a coalition of small political actors, out of which strong parties could be distilled (which requires solving what seems to be a universally intractable problem).
@Nizhsn If this reads like an optimistic prescription during a bleak moment that's because it is haha, but I can't think of a more productive thing to direct my attention towards.