Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk

Published by  Oxford university Press, 2001,.softcover, index, 724 pages, condition: new.

Account of war in the late-20th century both as historical document and as an eyewitness testament to human savagery. Written by one of Britain's foremost journalists, this book combines political analysis and war reporting: it is an epic account of the Lebanon conflict by an author who has personally witnessed the carnage of Beirut for over a decade. Fisk's book recounts the details of a terrible war but it also tells a story of betrayal and illusion, of Western blindness that had led inevitably to political and military catastrophe. Fisk's book gives us a further insight into this troubled part of the world.

I am a 19 year-old Lebanese university student. I was born in 1996, the year Israel massacred civilians in the village of Qana. I carry Beirut with me on my passport wherever I go. Lebanon is the country I was born and raised in, the country of my father and his ancestors. Yet, like all my peers, I graduated high school with a profound ignorance of my countrys modern history. The events that tore Lebanon apart for decades ever since its independence in 1943 and the evacuation of the last french soldier in 1946 until the day I was born are blackened out from the collective conscience of our society.
Upon reading this book, this marvelous piece of historical non-fiction, I was amazed at the horror, the depravity of the Lebanese civil war. The gory battles whose deafening echoes still reverberate in our contemporary society are only smothered by censors terrified of pouring salt on open wounds. It is insane to think about it this way: Have I not had the curiosity of reading this bulky book, I wouldve stayed oblivious of the appalling history of my fatherland. The Beirut streets, which Fisk describes with such vivacity, are the same streets I spent my childhood in, yet this foreigner seems to know them more than I do. How disgraceful it is to learn about your own countrys modern history through the words of a foreign correspondent. How disgraceful it is to trust his version of the story more than your fellow countrymens because youre sure of their biasedness. How shameful it is for me to be oblivious of these important facts when my own father fought on those same frontlines Fisk so ingeniously wrote of.

I am personally indebted to Mr. Robert Fisk for his dedicated first-hand reporting of the Lebanese civil war, for risking his life countless times for the sake of honest journalism, especially when all the parties (Israel, Syria, the PLO, the Phalange, the United States) without exception never ceased to distort reality as if the stories of the war were plunged in a deep well of Orwellian purgative waters.
It is quite astounding that accounts of the civil war arent taught in classrooms, but understandably so, because the same warlords who terrorized, slaughtered, plundered, raped and prevaricated 30 years ago, are still wearing suits and holding an (apparently permanent but definitely illegitimate) seat in our Lebanese parliament today.
As if reading about how foreign armies and guerrillas so insolently destroyed my country wasnt enough, I had to read about how Lebanese people themselves slaughtered each other in cold blood, how Lebanese leaders so worshipped by their followers to THIS DAY antagonized each other and gave military orders which have inevitably ended in human carnage.

It is no surprise factious tensions still arise today and the country is constantly on the verge of the outbreak of violence, thats all because the scars of the civil war are still branded in our society and people are still embittered. My own parents and many people I know still use east and west Beirut as if the war never really ended.