What are you talking about? (2-3)

We saw - in the last article - that the people are in the concept of the empowered elite (i.e. with its alleged faults): a fictional being, and that the people whose falsehood does not come from behind it or whoever is in front of it in the concept of the populist revolting against this elite: a being no less fictional.

We did not win from the two scenarios except with a list of prejudiced or na الأحكامve normative provisions by which political parties clash in a fierce battle, the goal of each of which is to seize the greatest amount of wealth, power and consideration.

But what about the real people? We will not discover it unless we are freed from the prejudicial normative provisions, and they all predict more about the nature of the descriptor than the nature of the description, so where do we start?

If the features of the road have overlapped before you in normal life, return to the values, and if they overlapped in the world of ideas, return to the origin of the words. In the language of the ancient Arabs, the term “people” has two meanings: the largest group of the tribe ... which is of one origin.

What is meant by the largest number is, of course, not the matter or the value. Every people necessarily have a number that increases or decreases, and this alone is sometimes sufficient to define it. The 1.4 billion people can distinguish the Chinese people from the hundreds of people currently on the surface of the earth. But the importance of this data - simple and objective - does not lie in the large or small number of the same, but - as we will see - in its source.

Now what about the one parent? No one will take you seriously if you say that the Egyptian people are descended from one grandfather, and everyone also knows that there is no American Adam, the child of the American people, or a Japanese container that the Japanese people owe to exist. So what is the common denominator that allows us to put tens or hundreds of millions in one box that we call the people?

Ethnicity? It might be ... but the American people are a mixture of whites, blacks, indigenous people and Asian immigrants. Earth? An important element ... but there are about a million Tunisians outside of Tunisian territory, and yet they are an integral part of the Tunisian people. There are millions of Palestinians who are undisputed in being a people, even though their lands were taken from them.

The language? Of course this should be taken into consideration ... but the Canadian or Belgian people have two official languages. Debt? Yes, it plays a pivotal role, but the Lebanese people are made up of Christians and Muslims. Common history? On the eyes and the head, but if this were the determining factor, the Saudis and the Iranians would have formed the same people.

customs and traditions? Indeed, it is an element that Labib's analyst does not overlook, but many customs and traditions of eating, dressing, and musical taste hardly differ in anything between the German people and the French people, however!

political system? Who doubts his role? However, the participation of the Swedes and the Norwegians in democracy, apart from the unity of race, language and religion, did not prevent them from forming two independent peoples.

Common interests? Certainly we are facing a very dangerous factor, but look at the reality of all peoples and you will find the conflict of contradictory interests at its most intense between classes, and it may even amount to a civil war.

Feeling of a common affiliation? Yes, praise be to God, but see what tribal, religious, and sectarian conflicts have done in how many countries a single people is supposed to exist.

To summarize:

1 - The real people is an objective human gathering made of multi-continent pluralism, in which different proportions contribute to this or that people, with racial, religious, linguistic, cultural, economic / social, political pluralism, without neglecting the importance of multi-generational and pluralistic people in an era Excessive individualism.

2- Neither language, race, nor religion, nor land, political system, or shared history, nor customs, traditions, and values; sufficient elements - combined or individual - to form a common, unified trunk that plays the role of biological or mythical grandfather in the composition of the tribe. What is the main factor that there is no people without it, even if all or most of the factors mentioned are found?

**

We saw the importance of the number in a primary identification of the people, but its importance does not lie in it, but in who determines it? Who determines the number of the largest group of the tribe? Who decides that these Tunisians are given documents proving their Tunisian identity, and excludes brothers, relatives and loved ones who may live among them sharing the language, religion, history and customs, whose name are Libyans in the south and Algerians in the west?

Who gives the citizenship that brings us together (even if we do not know them) within the same people, and sets us apart from the human beings of other peoples (even if they bring us together some of them with the closest connections)? Who can deny us this nationality, and we know that it - like name, gender, and profession - is an essential part of our identity?

Who is charged with protecting the land on which this community called the People lives? Whoever watches over the protection of meat, that is, peaceful coexistence between the components of pluralism that we have seen, and everyone knows that most of the problems are caused by the difficulties of managing them?

Of course, the answer to all these questions is the state. It is the most important common denominator that combines human beings who may share language, race and religion and may not participate, and its most important function is to control its natural pluralism so that the meat does not explode into diaspora.

Of course, every rule has an exception, but the exceptions do not negate the rule, which is that there is no people in our time - as we know it - without the state as we know it; and the Saudi people took an example.

It is this new organization that succeeded the tribal or imperial organization that gives - in our times - the people its place among peoples, through the legal personality that enables it to occupy a position within the joint institutions, and its members were able to move with a recognized travel document. It is this modern organization of power that gives the people a place among peoples, which increases if the performance of the state is high and decreases if the state is rogue or failed.

In return, the state does not exist except the people. We must not forget that the state at the end is nothing but a hierarchical bureaucracy emanating from the people. In Tunisia, for example, it is made up of 650,000 employees, the highest of whom is the rank of President of the Republic, and they are all counted in the general census from among the Tunisians and documents proving their nationality.

All of these people are distributed in structures (the army, security, administration, etc.) that are subject to the values ​​and traditions of their society, laws and transitory political will, and they consume a specific budget; all this is only to run the affairs of a people whose fools perceive to be found to serve them. How funny it is for the state to be - at the same time - the mother and daughter of the people, and the people will be the son and father of the state!

**

If the people and the state are so closely connected, then the logical conclusion is that the future of our peoples is the future of our nations. Here we come to the third characteristic of the real people: that it is a historical being, whatever we think it exists from and to eternity.

It is a stage in the history of a human group that has taken more than one name and identity, has lived under the control of more than one transient authority and will continue its changes, but no one knows where and what we Tunisians will be like, for example, a hundred years or a thousand years ago (assuming that there will be a human race on the surface of the earth A thousand years later?

This moving people is a group of people that collaborates among them on the challenges posed by the constraints of nature and the pressures of other peoples competing with them, and therefore it is always a collective project framed by a myth and led by a dream, and it runs the most difficult, longest and most dangerous way.

Even in the short timeframe of the coming decades, nothing is optimistic and we see the way our people take today, as a result of what our countries have gone through in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan and Somalia. Who is able today to give us reassurances that we are not before the beginning of a total collapse of all our Arab countries and their peoples?

The state of the state today in our Arab world is similar to a house that moves slowly under the earth, and is attacked on the four sides by the tsunami, and the family that inhabits it is involved in the dispute over the arrangement of rooms, the powers that should be given to the head of the house, and how the girls' disputes with their mother are resolved.

"We are in the process of destroying our capital from nature, but we are determined to ignore the cost. On the day we are given the bill, we will find ourselves powerless to pay," wrote American novelist Richard Powers about the climate disaster that is plaguing us all. What Powers did not say is that the bulk of the bill will be given to Arabs, and we will be unable to pay the people.

Our countries today are unable to provide work for millions of the unemployed, and to preserve the security of their internal and external peoples. So what about preparing the conditions for survival for future generations, not only because of the tyranny or democratic corruption that is lurking in them, but also because of tremendous external factors that I did not notice during the day, which are today - more Ever - I am unable to influence it.

When my memory goes back to recent decades and the intellectual / political struggles that my generation experienced regarding our plan for the better country, today - after the experience of opposition and governance - came to me a picture of arrogant pupils, overestimated their intelligence and sat for the telling of an assumption about "the solution" and wrote the most beautiful texts, but they were All of them are off topic because these conceited did not originally understand the exam question.

The question of the exam was in the 1980s: after Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher laid the foundations of the new world economic order, that is, the rules of wild liberalism ...; and because your countries will become the result of this transformation as either customers or hostages ...; and because new economic policies in the shadow of authoritarian corruption will divide your peoples into Their “thieves” are valued by unemployment and poverty, and corrupt “elites” who are brutal to preserve their privileges ..; and that the chasm widens among them swallowing the middle class that is the backbone of your societies ..; and because the situation will end in continuous social explosions leading to revolutions, most of them bloody ..; Are they doing?

In the nineties the question was: After the industrial boom in China and India that will exacerbate the sins of the industrial boom in Europe and America, then the effects of global warming accelerate as a result of all the new factories emitting carbon dioxide ...; and given that the most affected areas are your Arab region Which will become - according to the expectations of the specialists - at the end of this century, not inherently viable, as a result of water shortages, the disappearance of agricultural lands, and the rise in temperature ... So what are you going to do?

In the 2000s, the question was: Because the boom in communications and information technology will make you countries and peoples fully dependent on a handful of American companies, shape your minds and hearts, control your secrets, and guide your democratic elections in the direction that serves their interests ..; what are you doing?

The question today: Now that all the bridges around you have shed their teeth, and you have become like orphans in the banquet of harmony, the direct occupation and the subordinate dependency have returned, and the border battles have become battles of existence, so what are you doing to defend what was once called Arab national security?

Thus were the exam questions, and our response to them was all this intellectual thirstiness that poisoned our minds and put a thick film on our eyes: Islam (political) is the solution; socialism (Soviet or Yugoslav) is the solution; Arab unity (Baathist or Nasserism) is the solution; democracy (liberal) (Or social) is the solution, and today normalization and subordination are the solution.

I hope no one will tell me what I do not mean, or that he accuses me of having atone for what I have believed in my entire life and misled people with. Of course, democracy, as Winston Churchill said, remains a bad system, but it is the least bad regime. Of course, we must fight despotism, while mortgaging the fate of an entire people in the hands of an ordinary person and sometimes less than ordinary.

It is evident that we should not abandon our Islamic values ​​or our unitary project. It remains for us, though, to admit - without accusing each other, or to argue against each other, as the situation no longer permits such childishness - that all of our solutions were at best partial, naive, and at worst completely out of touch.

The definitive evidence is our failure, all of us facing millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey, the Bantustans of Palestine, the Yemeni famines, the wars of Sudan and Somalia, the rupture of Libya, the unprecedented repression in Egypt, the halal bars in Saudi Arabia, the suicide of children in Tunisia, and the angry youth in the arenas of Algeria, Beirut and Baghdad No one knows whether this slipping of our nations and peoples towards the bloody chaos unprecedented in our contemporary history will end one day.

What should we pursue with all our strength openly to stop this drift toward the abyss? Is there a possibility for our countries to recover and be able to save our people? Can the people of the citizens - who roar today in the streets without a clear vision - save our countries? The rest of the conversation .. And it would not be too hard to live without hope!