Nothing in this country shocks anymore.

We live in a land where thieves receive certificates of integrity, while reformers are denied even the right to defend themselves.

The latest act in this tragic farce appeared in the barrel-bomb daily al-Akhbar, where writer Badr al-Hajj attacked Lokman Slim and Monika Borgmann, accusing them of having “seized” the archive of Studio Baalbak— a trailblazing production company founded in 1963 that revolutionized Lebanese cinema and advertising.

In truth, his article is nothing more than a new hymn in the long liturgy of Syrian Social Nationalist falsification — a tired voice fluent in the language of treachery, living off the crumbs of the same looted archives it pretends to defend.

Al-Hajj writes solemnly about “national heritage,” yet his likes have built their private museums on stolen public shores, trading in antiquities smuggled from Syria — some through ISIS and war profiteers, others looted from Palmyra, Homs, and Aleppo at the height of devastation.
They never raised their voices when manuscripts were sold by the pound, nor when Tele Liban’s archives were plundered. Their problem has never been with theft — only with those who preserved memory from their grasp.

Lokman Slim was no bureaucrat, no beneficiary of any intelligence-funded foundation.
He was a living conscience who chose to confront the assassination machine through documentation.
He liberated the archive while others pillaged the state; he restored those materials not to decorate a private museum, but to return them to the people.

Those who attack him today are the natural heirs of those who killed him — physically, because they could not kill him intellectually.

Badr al-Hajj proclaims himself a “historian” and a “heritage scholar,” yet he possesses neither history nor scholarship — only the craft of the copyist and the greed of the gravedigger, and worse still, the appetite of the tomb raider.
He digs through the bones of others not out of love for history, but in search of spoils, gathering what remains of the dead to sell it as “cultural heritage.”
A petty clerk who steals other people’s words and recycles them in the stale rhetoric of the intelligence age — claiming to guard the nation’s memory while serving as the polished face of cultural looting.

At a time when Justice Minister Adel Nassar has appointed new investigative judges to reopen Lebanon’s long-buried cases of political assassination — from Samir Kassir and Gebran Tueni to Pierre Gemayel and Saleh Aridi — figures like al-Hajj reemerge to commit another kind of murder: the assassination of memory.

While the judiciary, however belatedly, seeks to exhume graves in pursuit of truth, al-Hajj rushes to seal them again — defending killers he dares not name.
He stands against the spirit of justice with a corrupt cultural tongue, replacing accountability with justification, and inquiry with spite.
It is no coincidence that such rhetoric thrives in the same moral climate that shields assassins and rewards their apologists.

It is hardly surprising that this discourse comes from a writer nourished by the decaying legacy of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) — a movement that produced not a renaissance but an archive of security reports disguised as ideology.
The SSNP, which once preached “the nation’s awakening,” has long survived on the files of the intelligence services, not on ideas — twisting history to sanctify obedience.
In its Lebanese form, it has withered into a retired cultural project feeding on the independence of others and scavenging their memory to sustain an illusion of moral superiority.
It is, quite literally, a movement of archives — incapable of creation, expert only in recycling: lies, history, and corpses alike.

Al-Hajj questions Lokman and Monika about the archive while ignoring the fact that the very state entrusted with protecting heritage has long handed its institutions to militias and corrupt contractors.
If there were any foreign loyalty or political leverage involved, the authorities would have rushed to intervene.
But they remain silent because the victim here is Lokman Slim — and the culprit is the system itself, terrified of any reminder that true culture is an act of resistance against lies.

When part of the archive was transferred to Germany for restoration and digitization, it was not “smuggled,” as the new gravediggers claim — it was rescued from an environment that treats memory as a crime.
The European institutions that cooperated with UMAM Documentation and Research did not steal anything; they helped preserve what remains of Lebanon’s cultural memory.

It is easy for such people to sermonize about “ethics” and “the rule of law.”
Yet the bitter irony is that those who plundered history, destroyed cities, and looted the sea now present themselves as guardians of national heritage.

Lokman did not die from bullets alone.
He is killed anew with every article that seeks to bury him again.
And yet he remains — his memory a mirror in which the Lebanese see the faces of their tormentors.

The Lebanon Lokman dreamed of was never a land of corrupt deals and fake museums; it was a republic of free memory.
Those who attack him today are the custodians of rot — heirs of barrel bombs and censorship, allies of every power that fears ink more than lead.

The pretenders of culture cannot claim morality or humanity.
For culture without freedom is merely the instinct of authority, and ethics without truth are nothing but ornate lies.

And these people, whatever purity they feign, could never lift their eyes toward Nabu, the Babylonian god of writing and wisdom, who weighed every word on the scales of conscience.
Were they to stand before his temple, the pen would tremble in their hands and their tongues would dry — for Nabu accepts no offerings from hands stained with dust and blood, nor blesses those who turn writing into a cloak for theft and deceit.

The eulogists of silence who write under the shadow of corruption can never claim culture.
Those who attack Lokman in the name of “heritage” fail to grasp the simplest truth:
that ink, not bullets, is what grants immortality.

Makram Rabah is an Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut, Department of History. His book Conflict on Mount Lebanon: The Druze, the Maronites and Collective Memory (Edinburgh University Press) covers collective identities and the Lebanese Civil War.