{"id":1421,"date":"2020-08-17T20:01:13","date_gmt":"2020-08-17T21:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malvinartley.com\/blog.malvinartley.com\/?p=1421"},"modified":"2020-08-17T20:01:13","modified_gmt":"2020-08-17T21:01:13","slug":"lebanon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malvinartley.com\/blog.malvinartley.com\/2020\/08\/17\/lebanon\/","title":{"rendered":"Lebanon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following on from the previous article about Lebanon, that nation is at another crossroads, which is easy to see. The warehouse area of the port of Beirut, Lebanon\u2019s major port, through which most of its food was imported, is now gone. One of the richest areas of Beirut is in ruins. The nation is the site of an emerging great power competition, as those great powers (Russia, China and the US, and Iran as well) vie for ultimate influence. The outcome of that struggle will determine Lebanon\u2019s future for the next few years at least, but also for the wider Middle East, as well as for the great powers. It will be of Lebanon\u2019s choosing. To know what to expect next, we needed a working chart for the nation. In this post we look at that chart and then at what is in store astrologically for Lebanon and Western Asia in the immediate years ahead.<\/span><\/p>\n

We start with a very brief background. What we know as the land of Lebanon today has always had a sectarian history since Islam and Christianity emerged. The primary sects these days are headed by warlords (like mafia bosses, and with private armies), composed largely of Maronite Christians, Sunni and Shia Muslims and Druze. The people there, especially the Maronite Christians, have had close ties with Roman Catholicism and thereby France and Italy. The Druze emerged from the Maronites.<\/span><\/p>\n

The area was under Muslim rule for about 400 years, starting with the Emirate of Mt. Lebanon, which was an autonomous region in the Ottoman Empire. In 1861 the area became the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, which lasted until 1920 and the French Mandate, the latter an outcome of the fall of the Ottomans after the 1st<\/sup> World War. Since the Crusades, the French Mandate was the first time any European power had wielded any sort of controlling interest in the region.<\/span><\/p>\n

During the French Mandate the state of Greater Lebanon was cobbled together from majority Maronite areas and surrounding Shia and Sunni provinces. It had the same boundaries as the modern Lebanese state. In 1926 it was declared a democratic republic by France with a parliamentary system of government, noting that system of government was French-imposed. During WWII, when France was occupied by Germany, Lebanon gained a measure of independence. On 8 Nov 1943, after elections were held, the government announced the end of the French mandate. They were promptly imprisoned by the French, until international pressure gained their release, at which point they re-declared their independence, by appearances in the morning of 22 Nov 1943. That date is celebrated as Lebanese Independence Day.<\/span><\/p>\n

The reasons for choosing the timing of independence for that date were given in the preceding article. What we need now is to prove the chart. As a proving of the independence chart, the following are some of the major events that changed Lebanese society flowing on from their independence, with links to the charts of the events:<\/span><\/p>\n