Hashim `Ali Muhsin

This is an unknown soldier. Hashim `Ali Muhsin (there is a one line about him in Hanna Batatu's The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movement in Iraq) was a Stalinist Marxist-Leninist but he was also a distinguished Arab revolutionary. This is the 20-year anniversary of his death. He remains largely unknown except who knew him from the 60s during his work with the Union of Arab Workers and the Movement of Arab Nationalists. But people don't know (because he is not a braggart like George Hawi) that he was most instrumental in forming a Lebanese (leftist) national resistance movement against Israeli occupation back in 1978. Back then, he tried to invite George Hawi and Muhsin Ibrahim to join, but they did not. They later did in 1982. He coined the name. From 1970, he led the Lebanese sister party of the PFLP, the Arab Socialist Action Party-Lebanon (I wrote my MA thesis at AUB on this party, and Rashid Khalidi was my supervisor.) Muhsin later in the mid-1980s broke with the PFLP. He was a prolific (but not a very good) writer, and produced tons of organizational literature on Marxist Arab politics. He was a good polemicist, in the Leninist tradition, and his critique of the Lebanese Communist Party and the Organization of Communist Action was devastating and correct, in my opinion. I was in high school when I first saw him. He was neither charismatic nor appealing, but he was effective in his world. (thanks Rami)