Tuesday, September 03, 2013

Leftists on Syria: a classification

The world leftists are now three groups as far as Syria is concerned: 1) there are those leftists who are now part of the US-Saudi-Israeli camp and they make no qualms about it. Sure, they make all sorts of noise and they spin fat tales about how the Fee Syrian Army thugs (created and sponsored by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and US and Turkey and Israel) are misunderstood communists.  They also claim that their support for a revolution that does not exist in Syria is to fight Russian imperialism and Iranian religious ideology: but curiously, they don't notice American imperialism, or they think it is too quiet and peaceful and they also have to claim that the ideology of their allies in the Jihadi groups, and in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and UAE are secular and progressive.  2) there are vulgar leftists who support the Syrian regime and who pretend that the regime is a fellow leftist party when the regime has in fact dismantled the progressive element that the Ba`th Party first introduced in Syria (although it was repressive from the start).  Those leftists also want to forget that the Asad regime (father and son) moved away from the brilliant secularism of the Salah Jadid regime (probably one of the most secular regimes in contemporary Arab history).  Those leftists see that supporting the Syrian regime is part of supporting the "resistance axis" against the reactionary axis of US-Israel-Saudi Arabia, etc.  Those leftists forget that the Syrian regime of Bashshar has moved the farthest toward capitalism than any previous Ba`thist regime.  3) I place myself in the third group: those leftists who oppose both the Syrian regime and the reactionary Syrian rebels supported by US-Saudi Arabia-Israel-UAE and other reactionary forces in the region.  There is in fact a segment of the Syrian opposition (represented by Haytham Al-Manna` and others) which also can be placed in this segment.