Im aware that he is not a socialist by any means but i watched some interviews of him and he does have some good takes on US imperialism and the Western Hegemony but i also recall hearing that he did some pretty shady stuff but i cant remember any specifics…Im generally supportive of leaders who try to free their countries of the boots of the US even when they’re not socialist per se but this Assad guy seems a little off
Maybe he’s as bad as The West insists he is. Maybe all the evidence of his war crimes and crimes against humanity are real and not fabricated.
It doesn’t matter.
We Westerners (and we people discussing it in English) are the last people entitled to an opinion after what we did to Libya and Iraq. Maybe a lot of people here were just kids when Libya was destroyed, and a lot of people here weren’t alive when Iraq was destroyed, but when you say “this Assad guy seems a little off” that’s what leftists were saying about Qaddafi with his weird plastic surgery lips and chin and his ‘Bodyguard Harem’.
We don’t get to sit here and weigh up the mountains of evidence against Assad and discuss amongst ourselves what’s real and fake and come up with a net positive or negative opinion. Every time those kinds of discussions has happened in English, it’s just ended up enabling and approving atrocities.
We need to recognize that we don’t have enough reliable information about him - especially those of us in The West - and we need to recognize that feeling the need to have an opinion is a symptom of our interventionist culture.
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It doesn’t matter.
Weeell, it wouldn’t if shit like chemical attacks pinned on him weren’t fabricated by the West. I sure shit ain’t about to absolve them alphabet agencies of that.
Uncritical support for global south countries looking for national self-determination.
yes
He must stay.
Congrats, you are now immortal.
AFAIK he’s a Ba’athist (a type of
non-Marxist socialistMarxist) and a very popular leader, but I don’t know much about him personally. I’m sure Marxists have many disagreements with his party’s domestic policies, as with any non-ML country, but Syria’s anti-imperialist struggle should absolutely be supportedBa’athists were originally Marxists and scientific socialists (they have since grown into “big tents”). They split with the Comintern communists in West Asia due to those parties being weak on French and British Imperialism as well as the early Comintern lines on Israel. They are primarily focused on building socialist states in the region to eventually merge into an Arab Socialist nation. It’s a decolonization movement. However, Bashar’s father was a revisionist who caused MLs to leave the Ba’ath in Syria. The Iraqi Ba’athists held the original lines up until they were ousted in 2003. Overall they are very watered down on the ML side and more-so focused on the NatLib side of things.
One more thing that made them keep a distance from other Socialist movements was the religion question. Iraq and Syria are very diverse countries and have communities practicing some of the oldest religions in the world. They were secular but did not have an anti-religious line and in fact believed religions in the region could play a revolutionary role against colonialism.
you’re right, I vaguely remember reading that somewhere
Do you have any quick resources to read more on Ba’athism for people who don’t know much about current day MENA? I was interested on learning about it a while back, but NATOpedia was not helpful and doing full research looks a bit daunting.
Iraqi Ba’athists self crit of their first 5 years in power: https://www.marxists.org/history/iraq/baath/index.htm
It’s a good outline of their views and their description of the region and country’s role.
Ba’ath you mean? I didnt know that, the only politician i know who followed this was Saddam Hussein
yes, a Ba’athist is someone who practices Ba’athism, and Hussein was part of the Iraqi Ba’ath party
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The main thing to keep in mind about this topic: if you want to have a long, healthy and happy life you should never utter the words “Assad must go”.
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I mean i agree with everything he has said so far but the one thing that bothers me a little is the ba’athism, and to be fair…i dont know a lot about ba’athism but isnt it like a little ethnically chauvinist? I know that Saddam Hussein tried to commit genocide against Kurds in Iraq.
Ba’athists are not chauvinists they are Arab nationalists, wanting to unite the Arabic speaking peoples against colonialism. However, they live in diverse countries with significant numbers of non-Arabic cultures. Previous iterations of the Arab Nationlist movement like the Nasserists wanted to immediately unite Arab majority countries while the Ba’athists realized they need to first unite the cultures within their countries and then building a greater indigenous state in the region to fight European (and Turk) colonialism. So the Ba’ath in Iraq started a popular front with the Kurdish communities, but the tensions with Kurds, Arabs, and Persians in the Levant was already strained by Imperialist strategy before the Ba’ath seized power. The popular front was in the right direction of peace and unity until the war with a Iran, who’s new government hated the Arab socialists.
Now, on the gas attacks, we have to know a few things. The US only blamed Iraq for the attacks retroactively, and in fact initially blamed Iran. The only witnesses of the attacks from the outside were Iranian journalists, working alongside British “journalists”. When the US switched to blame Iraq, in preparation for the sanctions they would lay on Iraq in the 90s to choke out the Ba’ath, they claimed that they knew it was Iraq the whole time and only blamed Iran because Iraq was their “ally”. Neither Iraq nor Iran ever claimed the US to be an ally. Iraq had been fighting Kurdish insurgents who were being organized by US/UK and Iranian intelligence, Iraq had real reasons to be fighting in Kurdish territory in the north. The Iranians had been occupying the village up until the day of the attack, where they quietly retreated in the morning before the attack. Now we also have the false flag accusations against Syria and Libya, where British intelligence worked with the so-called White Helmets to fabricate a chemical attack to justify the American occupation in the Kurdish region of Syria as well as NATO funding for ISIS, I mean the “moderate rebels”.
A lot of these attacks towards the Ba’aths come retroactively. To me, an obvious attempt to discredit the Ba’ath based on inflating the “relationship” between the US and Iraq. By pretending to be an ally of Iraq, and acknowledging some of the US’s bad history of intervention, they were able to divide the left on Iraq and later Libya and Syria. “We were bad but now we are good and we gotta get rid of the monsters we’ve accidentally created while doing realpolitik”. I think even people like Parenti fell for this. Meanwhile the only real theme in these events is that the US and British supported rebels against anti-Imperialists governments wherever they could.
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Pro
Whatever your feelings about Assad, he is more legitimate a leader of Syria than Obama, Biden, Trump, Bolton, Blinken, Clinton or any of the western anarchoimperialists, i.e. belden, NATO freaks, etc. Western imperialism has already done enough damage and needs to stfu and go away.
I don’t really care about him one way or the other
Generally favorable but I will readily admit I don’t know that much about him.
