******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
From Wikipedia: Yassin al-Haj Saleh (born in Ar-Raqqah in 1961) is a
Syrian writer and political dissident. He writes on political, social
and cultural subjects relating to Syria and the Arab world.[1]
From 1980 until 1996 he spent time in prison in Syria for his
membership in what he now calls a "communist pro-democracy group". He
was arrested while he was studying medicine in Aleppo and spent sixteen
years in prison, the last in Tadmur Prison. He took his final
examination as a general medical practitioner in 2000, but never practiced.
---
Part one:
The Assad state prefers the geopolitical approach, which reduces the
country to its rulers, keeping the general population invisible. The
approach that centers around the powerful of the West easily serves the
purposes of the domestic powerful. The narrative goes this way: the
world is in constant conspiracy against us, and thus it is necessary to
strengthen our ‘national unity,’ to allow no break in our ranks so that
the enemies do not infiltrate our ‘internal front’. This theory leaves
no space for internal political life, no space for public conversation
or for any type of independent political organization. Indeed, it was
impossible for groups of Syrians to gather even in private homes to
discuss public matters. The Syrian people lived in absolute political
poverty, forbidden for more than forty years the right to assembly and
the right to speech. There is a fixed bond between political poverty and
economic poverty, as the works of the Indian Amartya Sen show.
full:
http://internationaleonline.tumblr.com/post/102807091601/forty-four-months-and-forty-four-years-1-two
Part two:
The population targeted by war lives in impoverished neighborhoods of
big cities, in towns with crumbling social conditions and services, and
in dilapidated rural areas. They suffer from the rampant embezzlement by
state agents, security personnel, bureaucrats, and Baath party
affiliates. Patron client relations, not citizenship, defined the
relation between the state and the lucky segment of the population,
while most of the Syrians lived impoverished (37% below the poverty line
of two dollars per day in 2007), excluded from the system of
clientelism, and compelled to pay bribes out of the little they have in
the first place. The poor were more deeply impoverished by this power
structure, and the holders of power were enriched.
This elite war is not new in Syria.
A generation ago, between 1979 and 1982, a wave of intense social and
political struggle rose up, ending in the great massacre in Hama in
February 1982, in which twenty to thirty thousand people were killed.
Hama was only one of the cities in which protests erupted from various
ideological backgrounds. Tens of thousands spent long years in prison. I
was one of them for a period of sixteen years, during which time close
to fifteen thousand prisoners were executed in Tadmur prison. At that
time too, the regime and its ideological tools reduced the struggle to
one between the regime and the Islamists. Untrue. It was a much wider
struggle, involving university students, trade unions, and political
parties. This struggle included a general strike in a number of cities,
and many public statements with emancipatory and democratic demands were
disseminated.
The aim of such an excess of repression was to discipline the public, to
create a long-term memory of fear. For nearly 20 years after it, Syria
was a ‘kingdom of silence,’ in the expression of Riyad al-Turk, the
leftist struggler who spent about eighteen years in solitary confinement
during the rule of Hafez (1980-1998). He was held captive for fifteen
months under Bashar (2001-2002), and lives now in hiding in Damascus.
full:
http://internationaleonline.tumblr.com/post/104098825621/forty-four-months-and-forty-four-years-2-wars
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
