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On 11/15/15 11:51 AM, Lüko Willms wrote:
For me, this says that there is no revolution, but the opposite.
You have made this mistake before. The schisms in Syria have a lot to do with a crisis on the left in general, particularly in the Middle East with the collapse of the USSR. Under Baathism, the CP became part of the political establishment thus discrediting the image of socialism even though it was Stalinism that the average Syrian had encountered. Furthermore, Syria lacked a civil society. If a student became an opponent of Baathism, he or she could be tortured, imprisoned or killed. So this meant that an independent left had little chance of getting started. Furthermore, this meant that oppositional politics tended to gravitate to the Sunni mosques that like Black churches in the south could function as organizing centers. It also meant that the Muslim Brotherhood could become a pole of attraction for anti-Baathist dissidents until it was smashed in 1982 at Hama. Robert Fisk said that the Syrian army killed 20,000 people there in less than a month to give you an idea of the savagery of the Syrian government.
But the biggest problem of all was Assad's turning the conflict into a sectarian one from the very start. He calculated correctly that it would sucker a large part of the liberal left, including a lot of people who mistakenly view themselves as revolutionaries, into taking his side as a symbol of pluralism, tolerance and all the other bullshit.
There are still many people in Syria who have politics that are revolutionary even if they don't quote Karl Marx. Marx and Lenin fought for democratic rights and even for the replacement of dictatorial rule by parliamentary democracy, despite capitalist property relations remaining. The admiration for Assad by so many on the left in defiance of what the founders of our movement believed is a stain on socialism that is almost too deep to remove at this point.
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