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Forsaking The Syrian Revolution: An Anti-Imperialist Handbook Fadi A. Bardawil http://tinyurl.com/zx59ftr A powerful indictment of the refusal of so many U.S. "anti-imperialists" to support the Syrian uprising against Bashar al-Assad. (Applies with equal force to much of the left in Canada.) Particularly important, I think, is the anticolonialist perspective that Bardawil brings to the debate. "The gap between ideology (socialism) and political practice (Stalinism), the theorization of the struggle in the colonies, as well as the fraught politics of internationalist solidarity between Leftists in the Metropoles and revolutionaries in the peripheries are re-emerging today in the wake of the Arab revolutions. Nowhere are they more salient than in the case of the political and moral failure of wide segments of the anti-imperialist Left in the Metropoles who have either bluntly supported Assad for his anti-imperialism and secularism or withheld their solidarity from the Syrian struggle for emancipation from a regime of mass murder." Bardawil concludes with this 1956 appeal by the anticolonial leader Aimé Césaire: "What I want is that Marxism and communism be placed in the service of black peoples, and not black peoples in the service of Marxism and communism. That the doctrine and the movement would be made to fit men, not men to fit the doctrine or the movement. _________________________________________________________ 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