As one looks out onto the world stage one can clearly identify the arrival of a new leading politics, one that replaces globalising neoliberalism with aggressive nationalist populism. These circumstances have arisen in the west as a consequence of our acceptance of empire. One specific instance is the US left’s ambivalence regarding the ongoing crushing of the Syrian Revolution.
First, we have to understand the methods and reasons for the extreme violence used by the Syrian regime. The Assad regime’s verifiable murder of nearly half million people since the beginning of the revolution has been targeted to deconstruct society. Thousands have been shot and bombed at peaceful protests; others have been summarily executed when they refused to fire on protestors. Of the 56 sectarian massacres that have occurred since 2011, 49 have been committed by the regime alongside the targeting of Sunni religious sites, the targeting of hospitals and funerals in rebel-held areas, and the use of rape as collective punishment. The jails of Bashar al-Assad are active death camps. The violence committed by the Assad regime is not senseless: it is meant to tear apart communities, to shred the public space, to pulverise the social fabric, to silence any voice that is not approved by the state embodied in Bashar al-Assad, and to commit such horrors that entire peoples will be irrevocably divorced. Such atrocities are only possible because the world has consigned the Syrian people to the shadows.
There have been moments when the Syrian people appeared to us, such as the crushing of Aleppo or the Sarin gas attacks in Ghouta. These events, shocking as they were, came out of a fog of illusion where the Syrian people remained a blank, an enigma or an object of orientalist fantasy. The photo of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy who was found dead on a Turkish beach on September 2, 2015, inspired great sympathy for Syrian refugees—but remained largely a mystery. The circumstances surrounding his family’s exile, the history of the Assad regime and the resistance to it, remained for most a netherworld of rumour and assumption. The proposed solutions to the Syrian refugee crisis are never sought for in Syria, never looked for in the Syrian people. The regime and the world have relied upon the invisibility of the Syrian people to cover its crimes.
Trump’s feuding with the media prepares their suppression and the corrupt criminal justice system is being ramped up to crush protests. The eviction of protestors at Standing Rock using military tactics can only escalate to the kinds of attacks suffered by protestors in Syria since 2011. There will be more Aleppos: we are made vulnerable by a left that has signalled to the ruling class its willingness to turn its back on popular struggles for liberation like the one in Syria.
For decades under Hafez al-Assad, Syria was an important and relatively predictable piece on the geopolitical chessboard. The people of Syria were considered of no account, being thought of once as too politically immature for democracy and to have been cowed by the 1982 massacre of a popular uprising in Hama. Incarnating Nasser’s third way, the Assad regime proved it could come to terms with Iran, Israel, the US, the Gulf States and even Russia if the terms were beneficial. When Bashar al-Assad took power, the multitude of attempts made by the Syrian people to develop a civil society independent of the state and to exercise democratic rights went unnoticed by the US public and, with them, the majority of the US left. So it was that when mass protests erupted in Syria in 2011 in response to the brutality of the Assad regime’s repression of democratic rights and free speech, many were only too willing to accept the Russian propaganda line: that these protests were instigated and organised by American government agents. Bashar al-Assad’s line has been straight out of the American playbook: he is fighting the ‘war on terror’. But simply saying so is not enough: Assad had to create his own preferred enemy. Luckily for him, he had been allowing foreign Islamist militants to enter Iraq for nearly a decade to aid the resistance against the US occupation, and those fighters had split from al-Qaeda over the former’s insistence on even more brutal and severe tactics. Early on in the Syrian revolution, the Assad regime committed an act of mass provocation by releasing from prison about 1,000 leaders of the extreme currents of Islamism, leading to a rapid expansion of IS in Syria. Daesh’s (another name for ISIS) spectacular displaying of their own brutality would eclipse on the media horizon the genocidal attacks of the Syrian regime. In every instance, the Syrian people were hidden from view and ignored. The way this was achieved was through Russian style information warfare.
Over and over again in the past two decades or so, Russia has slurred opposition movements as western agents, used extreme violence to crush mass movements and stoked ethnic tensions to lift up their local strongmen in Georgia, in Ajaria, in Abkhazia, in the Ukraine and in Moscow itself.
That form of rule stands in stark contrast to neoliberalism, which has meant replacing public services with the shorter blanket of private institutions. The ruling elite are now weaponising these institutions. Just as Assad used Daesh to save himself from the revolution, and as he limits UN aid to areas that support him, governments around the world, including the US, will increasingly rely on NGOs dependent on funding from the ruling class, eliminating democratic oversight of public services worldwide.
In the 00s, the Russian government sponsored a grass-tops patriotic Russian mass movement known as Nashi. In 2005, Russia passed legislation that monetised social services so the corporate elite can decide who gets them in a general environment of corruption. In 2012, Russia required foreign-sponsored NGOs to register with the Russian government and get approval before operating in Russia; this was the culmination of a series of actions designed to tame the civil society. In doing so, Russia is following a style of rule that has long been the norm in the Middle East: to co-opt as much of the social fabric as possible by amalgamating all churches, trades union, media and political parties into the government hierarchy. In their book, Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami wrote: “A façade of pluralism was provided by the National Progressive Front, set up in 1976, comprising the Baath and nine smaller parties which accepted the Baath’s leadership… By the end of Hafez’s [Bashar al-Assad’s father] reign all organised political opposition had been crushed and civil society, where it existed, was co-opted and quiescent.”
Syrians have shown us how to face such a menace, and there is one sense in which the Syrian Revolution was a success. A people who had been eclipsed by the geopolitical dealings of their authoritarian government have burst upon the page of world history. This is both an inspiring expression of faith in basic human solidarity and a serious act of defiance against a state that has regularly arrested and tortured people for speaking their mind for nearly half a century now.
This anti-democratic form of government is still getting its feet here in the US. The Trump administration with a Republican majority in both houses and in the Supreme Court will expand voter suppression. Hillary Clinton likely helped Trump win the Republican nomination. Meanwhile, in Russia, Putin may have actually hired someone to run against him, and his former advisor Vladislav Surkov organised the political opposition parties personally.
Trump’s feuding with the media prepares their suppression and the corrupt criminal justice system is being ramped up to crush protests. The eviction of protestors at Standing Rock using military tactics can only escalate to the kinds of attacks suffered by protestors in Syria since 2011. There will be more Aleppos: we are made vulnerable by a left that has signalled to the ruling class its willingness to turn its back on popular struggles for liberation like the one in Syria. Already, Trump’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and targeting of Muslims is benefiting from the left’s normalisation of the war on terror narrative.
The politics Trump represents—which is now dominating the world—is revolutionary and must work outside of the existing liberal institutions. That is why although he has only been president for a few weeks, Donald Trump recently began his campaign for re-election in 2020. As they have confirmed, the Trump administration’s white supremacist agenda will require extra-legal activity.
Unable to provide jobs or services, governments will be more and more interested to rely on terror to keep people in check. The work of the Shabiha in Syria, paid agents of the regime producing massacres targeting minorities, has its parallel in the lynchings of black people in the US and the recent discovery of an illicit black site used to torture supposed criminals in Chicago. The law is increasingly becoming more of an expression of arbitrary will. If you are white and don’t get in the way the law will not touch you. The very real tragedy that is tearing apart undocumented sections of our communities is just a foretaste of what is to come. The war on drugs has shown us that the US government is more than capable of targeting minorities on behalf of the ruling class and white supremacy. The climate of confusion that propaganda sources create in the media will make it easy for society to disavow these acts and to believe against all evidence that the system is not reeling out of control.
For those still sceptical regarding the parallels drawn here between the Putin style of governance and that of Trump, consider these words of Donald Trump’s from a Playboy interview in 1989 regarding the government of Mikhail Gorbachev: “I predict he [Gorbachev] will be overthrown because he has shown extraordinary weakness. Suddenly, for the first time ever, there are coal miner strikes and brush fires everywhere–which will all ultimately lead to a violent revolution.”
The questioner asked: “Besides the real-estate deal, you’ve met with top-level Soviet officials to negotiate potential business deals with them; how did they strike you?”
Trump replied, “Generally, these guys are much tougher and smarter than our representatives… Some of our Presidents have been incredible jerk-offs. We need to be tough.”
Trump predicted the rise of Putin, under the same logic that brought the former into the White House—the appeal of strongman rule in a crisis.
Syrians have shown us how to face such a menace, and there is one sense in which the Syrian Revolution was a success. A people who had been eclipsed by the geopolitical dealings of their authoritarian government have burst upon the page of world history. This is both an inspiring expression of faith in basic human solidarity and a serious act of defiance against a state that has regularly arrested and tortured people for speaking their mind for nearly half a century now.
One could say that the Syrian revolutionaries made a fatal mistake overestimating the will of the international community to support their struggle for freedom. We must not despair: only by openly contesting the power of a local ruling class can the very possibility of international solidarity exist.