camouflage
gaslit at scale.
A rant...
M of A - Syria: The Feckless Left
Syria: The Feckless Left
by Malooga
One must not forget the disgraceful petition put out by what calls itself the "Left" in the name of "dignity and freedom" last week, the so-called "Global Campaign of Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution". The geo-political analysis of the screed would not pass the muster of a child, and the empty verbiage comes straight out of a George W. Bush or Barak Obama speech -- without exaggeration. In any event, don't mislead yourself into thinking the timing was accidental in the face of the collapse of the mercenary Takfiri front. Because it wasn't. When the empire finds its back against wall, it will not hesitate in pulling out all stops -- even if it means trotting out a brigade of tired old leftists in its dirty service.
And if ever there was evidence that the entire moribund left intellectual class is bought and sold, this is surely it. One should carefully examine the list of names and publicly excoriate them for their now public complicity in international war crimes and the use of chemical weaponry. Tariq Ali, Norman Finkelstein!, Richard Seymour (author of "The Liberal Defence of Murder," "tracing the descent of liberal supporters of war..."), Anthony Arnove (Howard Zinn's boy), Fredric Jameson, Vijay Prasad, Ilan Pappe, Stephen R. Shalom, Alice Walker and so on down the line, over 220 Benedict Arnolds in all. Laudable behavior in the past is no excuse for lying while supporting Takfiri murderers in the present. May every single one of them know what it is like to be exposed to DU -- in the name of freedom and democracy, of course!
According to these house puppets, "The revolution in Syria (sic) is ... also an extension of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico, the landless movement in Brazil, the European and North American revolts against neoliberal exploitation", and every other emotional struggle for justice that these betrayers can throw against the wall and hope it sticks, while, like a virus, they live off the suffering of others, with their pompous pontificating and venal obfuscating, as their salaries and position are paid for by the big boys.
I am sorry that do to personal problems I am not at present able to take the time to deconstruct the empty verbiage of that embarrassing petition line by line as I have done with others in the past (The Euston Manifesto). This document's vacuous invocation of democracy, freedom and the Geneva Convention, its selective one-sided claims bereft of any factual evidence whatsoever, its twisting of truth on its head and its transparent Orwellism against "Asad’s regime" should be a deep and enduring embarrassment for any signatory of the document.
In ostensibly "hop(ing) for a free, unified, and independent Syria," (Didn't that exist, albeit with blemishes, as all power structures exhibit, until a few years ago? The same hope was evinced for Iraq after the nation was first destroyed, but why should a few well trained house lackeys quibble over cause and effect?) while "confront(ing) a world upside down" consisting of "Russia, China, and Iran," (the bad guys) and in throwing in their lot and supporting "the US and their Gulf allies" (the good guys -- Saudi Arabia and Qatar for hummus sake!) these ahistorical ignoramuses not only have the blood of innocent Syrians on their heads, but that of the multi-million Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of Libyans, Afghanis, Yemeni, Sudanese and many other nations killed, injured, displaced and dispossessed by the time honored imperial strategy of divide et impera, divide and conquer. Apparently, those who refuse to study the bloody history of the West's destabilization campaigns are consigned (perhaps enlisted?) to support them.
As the election of Barak Obama, supported by similar empty-headed intellectual idealists, has proved, "Hope," in the absence of an honest and rigorous economic and power analysis, a realistic and workable political strategy of opposition, and the building of a viable alternative power structure, is even more destructive than surly apathy. These intellectuals' piteous petition evinces none of the above minimal requirements for successful activism -- except, of course, for Hope, the Orwellian trope of our decade. Their elitist Hope, is misplaced from the get go, of course -- for there is no attempt in the petition to address or assay the hopes and desires of the majority of the Syrian people. Instead, it is all about their precious hope. When your car careens off the road, you momentarily "hope" you won't be killed, although you know it is too late for hope; Intellectual study, attainment and popular acclaim is supposed to provide more effective tools than hope. In this case, like petition signing, apparently.
It simply beggars belief that the Left -- which claims to pride itself on solid structural analysis as opposed to groupcentric conspiracy theory -- betrays its utter ignorance of its purported forte (the former) while buying whole hog into the later, namely into the magical conspiracy theory that the removal of an individual, Assad, rather than the democratic restructuring of a power structure and national political economy, will in any way help solve the Syrians' problems. The undemocratic abdication of the duly elected "Bashar al-Asad," as called for by the petitioners, would clearly leave a prolonged bloody power vacuum, with every interested external and internal party vying in the darkest of ways for support, thereby inaugurating in a reign of terror even worse than at present and destroying the state. The recent bloody examples of Iraq and Libya should be obvious even to the purblind pusillanimous petitioners. One might think… An honest leftist, Stephen Gowans once described this type of thinking among the left as the "Rogue's Gallery" syndrome: the demonization of individual "monsters" like Saddam Hussein, Qaddaffi, Chavez, Castro. As the noted political thinker Noam Chomsky notoriously and repeatedly opined a decade ago, (paraphrased), "Iraqis, and the world, would be much better off without Saddam Hussein." So much for the vaunted structural analysis of the left. But who, especially the tenured left, has time for historical memory in an age of evanescent tweets?
To even imagine that one could throw one's hat in with the US, Zionist Israel, bought off and dying NATO, Saudi Arabian, and Qatari interests and end up with some type of leftist anti-globalist democracy movement complying with the will of the Syrian people is absolutely and utterly laughable. The destruction of Sirte and the ethnic cleansing of Tawergha, as well as the confessional partition of Iraq, come to mind as case examples of more likely consequences, especially for a multi-confessional state such as Syria. Do these people really have academic degrees; do they study history; are they in any way capable of critical thinking? They betray the rankest of historical ignorance, and to my mind, these moronic intellectuals demonstrate the far-sighted perspective of an ostrich with its head in the sand. It is truly a left gone mad.
M of A - Syria: The Feckless Left
