Category: Uncategorized

Russia Is Not Iraq (and Neither Was Syria)

With right-wing authoritarians ruling in Moscow and Washington, leftists should find it easy to oppose these evil empires — but some, poisoned by pre-election contrarianism, are too busy what-abouting their evils and conflating legitimate fears of demonstrable collusion with bigoted, liberal hysteria.

“If you look, for example, at the agency that has led the way in pushing these allegations about Russia, which is the CIA…. The CIA was very aggressively in favor of Hillary Clinton’s victory. And there’s a lot of different reasons for that, but I think the primary one is that the CIA proxy war in Syria is something that Hillary Clinton had promised not just to support, but to escalate.”

— Glenn Greenwald on Democracy Now!

One thing  we really ought to sneak up on with a cloth soaked in ether, nudge into a ditch on the side of the trading route and leave behind for dead in 2016 is the notion, pushed by a social media left and libertarian fellow travelers poisoned by brand-conscious contrarianism, that Donald J. Trump — reminder: right-wing authoritarian scumbag — is a victim of liberal McCarthyist red-baiting over his fondness for a kleptocrat in Russia whose intelligence agencies worked as an arm of the Republican billionaire’s opposition research team. And buried with this notion, in a lead-lined coffin incapable of penetration by a WiFi signal, we ought to lay the accompanying dogma that to express concern about this budding geopolitical realignment (and the clear and present evidence that of course the Russian state had an interest in aiding the election of an avowed ally, and indeed did) is the product of a decidedly normie faith in the CIA that — betcha didn’t know — was wrong about Iraq.

One might have thought the alarming spectacle of an actually-going-to-be-president Trump, and his continued, open embrace of a foreign war criminal, would wake the sophists of the left from their intellectual slumber, but paradigms, like Russia as a universally loathed official enemy and Hillary as the next U.S. president, are awful hard to kick. And so the trite response to the unsurprising revelations of the Russian state’s perfectly sensible partisan hacking operations is itself lacking in shock value. This was to be expected from a left that’s only frame of reference appears to the be the 2003 invasion of Iraq, supported by the likes of Glenn Greenwald, and which long ago decided to serve penance for the crimes of the U.S. empire by reflexively countering indictments of others’ crimes with something moderately less rank than outright apologism: increasingly stale reminders that the U.S., also, meddles and bombs.

What’s lacking in the response to Russian intelligence operations — different from the U.S. variety only in that the hacked information was selectively made public — is any attempt at a counter narrative: If not them, then who? No, bumper-sticker leftism requires the centering of the U.S. for the purposes of battle-tested talking points, like: If not us, then who cares? We’ve got plenty for which to atone, mister. It’s a leftism divorced from the trials of reality and the difficulties of grappling with multiple poles of power as they actually exist in a world from which a certain brand of “left” (“pseudo-” if one prefers that to mocking quote marks) has retreated, preferring the smugness of a contrarian subculture and a reactionary (and boring) anti-liberalism with its self-satisfied truisms to truly independent socialist critique.

Another Iran, Not Iraq

The truth is Russia is not Iraq, nor is evidence that Moscow hacked and disseminated information that helped a friend akin to saying Baghdad had WMDs — and neither claim, true or not, could possibly justify U.S. militarism. The claims are dissimilar in another respect: The intelligence in the lead-up to Iraq was manufactured from the top down by political appointees that accused the CIA of housing liberals who just didn’t get that the intelligence its agents had discarded as unreliable or fake could, in fact, be useful to its boss, Dick Cheney. Today, we witness the spectacle of the CIA and the FBI and the NSA all concurring on a matter that President Barack Obama reportedly sought to delay addressing until after Trump’s election, and which (badump) doesn’t ingratiate the intelligence community to the next man that community will call “dad,” and who will have the power to dismantle it.

If there’s a historic parallel, it’s not Iraq, but Iran: As with Russia’s hacking, it was also the U.S. intelligence community’s consensus that Iran was not building nuclear weapons, a finding that didn’t please the “real men” in the Bush administration who wanted to follow up the bombing of Baghdad with airstrikes on Tehran.

But that said, did you know (I bet you didn’t) that there were, in fact, no WMDs in Iraq? It’s a reference that is damning, on the surface, for those unfamiliar with how the U.S. came to invade that country, and so those who prefer their politics superficial will return to it time and again, just as they do a narrative on Syria, the next Iraq that wasn’t.

Appearing on Democracy Now!, The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald helpfully united both Russia and Syria in the “next Iraq” take we didn’t know we wanted but which we, as inhabitants of an evil empire, totally deserve. Asked why revelations of Russian responsibility were coming out now, Greenwald suggested we were on the road to Damascus. “There’s a lot of different reasons,” Greenwald said, “but I think the primary one is that the CIA proxy war in Syria is something that Hillary Clinton had promised not just to support, but to escalate.” The CIA, Greenwald maintained, “is attempting to undermine and subvert Trump because they never wanted him to be president in the first place, and now they’re trying to weaken and subvert his agenda, that they oppose.”

Trump, in other words, poses a challenge to the deep state because he threatened to pursue the same policy as his predecessor: regime preservation, not change, with Obama even pursuing a deal with Russia to jointly bomb Syria together. Greenwald, who failed to recognize the latter’s joint bombing plans until it was useful to deploy against liberal “Russophobic” hysterics, is here seeking to salvage his pre-election take that Trump has a “non-interventionist mindset” by portraying his non-interventionism as under assault by the deep state; when the bombs do inevitably fall, then, they can then be spun as the spoils of that deep state’s victory against a president “they never wanted.” And so, even post-November, harping on liberals and their intelligence allies as the greater evil can continue to be the woke call despite a proto-fascist’s assumption of power. Hillary, after all, would have started World War III for Jabhat al-Nusra, and it doesn’t take supporting Trump to oppose that!

End this, please. A new year and a new U.S. head of state requires more from the ironically detached left than the cock-sure scumbaggery of vapid owns of liberals and asinine comparisons to earlier , more easily understood times that only demonstrate one’s inability to accept that times change and alliances shift.

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Whatever This Is, I’m Against It

Whatever the reasons — likes and shares or an intellectual laziness that prevents them from abandoning old paradigms — it is disappointing and sad that many old comrades cannot abide their analysis, proven woke and true in the mid-2000s, being affected by new developments, like Russia no longer being red and non-U.S. imperialisms having eclipsed the American empire’s body count in the 21st century. We sneer at Democratic elites’ unwillingness to own their failures, and that perhaps explains the unwillingness to concede the reality of Russian hacking lest we excuse those failings, but the left’s most confident pundits have, like the liberals they deride, fallen into the comfortable habit of preaching to their own social media cluster, where possessing superior politics, in the abstract, is a license for not having to grapple with the world through anything but the comfortably distorting prism of ahistorical slogans.

The world, as it exists, is defined by a resurgent threat of fascism that a swathe of the left is content to challenge by blaming everyone and everything but itself, a self-defeating and self-satisfied impotence — literally nothing a leftist says or does matters because the left doesn’t hold power which is totally not its own fault in any fashion — absolving the savviest from having to wake up and notice that the Russian state is objectively bad, even if liberals say it too, and that the right-wing authoritarian who rules from Moscow is about to have an ally in Washington that his intelligence services helped elect. Instead of retreating to the comfort of takes we knew to be true in an earlier, more innocent time, when the laughter of children wasn’t at plausible risk of being extinguished by an unhinged megalomaniac with a greater-than-zero chance of firing off some nukes because he finds that laughter annoying, the left should consider that rejecting Moscow and Washington alike was leftists’ proudest moment, and that we live in a time when both empires are set to work in concert, with Syria likely to be the first testing grounds for this alliance — making it all the more easy and refreshingly unproblematic to oppose them both.

Let’s do that, not whatever it is Greenwald and his imitators think they’re doing.

Charles Davis is a journalist based in Los Angeles.

Syria and Leftwing Hasbara

Or how hawkish and dovish leftwing denialists on Syria echo hawkish and dovish Zionists on Palestine

By Sergio Pérez

While Syrians continue to lose their lives, or struggle to survive, under atrocious conditions, subjected to indiscriminate shelling and airstrikes, displaced, besieged, starved, and tortured in every conceivable way, a heated exchange of indictments has taken place among left-wingers in the stormy arena of the social media.

At the centre are some prominent, mostly Western figures of the pro-Palestinian activism, who are charged with denialism and/or accused of displaying a deafening silence on the Syrian uprising and the brutal repression that it has been facing at the hands of Assad regime—a regime, we shouldn’t forget, that is responsible for over 95% of civilian deaths and accused by the UN of crimes against humanity amount to “extermination” which “far outnumber those of ISIS militants and other jihadist groups”.The arguments that these figures have used seem to reveal, oddly enough, striking similarities to those that Zionists make in defense of Israel.

To be precise, we must distinguish two principal trends in the so-called denialist Left: the hawkish and the dovish.

Hawkish and Dovish

Detached from reality, hawkish Zionists will deny any evil inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians. When acknowledged, the evil will be justified as a collateral damage or a necessary step in the name of security and counterterrorism. Their denialism will frequently lead them to claims of forgery and fake (“Pallywood”) even in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary.

Detached from reality, the Geo-Stalinist anti-Imperialist Left will deny any evil inflicted by Assad and his allies on the Syrian people. When acknowledged, the evil will be justified as a collateral damage or a necessary step in the name of security and counterterrorism. Their denialism will frequently lead them to claims of fabrication (“White Helmets’ soap opera, just to force NATO to intervene”), all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Partially detached from reality, dovish Zionism will acknowledge many evils inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian people, but they will all be rationalized in the name of the lesser evil, that is, the preservation of the Zionist regime and its allegedly more progressive cause (a modern, secular, supportive of minorities regime). Moreover, dovish Zionism adopts the discourse of the “moral equivalence”, that is, the idea that both Palestinian and Israelis commit crimes and must therefore resolve their differences through “diplomacy” (as if both sides are equal). But most of the time, dovish Zionists remain silent.

Partially detached from reality, dovish left denialists will acknowledge many evils inflicted by Assad and his allies on the Syrian people, but they all will be rationalized in the name of the lesser evil, that is, the preservation of the Assad regime and its allegedly more progressive cause (a modern, secular, supportive of minorities regime). Moreover, dovish denialist Left adopts the discourse of the “moral equivalence”, that is, that both pro-regime and anti-regime sides have committed crimes and all they need to do is to engage in “diplomacy”, their imbalance in power and legitimacy notwithstanding. But most of the time, dovish denialist Left remains silent.

Continue reading “Syria and Leftwing Hasbara”

The Moral Dysfunction of Assadism

By Abed Abu-Shehade (translated by Ofer Neiman)

During one of the last lectures given at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna before his passing, Professor Sadiq al-Azm rejected the notion that what was happening in Syria was a “civil war”. He explained that unlike the Lebanese case, in which civilians of various religions took up arms and went out to seek vengeance upon others, the Syrian case involves a struggle between the regime and civil society. Sadik does not ignore the fact that there are identity-based elements in the struggle between Alawis and Sunnis, but he stressed that the regime is the key player acting against both civilians and rebels to suppress the uprising using every means at its disposal. He added that even at its most extreme, rebel actions pale in comparison to the regime’s barrel bombs and the Russians’ bunker busters.

Syrian intellectuals have reached such a state of despair in the face of the crisis, that they have ironically proposed to the US Administration to allow the Syrian regime to use chemical weapons, as long as the latter stopped its bombings — because dying by chemical weapons is a lot ‘cleaner’, and at least no body parts would litter streets or children lie buried under rubble.

Sadik wonders how people can still dispute the legitimacy of the Syrian uprising. He compares the Syrian case to Hungary in 1956, when Hungarians rose up against the Soviet regime. But back then, no one (except for dogmatic supporters of the USSR) criticized the Hungarian people for what seems like a human act, a popular uprising against a violent regime.

Continue reading “The Moral Dysfunction of Assadism”

Syria and the Left: A Call to Arms

As the world’s imperial powers unify against Syrians, we offer suggestions for how those in the West can demonstrate solidarity with the besieged

by Charles Davis, Loubna Mrie, and Kareem Chehayeb

THE last year has been one of the worst in history for Syrians, whose country continues to be torn apart by dictatorship, the Islamic State, various rebel groups, and both U.S. and Russian imperialism. As the regime has solidified its grip on Aleppo–one of the last urban strongholds of opposition forces–the Islamic State continues to be a significant force in the country, as shown by its recapture of the ancient town of Palmyra.

The rise of Donald Trump and his desire to openly work alongside Russia and the Syrian regime as part of an escalated war on terror demands change with respect to how the Western left engages the issue of Syria. Some have spent years downplaying or even openly denying the well-documented suffering of Syrians, dismissing such reports as part of a ploy by Clintonites and liberal interventionists seeking to sell the world a no-fly zone that hasn’t come. The presidential election has all but settled this policy debate; moving forward, the left now needs to figure out how it can organize on behalf of those whom the world has united against. Rehashing the past while displaced Syrians are bombed and deported would be a historical dereliction.

Refugees need to be supported wherever they are, and imperial designs for the partition of their homeland–as well as the normalization of a hereditary regime that has killed hundreds of thousands–must be opposed. Meaningful solidarity could take a number of forms that the global left should pursue immediately, lest it continues to fail Syrians as it has for the last half decade.

Continue reading “Syria and the Left: A Call to Arms”

Down the Alt-Right’s Syrian Rabbit Hole

How a Chemical Attack in 2013 set the Stage for Trump’s Post-Truth Presidency, and How We Can Fight Back.

On August 21st 2013 rumors of a massive chemical attack in Eastern Ghouta, a rebel held suburb of Damascus began to emerge. A series of now famous videos which showed victims laid out on the floor shaking were uploaded. Over the next few day fragmentary details of a major sarin gas attack began to emerge in the western media. As  journalists started putting the pieces together an Austin based conspiracy theorist named Alex Jones went on air to present his own version of events with absolute certainty.

In retrospect the August 23rd episode of “The Alex Jones Show” is worth re watching, because it was a chilling precursor to the alt right movement that would shape how Donald Trump sees the world. Between segments hawking survivalist and pseudo medical products, listeners called in to speak with Jones. One caller ranted about fears that Obamacare death panels would kill his grandmother, Jones suggested Obama’s Muslim background made him a bad dog owner and a segment about the inappropriate conduct of the Clinton foundation ran (remember this was during the summer of 2013).

The the subject of Jones program that day was the sarin gas attack in Damascus, and he jumped right into it.

“The so-called US, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Chase, that run this country, along with the Sachs, Cobergs, Gothes, and others, the Queen of England, the Dutch Queen others, that’s the main folks that own it all. They are openly taking the funding away from Egypt, and I’m not defending foreign aide, but the point is they are taking it away becasue they aren’t doing what they are told to turn it over to jihadis to just wreck everything.”

Continue reading “Down the Alt-Right’s Syrian Rabbit Hole”

Left-wing Argentinian Politician Condemns ‘Genocide’ in Syria

Juan Carlos Giordano of the ‘Socialist Left’ party condemned the ‘international genocide’ in Syria.

Juan Carlos Giordano, the Argentinian MP and leader of the ‘Izquierda Socialista‘ (Socialist Left) party, itself a member of the Trotskyist ‘Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores’ (Workers’ Left Front) coalition, gave a powerful speech on the situation in Aleppo at the Buenos Aires City Council.

On Twitter, Giordano said:

“My intervention in solidarity with the rebellious people of Syria against the genocide committed by Assad and Russia with the endorsement of imperialism.”

Here is a transcript of his speech, translated by Elisa Marvena:

My motion of privilege, that we have brought up in this parliamentary work, is about denouncing an international genocide. When one is asked in what way is an MP, the chamber of deputies of the nation affected? An international genocide! A crime against humanity perpetrated against the people of Aleppo, Syria, which we want to condemn. And this flag represents not the dictator Bashar al Assad, but the rebellious people of Aleppo against the dictatorship of Bashar al Assad. What has been named the Guernica of the 21st century, where bombs condemned by the international community have been dropped… on hospitals, schools… Where the civilian population has been murdered, [where] 95 per cent of all physicians have fled. Aleppo has been put under siege, food and medicine were not allowed to enter. The dictatorship of Bashar al Assad, the bombardment from Russia with the complicity of the United States and the complicity of the European Union, because this is a people that rose up against dictatorship as part of the Arab Spring in 2011 and [the situation] transformed into a civil war, provoking a humanitarian catastrophe. Therefore, we defend the people of Aleppo, the rebellious people of Syria against Bashar al Assad, against the bombardment and imperialist interference. And we are demanding that the national government break all diplomatic relationships with this dictatorship, corner the dictator and side with the rebellious peoples struggling with dignity against dictatorships in the world. Thank you, Mr. President.

Continue reading “Left-wing Argentinian Politician Condemns ‘Genocide’ in Syria”

To “leftist” admirers of Assad’s Syria

By Farouk Mardam-Bey

As a Syrian who has always identified politically with the left, I am particularly appalled by those men and women who call themselves left-wingers — and are therefore supposed to stand in solidarity with struggles for justice worldwide — and yet openly support the regime of the Assads, father and son, who are chiefly responsible for the Syrian disaster.

Following four months of intense bombardment by the Russian air force, Bashar Al-Assad’s army, along with Shiite militias hailing from everywhere and mobilized by the Iranian mullahs, have now finished ‘liberating’ Eastern Aleppo. Liberated from whom? From its inhabitants. More than 250,000 inhabitants were forced to flee their own city to escape massacres, as had the people of Zabadani and Daraya before them, and as will many more Syrians if systematic social and sectarian ‘cleansing’ continues in their country under the cover of a massive media disinformation campaign.

That in Syria itself wealthy residents of Aleppo, belonging to all religious sects, rejoice over having been rid of the “scum” — meaning the poor classes who populated Eastern Aleppo — is not surprising at all. We are accustomed to it: the arrogance of dominant classes is universal.

Continue reading “To “leftist” admirers of Assad’s Syria”

Greece is no place for refuge

It has been nine months since the introduction of the EU-Turkey deal, under which refugees arriving on Greek islands face the threat of deportation back to Turkey. Since then, thousands of refugees have been stuck in inhumane conditions, in camps lacking basic resources like heat and electricity, as they await to have their asylum requests processed. With the arrival of winter, the situation continues to deteriorate.

Meanwhile, UNHCR and the EU’s aid department (ECHO) have been accused of mismanaging millions in emergency funding earmarked for upgrading shelters, leaving thousands sleeping in freezing conditions in camps across Greece. On Chios, refugees have begun to protest against these intolerable conditions. ‘We all are fighting this battle with the leaders of Europe’s non-humanists. Yes, we are now one team fighting the lies and hatred, racism and the enslavement of human beings and the imprisonment of freedom,’ writes Mohammed, a refugee from Deir ez-Zor.

The following commentary, originally published in Politico last week, was written in response to the European Commission’s proposal to resume ‘Dublin transfers’ back to Greece.    

By John-Mark Philo & Ludek Stavinoha

In the same week as the world marked Human Rights Day, the European Commission announced its plans to resume the so-called “Dublin transfers” of refugees back to Greece. If the recommendation is adopted at Thursday’s meeting of European leaders in Brussels, EU member countries will be able to start returning refugees who arrive on their territory back to the country of their first entry into the European Union, wherever that may be.

Continue reading “Greece is no place for refuge”

How “Stop the War” and Patrick Cockburn justified atrocities in Aleppo

By Amr Salahi

Last week, as Assad’s forces and their foreign militia allies closed in on the last remaining opposition enclave in East Aleppo, the horrific crimes being committed during their assault became headline news across the world. In one massacre alone 82 people were killed and there were reports of children being burned alive.

Activists and civil defence workers in Aleppo uploaded photos and videos to social media and gave interviews to the UK media, telling the world that they were trapped and completely surrounded in East Aleppo. Nearly 100,000 people were herded by the Assad regime and its allies into an area of less than 2 square kilometres. The people in this tiny enclave were deprived of food, medicine, and electricity while barrel bombs and cluster bombs dropped by the Russian and Syrian air forces rained down on them.

Eventually, what was called an “evacuation” agreement was signed. This was a misnomer. The people remaining in East Aleppo were being given a choice. Either a horrific death at the hands of the regime and its militia allies or permanent forced displacement from their city to other opposition-held areas of Syria – where they would be subject to continued aerial bombardment by Russia and the Assad regime.

Continue reading “How “Stop the War” and Patrick Cockburn justified atrocities in Aleppo”

Trump has defeated the media, and here’s the picture to prove it.

The picture above, tweeted out last night by Politico co-founder Mike Allen, is one of the saddest images I’ve seen since Election Day.

 

Here are a couple more gems that followed.

The occasion of these tweets, in case you haven’t heard, was the off-the-record cocktail party Trump threw for his traveling press corps — the same reporters he mocked throughout his campaign, and continues to call a bunch of liars, along with the rest of the media. The same reporters who watched Trump single out one of their own at three separate rallies in front of his hopped-up crowds, knowingly and deliberately putting her physical safety at risk. These reporters were invited to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida resort, to chat with him for a half hour over drinks, on the condition they don’t tell their readers (us) anything about what he says. Mike Allen thought we might be more interested in pictures of the fancy drapes at his exclusive beach club than his answers to boring policy questions, I guess. Continue reading “Trump has defeated the media, and here’s the picture to prove it.”