The Bookroom
I wrote this a couple of years ago for the CM’s Transitions issue. It’s about categorization of books, ideas, east-west boundaries, and suchlike….
1
My friend Will has built me a bookroom. It sits at the transition point of our property and the farmer’s. From the large window I see the two-year-old hedge on the boundary, and sheep fields and drumlins, and beyond them the rising Galloway Hills.
It’s built of larch, with a metal roof. The ceiling and walls are plastered with clay, and the shelves are cut from sitka spruce. I’ve dreamt of this room for years. With Will’s help, I’ve dreamt it into existence. It’s my own bayt al-hikmah, this one a working temple to the printed rather than the calligraphed or digitized word – something which readers of languages in Arabic script missed out on for a long and impoverished three and a half centuries. True there is one calligraphed mashallah hanging from a beam, but no internet connection – this radically cuts down distraction and creates a mental silence.
The first task is unpacking the books from the boxes they’ve lived in for the last four years.
This evokes warm feelings. It’s like recognizing the faces of old friends. But it also involves a mourning for absences. Those missing include Albert Hourani’s “Arab Thought in the Liberal Age”, Timothy Snyder’s “The Road to Unfreedom”, “Black Jacobins” by CLR James, “The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks, “The Eden Express” by Mark Vonnegut (Kurt’s son), “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”. And quite a few others. O I have been too liberal a lender. I hope they’re happy, wherever they are. There are also all those I shed when I left a country, when I left a life behind – something I’ve done at least six times. And there was a major purge four years ago, before the survivors were packed into their boxes. Still, there are so many books. Too many books even for this generous shelf space. So I set about another, more minor purge now.
I get rid of some I read to potentially review – ‘for work’, as it were – and which I didn’t much like. And some, even after the earlier purge, of which I discover I own more than one copy. And some I’ve outgrown.
Here is “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung”. I can’t remember where or when I acquired this. It’s a book so cocky and unjustly sure of itself I want to hurl it into the bin. Published by Foreign Languages Press, Peking, in 1967 – as part of a state-driven propaganda project, therefore. “Once Mao Tse-Tung’s thought is grasped by the broad masses,” says the foreword, “it becomes an inexhaustible source of strength and a spiritual atom bomb of infinite power.”
I don’t hurl it into the bin, nor into the fire. However bad a book might be, burning books is worse. Book burning is a symbolic violence and a historical echo too terrible to allow. Not even if the book has been painted with poison. Not even if you’re dying of cold.
Though the flames do tempt. Here is “Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah”. An interesting historical document, no doubt, but these days – after the bloody victory of counter-revolution in Syria – the sight of it gives me a trauma response. Even the name of the publisher gives me a trauma response. So I pass that one on to an interested friend. I feel comfortable doing so because she understands the severity of Nasrallah’s crimes. And for now I keep the Mao book, more for the absurd enthusiasm of the foreword than for the platitudes of the genocidal Great Leader. Also because it’s pocket sized, and it won’t take up much space.
Read the rest of this entry »Selective Outrage
There’s a link here to a two-part podcast of me talking about the genocide in Gaza, the genocide in Syria, and universal anti-fascism. Thanks to Andy Heintz for the opportunity.
A Key to All Conspiracies
This essay on conspiracy theories, covering three cultures and the collapse of religion, was first published in 2022 in the Critical Muslim’s Ignorance issue. It was recently translated and adapted for Arabic at Alpheratz.
Now here’s a strange coincidence. In the summer of 1994, after a year living in Rawalpindi and working for ‘The News’ – the English-language sister of the Urdu ‘Jang’ – I spent six weeks travelling in the high mountains of the Pakistani north. I hear the area has since been opened up for tourism, but in those days it was the very definition of isolated. You were unlikely to meet even a Punjabi up there, let alone a group of Scotsmen, let alone a group of Scotsmen from the specific part of Galloway in which I’d passed a large part of my childhood. And yet that’s what happened: in Mastuj, on the Chitral side of the Shandur Pass, I bumped into three sons of Galloway, artists, fishermen, farmers, and they were called Robin, Robert and Richard.
Brought together for a few hours there in a dip between the Karakorum and the Hindu Kush, we marveled at our common Gallovidian connections and the strange similarity of our names, and drank several cups of tea together, and shared several Chitrali cigarettes, then slept side by side on the floor of the tiny village’s one-room accommodation. The next day we continued on our respective ways – I towards Chitral, and they in the direction of Gilgit.
Soon the encounter was lost in the stream of events; that is, I more-or-less forgot it, until one afternoon fourteen years later, when I had recently returned to Galloway, and there was a knocking at my door.
It was Robin. The other one.
“I saw you in the shops and followed you home,” he said. “We met in Pakistan, years ago now. You’re Robin, I think.”
What were the chances of that? Not only of the meeting, but of the re-meeting too. In the following weeks I also re-met Robert and Richard. And Robin introduced me to others, in Galloway and further afield. A good part of my current social life owes to him, or to that serendipitous meeting in Mastuj.
What should I make of this?
Our storytelling minds always look for correspondences, for patterns. Through them we find rhyme and rhythm in reality. By them we make sense of what otherwise seems senseless.
Read the rest of this entry »Nursery Rhyme
| Nursery Rhyme[1] |
| How arrogant is the Englishman of whatever creed or hue who avers the Arab native is inferior to the Jew[2] |
| How Blinkened the American And all that he can see is a Disneyfied Holy Land through Judeao-Christian lunacy[3] |
| How ugly is the German with his foolish liberal pride He’s got a new set of stories but still commits genocide |
| How insane is the Israeli now that history’s put him here He builds his walls and mows his lawns in brute anger and red fear |
| How deceitful the Iranian and what a hypocrite Instead of liberating Palestine he forces Syria to submit |
| How corrupt the craven Arabs the dictators bound for hell[4] The blood of us is on their hands Our souls is what they sell |
[2] See Winston Churchill et al.
[3] Or ‘through Judeao-Christian lunettes’
[4] The author is too humble an agnostic to claim to know the actually destined destination of the dictators. ‘Hell’ here, then, as may or may not be the case there, in the afterlife, acts as a metaphor rather than a literal fact
Capital
Here is an extract from the novel I was writing before I got two jobs. The novel might be called ‘Whale’. I’ve written the first of five parts, and one day when things calm down I may be able to write the rest. The extract was published in the Critical Muslim’s Capital issue.
أساطير الآخِرين: لماذا صارت نظرياتُ المؤامرة دِيناً جديداً؟
I’m very proud to be published in Alpheratz, the new Arabic-language sister publication of the brilliant English-language New Lines. This is my essay on conspiracy theories, originally published at the Critical Muslim, adapted and translated into Arabic. Read it here.
Genocide justifying itself by genocide
The most repulsive thing I saw yesterday was a Zionist justifying the genocide of Palestinians by reference to the genocide of Syrians. Three points.
One: One genocide doesn’t make another OK. Obviously.
Two: Israel was a major reason why the US stopped serious weapons reaching the Free Army. Other than a few rhetorical comments, the US worked with Iran (doing a deal) and Russia (welcoming it into Syria to ‘solve the chemical weapons problem’, which of course it didn’t) to save Assad. This, according to what American officials told Syrians lobbying for weapons, was because Israel was worried about ‘instability’, especially about Syrians having anti-aircraft missiles and heavy weapons. So hundreds of thousands of Syrians were murdered, millions expelled, and the country utterly destroyed, for the sake of the apartheid state’s ‘stability’.
Three: Israel is doing exactly the same to Gaza as what Assad/Iran/Russia did to Homs, Aleppo, the Ghouta, etc: it is destroying the civilian infrastructure, imposing starvation sieges, hitting schools, hospitals, residential blocks, bakeries. Its aim is the same – to remove or annihilate the civilian population. Its genocidal rhetoric is the same, but it seems to be far more deeply spread amongst Israeli Jews than it is amongst Assad’s ‘loyal’ Alawi community. The difference in method is that Israel does the killing faster and more efficiently, with more advanced western (American and German) weapons.
So Israel does the same as Assad/Iran/Russia, only faster, and Israel contributed to the disaster in Syria anyway, and you can’t justify your fascist genocide in the south of bilad ash-sham by pointing to the fascist genocide in the north. You are all fascists, and the people of the region in their overwhelming majority despise you both. There will be no peace until both of your ideologies and murderous power systems are dismantled.
Read the rest of this entry »Syrian Gulag
I’ve written a long essay for a future issue (the Halal issue) of the Critical Muslim which reviews three necessary books on the politics of the Middle East. Two are Alex Rowell’s “We Are Your Soldiers” and Azmi Bishara’s “Syria 2011 – 2013”. Here I’m showing you a few paragraphs on the third book – Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System – because it’s such an essential addition to the Syrian bookshelf that I feel the need to publicise it. Nobody should pontificate about Syria before making themselves familiar with this material.
To better understand the history of the strong man, or the taghout, in Syria, let’s return to the country’s torture chambers, which became more numerous and more politically salient in the days of the UAR. Some years later, Hafez al-Assad further expanded the detention and torture network, to the point that the entire Syrian society was governed, and smothered, by the fear of detention and torture. The misrule of the supreme strong man was underpinned by hundreds of little strong men abusing people in prisons.
The US incarcerates 629 people per 100,000 of the population. This is generally considered to be the worst rate in the world. Russia incarcerates 445 per 100,000. In Syria, however, 1,200 per 100,000 are incarcerated. That’s a conservative estimate. And many of those who are taken “behind the sun”, as Syrians say, never return.
I’ve taken those figures from Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System by Jaber Baker and Ugur Umit Ungor. This is an immense work, based on over 100 interviews with survivors, some interviews with defected perpetrators, leaks – including the ‘Caesar’ photos of at least 6,786 people murdered in detention – as well as reports by international organizations, a vast archive of torture accounts held by a Dutch immigration lawyer, and published and unpublished prison memoirs. Prison literature (adab as-sijoon) is Syria’s most developed genre, very unfortunately.
Syrian Gulag is encyclopedic, organizing information on the different types of prisons, the various branches and their histories, and the officers who built the system. In so doing, sadly, it gives a history of the last sixty years in Syria. What’s surprising here is the petty sadism of the top-level, household-name officers, their willingness to get their hands dirty. The people in charge are thugs, quite literally. And what is wearily familiar here is the taghout’s tactic of turning meaning on its head. The “Palestine Branch” sounds like it does exciting espionage on Israel, but is in fact a torture camp for the abuse of Palestinians and Syrians.
The torture methods described are numerous and heart-shattering. They include “the German Chair”, “the Dynamo”, tying the penis, sleep deprivation, electrocution, “the Magic Carpet”, “the Ladder”, burning with charcoal, burning with hot water, fingernail extraction, drowning, “the Parachute”, “the Pyramid Pose”, cutting with knives, and rape. Remember, these horrors are not freak occurrences. Almost every Syrian family has encountered them.
Read the rest of this entry »Khaled’s Death is Hard Work
A slightly different version was published at The Markaz Review.
I remember Khaled in a beer garden in Bristol. He was sitting at a table performing the English language: “So so so,” he sang. “And and and, but and but! and so… but! so… but!” Khaled inhabiting his stocky body, his warm, brimming smile, his big head of fluffy white hair.
Of course he knew far more words than those. He somehow managed to communicate very well in English without speaking it very fluently. In Arabic he talked and talked, like the tide. Sometimes he broke into song. His writing was brilliant, the kind that will last for many generations. A poet, screenwriter, novelist — he was endlessly playful with words. And he was gentle with life, and with people. He took them very seriously.
I was with him at the BBC one evening in June 2014. ISIS had captured Mosul, and using the money looted from the city’s banks, and the American weapons captured from the fleeing Iraqi army, the organization had rapidly seized vast swathes of eastern Syria, areas which had been previously liberated from the Assad regime. The radio presenter asked Khaled what he thought of it all. His answer — “It’s important to pay attention to the role of Iran” — may have confused non-experts at the time, but was absolutely apt.
He was politically acute, although he wasn’t primarily a political person. He was a humanist, an artist, and a Syrian who cared deeply about Syrians. Once, as we toured England to introduce the Syria Speaks anthology, Khaled met refugees from villages near his own in the Aleppo countryside. “They asked me about the olive trees and the seasons,” he grinned afterwards. “I love these people.”
He liked the concrete, material detail of life, and was aware of the dense social webs connecting people. This comes through in his writing, in its sensuousness and physicality as well as in its careful intricacies of plot and character. His novels are beautiful and rewarding, but not always easy reading. The stories often proceed in narrative swirls and mosaics rather than in linear fashion. This form manifests a kind of realism, because in real human life everywhere, not only in Syria, characters are woven from stories, and stories link to further stories …
Read the rest of this entry »October the Seventh
A very slightly different version of this piece was published at The Markaz Review.
On October the seventh, Hamas fighters broke through the fence which locks Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip. In doing so they revealed Israel as a paper tiger. This supposed regional superpower, so skilled at containing and killing dispossessed Palestinian civilians, was unable to stop its enemies from attacking military bases and killing and abducting soldiers.
If Hamas had ended the operation there, it would have won an undoubted political as well as military victory. No doubt Israel would have responded with force, and as disproportionately as it always does, but it would have been somewhat restrained by its western allies and sponsors. The Israeli ‘peace camp’ (such as it is) might even have been revived. Even now we see Israeli fury directed at Netanyahu’s government that focused on guarding illegal settlers in the West Bank rather than the Gaza border fence. Just by breaking through the fence, Hamas changed the regional equation, showing that normalization between Israel and Arab dictators wouldn’t bring Israel security, that only a settlement with the Palestinians would do that.
But Hamas did more than break through the fence and strike military targets. It killed hundreds of civilians, including children and the elderly. A group of elderly people waiting at a bus stop were gunned down. Children were tied to their parents and set on fire. Whole families were murdered. Hamas perpetrated an appalling and enormous war crime.
This was immoral, illegal, and stupid. First, it pushed the already hyper-violent Israeli society into a blind rage for revenge. That may have been part of the calculation – to provoke a response so massive that it would upend the power structures in the region, in the hope that the new structure would turn out to be better for Palestinians. This is the kind of gamble that only a blind-faith pyromaniac could make.
Maybe the orders were, go in and cause as much damage and pain as you possibly can. Maybe they expected they would have only a few minutes to spend killing before the IDF killed them. In fact, incredibly, they had forty eight hours. I have no idea how this happened. If Israel were an Arab dictatorship, I’d say it was because key officers had been bribed or threatened to look the other way. But Israel is not an Arab dictatorship. No doubt in the years to come books will be written to attempt to explain.
In the end, Hamas achieved what has been called ‘catastrophic success’. It probably hoped to grab a few dozen hostages with which to bargain for Palestinian prisoners (or hostages) held in Israeli prisons. By taking so many hostages, and by killing so many civilians, it decreased the hostages’ value. Sections of the Israeli establishment seem to have already sacrificed the hostages. Their priority is to destroy the Palestinians, not to negotiate.
What Hamas fighters did was behave like savages. In so doing they gave Israelis and Westerners the perfect reflection of an image that already existed in their minds: the Muslim barbarian, the savage other, the irrational absolute enemy against whom all measures are justified. Because Hamas calls itself an ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’, the stain spreads to cover Muslims everywhere. (It’s worth repeating that Islamic rules of warfare very specifically forbid the harming of non-combatants.)
Irreconcilable Narratives
When I called relatives and friends living in Arab countries I realized that the story they were hearing from Arab media was very different to the story here in the west. There the focus was on Hamas’s assault on the military; here it was on Hamas’s terrorism against women and children. From the very start, the narratives spun in east and west were irreconcilable.
It didn’t help that Joe Biden said he’d personally seen and confirmed evidence of beheaded babies, and then a few hours later that the White House retracted his claim. It didn’t help that unverified claims of rape were spread far and wide. Some or all of these atrocities may actually have happened, but a lack of concern for truth on all sides has made it difficult to convince anybody of anything they don’t already believe.
Personally I don’t see any moral difference between shooting a baby in the head, or beheading a baby, or incinerating a baby with a bomb (and Israel has killed far more Palestinian children in the last few days than the total number of Israelis killed on October the Seventh). What the image of the baby-beheading rapist does, however, is to provide a justification for further genocidal violence.
The Context
Hamas’s attacks against civilians cannot be justified, but they can and must be contextualized. Israel and the West choose to believe that Hamas started the war on October Seventh. They tell us that when Hamas kills civilians it does so simply because it’s evil, and that when Israel kills civilians in greater numbers, and besieges and occupies them, it also does so simply because Hamas is evil.
Read the rest of this entry »Revolutionary Resurgence in Syria
Just a couple of points:
Twelve and a half years on, days after the tenth anniversary of the sarin slaughter in the Ghouta, that is a decade after Syrians lost all reason to hope…
As in the first years of the Syrian Revolution, people of all sects and social backgrounds are coming together to demand freedom and dignity. Over a decade of fierce sectarian counter-revolutionary violence hasn’t changed the basic demands of the Syrian people.
Protests are rising throughout southern Syria, in Daraa and Sweida provinces. As if this were 2011 reborn, there are massive popular demonstrations in regime-controlled territory. They’ve been met by solidarity demonstrations in eastern Syria: in Deir ez-Zor, and in Raqqa in PKK/PYD/SDF territory; as well as in the liberated areas of the north. The chants and lyrics of greeting and solidarity exchanged between the various regions of the country feel like a fresh breeze after the years of engineered sectarian and ethnic breakdown.
Syrians have been disappointed so many times before that it seems foolish to continue hoping. And yet, there are two new elements to the situation today. First, the entire Druze community – centred on Sweida – appears to be rejecting Assad entirely.
Individuals from minority communities have opposed Assad previously, but not a minority community en masse. The Druze of Sweida tolerated Assad so long as his forces kept their distance, and so long as young Druze conscripts served in the province rather than went to fight other Syrians. And the community sheltered defectors and others on the run from Assad’s killers. But it didn’t stage mass protests, nor an armed uprising, even as the Sunnis in neighbouring Deraa province were tortured, shot, and bombed. Assad’s main strategy has been to slaughter, rape, torture and expel Sunnis in particular, and to scare minority groups to sell them the lie that only Assad can protect them from the Sunnis. So mass protests of Druze are particularly difficult for Assad to deal with.
It looks like these protests won’t be stopped without massive violence. But massive violence against a minority sect ruins the pretext of the regime being a ‘protector of minorities’. It emphasises the unity of the Syrian people. Assad can’t survive a meeting with a unified Syrian people. Hence the slogan once again rising: One, One, One, the Syrian People are One.
Second,
Read the rest of this entry »Lesson from Iraq and Syria
Everybody’s asking what lessons can be learned from Iraq twenty years after the invasion and occupation. But more can be learned by looking back further, to 1991.
I’ve just listened to the two episodes on the The Rest is Politics podcast in which Rory Stewart grills Alastair Campbell on the 2003 invasion. It’s a fascinating discussion which I recommend listening to, but there are some glaring omissions. First, there’s lots of talk about British military casualties and the effects on western politics in the years since (and good they mention the Iraq hangover’s role in the west’s criminal inaction in Syria), but not much talk on the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians. Next, and most importantly, there is no mention of the American decision in 1991, after driving Iraqi forces from Kuwait, to not only leave Saddam in office but to give him permission to use helicopter gunships to put down the uprising in the mainly Shia Iraqi south.
That was the time to remove Saddam from power, not as a remotely decided regime change, but in support of a population that was already rising against the tyrant. At that key moment, America (and its allies) decided to NOT protect the Iraqi population. America had soldiers right there in southern Iraq watching as Saddam’s forces massacred civilians and filled mass graves. The reason for this was probably fear that Iran would take advantage – but if this terrified decision makers then into such immoral behaviour, why in 2003 did British and American decision makers not bother even considering how Iran would take advantage of their invasion? Of course the end result of the 2003 invasion was the takeover of Iraqi institutions by Iranian-run militias. This was the key factor in the rise of ISIS and then the consequent war to destroy the so-called ‘caliphate’.
So in 1991, after destroying the Iraqi army and liberating Kuwait, the US chose to allow Saddam to slaughter the southern Shia. Then it imposed ruinous sanctions which destroyed the Iraqi middle class. Sectarianism became much worse as Saddam used loyal Sunni troops to massacre Shia, and as he turned to sectarian rhetoric to shore up his damaged rule. By 2003, when the US and Britain decided to invade for their own reasons, on their own timetable, it wasn’t surprising that the place soon collapsed in civil war.
Read the rest of this entry »Palestinian Assadists
There’s nothing more ridiculous than a Palestinian Assadist. For western Assadists, the Arab world is a blank on which to project ideological fantasies. But the Palestinians are part of this world. So what makes some repeat inhuman and absurd Assadist propaganda?
How has the Assad regime under father and son won such loyalty? Is it because in 1967 Hafez al-Assad, then defence minister, ordered the Syrian army to retreat from the Golan before any Israeli soldiers had turned up? So the Golan was handed to Israel, which then annexed it. Or is it because in 1973 Hafez al-Assad, now in absolute control, lost another war (not surprising given his endless purges and rabid sectarianization of the army) but spun the defeat as a historic victory and proof of his nationalist genius? Perhaps it’s because early in the Lebanese civil war, the Assad regime, which had loudly proclaimed its support for the Palestinian/Muslim/leftist alliance, intervened, but on the side of the pro-Israel Maronite Falangists to defeat the Palestinian/Muslim/Leftist alliance? Or could it be because throughout the 1980s the Assad regime slaughtered tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in camps in Lebanon, most notably at Tel Za’atar? Perhaps it’s because the regime under Bashar utterly destroyed Yarmouk camp, until then Syria’s most important centre of Palestinian culture. Or because the regime tortured and starved so many Palestinians to death during the Syrian Revolution. Or maybe Assadist Palestinians love the regime because its reign has seen all of Syria parceled out to foreign powers – Russia, Iran, the United States, Turkey, the Turkish-Kurdish PKK, as well as the part it had already handed to Israel. Perhaps they believe the destruction of Syria’s cities, the murder of a million Syrians, and the expulsion of millions more, will in the end hasten the liberation of Palestine.
I should say that very many, probably most, Palestinians sympathise with the revolutionary Syrian people and not with the regime (and its allies) killing them. The more working class and more religious the Palestinian, the more this is the case (in my experience). And among liberal middle class activists there are many decent people who have shown solidarity with Syrians. Here’s a great statement by some of them from 2016. But some of the signatories were ostracised by other Palestinians for signing. Amongst the West Bank middle classes, including not a few faux-intellectuals, there’s plenty of Assadism. There’s also, for God’s sake, the statue of Saddam Hussein at Bir Zeit.
Why is it that this kind of Palestinian, the very kind who in previous decades we might have considered as being at the forefront of radical politics in the Arab world, has become enmeshed in such backward and inhumane modes of thought? It might be because the Palestinians haven’t experienced the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring. This isn’t really their fault. They are stuck with the old nationalist narratives because they are stuck with a foreign occupation. Whereas their neighbours have moved on to postcolonial struggles. The foreign occupations have gone (or had gone, before Assad brought them back), so the struggle now is against those gangsters who seized control of the weakened countries the colonialists left behind.
Read the rest of this entry »‘It can’t get any worse.’ And then the earthquake…
(A lightly edited version of this piece was published by Dawn Mena. At the bottom of this page there is information on who to donate to.)
Syrians wanted to be known for their contributions to civilization, as they were in ancient times. Syria is part of the Fertile Crescent where agriculture began, where the first cities were built, where the first states developed. The first alphabet (Ugaritic) was thought up in Syria. The country produced Roman emperors and, under the Umayyad dynasty, became the first centre of a new ‘Islamic world’. When Syrians achieved independence in the mid 20th Century, they hoped their modern accomplishments would echo the old. As a diverse, cultured, hardworking people who valued education, and who tended to excel in business when abroad, they had good reason to hope this would be the case.
But like so many post-colonial states lacking strong institutions, modern Syria soon fell into a cycle of military coup and counter-coup, ending with the Baathist dictatorship which has tortured and plundered the country and its people since 1963 – and under the Assad family since 1970. In 2011 Syrians rose in revolution against the Assad regime, and would have liked then to be recognized for their revolution’s successes. For years they resisted the most extreme oppression, and even under the bombs managed to build hundreds of democratic local councils. They also managed to avoid falling into sectarian civil war, despite the provocations. Sunni and Alawi villages didn’t attack each other. The sectarian massacres had to be organized from on high, first by the regime, then by ISIS, the regime’s dark protégé.
But the Assad regime was rescued by Russian and Iranian imperialists, and by the West’s appeasement of these imperialists. The democratic Syrian Revolution was defeated by force of arms. Worse, it was ‘orphaned’, to use Ziad Majed’s term. Beyond Syria it was ignored or misrepresented, particularly in the West, by the Kremlin’s leftist and rightist useful idiots and a wider public prepared to believe the worst of a mainly Arab and mainly Muslim people.
So now Syrians have become known internationally not for their history, nor their modern success, but for the extremity of their suffering. Their pains under dictatorship were bad enough, culminating in the 1982 Hama massacre when at least 20,000 were murdered, but multiplied after 2011 when the full force of local, regional and international counter-revolution was deployed against them.
Read the rest of this entry »British Political Breakdown: An Explanation
An explanation for why British politics is in such a mess:
In 2016 Prime Minister David Cameron gave the right wing of the Tory Party what it wanted – a referendum on British membership of the EU. He expected the result to be an overwhelming vote to stay in the EU, because leaving was clearly such a bad idea. Tragically, however, this coincided with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the opposition Labour Party. Corbyn – a fossilised teenager from the early 70s, a propagandist for Assad and Putin, and a conspiracy theorist – had opposed EU membership for decades. This meant that the Labour leadership failed to oppose Brexit, and that therefore no substantive criticism of this far right idea was made from the left. It also coincided with years of anti-migration rhetoric from all major English parties and from almost all media. Therefore 52% of people voted to leave the EU.
From that point on, Britain became ungovernable. This is because people had been promised things which were impossible – for instance, that immigration would be dramatically reduced while the economy would continue to grow. Or that British trade would increase while barriers were put up to trade with Britain’s neighbours and closest partners.
Read the rest of this entry »
Qunfuz 