thanks!

Okay, everyone, bye

Everybody should write in me.

@Othello@hexbear.net this is a musical I might want to see

If anybody finds my rants useful, they should save them somewhere. I plan on deleting my account eventually, for opsec reasons. I will rejoin with a fresh one, of course.

Zelensky sounds like Jesus two months before the crucification in the quote, ngl

Repasting my scribbles on the syrian ba3th party, up untl the point where Hafiz al-Asad, the dad of Bashar al-Asad, seized power .

Happy to provide, Hanna Batatu is the communist, Patrick Seale the Asad-fan, but they have both good takes and save you a bunch of lib brain worms. You should look at some lib stuff for that time, but it is mostly these guys that are essential

I did an effort post about Syria’s ba3th until 1970 in the replies to my other comment about Libya, if you are interested, check it out if you want: https://hexbear.net/comment/3914654

Okay, so, I am mostly gonna talk on the Syrian Ba3th (بعث, means “mission, rebirth, evangelium”) bc I am the most knowledgeable on those guys. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say the ba3th started as a nationalist circle led by Michel Aflaq and a guy named Zaki Arsuzi with clear nazi-curious positions or open racism that was repulsive even in the 1930ies. Those were more common in the Levante than most people would like to admit, from the Syrian Social nationalist Party (SSNP) to even Zionist groups, communists being pretty much the exception (), the main impetus being more opportunistic anti-colonialism that didnt want to rely on the colonized alone and naivety or ignorance about fascism, not outright developed fascist positions.

The party was pretty illegal until the end of the French mandate, its activities restricted to violent anti-colonial demonstrations. It always considered itself a pan-arab party, so it founded itself in a national (pan-arab) and a regional (individual arab countries) structure even before taking off. It always had some appeal for christians and non-muslim groups outside of Palestine and Lebanon, who saw secular nationalism as a way to become equal co-citizens with the muslim population around them. It was also very attractive to merchants, students and intellectuals who were fed up with the incompetent and corrupt old guard of Arab Nationalism, mostly landowners, a bunch of propped-up clerics (see al-husseini in Jerusalem) and so on who all had cooperated with the west and zionism and bickered among themselves, finally getting smashed to bloody pieces in the war leading up to the Nakba, 1947 and 1948.

Independence 1946 allowed for some activities. The party was not just running on anti-colonialism, but on a moral message about regeneration and rebirth. The very christian elements of ba3th came from Michel Aflaq, a christian. Individual party members would go around villages and assist however they could, often as doctors. This led to some mild success. The party’s extremely elitist and idealist approaches kept it from taking off for a considerable amount of time.

Immediately after the disastrous failures against Israel, Syria went through 3 presidents in a single year, all militarily couped, leading to military guy Adib Shishakli taking power. He banned all parties. Big Mistake. In illegality and exile, the ba3th fused with the Arab Socialist Party, that had been pretty successful in Syria organizing peasants. It also led to the more differentiation between the national and regional levels. This led to it slowly taking more socialist positions and the, albeit not very ideologically firm (for some exceptions) socialist wing of the ba3th to become stronger at the expense of the more disgusting nationalists. After Shishkali suspended the constitution, the rest of the military had enough and deposed him with the support of a coalition of basically every party.

This led to tense back and forth, I am already taking too long. in 1958 the ba3th was in charge, but in a politically very insecure position and fused with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt to hold onto power, somewhat against its own will. Today, many Arabs will blame the period of the United Arab republic failing on “cultural differences”. It was, quite frankly, Nasser’s massive and monumental ego that didn’t allow for anyone outside of his Arab Socialist Union Party and his desire to see Egypt on the top of any unified Arab state. Not that the Ba3th was not also full of people with massive egos, who were seething with rage at the fact that Nasser dissolved the party bis his order, which some branches ignored. In any case, syria was getting the short end of the deal, so the military couped and deposed the ba3th 1961. The refounding and reorganization of the ba3th in the wake of this led to hasty promotions along ethnoreligious lines, which were still the predominant form of loyality and social connection during that time for a host of reasons. These promotions absolutely destroyed party discipline.

The two trends of the military routinely intervening in syrian politics in mostly unbloody coups and promotions and loyality running along the lines of a religious community (which worked very different from attending mass/friday prayer once a week, imagine if your leftist sect was inheritable and you couldn’t convert away easily) dominated the 60ies. The ba3th couped itself into power again, this time led by the more socialist oriented party members and officers, who had their disticnt subgroup in the party and heavily recruited along religious lines as well. A Sunni leader would have Sunni soldiers across the ranks behind him who would listen to him instead of their actual superior, a druze had druze guys etc. This ragtag group decided that the party was gonna be hardcore communist, goddammit, so they mobilized all their support to get a huge bunch of motions through during the party’s congress which used really communist language and had a bunch of points about how things were to be done. This was mostly ignored in general, party discipline having become pretty much a joke. Michel Aflaq, a nazi-curious petty bourgeois dreamer, was NOT happy, still. The increasing split and infighting within the party became charged with sectarian (in a religious sense) feelings bc of the power dynamics () with the sectarian lines of loyalty. Aflaq and his dudes got kicked and went to Iraq where Saddam ate them for breakfast (I don’t know the details there, but Saddam was a more ruthless, more powerful, more cunning politican than Aflaq for sure).

Open Sectarianism was outlawed by the secular ba3th, but the suspicion of secretly being sectarian was often projected onto others. This led to more and more coups and purges by the military, often along sectarian lines, so after some time, sunnis, christians, and finally the druze went out, until only the Alawite leadership was left by 1967. Repeatedly purging your military is not good for its abilities, ask .

So when the war with Israel 1967 became inevitable, the military officer Salah Jadid was in charge of Syria. He had a decent socialist program and was puppetered by the communist group of the “three doctors”, but was pretty fucking clueless himself (he called using the Palestinian bataillions loyal to syria a “people’s war” in reference to Mao). The Arab armies lost in a hilariously bad manner. I can’t overstate that, there is no way around that. I don’t have details on the war itself. I only know It was a depressing fucking curbstomp for Syria. Egypt had some chances, had its airforce survived. But the Syrian front was a total wash. Salah Jadid was a dead man walking from that point on. Hafiz al-Asad, a fellow Alawite, prepared his coup and took power 1970. He quickly cemented some rule, cut some deals with the sunni petty bourgeoisie, who didn’t thank him at all for that. I am exhausted now and need to start my day. I skimmed over a lot of details and probably misremembered a bunch of stuff, read Patrick Seale and Hanna Batatu for more.

Gotta hand it to him

super short late night rant: al-Gaddafi turned pan-african later on. He definitely had some personal stuff going on and I wouldn’t hold him as a great example, but he is closer to many leftist’s subjective experience than we would like to admit and grappling with his and some of the others’ faults should show anybody that you can’t “great man” things into communism, bc even the most charismatic, visionary guys with a bunch of intellectuals behind them fucked up hard. Aflaq and the iraqi ba3th were the worst bunch, in all honesty.

al-Asad was an incredibly smart and cynical realpolitiks guy. I find it hard to believe he believed in anything but getting results for syria, at any cost to ideological coherence, credibility or any other movements. Even the GDR was pretty clear that he wasn’t a socialist. There is an old report about Syria from gdr times, hard to get. They assumed continued socialist construction would lead to socialism in syria, lol.

Libya: Gaddafi’s Green Book was more coherent than most people like to give it credit for. Was it very well written and a revolutionary theory that added to communism? No. Was it the insane ramblings of a mad dictator? Also no. There is a bunch of orientalism which made all the scholars switch off their brains, but Gaddafi bases his Third Universal Theory on the assumption that there has been too much abstraction and mediation from a natural state of things, which he refers to consistently throughout his books. this is the ideational foundation for his approach to direct democracy, for example. He was still a believer in development etc, so it is pretty wrong to say he espouses a “primitivist” worldview or something orientalist like that.

There might be some arguments about a “naturalist” point of view he takes, but being an oil exporting and consuming country, it is obviously silly to think he was an environmentalist.

Mu3ammar al-Gaddafi, actually al-Qadhdhâfî (“softer” th, Q comes from the back of your throat, î is a long vowel) was very flexible, which he had to be. He took power 1969 by taking leadership of a group of officers that styled themselves in the image of Naser, calling themselves the Free Officer (ad-dubbat al-ahrar) and establishing similar bodies after throwing out the western proxy Idris as-Sanousi who was a far cry from his grandfather, the founder of the Sanousiyya, a sufi order that lead the fight.

Originally, he had no desire to rule Libya as its own state, which was divided between Tripoli in the West and Cyrenaica in the East as well as independ tribes in the South. Being a good Nasserite, he wanted it annexed to Egypt under Naser, whom he saw as his personal hero. Tragically, Naser died and al-Gaddafi did not like Sadat at all, so he decided to do his own thing. His position was very precarious. Libya was underdeveloped, had little national identity, neither pan-arab nor Libyan, both the USA and the USSR kind of liked and kind of didn’t like him, there were internal power struggles in the ruling comitee as well, which Gaddafi won by virtue of his charisma and stubbornness. After a lot of experimentation and getting rid of rivals, he solidified his rule enough to be more or less the guy people turned to for questions. His politics put him closer to the USSR than to the US, even though he never cut ties with anybody or joined a camp during the cold war.

He was kind of a guy out of his time, having come to power after the Naksa (set-back) 1968 whose effects on the pan-arab movement are hard to convey in a few words, but basically, the hopes that the ba3th and Nasser would manage to turn the “backwards” arab states into socialist bastions of modernity were dashed, the PLO began to emerge as the hope for a lot of leftists for Arab independence and revolution in the Levante. al-Qaddafi was not impressed, holding on to the ideology for quite some time. Economic development was rocky at start, but his famously robust welfare program was probably not a bad call to hold onto power and achieve some form of national identity, considering the situation he was in. He also financed a lot of Palestinian groups. I am not knowledgeable enough to trace his involvement into the Lebanese Civil War starting 1975, but he did host the Abu Nidal group, which was just one of the worse palestinian groups, objectively speaking more busy killing Palestinians and random jews around the world than killing Israeli leadership, trying claim Arafat was a homosexual with AIDS and other gameresque shit.

He was pretty good at playing both the USSR and the USA for support for his country.

The Green Book is a reference to Mao’s “Red Book”. He published three parts, 1975, 1977, 1981, the first on Politics, the second on economics, the third on society at large. It’s not long, go read it when bored. Most points you’ll disagree with, but his point about sports was pretty agreeable to me. He famously received a visit from the German Greens 1982. https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/gaddafi/index.htm

I can continue rambling on if you find this interessting, but I need to do irl stuff rn.