Capitalism and its imperialisms in crisis are nothing other than nihilistic death cults. We are living in an increasingly violent and dangerous arena as they flail and expire. We must bring an end to them before they bring us down with them.
The authoritarian Western left has, in light of the tragedy in Syria, lost both its credibility as well as its right to speak on the matter. If they cannot, given time, begin to address this, they are well on the way to complete irrelevance.
The Assad regime’s open genocidal policies against its own people are enviable to people on the far right. For people whose politics come from identification with the state, this completely unrestrained killing is the highest form of freedom.
The sectarian narrative is often completely false; this messaging of fear is designed to preserve authoritarian regimes in the face of popular protest movements that have nothing to do with sect.
Whether in Syria or in the diaspora, a big part of the problem is that Syrian voices are just not listened to. They know best what’s happening in their country. We could learn from their experience and support them.
The ideas that became socially acceptable with the rise of Serbian nationalism in the 1980s soon found their concrete political implementation. What emerged was an ideological cocktail of racism, demographic panic, conspiratorial paranoia, and revanchism that ultimately proposed an urgent need for action against an allegedly existential threat.
Neither Syrians nor Palestinians need us to teach them how to liberate themselves. They know what they need, and they know what liberation for them looks like. But can we help lessen the extreme conditions they live under so that they have the space to self-organize?
Anti-imperialists may believe they are on the right side of history. But history has already shown the results of opposing a liberal order through red-brown populist collaboration.
Exiled Syrian dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh in conversation with Loubna Mrie and Mustafa – The Irrelevant Arabs
Combating Islamophobia at its roots means attacking the structures of domination and division that produce it, promote it, and use it. If we ignore those and fight only its surface expressions, we will lose.
