I love your drapes.

You’re a sweet talking liar! ❤️

#meme #nostrmeme #memes
#zap it, Feels good man.
🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘🌚 🤦🙋‍♂️
#humor #bitcoin regret
#bullishbounty

video.nostr.build/162024b5a6fa…

Now that I'm starting to get the hang of what does what in #CSS, I'm discovering all of the redundant things I specified while experimenting, so my style sheet is actually getting shorter and easier to comprehend as I progress

(this is not the normal way when I make things)

Every time I make a thread to raise awareness of how hostile #Spotify and other streamers are to the artists whose music they exploit, there's ALWAYS one fucking guy who has to jump in to say "I know it's bad but I like the convenience so fuck them artists" and like... I *know* that's the prevalent attitude but if you feel compelled to say that to the people who make the music, I have to assume you're the kind of person who farts in elevators to ensure maximum suffering.

Fuck off!

26. The Legacy of Samir Kassir 15 Years On

open.spotify.com/episode/4QHQV…

This is an in-depth conversation with Ziad Majed, a Lebanese-French writer and Program Coordinator for Middle East Pluralities at the American University of Paris.

Ziad was one of the founders of the Democratic Left Movement (DLM) in Lebanon, one of the few independent and leftwing groups that came out of the anti-Assad mobilisation that followed the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005.

The DLM soon found two of its prominent figures and allies assassinated: George Hawi, former secretary general of the Lebanese Communist Party, and Samir Kassir, the man we’ll be talking about in this episode.

Samir Kassir was assassinated on this day 15 years ago, June 2nd 2005, with a car bomb just outside of his house in Beirut. Born to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother, Kassir brought together his multiple identities with his principled opposition against both Israeli and Syrian occupations of Lebanon to create a unique persona.

I wanted to have Ziad on because he was ‘there’. He saw first-hand some of the major events that defined Lebanon in the past three decades, and he saw his friends pay the ultimate price for their principled stances. He himself also had to pay a price due to the increasing threats made against him.

Naturally, we also spoke about what Samir represented, about Syria, Lebanon and Palestine and how and why they are interrelated, and about why it’s two prominent anti-Assad leftists Samir Kassir and, later, George Hawi who were assassinated first after Hariri’s assassination.

We spoke about the Syrian revolution, the role of the Assad regime in Syria and Lebanon, the intsrumentalisation of the Palestinian cause by authoritarian regimes and groups, the difficulties in dealing with Hezbollah and the recent October uprising in Lebanon.

There was a particular focus on the Syrian occupation of Lebanon since it is linked to the assassination of Samir Kassir, and George Hawi. We spoke about how Hezbollah took over the Assad regime’s role in Lebanon and its relationship with the Iranian regime’s foreign policy.

We also spoke about how the sectarian groups within March 14 preferred to deal with Hezbollah and Amal rather than deal with independent Shia voices, as that would have meant dealing with independent Christian, Druze and Sunni voices, and thus feeling threatened ‘from within’.

This is a long conversation but one which I think will stand the test of time. I wanted us to do justice to Samir Kassir’s legacy and I hope we succeeded.

The Fire These Times is available on Apple Podcasts, Anchor, Breaker, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio Public, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Castro and RSS.

If it is not available wherever you get your podcasts, please drop me a message!

You can follow the podcast on Twitter @FireTheseTimes.If you like what I do, please consider supporting this project with only 1$ a month on Patreon or on BuyMeACoffee.com. You can also do so directly on PayPal if you prefer.

Patreon is for monthly, PayPal is for one-offs and BuyMeACoffee has both options.

If you cannot donate you can still help by reviewing this podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Resources relevant to our conversation:

• Beirut Banyan’s reflection on Samir Kassir and the interview with Ziad Majed
• Ziad Majed’s talk on Syria and Lebanon on the occasion of the 6th year commemoration of Samir Kassir’s assassination
• A lot of videos with Ziad Majed available on YouTube, mainly in French and Arabic. Focused on Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.
• Ziad Majed’s Arabic website and English/French website

Music by Tarabeat. Photo by Syrian Banksy in Idlib.

Transcript prepared by Yusra Bitar and Antidote Zine.

Elia J. Ayoub: On the second of June 2005, I was having some friends over to celebrate my fourteenth birthday. Within a couple of hours, we were told that something happened, so we turned on the television as one would, and we discovered that someone was assassinated. This was a bit of a shock because at the time, we were just recovering as a country from a major assassination – that of then prime minister Rafik Hariri. His assassination led to what we now call the Cedar Revolution, which itself ousted the Syrian army and thus ended the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, but that particular assassination, the one on June 2, marked me in a different way. On that day, the journalist Samir Kassir was killed. He was assassinated with a car bomb. I, like many others of my generation, did not fully understand back then the significance of what was happening.

I keep on going back to June 2 and the assassination of Samir Kassir. Samir was not just an excellent Lebanese writer, historian, and journalist, but he was also someone of multiple identities. He was not just Lebanese, but Palestinian and Syrian as well as a French citizen. He was able to navigate those identities in a way that I think symbolizes the best of that time. When he was killed in an assassination, which was followed by the assassination of George Hawi just a few weeks later, Hawi being the former secretary of the Lebanese communist party–when these two men were killed, it felt maybe later on that nothing would ever be the same anymore.

So, to commemorate the date of his assassination, I sat down with Ziad Majed, a friend of Samir, to talk about the leftist movement that they were trying to build, about their opposition to the Assad regime’s occupation, and about what it meant for Ziad to see his close friends pay the ultimate price for their principled positions. So that’s it for me. Thank you for sticking around, and I hope you enjoy it.

Ziad Majed: I’m Ziad Majed, associate professor at the American University of Paris and coordinator of the Middle Eastern Studies Program, author of two books on Syria and one book on Lebanon.

EA: So this episode will be released tomorrow, June 2, which would be exactly fifteen years to the day since Samir Kassir was assassinated. Can you give a bit of context about the assassination, for those who don’t know, first of all, and then if you can also give a wider context about the party that you were both part of, your respective roles, and what your positions were?

ZM: Sure. I met Samir Kassir in Beirut in 1994. At the time, he was settling down in the city after spending many years in Paris, where he did his PhD in history, and he wrote on the Lebanese civil war, especially the first part of the war, the one from 1975 until 1982 and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He returned to Lebanon after that. He started teaching at the Universite Saint Joseph (USJ) and he started writing in An-Nahar – the Lebanese newspaper – where he had a weekly column evoking issues related to Lebanon and Syria, Palestine, international affairs, etcetera.

He was ambitious in a sense that he wanted to create a cultural review that would be in French, but would show that you can write in French while being leftist, that you can write in French while being concerned with Arabity, with an Arab renaissance project, with causes that usually the French-speaking newspapers or historically Francophone people in Lebanon were not always writing about or dealing with in French. There was a connotation for the French-speaking journalists or intellectuals, whether it was true or wrong, but it was there that they were much more into Lebanese identity, into centrist or right-wing ideas, etcetera.

So his ambition was to write in French while thinking as a leftist and as someone who has always been involved politically and intellectually for the Palestinian cause, because while in Paris used to write in Lyom El-Sabi’ which was a newspaper related to the PLO. He was also very much active in the Journal for Palestine Studies in French as well, and he used to write in Le Monde and Le Monde diplomatique mainly about Palestine and the Palestinian cause. So he was preparing for that review to start, and in fact, he started it in 1995. It was called L’orient Express, and it lived for three years. It was probably one of the best experiences in publishing in French in Lebanon, cultural and political articles and papers on different issues, then Samir was also – as most Lebanese at the time – involved in dynamics and initiatives related to the Lebanese civil society, to the roles of intellectuals. When it comes to, at the same time, confronting corruption and the political elite, Lebanese political elite business as usual in power, but also concerned with public and private freedoms in front of the Syrian regime, hegemony and the security service apparatus and the way of controlling and manipulating the different scenes in Lebanon.

So as of 1998, we got involved in many political initiatives, most of them did not succeed in creating a party, but the idea of having a political party that could at the same time incarnate a certain left in Lebanon. Left in the sense that social justice, financial and economic reforms, that a secular project with that socio-economic project and a political one, connecting Lebanon to Syria, to Palestine and to the Arab world in general, in terms of freedom and in terms of liberation and not disconnecting them as it has been in many leftist circles, the tradition of considering the liberation and the anti-Israeli/anti-imperialist stances as the priority while public and private freedoms and the confrontation with Arab regimes was not at all a priority if we don’t want to talk about complicity, in some cases, with the Syrian regime specifically.

So we wanted to try a political experience, to see if we can found a party that could reconcile our leftist identity with democratic practices, with an understanding of the struggle for freedom in Syria and for liberation in Palestine, and connecting all that to the Lebanese context and to what we were going through in Lebanon. The attempt at creating such a party would continue in 2000 and then in 2002, but we were never able to have this as a concrete project with concrete people and to enlarge at least the small circle we were all in, including Elias Khoury and others.

And finally in 2004, we succeeded in founding the Democratic Left Movement that was composed of people, most of them, or let’s say more than half of them coming from the Lebanese Communist Party. They left the party either because they had some disputes about the organizational structure and their freedom within the party, or because of the position when it comes to the Syrian regime. They wanted a clear stance about the Syrian regime, as the party at the time was not involved in any opposition to the Syrian regime. So that was one component of the Democratic Left Movement, another one was made of students: many of the independent student organizations in universities were part of the experience at the beginning. Some of them unfortunately left later for different reasons, but many stayed.

A third component was much more individuals and smaller groups, either coming from the communist action organization – Munazamit el-’Amal al-Shuyu’i – or from different civil society movements or just individuals who define themselves as leftists. What was common between us was a will or a desire at least to have a new movement, a new party that would accept inside proportional representation of its different components that we can be Marxist or non-Marxist, but leftist. We can be young, old, feminist, concerned with the environment. We’re coming from different backgrounds, and the idea was to have an experience where all those backgrounds would be part of the political laboratory and would express themselves differently with of course, a priority that is to confront the Syrian regime.

Samir was one of the spokesmen of the movement. I was the vice president of that movement as well. Elias Khoury was with us as a member of the political bureau and Elias Attallah was the Secretary General. Nadim AbdelSamad was the summer president and Hikmat Eid was the other vice president, plus other people like Ziad Saab. I think in 2004 and in 2005, we managed to attract different groups in different regions, and then with the assassination of Hariri and with the establishment of a large political camp in Lebanon against the Syrian regime that we were part of, we lost some support among some leftist groups because they accused us of cooperating with part of the corrupt political elite of the country that turned against the Syrian Regime after the assassination of Hariri, and we at the same time attracted other groups who are very much concerned by the fight against the Syrian regime and who considered that finally they can find a leftist group involved in that fight.

Now, if you allow me just to say a few words about that specific moment and take some time to clarify how we went into an alliance with groups with whom we share very few things when it comes to social justice, to the secular system, to the equality between men and women, to ending corrupt practices, etcetera. What we said at the time is that we have no illusion that this will be a temporary alliance. We have no illusion that most of our allies were before, and probably will continue after a possible withdrawal of the Syrian regime, corrupt elites or elites involved in all kinds of confessional sectarian politics. We did not have an illusion about it. We thought that there are some others among the allies who might be interested, like us, in a project of reconstructing the state in the country, of having a new political contract, maybe a new social contract, and there were some secular groups and non-corrupt groups within that 14 March Alliance, and we want to just end Syrian hegemony so that we can go into a different approach related to alliances and to Lebanese politics. Now, some people might not approve of that, which is also very legitimate, but that was our point of view of the time, and we couldn’t afford the possibility of being on our own opposed to the Syrian regime and not connected to any large group in the country.

So we considered this as a kind of a historical opportunity in which we can get rid of the Syrian regime in Lebanon and that will weaken it in Syria itself, allowing democrats and people who resemble us in Syria to start their own experience as well, maybe, and to try to benefit or to seek a project that would build on what we have done or started to do in Lebanon.

Except that while we were still in the momentum that just followed the withdrawal of the Syrian regime on 26 April 2005, the fact that parliamentary elections were to be organized in late May, and the fact that we thought that having for the first time a deputy coming from an organized movement of the left (because in the past in Lebanon, there were leftists in the parliament, like Habib Sadek, but never a candidate of the communist party, for instance, made it because of different reasons, and no other leftists were able to reach the parliament) so having a deputy there, trying to show through that deputy that we can do politics differently, that we can present legislations, this projects for legislation, even if they fail in the votes, but at least to say that we can do something different, that a parliamentarian is not to be just someone dealing with his clientelist network, that he can be honest and someone who will show that there are possibilities of being officially a politician without being part of the system itself–in the middle of all that, and on June 2 just before the elections in Mount Lebanon and then in the north (it was after the elections in Beirut in fact), Samir got assassinated.

And two weeks after, three weeks after his assassination, George Hawi, the former Secretary General of the Communist Party, with whom we started to coordinate and to cooperate with the ambition of having a larger leftist camp, was also assassinated. And both of them, in my opinion, and with many proofs in fact, were assassinated by the Syrian regime and its Lebanese allies because they were considered as two pillars in such a leftist project that could have an influence in Syria itself among many young people and leftist people. Many of us were put under security pressure and we had to go underground, and we were at the same time criticized by many groups, and assassinations continued in Lebanon and many of us had to leave the country. I left for Paris six months after. Elias Khoury stayed in Lebanon, but he went teaching in the US and then returned. Elias Attallah went underground and became a deputy in the parliament, but when he became a deputy we started diverging, in fact, politically with him.

When I’m saying we, I mean myself, many of the young comrades, Elias Khoury and others, because we thought that he was not doing, let’s say, what we hoped he would have been able to do. Many internal disputes started to appear, and then many episodes related to Lebanese politics (and then related to the July war in 2006) led to a split in the movement and then led to a kind of clinical death of the movement as of 2007-2008 and since that time. Unfortunately, this experience ended the way at least we were hoping it will evolve.

So Samir was assassinated on June 2 fifteen years ago, and he incarnated this kind of reconciliation between the fact that he was born into a Christian family where his father is Palestinian and his mother is Syrian, and he is himself a Lebanese from Achrafieh and Beirut. In the Civil War, at least in the first years of the Civil War, while living in Achrafieh, he was politically much more influenced by the discourse of the Lebanese left in the other other part of the city, in Western Beirut. And then in Paris, he discovered friendships and he built friendships with Syrian dissidents, intellectuals living in Paris like Farouk Mardambey. He started his friendships with Palestinian intellectuals Elie Sambar and others, and he discovered his Arab identity here in Paris, and that’s why, when he returned to Lebanon, he was very much concerned with translating all that into concrete cultural and political projects, and I believe that this was mainly the reason why he was assassinated: because he incarnated all what the Syrian regime hated the most, being pro-Palestinian and pro-democracy, reconciled with the Western culture (without approving Western policies and approaches when it comes to the Middle East and to other places) and being at the same time attached to secularism and social justice.

EA: To understand the context of Samir’s assassination and then as you say, also George Hawi’s assassination, can you sort of paint a picture for those who don’t know of what Lebanon was like under the Syrian regime’s hegemony? So from the initial invasion in ’76 during the war, until its withdrawal in 2005?

ZM: Yes. The Syrian regime invaded Lebanon in 1976, and the pretext was to stop the Lebanese civil war and to impose a ceasefire, following an Arab summit meeting–and also following (and this is no secret) negotiations between Hafez el-Assad the father of Bashar and Henry Kissinger the secretary of state of the US at the time, who also got the approval of Israel for the invasion with one or two Israeli conditions: one not to use the Syrian Air Force, and the second not to deploy to the south of the Ouwali River, which is the river in south Lebanon that crosses the city of Saida, the entrance of south Lebanon. And the Syrian regime did respect those two Israeli conditions, invaded the country, defeated the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Lebanese left, contrary to what it was saying about intervening to save the Palestinians and to protect Lebanon, etcetera.

It defeated the Lebanese Left aligned with the PLO, and then, it’s not a secret either, it assassinated Kamal Jumblatt, who was the head of the socialist party and the leader of the Lebanese left at the time. And it controlled Lebanon or parts of Lebanon after that, with shifting alliances and playing one group against the other in order to keep justifying its occupation of the country. And then when the war ended in 1990 and the Syrian regime got international recognition of its role in Lebanon as a sponsor of the post-war era, that coincided with the Gulf War – the Desert Storm operation – the American attack on Iraq after Iraq invaded Kuwait, in which the Syrian army was sent under the American flag to fight the Iraqi Ba’athist rival along with Egyptian army as well.

And in return, Syrian got the approval of Saudi Arabia and of the United States to manage Lebanon in the postwar. The agreement between Saudia Arabia and Syria that the Americans approved was to have Rafiq Hariri, who is a Lebanese billionaire, a businessman working in Saudi Arabia (and he was a mediator in the Taif Accord that put an end to the Lebanese civil war and brought some reforms – some of them were implemented and the majority were not), will be in charge of the reconstruction, while Syria will keep managing the foreign policy and the political scene in Lebanon.

This was also the time of Arab-Israeli negotiations, the Madrid Process. Syria and Lebanon had a common delegation led by the Syrian foreign affairs minister Farouk El-Sharaa. So Syria managed politically while Hariri was kind of a bridge or a connection with his friends in the west (Chirac, Blair, Bush and later Clinton), and he was in charge of the reconstruction in Lebanon. The reconstruction, of course, was controversial, many people criticized it because they considered that it was not taking into consideration the social tissue of Beirut, the social fabric. It was aiming at designing a city or downtown that will exclude part of its population and part of the middle and popular classes, and to make it an area of investment and deluxe shops and foreign tourism.

So there were lots of critics for Hariri and his reconstruction plan, plus the fact that it was not a balanced reconstruction in different areas. Most of the reconstruction was in Beirut, plus he didn’t take into consideration the size of the Lebanese economy, so there would be lots of debts, and there will be a policy to keep the currency stable, whatever the cost. There would be lots of controversies about the reconstruction plan, but that plan anyway took off, and he was accused by many of his opponents of bribing (or sometimes buying) politicians, while the corruption of course existed before him and continued through his reign from ’92 on and off until his assassination. He was excluded from power for two years between ’98 and 2000.

Meanwhile, the Syrian regime kept controlling the political scene: demonstrations, sit-ins, and the creation of new political parties were banned in Lebanon, were not allowed. Even what usually used to manage the civil society, what we call the 1905 Association Law, which is an Ottoman law where you can create your own organization and you don’t need an approval, you just inform the authorities that you have created your organization–even that as a law was violated, and everything needed an approval by the Ministry of Interior that was directly connected to the Syrian regime. And there were in Lebanon Syrian officers who were in charge of managing political questions, connecting people, manipulating others. There was censorship on the press, and many journalists used to self-censor themselves as well to avoid problems. Some leaders of the Christian rightwing parties were in jail, others were in exile.

So there was a serious political problem in the country, and that problem got worse after 1998 because in 1998, to prepare Bashar al-Assad for succession in Syria while Hafez was getting sick and tired, Bashar was in charge of the management of the Lebanese political scene, and he wanted to weaken Hariri and Jumblatt and other heavyweights in the Lebanese scene, and to bring his own people, what he called his “own generation” of politicians, to replace them. So Emile Lahoud, who was the head of the Lebanese army, was elected president while constitutionally, this was a violation of the constitution because he was the head of the army. He should have resigned at least six months before the elections. This didn’t happen, so they did an amendment: they modified a clause in the constitution allowing him to become president. And under Lahoud, the security general director Jamil El-Sayed became the strongman of the country. He was into controlling public freedoms, into interfering in newspapers’ affairs, and he had a very conflictual relation with Samir because he criticized him on many occasions. He even confiscated Samir’s passport at the Beirut airport.

And this is the moment where in Lebanon also there were more and more articles about Syria itself. And then in 2000, Assad the father died, Bashar became president, Syria witnessed what was called at the time the “Damascus Spring” from September 2000 until February 2001.And in Lebanon, there were many articles in An-Nahar and its cultural supplement that Elias Khoury was editing: lots of articles by Syrian intellectuals and by Lebanese intellectuals supporting them in their attempts at ending the state of emergency. They demanded the liberation of political prisoners and the return of those who were in exile. And this is a period where at the same time, George Hawi was leaving the communist party and becoming critical of the leadership of the party.

Then things developed: Hariri returned as a prime minister. He was accused in 2003 and 2004 of coordinating with the Lebanese Christian opposition that was formed around Kornet Shihwan and the Maronite Patriarch. And what did change or modify the political situation was the liberation of south Lebanon from the Israeli occupation–because Lebanon was not only invaded by the Syrian regime, it was invaded twice by Israel: in 1975 and then in 1982, where the Israeli forces reached Beirut and destroyed part of Beirut, and that Israeli invasion killed 34,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians in addition to the occupation of large parts of the country, until Israel started to withdraw gradually following a military operation, military resistance that was at the time launched by the communist party and leftist groups, before Hezbollah (that was born in 1983) would start imposing itself on the resistance scene as of 1987-88 and then after the end of the Civil War, because Israel continued to occupy Lebanon until 2000.

The communist party was excluded from the resistance after the end of the war, due to a series of assassinations that targeted its intellectuals and many of its leaders, and it was also because the Syrian regime wanted to control the military resistance and to have the monopoly of Hezbollah allowing Syria and Iran to decide on the momentum of the resistance, and the moment where it’s military acts could take place, and when this was not beneficial for what Syria considered to be the negotiations with Israelis that were taking place.

So within that context and after the withdrawal of Israel, the opposition against the Syrian regime took a new momentum. It was easy now to directly discredit the Syrian argument and discourse justifying its occupation of Lebanon (“Israel also occupies the country, so our presence here depends on the Israeli occupation“). That allowed the opposition to grow against the Syrian regime and to develop until 2005 and later. The assassination of Samir and George was not a coincidence. They targeted at the beginning the leftists who played a role against them directly or indirectly.

EA: The last point is very important, because it’s very important to understand that after Hariri’s assassination, the first two people who were killed were Samir Kassir and George Hawi. Can you expand a bit on the communist intellectuals, especially the majority of people who were from the South who were also assassinated during the war?

ZM: The assassinations of many of the Marxist and communist intellectuals started in ’86 and would continue throughout the eighties until ’88, and there would be other incidents at the end of the war. At the time, the context was of the rise of Hezbollah. It wanted to impose itself on the Shi’a scene, which led to clashes between the communists and Hezbollah and later between the Amal movement and Hezbollah. To talk briefly about that era is also to say that most of the communists who were assassinated were Shi’a themselves or were from Shi’a families. Hussein Mroue, Marxist philosopher who was in his 80s and was killed in his bed–he was not even able to move when the killer entered his apartment and assassinated him. Mehdi Amel (Hassan Hamdan, who used to write under the name Mehdi Amel) was assassinated on 18 May 1987 in Beirut close to his house after being underground for some time following the assassination of Hussein Mroueh. There were also other younger intellectuals and activists who were assassinated in the southern suburb of Beirut and in the South. And there were people like Suhail Tawileh, who is not from a Shi’a family, who was leading Al-Tareek magazine (that was the magazine of the communist party), who was assassinated at home after being kidnapped in Beirut as well. There would be Khalil Naous and others.

So at the time, the communist party used to talk about obscurantist forces behind the assassinations, hence he was talking indirectly about Hezbollah as being behind the assassinations, and there would be many clashes between the communist party and Hezbollah, and between a group that would later defect from Hezbollah and create its own movement. Most of the assassinations took place while Hezbollah was rising and imposing itself when it comes to the military resistance, or when it comes to the control of the Shi’a regions, let’s say, geographically speaking, in the eighties. Then Iran and Syria were also competing, even if they were allies–but they were rivals when it comes to who controlled the Shi’a of Lebanon. Amal and Hezbollah was the second episode of that internal fight between the Shi’a, exactly at the time where also among the Christians, Aoun and Geagea were fighting each other and Hezbullah as well. And while Syria wanted Amal to be the most important and central representatives of the Shi’a, Iran was pushing for Hezbollah. And finally, in 1991, they agreed to have a power sharing formula in which the Amal movement would be feeding the state institutions (in the sense that it will feed it with employees), would have a quota for Shi’a employees based on the Lebanese sectarian system, and that Amal will nominate them while Hezbollah will remain the only military force in the country after the war, and the pretext is to keep fighting the Israelis until the liberation of south Lebanon. That allowed Iran and Syria to agree on those terms and Hezbollah leadership changed after that.That was the final compromise.

George Hawi was himself a witness of all those things, and he had lots of information about those episodes of the Civil War and of the assassination era, and then about the way the Syrians used to manage the Lebanese political scene because he dealt with them directly. He fought them in the early seventies and mid-seventies, and then he allied with them in other episodes of the war. And he was himself once in a meeting with Ghazi Kanaan, the Syrian officer who was in charge of Lebanon with Elias Atallah as well in that meeting, where Kanaan asked George Hawi to give him, regularly, the program of the military operations against the Israelis before attacks happened. And George Hawi told him he cannot do that, because we were given the order to act whenever that is possible without asking us or returning to Beirut to brief us about what they are going to do, so you’re asking something impossible. At that moment, Ghazi Kanaan ended the meeting, and following that, there would be a series of assassinations of communists in the South, and even there would be, on two different occasions, clashes between the Syrian army or Amal Movement and communist groups who were returning after attacking Israelis in the occupied zone in south Lebanon.

So Hawi was an important witness in that, and Samir was a very brave voice against the Syrain regime. And to the contrary of many Lebanese who were opposed to the Syrian regime, he made lots of nuances and he was very clear about his opposition to the regime and not to the Syrian people and not to the Syrian intellectuals, and that he was opposed to the Syrian regime also from a Syrian point of view and not only a Lebanese one, and from a Palestinian point of view and not only a Lebanese one, in the sense that the Syrian regime was the enemy for Samir and for many people among us of the Lebanese, the Syrian, and the Palestinian peoples, regardless of the discourses that it used for its propaganda and for political consumption. That nuance and that difference with the other opponents of the Syrian regime in Lebanon was crucial, and was part of the credibility that we wanted to build while distinguishing between Syrian laborers who are abused and who were exploited in Lebanon, and the Syrian army and the Syrian regime. Samir even read one statement by Syrian intellectuals in the Martyr’s Square in Beirut in March 2005, and he was insulted by many of the demonstrators who were there who didn’t want to hear anything related to Syria and to the Syrians.

That position was very important. George Hawi, after that, and on many occasions we met with him, and the day when he was assassinated, on 21 June 2005, we were going to have a meeting with him in order also to see how to consolidate a leftist front that would bring more communists who were disappointed by the official position of their party, more former communists who left the party but remained in touch with Hawi, and that young democratic left movement that we represented, and that was receiving lots of sympathy and having lots of solidarity after the assassination of Samir. The assassination of Hawi also killed that second attempt at enlarging the leftist front in Lebanon. And then unfortunately in the elections, we committed mistakes, and we went into the elections without realizing to which extent we might be dragged into Lebanese politics themselves and the way they were run and the way the alliance will impose on Elias Atallah our deputy to be part of the March 14 camp without really incarnating the leftist values that we want to defend after the withdrawal of the Syrian regime.

EA: On that topic, can you talk about–you had mentioned the episode of The Beirut Banyan, which I will link on the blog post. You had mentioned that the March 14 camp at the time, the ones that the parties that were dominated actually preferred to deal with groups like Hezbollah and Amal rather than independent Shi’a voices for that matter, because if they dealt with independent Shi’a voices that woud mean they would have to also deal with independent Christian, Sunni, and Druze voices.

ZM: Exactly. In fact, what happened is that in May 2005 and after the withdrawal of the Syrians, and while preparing for the elections, the heavyweights of March 14, meaning Hariri and Jumblatt but also the Christian components of that alliance, started to deal with politics exactly as if the Syrians were still there, in the sense that you make deals, you try to negotiate with other groups, any form of alliance, without respecting the sacrifices and the courage of many independent and small groups who challenged Hezbollah inside the Shi’a community, and without respecting the diversity of what could have been the March 14 front. Once again, we did not have illusions about their non-interest in political reforms and in political changes. But we hoped, at the time at least, to make it possible for people in south Lebanon like Habib Sadiq, people like Sayed Hassan El-Amine, people like Hani Fahs and for many of the figures (whether intellectuals or even coming from religious backgrounds but with an open, clearly secular and leftist discourse) to be represented and to be respected regardless of their size and clientelist networks within the Shi’a community.

But for many of the March 14 leaders, it was much easier to deal with Hezbollah, to deal with Amal–with blocs and with those who are considered as representative of the Shi’a community, exactly as they wanted Amal and Hezbollah to deal with them as the only representatives of the Sunni or of the Druze or of the Christian communities. They preferred to have blocks sharing the quotas and sharing the lists and sharing power rather than accepting, of course, to dialogue with Amal and Hezbollah. They do represent the reality in the country and a large part of the Lebanese, and everyone had to deal with them, but to deal with them on clear stances based on principles and without feeling the necessity and without avoiding the alliance with other voices, accepting a new electoral system that would allow those diversities to emerge.

Because what happened in Lebanon under the Syrian regime and continued after the Syrian regime left is that more and more blocs and parties and sometimes leaders were monopolizing the representations of their communities, and while doing that, any clash between them, any rivalry between them and the representatives of another community, was leading to clash between communities, making the confessional system itself work even more “efficiently” in bringing people against each other or turning people against each other whenever their representatives (who were more and more imposing themselves and monopolizing the representations of the community) were clashing with each other on questions that were not always political. They might be about who will put whom in which position, what kind of project will be implemented in which area, who will take that contract and who will obtain that privilege in getting a commission for another project.

We saw it later with many of the crises, whether related to the electricity or to the garbage, or to many other crises. It was about sharing the administration, the economy, and most leaders in Lebanon, whether from March 14 or from March 8, prefer that on dealing with political reforms, on dealing with groups that might be minorities in their communities, but they do have their own representative legitimacy, and of course, without a proportional system in the elections, having those people was impossible.

So finally, in 2005, March 14 preferred to sacrifice many of those who worked with the opposition to the Syrian regime in order to make a deal with Amal and Hezbollah and to share power. Again, their argument was to avoid civil strife, to avoid conflict, while in reality even if avoiding conflict is of course demanded and is a priority, it was much more about their own clientelist and sectarian mentality and not something else.

EA: This would happen again and again and again, even after 2005, whenever there is a broadly independent alternative. I guess the most well-known case is Beirut Madinati: you would have the entirety of the establishment basically going against them.

ZM: Absolutely. This is typical, in fact: they can accuse each other of having loyalty to Iran, to Saudi Arabia; they accuse each other of being pro-Western, pro-Syrian regime…until the elections happen. There will, in many cases, be in confrontations, but they finally make governments together, make the decisions together, share the power and share the quotas within the administration. And whenever they are in a mood of reconciliation and harmony, you have more corruption and you have more deals and you have much more agreements on most of the questions that will lead, in fact, to spending money in different ways and without regulations and without control. Each time there is a group or a force that is trying to emerge and create a new language in politics and new practices and a new culture, they will all be allied against it because they consider that it will threaten them regardless of which region and how. They are all obsessed with this idea of change–unless the change is targeting only one group or one camp.

So Hezbollah would not mind having a new experience, if it will only target Hariri or Geagea or Jumblatt, let’s say, and they might also, in reciprocity, not have a problem if there is one group that will only target Hezbollah for different reasons. However, if they consider when the elections will happen, that this will not be useful, they will once again sacrifice and try to find a deal or contract, and this is related to the nature and characteristics of the consociational system in Lebanon, the way it has evolved and developed since the Civil War and since the rise first of the Christian rightwing with Bashir Gemayel and the whole idea of unifying the militias and unifying the Christian ranks. It continued with Amal and Hezbollah in the Shi’a community, then Hariri brought it through the economy and through his network of relations to the Sunni community.

And since that time, you have monopolies. Of course, Jumblatt is also the heavyweight in the Druze community. You have those representatives who have been sharing power since the Taif Accord until today. And if you look at all of them, they were all in the Civil War (except Saad Hariri). Berri was in the Civil War, Hezbollah was in the Civil War, Jumblatt was in the Civil War, Geagea was in the Civil War, Aoun was in the Civil War, Gemayel was in the civil war (Amine Gemayel, not his son). So all of them were part of the Civil War, and then some were excluded in the post-war by the Syrian regime for some time; they returned after, and it has been the same political elite. Changing it is not an easy task; confronting it is of course not easy either, but at any moment, there are attempts at doing something. We see that directly or indirectly, they will have ways of containing that and being opposed to it. And now with the current situation, Hezbollah is leading the counterrevolution or the counter-attack and it has consolidated the government and weakened, dramatically, the revolutionary momentum and attempts at modifying things.

EA: I’ll just expand a bit for those who don’t know that the names that we’re talking of are names that come from the seventies and eighties; some of them come from the early nineties. Walid Jumblatt and Nabih Berri are late seventies; Nasrallah is from the late eighties and early nineties, the Gemayels as a family go back to the thirties and the forties. Michel Aoun is from the eighties, Samir Geagea also from the eighties. Elias Khoury was interviewed by Megaphone like two years ago, and he described the current regime as the “Civil War regime.” At the end of the day, they are not fighting each other anymore in the sense that they’re killing each other. There was a brief moment where this could have erupted again in 2008, of course–the May conflict of 2008–but by and large they seem to have a kind of power sharing agreement of tolerating each other. They don’t like each other, none of them, even though they’re each other’s allies. The Free Patriotic Movement, or Aounieh, and the Amal movement are notoriously antagonistic towards one another, but they agree to form this alliance with one another, because at the end of the day, it’s easier than to deal with any kind of serious alternative, however that alternative might look like.

I wanted to switch a bit to Syria–one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is that you’re actually one of the few Lebanese (and as a Lebanese this frustrates me very, very much) that thinks as well about Syria and that actually engages with Syrian civil society. In your case you’ve even written books on that. There is a quote by Samir which is extraordinary when one reads it today, because I think he wrote it only two months before he was killed, which is: “When the Arab spring blooms in Beirut, it announces the time of roses in Damascus,” and this is a quote that just a few months ago had been redrawn as a graffiti in Idlib, which is one of the most difficult places to be right in Syria, with Samir Kassir’s name, by someone who calls himself the “Syrian Banksy.” It shows that there is a legacy with this Lebanese (and of course part Syrian and Palestinian) intellectual. He was very active in Lebanon first and foremost when he came back from Paris, but the legacy that he has among Syrians is something that we don’t often see among Lebanese as far as I’m aware, no?

ZM: You’re right, absolutely. In fact, in Lebanon there is a tendency among a majority not to evoke Syria, either out of fear or because this is a divisive issue. Some people among the Aounists and Hezbollah and Amal movement support the Syrian regime. Some others would prefer not to be categorized or considered in one camp or the other. And some, of course, are opposed to the Syrian regime, but as I said, either out of fear or they do not consider that it’s their priority. So unfortunately in Lebanon, yes, there is the tendency of avoiding the Syrian issue, even though we have around a million refugees in the country added to the 250,000 Palestinian refugees and tens of thousands of Iraqi and Sudanese and other refugees. While Lebanon is not a country that signed the 1951 agreement on refugees, so they are not legally refugees, they are considered just guests or people who are there. UNHCR is dealing with them, and there are lots of laws and legislation and lots of practices full of racism and discrimination against them. This has been the case for the Palestinians; it’s now the case for the Syrians and all the others. This is very unfortunate, but there are also many Lebanese who kept supporting the Syrian revolution and the Syrian civil society regardless of the balance of power and regardless of the tragic development of the events of the war and of the balance of power in Syria.

EA: So we had something called the Damascus Spring in 2000. It was very small, it was limited to intellectuals, but it kind of was part of this – we can call it planting the seeds, in a sense, for what was to come later. But when Samir wrote this specifically, let’s use this metaphor, a “spring” had happened in Beirut, the Cedar revolution, and only six years later we had the widespread uprisings throughout the region, including the Syrian revolution. And since then–that’s now nine years–we’ve seen ups and downs for the region, a lot of disasters, a lot of horror stories, especially in Syria, of course. And in October, just six or seven months ago, we had another uprising in Lebanon, which for my generation was really the first of its kind. We did have the 2015 #YouStink movement, I was involved in that as well, but there’s really nothing that compares in our generation to what has been happening since October 2019.

As a reflection, how would you interpret that quote and how would you reflect on the links between Lebanon and Syria which, as you said, are not talked about as much as they should br in Lebanon?

As a small anecdote, just to link it to the present, I recently co-wrote an essay on the Syrian Jumhuriya, not the other one, with a Syrian friend who had to write under a pseudonym for security reasons. She couldn’t use her real name: she’s based in Beirut and was participating in the protest with us–and then at some point she felt that she couldn’t, because it was becoming a bit too much for someone who’s visibly Syrian. When she talks, she has a perceptibly Syrian accent.

There’s this weird dynamic in Beirut, for those who don’t know: on Martyr’s Square, the general population is maybe centrist, liberals and others; on Riad El-Solh square, you have the communists and the more secular-oriented–the more politicized segment. So I would be with the latter, and you might see some Palestinian flags sometimes, but it is utterly impossible to find any kind of Syrian opposition flag, or a Kurdish flag for that matter. We don’t even think about it, and there is a genuine fear among anti-Assad Syrians who are in Beirut (those I know personally and others) that if they are too visible, if they try to link up what’s happening in Lebanon with the 2011 uprisings for example (not to mention everything that has happened since), that there won’t to be a reception for that. At the very least there will be some complications ahead of them, and they just can’t take that risk because they didn’t know if there were people among us, even among the protesters, who weren’t necessarily anti-Hezbollah. In the beginning, especially in the first few weeks, there was a mix of everyone. We had the Lebanese Forces, we had Hezbollah, everyone with us among the secularists and the communists and the leftists and so on.

So how would you reflect on these contradictions fifteen years on, after the quote itself and of course after the assassination?

ZM: The quote came in a moment when, in Lebanon, we were more and more convinced that as long as the Syrian regime exists, it would be extremely difficult to have a sovereign, secure, and peaceful Lebanon. Because the whole ideology of the Syrian regime, as developed by Hafez El-Assad, was related to controlling Lebanon on the one hand and to try to control the Palestinian question on the other, in order to make regional and Middle Eastern politics what will give the Syrian regime its legitimacy and the reason of its existence. Because Assad (the father) did everything to erase Syrian society, not to allow it to appear, to bomb it if necessary, and to use regional policies and politics and Syria’s position as a way of getting legitimacy while negotiating with the Americans, with France, with the Soviet Union, and with Arab actors, especially the Gulf actors (being at the same time an ally of Saudi Arabia and the only ally of Iran, offering himself as a possible mediator with Iran, being an ally of the Soviet Union), and then also communicating and coordinating regularly with the Americans, and then finally, while the Soviet Union was collapsing, sending his own army to fight under American leadership against Iraq.

So Assad used Lebanon as a place where he could bargain, where he could negotiate. Controlling Lebanon was an obsession, and assassinating anyone who could threaten that control happened on many occasions in Beirut, in Tripoli, in different places. So the idea of connecting Lebanon to Syria in that sense was a kind of realistic acceptance of how politics function between the two countries under the Assad regime. Samir had already published, in 2004, a book that gathered many of his articles in An-Nahar. The book was entitled The Independence of Lebanon and the Freedom of Syria [Istiqlal Lubnan wa Huryat Surya] considering that the independence and the freedom in the two countries are very much interdependent, very much connected. There is an interdependence between the two questions, and the whole relation and friendship with many of the Syrian dissidents, whether outside Syria or opponents and former political prisoners inside Syria, was part of the 1998-2000 experience in the cultural supplement of An-Nahar. And then after 2000, during the Damascus Spring, there were lots of connections and friendships that were built, and that tendency continued until 2005 when Samir wrote that article in which he considered that the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon will weaken the Syrian regime in Syria and hopefully will allow for a change in Syria itself after the Syrian regime loses the most important scene for it–that is, Lebanon.

And of course, one can analyze the reasons for Arab revolutions that might not be related to or inspired by the Lebanese 2005 event–in my opinion, there was no influence from what happened in 2005 in Lebanon, on what will happen in Tunisia or Egypt, or even later in Syria. Even if it’s only six years, the context is different and the dynamics are very different. Even if the images of the crowds defying fear and challenging authority do create some similarities and allow us a few comparisons, there were different reasons. However, what you just said about the 2019 uprising in Lebanon, after the previous 2015 uprising that was related to the garbage crisis: definitely here we have a second moment of Arab revolutions, because in Lebanon as well as in Sudan, in Iraq and in Algeria, millions of people went to the street again–and went to the streets knowing that what happened in 2011 in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria was not always a success story, there was a lot of suffering after that. There were counterrevolutions, there were defeats, there were terrible wars with interventions as in Yemen and in Libya. There was all sorts of disasters in Syria, not only the Assad regime’s barbaric repression and crimes against humanity that were committed, but also the Russian occupation now, the Iranian intervention, ISIS or Daesh, then the Americans, the Turks–everyone got involved in that terrible conflict, and in the wrong way in most cases, and the country today is fragmented and more than half of its population are either refugees or internally displaced.

So I think there was an awareness among the new generations in Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, and Sudan to avoid some of the failures of the first important waves of Arab revolutions in 2011, and if in Lebanon some were part of March 14th or the political moment, let’s say, with its huge mobilization in 2005, the reasons in 2019 were really different. What I can say is that in 2005, our dream and our hope and what we were trying to work for was to have something similar to what happened in 2019, just immediately after the withdrawal of the Syrian regime, and we did write many articles in that sense. In fact, one other quote that is always used, that Samir used in 2005, is ‘Oudu Illa Al-Shari’ or “return to the streets,” and many of the articles that I published in An-Nahar (and that many others published as well) were about the necessity now of moving from the Independence Intifada, as we called it, to the Reform and Change Intifada and to bring some ideas. I did summarize many of them in a book that was called Rabi’ Beirut wal Dawla Al-Naqeesa (The Spring of Beirut and the Unachieved State), published in 2006, with some ideas of reforms, and then I published a small booklet called “An Takouna Yasariyyan” (“Being a Leftist in Lebanon”) with some ideas also for reforms.

But unfortunately all that, and all that many others did from different positions and different backgrounds, was digested by the Lebanese confessional system, by the leading political elite and by the political class, and we failed in modifying the balance of power. Not only the assassinations, but also some of the mistakes that we committed, some of the–I don’t wanna say illusions, but we probably underestimated the strength of the system itself. It was not naive at the time to underestimate, not at all, because there were one million people in the street and many of those people were not really fond of the whole political class. Some were, of course; there were blocs that were mobilized by this political class and remained loyal to it. But there was also what we called the citizen pole or the citizen camp within 14 March that was lost, unfortunately, because we did not build something that could have gathered all those who were secular, who wanted reforms after the withdrawal of the Syrian regime. We got dispersed, and we did not build the momentum, and we lost the opportunity.

After that, it was a bit late, and due to the assassinations, and also due to the new cleavage in the country that did drag us all, it was a kind of dilemma in which you cannot withdraw when assassinations continue and you cannot approve of what your supposed allies and comrades are doing, so you feel trapped between criticizing them and at the same time keeping your position very clear and sharp against those who were committing the assassinations, meaning the Syrian regime and its allies in Lebanon.

So that situation was very difficult, and continued that way until at least 2009, because after 2009, in my opinion, there was nothing any more meaningful in talking about March 14. Saad el Hariri was forced by the Saudis to go to Syria; Jumblatt followed him; they reconciled with Hezbollah and formed a government that he led, and things kept like this, ups and downs, until 2019. In some moments, they have had severe disputes. Hezbollah orchestrated a coup and removed Hariri. Then there are mediations and agreements and Hariri returns. They all share the government, they share the administration, they all voted for the budget for the financial policy that led us to the current disaster. Aoun was part of it, and his bloc can never pretend that they were not. So it was a completely different dynamic that finally led to 2019 uprising.

EA: I saw video of you from July 2011 in which you spoke about the deafening silence we just mentioned of Lebanese society and activists around what’s happening in Syria. And that was in the early days of the revolution when it was still mostly peaceful and nonviolent. Not peaceful in the sense of – the regime was cracking down, but the revolution itself was not armed yet. By the time I personally started paying attention, which was in 2012, 2013, the same hesitation would happen. And since then, I remember, a bit in 2015, a bit in 2016, a bit in 2018, you might have some small movement among Lebanese civil society when it comes to Syria. There was even a small protest that I attended. I think it was around the fall of Eastern Ghouta a couple of years ago, where you had some people talking and everything, but as a small group.

More recently, as I said, this has not been resolved in the sense that the Syrian friend I mentioned would still feel threatened, would still feel unsafe to say I’m here as a Syrian in the same way that some Palestinians might be able to say I’m here as a Palestinian (but even with Palestinians I should emphasize there is also a lot of risk if they are too visibly Palestinian).

I’m not going to rehash the question of how you saw the Lebanese response to the Syrian revolution, because you’ve already answered this, but I wonder if we can talk a bit about how right now, when we speak about the Lebanese government, what we mean in effect is essentially Hezbollah, the Free Patriotic Movement, and Amal. Those are three big blocs, and then you have the other blocs aligning themselves in a sort of opportunistic way however it pleases them. But Hezbollah, up until 2018 (with the exception of the big big clash of 2008) usually did not openly target other Lebanese, at least not since the Civil War. It was part of the myth of Hezbollah: We are only here to fight Israel; this is our role, etcetera. Putting aside 2008, which was quite an exception in a sense–in October 2019, I was personally beaten up by Hezbollah people. You had Amal and Hezbollah openly saying that they are with Amal and Hezbollah, with flags and tattoos–very visibly partisan and sectarian, beating up protesters, torching tents. Not just in Beirut, but especially in the Nabatiyeh and in other places.

But this for me is the extraordinary bit: after these events, sometimes just like an hour or two after the event (sometimes the fear would be a bit too great so it would take a bit more time), people would go back down on the streets, rebuilding the tents and maintaining anti-sectarian chants. That’s important because in 2008, the fights were sectarian, the fights were between the two camps: one essentially Shi’a, one was Sunni, and Druze and some Christians in between, whatever. But since then, there is an open resistance to the idea that anything can be solved through sectarianism. As someone who witnessed 2005 (and I know that you still visit Lebanon quite a lot since then), how would you interpret the post-October moment and what do you think are some of its potentials and maybe even some of its risks?

ZM: Exactly as you said, when it comes to Hezbollah, there is a myth about Hezbollah not being involved in internal Lebanese fights or clashes–besides Hezbollah being part of the Civil War after it was created, after 1983. There were still seven years of civil war in which Hezbollah was involved either between the two Beiruts or against the communists or against Amal or against some other groups in the Bekaa, etcetera. In the aftermath of the war, yes, it’s true that from 1991 until 2005, Hezbollah was much more either into the resistance against the Israelis or into having a low profile in Lebanese politics, simply because Iran and Syria were managing the Lebanese political scene in a way that protected the party and allowed it to be consolidating itself as a grassroots–not only as a political and military organization, but with all kind of social institutions, hospitals, schools, dispensaries, charity networks, scouts, cultural institutions, media, newspapers. So Hezbollah was not concerned about the macro politics and was getting more and more involved in managing municipalities, in having a large bloc with its allies in the parliament, and in keeping the Amal movement managing the government but not being directly involved.

After 2005 what changed is that while the Syrian regime was expelled from Lebanon, Hezbollah started to act inside Lebanon as if it was replacing the Syrian regime, in the sense that they were not only now involved in the government directly, not only in the parliament and on the local level in the municipalities, but they have also controlled what can be considered the foreign policy and security situation in the country exactly as the Syrian regime had been doing. And whenever Hariri or the other camp was threatening that control – for example when it comes to security, you can talk about Feri’ El-Ma’loumeit, which Hezbollah opposed because it was not under its own control. Whenever the foreign minister was not directly from the Amal movement or Aounist, they will try to see, when it comes to the ambassadors, who’s who, what kind of position will be taken. And when in 2008 Hezbollah could not control the situation as it wished, because of its clash with Hariri and Jumblatt and the other camp, they invaded Beirut, and by force they took over the government. Siniora had to resign. New negotiations happened in Qatar, with France also being a mediator, starting a new phase in the history of relations between Hezbollah and its rivals on the Lebanese scene.

Then in 2011, when Arab revolution started and when there were some talks about a possible uprising in Syria, Hezbollah did not invade Beirut this time, but they deployed thousands of young men in black shirts to send the message that we are ready to take over. That led later to the resignation of Hariri when Jumblatt shifted his camp out of fear of Hezbollah’s objectives, and that moment led to Hezbollah taking over–but due to the confessional system they have to bring a Prime Minister who is Sunni, so Mikati was brought, etcetera.There are constantly moments where Hezbollah does attack and impose itself, and that’s what happened again now, when there was a threat of a new revolution, with the uprising of October 2019. Hezbollah did orchestrate the whole situation by taking over, and the government today as well as its foreign policy is controlled by Hezbollah.

Now what changed, however, is that we have a new generation: not only the old people (or the less young, let’s say) who are still involved in the uprising, but a new generation. They were not concerned politically in 2005. Let’s say they were born in 2000 or 1998. They were not concerned with the cleavages, the divisions of 2005. Many of them were born or at least became mature politically after the end of the Syrian era or during the Syrian revolution. So for them, Syrian control of Lebanon is old history. They had other dynamics. Their consciousness is much more related to human rights and social justice, and not any more about being pro or against the Syrian regime. Of course, some of them, and you know them quite well, were pro-Syrian revolution. And in many of their slogans, they saluted all Arab revolutions, including the Syrian one, but many maybe were considering that they are doing their own uprising, their own revolution, and they didn’t want to be trapped by any kind of classification whether they are pro or against the Syrian revolution. I think that whenever they are into the human rights and social justice and freedom discourse, they cannot be opposed to the aspirations of other people around them, whether they announce that or not, for similar causes, whether in Syria or in any of the other places that witnessed Arab uprisings.

So what changed today is that they are no longer concerned with March 14 versus March 8. They are not obsessed by the Syrian regime in Lebanon as we were in the generation of the eighties and nineties. They have a new discourse, they have new ideas, they are about personal freedoms as well, and personal choices–taboos in the past, in a way. There is a dose of feminism that is important; I saw it at least in the demonstrations and the slogans. They are much more creative now with social media allowing them to express all that through their videos, their documentation, their initiatives, their slogans, their sense of humor. There is something that developed after 2011 that we can also find here. So the potential for the change is there; there are definitely leaders who are emerging and will continue to emerge. We’re talking about just a few months of uprisings, including two months or so of Corona and lockdown.

What is missing, however, is coordination. I don’t want to say “leadership” in the sense that you have a camp with a porte-parole, with a spokesman/woman, no, but something that would coordinate and would keep the diversity and would keep the leftists and independents and liberals and those who just want to get rid of corruption with those who want more things when it comes to a feminist approach, when it comes to social justice, to racism against foreign laborers and refugees–we can have all of those together, including even some part of the bourgeoisie that are opposed to corruption. This diversity should be tolerated, and it is useful; it’s something that could find what is common and keep what is different, and struggle for it and fight for it peacefully–but to have coordination that would put all these energies and efforts together in order to modify the balance of power is today once again disrupted by violence that Hezbollah directly deployed through its ally the Amal movement and some of its members, and, since it formed the new government, through the security forces and the army that are now under the orders of Hezbollah.

They don’t need to send their militants or their members to attack people in Kfar Rumman or in Nabatieh or in Sour or in Beirut. Now the army and security forces – differently of course – can impose curfews, can request to dismantle tents (and they did dismantle some of them themselves), can attack demonstrators who are trying to be on the street blocking access. They can now use the repressive measures of state institutions in order to impose, once again, their order and their control and to make any change extremely difficult.

However, there is still resilience so far, and we saw recently many demonstrations took place, and that sit-ins are once again organized. We saw in Tripoli a mixture of anger and frustration because of poverty and because of the terrible financial and economic crisis (that was made even worse with Corona), and the political desire to change things and to confront the political ruling class. So it’s an ongoing process. It will have ups and downs. It will continue. I don’t see that it will die or it will be defeated soon. But let’s also agree that it’s extremely difficult and that Hezbollah does hold power with its allies, and they do have their own power, and they do have as well the power of state institutions, of the army, and they might be held indirectly by by creating a new dilemma related to the IMF and to the collapse of the banking system with all the billions of losses for all households and for the majority of the Lebanese who will be confronted with more and more challenges in the future.

EA: I have a final question about Samir Kassir, but I wanted to squeeze in a parenthesis. We briefly mentioned him and he was mentioned in the past, but I only wanna talk about him now because he was recently revoted as an MP: can you talk a bit about the role of someone like Jamil El-Sayyed and the entire structure of the security forces and Amn El-’Am at the time–because I know that there was a personal antagonism between Jamil El-Sayyed, as you said, and Samir Kassir–and since then? Because as you mentioned, Hezbollah sort of took over the role of the Syrian regime, and in some ways it’s even stronger than the Syrian regime was at some point. And since then, you have people who were in prison, like Jamil El-Sayyed, who were seen as personae non-grata, now resurfacing and feeling more comfortable about themselves and even being comfortable enough to run for elections and win one.

ZM: Yes. In fact, in 1998, when Emile Lahoud became the president of the republic, something changed in the internal structure of the Lebanese state. Under Hariri the father, the control of Hariri was very strong and he managed to have deals with the Syrian regime: Keep me working and doing my economic and other stuff and I will let you do the regional international compromises and accords; you will manage the rest through your relations directly with the Lebanese security apparatus. So Hariri was much more in an economic role, and from time to time, due to his international connections and his Arab connections, he was allowed–he played a role, in agreement with Hafez El-Assad, to represent both Lebanon and Syria in some connections and some relations. That formula that Hariri found with the Syrian regime functioned for a while. When Bashar came to power, it was the end. Bashar wanted to impose himself on everything, and didn’t trust Hariri, so he started bringing his people, and among them was Emile Lahoud. He became president. Hariri had to withdraw at the time; he was no longer prime minister; he became in the opposition. and this is the moment where the role of Jamil El-Sayyed along with the role ofthe one who would replace Ghazi Kanaan, Rustom Ghazali, and the aide of Rustom Ghazali, Jami’ Jami’ (another officer, by the way)–

EA: Can you say who these men are?

ZM: Rustom Ghazali was the Syrian officer managing Lebanese affairs exactly as Ghazi Kanaan, who was also a general, did before. Ghazi Kanaan–officially, he committed suicide in late 2005 in his office. There are of course rumors about him being assassinated or eliminated by the Syrian regime after the assassination of Hariri because of what he represented, and because of the information he had. Rustom Ghazali replaced him, and then Rustom Ghazali himself was killed in Syria in 2015 after being beaten badly in 2014. Jami’ Jami’ was number two after Rustom Ghazali in Lebanon. He was skilled in Deir El-Zor, and both of them–Jami’ Jami’ and Rustom Ghazali–their names appear in many reports when it comes to the assassination of Hariri and their presumed role in the assassination. It was as if the Syrian regime kept cleaning its own ranks of those who were directly involved and who could lead to the top of the hierarchy in the accusation.

Anyway, they became, with Jamil El-Sayyed, more and more powerful in the absence of Hariri the father, and Jamil El-Sayyed became the architect of the political system at the time. He was a security man, so he had lots of information, many files in his hands, and he started to play political roles that are related to political mediations, to elections, to journalists; he had lots of connections within media outlets in Lebanon, and he appeared as a very strong man in the country. And this did not really change after Hariri returned to power in 2000 and until his assassination in 2005. Jamil El-Sayyed remained crucial in the political system, whether against or sometimes in understanding with Hariri, he remained an important person, and this is when his conflictual relation with Samir appeared.

Samir criticized him directly on many occasions, wrote articles about the role of the security apparatus in Lebanese politics. His passport was confiscated, as I mentioned, and there were two people working for the Securite General of Jamil El-Sayyed following him regularly, wherever he went, just to keep a pressure on him.So in 2005, after the assassination of Hariri, many believed that El-Sayyed himself, with the Syrian officers and with some other Lebanese officers, was connected to the assassination, and that’s why he was arrested. Now, legally, he was arrested in a controversial manner because he was only accused and not yet condemned, or there was no proof about the whole thing when he was arrested, but [Detlev] Mehlis, the international investigator who arrested him, considered that he has the right to arrest those who might threaten his own investigation for some time. And due to a Lebanese law that was passed under Emile Lahoud (and some people say it passed under the guidance of Jamil El-Sayyed himself), the period of arrest should expire, and if you do not prove that the person you arrested is really guilty, you should liberate him–that law was amended allowing for renewal of the arrest until you decide whether it’s necessary any more. So Mehlis, with the Lebanese investigation group, used that pretext to keep Jamil El-Sayyed and the other officers in jail. That of course created among some people, sympathy with them–among some others there was no sympathy at all; the opposite is quite the case.

And finally, I think it was in 2009, Jamil El-Sayyed was liberated by the new investigator who said, I don’t have enough proof to keep him in jail, and since that time he tried to appear as if he was the martyr, as if his rights were violated, that he was a political prisoner, that it was out of political revenge that he was put in jail. He became a deputy in the last election, plus many consider that he is very ambitious and he wants to be the speaker of the parliament, and that is creating lots of tensions with Nabih Berri, and Berri’s people keep criticizing Sayyed (and he responds regularly, criticizing their corruption). And in the current government, many of the ministers in fact are considered to be very close to Sayyed himself, so he was kind of the minister-maker in the current government, in alliance with Hezbollah. His role is definitely important today.

When it comes to Samir’s assassination, there was no clear proof leading to Jamil El-Sayyed, to be very clear about it, at least to my knowledge. But definitely the hostility that he had towards Samir, the pressure and the threats that he did against Samir, were obvious and were official in a way that he didn’t even hide them or deny them. He spoke about them in front of many journalists who repeated what he used to say, and he explained to what extent he used to hate Samir and wished to put more pressure on him, if possible.

EA: It’s extraordinary.

So this will be my final question, which is linked to this. Because at the end of the day, Samir was a writer. That was the main thing he did, even though obviously he was politically involved as a spokesperson for the movement and so on. But fundamentally, what he did with the vast majority of his time was write. He had a book on the history of Beirut. As you mentioned he wrote a book on the first part of the Civil War, and of course, was part of L’orient express and An-Nahar and so on and so forth.

So maybe this can wrap up this entire conversation, and thank you a lot for the time you’ve spent on this. Can we talk a bit more about the symbolism of Samir being part Palestinian and part Syrian? He was able to tie the Palestinian cause with the Syrian cause, and at the same time he was able to tie the Syrian cause with the Lebanese cause and the Palestinian cause with the Lebanese cause. Today we see Hezbollah is the only major sectarian political party in Lebanon that even pretends to “care about Palestinians,” it pays lip service to the cause. Of course, that doesn’t include the Palestinians in Syria, obviously. Even as it kills Syrians and Palestinian Syrians, Hezbollah takes credit for liberating Lebanon from one of its occupiers and now it’s allied with the other occupier.

Samir was killed before Hezbollah really showed its strength in 2008. It was even before the 2006 war. Why did it matter so much for him, personally and politically, to link the Palestinian cause to the Syrian causes the Lebanese cause, and why does it still matter today?

ZM: For the first part of the question: Samir being himself Lebanese but also Syrian and Palestinian, being from a Christian family and leftist and secular, was something that I think had lots of impact on his political profile and political culture and on his evolution. Paris did change Samir a lot when it comes to understanding what the Syrian regime is about, through the Syrian dissidents who were living in France and the intellectuals that he met, and to understand as well, how important the Palestinian propaganda in the Syrian regime’s discourse was to the legitimacy that the regime was trying to build among Arab nationalists and leftists who are not from the Levant, who we can see until today supporting the Syrian regime against the majority of its people, in the Maghreb and in Egypt, and in other places.

For Samir, in that sense, being Palestinian is by itself a reason for being opposed to the Syrian regime, exactly as being a Syrian opposed to the Syrian regime and exactly as being a Lebanese opposed to the Syrian regime. In Lebanon, we suffered the regime’s hegemony and military occupation. In Palestine, we suffer the brutal, despotic, barbaric regime using Palestine as a pretext to repress its own people and to impose itself in Lebanon and in regional politics. Palestinians are used as if the Syrian regime does everything for their sake–repressing its own people and occupying Lebanon and brutalizing the PLO and Palestinian camps (in Lebanon and not only in Syria). And of course for the Syrians, it’s the worst thing that can happen to be under that regime–under the father for three decades, and now already nineteen years under the son. So almost half a century.

So for him connecting Lebanese independence and sovereignty would mean the withdrawal of the Syrian regime; to the Palestinian identity, liberating the Palestinian struggle from all those who use it as a pretext to impose themselves elsewhere and to repress their people is important; and as a Syrian (and with his friendship with Syrian intellectuals, especially Farouk and Omar Amiralia and many others), it is important to support the Syrian struggle against the regime. That connectivity between the three causes for him was important.

And since he was very much concerned with an Arab Renaissance Project that he wrote about in his small though important book called “Consideration de Maleuse Arab” (I think it was translated in English as Being Arab), he considered himself among those Arab intellectuals who should continue the discourse the Al-Nahda, the Renaissance, of talking about freedom, empowerment, emancipation of men and women, about secularism, about social justice. That’s what he said in the book: that our problem is not in our history, it was much more in our geography, so we should understand that and consider that we have all the potential to bring the Renaissance on track again, and at the same time, we should not keep a victimization discourse when it comes to the West–without denying that in the West there are imperialist projects, domination projects, Islamophobia, etcetera.

He wanted to find a kind of a synthesis that would put together many ideas and many principles related to his Arab identity within the Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian contexts, and also within a kind of Mediterranean or universal world of connections and cultural exchange and influence and metisage, or all kinds of relations that could exist in a healthy manner with the rest of the world. That’s why for him, the struggle for the liberation of Palestine or a Palestinian state should be connected to the struggle against all despotism, specifically the despotisms that use Palestine as a pretext to justify their practices, and as a Lebanese of course, liberating Lebanon from both Israel and the Syrian regime was an important question.

Now, as for Hezbollah, it’s true that Hezbollah in Lebanon pretends to always be defending Palestine and celebrating Jerusalem Day and preparing for the liberation of Palestine after the liberation of Lebanon, as the secretary general himself of Hezbollah, Hassan Nassrallah, repeats each year. But let’s not forget that even before getting involved in Syria in support of the regime that killed not only Syrians but also Palestinians in Syria in Yarmouk and in other places, Hezbollah evoked in Lebanon the question of Palestinian social and civil rights. We have refugees in Lebanon that have been there since 1949. They were at the beginning in fifteen or sixteen camps. They are still today in twelve camps. Some of the camps were devastated by war and by massacres. Some others are still there, and they have become even more crowded now with the arrival of Syrian and Palestinian-Syrian refugees. Palestinians are not allowed to work in 77 career fields in Lebanon, which leaves almost nothing for them. They are not allowed to have property; they cannot move easily from one place to the other; there is a kind of embargo or a kind of siege around their camps–and never has Hezbollah presented legislation in the Parliament asking to modify those discriminatory laws.

Hezbollah’s perfect ally since 2005 and 2006, the Aounist or Free Patriotic Movement, is probably the most racist movement against the Palestinians, before even the Syrian refugees. They keep talking about them as if They are going to take our country and Those refugees, Lebanon cannot deal with them. They say, We are proud of being racist. And with all their measures against the Palestinians, Hezbollah has never so much as condemned Gebran Bassil’s statements, which if you used them in Europe, you might be attacked by SOS-Racisme and many different groups.

Hezbollah’s allies are racist against the Palestinians. The Syrian regime massacred the Palestinians, not only in Syria, but even in Lebanon during the Civil War–not only the PLO in ’76, but in Sabra and Shatila and Bourj El Barajneh in ’85/’86/’87, during the war of the camps between the Amal Movement, the Syrian allies, and the Palestinians. Most Hezbollah allies, as I said, are racist against Palestinians, and this reminds me of what some Palestinian and Lebanese friends used to say: that there are many groups and regimes in the region that love Palestine and hate the Palestinians. I’m not saying that Hezbollah is exactly in that configuration, but I mean when it comes to the Palestinians themselves, nothing has been done in Lebanon to make their life more decent, and in Syria, Hezbollah has intervened to support a regime that was massacring them.

Does this deny that has Hezbollah fought Israel with lots of efficiency in south Lebanon? Of course not. Hezbollah did fight Israel and contributed to the liberation of south Lebanon, and performed very well in the 2006 war with the Israelis. However, this does not give it any right to intervene in Syria and to contribute to the massacre of the Syrian people. It does not give it any right to impose its own will on all Lebanese, including those that disapprove the party when it comes to its policies and its regional alliance–and I’m not talking about its fight with Israel, but its alliance with Iran. Many consider today that Hezbollah implements Iranian policies, and we are not supposed to accept that implementation when it comes to our own sovereignty or to our own interests as a Lebanese nation or as a Lebanese society (or as a Syrian nation and society, since this Iranian policy imposed itself Syria as well).

So the problem with Hezbollah in that sense (and I tried to summarize it yesterday in an article) is that there is no solution with this party, and we also cannot reach any solution without the party. That’s our dilemma today. It’s such a strong party internally–and regionally now because of Iran–and it has such mediocre opponents in front of it, when it comes to other sectarian groups, allowing it to control the situation in the country. So you cannot change things as long as it controls the situation, because it’s powerful and it will not allow that to happen easily. And at the same time, you cannot have a long-term solution if Hezbollah and the popular basis of Hezbollah is not part of the solution.

We have been confronted with that now for at least fifteen years, and we continue to be confronted. Maybe because of the system that is confessional, that is sectarian; maybe because of the Iranian rise as a regional power; maybe because of the Israeli threat that pushes lots of people in south Lebanon to remain loyal to the party. This is a severe and serious challenge that we have to deal with in Lebanon, avoiding at the same time any possible clashes and violence, but also without just surrendering and accepting Hezbollah’s will and the way it wants to impose Iranian regional interests and internal power arrogance on all Lebanese, making the reforms and the change impossible and preserving a system that, even if some of its heavyweights are not part of it today, remains very much corrupt and very much responsible for the series of crises that we have been living through for decades.

And just if you allow me one final question that is related to what I believe is a key issue in the whole region, and that is also connected or related to Samir’s assassination: that is, impunity. The Middle East, the Arab World and Lebanon have been going through impunities for now at least a century, if not more. You have one state, Israel, that was created in ’47 and imposed itself in ’48, that has been violating international law, Geneva Conventions, United Nations resolutions, and it has not been sanctioned by any international body or by any powerful government up to today. And that impunity that allowed Israel to impose its violations and its will by by force and occupation and apartheid and settlement did give lots of arguments and justifications to many Arab regimes to do exactly the same against their own societies, and sometimes even to use more violence and more barbaric acts against their own societies.

We see it today in Syria. We saw it before in Iraq, we saw it in Libya, we see it today in Yemen. In many places, those regimes also benefited from this same question of impunity, because there were always deals with them, compromises, stability versus freedom, avoiding the rise of political Islam and accepting all kind of abuses, avoiding refugees and political opponents who might leave, etcetera. We see impunity of course in Syria; we’ve been seeing it since 2010 in a terrible manner. All kind of massacres, chemical weapons, torture, rape, abuses–and still up to today, there are vetoes protecting the Syrian regime as there are vetoes protecting Israel. There is no international tribunal when it comes to the Syrian case because of different legal questions and not only political ones–but it’s the key, this question of impunity.

And when it comes to assassinations, it’s the same. Samir’s killers are still, if not killed in Syria, they are still running free. By “killed in Syria” I mean after 2011 or in internal eliminations to ger rid of all those who might have proof of the Syrian involvement and that of its Lebanese allies. So this question of impunity goes from individual assassination to mass murder and genocidal crimes, to occupation and settlement and apartheid in our region, and is the poision that keeps on ipoisoning our lives for decades, and I think it should become a priority in all political agendas. Not because we believe in international justice, this is not the issue, but in a certain form of justice that should be built and imposed with international alliances, with international networks of jurists, of militants, of academics, of political fighters, etcetera.

So I think this is an extremely important question. otherwise it might continue, and we might have other assassinations and other repressive regimes and occupations.

EA: I guess the conclusion would be that impunity leads to impunity and there has to be accountability, which protestors in Lebanon would definitely agree with, as well as protestors everywhere in the world. And on that note, Ziad, thank you a lot, you were very generous with your time. Continue what you’re doing, and thanks again.

ZM: Thank you very much. I enjoyed it and I hope it was useful.

EA: Absolutely.

#2011Revolutions #CedarRevolution #DemocraticLeftMovement #EliasKhoury #GeorgeHawi #Hezbollah #IsraeliOccupation #JamilAlSayyed #LebaneseCommunistParty #Lebanon #October17Uprising #Palestine #SamirKassir #Syria #SyrianRevolution #ZiadMajed

Ghassan Halwani and the reclaiming of Lebanon’s imaginaries

This piece was initially published on Civil Society Knowledge Centre, Lebanon Support on the 1st of December, 2019.

With Lebanon’s Revolution closing in on its second month, the Lebanese scholar Jamil Mouawad listed “discursive hegemony and control over the imaginaries” as one of the three pillars of the sectarian regime1 being challenged by protesters.

The latter begs the following inquiry: How is the October 17 Revolution catalysing the reclaiming of imaginaries? In order to answer this question, it is important to understand how the collective memory pertaining to the war’s kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances, has thus far been addressed in Lebanon. The following piece explores this topic through Ghassan Halwani’s 2018 film “Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible”.

“He elevates them to the symbolic rank of martyrdom, only to sink them to the bottom of their disappearance.” – Ghassan Halwani

When a photojournalist was presented with a photograph that he had taken of a kidnapping during the Lebanese civil war, he expressed to Ghassan Halwani the following: “I cannot confront this on my own. It requires the collective”. We, the audience, see this scene unfold in Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible (2018)2, a critically acclaimed film by Halwani which touches upon the ever-persisting topic of those kidnapped during the war, and the victims of enforced disappearances. Similar to the photojournalist, and as portrayed in Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible, we [the audience] are also witnesses to the grave violations of human rights which have occurred during the war, and are not mere innocent bystanders who just happen to share territory with those who have committed these crimes.

To witness the crime of disappearance is an inherently political act, one which is often set aside in ‘postwar’ discourses on the kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances. We are meant to believe that this issue is strictly humanitarian, and should only appeal to our common humanity. Surely there is some truth to this, yet we tend to forget that the kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances have stories. They are individuals with agency beyond their categorisation as ‘the disappeared’. The multiple incidents of enforced disappearances should not just be regarded as occurrences among many that took place during the civil war, incidentally referred to as ‘the events’ (Al Ahdath). Just as with ‘the events’, the depoliticised category of ‘the disappeared’often serves to blur the distinction between a series of crimes that must be accounted for, and the need to move on from the war’s trauma. Rather than hold perpetrators accountable, it defacto places the burden on the families of the kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances to ‘explain themselves’, to justify why they “just don’t declare them dead and move on”3.

From the onset of Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible, Halwani denies us the opportunity to turn the kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances into a strictly humanitarian cause. In that aforementioned scene, we do not see what they are seeing because Halwani doctored the photo to erase the men kidnapping, and the man being kidnapped. Instead, the scene is described to us by Halwani and the photojournalist. Due to the fact that these perpetrators are still alive and the photojournalist knows who they are, we were not able to see their faces. As the Lebanese government, under the ‘tutelage’ of the Syrian regime at the time, passed an Amnesty Law exonerating all “political and wartime crimes committed before the 28th of March 1991”, no real accountability has been possible. The kidnapping, although a punishable crime, is thus transformed into a discursive impossibility, a taboo which cannot be examined in great detail. This is the process through which ‘the disappeared’ are turned into an invisible class, yet existent. Rather, it is the association between existence and visibility that we are asked to deconstruct. Just because we are not able to see them, does not mean that they are not there. Beirut, after all, is filled with mass graves, some estimates numbering them at over 1004.

Halwani’s intention was not to repeat “the discourse of the families”, as he considers that the families of the kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances have their own discourse, drawn from their personal traumatic experiences. He believes that it is their discourse, and theirs alone, and that it should not be reproduced by the rest of us, as it risks painting political crimes affecting thousands in manifestly apolitical terms, thus incurring the risk of exempting criminals of their acts. Of course, there is no generalised attitude to approach such a topic, and there are differences in how the families have chosen to approach it. This was behind his motivation to make this film. He wanted the kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances to speak to ‘us’ directly rather than through the mediation of their families. By speaking to us directly, they regain their agency and, subsequently, ‘ascend’. By speaking to us directly, they are conveying the message that they are just like us, and what happened to them, could have happened to us.

In a scene marking perhaps the most moving segment of Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible, Halwani is seen removing posters from a wall in Beirut, revealing photos of the kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances, beneath them. He removed those posters in 2013, and chose to make them public knowledge anonymously to avoid being swept up in humanitarian discourse. “Of course he would do that. His father [Adnan Halwani] was kidnapped and his mom [Wadad Halwani] leads the Committee of the Families of Kidnapped and Disappeared in Lebanon”, he told me. This is how the narrative would usually go, and this is what he wanted to challenge. “I chose not to present myself as myself”, he adds. At one point, after carefully removing the posters, which had erased and rendered the kidnapped and the victims of enforced disappearances invisible, thereby allowing them to ‘ascend’, Halwani slowly writes down the names, dates of birth, and dates of kidnapping next to each photo. Through this process, he gave them agency long denied at the national and, often, community level.

Since his father, a public school teacher, and a member of the Communist Action Organisation in Lebanon, was kidnapped in 1982, Halwani witnessed the moment when people officially became ‘the disappeared’, and turned into an idea that was often devoid of the accounts which would allow these victims to be individuals in the first place. The absurdity of a man who was only a child during ‘the events’ being the one to unveil these stories is not lost on the viewers, particularly those of the postwar generation, such as myself. Like Halwani, those who grew up with stories of the war, or the lack thereof, also ‘inherited’ a discourse that didn’t belong to them. That generation was left in the uneasy situation of having to understand events, which they never witnessed, in a ‘postwar’ setting that ultimately discourages substantial conversations about the war. Furthermore, the aforementioned discursive impossibility imposed on the kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances ends up becoming ‘our’ problem to solve.

What is left behind when that war generation passes away? “What will stay for society is perhaps only the discourse of these families as a legacy. I am not making a discourse here. I am extracting the case of the missing persons from these families and trying to put these kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances in the context of a national problem.” As these need to be done – and not just said – Halwani tried to provide in this film “a connection between the viewer and the ‘disappeared’ as a person”. This, again, is a way of bypassing the mediation of their families, not to diminish the latter’s importance, but simply to allow for a direct connection to be made between the kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances, and the majority of the population in Lebanon who do not think about them on a daily basis.

Halawni touched upon a topic that is difficult to address, again for the simple reason of no space being provided at the national level for these difficult conversations to occur. When I went to speak with families whose children were kidnapped on behalf of an NGO a few years ago, I was asked to present their case, at the time, as a blogger, in a way that would appeal to a wider audience, in an attempt to ‘raise awareness’. I was immediately faced with an impossibility, for what awareness can be raised about a subject that is in and of itself actively rendered invisible? For these people to become visible, individuals such as myself need to “make a personal attempt at connecting with this cause”, to quote Halwani. I had not done so at the time, as I was raised in an environment where the personal was actively separated from the political. ‘The events’, whether those of the past, or those of the endlessly extended ‘now’, from which all those living in postwar Lebanon – and it is important here to note that Halwani speaks about all of Lebanon’s residents, not just Lebanese citizens – are unable to escape, could not be addressed. We were rendered powerless before even understanding the power dynamics which rendered us as such.

The pace of discovery and revelation in Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible is slow. We progressively form a cognitive map of the stories of kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances. This allows us to filter out preconceptions that many of us may have had before starting to watch the film. This is what, in my opinion, truly makes this film stand out. There have been many movies produced since 1990 on the topic of the kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances such as Here Comes The Rain (Bahij Hojeij, 2010), A Perfect Day (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, 2005) and Phantom Beirut (Ghassan Salhab, 1998). There have also been a few documentaries such as Sleepless Nights (Eliane Raheb, 2012). In many ways, these can be considered as attempts to rectify a national error, made by our political class often, it seems, with our complicity. It reflects Lebanese cinema’s general tendency to be mirrors of a society, without necessarily proposing healing processes. As Lina Khatib wrote in her seminal 2008 book on Lebanese cinema5, in the postwar era the medium took on the role of a “commentator on the development of sectarian conflict in Lebanon; on the normalization of war; on the reconstruction of Lebanon in the post-war period; and on the way the war still lurks in every corner in today’s Lebanon.” Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible does, perhaps, propose a roadmap moving forward: identify and name the kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances, learn their stories, find out what happened to them, and make amends with their families. This, to quote the photojournalist again, “requires the collective”.

In other words, Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible makes the case for the act of witnessing. Since writing the above piece, Lebanon’s October 17th revolution erupted. Among other achievements, it has allowed a resurfacing of previously suppressed imaginaries. Never before has it been this possible to imagine an alternative way of dealing with our collective past as a national problem, to put it in Halwani’s words. The postwar era has, up until now, made way for a number of groups and individuals seemingly fighting against impossible odds. Has the October 17th revolution shifted these dynamics? Are we now able to ‘deal with the past’? The upcoming essay will attempt to deal with these questions.

• 1. Jamil Mouawad. Twitter Post. November 6, 2019, 12:28 a.m. twitter.com/JamilMouawad/statu…
• 2. The movie is an exploration of, and a lament for, Lebanon’s kidnapped and victims of enforced disappearances during the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, as well as the suppressed memories in the postwar era. It was not released in theaters in Lebanon, but has been screened at Ayyam Beirut Cinamai’ya, the “Almost There” festival hosted by the Heinrich Boell Foundation’s Middle East Office in Lebanon, and lately during the Berlinale Talents-Lebanon.
• 3. A statement heard from interlocutors during previous fieldwork I had conducted.
• 4. The Economist. “NGOs in Lebanon Want to Dig up Mass Graves from the Civil War”. The Economist, July 5, 2018. Accessed December 19, 2019. https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2018/07/05/ngos-in-leba… ; Varzi, Changiz. “A Legacy of War in Beirut’s Unknown Mass Graves”. Al Jazeera, December 31, 2016. Accessed on December 19, 2019. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/11/legacy-war-lebanon-un… .
• 5. Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008. Read More at: civilsociety-centre.org/paper/… Copyrights © 2019 Lebanon Support. All rights reserved.

58/Democracy, Counterrevolution, the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (with Rohini Hensman)

youtu.be/h3d6oAGgmkY

Today we’ll be talking to Rohini Hensman.

She is an India-based Sri Lankan labor activist and feminist and an independent scholar whose book “Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism” I’ve reviewed some years ago, and which will be the topic of our conversation today.

In that book, she argues that the apparent anti-imperialism of many self-professed socialists amounts to explicit or implicit support for totalitarianism, fascism, Islamist theocracy and, ironically enough, imperialism.

She goes through the examples of Syria, Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, Russia and Ukraine.

This has been a concern of mind for a few years now and I wanted to take this opportunity to bring it to a wider audience, so I invited Rohini on to explore how such a supposedly noble political position – anti-imperialism – can be so easily corrupted.

You don’t have to identify with any -ism to find this topic informative. You just need to be someone who opposes authoritarian politics.

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Music by Tarabeat.

Photo taken from ‘The Syrian People Know Their Way’. Link.

Transcription thanks to Antidote Zine.

Elia Ayoub: Today we’re talking to Rohini Hensman. She is an India-based Sri Lankan labor activist, feminist, and independent scholar whose book Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism I reviewed some years ago and will be the topic of our conversation today.

In that book, she argues that the apparent anti-imperialism of many self-professed socialists amounts to explicit or implicit support for totalitarianism, fascism, Islamic theocracy, and—ironically enough—imperialism. She goes through the examples of Syria, Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, Russia, and Ukraine.

Some of you may know by now that this has been a concern of mine for a few years now, and I wanted to take this opportunity to bring it to a wider audience. So Rohini is on to explore how such a supposedly noble political position—anti-imperialism—can be so easily corrupted. I should say here that you don’t have to identify with any “ism” to find this topic informative. You just need to be someone who opposes authoritarian politics.

Rohini, your book asks a question that I know many of our listeners would have asked themselves: how has the rhetoric of what we might call anti-imperialism (very broadly understood) come to be used by various actors in support of anti-democratic counterrevolutions around the world?

Rohini Hensman: I came to ask this question at a specific point in time, when the Syrian uprising was being crushed very brutally. One would have expected there would be an outcry from the left. Earlier on, when the Arab Spring started, at the end of 2010, the entire left welcomed it, very excited about the positive development. But very soon I realized that the response to the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia was different from the response to the uprisings in Syria and Libya.

As the repression grew, it became more and more obvious that there was a significant section of the left which did not side with the uprising in Syria in particular, and which even was cheering on Assad. I found that really upsetting. At roughly that same time, other things were also happening. There was the Russian incursion into eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. Again, there was a section of the left which was cheering it on. That really set me off. I thought I had to understand, and help other people to understand why this is happening. It’s really a very negative development for the left to be taking these stances.

EA: Thank you for that background. To kickstart this conversation, how do you understand that question of Why? Why does this happen? What are some of the underlying causes?

RH: The original problem starts with what happened in the Russian revolution and then the counterrevolution that occurred in Russia, in spite of which large sections of socialists continued to treat Russia as a socialist country and the Stalinists as socialists. This carried on throughout the Cold War, where there were people on one side, the American side, supporting US imperialism, but on the other side there were equally horrific violations of human rights and imperialist domination of what were formerly tsarist Russian colonies. While that was going on, people were calling it socialism and communism. Of course, that’s a completely wrong idea from the standpoint I would take on what is meant by socialism or communism.

I call this wide section of people who support what became Putin’s Russia—which actually has no resemblance to what Russia was after the revolution, and is not even similar to Stalin’s Russia or its allies—neo-Stalinists, because they are no longer like the old Stalinists. They support everything that Russia and its allies do, regardless of how atrocious and oppressive it is.

But there is an even wider section of people who don’t necessarily support Assad or Putin but who more generally feel that the only thing to do is oppose western imperialism. This seems to me also a sort of strange stance to take. Because if you are a true internationalist you should support struggles against capitalism and authoritarianism wherever they occur in the world. Maybe you have more leverage to support struggles against your own state, but regardless of that you should do your best at least to speak out against oppression by other imperialisms or other authoritarian states, and possibly to take other actions such as demonstrating against them, and so on.

If you ask them why they don’t do this, there’s hedging. Ultimately these people set up a binary: if you don’t support these supposedly anti-US and anti-Israel forces, then it necessarily means that you are supporting US imperialism and Israeli aggression and so on. They don’t seem to understand that there is a possible third position where you oppose both. That’s a very common stance.

Finally, taking advantage of this, there are the despots and tyrants themselves, the authoritarian dictators and the imperialists on the other side who claim that because they are opposed to the US and its allies, they are therefore anti-imperialist. So the worst elements are also claiming to be anti-imperialist.

EA: There are three broad categories of this tendency, which you call pseudo anti-imperialism (I’ve called it “alt-imperialism,” Leila Shami called it “the anti-imperialism of idiots;” so many other terms have been used). It is a real problem on the left. It might sound like we’re focusing a bit too much on this relatively small minority or whatever, but the tendency goes beyond those who are card-carrying supporters of this ideology. There is a broader tendency which people adhere to, to various extents, and which can be just as damaging.

So just to reiterate the three categories for those who missed it: there are the tyrants and imperialists, there are the neo-Stalinists (whom many people just call tankies these days), and then there are those who “seem unable to deal with complexity, including the possibility that there may be more than one oppressor in a particular situation” [Hensman 2018]. They don’t understand that there can actually be two or more “bad guys.” I’ll mention that I did an episode of the Arab Tyrant Manual last year in which I was asked very similar questions by Ahmed Gatnash, who is a Libyan-British activist [transcript here –ed.]. One of the things I reiterated many times is this allergy, this hostility towards complexity.

One of the main takeaways I got from your book, and what I myself concluded from my understanding specifically of Syria (sometimes I can’t believe that it’s really been a decade) is that this alt-imperialism depends on “a West-centrism which makes them oblivious to the fact that people in other parts of the world have agency too and that they can exercise it both to oppress others and to fight against oppression; an orientalism which refuses to acknowledge that ‘Third World’ peoples can desire and fight for democratic rights and freedoms taken for granted in the West; and a complete lack of solidarity with people who do undertake such struggles” [Hensman 2018].

As a feminist too, I find support for these regimes quite obnoxious. All of them are extremely patriarchal and misogynist—horrific treatment of women, including women political prisoners; torture and rape used as a weapon of war. I find it really hard to take, this support for these regimes. Both as a long-time anti-imperialist and as a feminist, I find it quite repellent.

This is kind of a joke in the circles I am in now: everything that happens in the world is a conspiracy or a Western plot or the CIA has its hands in it one way or another. I’ve seen this tendency, and I’ll ask you to comment from your own background on this. I’ve seen it not just among Westerners. I’ve been at the receiving end of it—I’ve been called al Qaeda to ISIS, an agent of empire; sometimes they just call me a liberal because they think this is the worst thing they can call me. And I’ve gotten it from both Westerners in the West but also (in smaller numbers) from other Arabs in the Middle East. Even nominally anti-imperialist Arabs or Arab leftists specifically who reproduce alt-imperialism are deeply invested in this West-centrism, and are unable to view the agency of Assad in Syria or Gaddafi in Libya, ignoring things like Assad’s participation in the CIA torture program under the Bush administration, Gaddafi’s open and cozy relationship with Berlusconi, his assassinations of activists abroad and in Libya, and so on.

This, to me, is the other side of the coin of those who believe in US exceptionalism through military means. They don’t just reproduce the same logic, they reproduce the same narrative—they simply pick the other camp. It’s a campism, it’s a binary. And they don’t try to undo that binary, obviously. That’s the entire problem here. They don’t seek that third option.

This is my experience in the Arab world—would you mind bringing your own background into this?

RH: I came from an anti-imperialist family in Sri Lanka. Both my parents were committed anti-imperialists, and they tracked liberation struggles around the world. I grew up in that atmosphere. But that was part of a general support for democracy and against authoritarianism, wherever it came up, including in Sri Lanka itself. So I associated anti-imperialism with anti-authoritarianism and pro-democracy ideas. This is one reason I was so appalled at what was happening after the Syrian revolution.

As a feminist too, I find support for these regimes quite obnoxious. All of them are extremely patriarchal and misogynist—horrific treatment of women, including women political prisoners; torture and rape used as a weapon of war. There was a previous episode which I found equally horrendous, which was the Bosnian genocide. Then, too, there was a section of the left—including some mainstream people like Edward Herman, who was Chomsky’s associate and coworker—coming out very strongly in support of the Serb nationalists. Think of the horrific things: an actual genocide happening that included mass rape; rape camps (something that hadn’t been reported before) as a way to commit genocide that has not even been addressed today. There are victims who are still waiting for some kind of acknowledgment of their experience. So as a feminist I find it really hard to take, this support for these regimes. Both as a long-time anti-imperialist and as a feminist, I find it quite repellent, really, these tendencies.

There is also orientalism, as you mentioned. I would go so far as to call it racism. Imagine, there are these huge masses of people coming out in peaceful protest, and you say that they are being manipulated either by Islamists or by imperialists; you don’t give them the benefit of recognizing them as people who want democracy, just like you. No, they’re different. And yes, we find it even among our people, “Third World” people—I find it in India too, this writing off of uprisings as either Islamist or imperialist or both.

Earlier on at least, India was a staunch supporter of Palestine. Many on the left still support Palestine. Part of the problem is that they have followed discourse around the “axis of resistance” and therefore feel that those who claim to be part of the axis of resistance, such as Assad or Khamenei, have to be supported. For one section of the left, that is their motivation for supporting these people. Again, this is crazy, because Assad has actually bombed Palestinians in Syria. There are Palestinian political prisoners in Syria. The fact that he’s doing it to Syrians surely should move one to think: is he really pro-Palestinian if he crushes a democratic uprising this way? Is he supporting democracy?

That is one motivation. Another is a failure to identify with and empathize. In India there is a situation where ethnoreligious minorities, women, workers, the rural poor, and dissidents of all kinds including journalists, intellectuals, academics, human rights defenders—all are being suppressed in various ways. There is a similar situation in Syria, and one would expect that people who are facing this kind of situation in our country would sympathize with and identify with people who are being subjected to the same kinds of oppression elsewhere. But again racism comes in the way. They claim to be opposed to US imperialism; they claim to be against Israeli oppression; therefore you must support the oppressors, not the people rising up against them.

This is very weird, really. That’s why one feels so terrible about what happened in Syria: they are people like us who are being crushed. That’s what I would expect anyone on the left to feel.

EA: I had a very similar thought process in the past decade or so. My exposure to Syria was through Lebanon, since I grew up in Lebanon and I’m Lebanese. There’s a very specific context there. To some people, Syria is the ally that helped Lebanon resist against Israel. To other people, Syria was the invader in 1976. The reality is it’s a combination of both, and it’s also beyond both. The support against Israel, for example, was conditional. It had its limitations; at times it was contradictory, and it erases the fact that in 1976 Hafez al Assad’s regime invaded Lebanon to oppose the Palestinian and leftwing nationalist factions.

The year after the invasion, in 1977, Kamal Jumblatt was assassinated; he was the leader of that coalition of Palestinian and leftwing factions (and a few nationalist factions) in Lebanon. Their main opponent was the Christian rightwing nationalists at the time, who were broadly aligned with Israel. The people who bring up the eighties do so without bringing up the seventies; people who mention Hezbollah’s role against Israel in the nineties then ignore events like in 2008 when Hezbollah took over parts of Beirut and Mount Lebanon, and obviously ignore Hezbollah’s military intervention in Syria since 2011, especially 2012-13. This suggests to me that they are willing to go against their own history.

There is the example of Lebanese and Syrian communists. There are many of them, and there is no one tendency. But those who were opposed to the authoritarian regimes in Lebanon or in Syria were crushed—exiled or killed. Those who put that aside or have openly allied themselves with these regimes were more or less allowed to operate, because they were defanged; they don’t really pose a threat. In Lebanon (and in Syria as well, but that’s a different story), prominent Marxists and intellectuals in the south, like Mahdi Amel, were assassinated by what would end up becoming Hezbollah. These were people who were part of the community. They were Shias from southern Lebanon who dominated rural and working class politics in southern Lebanon especially. I suppose Gramsci would call them organic intellectuals; there were a lot of these coming up.

There is the example of Lebanese and Syrian communists. There are many of them, and there is no one tendency. But those who were opposed to the authoritarian regimes in Lebanon or in Syria were crushed—exiled or killed. Those who put that aside or have openly allied themselves with these regimes were more or less allowed to operate, because they were defanged.

Now, it’s a broader story. I did an episode with Ziad Majed, who was part of that world for a long time, on the fifteen-year commemoration of the assassination of Samir Kassir—2 June 2005. He was a leftwing Lebanese-Palestinian-Syrian involved in liberation struggles in both Palestine and Syria, and he saw them linked as well as linked to the struggle in Lebanon at the time against the Syrian government. That was after the liberation of southern Lebanon in 2000. Between 2000 and 2005 is when all of this happened, mostly.

This is all to say that there are still people today in Lebanon—not many, and in general these numbers are not very high in the first place—who would call themselves communists but who sort of gloss over the fact that Hezbollah did this to communists. It is similar to some Iranian anti-imperialists glossing over the role of Khomeini in crushing Iranian communists. These people would often fight with other Iranian communists who opposed Khomeini for those specific reasons (and Khamenei these days for the same specific reasons).

It goes back to your initial point that being uncomfortable with complexity. Being willing to go with the flow to embrace one narrative that’s easy to digest does incredible damage. I’m barely scratching the surface here. I’ve mentioned assassinations and I’ve barely started.

I wanted to ask you again about the Sri Lankan context, because probably most people listening to this don’t know much. Would you mind mentioning how anti-imperialism as a rhetoric, as a narrative, was used and maybe is still being used by the ruling establishment in Sri Lanka to whitewash their own politics?

RH: Most people know there was a civil war in Sri Lanka. There was oppression of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka. There were many armed groups but the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam became the dominant one. They were on the other side of the war. Huge violations of human rights occurred on both sides. It ended in 2009 in a most horrific way. The Tamil Tigers, basically using Tamil civilians, hundreds of thousands of them, forced them to retreat as the Sri Lankan forces were advancing. At that time, Mahinda Rajapaksa was the president. His brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa was the army commander. And they showed no mercy. They knew that most of these people were civilians. They knew the Tigers were forcing them to retreat. And still they went ahead. They bombed hospitals, they bombed breadlines. At the end of the war at least forty thousand (and some people put it at many more) civilians were killed when the Sri Lankan forces finally defeated the Tigers.

Of course, not all Sinhalese were in favor of what was happening. And the government was clamping down on people who objected. At the end of the war, it was mainly Western powers in the UN, in the human rights council as well as the security council, arguing that there should be an investigation into war crimes at the end of the war in Sri Lanka, and people should be held accountable. In that context, Mahinda Rajapaksa claimed anti-imperialism, opposing this demand for accountability for war crimes; anti-imperialism was the grounds on which he opposed it.

Oppression had been heaped on Tamils. Apart from those who were killed, hundreds of thousands were interned in military camps. It was horrendous. Their relatives outside didn’t know who had died, who had survived, who had disappeared, nothing. At this point you would expect anyone to support a demand for at least an investigation, if not some degree of accountability. They should also have held the Tigers to account for their atrocities too. But no. Now, I would expect China and Russia to object. But what I found especially disturbing was the Pink Tide people in Latin America. They were supporting Rajapaksa. The Evo Morales regime even gave Rajapaksa a Peace and Democracy award. At that point I must say I lost my respect for them. If they didn’t know what had been going on, they should have. To honor someone who has been slaughtering civilians is really beyond the pale.

That was my personal experience of the way anti-imperialism has been used by criminals, essentially—people responsible for mass crimes—to cover up their crimes. And the way other people accepted it.

EA: I was thinking about the gendered aspect of it, which you already brought up. I feel that by and large, this tendency that we’re calling alt-imperialists, tankies, pseudo-anti-imperialists—authoritarianism on the “left” broadly speaking—it doesn’t take too much to notice that they tend to be men.

What is the link between masculinity, misogyny, patriarchy, these forms of power and domination, the forms of masculinity that are authoritarian and toxic—what is the relationship between these things and this specific form of “anti-imperialism?” How would you understand it? I don’t think enough attention has been paid to the gendered component of it.

I’ll include this as a parenthesis: Lebanon also had a civil war, of course, 1975 to 1990, and the crimes that were committed during that war, which included rape and torture and everything else, were essentially written off in 1990-91 through an amnesty law. Long story short it’s how the warlords who were in power during the war ended up in government after the war. They are all men, obviously. And Lebanon, although there is a very vibrant feminist movement, remains a hyper patriarchal society.

By and large this form of “anti-imperialism” draws its political energy from existing patriarchal structures and from existing misogyny, and we can add transphobia and homophobia that also come with it. It can be very obvious. As soon as you include feminism as a framework, the links are very obvious. It can be very jarring to see people, often men (but not always; there are also women who participate in this), calling themselves feminists while reproducing this authoritarian logic which ultimately is linked in one way or another to patriarchal domination and violence.

How would you see this link between masculinity and “alt-imperialism?”

In the patriarchal family, the last resort to enforce the subordination of women is violence. There is a huge amount of violence against women, which may or may not be acknowledged, and women fighting against it are often suppressed and repressed. I would see this as a key feature of all these regimes.

RH: I have argued elsewhere that a key pillar of any authoritarian state is the authoritarian patriarchal family. All of these authoritarian regimes, whether they are on the protofascist right or whether they claim to be on the left but are in many ways equally oppressive, depend to a large degree on suppressing women. In the patriarchal family, the last resort to enforce the subordination of women is violence. There is a huge amount of violence against women, which may or may not be acknowledged, and women fighting against it are often suppressed and repressed. I would see this as a key feature of all these regimes. Because they are authoritarian, they do rely on patriarchy, misogyny, and in many cases homophobia—the so-called “family values” which see women as subordinate, girls being less valuable than boys, and so on. And violence against women has been permissible.

So there’s no puzzle here, really. I would agree with you that this kind of masculinity is very compatible with it, even where there are a few women who participate in this—they have also succumbed to this logic of aggressive masculinity.

EA: I would add another example, the figure of Hezbollah’s leader himself, Hassan Nasrallah. If people just listen to his speeches—and a lot of them are subtitled in English—his comments on feminism and on people who are LGBTQ (which he doesn’t even recognize as existing) are so rightwing that they make some rightwing figures in places like Europe and America look liberal in comparison. They are extremely ultraconservative. He literally views feminism as a Western invention and a Western import—that this comes directly down the line from Khomeini and Khamenei is very obvious two people who study these two figures and others around them.

For me personally, it ends up becoming like a dissociative state: seeing on one side people saying one thing and then as soon as they cross the border, so to speak, to Lebanon or to Syria or Iran or wherever, then they put on a completely different hat, which is identical to what someone on the far right would say. Syria for me was the case study par excellence of this happening. I documented this, that’s how meticulous and obsessive I was about it: if you look at which side of the spectrum the Western politicians are on who would go to Syria (and to Damascus specifically, invited by the Assad regime), it’s seventy to eighty percent far right, and the remaining twenty to thirty percent are “leftwing” “anti-imperialists.” This includes American politicians, Spanish politicians, some in the UK and so on. I can also name leaders on both the left and the far right in France who have made almost identical statements when it comes to Bashar al Assad.

In the last section of your book, you list five ways that anti-authoritarians can use to counter the tendency that we’ve been talking about here. Can you go through them a bit?

RH: The first one is to pursue the truth and tell the truth. A lot of the people who swallow the kind of disinformation that’s been dished out—I don’t blame all of them, because it’s really hard. It takes a lot of time and effort to find out for yourself what is actually going on. But the people who create this disinformation, who put it out, who create bots that repeat it ad nauseam and so on—that is a counterrevolutionary thing to do. Regardless of what you call yourself, that is rightwing. Because it completely denies the truth—you see what’s happening in the US right now—and therefore actively helps oppressors carry on oppressing.

It is the task and the responsibility of those of us who are opposed to this kind of oppression to find out the truth and to find ways of getting it out, and telling people that it’s not a simple matter of everything that’s put out in the Western media is wrong and everything that’s put out in the anti-Western media is correct. No, you have to use your mind and look at them all critically. You will find inconsistencies in stuff on both sides. But there’s so much similarity in the stories about weapons of mass destruction in 2003 to justify the war on Iraq on the one hand and the stories denying the chemical weapons attacks on Syrians. It’s so similar. In both cases it helps an aggressor kill and maim and displace innocent people. It is a profoundly counterrevolutionary and criminal thing to do. You are becoming a part of the crime.

The second one is to bring back humanity and morality into politics. This may sound wishy-washy, but it is absolutely necessary. As Howard Zinn said: in a world of conflict, there are victims and executioners, and it’s the responsibility of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners. Unfortunately this is what people who I call pseudo anti-imperialists are. They are taking the side of the executioners and completely ignoring—or in some cases actually vilifying—the victims. There are the stories against the White Helmets, who are rescue workers and have saved thousands of lives. Many of them have been killed in the process. And you vilify them as Islamist or imperialist. And you vilify the victims who they are trying to help, who are being bombed. You call them terrorists as well. That is totally evil. People—not just socialists, but anyone with any kind of humanitarian instincts—should not participate in that, and should see what is wrong with that.

The third one is democracy. Here we have a problem on the left that is encapsulated in the term bourgeois democracy. Somehow democracy is associated with capitalism, and therefore it is dismissed, it’s not what we fight for. But this is completely untrue. I have examined it, gone back to Marx and Engels and so on, and this is not at all how democracy was seen. In fact, democratic revolution was the first step towards a socialist revolution. So this is a profoundly wrong attitude towards democracy. We should support struggles for democracy wherever they are in the world. That is one step towards socialism.

We have to critique not just the Stalinists—they are the worst in some ways, because they justify an ultra-authoritarian dictatorship which crushed democracy completely—but there are also some on the left who may even be anti-Stalinist but still have this suspicion against democracy and don’t see it as their duty to support democratic struggles, only seeing revolution as coming from above in some way, by a party or some section of elite, and not by working people as a mass.

This leads into the theme of internationalism, which is the fourth one. Capitalism is an international system. The world is increasingly globalized. Whatever problems we face, from poverty and unemployment to global warming to refugees—the whole idea that you can tackle any of these things simply within the borders of one country, your own country, is wrong. What is happening in the rest of the world is of profound importance to your own struggle. That is, elsewhere there is some dictatorship which is crushing democracy, and crushing democracy means crushing trades unions, which means crushing workers’ struggles, women’s rights struggles. Ultimately that is going to affect you. Ultimately, to oppose capitalism you will need the help of those people who are being crushed. So it is absolutely necessary, and not a luxury, that you support struggles for democracy and human rights wherever they happen in the world. That is part of the struggle for socialism.

It has become extremely evident, especially from the example of Syria, that any international intent to help a population of working people under a murderous genocidal assault will need to deal with the fact that any such help can be blocked by the UN security council’s permanent members who will not allow any such assistance. Even food and medicine—forget about any kind of military assistance—could not be delivered to populations under siege, people who were being starved.

Whatever problems we face, from poverty and unemployment to global warming to refugees—the whole idea that you can tackle any of these things simply within the borders of one country, your own country, is wrong. What is happening in the rest of the world is of profound importance to your own struggle.

There are institutions that can be made use of, like the international criminal court, though again there is the problem that you have to go through the UN security council unless the country is signed up and has their own statute. Still, although we try as much as possible to build solidarity from below, there are some things that ordinary people like us can’t do. We can pursue the truth. We can publicize the truth. We can hold meetings and demonstrations in support of people who are being assaulted. But most of us are not really equipped to supply them with what they need in terms of support to defend their lives. And by opposing any attempts to help them, you become complicit in what is happening to them.

I’m thinking—and I may be wrong here—of the demand for no-fly zones in Syria, which many Syrians were asking for. How these would work I don’t know. But we have to at least look at that. People who are being bombarded, who are being gassed, who are being besieged and starved and killed—we have to do something, I think, which we can’t do as civilians. Something needs to be done for them. And for that we need some institution to call upon. To oppose that kind of initiative outright is wrong. Then you become complicit in the slaughter.

EA: One of the things I’m trying to focus on this year is the commemoration of the fact that it’s been ten years since the start of the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. But one of the negative things that has happened since then is the rise of authoritarianism throughout the world. I don’t want to be Arab-centric, either. It’s not just about the Arab Spring; it’s not just about the Middle East and North Africa of course. There are other factors. But part of the problem we’re facing today is the fact that there have been no consequences for people who have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This doesn’t just include Arab dictators. It doesn’t just include Putin. I’m also referring to Western leaders in various capacities as well. But there’s something specific about what happened in Syria and what’s been happening in Syria, and the consequences on the world. Yassin al Haj Saleh called it the “syrianization” of the world, pointing towards the normalization of impunity. Especially in the past four or five years (and indeed we’re recording this just a couple days after the storming of the Capitol in the US), we’ve seen this extremely toxic combination of things like online disinformation, the messed up algorithms that social media giants use, the toxic masculinity, the sort of thing we see in Trump—all of these things, in addition to the environmental pressures that are increasing, and in addition to the economic crisis, which most likely will continue for the foreseeable future, especially as we’re still dealing with and reeling from the consequences of the global COVID-19 pandemic, a big part of the story is how the world has reacted, or not reacted, to the Syrian crisis.

This is perhaps most obvious in the Arab world and Europe. I’m thinking of “Fortress Europe,” the raising up of walls—while criticizing Trump’s plan, they are doing the same stuff to their own borders. Some of the militarized tactics that the Europeans use are worse than what the Americans use. I have an upcoming guest from the Border Violence Monitoring Network in the EU. They have recently published something called the Black Book of Pushbacks. It’s this massive volume of documented pushbacks, when border police literally push refugees and asylum-seekers and migrants back into a non-EU country where they don’t have to deal with them or think about them. This long document is being distributed in the EU among parliamentarians and so on, and one of the things it reveals is that in addition to the already-existing xenophobia and racism and nativism and nationalism and all these things we see pretty much everywhere in the world, there’s a very specific hatred and fear towards Syrian refugees. This is one consequence of the Arab Spring on Europe.

In the Arab world, the main result, with the exception of Tunisia which had its own trajectory, is for governments to point to Syria in order to discourage people from demanding too much. They can tolerate various forms of dissent, but this changes from place to place. In Iraq it depends which region; in Egypt (and in the Gulf region as well) it tends to be zero tolerance—it depends on your region but it also depends on your class, what kind of clout you have in different forms of financial or cultural capital that might protect you from certain repercussions. But they use Syria: “Well, at least we’re not Syria. At least it’s not as bad here as it is in Syria.” You don’t hear this as much any more in Lebanon because things have gotten so bad since the explosion and the crisis and everything, so people don’t seem to respond to it in the same way. But it has worked for the better part of a decade to use this fear tactic.

So my question to you after all this is: how would you describe the impact of the 2011 uprisings and revolutions on your own politics?

RH: I’ve learned a lot about the countries involved, including Iraq (which I thought I knew something about earlier because of opposition to the Iraq war, but it’s a much more complex situation after the war). You are right about the completely negative results, around the world, from the way there has been no accountability for the repression of them Arab uprisings. There was so much positive feeling when they started! That’s one of the things I learned: how in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, the US and UK sectarianized the country and (this is very bizarre) handed it over to Iran-backed Shia politicians and militias, which in turn worsened the sectarian conflict in Iraq and allowed ISIS to form.

I was not aware of these aspects earlier, nor was I aware that from the beginning, Khomeini had his sights fixed on dominating Iraq. I didn’t know; I always thought of Saddam Hussein as the only bad guy in the Iran-Iraq war. I didn’t realize that after two years it could have ended if it weren’t pushed further by Khomeini for another six years in which over a million people died.

Of course now Iraq has become much more fundamentalist-dominated; I did not know the complexity of problems Iraqi women face as a result of this. I have learned about the incredibly complex character of what is going on in the countries I looked at in the book—again including Iran—and the incredible courage of the people standing up to the state in these places even with the horrific repression that they are met with. In Iraq just now, the uprising was again crushed in very brutal ways. One has to really admire the people fighting against sectarianism and authoritarianism in these countries, and look for better ways of supporting them.

The reaction of the pseudo anti-imperialists is so toxic, because on the one hand you would expect the rightwing to support these authoritarian regimes, and they do—but you would also expect a united leftwing response against them, and it is not there. The so-called left is completely divided and confused. On one side there are people who do support the uprisings and the democratic aspirations of the people in these countries. On the other hand there is a section who support the dictators, who support the oppressors, and still call themselves socialists. The way in which the Arab Spring has progressed brought this home to me in a very stark and heartbreaking way. It still breaks my heart to think of Syria and what happened there. It’s horrendous.

EA: Rohini Hensman, thanks a lot for your time, this has been a fascinating conversation.

RH: Thank you.

Anti-Imperialism From the Periphery w/ Leila Al Shami, Romeo Kokriatski & Dana El Kurd

Elia Ayoub is joined by Leila Al-Shami, British-Syrian activist and co-author of ⁠Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War⁠, Romeo Kokriatski, Ukrainian-American managing editor of The ⁠New Voice of Ukraine⁠ and co-host of the ⁠Ukraine Without Hype⁠ podcast, and Dana El Kurd, Palestinian-American assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Richmond to talk about an essay the four of us wrote.

The essay, “⁠A view of anti-imperialism from the periphery⁠,” was published by the south/south movement as part of their ⁠south/south dialogues⁠: ⁠Beyond the colonial vortex of the ‘West’: Subverting non-western imperialisms before and after 24 February 2022⁠. I recommend giving it a read before listening, but this is not necessary.

Mentions

• Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race⁠ by Reni Eddo-Lodge
• ⁠Too Like the Lightning Book⁠ I by Ada Palmer
• Commons journal, including the interviews with ⁠Elia Ayoub⁠ and ⁠Dana El Kurd⁠⁠
• Sumoud-Washing: A Queer-Feminist Analysis of the Syrian and Palestinian Struggle for Liberation⁠ by Nayrouz Abu Hatoum and Razan Ghazzawi

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Episode Credits

Host: Elia Ayoub
Producer: Elia Ayoub
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: Artin Salimi
Episode design: Elia Ayoub

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

People were more concerned that we were leveling criticism against the left and might damage the left, than that we were trying to raise awareness of problematic narratives that were actually contributing to continued attacks and continued genocide against civilian populations in our context.

Elia Ayoub: Today we’ll be talking with three guests—Dana El Kurd, Leila Al Shami, and Romeo Kokriatski—about a piece we all did together for the south/south movement website entitled “⁠A view of anti-imperialism from the periphery⁠.” The essay was published as part of the ⁠south/south dialogues⁠—⁠Beyond the colonial vortex of the ‘West’: Subverting non-western imperialisms before and after 24 February 2022.⁠ The date refers to what’s called the full-scale invasion or the second invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

That event kickstarted for Dana, Leila, and I a bunch of different reflections that brought us back to what we were thinking about related to Syria, Palestine, and the default, hegemonic attitude we’ve been seeing on the left. Best case, [the left] tends to be hesitant on the matter, and worst case, it overtly whitewashes or supports regimes like Putin’s in the name of a pretty vague, ill-defined, and contradictory anti-imperialism.

We saw this with Syria before, and it’s still ongoing. Folks tend to forget Syria is still a thing, but the regime is still bombing; Russia is still bombing, despite supposedly having its hands full in Ukraine.

We have reached a point where we need to find different terminologies, and this essay is an attempt to do so. I’ve been quite keen on using the term “the periphery,” not as a replacement for “the Global South” (because I know there’s an entire history of this term) but as a supplementary concept, something that adds, that makes it a bit richer. Because the “Global South” often does not include “post-Soviet” countries.

(I’ve been recently made aware of how the term “post-Soviet” is a bizarre term, because we don’t call Germany a “post-Nazi” state. It is, but we don’t use those terms. The “post-Soviet” space also needs to be questioned.)

I would like to ask the three of you to introduce yourselves, for those who haven’t listened to previous episodes.

Dana El Kurd: My name is Dana El Kurd, I’m an assistant professor at the University of Richmond. I write about Palestine, authoritarianism in the Arab world, and international intervention. Pronouns she/her.

Leila Al Shami: I’m Leila Al Shami. I’m an activist involved mainly in human rights and social justice issues. I occasionally write, and I’m the co-author of a book on Syria called Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War.

Romeo Kokriatski: I’m Romeo Kokriatski, I’m a journalist in Ukraine and the managing editor of the New Voice of Ukraine, a Ukrainian English-language news site. I’m also the host of the podcast Ukraine without Hype, which is Ukraine news with hopefully less bias and hype than you would otherwise find.

EA: In the past couple of years, the four of us went through different trajectories and conversations—we’re in a number of different groups together, and we’ve been seeing parallels between our contexts: how the places we come from, cover, think about a lot, or have some connection to are discussed and represented in political spaces that are not unfamiliar (circles we used to hang out in, have some kind of connection with). It’s broadly defined or talked about as ‘the left.’ More specifically, we would call it the tankie left or the authoritarian left.

Crucially, the authoritarian left’s essentialist anti-imperialism or pseudo-anti-imperialism or alt-anti-imperialism (the idea that America is the only imperialist game in town and therefore anything that can supposedly weaken America or be against America, or can vaguely be argued to be so, should be supported or at least whitewashed or downplayed)—the reason this works is that there’s an already-present idea-space in which it’s the default within the left. This insight is from a friend of ours, Adnan, given his experiences as a survivor of the Bosnian genocide.

By “default” I mean it’s not very complicated or difficult to be pro-Palestine on the left—it’s almost like how you get your card when you enter the club, almost like being for Irish independence. There’s a history to being pro-Palestine in the left, and of course Dana, your contribution in the piece was partly about that history, which is a rich one, and has a lot of pros in it, obviously. But the flip-side of that coin is that other contexts that are not Palestine, and other oppressors that are not Israel, are often seen in comparison to those oppressors—and in comparison to America, with Israel being an extension of America in that discourse.

This is what we’ve experienced with Syria and Ukraine. Russia is the obvious example here, but honestly China is another example, and of course Iran in the context of Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. So I want to get some initial reflections on your sections of the piece, and on the project that the south/south movement is doing.

RK: Since the full-scale invasion, one of the biggest changes I’ve seen on the Ukrainian left—and yes, Ukraine has a left, this is not a purely Western invention—is the discovery by many Ukrainian leftists that the rest of the world, and specifically the rest of the left, hates us.

Since I grew up in the US and I had experience with the American left prior to moving back to Ukraine, it was less surprising—although there was vitriol and vehemence in the way Ukraine became an identifier card for people. Elia, you were saying that when you enter the club you get an “I support Palestine” card; the flip-side of that is: “Ukrainians are all Nazis.”

It was a weird thing for the Ukrainian left to discover, because we always had this idea of internationalism, where the left should not be bound by national borders or ethnic divisions. This is an explicitly universalist worldview, where we think everyone should have rights regardless of who they are. But that doesn’t apply to some! This is something Syrian friends have brought up: the meme of the guy being hung and asking the person next to him, Oh, first time?

While this kind of depersonalization and dehumanization was new to Ukrainian leftists, there were people who had gone through this process years ago (especially Syrians and Bosnians), where we are declared by wide swathes of the western left not to be worth it, or that we fundamentally cannot be leftists. It is such a weird thing to go through.

For me it wasn’t weird that people had this position; it was weird when people refused to learn anything or listen to left voices from Ukraine, refused to educate themselves at all on the topic. It quickly devolved into memes of Ukrainians—Bandera—Nazis! Just purely regurgitated Russian propaganda.

Intellectually I understood it, but at the same time we’re presumably talking to people who share our goals. We share a goal of an anti-capitalist world, where people are free to do what they want to do without oppressions upon oppressions being piled up on them, where we believe people have inalienable rights. You’d think that would be enough of a bridge to convince people—Listen, I am Ukrainian but all this stuff you’ve learned is incorrect or flawed or just an outright lie, please listen to us—but the refusal is, still to this day, pretty confusing to me.

I’ve made my peace that the ideal of internationalism in large parts of the western left is basically non-existent and probably impossible to revive. But it’s still a struggle to comprehend how people you would otherwise agree with have such utterly abhorrent and imperialist ideas about you.

For listeners who don’t know and can’t see me, I’m not a pure Slav—my dad is from Bangladesh and I look more South Asian than Slavic. It’s really weird when people accuse me of being a Bandera lover or a Nazi, or that I want to destroy socialism. By the way, the Soviet Union destroyed socialism! Don’t put that on me, put that on Lenin! It’s so tough to wrap my mind around the inability (or the non-desire) of these people to learn anything outside their preconceived notions.

That’s what drove my thought process when I was making my contribution to the article. I want to lay out how absurd it is to claim you have anti-imperial, anti-racist, and anti-fascist ideas, and still buy into this essentializing, reactionary worldview when it comes to some people.

LS: I relate a lot to what Romeo is saying. We each came to an awareness of problems with the authoritarian left through the lens of our own struggles. For Syrians and for myself, a big wake up call was April 2018. We saw large protests across the western world that were bringing together people from the left and people from the far-right to oppose the “war on Syria.” But the war they were opposing was not the genocidal war Assad had been waging on the Syrian people for so many years—it was targeted air strikes by the US against the military capabilities of the regime which had just carried out a chemical weapons attack and massacre in the Damascus suburbs.

What Romeo says about people calling this out in Ukraine being tarred as Nazis—we also went through that in Syria, where many people who were trying to raise awareness around problems of this discourse were targeted as being jihadists, Islamists, and terrorists. People were more concerned that we were leveling criticism against the left and might damage the left, than that we were trying to raise awareness of problematic narratives that were actually contributing to continued attacks and continued genocide against civilian populations in our context.

We’ve all come to these realizations through the lens of our struggles, but what’s nice is that we’ve all met each other through our own experience that brought us towards something united, and that we’re continuing to build those links and bridges of solidarity across struggles. We’ve seen the same discourse play out in Hong Kong and numerous other struggles; we’re opening this space for debate, and hopefully we’re getting much bigger, those of us who are trying to bring in an internationalist and anti-authoritarian perspective to political struggles. I think we’re growing all the time.

I don’t understand how we build power with this kind of fragmentation, in accepting allies who harbor anti-Ukrainian views or anti-Syrian views. I think this is morally repugnant, and also strategically very poor.

DK: I was just reflecting while you both were talking on what Elia said at the beginning about how being pro-Palestine is easy in these spaces. What I wanted to bring to light or to discuss in my part of the piece was that fact. Not to downplay anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Palestinian bias in the larger liberal space, which still exists. But in leftist spaces, like the DSA or other organizations like that, being pro-Palestine is more accepted.

Something I noticed, and how I fell into these discussions, is that I was for a time in the Arab world, in the context of an institution that’s pan-Arab, that has different kinds of people from all over the Arab world, and the tankie mentality was seen as fringe. Even if there were a few individuals associated with that institution who may have harbored certain ideas about Syria, they genuinely could not express it. This institution is not just Palestine-focused; it discusses the issues around the region, and many of the people I worked with there had directly been impacted by Iran or by Russia. So it seemed like a no-brainer.

And then I start going online, and I move back to the US, and I’m flabbergasted at the differentiation in the discourse. What was considered completely fringe, like the Max Blumenthals of the world, are seen as valid in Western leftist spaces. I was really outraged by that, because as a Palestinian I don’t see Palestine as separate from any of these other issues occurring in the region or in the world. All these struggles are connected in various ways. That comes out in the themes of my research, and in any activism I have engaged in.

It may have been easy for me just to talk about Palestine, and a lot of Palestinian activists do that, but I couldn’t understand how we could build power in that kind of siloing and fragmentation, in accepting allies who harbor anti-Ukrainian views or anti-Syrian views. I thought that it was morally repugnant but also strategically very poor.

Just to be clear, the fact that among young people aged eighteen to twenty-four in the latest polling here in the United States, thirty percent would vote for somebody like RFK Jr.—that tells you how much damage this alt-imperialist viewpoint has done to leftist spaces: so much that we risk Trump again, or even worse.

Lastly I wanted to comment on Romeo’s discussion of how Ukrainians and Syrians are seen as outside the fold. Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a Syrian activist and theorist, talks about the ‘Syrianization‘ of the world: you’re in this periphery and you’re outside of the fold of humanity, and the rules that exist for human rights and human dignity don’t apply to you. The danger is that this is spreading: it’s not just Syria, and it won’t be just Ukraine, and it won’t be just Palestine. But leftists don’t make those connections.

EA: There’s an amazing term I learned after we published our piece: sumoud-washing. There’s a piece published on Kohl Journal by Nayrouz Abu Hatoum and Razan Ghazzawi which coins this term, sumoud-washing, pretty specifically in terms of positionality: it is a Syrian, Palestinian, queer, feminist, and decolonial lens. Sumoud is Arabic for ‘steadfastness,’ and it used to be (and to some extent still is) associated with the Palestinian cause, and different types of resistance against Arab regimes at the time, especially those that were seen as allied with Israel.

The Arabic language has these terms; they already exist. For example, in Lebanon it doesn’t make sense to say ‘tankie’—that doesn’t mean anything. But we can easily identify the “left,” the parts of the Communist Party and so on, who are pro-Hezbollah or whitewash Hezbollah, and we just call them “mumena’a.” We have that term. And the “moqawameh,” obviously, is the “the resistance,” and now it’s basically synonymous with Hezbollah. I may still use it without meaning they are the resistance, it’s just the title they use. In the same way al-Qaeda—

DK: They’ve appropriated resistance; that’s how they identify.

EA: Exactly.

That’s why I’m grateful for the term sumoud-washing, and I’ll definitely be using it. It’s very specific to the Arab world, and it is connected at the very least to the Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon sections we were covering in that essay. I’d be interested in looking at the parallels with the Ukrainian context, and the differences—maybe that’s something we can pin for now. But essentially it means the Syrian regime (pretty notoriously, for those who are from Syria, or Palestinians who grew up in Syria) uses this narrative of resistance against Israel to effectively justify everything.

People on the anti-authoritarian Lebanese left know this history quite well, and I’m glad the piece in Kohl Journal mentions that the Syrian regime intervened in Lebanon in order to crush the Palestinian resistance at the time. This is something many people already know, but it’s been siloed into a part of our brain, compartmentalized—we don’t want to think about it too much.

But this facilitated the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 1982! Because by then, ’76-’77, the big coalition was pretty much winning what is now called the Lebanese Civil War, and had like ninety percent of the territory between them: the Palestinians, the Lebanese communists, and the pan-Arab nationalists. They were the biggest alliance by far. The minority called themselves Lebanese nationalists, but they were right-wing Christian militias associated with the Maronite bourgeoisie at the time. They were losing, that small elite group of people.

It was Hafez al-Assad who, either directly or indirectly (we don’t know for sure, because these things are not exactly transparent), let the Americans know that he would take care of it. And you would assume this was done with Israel’s knowledge or approval as well: we know for a fact that after ’82, after Israel invaded—Israel was kicked out in 2000, and Syria wasn’t kicked out until 2005, so there was an eighteen-year overlap between the Israelis occupying southern Lebanon and the Syrian regime occupying the rest of Lebanon. I still remember the checkpoints. They had obviously made a truce to make that possible.

Throughout that entire period, and continuing today, Israel has been occupying the Golan Heights—al-Jawlan. Razan and Nayrouz’s piece on Kohl talks about that very specific positionality of the Jawlani, the Syrians from the Golan Heights, and their positionality vis-á-vis both Israel—which has annexed the Golan Heights—and the Assad regime. Jawlani activists and leftists would always describe how the Assad regime would always be hostile to them, because they’re seen as ‘too Israeli’—they’re seen with contempt if not with suspicion.

Those are the positionalities that drew me into the Syrian context before even knowing much about the Golan Heights. It was the Yarmouk experience: the Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus that was utterly destroyed, virtually eradicated by the Assad regime, in a way that we in Lebanon hadn’t seen since Israel tried to do the same to the entire city of Beirut in 1982.

Yet there was this complete disconnect in some people’s minds, which I discovered later on. At the time, I was still in Beirut and what was happening in Yarmouk wasn’t part of some online discursive battle, it was just like, This shit is happening, and we are seeing photos and videos, and people are leaving, and people were telling us. Because it’s not that far—Lebanon is tiny, one of the smallest countries in the world. So it was a lived experience, in the same way that if this were possible from Gaza, geographically, people would be fleeing and coming to Lebanon and telling us the same things.

But there was easier communication between parts of this mumena’a side of the “left” in Lebanon. I don’t know how to define them—or if they’re even technically on the left, because they’re really rightwing on a lot of things as well.

DK: I mean, they’re not on the left if we think about the left morally—but they claim the left and they’re accepted by the left.

EA: They are the reason why in Lebanon there’s almost this exception (now less so since the 2019 revolution) when it comes to Hezbollah. When you say Kellon yaani kellon, “All of them means all of them,” there is a: But do you really mean all of them? It’s a bit more difficult to criticize Hezbollah than it is to criticize the rightwing parties like the Lebanese Forces. Now less so, now it’s much more open, but at the time it was definitely much more difficult.

All of which is to say: the mumena’a types had a direct line of communication with a lot of people in Gaza, and obviously you physically can’t go to Gaza from Lebanon because Israel has the blockade, but it was there. Whereas with Yarmouk, the border between Lebanon and Syria was technically still open—you can’t close it, because that’s most of Lebanon. And there were all these stories left and right, but they’d be falling on deaf ears. That’s one of the things that led me to question a lot of the assumptions I had vis-á-vis the left: that we are the moral side, we’re the good guys, we hate oppression—Not our thing, we don’t like it!

In the beginning, I got into it through my Palestinian background and activism, and I assumed very naively that it’s the same logic that would be extended to those other contexts. Of course what Israel is doing to Palestine is bad, and what Assad is doing to Syrians is bad, and that’s the end of it, we should be talking about other things now. The fact that it was a sticking point always bugged me, before I was thinking about it politically and trying to make sense of it. After reading Syrian accounts (Yassin al-Haj Saleh was a big one at the time, Al-Jumhuriya, Leila’s writings, a bunch of other folks’ writings), I started understanding.

We should have consistency with our values and principles: that we’re against oppression, that we’re against injustice, that we support people in struggle against oppressive regimes, that we support people in struggle against imperialist powers, whether those imperialisms are Western imperialisms or whether they’re Russia or Iran.

And of course on Twitter and Facebook a lot of Syrians talk about this. Romeo, I wish there was a way of getting these archives very efficiently and quickly, because instead of the word “Syria” you could just put the word “Ukraine,” or “Hong Kong.” The complaints were so similar, I felt insane. I felt I was losing my mind at how similar these things are and how obvious they were in my brain, and how not-obvious they seemed to be elsewhere.

This is the background of my motivation, and it followed from there, this podcast and other stuff. There’s a Ukrainian who is saying this exact same thing, and because of how the algorithm works on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, they would meet a Syrian and hear about this experience, or in the replies Hong Kongers saying, We went through this as well! or Taiwanese people saying, We are talked about this way as well!

LS:One of the problems is that instead of having a copy-paste or consistency on moral values and standards that Dana related to, what you actually have a copy-paste of is narrative, and that narrative is that the US is always evil and that anyone opposing the US is good. That’s the reason you could copy-paste any of these statements written about Ukraine from Syria or many other struggles. Because the narrative doesn’t change. It’s completely irrelevant what the local context is, what the politics is, what the history is, what the economic situation or the culture is. The narrative stays the same, it doesn’t adjust according to different struggles.

What we should be having consistency with are our values and our principles: that we’re against oppression, that we’re against injustice, that we support people in struggle against oppressive regimes, that we support people in struggle against imperialist powers whether those imperialisms are Western imperialisms or they’re Russia or they’re Iran.

RK: It’s funny: when you started talking about how Assad’s bad, let’s move on, it’s pretty obvious, I had a very clear flashback to the beginning of the regime’s war against its own people. I remember sitting in college and discussing it with a couple of my classmates, and saying, Well, he’s a dictator bombing his own people; it’s pretty clear that he’s an asshole and should be removed. There wasn’t even the thought that there was another way to evaluate this, that I had to look at American geopolitical interests and think, Is this bad for America? No, that doesn’t matter. The moral lesson here is completely clear.

I didn’t draw that connection with my experience in Ukraine until just now, but I had the exact same feeling now that I think about it. It’s morally obvious that you shouldn’t invade your neighbor in an explicit war of conquest. That’s obviously evil. The fact this isn’t the end of discussion, and we keep having to explain kindergarten-level morality to people who are basing their whole ideology on We are the good guys, is mind-boggling.

EA: I have a theory that I need to elaborate at some point, that in essence this is not that different from what we call Realpolitik of the Kissinger variety. I hope this variety doesn’t last as long as Kissinger lasts, because he’s already a hundred years old. But I mean things like Owen Jones, the British leftwing commentator, describing Ukraine as part of Russia’s “sphere of influence.” That’s Kissinger’s terminology; that’s a Fukuyama situation! Dividing the world into those camps is by definition a campist worldview. And that has never really been outside of the Stalinist worldview with all of its echoes around the world.

I’m not trying to romanticize the left’s history necessarily; lots of fucked up things happen in leftist spaces. But in terms of basic understanding—you go on Wikipedia and write “leftwing politics”—that sort of thing should be non-negotiable. I’m not saying there can be no room for discussion of what to do and what not to do. But it’s the same way that in the US right now, the transphobic shit by the right is non-negotiable—this is not something we can or should be compromising on. The same thing in Europe: it should be non-controversial to say We support migrant and refugee rights. Though these days it’s not as uncontroversial as it should be. There are lots of left-wing parties that are not pro-migrant.

Dana, you wanted to say something.

DK: I was just absorbing what you guys were talking about, how you’ve lost the motivation to explain. I totally get that, but we should differentiate that leftists who are active, even minimally, as organizers or in these kinds of organizations, are different from the rest of society, from normal people. And even among leftists, there are people who are confused and don’t know, and then there are people who are actively taking this position.

The reason I say that is: if you think about Palestinian public opinion, it was quite pro-Syrian revolution. But when it comes to the Ukrainian issue, it’s very polarized: forty percent blame Russia, thirty percent blame Ukraine, some people don’t know. The exact numbers are in the piece. The point is, for most normal people who aren’t part of this milieu of discussion, it’s very clearly a moral issue. But because of Russian disinformation, the narratives by thought leaders and organizers who have outsized voices, even if there aren’t a lot of them, it starts to muddle the picture for normal people.

Even among people who consider themselves actively part of the left, there are some people who just don’t know and absorb that confusion. Then there are some who are such Western chauvinists that they center themselves without really critically thinking about that, and who genuinely believe that US intervention is the worst evil, and anything that might facilitate a discussion on US intervention should be shut down.

They know everything about Yarmouk, they know everything you just mentioned, but they’re going to pretend like that didn’t happen; they’re going to play the game of narratives and disinformation because they have a higher goal, which is to stop any kind of US intervention.

Like you, I really went through some mental health struggles when I started commenting online, because I was being harassed so often about things that I thought were so simple. People were scoffing at me when I used the word “authoritarian.” I thought, Am I in a parallel reality? Does authoritarianism not exist in your world? But that’s the level of discourse we have to deal with.

There are certain people who are doing this on purpose; they are doing it to muddle the discussion. Unfortunately, those people have winnowed their way into major organizations, and have done damage, especially to younger folks who are absorbing this information. But I thought I should differentiate between “normal people” and “non-normals.” I count myself as a non-normal here, just FYI.

RK: It’s so weird to me because I definitely remember—maybe I’m hallucinating, maybe we did all cross into a parallel reality! I have pretty distinct memories during the US war in Iraq that people on the left would criticize dictators like Assad for cooperating with the US. It was public information that Assad allowed the US to operate black sites in Syria. This was not some hidden thing; this was one of the main critiques of many of these regimes: that they worked with the US to do all its horrible illegal torture bullshit on their territory, in exchange for dollars.

Then you fast forward not really that long, and it’s like that shit didn’t happen. If you bring it up, people accuse you of parroting CIA talking points. Like, what happened?

EA: It’s just a decade. There are those books describing the interwar period—as in, between the First World War and the Second World War in Europe and the rest of the world—as a special period, because of what happened before and after. There’s something to be said about that decade, because between 9/11 and the Arab Spring it’s just ten years, which is kind of insane given everything that happened basically in my teenage years.

It’s something I’ve been pondering, and with a bit more distance maybe I’ll be able to reflect on it a bit more. A lot of the things we’ve been talking about now as being almost taken for granted, the tankie stuff or whatever, were a bit more in flux at the time. There was a bit more confusion, I’m not sure what the term would be.

DK: Well, there was less direct international intervention in these discussions to weaponize them. There was less Chinese funding, and Russian funding.

As Moishe Postone once said, the right are always better nationalists than the left. We shouldn’t be playing that game, we should be changing the rules of the game.

EA: Exactly, and the example I always think of (to go back to the whole mumena’a thing) is that in the beginning of the Arab Spring, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, gave a speech celebrating our brave Arab brothers on the streets—because that was before it really came to Syria (though it was starting there)—and there’s an interview he did with Julian Assange, which is still online, which is a fascinating thing as a document. He was saying, We’re negotiating between the opposition and the government, and calling them “the opposition.” There was a sense of: We’re not fully on board, necessarily, and that’s why a lot of Syrians (and Palestinians for that matter) were still on the fence about Hezbollah. Are they going to be on our side? Are they not? We’re getting mixed messages here. Of course, many others had no illusions about that.

Also, Hezbollah supported the intervention in Libya—which is a whole controversial thing, I don’t want to get into it. But Hezbollah supported it. Lebanon was one of the signatories to the resolution at the UN to allow intervention to prevent Muammar Gaddafi’s threats against the population. Lebanon had no problem with that, because there’s a internal Lebanese thing (which I won’t get into) with Hezbollah and Amal hating Muammar Gaddafi.

This is something that gets lost in these discussions. At the end of the day, Gaddafi is romanticized as a pan-African figure in pan-African spaces. The guy was an open racist and misogynist who was chilling with Berlusconi, but facts just don’t matter in these spaces.

I find it fascinating that we are at a time now where you can almost predict: if there is some kind of normalization discussion with Israel among Arab states, there seems to be, afterwards or in parallel, a re-normalization with the Assad regime. They’re almost following one another. There’s something happening, and I’m not saying this in a conspiracy way—

DK: No, it’s just that the Western establishments’ agreement is that the way to deal with these pesky peripheries is authoritarian conflict management. Whether it’s Israel, whether it’s the Syrian regime being normalized. It’s the same underlying policy, which is: These people can’t have democracy; they won’t have human rights; maybe they can have subsistence.

RK: The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict is a perfect encapsulation of this. In real time, you see the West basically turning a blind eye to the genocide of Armenians in Karabakh, in Artsakh. Regardless of what you might think are the merits of the Armenian or the Azerbaijani side, people shouldn’t be starved—that’s a pretty easy thing to see. But there’s basically no pushback from anyone, any country, any leaders in the West, against these actions. It’s like, Okay, we cut off Russian oil, but we still need Russian oil, and Azerbaijan is willing to sell us Russian oil and claim it’s theirs, so that means we’re not going to say a word. Whatever they do, we don’t care. The Armenians brought it on themselves.

When you bring it up in a left perspective, people are just like, Oh, these are uneducated mountain peoples, they’re just going to kill each other. There’s no left-wing analysis, apparently—which is insane. How can you really see yourself as the good guys if you’re willing to ignore clearly moral judgements on ongoing events. Every time I think about this, I’m just stunned by the doublethink that’s become so commonplace.

LS: We’ve heard so many times: Arabs aren’t ready for democracy and they need an authoritarian strongman to keep them in power. It just shows the absolute disconnect between the discourse and the reality, because what we saw in Syria was when the state was pushed out of two-thirds of the country, people implemented themselves a very grassroots participatory democracy; it was democracy that people were fighting for. So actually the only obstacle to democracy we have in Syria (and I imagine in many other countries in the region) are these authoritarian regimes.

EA: To bring us back to the headline “Anti-Imperialism from the periphery,” as a way of slowly wrapping up—this is one of those conversations that can last for ten hours, and I’ve been told listeners don’t want to listen to my voice for ten hours—what is it about the periphery?

“South/south movement”—there’s something about that. It’s a south to south movement. There’s this other term, “the Global East,” to use for the “post-Soviet” space as a related but different thing—almost in between the Global South and the Global North. All of these concepts are questionable, problematic, to be criticized. But they may at least in the short term help us think through certain things. Because the term “Global South” has its critiques, obviously, and I’ve tried to make them as well. It’s not that I don’t use it, or think it’s completely useless. But when you think about China, the term Global South doesn’t really apply anymore in the same way; there are other qualifications that need to be added—

LS: There’s a south in the north, and a north in the south.

EA: That’s it. There are centers and peripheries in the north. The banlieues of Paris are technically part of the Global North, but they aren’t treated as such by the Paris government. We saw that with the recent uprisings, with ex-colonial subjects being treated similarly to how colonial subjects would have been treated, because they are themselves descendants, for the most part, of former colonial subjects.

There’s something about the way Russia and Putin talk about Ukrainians: it’s not that dissimilar from any kind of dominant political power—for example, how the Chinese Communist Party has talked about Uyghurs. Of course, there are differences here and there; in China, for example, as long as you stop being Muslim and stop being Uyghurs you’re welcome to become Chinese. With Putin, it’s Novorossiya, like, Oh, well, they’re actually Russians in denial.

There is that dimension to it, which, if folks don’t take into account that this is a very violent and authoritarian way of seeing the world, the rest of the -isms are pointless.

I know you’ve mentioned this a number of times, Romeo, that at the end of the day, the whole debate about What kind of weapons should Ukrainians take and where should they say no?—well, give them the options in the first place. Where are the warplanes? I understand clearly they’re not good and they’re very bad for everything, but still, where are the warplanes? What can be done in that situation, given that what they are asking for is either not given or is given very late? At the same time we know of course that a lot of Western diplomats are still complaining that Ukrainians are asking for too much.

At the beginning of this entire thing I said that what Ukrainians need to immediately understand is that they should not be asking the West, they should be demanding, and to remember at all times that whatever solidarity and support is coming from the West is always fragile, can stop overnight—as Trump did with supposed allies in the Kurdish areas of northern Syria. This has always been a thing with the Americans especially, but with Europe as well.

All of the discourse that misses that aspect, that it’s very ephemeral, that this is about stopping Russia as much as possible as quickly as possible because the Ukrainians don’t know how long the support will come, and if the support stops it will get worse, it’ll make things more difficult—that sheer pragmatism for me, that survival question, if it’s not at the forefront of any debate of what we should do, then it’s saying the geopolitics, the realpolitik, can always trump other questions.

That’s why the question of the right to intervene, the duty to intervene, is a complicated one but is one that the left should be engaging with. For the most part, we pretend it is not there. There are no contexts, ever, in which Western states in theory capable of doing so should intervene—which makes World War Two an awkward example for people wanting to think about it; that’s why they end up not wanting to think about Bosnia, the Rwandan Genocide, Kosovo, or Libya for that matter. It brings up those questions.

It’s easier to say, It’s all like Iraq! Libya 2011 is like Iraq 2003. If you say that, you don’t have to think anymore, you don’t have to think about Libya or Gaddafi or the people on the ground. You can just think, It’s close enough to Iraq on the map; they had it good clearly, and it’s all a conspiracy, a Color Revolution.

It’s an easier way of thinking about the world, it’s maybe comforting for some to think in those simplistic binaries, but I keep on worrying that if there aren’t these basic values that are non-negotiable, that have to do with the sanctity of human life—these very basic things, if they are debatable, we’ve already lost the debate. Because the right is always going to do a better job at that. As Moishe Postone once said, the right are always better nationalists than the left. We shouldn’t be playing that game, we should be changing the rules of the game.

I’ll leave our guests to end on their thoughts and recommendations, calls to arms, propaganda, and all of the above.

RK: I wanted to address one of the things you said, Elia, which is this idea that aid is very conditional. In fact, some of the biggest criticisms from Europe and even from the UK (which has been shockingly one of the more stalwart partners of Ukraine) has been that Ukraine has asked too much. You heard this pretty constantly from French and German diplomats especially, in the first year of the full-scale invasion, that Ukraine wants too much, that they’re not grateful enough.

There was just a scandal a few weeks or months ago, where the former UK defense secretary Ben Wallace gave an interview with some Lithuanian paper where he was also seemingly complaining that the Ukrainians were asking for too much, that we were not grateful enough for the help that we’ve received. This is one thing that Ukrainians are very aware of, that aid can dry up at pretty much any moment. We’re very aware that democratic countries can change governments, and those new governments can have completely different priorities with regards to us. There’s no stability there.

To tie it to an earlier point you made about the Global East—I hadn’t heard that term, but it makes sense—one of the big differences between the “post-Soviet world” and the Global South is that by and large these countries want to become “more European,” but what they see Europe as is not quite how Europe sees itself. We see Europe as transparent, anti-corrupt, with a level playing field, rule of law. Europe is not conceived of as a colonial oppressor that has grown fat off the blood of its slaughtered subjects, it’s seen as a troubled region that managed to rebuild itself while we, after thirty years of independence, haven’t been able to match their speed.

For Ukraine, this is especially resonant because we just look at Poland. Poland is not just our neighbor geographically, but a lot of Ukrainians have ties to Poland, there’s a lot of cultural connection, they left the Soviet Union in about the same situation that we did—but they are remarkably better off than Ukraine. They’ve managed to build themselves into what Ukrainians consider a “European” nation.

This is something that I hope discussions like we’re having now will examine more thoroughly. Things that Ukrainians think are European are not exclusively European. European chauvinists might say, This is a uniquely European thing, but these values are universal—people want transparent governments, people want rule of law. These are things that objectively make life better for Joe Schmuck, the average person on the street. These are not magical European values that can only be adopted if we throw away all of our identity and say, We’re European now. Stressing the universality of those ideals is going to be very important to continue to build solidarity and connections between the Global East and Global South.

My recommendations: I recently started reading Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race⁠ by Reni Eddo-Lodge. A fantastic book. If you are white in the West and want to know why us uppity People of Color get so annoyed and upset and frustrated when you try to talk to us about this, read this book and then never talk to us about it again! And if you are a Person of Color who has never been able to really articulate the constant frustrations, read the book and you’ll get a very clear sense that you’re not alone, and why we feel this, why it’s so difficult to get through your white friends’ heads the frustrations and indignities we face on a daily basis.

EA: It’s important to add as a caveat or disclaimer that we do not hate white people. Some of my best friends are white!

DK: I’m right now just reading novels, but everyone should check out Commons, which is a Ukrainian platform and journal. They had an interview with Elia, an interview with Kavita Krishnan, and there’s an interview with me coming out. They touch on a lot of the themes discussed in this podcast.

LS: I totally forgot to prepare a recommendation, even though I’ve been on this podcast before and knew that it’s coming.

EA: I’m currently reading a novel called Terra Ignota by Ada Palmer. It’s a trilogy set in the twenty-fifth century, and I won’t do it justice here, but different societies have been built by then, and it’s one of those things where the worldbuilding is what’s really good about it. It’s a fascinating thing that I highly recommend.

Thank you all for doing this. It was really great having you.

#Podcast

38. My Father and Syria’s Forcibly Disappeared (With Wafa Mustafa)

open.spotify.com/episode/5I5By…

This is a conversation with Wafa Mustafa, a Berlin-based Syrian journalist.

We spoke about her father, Ali Mustafa, who was forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime on July 2nd 2013. Wafa highlights the fact that those who are forcibly disappeared are often depoliticized and coated in ‘humanitarian’ language. We spoke about how she participated in the 2011 uprising and how her activism actually started from sooner. We also spoke about her journey from Syria to Turkey and then Berlin, about dealing with and talking about depression, and about her next projects.

You can follow the podcast on Twitter @FireTheseTimes.

If you like what I do, please consider supporting this project with only 1$ a month on Patreon or on BuyMeACoffee.com. You can also do so directly on PayPal if you prefer.

Patreon is for monthly, PayPal is for one-offs and BuyMeACoffee has both options.

If you cannot donate you can still help by reviewing this podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Fire These Times is available on Apple Podcasts, Anchor, Breaker, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio Public, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Castro and RSS.

If it is not available wherever you get your podcasts, please drop me a message!

Music by Tarabeat.

Additional links

youtube.com/watch?v=_kvZ_T1HEg…

• The documentary mentioned is ‘Erased, Ascent of the Invisible’ by Ghassan Halwani. I wrote about it which you can read here.
• Her appearance on the Branch 251 podcast, which I recommend.
• The Syria Campaign – Why refugees can’t return to Syria
• Die Barliner – Wafa Mustafa: The Story Behind The Name
• GWI – Boell: Wafa Mustafa: Wer steckt hinter diesem Namen?
• The National: How one woman’s missing father inspired her to fight for justice for Syria
• Huffington Post: The Day I Lost My Father, My Country And My Home

#FamiliesForFreedom #ForciblyDisappeared #Syria #WafaMustafa

Podcast: From Yarmouk to the World: On Syria, Palestine and Lebanon w/ Nidal Betare

youtu.be/z0FWdKwPYbM

Nidal Betare joins Elia Ayoub to talk about growing up in Yarmouk, being Palestinian-Syrian and the links between Syria, Palestine and Lebanon.

The Fire These Times is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Anchor, Breaker, Amazon Music, Audible, Stitcher, Radio Public, Pocket Casts, Castro and RSS.

Support: Patreon.com/fromtheperiphery
Substack: thefirethesetimes.substack.com
Twitter: twitter.com/fireTheseTimes
Instagram: instagram.com/firethesetimes

Recommended Books:

• Samir Kassir’s books: ديمقراطية سوريا واستقلال لبنان: البحث عن ربيع دمشق، دار النهار، 2004 and عسكر على مين؟: لبنان الجمهورية المفقودة، دار النهار، 2004
• Serhy Yekelchyk: Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know

#Podcast

32. Wretched of the Earth: Thoughts on Syria, Palestine and Discourse (with Mohammed Sulaiman)

youtube.com/watch?v=BjAormrZXN…

This is a conversation with Mohammed Sulaiman, a Palestinian writer and researcher who grew up in Gaza and currently works at the University of South Australia.

The core of our conversation was Mohammed’s two essays for Hummus For Thought:

• Wretched of the Earth: Thoughts on Syria, Palestine and Discourse (2016)
• Israel and ‘The Right to Maim’ (2017)

Topics discussed: growing up in Gaza and surviving the Israeli wars and blockade; his and his partner’s difficult journey to Australia, himself via Israel and herself via Egypt; the Western Left’s failures on Syria and Bosnia as well as its relationship to Palestine; the dehumanisation of Palestinians and Syrians; Israel’s politics of domination; Israel’s ‘right to maim’ as inherent to colonial logic through Jasbir Puar’s work; and Palestinians being asked to show gratitude by self-appointed ‘saviors’.

This episode was re-posted on May 18th 2021 with a brief new intro.

open.spotify.com/episode/6cvGm…

You can follow the podcast on Twitter @FireTheseTimes.

If you like what I do, please consider supporting this project with only 1$ a month on Patreon or on BuyMeACoffee.com. You can also do so directly on PayPal if you prefer.

Patreon is for monthly, PayPal is for one-offs and BuyMeACoffee has both options.

If you cannot donate you can still help by reviewing this podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Fire These Times is available on Apple Podcasts, Anchor, Breaker, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio Public, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Castro and RSS.

If it is not available wherever you get your podcasts, please drop me a message!

Music by Tarabeat.

#Australia #Bosnia #IsraeliOccupation #JasbirPuar #LeftwingPolitics #MohammedSulaiman #Palestine #RightToMaim

Podcast: Disinformation, Russia and Syrian-Ukrainian Solidarity w/ Peter Pomerantsev

open.spotify.com/episode/6kRxw…

This is a conversation with Peter Pomerantsev. He’s a Soviet-born British writer and the author of two books: Nothing is True and Everything is Possible and This is Not Propaganda. He also runs the research initiative Arena based at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), an innovative programme dedicated to overcoming the challenges of disinformation.

Topics discussed: Russian disinformation on Ukraine and Syria; the Brexit campaign; the Trump presidency; Maria Ressa’s conviction in the Philippines; missed opportunities of Ukrainian-Syrian solidarity; 1990s Russia and the rise of Putin; pop-up populism; and how to deal with disinformation while being mindful of censorship fears.

Relevant links:

• Pop-Up People
• The Mechanics of Russia’s Information War
• On the Politics of Feeling
• In Politics and Prose: “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible”
• Adventures in the War on Reality
• What are post-truth politics?
• Peter Pomerantsev interview on “This is not propaganda”, disinformation and fake new HQ
• Peter Pomerantsev on Disinformation in the Modern Age
• Rappler Talk: Peter Pomerantsev on Facebook, truth, and the crisis of democracy
• Peter Pomerantsev: From Information to Disinformation Age – Russia and the Future of Propaganda Wars

You can follow the podcast on Twitter @FireTheseTimes.

If you like what I do, please consider supporting this project with only 1$ a month on Patreon or on BuyMeACoffee.com. You can also do so directly on PayPal if you prefer.

Patreon is for monthly, PayPal is for one-offs and BuyMeACoffee has both options.

If you cannot donate you can still help by reviewing this podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Fire These Times is available on Apple Podcasts, Anchor, Breaker, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio Public, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Castro and RSS.

If it is not available wherever you get your podcasts, please drop me a message!

Music by Tarabeat. Photo by Elijah O’Donnell on Unsplash, modified for this episode.

#Disinformation #MariaRessa #PeterPomerantsev #PopUpPopulism #Propaganda #Russia #Syria #Ukraine

TFTT Special: Roundtable on Syria

For episode 178, From the Periphery collective members Leila Al-Shami, Elia Ayoub, Karena Avedissian, and Ayman Makarem gathered together for a roundtable to discuss the latest developments in Syria and to provide a historical and political background to help understand the current moment. We discuss a broad range of topics starting with an overview of the what’s happened in the last week or so, including: the origins of the Syrian revolution, the counter-revolutionary war, the abuses and crimes of the Assad regime, foreign interventions and regional factors, descriptions of groups such as HTS (Hayat Tahrir al Sham) and SNA (Syria National Army), Kurdish movements and the concerns of ethnic/religious minorities, the racist tankie ‘hot take’ industry, and the connections between liberatory movements for Palestine and Syria. We cover a lot, but of course we couldn’t do everything justice. We will provide links below for further resources, but also plan on doing more episodes in the near future on all of these topics as things develop and progress.

The Fire These Times is a proud member of ⁠⁠⁠From The Periphery (FTP) Media Collective⁠⁠⁠.

How to Support: on ⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠ or on ⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠. You’ll get early access to all podcasts, exclusive audio and video episodes, an invitation to join ⁠⁠⁠our monthly hangouts⁠⁠⁠, and more.

Transcriptions: Transcriptions will be by ⁠⁠Antidote Zine⁠⁠ and published on this website.

Episode links:

⁠Bluesky thread of Syria-related TFTT episodes⁠

⁠Bluesky thread of resources on Syria⁠

For more:

• Follow The Fire These Times on ⁠⁠IG⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠
• From The Periphery is on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and has a ⁠⁠⁠website⁠⁠⁠⁠
• Follow Leila on ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Mastodon⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠
• Check out ⁠⁠Leila’s blog⁠⁠

Credits:

Guests: Leila Al-Shami, Elia Ayoub, Karena Avedissian, Ayman Makarem | Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | TFTT theme design: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | FTP theme design: ⁠⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠ | Sound editor: Ayman Makarem| Team profile pics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | Episode design: Elia Ayoub | Producer: Ayman Makarem

From The Periphery is built by Elia Ayoub, Leila Al-Shami, Ayman Makarem, Dana El Kurd, Karena Avedissian, Daniel Voskoboynik, Anna M, Aydın Yıldız, Ed S, Alice Bonfatti, israa abd elfattah, with more joining soon!

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

We don’t know what’s going to happen over the coming days, weeks, and months. But what we do need to be doing is supporting people on the ground who are still there, still want to live a safe, peaceful life, some kind of democratic future.

Ayman Makarem: Welcome to this very special episode of The Fire These Times. It’s a roundtable on Syria. As many of you may have noticed in the news, there is a lot going on in Syria: there’s a rebel counteroffensive that has taken everybody by surprise, and they have recaptured Aleppo [city] and large swathes of the Aleppo countryside, as well as the south of Idlib, reaching almost to the gates of Hama.

With that, there has been a resurgence of certain narratives and discourses that are very problematic, or at the very least not helpful to understanding what is happening situated within the context of the Syrian revolution, and we thought it would be good to talk about what’s happening and provide a resource for people to understand what’s happening with a Syrian-centric perspective—obviously factoring in geopolitics, but also lived experience.

This is coming eight years after the fall of Aleppo, and thirteen years into the Syrian revolution. So we’re four people from the From the Periphery media collective and we’re going to talk about that.

First up, Leila if you’d like to talk about your reactions to what’s going on and maybe a brief overview? A lot is happening, and it is at a pace that is very hard to keep up with.

Leila Al Shami: My first reaction, like most Syrians, was absolute shock, because this was so unexpected at this time. We woke up to news that rebels were advancing on areas that had been firmly out of rebel hands since 2020 in the north in Syria, where the negotiations between Turkey, Russia, and Iran froze the power-sharing agreement. It was a shock that all of a sudden a coalition of rebel forces (we’ll talk later about who those are) managed to get into those areas and liberate that territory—and the speed at which regime forces crumbled; there wasn’t really any massive resistance to that.

The question is Why now? There are a number of factors external to Syria which made this time possible. One factor is that the regime, which is massively unpopular and is kept in power by foreign states—its foreign backers were significantly weakened. Russia is bogged down in Ukraine at the moment, and Iranian infrastructure in Syria has been completely decimated by Israeli airstrikes, including the Iranian proxy Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’a militia. So the regime was isolated and rebel groups seized on that opportunity.

By contrast, rebel groups seem to be much more organized and unified than ever before. Part of that is because so many groups have been forced into Idlib over the past years; in the areas where the regime has control, rebel groups were displaced into Idlib province. This could be a factor as to why there is now more unity among them. They certainly seem much better disciplined than they’ve been, and under unified command.

And they seem to have access to much better weapons. They have drones now, for a few months. That has empowered the rebels, because prior to that they didn’t have any form of aerial warfare. During this offensive they’ve captured massive weapons stores from the regime, when the regime forces fled.

It’s really taken me a few days to digest what’s happening. Syrians have very mixed emotions, how they’re responding to it. Many Syrians, both inside Syria and abroad, were celebrating, because they hate the Assad regime and this is the first successful push against it for a long time. But people are very nervous and fearful at what might come in the future in terms of regime retaliation.

We’ve already seen that the regime has been bombing Idlib and Aleppo—as always, it’s not targeting rebel forces, it’s targeting civilian communities; it’s been targeting residential areas, hospitals, camps for displaced people. Many people have been killed; many more injured. In fact, doctors in Aleppo issued an emergency appeal saying they were really struggling with the influx and that they needed assistance to respond to the casualties.

But on the ground, the regime forces haven’t put up much of a fight. We’ve heard in the past twenty-four hours of the entry of Iranian-backed Shi’a militias from Iraq—we’ll see how that changes the balance of power on the ground.

AM: Some of the images we’re seeing of the developments are really hard to take in. It’s happening very quickly, and it’s all very big and new and I don’t know how to describe it. With that there’s a great deal of trepidation, hesitation, fear—unsureness of where this leads.

But with that a lot of questions. And there are a lot of people for whom this might seem new, and a lot of our listeners who have joined us from listening to our stuff on Palestine, and people who have been radicalized by what they’ve been seeing in Palestine and entered into political action, a lot of them very young—I see a bit of confusion.

There’s going to be space here to talk about some of those questions and misconceptions, some of the problematic narratives.

Elia J. Ayoub: Like Leila said, virtually every Syrian I know—for quite some time, Syria was basically my world, even more than Lebanon and Palestine—is expressing a combination of shock (both positive and negative) and fear: How can something like this happen this quick? Conspiracy theories are rife in our region—that’s not anything new—so many folks have partly nestled into the stories that they’re more familiar with: This is all Turkey; this is all Israel. Some stories are more valid than others; fears over Turkey’s role are valid and legitimate.

That being said, some of the rebels are very young. You mentioned some of our listeners are very young and may not know 2016, let alone 2011. It baffles me sometimes that it’s really been eight years since the fall of Aleppo—almost to the day! The fall of Aleppo was December 2016. And we’ve seen photos of rebels who are maybe eighteen or nineteen, maybe younger, who had photos of themselves leaving Aleppo [as children], being forcibly displaced in 2016, saying We will be back to liberate our lands.

That emotional resonance is quite something to take in. The siege in 2016 was extremely brutal, very much compared to Gaza, at least in 2014—because at this point the scale of what’s happening now in Gaza is difficult to compare to most things; 2014 is a more accurate or fair comparison.

As for fears over what might happen next: the more obvious one is what’s already happening, that the Assad regime and Russia will step up their attacks. They do still have air dominance, and they will very likely always have that. The entrance of drones on the rebel side surely changes dynamics to some extent—to what extent remains to be seen, but it’s certainly changing.

But it points to one really important thing that we have seen in Gaza as well: the Israelis, for example, in Gaza have difficulties dealing with Hamas when they’re only fighting on the ground, when it’s more “equal” (even though it’s not that equal), or in south Lebanon for that matter, if they’re fighting Hezbollah on the ground. Which is why they have air dominance; this is ninety-five percent of what makes a difference here.

In Syria, we see this a lot as well: the Syrian regime was on the verge of collapse once, and needed the intervention of Iran and its allies; then again, even with that, it was on the verge of collapse a second time and needed the intervention of Russia. Russia made a huge difference, in addition to what was already there.

LS: I don’t think they have the current capacity to have an intervention on the scale that they previously had. It looks like that, whether Iran and Russia are going to secure what they see as their interests in Syria and focus on those areas which are important to them, such as the corridor from Iraq to Lebanon which Iran relies on.

AM: I’ve been seeing some anti-aircraft weapons that I’ve never seen before with these rebel groups, and some reports even that a war jet was shot down over Aleppo—which honestly is kind of my dream. Death from the air is something that all of us from the region experience in this brutal way.

But before we get into it, and I’d like to get into the slightly larger question of how we got here historically, Karena, if you’d like to share any reactions you’ve had or how you’re reading the situation, where you’re coming from?

Karena Avedissian: I’m Armenian, and I have lots of Armenian friends from Syria and Aleppo specifically, and I have a lot of contacts among the Kurdish community also, which itself has contacts in Rojava (or the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria). It’s almost as if you’re dealing with a parallel universe with regard to these latest developments.

The main forces on the ground for the Kurds, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), primarily led by Kurdish elements and the various forces under them—their position has been deeply influenced by years and years of systemic oppression and cultural erasure of Kurdish communities prior to the revolution and the outbreak of the civil war after that.

They shouldn’t be seen as pro-regime, but these developments are very concerning; the minorities in Aleppo, specifically the Christian and Alawite minorities, are also watching with trepidation. The situation so far seems calm but very tense. The HTS (at some point we can go into who the SNA and HTS are) have made public assurances in Aleppo that they won’t harm minorities, specifically Christians. Early indications seem to suggest that that’s the situation right now, although I do know of an Armenian who was recently sniped and killed in Aleppo. I know their relative, who lives in Armenia now.

There are videos of older Christian Aleppans expressing that they feel safe; one says that she has her Christmas tree up. I just read this morning that bishop Boutros Kassis of the Syriac orthodox church in Aleppo has stated that Christian leaders have coordinated and decided they’re going to stay; they’re not going to leave the city. But despite these assurances, the conversations I’ve been having with different people in Rojava and Aleppo indicate that specifically Armenians, Kurds, Assyrians, and Yezidis do remain fearful.

In Aleppo right now, many are still afraid to leave their homes; they’re not leaving. Their fear, more than regime reprisals (because it’s a completely different context), is of the more extremist Islamist groups that they have bad memories of. They have troubling history with some of these factions’ (including HTS’s) past alliances with ISIS and Al Nusra against the YPG in 2013, as well as their involvement in the ethnic cleansing of Afrin in 2018 and Ras al-Ayn in 2019.

These groups pose a threat also because of the involvement and backing of Turkey specifically; that is the main bogeyman for these groups, and really for anyone who’s opposed to pan-Turkism or Islamist supremacism. These concerns are not hypothetical; they actually reflect tangible actions on the ground, even in the last couple of days. A massive Turkish flag was unfurled over the Aleppo citadel, which signals to some degree Ankara’s influence and ambitions, even though they might not be directly backing this banner drop.

We’ve also seen the hashtag #Halep82 circulating; it refers to Aleppo as Turkey’s eighty-second province (Turkey has eighty-one provinces). There are fears that this could mean the end of certain communities, Christian communities, in Aleppo, because of that Turkish-backed element. If they were to completely take over control, they fear that they would be either targeted for murder, disappeared, or ethnically cleansed from the city.

We can talk about SNA separately; that’s another element. The Syrian National Army is more overtly, directly backed by Turkey.

LS: The Kurds are in a particularly vulnerable position right now, because it’s anticipated that America may well withdraw its forces which have been supporting the SDF in Syria. It’s also important to point out that many Syrians are also very fearful of the composition of these forces; they contain a lot of radical and extremist elements, and they certainly don’t represent Syrians’ aspirations or the values of the revolution.

EA: It’s important to point out that in the areas where HTS has already ruled, there have been protests and demonstrations over the years; notable activists have been assassinated as well. That has happened. It is also true that they have “changed” on some level in the past few years; that is notable. It could be, as Leila mentioned, that the fact most of the forces were in the same place, Idlib, for a number of years may have shifted things. Maybe they’re more organized; the more extreme, reckless elements are pushed to the side. It doesn’t mean they’re not there, but they’re pushed to the side.

I would guess that the Turkish flag over the citadel is one of the less organized elements, and the more organized elements are the ones who unfurled the Free Syrian and Palestinian flags which we also saw on the citadel. We also saw on day one or day two that some idiot took down a Christmas tree; the next day they put it back up. Clearly there is some coordinated element. I saw speeches by [Abu Mohammed] al-Jolani himself, the leader of HTS, basically saying no one shall be harmed, all property shall be preserved, etcetera.

At the very least this seems to suggest that they are aware of bad PR, which is not nothing. It’s something that can make a huge difference; a lot of the time, panic can ensue if you fear—rightly, for very good reasons—that you might be next. So saying openly that No, you’re not next; no, you’re safe is something. Of course it’s good that they bring up Christians; they usually don’t bring up Kurds. That might be because they don’t make the distinction (“everyone is Sunni” in their eyes), but it’s also a question mark. More importantly, they (HTS) don’t bring up Alawites for the most part.

Among people who are just there—the vast majority of people in any of those areas have nothing to do with HTS (they don’t have a gigantic membership; it’s in the low thousands, maybe, not hundreds of thousands). Those people are the ones who protest against HTS, and some of those people will have very complicated feelings about what is happening now: celebrating that a statue of Hafez al-Assad is taken down, and the Syrian regime flag taken down, and they went into the palace of the Aleppo governor and shit like that, while also being worried about what comes up.

For me that is very understandable; I would have had similar fears about Hezbollah, to be honest, in the nineties, and I know of writers at the time who expressed very similar things to what we’re hearing today—it’s a different context, but similar enough that it’s worth mentioning.

We’ve mentioned HTS. What about the SNA? Who wants to explain them?

KA: I think it would also be helpful because the minority perspective that I’m looking at conflates the two. I know they’re very different, but some people insist they’re the same.

EA: What I can say about HTS: I’m not a fan, but they’re locals. The HTS folks in Aleppo are from Aleppo, and there is very clearly a familiarity to them. I’ve seen the video you mentioned of that old lady—she wasn’t talking to an HTS guy, she was talking to a journalist, but the way she was talking about the HTS guys—she was calling them “the guys,” “the youth.” Because many of them are young—we really have to emphasize this—and clearly with a direct connection to Aleppo, for the most part probably exiled in 2016, as many were.

That creates some kind of accountability to some extent. Again, all of this is very limited and still in the context of war. But more than I take my orders from Turkey. It’s a very distinct dynamic there.

The SNA I’m less familiar with, other than I also don’t like them. Maybe Leila can explain more.

LS: The Syrian National Army was established in 2017, composed of former Free Syrian Army brigades that were backed, funded, trained, and provided with military support by Turkey. They really seemed to focus on a Turkish agenda, not a Syrian agenda, and that’s been primarily to stop aspirations to Kurdish autonomy in the north, and also to create a “safe area” under Turkish control in northern Syria where the refugees that Turkey no longer wants can be expelled back to.

While HTS seems to have gone on this massive drive to reassure minorities—it’s even set up emergency hotlines in Idlib and Aleppo if anyone suffers any abuses or there’s security incidents—and it seems for now that they’re very concerned about popular opinion and getting popular support, and they’re trying to reassure minorities that they will be safe, the Syrian National Army has been focusing its fight on areas controlled by Kurdish forces, such as Tel Rifaat area.

I’ve seen some horrific videos of abuses and humiliation of SDF soldiers that were carried out by these Turkish-backed forces. So at the moment, if we take HTS at its word, at face value, my main concern for ethnic conflict or sectarian backlash comes from these Turkish-backed forces.

EA: I agree with that. It’s the elephant in the room what’s going to happen with that and the incoming Trump administration.

We don’t know this one hundred percent sure, and we can’t know, because Turkey isn’t transparent about these things, but the campaign does seem to have taken the Turks by surprise—which is saying something.

LS: It seems that they’d given the green light for some limited operation, but certainly nothing on this scale. I agree with you, I think it completely took the Turks by surprise. In fact, on the first day there were reports that Turks prevented the Syrian National Army from entering Aleppo and joining the liberation of the city.

KA: If I can just add a couple things about the SNA and why Kurds are so worried: they were the ones with Turkish support who were responsible for capturing Afrin in 2018, and they reduced the Kurdish population from ninety percent to under twenty percent through systematic murder and torture. So you could also see them as a broader pan-Turkic project to reshape the demographics of northern Syria.

I wanted to also mention that it was these same forces, or fighters from some of these forces, who, again coordinated by Turkey and Azerbaijan, sent at least five hundred (and possibly up to four thousand) fighters to target Armenians during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) war. Fighters from the SNA, Sultan Murad and al-Hamza divisions, arrived in Azerbaijan and were involved in the fighting there. So they have genocidal experience, and I really do understand the trepidation around them.

LS: It’s also important to point out that it’s not just minorities that don’t like the SNA. Syrians in general and Sunni communities also have a lot of problems with the SNA, because they have a reputation for corruption; they have a reputation for abuses; and they were constantly involved in infighting between rebels.

In addition to that, Turkey, which was once seen as an ally of the revolution, has really fallen out of favor with Syrians—for two reasons. One, because Turkey has been pursuing normalization with the regime, and secondly because of the rise of xenophobic nationalism and attacks on Syrian communities inside Turkey.

None of the formations represent the interests of the majority of the Syrian people, and of course as Karena has said, minorities in particular feel very vulnerable at the moment.

EA: I’ve even heard Syrians describe them as “shabiha,” which is a term that’s usually used almost exclusively, historically, against the Assad regime. Even in Lebanon it was specifically about the Assad regime.

AM: I want to take a little bit of a step back for listeners who might be a bit unfamiliar with how we got here. That’s a huge question, but it’s important, and important to discuss some of the narratives, some of the “hot takes” (I say “takes” not “analyses,” because they are not analyses).

Let’s situate this in a historical process. I think we can start with the Syrian revolution in 2011. In the broadest terms, what are we seeing here, how is it connected to that, and what other historical processes can lead us up to this moment?

LS: For a quick overview of the past decade and a half in Syria: the Syrian revolution arrived in the context of a transnational revolutionary wave sweeping the region, which was called the Arab Spring. People saw the protests that were happening in Egypt and Tunisia, and started to ask, Why not here? Why not us?

The Assad regime, by 2011, had been in power for four decades, and it ruled Syria as a totalitarian police state. Any dissent against the Assad regime was severely repressed: any political opponents were thrown into prison, torture was widespread, there were no political freedoms, no media freedoms—there were three state-controlled newspapers in the country—and there was absolutely no space for any form of civil activism.

In addition to that, Syrians had gone through a period of massive poverty, precisely because of the neoliberal policies brought in by Bashar al-Assad when he came to power when his father died, which developed this kind of crony capitalism where people related to the sectarian regime (it’s a regime which is from the Alawi sect, a minority sect in Syria), people from that sect, and members of the Assad regime greatly benefited.

There was this very brutal form of crony capitalism that was practiced, and meanwhile subsidies that Syrians were reliant on for daily needs were slowly eroded, and life became more and more difficult, economically. So there were real reasons within Syria why Syrians no longer wanted this regime, and people went to the streets and started protesting in 2011.

The response from the regime was absolutely brutal. From the very early stages, the regime was shooting at people who were involved in protests; it was carrying out mass arrests of political dissidents and people involved in protests; it was carrying out rape campaigns in dissenting communities. This level of brutality galvanized Syrians who were initially calling for political reform, but then more and more people started taking to the streets and calling for revolution.

That’s the context of how the Syrian revolution arrived, and why. Over the years, of course, the response was more and more brutal, and people started to take up arms to defend themselves and their communities from regime assault. At first this was local neighborhood militias, but by July of 2011 people started unifying under the Free Syrian Army umbrella.

The Free Syrian Army was never really a unified army or a unified command, but was a collection of these local militias who were all signed up to the twin aims of protecting protesters from regime assault, resisting that, and trying to go forward to a democratic transition, which is what the goals of the revolution were. People wanted a democratic transition away from the regime.

So of course the conflict escalated; violence breeds more violence. The reprisals started getting heavier and heavier on dissenting communities. But the Free Syrian Army had some successes, and managed to liberate large swathes of Syrian territory. At one point some four-fifths of the country were no longer under regime control.

The liberation of territory was amazing for Syrians, because what that meant was civil activism could really flourish in those areas. As the regime was pushed out, people set up local councils which were democratically administering the needs of the community. They were running the healthcare system, the education system, the water and food supply. And in addition to that, there was lots of civil activism: independent newspapers were set up, all these new ideas that people were coming to for the first time because of the revolution were debated, were discussed. Women started setting up women’s centers all around the country to try to enable women to participate both politically and economically in Syrian life and participate in the revolution.

That was a very useful experience. When you talk to Syrians about the revolution, it’s these things which had a huge meaning for them. It completely changed Syrians’ consciousness and the way that they interacted with each other.

Now, this was a revolution that wasn’t just Sunni Muslims. It comprised men and women from all of Syria’s religions, sects, and ethnicities—which was the greatest threat to the regime. Having a democratic alternative was the greatest threat, and that was why it was so absolutely, viciously destroyed. We saw chemical massacres, targeting hospitals en masse across the country, causing a very severe humanitarian crisis.

The regime couldn’t hold power on its own, and it was enabled to stay in power by the intervention of foreign states; both Iran and Russia have given significant backing to the regime, both economically and politically. They’ve shielded the regime, Russia specifically, from any level of accountability through the Security Council. But Russia also gave the regime a great deal of air support—Russia has been targeting residential areas and hospitals throughout the years—and Iran provided the ground forces.

These were collections of Shi’a militias from all over the region—Iraq, Lebanon, Iran itself, even from Afghanistan—that came in to support the regime on the ground. If you look at Syria over the past years, you can actually talk about an Iranian occupation in Syria, because many communities across the country, when they were retaken by the regime, their population was completely forcibly expelled (many of them went to Idlib as we previously mentioned), and over time Iranians, or Shi’a from across the region, have been moving into those communities, changing the demographic balance in a way the regime feels it has support among the community.

The other factor that’s important to talk about is that the Free Syrian Army never got any significant support, either financial or military. There were drips and drabs of support from, for example, America—never enough to force the regime from power, but to force the regime to the negotiating table. After the gas attacks in Ghouta—this was a traumatic event for Syrians—Syrians realized at at that point that they weren’t going to get any kind of support.

This is when we really see the rise of Islamist battalions in Syria. There’s a whole range of Islamist battalions, from more moderate to really extremist, but the vast majority of them are authoritarian, not really having anything to do with the original values of the revolution, and they increased in strength. They looked to the Gulf states for support and funding.

This created a situation where there’s lots of different militias in the country, lots of different warlords. The space for civil society activism decreased massively—also because of mass arrests and people being tortured to death in Assad prisons, and also from the millions who fled the country into refugee camps around the region or further afield to Europe.

That’s the situation that we’ve been in a stalemate from for the past couple of years now. A lot of the country came back under regime control, apart from Idlib and parts of northern Syria which were divided among different power bases or different armed groups. The economy is in absolute shatters; the regime runs the country as a drug mafia—it gets all of its money today from the sale of captagon, which is an amphetamine-like substance—and refugees have chosen not to go home, because they fear if they do go home they will be subject to arrest (which is absolutely the case with people who have returned) so they have stayed outside the country.

This is one of the reasons why so many people were hopeful by the events of the past few days. One, because there’s a hope that people can return to Syria if land is liberated from the regime. That’s a massive thing, because that means that all the democrats and civil society activists who were forced out of the country could return to build the country. Civil activism could resume in the country.

The second thing that made people very emotional was seeing the release of prisoners. The rebels in the past few days have liberated a number of prisons; people are reunited with their families. You can’t imagine what an emotional thing this is for Syrians, because none of us have a situation where we don’t have family or friends who are in regime prisons.

So this is two central things for Syrians: one, they want to go home and rebuild their country, and two, they want the release of the prisoners. That’s why they’ve taken some kind of hope from what’s been happening in the past few days.

AM: Wow, thank you so much for that, Leila. That was a presentation.

LS: I’ve done it a thousand times.

EA: I would add something very quickly. You mentioned it towards the end: the scale of the gulags, the underground prisons, is unheard of around the world; it’s up there among the worst in the world. We’ve seen footage; one man was released by the rebels after five years, another after eight. One of the rebels himself—there’s a video of him running across a field and hugging his father. This is what I mean by the big question being whether the rebels are locals or not.

Many Syrians watched the video of rebels releasing women and men from that prison in Aleppo with hope that their loved ones would be next. Because many people don’t know where they are, or if they know the location of their loved ones, they don’t know if they are alive. There’s been hundreds of reports; one of the most notorious is the Saydnaya prison, which Amnesty International called a slaughterhouse in a 2017 report because [between 5,000 and 13,000] people were hanged there in a matter of a couple of years—just mass hangings.

We’ve seen photos like the Caesar files, and videos of soldiers just mass executing people and throwing the bodies into mass graves. And those are just the ones we’ve seen. We’ve obviously heard much more from survivors who have described horrors that are on a scale that, again, is very difficult to compare to most situations, certainly up there among the worst.

Folks who don’t take into consideration just the scale of what we’re talking about—I know anecdotally of a queer feminist from a pretty privileged background (formerly) in Damascus cheering on the HTS offensive. Those are not natural allies. Those are desperate. This is a situation of desperation. That should be understood. How bad can a regime get? How bad does it have to be for people to say, How much worse could it get?

LS: It’s important to raise—with the rise of the Islamist militias, to some extent there was support for them because they were fighting against the regime. They were seen as part of the opposition to Assad, but they were never seen as part of the revolution. Certainly when those militias became dominant in certain areas, there was a lot of public protest against them, as we’ve mentioned, because of their abuses and because they were trying to implement a system of control that didn’t resonate with Syrians. They had a very sectarian, hardline religious ideology which didn’t match with the general population, so they were widely despised.

What we also didn’t mention was the rise of ISIS. ISIS, the Islamic State, appeared as a third force. This was neither part of the revolution nor part of the regime. They had an agenda that wasn’t Syrian; their agenda was to set up a global Islamic caliphate. And they also carried out horrific abuses against minorities, against anyone who dissented.

Syrians always saw ISIS and the regime as two sides of the same coin; they were against both of them. As we know, with the foreign intervention of Western states, ISIS was crushed—although it’s now reorganizing in eastern Syria.

EA: Yassin al-Haj Saleh called them “necktie fascists” and “bearded fascists.”

AM: I’ll add a question that will lead us up to what I think is an important point to hit on for this roundtable, which is: hearing how you describe things just now, Leila—go to Twitter or Instagram and it’s a completely different show. It’s a shitshow. There are these narratives. Especially for those listening, a lot of the accounts that people have been following and retweeting, unknowingly—a lot of us do this work of reaching out and asking, Do you know who this person is? Because we know these people who are “good on Palestine”—you might notice them now chiming in on what’s happening in Syria, and saying things that are very different to how we’re discussing things.

Their narratives, and the “history”—it’s all very different. This is a ploy! Why now? Oh, well, because it’s just after the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. We’ve seen these narratives before, and we’ve seen them grow. But if anyone wants to take this—otherwise I’m happy to talk about it: the parallel development of the Russian interference in Syria with its air force and also with its propaganda machine. I definitely was very conscious of this as it was happening in 2015; I noticed both those things escalated instantly.

We’re not just talking about RT, but a lot of different operations, and it formed a narrative that had a sort of internal cohesion. So I don’t know. Anyone want to talk about the rise in 2015 of that sort of propaganda? And then we can talk about the core narrative, the takes, the framework that we’ve been seeing from some very big accounts. To my mind, they just sound like Zionists all of a sudden.

LS: I agree with you, I think it really changed in 2015 with the intervention of Russia. That’s because much of the left falls into this campist framework of how it views anti-imperialism; it sees imperialism as only being carried out by the West, by the US, by Israel and its allies. Anything that axis does is very bad, but on the other side it sees other states like Russia and China and the Syrian regime as being anti-imperialist states, and makes excuses for the abuses they carry out, and discredits anyone who opposes them.

We saw, for example, when chemical massacres happened, chemical atrocities, these anti-imperialists on the left actually tried to excuse them, or deny them and pretend they didn’t happen. They’ve taken a stand whereby any opposition to Assad is constantly slandered either as CIA agents, Zionists, jihadists—really using the worst kind of Islamophobic, War-on-Terror language.

That’s the situation we’re in. Unfortunately there are many people who are very prominent in the pro-Palestine movement who have this worldview, and while their politics on Palestine have been “good,” there’s a double standard in how they respond to what’s happening in Syria. For us Syrians—fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t know—the US is not our main enemy. Our main enemy is the regime, and the imperialist powers which are supporting that regime and carrying out mass atrocities, the Iranian and Russian states.

As has been mentioned, Russia (both of them, but specifically Russia) has a very powerful propaganda arm, and its propaganda arm’s aim has not just been to dispute things with an alternative explanation, but really to bombard and pollute the public space with so many different narratives that no one can really work out what is going on, who to support.

It’s a messy situation.

EA: It’s like that book Nothing Is Real and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev. [Transcriber’s note: here are two interviews with Pomerantsev on this book, on From the Periphery-associated sites.]

Before we started recording, I was worried I would be exhausted by the end of this, because Leila and I basically met in this context—ranting about campists and tankies online and shit like that in London—almost ten years ago now, and some of the same actors are still around. Literally the same faces are still around, with even bigger budgets now.

I don’t blame people who find themselves following a bunch of accounts and suddenly those accounts are pushing a different narrative, a more or less coherent narrative on Syria, and they think, Well, I’ve trusted them on Palestine, why wouldn’t I trust them on Syria? I get that. It’s a misinformation problem, more than meaning badly. The problem is that it causes the same amount of damage regardless.

We said “good on Palestine.” I would quibble over that. They’re anti-Israel, fine. When Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, it’s good to be anti-Israel. I’m fine with that, no problem. The problem is that it’s not relevant if you’re from Yarmouk. It’s not that if you’re from Yarmouk, it’s not relevant to be anti-Israel. It is. But if the Assad regime is the one exterminating your camp, as happened a decade ago now more or less, then your main problem is Assad.

LS: For listeners: Yarmouk is a Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus.

EA: And the largest in the diaspora, before the Assad regime destroyed it.

For me, as someone who knows a bit too much about the Assad regime, including in Lebanon—the Assad regime’s role when it comes to Palestine is, at best, abandoning the Palestinian cause, abandoning the Golan Heights; at worst it’s intervening in Lebanon in 1976 on the side of the Christian far right in order to crush the Palestinian resistance and their Lebanese allies—and of course in 1982, while the Lebanese, backed by the Israelis, were committing the massacre in Sabra and Shatila, the regime was committing the massacre in Hama.

They’ve done this time and time again. Same fucking year, 1982. This has happened multiple times. The Assad regime and the Israeli regime have a lot of things that are similar, a lot of things in common; in terms of tactics, in terms of obsession with crushing any kind of Palestinian dissent. The only Palestinian they like is a docile one who doesn’t complain. That’s the only thing the Israelis are happy with; the Assad regime does the same thing. It’s fine to be a Palestinian in Syria, no problem. As long as you shut the fuck up.

For me it’s like two parallel universes—but not like the parallel universe Karena was describing initially, where if you’re a Kurd from Rojava and your main fear right now is the Turkish regime, in some ways you’re in a parallel universe and your “analysis” might be off sometimes, but it comes from a positionality of pain and fear, which I’m not going to judge. I’m not in that position. But that’s not the case with the Assad regime.

We’re talking about a now five-decades-old dynasty, first the dad and now the son, that has done absolutely everything humanly imaginable to stay in power at whatever cost. This is the situation we’re in. If we don’t start our analysis of Syria with Syria, starting with Syria, not with fucking geopolitics, not with Iran and Israel and Turkey and America—we’ll include those at some point, but start with Syria: What is it? Who’s ruling it? What is that regime’s politics?

What are we doing if we don’t do that?

LS: It’s such a racist discourse, because it totally denies Syrians any agency at all. Everything that happens is always the result of foreign powers. And yes, foreign powers have intervened and are intervening, and they’re going to intervene—but not everything that happens starts and ends with foreign powers. Syrians also influence events, and as we’ve seen in the past few days, united Syrian forces have influenced events quite significantly.

The question now will be to what extent foreign powers try to take advantage of that.

EA: And allow them to exist as an alternative. We had a period of time when the liberated areas were sort of “allowed” to be that way. Same for Rojava. In the case of eastern Aleppo, which was a liberated area, it was “allowed”—partly because of geopolitics, Assad and Turkey. And with Rojava it was at least partly because of the Americans being on the ground, providing some kind of buffer against the Turks.

But that doesn’t mean that you deny the importance of Rojava, that experiment, that revolution. You just recognize that they are in a shitty situation and the more progressive among them have tried to do their best with that shitty situation. In Syria right now, the armed forces aren’t the ones who are progressive, but there are Syrians who are just there, civilians who are just there in their hundreds of thousands, who are liberals and progressives and leftists—they don’t have the guns, because this is the world we live in. But it doesn’t mean they’re not there and we get to erase them just because they don’t have the guns.

One thing I find baffling about this discourse is it’s effectively a War-on-Terror discourse. We see the Israelis calling Hamas “terrorists” and we see people rightly saying this is an Islamophobic Bush-era doctrine—and then five seconds later they’re calling all of the Syrian Sunnis who have a beard and have guns “takfiris.” It’s the same fucking thing. What’s the difference?

AM: And then conflating everybody, including civilian populations, with those groups. And basically all these people, regardless of whether their concerns with HTS are legitimate, are completely silent when Russia is bombing civilians.

It’s a hypocrisy that we know has existed for a very long time, but I think and I hope we are in a slightly different phase. I think there are a lot more people plugged in. It’s as if we’ve been in a group chat on the region, sharing experiences, and then like forty thousand people join this group chat and it’s like, We’re here now, what do we do to free Palestine? I have a bit more energy these days to try to address those people.

With [Lebanese-American political science professor] Asad Abukhalil, I only ever send him that picture of graffiti someone painted in Lebanon saying Asad Abukhalil Eat Shit. He’s a tankie, he’s a campist. Any time any of the Blumenthals or Khaleks or whatever—I just spit in their face. I just write, Shut up, you’re a genocide denier, no one should listen to this person.

But to the people who are posting them unknowingly, I give slightly more benefit of the doubt and slightly more conversation. That’s what I think is useful for us to be establishing. I’m not really trying to convince anyone when I tell Asad Abukhalil to eat shit—I’m definitely not trying to convince him, and I’m not trying to convince anyone else. But new people, and people who have been radicalized by scenes of people being absolutely massacred by war jets, who have nothing—ten years ago we were seeing this on the daily.

There was a painful thing Leila and a lot of Syrians have talked about, and it’s really hard: you never really want to correct someone, because everything in the last year has been atrocious and horrible in Gaza, but when people describe it as the “first live-streamed genocide”—it’s not. We saw those images ten years ago.We were seeing these images for years in the mid-2010s.

And now there’s that hypocrisy: people who were championing the Assad regime—and even when people say “Assad is a butcher, he is a murderer, he is a dictator…but…” this is part of denialism and apologia. Even people like Rania Khalek can never say, No, he’s great! The line is: He’s bad, but the alternative is worse. It’s not just in the analysis that we should start with what Syrians are saying—they are the main ones who are experiencing it.

LS: That’s a total erasure of us, a total erasure of the fact that there was a massive, radical, democratic experiment that went on for years in Syria. That’s the alternative. That’s always been the alternative, and it’s still the alternative today.

AM: Totally. But where I was going with that was that I’ve seen a lot of Lebanese reactions to it, and it’s almost instantaneously: What does that mean for us? Oh, shit’s happening in Halep, what does that mean for us? Oh no, HTS, what does that mean for us?

There’s not a minute where it’s, What does this mean for Syrians? What does that mean for them? They’re the primary people affected by this. The geopolitical concerns trump actual lives, and that is a fundamentally racist discourse.

Here’s the thing. I have a question, but I’m very aware that you have spent the last ten years answering this question, and it’s frustrating. Elia, you were just saying how exhausted you are, because yeah, we have been having this conversation a lot. The main thing is seeing this within the lens of a geopolitical play, so I don’t know if you can talk specifically against or towards the claim that the rebels are being funded by Israel. I’m sorry, it’s because I know it’s going around!

But also, within that narrative is: Why would Israel fund these rebels? Well, because the regime is part of the resistance against Israel! It connects to all that, so I think we should talk about it. I’m so sorry to have to ask this question.

EA: I can do this quickly if you want: where are the fucking Golan Heights? Where are they? They were annexed by Israel since the eighties. Smotrich, one of the leaders of the far right in Israel, was fucking born in the Golan Heights. What has been done, concretely, by the Assad regime to liberate the Golan Heights? The answer is absolutely nothing. Not a single thing.

In fact, in 2011, during the uprising, one of the popular chants was: Why are you directing the tanks towards us? The Golan Heights is fucking that way! People were aware of this, because why wouldn’t they be? It was a good chunk of Syrian territory that was annexed in the eighties—occupied since ’67, obviously, but annexed in the eighties. And that’s it, that’s the end of it, the Golan Heights are done, as far as the Assad regime is concerned.

Again: concretely, what has been the role of the Assad regime towards Palestine? Beyond having a flag here and there, or how they call one of the security branches where they torture people the “Palestine” branch? What is it? I mentioned 1976, which was the Tel al-Zaatar massacre against Palestinian refugees, and I mentioned 1982 with the Hama massacre, but Yarmouk is much more recent.

We even did a couple of episodes on this podcast: one with Mohammed Suleiman, who grew up in Gaza, talking about the Assad regime being insanely unpopular in Gaza, nowhere near what people seem to be imagining in that parallel universe on social media; and one with Nidal Betare, who grew up in Yarmouk, talking about the specificity of being a Palestinian-Syrian growing up in Yarmouk and being obviously aware of the Assad regime early on, and of course aware of the Israeli state, and always making the parallel, the link between the two, and how similar they are, kind of taking that for granted, and then having this weird out-of-body experience when you go online and see people actually saying the Assad regime is “resisting Israel.”

Maybe somewhere? On some planet? Not on this one, not for the past four decades!

AM: But the route between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon!

EA: Sure, but Hezbollah went to the east, which I’m pretty sure is not where Jerusalem is.

The thing is: a regime that crushes people cannot liberate people. If we don’t take this as a 101, what are we doing? Where is this liberation going to happen? He lost four-fifths of Syria, as Leila mentioned, because of Syrians. Syrians took to the streets against him, and he lost, because he did not have the popular legitimacy. He needed two (arguably three, if you count the Hezbollah one as separate from the Iranian one) interventions just to be propped up. How did he do that? By selling off a bunch of assets to the Russians and the Iranians, and allowing the Iranians to do ethnic cleansing in large parts of Syria.

What is this guy going to do for Palestine? Sometimes it’s so blatantly absurd that I feel—I don’t know what people are talking about. I mean, I know. I know campism, and I’m now educated and well-versed in this anti-imperialism of fools, I know Leila. But in terms of concrete usefulness, I know more Palestinian-Syrians, either personally or indirectly through acquaintances, who have been either forcibly disappeared or tortured—or their parents or relatives have been—by the Assad regime, than I know Palestinian-Syrian activists “on the left” who are pro-regime. Because why the fuck would they be?

The regime crushed unions, destroyed the communist movements, imprisoned and tortured them. This is the legacy. Do you expect me to be surprised that someone in Ramallah or Gaza is not a fan of Netanyahu? Why would I be surprised by that?

AM: Also, the Assad regime is not a threat. The Israelis do not see it as a threat, because it is not and it never has been.

EA: The most peaceful border Israel has had since the eighties.

LS: Another question, just stepping back a bit, is why people are prioritizing states to give solidarity to. Where are the people in this discussion? The people struggling against their states, the people struggling for liberation, the people struggling for better social and economic conditions? Those are the people we should be supporting, not saying which state is involved—Oh, should I support this state? Is that a good state or is that a bad state?

The question is bullshit. Where are the people in this analysis? We should always be looking for people, people who we can support, who are our people on the ground. There are always people on the ground who you can identify with and extend solidarity to.

EA: And we have no problem doing that when it comes to Palestine, where there is no state. We have no problem doing that where we have a state being opposed, the Israeli state; there is technically a “state of Palestine,” but that’s not what we’re talking about when we say Stop Bombing Gaza or From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free, or Free Palestine, or Stop Apartheid. We’re not thinking about the state of Palestine. We’re thinking about the Palestinians, the Palestinian cause.

I can put on this analytical hat and go through the theoretical flaws of campism. We had Rohini Hensman on, and we had an episode with Leila and Dana El Kurd and Romeo Kokriatski talking about anti-imperialism from the periphery; I can do that, and that is important. But fundamentally: I know people. When the scenes of prisoners being released came out, I messaged Wafa Mustafa, who was on this podcast, whose father has been disappeared for a fucking decade now. I thought of Yassin al-Haj Saleh, whose wife Samira was forcibly disappeared—not even by the regime, by Jaysh al-Islam—over a decade ago.

Those are the stories that, if we don’t center them—we center Hind Rajab, we center all of the Palestinian activists and writers and kids, because why wouldn’t we? Sure, people were also centering and romanticizing [Yahya] Sinwar when he was assassinated. But most people, when they’re thinking of Gaza, they’re thinking of that kid, and they’re thinking of that professor or that poet who was assassinated. Syrians don’t have those? Syrians don’t have kids?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Bana Alabed, if you guys remember her. In 2016, there was an insane amount of propaganda against her, calling her AI—She’s not real, she’s fake, managed by handlers—even though her mom helping her tweet was all that was happening. I’ve interviewed her. We have kids in Gaza today, also tweeting and posting and livestreaming on Instagram what’s happening around them, and that discourse doesn’t exist—accept on the Israeli side. They call it “Pallywood.”

Why is this different than the people who said that the 2011 uprising in Syria was created in some studio in Qatar? Why is that different? It’s the same fucking thing; it’s just different actors using the same language against mostly different people—but in some cases not even different people: if you’re a Palestinian-Syrian, you’re being talked about in the same way by the Assad regime and by the Israelis and their apologists.

For me, if we don’t start from that—this analysis of power, of authoritarianism—if we don’t include all of that, we’re just playing Risk. That’s fun to play when you’re a teenager, but that’s not the real world. There are people involved in all of this.

KA: I wanted to bring together a couple of these strains of thought that we’ve been talking about, especially regarding power and anti-imperialism. In the beginning I was talking about minorities as this parallel universe, but they’re not. I don’t want to get into the statist definitions, but they do live in the same political entity. And I’m generalizing minorities—they’re very different; obviously they’re not a monolith. But the Kurds largely are anti-imperialist; their project is anti-imperialist and not statist.

And then there are some of the other minorities in Aleppo: they’re not necessarily fans of Assad; they preferred to keep their head down and keep going. But is that sustainable in the long term? I wanted to rhetorically pose this question: these discourses, these positions are so separate, and they don’t speak to one another; it’s almost as though they consciously avoid acknowledging one another—what are the obstacles? Why is that happening? And what are other ways that could look?

LS: Do you mean why the unity that we spoke about previously at the beginning of the revolution broke down?

KA: Even more broadly—maybe drawing on that idea. I still haven’t read that piece in Antidote Zine about Kurdish-Arab rapprochement [Transcriber’s note: here’s a second earlier one as well], or Leila, what you and I have spoken about: how the Kurdish revolution in Rojava wouldn’t have been possible without the Syrian revolution and the Syrian revolutionaries, and how so many Western observers romanticize the Kurdish project as the first egalitarian feminist movement in the Middle East, whereas Syrian revolutionaries were doing the same—without erasing the well-grounded fears of these communities and their experience.

It’s so difficult; it’s a constant question in my mind and I don’t know how to approach it.

EA: If we talk about what’s ideal—maybe we’ll start from a more abstract, theoretical place. I would not say it’s impossible; it’s just extremely difficult, for largely geopolitical reasons. But there is such a thing as the southern front, which is inactive right now, but as far as I know (this is from memory, because it’s been a while now) it was multi-ethnic and secular. The big question right now is what happens with Sweida. It’s question mark because it’s an autonomous region within technically regime-held territory. They’re very much not fans of the regime, and there are regular protests, including waving the Free Syrian flag.

I would ideally see some kind of rapprochement between forces in the south—which for different reasons (bordering Jordan, for example) don’t have the same pressures from Turkey and shit like that, or from Iran for that matter, and have been able to do things a bit more like the early days of the revolution. Not quite the same, but a bit more than what rebels had to deal with in Aleppo in 2016, and certainly today—some kind of reconciliation, a serious one, between the components that formed the original parties or movements (I don’t want to say the FSA or SDF, because what will that look like in a year?).

And not “original” in the sense that we need to go back in time—that’s done, that’s in the past. But I don’t see any other path forward that’s good for Syria. There are alternatives and scenarios—the more likely scenarios are all bad; that’s what’s currently happening. In terms of a more progressive vision: the Rojava project continues as it is (without Turkey doing what Turkey has been doing for a long time), and the rest of Syria recreates the original forms of the local councils, and those two link up. Because those are more similar than not—it’s just that the local councils were destroyed by the Assad regime (Omar Aziz, one of the leading thinkers, died in prison, held by the Assad regime).

That’s what I would like to see. How to get there? There’s a lot of bad blood, animosity, and lack of trust—which is understandable. And that lack of trust is easily manipulated as well, and preyed upon by the wider powers, whether it’s the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian allies, or whether it’s Turkey.

LS: And also of course by the Free Army forces, the Turkish-backed militias, the SDF—the decisions they have taken are decisions that haven’t worked in the interests of Syrian unity.

We need to come to a realization that our liberation and our freedom is very much tied up with the liberation and freedom of the other—whether that’s Arabs and Kurds, whether that’s Syrians and Palestinians. The whole issue for the whole region is democratization. If we had a democratic Middle East, the Gaza genocide would have been stopped by now, because the states would have acted to reflect their populations’ wishes.

If we were in a democratic Middle East, we would be in a very different situation. Saudi could have such a big influence on ending the genocide in Gaza, just by turning off the oil tomorrow. I think its population would support that. Or Egypt or Jordan—these leaders are not acting in the interests of their people. We have to start thinking: how do we work together? People-to-people solidarity to really build a movement to take us forward to a different future.

EA: No disagreement there. And maybe we should stop calling everyone “terrorists.” Maybe we should give that up; let’s just stop doing that. Daesh are terrorists—I don’t care, go for it. But Hezbollah calls the FSA and all of the Syrians “terrorists;” the SDF calls all of the other Syrians “terrorists;” and HTS people and people in Idlib and Aleppo call the YPG and YPJ and SDF “PKK terrorists.”

LS: It’s not only the War-on-Terror language that we need to move away from; it’s the Islamophobic language that we need to move away from. Any group that has any sort of religious name or religious goal is just put in the “extremist” bracket—and Syria was never a revolution between secularism and religion. That wasn’t what the dividing line was! The dividing line was between democracy and authoritarianism.

Many people in Syria are religious. But they can organize themselves, under a religious framework, democratically. Many people will support that. But any kind of hint of Islam coming in is instantly discredited or brushed aside.

EA: And yet, the second largest group in Gaza is called Islamic Jihad, and that’s no problem! It’s okay, we can be nuanced! Hezbollah called their people “mujihadeen”—No problem, we can be nuanced! But Syria breaks people’s brains.

AM: I agree about the term “terrorist”—it’s just the term for the baddie. It’s never something you do, it’s always what they do.

EA: That’s what George W. Bush said: If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.

LS: Maybe we should just reserve the term for states—terrorist states. I can get on board with that.

AM: I feel like we’re wrapping up; those are all great concluding statements.

EA: One second. Karena, have we dealt with the minority question fairly? It’s not an easy one.

KA: Honestly, I don’t know. It’s not an easy one. But I think we’re doing the best we can.

AM: I did want to add one thing. What I find frustrating about some of these tankie, campist narratives, the sensationalist ones you see online, is that they don’t hold an analysis. It’s not thorough. They don’t ask you to read about Syria, it’s just, Look at this take. Again, this is different from Palestine: Watch this film, read this poem, listen to this song, read this book. But all these people producing these takes on Syria do not say, Read this. It’s just, Read this one weird article, or just read Noam Chomsky and nothing else.

Like you said, Elia, I don’t like using the term “terrorist”—it is a purely ideological term. What I find frustrating is some of these people claim power by saying, No, now you’re the terrorist. We have been, as Arabs, described as terrorists for decades. So there’s this feeling of: Actually, now I’m going to call you the terrorist! And it’s literally the idea of using the master’s tools! I don’t see the power in that at all.

Not just using the term specifically, but the whole package, the whole narrative and ideology. We’re not going to War-on-Terror ourselves out of the War on Terror. So doing the bullshit that the Zionists do vis-á-vis Palestine and Palestinians—erasing the Palestinians, literally and epistemologically; they don’t exist and they can only exist as these vague entities, like Hamas; Oh, it’s Iran; there are no Palestinians. This is Iran coming and using these people—justifying the “human shields” logic.

It’s sad that children are being killed in Gaza…but…Hamas. You’ll see the same thing from people who condemn this, with Syria: Okay, children being killed by Russian warplanes is sad…(again, this is the best they can do; for the most part they’ll be silent about these things)…but…HTS. But…Israel something something.

Both are condemnable. Not just the attacks, but the apologia for those attacks. And I really hope that a lot of these people who have been radicalized and whose hearts bleed, who have been so shaken by what we’ve been seeing in Gaza the last year, will have at the very least that emotional consistency, and at best that political consistency: that all of this comes from a struggle for liberation, that even though it’s manifested itself very differently at this point, thirteen years on, we are still seeing a counter-revolutionary war, and none of it will ever really end without those core issues of the revolution being addressed—i.e. the overthrow of Assad.

LS: Nothing can begin without the Assad regime ending. Whatever comes now, it’s going to be a mess. Syria’s been completely devastated and destroyed; the country is run by warlords; there are so many foreign powers involved. But Assad going is a prerequisite to even start talking about the day after or what comes next.

AM: Alright! That was a productive, interesting, exciting—I loved this conversation. It was what I had hoped and more. Is there anything else anyone wants to add or share, or reflect on?

LS: Just to say: we don’t know what’s going to happen over the coming days, weeks, and months. But what we do need to be doing is supporting people on the ground who are still there, still want to live a safe, peaceful life; they want some kind of democratic future. Those are the people we should be looking for and supporting. And certainly we should be condemning the violence and abuses of states, whether that’s the Assad regime or whether that’s any state that’s involved, and have a more human-centered focus on what we’re doing.

AM: Thank you everybody for listening. Thanks, guys, for joining. This was a great conversation.

#Aleppo #Syria

"Mass Formation Psychosis"
WOW! WATCH THIS

pol1.iv.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=er…

"#RationalKnowledge ... is building walls around life... and destroys life"

"If you're reducing life to rational understanding, you kill the essence of life... "

Video Explains
➖ Psychology as #Vulnerability
➖ Why Academic & Institutional ignorance happens
➖ Perfectionism ends up trying to be #God like

Goto start if you want about #Germany and #Germans in #1920 going the same crazy way... #psychosis

pol1.iv.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=er…

More ...
➕ Flaws in #Statistical #Maths / #Analysis (in wrong hands / #State / hands of leaders)
➕ Impossible #Stat being ignored (#Sweden didn't have #lockdown and didn't have as many deaths as #predicted)
➕ #Population #Control
➕ #Fake #Solidarity (Not #individuals #caring about each other but brought #together in #war type #collective constantly demonising something)

#Psychology + #MassFormation #Perfectionism
#COVID #Statistics causing #Blindness / #moving to what doesn't exist [ #Manipulation ]

by #MattiasDesmet
CC: @markhburton

I wonder how he did all that 🤔

FT: It was also the product of years of careful preparation by Jolani, who helped his group rebound from near-collapse five years ago. He has moderated its Islamist doctrine, built out its military capabilities and established a civilian-led government.

ft.com/content/574cc17a-fa3a-4…

Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the Syrian rebel leader hoping to overthrow Assad

The ongoing offensive by his Islamist group could mark a turning point in the country’s bloody 13-year civil war

^{Raya Jalabi (Financial Times)}

1500 lines of code later ... and #PolyculeClient now finally has support for #OIDC using MSC3861 "Next-generation auth for #Matrix, based on OAuth 2.0/OIDC" 🎉 !

Let's get it wrapped up and published soon !

Hi all,

Some fun news on the geoclue-stumber and meshtastic side!

I released gtk-meshtastic-client 0.3.0: gitlab.com/kop316/gtk-meshtast…

I also made an initial release for geoclue-stumbler: gitlab.com/kop316/geoclue-stum… Now you can record your path that you took, and it will show you various statistics (how fast are you going, how fast you were on average). You can even export the path into a GPX file! (The MR for geoclue was also merged!)

Chris Talbot / geoclue-stumbler · GitLab

GitLab.com

^GitLab

Commission fiunisehd for @japananon

Final art of the year, thank you once again for the business!
To be honest, i usually don't draw in such simple styles, so I had to think of a creative solution to make the best out of the minimalism. I figured that a chrome-like finish would be aesthetically pleasing, so I went with that. I don't do vector art either, so manually polishing those smooth lines took some time as well.

hh to all and i hope you like it, chano-san and silverpill! ^-^🎄🎄🎄

On the topic of "should a friend check in with me as much as I check in with them?":

"Friend" is an incredibly versatile term & varies wildly by who's using it and what they're describing

I have friends who I haven't talked to for a decade but I went to lunch with this week & it was like no time had passed

And people who I've cared about & talked to daily who've decided they don't want to be friends any more, sometimes for good reasons that were nobody's fault - and I've been that person too