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> > On Sep 15, 2014, at 11:53 PM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote: > >> What a joke. >> >> It should be mentioned that Landis has always been for Assadism without >> Assad. I don't see any evidence that Landis subscribes to "Assadism" - continued rule by the elites - in the Time magazine article linked to below, written at the outbreak of the current Syrian uprising. The 2005 New York Times article which Louis copied to the list predates it by a full six years (!) well before the revolt and was aimed at the Bush policy of regime change. Landis' 2011 article was written from the standpoint of support for the anti-Assad rebellion, as the following excerpts indicate: "Having been brought up in privilege in Damascus, the President has more in common with the capital's elite than he does with the Alawites of the coastal mountains who brought his father to power. When Bashar al-Assad took over after his father's death in 2000, he began liberalizing the economy and society. High culture has boomed. Foreign imports, tourism and arts are being revived. Today, Syria is a wonderful place to be wealthy; life is fun and vibrant for the well-heeled. "For the impoverished majority, however, the picture is grim. One-third of the population lives on $2 a day or less. Unemployment is rampant, and four years of drought have reduced Syria's eastern countryside to a wasteland of dusty and destitute towns and cities like Dara'a. The last thing wealthy Aleppines, Homsis and Damascenes want is a revolution that brings to power a new political class based in the rural poor, or for the country to slip into chaos and possible civil war." And: "...the only promised concessions that can be taken to the bank are pay rises for state employees of up to 30%, and the release of all activists arrested in the past weeks. Other reforms, which the regime undertook to study, are job creation, press freedom, permitting the formation of opposition parties and lifting emergency law. Should they be implemented, those changes would be nothing short of revolutionary. But many activists have already dismissed Assad's offer as a stalling tactic to make it through the next few days of funerals and demonstration. The opposition had called for Syrians to assemble in large numbers in mosques for a day of "dignity" and demonstrations. "In order to mount a serious challenge to the regime's iron grip on power, opposition activists will have to move their protest actions beyond Dara'a and its surrounding villages, and extend it to the major cities..." Full: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2061364,00.html Nor is there anything in his latest article which I posted yesterday from Al Jazeera which suggests that the political solution which Landis favours is a perpetuation of the Assad regime without Assad. Moreover, he is clear that the Obama administration has never intended to overthrow Assad, another point of demarcation from those on the left who have seen the uprising as a US-orchestrated operation aimed at regime change. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
