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On 10/29/15 2:27 AM, Michael Karadjis via Marxism wrote:
So once again, why do people like you keep trying to force reality to
fit your theories no matter how much it refuses to fit?
I think the answer for that is obvious. Richey is a non-Marxist radical.
A conspiracy theorist basically. A few days ago I cited Bassam Haddad's
"The Syrian Regime's Business Backbone" to help him understand something
about Syrian society and why the uprising is so difficult to defeat. It
was like trying to explain chess tactics to a Cocker Spaniel, I'm
afraid. When a military is defending privileges of a torturing elite
against the majority of a nation, that is what happens. The poor have
nothing to lose. He brings up the Gulf of Tonkin, being utterly clueless
that most rebels are shit-out-of-luck former farmers, workers and small
proprietors from Syria's hollowed out agrarian sector, basically the
same social classes that fought to throw the American military out of
Vietnam.
---
Four years of devastating drought beginning in 2006 caused at least
800,000 farmers to lose their entire livelihood and about 200,000 simply
abandoned their lands, according to the Center for Climate & Security.
In some areas, all agriculture ceased. In others, crop failures reached
75 percent. And generally as much as 85 percent of livestock died of
thirst or hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Syria’s farmers gave up,
abandoned their farms, and fled to the cities and towns in search of
almost non-existent jobs and severely short food supplies. Outside
observers including UN experts estimated that between 2 and 3 million of
Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”
As they flocked into the cities and towns seeking work and food, the
“economic” or “climate” refugees immediately found that they had to
compete not only with one another for scarce food, water, and jobs, but
also with the existing foreign refugee population. Syria was already a
refuge for a quarter of a million Palestinians and about 100,000 Iraqis
who had fled the war and occupation. Formerly prosperous farmers were
lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers.
full:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/12/understanding-syria-from-pre-civil-war-to-post-assad/281989/
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