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Syria and the Left
by Yassin Al-Haq Saleh
Yassin Al Haj Saleh is one of Syria’s leading political dissidents. He
spent from 1980-1996 in Syrian prisons and became one of the key
intellectual voices of the 2011 Syrian uprising. He spent 21 months in
hiding within Syria, eventually escaping to Istanbul. He was interviewed
via email by New Politics co-editor Stephen R. Shalom in early November
2014.
New Politics. You have written eloquently about the ongoing struggle for
progressive values in Syria. In most Western nations, particularly in
the United States, the left has relatively little power. What do you
think the Western left could best do to express its solidarity with the
Syrian revolution?
Yassin Al Haj Saleh. I am afraid that it is too late for the leftists in
the West to express any solidarity with the Syrians in their extremely
hard struggle. What I always found astonishing in this regard is that
mainstream Western leftists know almost nothing about Syria, its
society, its regime, its people, its political economy, its contemporary
history. Rarely have I found a useful piece of information or a
genuinely creative idea in their analyses. My impression about this
curious situation is that they simply do not see us; it is not about us
at all. Syria is only an additional occasion for their old
anti-imperialist tirades, never the living subject of the debate. So
they do not really need to know about us. For them the country is only a
black box about which you do not have to learn its internal structure
and dynamics; actually it has no internal structure and dynamics
according to their approach, one that is at the same time
Western-centered and high-politics centered.
The problem is that their narrow anti-imperialist worldview only sees
Obama, Putin, Holland, Erdoğan, Khamenei, Qatari Emir Hamad, Saudi King
Abdullah, Hassan Nasrallah, and Bashar al-Assad. Possibly they see also
Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. We, rank-and-file Syrians,
refugees, women, students, intellectuals, human rights activists,
political prisoners … do not exist.
I think this high-politics, Western-centered worldview is better suited
for the right and the ultra-right fascists. But honestly I’ve failed to
discern who is right and who is left in the West from a leftist Syrian
point of view. And I tend to think that these are the poisonous effects
of the Soviet experience, fascist in its own way. Many Western leftists
are the orphans of the late father, the USSR.
Besides, what prevents them from seeing the victims of Bashar, when they
see perfectly well ordinary people in Kobanê? Why wasn’t there the
slightest interest in the slaughter of 700 people at the hands of ISIS
thugs themselves in Deir Ezzor last August? One is forced to ask: Do
victims have different values based on who their murderers are? Why, as
the regime is bombing many regions in the country every day, killing
dozens of people every day, are the leftists in the West as silent as
the rightists? Could the reason be that the public killer Bashar and his
elegant wife are symbols of the First World inside Syria, a couple with
whom those in the First World identify easily?
Before helping Syrians or showing solidarity with Syrians, the
mainstream Western left needs to help themselves. Their views are
totally misguided, and the Syrian cause was only a litmus test of their
reactionary and decadent perspectives.
As a Syrian, I only need them if they are well-informed. Syria is a
microcosm, and I do not think that the nature of their understanding and
their policies in relation to the macrocosm is in any way better when
their position on the Syrian cause is mistaken to this degree.
Of course, these remarks are not meant to deny the existence of a small
number of courageous dissident Western leftists who saved the moral and
political dignity of the left in the United States and the West at large.
full: http://newpol.org/content/syria-and-left
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