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The process of dynasty transition in Syria and the enslavement of the dynasty’s subjects was supported by all international powers. Not a word of objection or suspicion was heard from the democratic countries in the world, nor from the international Left. Bashar al-Assad was baptised as heir to his father by the Americans and the French, as is well-known, and by Arab states that either were already hereditary kingdoms or found in the Assad precedence something their ageing presidents would later imitate. The upheaval in Syria’s history, and what appears to be a high-speed reversal towards the past, a return to historical eras that were supposed to have ended, is not unlinked to this international patronage.
That is to say, once again, that the archaic in our life is not exclusively local, or referring only to the fragility of the local new. It is the product of the global new, or what this new contains of the archaic, particularly the phenomena of clientelism, discrimination and evasion of justice. The Assads’ state has benefited from these phenomena as much as Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran have. Anyone who owns a state wins, however criminal their state may be, as long as this criminality is directed only at the weak and not at the powerful.
The contemporary state system is indeed the pump that drives the flow of the antiquated. I mean that all the inequality and injustice found in this world, all the violence and privilege, all the discrimination, plotting and conspiring that are characteristic of the regime are the source of what is archaic, dark and reactionary in today’s world.
full: http://aljumhuriya.net/en/critical-thought/syria-and-the-world-reactionarism-is-back-and-progressing
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