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This is a restarting of a conversation from last year, but one that I
need to be take up now because people keep imputing to me views and
motives that I do not have and because I must recognize self critically
that I did not continue the discussion then as I should have.
I just ran across the old thread Saturday, searching for something else,
and saw responses to me I'd never looked at.
Then Dennis Brasky's post came in, accusing me of being against a
popular uprising and for the regime in Syria. So I've decided I'd better
make myself very, very clear.
I am not a supporter of Assad. I am not an opponent of Assad. I am not
an anything of Assad.
In general and in the abstract, I am on the side of popular uprisings
everywhere save Cuba and a couple of other Latin American countries. And
I'm not a fan of the governments even without an uprising. But I can't
say more about Syria specifically because an incredible clusterfuck
ensued as well as all sort of debates, claims and counterclaims. For
reasons I will detail below, I've made a conscious decision that I'm not
going to try to unravel to my satisfaction what is going on.
Moreover, I don't live in that part of the world, I've never been there,
I don't speak the language, I know next to nothing about its history and
culture, and I haven't followed day-to-day or week-to-week news about
Syria ever.
Were I to get into a subject like the Syrian conflict I would spend
hundreds of hours chasing down and cross checking all sort of
information on it. That's why I decided from the outset of the Syrian
events to simply not get into it at that level.
Long time denizens of this list, and most of all I suspect Louis, will
remember how over the years time and again I have written these very
long posts or series of posts that included very specific and detailed
reporting on events, things that had been misunderstood or misreported,
etc. Think back on East Timor, the Elián González case, the 2000
election Florida recount, Venezuela and the 2002 coup attempt, the
persecution of Assange, the Tommy Sheridan imbroglio in the Scottish
Socialist Party among others. I have ALWAYS been like that and I still am.
The only things I would say about Syria are:
1) the United States should get out of the entire region, including
Syria. If that helps some bad guy or hurts some good guys, so be it. I
don't think at this point you can separate out any specific U.S. effort
from the 35 years of military interventions, invasions, etc.
2) I am sympathetic to the Kurdish cause, i.e., the right of the Kurds
to control their own destiny. However, I have not followed it and do not
know what groups they have, how they are fighting for their cause, their
alliances and so on.
The point of my "Syria 10; Spics 0" post had nothing to do with Syria as
such. It had to do with the U.S. left, as reflected on this list, but
not only, and what things it is paying more attention to and what things
it is paying less attention to.
My original post said I searched a few days of posts and found 10
talking about Syria and none talking about Latinos or Latin American
countries.
Nevertheless, Louis said that somehow this had to do with my being for
Assad. I'm not sure why but I did not see his reply nor follow the rest
of the conversation (nor anything else on Marxmail) then.
But I recognize these are serious, important subjects and for me,
taking them up would mean investing the necessary time and focus to
become really well-versed in it. AND I AM NOT GOING TO DO THAT.
In February of 2011 and the weeks that followed, I spent many hundreds
of hours following events in Libya, cross checking reports and sources,
etc. I'd just been restructured out of my job at CNN and had a year's
severance that prevented me from doing paid work in news. Suddenly Libya
happened and I dove into it. Then after a while other things started to
come up that crowded out putting that much attention on Libya and got
me not to get into Syria AT ALL.
Those things were in the spring and summer of 2011, the fight against a
Georgia anti-immigrant law, and abroad the Spain 15M (Occupy-type)
movement, then the Occupy Movement here, and then at the very end of the
year, as my legal restrictions from CNN ended, some activists from the
immigrant rights movement launched Radio Información, where I currently
produce and co-host the station's lead show, a talk show focused on
issues and concerns of Spanish-dominant (i.e., adult) immigrants, mostly
undocumented Mexicans from their late 20s up.
That has now determined what I follow. Stories like Ayotzinapa (the 43
teachers college students disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero in September
2014) the refugee crisis on the U.S. southern border; Pope Francis;
Trump, Bernie and Hillary, and so on. In other words, what my audience
is interested in or what I think will interest or affect them. They do
not have the time or experience digging into these things and that is my
responsibility as part of this community. This is what I do INSTEAD of
Syria.
And if you REALLY want to know how little I know about Syria and how
little attention I've paid to discussions about what is going on there,
when I read Andrew Pollacks post in last summer's thread that said, "Do
tell? I had no idea re Joaquin and Bashar," I started looking for a
"Bashar" among the comrades who posted. I didn't find a Bashar, so I
went back to Louis's post to see if there was something he'd quoted in
the thread from a Bashar. And then I saw that Bashar was Assad's first
name.
I understand people being agog at my ignorance, but that's the way it is.
But back to the main thread:
Louis's response to Andrew was that "Joaquin was always in tune with the
Cuban and Venezuelan line on Libya and Syria even though unlike Fred
Feldman and Walter Lippmann was good enough not to besiege the list with
warnings about how Obama was going to carry out regime change. I wonder
if these ex-subscribers are still harping on that nonsense."
I don't know if Louis is right to suggest (in effect) that I'd have
agreed with Cuba or Venezuela about Syria ... if I'd gotten into it to
begin with. But I don't remember ever reading anything about Syria from
either government. Also, I appreciate Louis's careful wording: "in tune
with the Cuban and Venezuelan line," but it is overstated. I think it is
fair to say that I've been in tune with their approach, but not with
their positions as *governments* at least as I best remember in the
Libya case.
As for Libya, I very much agreed with Fidel's position which, from the
outset, said we should focus on opposing a NATO intervention. Some
leftists pilloried Fidel, claiming he was giving back-handed support to
Gaddafi by shouting about a non-existent NATO threat. But one month
after Fidel's warning, the UN Security Council was blessing NATO'S
no-fly zone, so history absolved Fidel. Again.
I do not think it is right to say Fidel expressed a pro-Gaddafi "tilt"
in the internal dispute if you discount the claim that his opposition to
a NATO threat was really a diversion meant to help Gaddafi. He very
specifically said we'd need to wait to find out if the accusations
against him were true.
But I did not agree with the pro-Gaddafi tilt of some pieces in the
Cuban and especially Venezuelan press.
The main thing I did in relation to Libya was journalism, just digging
to try to figure out what was true or not. This is a summary of what I
concluded from a few weeks of digging:
* * *
The anti-Gaddafi explosion was a popular uprising against him; but there
was also a coup attempt or military rising led by the minister of the
interior who was the #3 or #4 man in the regime. Though I guess it is
possible that the military revolt was a spontaneous response to the
popular uprising, how concentrated and coordinated it was in the eastern
part of the country suggests it was at the very least there was a
pre-existing network if not an active conspiracy.
There was an immediate huge, coordinated campaign of false anti-Gaddafi
propaganda. In the initial weeks Gaddafi did not attack civilian
protests or population centers from the air nor did he bring in
mercenaries by the plane load nor did they roam the streets of Tripoli
randomly shooting people. The fact that these reports began a couple of
days into the rebellion, that there were numerous supposed eyewitness
telephone reports on CNN, the BBC and other outlets from Libya to things
that did not happen, and that they immediately gave rise to pleads from
Libya's UN mission and others to the "west" for a no-fly zone I think
suggests there was a coordinated and extraordinarily effective effort,
probably with the CIA or similar imperialist forces, possibly but not
necessarily prepared beforehand. Yet the initial imperialist response to
the no-fly zone was not enthusiastic, which IS puzzling if this was
their propaganda campaign.
[At least part of this you can verify for yourself: Google Benghazi
bombing aftermath for images with the dates set for 2011 and you will
find no pictures that claim to result from Gaddafi bombing in February
or March. Also, the Russians said their technical means showed no
bombing. Asked by reporters, Pentagon officials said in early march that
they could not confirm that the bombing had taken place. Same thing for
Tripoli.]
It is undeniable that there was a genuine popular uprising; that it
spread like wildfire; that army unit that defeated the one big Gaddafi
stronghold in the east was accompanied by a big crowd of people and that
civilians first besieged the compound not the tanks under the command of
the minister of the interior; that the pro-rebellion military folks were
accepted and acted as part of the popular rising, not people just
carrying out a coup; and that there was a monster overjoyed celebration
in Benghazi Sunday morning after the defeat of the Gaddafi stronghold
the previous evening (the mass rebellion had started Thursday night
although there had been attacks on Gaddafi targets --police stations and
so on-- for a couple of days).
* * *
That took hundreds and hundreds of hours of obsessive digging before I
was satisfied that I had the best picture I could get from here and that
I knew the main things that were unclear.
So the main way I related to Libya was not "taking a position" but
trying to figure out what had actually happened and then writing things
to counter the propaganda that was being used to promote the imperialist
intervention. I was not for Gaddafi against the rebels; I was against
the imperialist intervention. It is not my fault that especially the
"respectable" opposition and the wing of the regime that joined the
rebels decided to push for, welcomed, and relied on direct imperialist
military intervention.
At any rate, I only followed Libya closely for a few more weeks and I
don't think I wrote anything beyond an initial article or two with those
conclusions. My focus soon shifted to the immigrants rights fight. Syria
I never followed at all.
I didn't write, or at least not much, about the fight against
anti-immigrant laws or Occupy. Instead I did videos. Here are a couple:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpm-l70M65o [7/2/11 demonstration; there
are subtitles in English]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U22s3wyfvxs [Kimlee's brother was
murdered by police two years earlier; that set off the evolution she
describes, but she only told me later, when we had become very good
friends].
My choice of Syria for my earlier post last summer to contrast with
interest in Latinos was political but not in the sense of being for one
side or the other there. It was chosen because it seemed to me (and
still does) that the Syrian conflict has generated a disproportionate
degree of attention from sectors of the left and polemics that are very
harsh and heated.
My own experience has convinced me that the U.S. left, and especially
older cadre who have a lifetime of political activity, should focus much
more of their energy on the United States and Mesoamerica and the
intersection of thsese two in the Latino population than on issues
beyond the Americas. Now because of Trump this has become intimately
intertwined with the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East.
I think we should focus way more on that and way less on some other
subjects if that is what it takes.
We need to be conscious that the bourgeois imperialist news media has
been saying to focus on the Middle East and Eastern Europe for years,
and not on the collapsing social in Mesoamérica.
Those of us in our 60s and older are likely to be more affected because
it fits into how we learned to think about politics. We grew up and
lived much of our political lives in the world of the Cold War which is
very different from today's world. And especially, among those of us who
came of age during the Vietnam War, an overarching conflict that was the
central issue in world politics AND the central issue in the purely
national domestic politics of the United States for around a decade.
But Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and a lot of Mexico are now either
failed states or narco-states. This has provoked a huge flow of refugees
towards the U.S. border, perhaps double the one from two years ago, but
Mexico is intercepting most central americans and sending them back.
Trump and the media call them "illegals" or "undocumented" in the sense
of an economic migration like a decade ago but it is not true. The
majority do not try to cross, evade capture and make their way north.
The Central Americans especially come to the border crossings and ask
the authorities for asylum, for protection from persecution. Those who
do cross at other places often seek out the border patrol to turn
themselves in and ask for asylum, which is a procedure protected under
international refugee conventions. Of course they are also pushed by the
economy but it is a very different phenomenon now.
The hugely insufficient response by the left to this refugee crisis in
particular and the whole complex of social and political issues involved
is what motivated my original post and this one.
Joaquín
On 8/6/2016 7:14 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
I suppose that you are a supporter of Bashar al-Assad has nothing to > do with this demagogic intervention. > > On 8/5/16 10:42 PM, Joaquin
Bustelo via Marxism wrote: >> >> >> Maybe I'll write something more
about that, generally on the theme >> of, scratch a liberal and find a
pig. But for now I'm done.
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