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(I don't think I am violating confidentiality but Rick Sterling wrote
Jeff St. Clair about his submissions on Syria ending up in Jeff's
vertical folder. He also complained about how it had become a platform
for my views. CC'd in his complaint were all my favorite people: Yoshie
Furuhashi, Ben Norton, Daniel Lazare and the woman who runs Mint Press.
Jeff told Sterling that most articles on CP were in line with Robert
Fisk and Patrick Cockburn, not me. Based on ultra-Assadist Stephen
Gowans's attack on CP regular Eric Draitser below, it is clear that
there are growing divisions between the Beeley/Sterling/Mackler wing of
the Assadist movement and those still tethered to reality.)
Gowans:
Hasan and his coreligionist Eric Draitser, profess not to take sides.
Instead, they claim to hover neutrally above the field of battle, siding
only with such abstractions as “humanity,” as if humanity does not
include contending forces, or, in Draitser’s case, with “the Syrian
people”, as if the Syrian people does not include government forces,
Islamist insurgents, and Kurdish fighters. Through a verbal sleight of
hand they hope to conjure an artificial construct free from competing
forces to which they can claim fealty and thereby avoid taking a side.
This is a deception, and the position of cowards.
The intellectual predecessors of Hasan, Draitser, and their ilk likewise
adopted a position of neutrality in the struggle between slave owners
and the slave rebellion, deploring the methods of struggle chosen by
both sides, but particularly the violence of the slave rebellion, the
necessary condition of the slaves’ emancipation. “If only they could
work out their disagreements amicably,” they sighed.
In the 1930s, the neutralists, seeking to hover God-like above the fray,
refused to side with either the Communists or Nazis, abhorring the
deployment of defensive violence by Communists and Jews against the
Nazis who would destroy them.
https://gowans.wordpress.com/2018/04/21/mehdi-hasan-beautiful-soul-and-his-diatribe-against-the-consequential-left/
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