******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
Once the uprising had entered its third phase, in about summer 2012, the likes of Robert Fisk — who hypocritically embedded himself with an arm of the Assadist killing machine — seemed far more eager to denounce the shadow of Salafist-jihadism than the regime whose nihilism cast it.6 In doing so — in employing the language of the ‘War on Terror’ — Fisk and others aligned themselves neatly with the neocons and Israeli officials they always professed to despise. Never mind that Assad, who’d played host to many an ‘extraordinary rendition’, didn’t give a damn about Palestine; that Palestinians themselves — in the West Bank and in Gaza — were fully cognizant of this; that in time, pro-Assad forces came to obliterate Yarmouk, killing Palestinian refugees in the process.
More to the point, the ability of Fisk and Pilger, Cockburn and the Grayzone gang, to make causal connections between state policy and instances of terror — in other words, to mobilise the logic of ‘blowback’ — appeared to desert them when it came to the war in Syria. In reality, of course, there were several concrete reasons for the emergence and success of Salafist-jihadists in parts of the burning country.
If you deny a people a civic sphere, disappear their loved ones, systematically immiserate and humiliate them, then in their hopelessness they might — just might — seek refuge in religion.7 If you abuse Islamist prisoners daily for decades, as the father did at Tadmur, and subsequently release them en masse, as the son did in 2011, then you have knowingly supplied the loom with which Daesh et al will weave their sinister black banners. And if, on top of all of that, you subject a population to years and years of ‘continuous, horrifying violence’,8 including but not limited to shelling, torture, rape and dispossession, then of course conditions will be ripe for the irruption of ‘a religiously-tinged form of nihilism’.9 After all, such nihilism ‘is most likely to be found in a society that no longer trusts any available social mediations’, be they ‘politics, culture, laws and institutions’, or, indeed, the ‘international community’.10 (Such nihilism is also liable to be exploited, as in fact it was in Syria, by foreign actors possessed of their own agendas and lots of lucre.)
full: https://thecolossusisdead.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/mea-maxima-culpa/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
