http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=8118
Have Islamists Hijacked Syria’s Democratic Revolution? by Pham Binh on April 1, 2013 As the Syrian revolution progresses, support for it abroad among Marxists recedes. The Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) is not alone in trading its support for the revolution for “a plague on both your houses” neutrality. The Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) made an almost identical shift, albeit theirs seems to be based on smears and falsehoods about the Free Syrian Army (FSA) rather than an all-sided assessment of the contradictions of the Syrian opposition. Although neither group is terribly influential, the essentials of the narrative both have adopted about Syria is the predominant one among progressives in the West thanks to outlets like The Nation, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, MRZine Online, Mondoweiss, Global Research, Black Agenda Report, Jacobin, among many others. From Self-Defense to Jihad? The shift to the right among Marxists parallels the evolution of petty-bourgeois Arab intellectuals such as Jadiliya who supported Syria’s peaceful demonstrators but recoiled in fear when these same demonstrators grew tired of being cut down by machine gun fire and took up arms to defend themselves. If the revolution’s unavoidable militarization repelled these intellectuals, the militarized revolution’s “Islamization” repelled Marxists like AWL, CWI, and As’ad AbuKhalil, the Angry (but not intelligent) Arab. Underlying these shifts is the question of method. (clip) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
