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SonicG » Tue Apr 17, 2018 11:41 pm wrote:Elvis » Wed Apr 18, 2018 9:21 am wrote:American Dream » Tue Apr 17, 2018 5:00 pm wrote: gassing children and other such war crimes [...] I'm giving 100 to 1 odds that the Syrian regime is involved
That's the crux of this debate—are the charges against Assad to be believed? For me, all of the evidence says no, and if I had to make odds I'd put them at 100 to 1 the Syrian "regime" was not involved.
Adopting the view that Assad ordered the attacks is a choice one can make for any number of reasons, but it doesn't appear to be a rational choice. If there is a good evidence-based rationale for it, I haven't heard it.
I have no claim of expertise on the Syrian conflict...I willfully ignored it for quite a while but just for purposes of answering your question, Juan Cole laid out an argument although I do not know if it was ever echoed by bombing cheerleaders. Cannot locate his post but it was basically that he didn't want to lose any more elite troops in the fighting in that area. I am sure that Moon of Alabama, who do seem very on top of the detailed aspects of the actual fighting, disagree.
Glenn Greenwald and Patrick Cockburn have said they believe Assad did order chemical weapons attacks.(Cockburn)
Possibly it was the Syrian government’s frustration at the continued resistance of part of Jaysh al-Islam, the Saudi-backed jihadi movement in Douma, that led it to use chlorine gas. It had done so before without provoking an international reaction, but this time authentic-looking video was broadcast around the world showing dying children gasping for breath. The pictures provoked a wave of international fury which culminated in the US-led airstrikes on 14 April.
If the Syrian government’s purpose in launching a chemical weapons attack was to force the final surrender of the Douma rebels, then it succeeded. Within hours of it happening, Russian military police moved into Douma to supervise the departure of rebel fighters and to suppress looting by government forces. On 12 April, the Syrian national flag was finally raised over a building in central Douma and the long siege was over.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/04/13 ... d-strikes/
None of these three are socialist and there is, of course, a whole swath of the Left of various stripes that reject them so...cavet lector...
Within hours of it happening, Russian military police moved into Douma to supervise the departure of rebel fighters and to suppress looting by government forces.
We Retain the Dignity of the Revolution
Posted on 17/04/2018 by Ed Sutton in Culture of Resistance, Hearth & Home, Letters Of Fire and tagged Marcell Shehwaro, Que Se Vayan Todos, Syria.
What if we accept Bashar al-Assad?
Let’s discuss, “peacefully,” that “elephant in the room,” as you say: What if we accept that Assad remains in power?
We are asked this question, sometimes obliquely, sometimes filtered through the closed circles that decide on Syrian affairs without the attendance of any Syrians. Sometimes it is brought up in ways that infantilize us, as if we are children who don’t dare to confront the “truth,” “realistically.”
In the harshest times, this question is posed to us as a negotiation over the bodies of our children. The answer to why we don’t accept that Assad remains in power is obvious: he killed our children, and the scars of their smiles are etched on our hearts. The blackmailing question becomes: He will kill your children and their smiles, why don’t you just accept him?
Excuse us for a moment! We need some time to understand this world’s logic, the world ruled by Trump, Putin, and a bunch of politicians who only care about their four-year period in office.
Hafez al-Assad has blocked us from the outside world. Now his son follows in his footsteps. The liberationists among us gazed towards the United Nations charters and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Some of us believed that those charters meant something. When the revolution broke out, we discovered that those charters are ruined due to their misuse by members of the UN’s Security Council.
Apologies for the digression. So: Why don’t we accept Assad?
We wish to tell your people the “harsh truth.” We want to challenge your empty words and courtesy rhetoric. We know you mean nothing when you say things like: “using chemical weapons is a red line,” or “Aleppo is a red line,” or “Assad lost his legitimacy.”
The truth is that Assad is more your ally than the naïve group of dreamers that we are, believing like we do in democracy, justice, and accountability.
Isn’t this the message of bombing in Idlib and Ghouta today? To convince us, “gently,” to accept a political solution—the only solution that you lectured us about—as we are being killed?
You say that we are defeated. Well, gentlemen, I and my group of friends never imagined, as we hid from the bullets shot at our peaceful demonstration, that we could defeat Russian planes all by ourselves. We never thought that we could win the “war” while we were being tortured, or suffocated by chemical weapons, or destroyed by shelling, rape and detention.
It may be true that we have lost. But this defeat made me aware of something I never wanted to know.
I know today the terminology of violence: The Golan cluster bombs, the difference between sarin and chlorine, and the new version of bunker-buster that can destroy our “safe” basements. I learned even how to pronounce these words in English.
You say we were defeated in Sochi! We were not even at Sochi. Sochi was the costume party that gathered the regime himself with you. You have all our sympathy for the time you are forced to spend with them.
I keep digressing away from that nightmare, Bashar Assad’s ruling Syria, excuse me!
What if we “accept” that Bashar al-Assad stays in power? First, who are “we”? In the cities that are besieged and bombed, we are the people who must cross a thousand barriers to visit one another. Who are “we”? We are the refugees who fail to have a proper family reunion. Or need an official permission to breathe.
And if some of us actually accept Bashar al-Assad as president, what can we do with all those of us who are “rude” enough to reject giving up their dignity? What can we do with all those who still believe in their right to their homeland? What if mothers who buried their sons refused to believe that justice had died also? We have to let them die.
So the suggestion is that some of us surrender, so that others die in silence. Or maybe we can give you the names and coordinates of all those who oppose Bashar al-Assad, so that you and your Russian friends can ensure their disappearance?
What if some of us actually accepted that Bashar Al Assad stays in power—do you guarantee that the war will stop? That the brutal dictator won’t celebrate his victory with the taste of our defeated blood?
You say that you want him to stay for a transitional period. Funny joke, this one. Do you logically believe in your power to pressure Russia and the regime?
We have asked you for years to stop the shelling. We then felt sorry for you so we minimized our demands and asked you to stop the shelling of hospitals and schools. You failed here too. For years we have asked you to send relief convoys to the besieged areas, to move the sick a distance of ten kilometers, or to guarantee the families’ right to know the fate of their disappeared sons, and you failed to do so. You repeatedly explained that you are failing to put pressure on “Damascus.”
What logic do you want to believe, that you cannot stop a school bombing but you can guarantee Bashar al-Assad’s removal after a transitional period?
So the offer, that you are in a shock that we are refusing, is: we have to surrender without restrictions, guarantees, or conditions, and preferably silently.
Even if that means killing those who do not give up, we have to accept. Even if that means only that death will simply change from one form to another, we must accept. Even if that means that he will rule us with iron and fire, and that our children, who will believe again in their own freedom and may be killed by nuclear weapons this time…we must accept.
So the equation is whether:
To accept Bashar Al Assad; surrender and die.
Or oppose Bashar Al Assad; resist and die.
We reject the whole equation then, and learn to resist the idea of choosing between death and death through thousands of borders that limit us every day.
And we retain all the anger caused by the killings of our people, who we were unable to grieve amid the ongoing massacre; we retain the dignity of the revolution’s early days. We retain all of our memory and the choice of life. We retain the fragment of a beautiful dream we had one day to have a homeland.
American Dream » Wed Apr 18, 2018 2:32 am wrote:I might enjoy discussing Socialism/Communism with a circle of like-minded people but my sense of things is: not here, not now.
I have a long, long history with this board and I did want to engage more with people here ten years ago than I do now, though even then I was most interested in sharing information and reading some of other peoples' posts. There's a lot of water under the bridge however. While the dialogue here is sometimes very interesting- and there have been some really great posters over the years- a significant portion offers little merit. That's the honest truth.
The "boys gone wild" dynamic with the rampant bullying and personal attacks is extremely uninteresting. That's just the way it is. So a certain kind of moderation would be very, very welcome around here but I don't think it would be a panacea. It would be something, though.
Luther Blissett » Mon Nov 21, 2016 11:13 am wrote:History shows that the only thing that can defeat fascism is socialism.
A couple hundred organizers met yesterday to discuss ways in which to build forward taking the people power approach over the strictly electoral approach. To organize patrols to mobilize against deportation dragnets; to conduct anti-catcalling / anti-harassment / anti-assault patrols; to teach english classes to immigrants for free; to organize against police brutality, the war on drugs (including heroin and methamphetamines), and the carceral state; to unite labor unions and bring them back into their older, more radical leftist political spaces; to create our own media; to organize the students who for the first time have a more favorable opinion of socialism than of capitalism; to strike; to run for local office; and to protest.
The answer to defeating trump lies in a sectarian left and a united front of all tendencies: anarchists of all stripes, communists, progressives, the libertarian left, even liberals. By focusing on direct action, intervention, project work and disruption, the internecine conflicts the left is known for should hopefully fall by the wayside. We've already united leftist groups from all over the country to plan, meet, and protest against the DNC this summer, and the only dissenting group was the Spartacist League, but that's to be expected. We still have close ties to these groups and are already organizing with them again to fight trump and trumpism.
There's nothing to conserve. The planet and the political sphere are changing too fast. The way forward is the next stage in human evolution out of the scourge of capitalism as predicted by Marx and Engels, and the people are ready to fight for it.
Let's use this thread to gather ideas.
stillrobertpaulsen wrote:Seems to me the intention of this thread is to find ways for socialists to organize "to fight trump and trumpism" so that we the people can move forward in "the next stage in human evolution out of the scourge of capitalism as predicted by Marx and Engels."
Elvis » Wed Apr 18, 2018 8:22 pm wrote:stillrobertpaulsen wrote:Seems to me the intention of this thread is to find ways for socialists to organize "to fight trump and trumpism" so that we the people can move forward in "the next stage in human evolution out of the scourge of capitalism as predicted by Marx and Engels."
Thank you—I've tried to address the OP, and suggested earlier that this thread was a very important one (maybe the most important). I apologize for my own part in it getting off-topic, but from early on the thread has been littered with egghead philosophical essays etc. that have little utility to the OP.
So... what about the Democratic Socialists infiltrating the Democratic party—will it work?
DrEvil » Fri Jan 12, 2018 7:18 pm wrote:I have to say I vastly prefer the Nordic model of social democracy to any pure form of socialism or capitalism. Both of those tend to end up as authoritarianism.
The NM takes the best of both worlds and applies it towards helping as many as possible live a decent life. Capitalism in service to the people as opposed to capitalism for its own sake.
Some of the things that make that possible are:
- Strong unions and collective bargaining.
- Strong safety net for those who fall outside the norm.
- Free healthcare.
- Free education.
- Subsidized childcare.
- Government ownership of important industries (telecom, energy, infrastructure etc.).
So basically all the things the republicans (and to a degree the democrats) have spent the last 30 years dismantling and/or demonizing.
DrEvil wrote:So... what about the Democratic Socialists infiltrating the Democratic party—will it work?
It would be very nice if it did, but I'm not very optimistic. The mainstream media will grind them down with a flood of bullshit stories (see the treatment of Corbyn in the UK)
DrEvil wrote:Start with the things that people can get behind without having to explain anything in detail and work up from there. Good examples would be "rich people should pay their fair share of taxes", or "everyone should have access to basic health care", or "we should spend less on missiles and more on schools".
DrEvil wrote:Finally, and I hesitate to say this, but you should also probably tell the actual far left to fuck off. No one wants to hear about the proletariat or the revolutionary struggle or how Stalin got some things right.
DrEvil wrote:Finally, and I hesitate to say this, but you should also probably tell the actual far left to fuck off. No one wants to hear about the proletariat or the revolutionary struggle or how Stalin got some things right.
Alas this may be good advice. For one thing, many of the avowedly socialist blogs and websites seem hell-bent on discrediting the most practical leftist principles and inadvertantly or otherwise pushing U.S. imperialist aims. Among many of these it's so common and consistent, I've started taking a closer look at some of the leading online "socialist" exponents and finding some contentious troublemakers and a body of really curious output.
No War But The Class War!
April 18, 2018
A hundred cruise missiles were launched against the military installations of the Assad regime. In the aftermath the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, stated that the United States was “locked and loaded”. Together the US, France and Britain have engaged in bombings that will be of no benefit to the Syrian masses suffering under the murderous regime of Bashar Assad.
It can be seen that all three regimes in the USA, France and Britain have their own domestic problems, and that a military adventure is always a good ploy to divert attention. Trump is wrestling with the ongoing Muller investigation, the revelations of ex-FBI Director Comey, and ongoing legal wrangles with porn star Stormy Daniels and polls that show his lack of popularity. Theresa May is faced with serious divisions in her own Party, deepening problems over Brexit, not to mention that she is hanging on to power thanks to an alliance with the DUP. Macron faces increasing unrest at home with what looks increasingly like a re-run of May 1968.
Trump was elected President on a populist programme, but part of that programme was that he would withdraw troops from Iraq and not be involved in military adventures in the Middle East. This was in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton who maintained an aggressive stance towards Russia and calls for a no-fly zone over Syria that would have caused confrontation with Russia, Assad’s ally. Now Trump has betrayed his populist base, to the horror of some of his previous conservative backers.
Haley has stated that the US would maintain its troops in Syria and would start sanctions against Russian firms doing business with Assad.
Some of the most virulent critics of Trump have been papers like the Washington Post. In a lead editorial just after the bombings it criticised the joint US, French and British attack as inadequate and attacked Trump for saying that he had been ready to withdraw American troops from Syria. Similar views were aired in anti-Trump paper the New York Post. It is clear that a substantial part of the US ruling class wish to pursue a more aggressive attitude towards Russia and its allies. They are concerned by the new alliance between Russia, Turkey and Iran and the weakening US influence in the Middle East.
For the last quarter of a century, the US and its allies have been engaged in constant warfare, using fabricated excuses like the bogus weapons of mass destruction to dismantle the regime of their former ally Saddam, overthrow Gaddafi in Libya because of an “imminent” massacre of civilians and now the gas attacks by the Assad regime.
The attacks on the Syrian regime were not a last minute response but the result of plans prepared over many months as can be seen by the high level of coordination between the three state powers.
Large sections of the US ruling class including the leaders of the military have little confidence in Trump being able to oversee moves against Russia and its allies. That is why the campaign against Trump is increasing in intensity at the same time as aggressive moves by the US and its allies. This has been explicitly stated by neo-conservatives who link the removal of Trump to the expansion of war moves.
In the USA, France and Britain there is widespread anti-war feeling and this has been aggravated by the bombing attacks. In Germany, sections of the ruling class there have expressed the need to re-arm and, at the same time, pursue foreign policies less dependent on the USA. This turn is justified by lauding German “high moral and humanitarian standards”.
Assad is a bloody dictator and it is highly possible that he used gas attacks against the Syrian population. However those who condemn Assad are the same States that justified mass bombings of Hamburg and Dresden and two atom bomb attacks on Japan during World War Two, the use of the chemical Agent Orange in Vietnam, as well as the deployment of napalm there and previously in Greece, and the use of white phosphorus in Fallujah by Saddam, then the ally of the West. More recently, the British government has had few qualms about providing the weaponry used by the Saudi Arabian military to kill numerous civilians in Yemen.
The USA realised it has lost influence in the Middle East. It and its allies initially backed the Islamist militias in their attempts to overthrow Assad. Now ISIS is a shadow of its former self and Assad controls 75% of Syria. Russia had been warned before the bombing attacks with the hint that its own forces and bases there would not be touched. Nevertheless it was implied that the USA was still the only surviving superpower and that Russia should not overstep the mark.
Russia will not easily abandon its ally, Syria. It needs the Mediterranean ports that Syria provides. On the other hand the USA would like to confine Russia to the Black Sea and is seriously concerned about the new alliance, temporary though it may be, between Turkey and Russia and the increasing strength of the Shiite axis in Iran, Iraq and with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israel launched its own attacks on its old enemy, Syria, obviously with the approval of the USA. For its part, Turkey is looking to increase influence and presence in Syria and has moved against the Kurdish controlled enclave of Afrin, exploiting the tensions between the great powers.
Whatever the outcome, it is clear that the different world and regional powers are gearing up for more armed conflict. In Syria over 400,000 people have been slaughtered and many more have been displaced. The situation is the same in Iraq. The masses there have nothing to gain from the murderous and barbarous depredations of the different armed gangs, whether they be Russian, American, Turkish or Islamist etc. Only revolution to overthrow all these regimes offers any alternative.
For now, we call on all internationalist and class conscious workers, communists, anarchists and revolutionary socialists to come together under the ‘No War But The Class War’ banner to promote working class resistance to the bosses’ war machine.
War Is The Health of The State!
No War But The Class War!
Only revolution to overthrow all these regimes offers any alternative.
.......Farsi’s relationship to The Syria Campaign had been kept private until now. A Syrian-British oil tycoon named Ayman Asfari has taken a much more vocal role with the PR group, providing it with seed money to advance his mission to stimulate US and UK support for regime change in Syria. Waters was informed that Asfari’s wife, Sawsan, would be on hand for the 2016 White Helmets fundraising dinner.
Over the past two years, The Syria Campaign has secured endorsements of the White Helmets’ work from actors including George Clooney, Aziz Ansari, Ben Affleck, and pop stars like Coldplay and Justin Timberlake. The Syria Campaign also helped orchestrate the production of an Oscar-winning Netflix documentary about the White Helmets in 2017. In the email to Waters, a Corniche Group staffer urged the singer to watch that film and provided him with a link to its trailer.........
Assad’s Confused Apologists: Academics in The Times
Last weekend’s front-page in The Times, “Apologists for Assad hold senior positions in British universities” (April 14), provides another example of such distortions on the part of the corporate media. The air strikes had just begun and the Murdoch-press unleashed all barrels upon a group of largely unknown academics who happened to be opposed to the British government’s warmongering. But there was a reason for this choice of target. As rather than focus on the anti-war arguments being put forward by Corbyn, and by most of the public for that matter, The Times attacked a tiny group of deluded intellectuals so they could draw a direct connection between those who oppose the bombing of Syria and proponents of pro-Assad propaganda.
The conspiratorial notions put forward by the academic clique that has organised themselves as the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (SPM) do of course deserve criticism, but the timing of Murdoch’s attacks has nothing to do with promoting a democratic public debate on this matter, and everything to do with smearing all anti-war activists as being useful idiots for Assad. Here the focus of The Times’ article(s) centred around the group’s idiotic belief that the White Helmets, a volunteer rescue group in Syria, are actually terrorists working alongside Al–Qaeda, and that President Assad had not actually carried out the recent chemical attack that led to the air strikes by the British/French/American forces.
But this isn’t the first time that members of this Working Group have boosted such pro-Assad conspiracies, as earlier this year, Tara McCormack, a leading member of the group based at the University of Leicester, tweeted the following comment:“It is also an established fact that a) the White Helmets are basically Al Q (they provide most of the reporting from Jihadi held areas and b) that hospitals are used as bases by these groups.” (February 5, 2018)
Such pro-Assad propaganda does not materialise out of nothing, and members of the Working Group lean heavily upon the writings of leading libertarian conspiracy theorists like Vanessa Beeley. For those who don’t know, Beeley is an Assad regime propagandist who is counted as an associate editor for 21st Century Wire — a website closely associated with Alex Jones’ notorious US-based conspiracy outlet, InfoWars.
Tara McCormack also happens to be a longstanding contributor to the libertarian magazine Spiked Online – a magazine which has more in common with The Times than with any forces on the left of political spectrum. Indeed, as highlighted on an independent investigative wiki page, Spiked was previously run by Times columnist Mick Hume, and “is part of the libertarian anti-environmental” group which has the Orwellian name, the Living Marxism Network (which bears no relation to any Marxist ideas that I am familiar with, and I am a Marxist). To get a flavour of typical fare published in Spiked, recent articles not only dismiss the existence of a pay-gap between men and women, but also rail against “Jeremy Corbyn’s cult of youth” over his pledge to promote free bus travel.
Either way, we are where we are, and Tara McCormack and her friends unfortunately choose to present themselves to the public as being situated on the political left. This presents a problem for genuine socialist activists who are trying to concretely organise (in the real world) against all imperialist warmongers and against Assad’s brutal regime. The willingness of some academics to promote right-wing fictions within so-called left-wing circles gives the Tory press an easy way to paint the entire left as being Assad-loving conspiracy theorists. Such dangerous delusions are a tragic response by some on the left to slip into believing that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
With no hint of irony, McCormack recently tweeted a blog post titled “Delegitimising the British left” (April 19) which was written by the Guardian commentator Owen Jones. In his post, Jones points out how unfounded attacks by both Tories and Blairite against all socialists is “deeply and profoundly sinister” and should be seen as “an attempt to delegitimise the left as a political force.” No doubt McCormack feeling aggrieved by the recent attacks upon her pro-Assad tendencies felt especially able to identify with Jones’ opening sentence which warned of attempts dismiss the left “as irrational deluded cultists”.
McCormack clearly doesn’t see how her own ill-informed actions vis-à-vis Syria make it easy for the right-wing press to caricature the entire left as “irrational cultists”. Nevermind the fact that Spiked, the magazine McCormack has spent the last thirteen years writing for, is a major contributing force towards such toxic attacks on the left.
Spiked deputy editor Tom Slater concluded a recent article by suggesting that Corbynistas’ “display an incredible authoritarian streak” with Corbyn and supporters “reflect[ing] a strange sort of thin-skinned Stalinism-lite that would pose a real threat to liberty.” Or take another recent article, “Labour: the new Mosleyites?,” which was published by Spiked editor-at-large Mick Hume which stated “that Corbyn’s party poses more of a threat to freedom in Britain today than any fringe fascist grouplet.” “They are the political wing of an elitist alliance against free speech,” the former Times columnist concluded.
Few would deny that Corbyn is by any means perfect, but what he represents is the opening of new democratic vistas in Britain, offering up a long-awaited opportunity for the collective forces of the working-class to once again make their presence felt in politics. One can only hope that enquiring conspiracists like McCormack might do us all a favour and stop promoting the types of dangerous lies about the Syrian bloodbath that would find a more willing home within the conspiratorial political world inhabited by Donald Trump and The Times than they are within the Labour movement.
Only revolution to overthrow all these regimes offers any alternative.
.......Farsi’s relationship to The Syria Campaign had been kept private until now. A Syrian-British oil tycoon named Ayman Asfari has taken a much more vocal role with the PR group, providing it with seed money to advance his mission to stimulate US and UK support for regime change in Syria. Waters was informed that Asfari’s wife, Sawsan, would be on hand for the 2016 White Helmets fundraising dinner.
Over the past two years, The Syria Campaign has secured endorsements of the White Helmets’ work from actors including George Clooney, Aziz Ansari, Ben Affleck, and pop stars like Coldplay and Justin Timberlake. The Syria Campaign also helped orchestrate the production of an Oscar-winning Netflix documentary about the White Helmets in 2017. In the email to Waters, a Corniche Group staffer urged the singer to watch that film and provided him with a link to its trailer.........
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