Mick Hartley

The Left on Syria – The Anti-Imperialism of Fools:

And that about sums up the pitfalls of a pseudo-oppositional stance on Syria, from the left—that is, a position informed by what one perceives the U.S. government’s stance to be, bolstered by talking points about another country honed during the Bush administration. It ignores the pleas for solidarity from progressive forces that are often erased from existence for ease of argument. “My impression about this curious situation is that they simply do not see us; it is not about us at all,” Yassin Al Haz Saleh, a leftist Syrian dissident who spent 16 years in a regime prison, said in an interview last year. “Syria is only an additional occasion for their old anti-imperialist tirades, never the living subject of debate.”

The intellectual laziness of some on the left (and many on the right) has led to the mechanical repetition of a tidy narrative of regime change, and a New Cold War with Russia, that frees the soap-boxer from having to learn or acknowledge any incongruent details…

More distressingly, treating Syria not as its own country but as Iraq 2.0 has led to the erasure of the millions of Syrians who demanded the downfall of their government, peacefully, and continue to dream of a democratic state amid almost unfathomable levels of state and non-state terrorism. Solidarity with oppressed peoples is too often exchanged for solidarity with those oppressing them, should those oppressors have the good fortune of not being upstanding members of NATO, taking us to a place where murdering doctors causes outrage or complacency depending on the manufacturer of the ordinance that killed them. Internationalism has been replaced by American narcissism and an inverted nationalism that’s deadly ironic, given that the misreading of U.S. intentions has led anti-imperialists to embrace multiple forms of imperialism, including that practiced by the enemy at home. There is the anti-imperialism of fools….