No shortage of “theory” is invoked to justify and legitimize torture. Everything can be employed in the service of the racist scriptures: modernity; secularism; the War on Terror; even anti-imperialism https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/letter-progressive-international?fbclid=IwAR31rfpp56IwueIk3ZzM9e4H9zJ4Es293LDZsborZamwZs5-vuGX64rJnlw">https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/conten...
It happens that #Syria, was a torture state for decades before it became a major theater of the War on Terror, in which so many of the world’s crime agencies have demonstrated their skill by joining this torturous war; “Chemical” #Assad leading their way https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/letter-progressive-international?fbclid=IwAR31rfpp56IwueIk3ZzM9e4H9zJ4Es293LDZsborZamwZs5-vuGX64rJnlw">https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/conten...
After the Syrian uprising began in March 2011, Assad’s regime abolished the state of emergency that had been in effect in the country since the Baathist coup of March 1963, only to replace it with laws of “combating terror,” moving from one form a state of exception to another.
The move was simply a continuation of an exterminatory war on political organizations and independent initiatives.
With so much of the world in Syria, and as many as 6.5 million Syrians (just under 30% of the population) displaced outside the country, scattered around the world, present-day Syria is a denationalized nation, a non-homeland.
Syria has become a microcosm of a world which has become a macro-Syria.
To understand #Syria greatly helps us understand the world today, and I believe the failure of understanding and analysis is worse than the failure of solidarity with the subaltern millions in the country
I mean not to be harsh, but most of the prevailing analysis on the #Syrian crisis by so-called progressives is truly pathetic, showing rare levels of oversimplification and poverty of knowledge: sheer ignorance, in short https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/letter-progressive-international?fbclid=IwAR31rfpp56IwueIk3ZzM9e4H9zJ4Es293LDZsborZamwZs5-vuGX64rJnlw">https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/conten...
One cannot but be amazed at the worldlessness that has been Syrians’ lot: to be told that Putin’s protection of a genocidal regime is legitimate; or to hear sympathy expressed for a serial murderer like Iran’s Soleimani, rather than the victims on whose blood he walked in Aleppo
These are just two among innumerable examples of dehumanized people being told for almost a full decade now that they are irrelevant, indeed ostracized from the world https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/letter-progressive-international?fbclid=IwAR31rfpp56IwueIk3ZzM9e4H9zJ4Es293LDZsborZamwZs5-vuGX64rJnlw">https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/conten...
That is why I believe a new international that ignores or marginalizes the gravest international crime of this century so far, or that does not challenge these conditions of worldlessness and misrepresentation in both theory and practice, is dooming itself to failure.
It came to many of us Syrian leftists and democrats as a shock that our struggle for democracy, justice, and dignity was dismissed by anti-imperialists in the West, and indeed globally @AliAbunimah https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/letter-progressive-international?fbclid=IwAR31rfpp56IwueIk3ZzM9e4H9zJ4Es293LDZsborZamwZs5-vuGX64rJnlw">https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/conten...
The wised-up came to convince themselves that there were “no good guys” over there; a catchphrase formulated by that close friend of Syria’s murderous mukhabarat, the British journalist Robert Fisk
The comprehensive failure of international forces, anti-imperialists included, vis-à-vis this century’s principal struggle is symptomatic of an even larger crisis: their disorientation, and lack of a vision and project.
Dignity is the value that encompasses other values, and that requires respect for ourselves, everyone else, and life itself. https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/letter-progressive-international?fbclid=IwAR31rfpp56IwueIk3ZzM9e4H9zJ4Es293LDZsborZamwZs5-vuGX64rJnlw">https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/conten...