5 hours ago 4 99
Those
who advocate for violent, illegal, immoral and gruesome war have no leg to
stand on when criticising anyone else.
American liberal mainstream media has picked up a story which originated from the
state-owned Qatari propaganda outlet Al Jazeera which seeks to link the
American far-right, sometimes called the alt-right with Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad and his Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party.
As I wrote yesterday in The Duran,
“First of all, Bashar al-Assad is a socialist. He is
a member of Syria’s ruling Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. Although the clue is in
the name, it helps to understand the intellectual origins of Ba’athism.
The three leading founders of Ba’athism Salah
al-Din al-Bitar, Zaki al-Arsuzi and Michel Aflaq were all Syrian
Arabs, Aflaq being a Christian Arab with Salah and al-Arsuzi were Muslims.
Ba’athism’s essence combines traditional Arab cultural values with the
anti-imperialist concept of Arab nationalism while harnessing the ideas of
traditional socialism as both a bulwark against imperialist aggression and as a
means of allowing post-colonial peoples to elevate their economic independence
efficiently and rapidly.
Ba’athism, unlike Marxist-Leninism is not
anti-religious and encourages the integration of Islam and Christianity with
modern forms of government. Ba’athist organisations throughout the Arab world
continue to attract all varieties of both Muslim and Christian men and women.
Religious tolerance under a secular government and female rights are key
features of Ba’athism”.
To say that the US far-right is somehow
pro-Ba’athist is not only a contradiction in ideology but it is an objective
falsehood. The US far-right is on the whole vehemently anti-Muslim and
anti-Arab, thus making it totally incongruous to say that the leader of an Arab
Ba’athist government who happens to be a Muslim is an iconic figure of the US
far-right.
What is true is that the US far-right is not the
well-organised group that the liberal media claims it is. It is more accurately
described as a loose and informal coalition of various individuals reacting
negatively to the identity politics which the US mainstream media and political
elites have been promulgating for decades. This position in and of itself is
not only not extreme but is objectively moderate.
What is extreme is the symbolism that many online
self-identified alt-right individuals use to promote their ideas. Such symbolism
includes praising the fascist German leadership of the 1930s and 1940s and the
posting of vulgar and obscene memes. However, such people are a minority, even
among the American far-right let alone the much wider US conservative movement.
In many cases, such individuals are engaging in intentional parody in order to
inflame or ‘trigger’ the left. Whether this is in good or bad taste is a matter
of subjective opinion.
Among this wide coalition there may be some
individuals who correctly understand that the Syrian conflict is a battle
between secular tolerant Ba’athism and radical Wahhabi/Salafist terrorism which
ought to be called extremist ‘alt-Islam’. These people are almost certainly
from the more moderate, worldly and informed wings of the vague right-wing
movement in the US.
The following video of a man at an alt-right protest
in the United States has been used by the liberal mainstream media to demonise
all supporters and those sympathetic to the Syrian branch of the Arab Socialist
Ba’ath party as members of the extreme right, even though many such people are
on the traditional paleo-conservative right, the libertarian left or right or
the traditional socialist or communist left.
This video does not demonstrate that the far-right
is pro-Assad but rather that some Americans on the so-called fringes of
politics are not only more informed but are more peace minded than the
dangerous US mainstream.
Irrespective of who this man is and what he stands
for, his statement about the Syrian conflict is far more accurate than anything
that has been said in Congress with the noble exceptions of Rand Paul and Tulsi
Gabbard.
Indeed, such a statement is similar to those
frequently made by Ron Paul and his colleagues at the Ron Paul Institute for
Peace and Prosperity, a classical liberal/libertarian body with some
traditional anti-war conservative elements.
The fact of the matter is that it is the liberal and
neo-con parties in the US that consistently advocate for, apologise for and
actually implement crimes against humanity in foreign countries that have left
millions dead.
The illegal US wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, the
extra-legal fascist coup in Ukraine and the disastrous Hillary Clinton authored
crime against humanity in Libya had nothing to do with the alt-right/far-right
but they had everything to do with the opponents of the far-right/alt-right.
Ironically, this includes liberals who label their domestic opponents as
‘fascist’ even when they are not, while supporting open, classical fascists in Kiev.
The labels of right and left are becoming
increasingly difficult to pin down. While the anti-Vietnam war movement was
generally a leftist movement for peace, today’s radical left say precious
little about foreign war, preferring instead to feign being upset by
distasteful memes which do not result in any country going to war.
Not only has the liberal left lost its way, but in
advocating for war against a secular, socialist, tolerant, religiously
pluralistic and pro-women’s rights Arab Socialist Ba’athist government in
Syria, one could reasonably say that they have also lost their minds.
This is not to say that the far-right in the US is
good, extreme political movements are rarely wholesome. The fact is that while
the US far-right makes memes and holds marches calling for a revisionist view
of the US Civil War and Second World War, it is the US liberal left and neo-con
right who are waging wars in the present.
Therefore, no matter how one views the
far-right/alt-right, they are vastly less dangerous than the liberal and
neo-con war mongers who leave behind them not a trail of memes but a trail of
blood throughout the world.
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