Sorry for posting this here, I don’t know a better place. I feel very sick watching the events in my country unveil. Sectarian tensions have been bad for a while, but in a matter of one week, so many of my people have decided that the druze minority is their enemy, and that “liberating” their towns (from their own people!) is their righteous conquest.
I am very saddened about where things have gone. Things just keep getting worse and I see no way out. A small protest in damascus against the violence was attacked by mobs, without any government protection or presence whatsoever (the protest was next to the “parliament” building!). We are living in fascism, where speaking out against sectarian violence is punishable my mob beatings.
I apologize for the rant. I understand probably none of you here is syrian or even middle eastern, so please feel free to ask questions and I will happily answer. At this point this is my only outlet.
And in great mockery, after months of getting bombed by Israel and accepting them as an ally they can’t refuse, they do this ethnic cleansing under the name of fighting Israel.
Druze were already brutalized by the “moderate rebels” during the first trump presidency. Syrians nowadays think they can carve out a window in their prison cell, like many others in the region.
In the end the political islam and anti-communist baathism, both failed the arab peoples, as any peoples will be failed by the ideologies opposed to communism.
The Ba’ath did not exactly fail the people, it just lost (similar to how soviet union just “lost”). We could argue that Bashar himself failed Syrians, especially in the 2019-2025 period. But by then, he was as far from Ba’ath as was Gorbachev from Communist party.
To add, in mid 20th century, communist parties in Syria and much of the Arab world were unconditional followers of USSR and influential foreign communist parties, even in matters that like the early support of Israel, or the French communist party supporting the french occupation of Syria. The Ba’ath party emerged instead as an Arab implementation of socialism, where Arab liberation was centered, and dependence or blind following of foreign bodies was rejected. It was only opposed to Communism in that sense. If you look at the Ba’ath congress of 1966, you’ll see it was even more revolutionary than the communists.
I never really thought that Baathism, at least in Syria, was opposed to Communism.
However, I think the reason the Baathist gov’t failed had a lot to do with sectarianism (Alawite minority rule) and neoliberalization (Bashar Al Assad was trying to pull off a Gorbachev or Yeltsin), which is typical to the fledgling national capitalist class, once the national liberation movement is done, and all is left to do is create a typical bourgeois state, with Global South characteristics.
That doesn’t mean the sanctions and war didn’t have an effect, but it did accelerate those contradictions