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.
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