 FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY: WHY SYRIA IS NOT FREE. We have witnessed scores of celebrations in the streets of Syria's major cities, and across social media in the aftermath of the collapse of Syria's state. Such scenes are reminiscent of the original 'Arab spring' in 2011. People have evidently since not learned the lessons of why liberalism is fundamentally incapable of achieving freedom for a people. Of course, in the aftermath of the collapse of a state there is a great deal of catharsis, joy and reprieve that is felt. States are definitely imperfect and full of flaws. When they collapse, all of the injustices, flaws, and imperfections of a state immediately feel like they have disappeared. And they have in a sense: The key word is immediately. The pressure and fear felt by a state authority disappears. It's defects all suddenly disappear. All of its injustices appear to have been avenged immediately. That is because what is still taken for granted are the necessities provided by the state - security, stability, and most importantly, centralized authority capable of operating at the scale of an entire country. In the short and immediate term, these do not disappear right away. People acquire the illusion that only all the bad has disappeared - it takes a few weeks for them to realize that the good has been thrown out too. In the case of today's Syria, this is days. Not days after this 'revolution,' Israel has invaded and destroyed all of Syria's military infrastructure. Arab Spring style 'revolutions' feel very nice in the short term. The whole country can even feel united to an extent, as a modern state principally unites a country by, at minimum, inflicting upon it the trauma of indiscriminately enforcing universal submission to its authority. But the number one problem with the liberal comprehension of what a state is, is that it is personalized. Everyone blames Bashar for every grievance. Everyone wants to give the state a face, and treat it like the slights committed against them individually are personal. The brutal truth is that the state is not personal. It is an organ whose subject is an impersonal and collective reality that encompasses a scale that is simply beyond the comprehension of ordinary individual experience. It is no different than a force of nature. States appear brutal and inhuman because they do not react to individuals, but masses. At the scale of tens of millions, encompassing geographies and territories that are too big for one person to possibly experience. Think about how cold and inhuman surgeons can often appear. They cannot be emotional and personal when operating on someone - they are dealing with the impersonal reality of physiology, that is blind to our personal sentiments and subjectivities. And none the less we need our organs to survive and be personal in the first place. The same is true for states - a central authority that is blind to the individual, capable of enforcing the unity of a territory and its economic intercourse (via taxation, public works, etc.), capable of defending the people from foreign armies with a standing army, is a precondition for the possibility of a peoples free development. Modern states are necessary for a given population to resist colonial slavery, debt and pauperization on a mass scale by unifying a country’s productive forces and supply chains. Building modern infrastructure, investing domestically in industry, and ensuring access to electricity, water, and internet even for remote villages is only possible with a modern central authority. The brutality of modern states like Syria's appear senselessly cruel. But such a cruel authority is what it takes to unite a people beyond tribal, sectarian, and ethnic differences. To govern at the helm of a modern state is to occupy a very wide and long term perspective. This appears inhumane to people who cannot see beyond the scale of their personal and individual experiences. To effectively govern at the helm of the modern state machinery requires making difficult choices that benefit your population in the long term, at the expense of the pain and suffering of some in the short term. All of Syria's minorities had grievances with Assad. It just seems like Sunni Arabs hated him the most because they're in the majority. Only because of that did Syrias other minorities see him as the lesser of two evils - to oppose the majority. All of Syria’s minorities resented the central state authority. They just resented each other more. The truth is, the regime was keeping all these feuding sects at bay from destroying the entire unity of the nation. All of them were trying to assert their private and sectarian interests at the expense of national unity. The truth is, all of the Syrian people had the same primitive, petty and backward tribalism that made them resent the modern state. The Ba’athist regime represented a step in advance toward elevating them to modern civilization. Of course, the fact that it has collapsed has proven that it was full of inadequacies, corruption, defects and incompetence. Yet that doesn’t justify celebrating everything being thrown away. In my opinion, part of the reason the Ba’athist regimes fell to feuding sectarianism (notwithstanding the obvious fact of foreign imperialist intervention) is that they did not fully disempower the landowning and bourgeois elites. These elites were the source of sectarianism - they acted as mafia bosses for their tribes and sects. They should have been smashed. That is true socialist democracy. Say what you want about Enver Hoxha’s Albania, but sectarianism was the least of Albania’s issues. He smashed all the feudal, tribal and bourgeois authorities completely. That’s why Albanian Muslims and Christians don’t kill each other today. Ironically, the problem with Bashar was not that he was a brutal tyrant, but that HE WAS NOT BRUTAL AND AUTHORITARIAN ENOUGH. Recently, @yanisvaroufakis wrote that anti-imperialists shouldn’t defend ‘tyrants,’ because tyrants are not competent anti-imperialists. In the case of Syria this appears like a compelling argument. But the problem with Syria wasn’t that it was a ‘tyranny.’ Plenty of ‘tyrannies’ (from the liberal perspective) are immensely popular. Look no further than China, North Korea and today’s Russia. The problem is not tyranny but incompetence. Liberal ‘democracy’ means the destruction of all sovereign state infrastructure in non-Western countries. I mean, democracy itself is a pure myth even in the West - it’s just that only the West can afford this expensive and wasteful pageantry to dupe its own citizens. Everyone else, in order to be sovereign, has to contend themselves with the necessity of first of all building functioning modern states. And there is no time or energy for the silly mythology of liberal democracy. What comes first is establishing central authority, modern infrastructure, national industrial policy, and modern defense. True ‘democracy’ is not hamstringing the decisive tasks of a state authority by putting everything to a vote. Only states whose popularity and democratic legitimacy are insecure have to do that. True ‘democracy’ is governing on behalf of the will of the broad majority of ordinary and common people. Sometimes that will has to be measured through elections, referendums and votes. But that is not the popular FOUNDATION of the state, that is just another mechanism of the modern state. The true popular foundation of the modern state, well, even the ancient states of Babylonia, lies in people acquiring an economic stake in the system, and a common existence through war. The ‘people’ only become a subject when individuals are dying and risking everything for it. What determines the popular will is not elections - but war and struggle. What makes ‘the people’ an authority is not when a populations’ votes are tallied up, but when they become something on behalf of which armies can be raised, mobilized, and materially sustained (by populations, being fed and quartered, etc.). The foundation of popular sovereignty is not electoralism, but the ability for a state to facilitate and realize the social contract: An extent to which the impersonal reality of state power recognizes and is recognized by people. It is true that anyone can falsely claim that their actions are being done in the name of the people. But for it to be proven, ‘the people’ actually have to materially tip the scales to your advantage over your enemies in war. A true authority rises to power on the basis of recognition by the popular national subject (the people) - rather than tribes, oligarchies and cliques. This recognition is not proven by elections - but by war, and by its ability to respond to their existence, and by the ability for that response to somehow itself be communicated to individuals. The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communists did not need elections to prove their popularity. The fact that nearly all the Russian peasantry went over to their side from the strategic standpoint of a civil war, proved it in actual material reality rather than institutionally. Without the Arab street, the fellaheen and the popular masses, there would never have been Ba’athist states nor Nasserism. Somehow, this fact got lost on all the discourse surrounding the ‘Arab spring’ in 2011. The liberal view was taken for granted over the socialist view regarding democracy and popular legitimation. Obviously in their later years, Arab nationalist regimes like Bashar’s were deeply unpopular and so were other nationalist leaders. But is that because they were tyrants, or because they were weak? Think about it. Was Hosni Mubarak a strong man? What was so strong about him? Who was stronger, Nasser or Anwar Sadat? Now ask - who was more popular? Who was more popular, Bashar or his father? Arab nationalist modernism wasn’t perfect but that doesn’t mean it accomplished nothing. And while the Six Day war is remembered as having discredited the project, people forget just how close the then matured regimes got to defeating Israel in 73. I believe Syrians, like today's Iraqis, will miss the cruelty of the regime most of all. They will see it for the impersonal and blind justice that it was, trying its best to keep everyone in line for the sake of the country's independence and sovereignty. Ba'athism/Nasserism wasn't perfect. But it built military modernization, central state authority, modern infrastructure, and sovereign command economies. Syrians should know if Syria is going to survive, it will have to build off the foundations that have been thus far developed. Turkey will never accept Arabs as their brothers. Turkey has its own modern national state tradition in Kemalism. I am far from saying it is impossible to achieve greater justice for the Syrian people than what existed before. Syrians are going to realize just how ‘Syrian’ they were - rather than how Sunni, Shia, Christian, Alawite, and Kurdish - when they face the reality that Turkey has no intention of integrating them as equals. I am saying that liberal illusions must be cast aside and that a new, strong and tough state authority will still need to be built - it is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of modern civilizations. Many Shias in Iraq today miss Saddams rule. And that is not because they personally forgive Saddam, it's because they understand that dismantling and destroying the sovereign state infrastructure of the Iraqi state was a huge mistake. And that their grievances with Saddam did not justify that. The same is true for Syria. The region as a whole must rediscover a form of regime politics far stronger than Ba'athism and Arab nationalism. It is evidently the case that the Arab nationalist form of modernism was a failure. Its exclusion of Kurds and other ethnic minorities made it impossible. Such exclusions reinforced the very tribal parochialisms that the nationalists wanted to overcome. However, ‘liberal democracy,’ and Jihadi-liberalism is a nonstarter. These lead only to the destruction of nations and peoples. A form of regime politics evidently stronger than Ba’athism is called the proletarian dictatorship, and it is what prevented many parts of Asia from looking like the middle east today. Communism is not just some pipedream or ideal. In practice, it addressed precisely the problems faced by countries like Syria today. The East has its own Red, democratic tradition. There is no need to look toward the rotten colonial West for a model of governance. That is my sincere advice to the people of Syria as Chairman of the American Communist Party. AuthorHaz Al-Din This article was produced by Haz Al-Din on X. Archives December 2024
2 Comments
steven t johnson
12/20/2024 09:47:37 am
Fundamentally agree.
Jon
12/23/2024 03:40:12 am
> "I mean, democracy itself is a pure myth even in the West - it’s just that only the West can afford this expensive and wasteful pageantry to dupe its own citizens." Leave a Reply. |
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