Joseph de Maistre: the namesake of The North Star’s Baathist ideologue

UPDATE:

Apparently the knuckleheads at TNS got really upset by this post. I just took a gander to see if there were any comments on Red Maistre’s article and saw this, a first for me on the Internet. I have been banned from commenting on many blogs but have never been from blocked from looking at one!

Wow!

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I am not sure how many of my readers ever paid much attention to The North Star, a website formerly run by Pham Binh. Since his retirement from political activity two out of the three pieces appearing there have represented a 180-degree turn on Syria–one from supporting the rebels to now supporting the dictatorship. Well, maybe not 180 degrees, but certainly at least 140.

Since Alexa ranks TNS at 1,410,867, I am not sure that it is worth mentioning what appears there one way or the other but I can’t resist commenting on the second part of an interminable pro-Baathist essay (14,192 words!) by one “Red Maistre” (let’s call him RM for short) who describes himself as a “traditionalist Catholic” with Marxist-Leninist leanings. Gosh, that’s something you don’t see every day. Joseph de Maistre, by the way, was an arch-reactionary foe of the French Revolution who believed in the authority of the pope over civil matters. I can easily understand why someone who styles himself as a “red” version of de Maistre would be enamored of the Baathist dictatorship.

At any rate, RM’s article is your run-of-the-mill “colored revolution” analysis that has appeared in one form or another on countless blogs and websites, with Stephen Gowans’s “What’s Left” being a prime example. The interest is never in the social and economic contradictions that led to a mass movement but rather in any connections between imperialism and the mass movement. Once you discover that the State Department or George Soros had a training session for some organizers, that’s the kiss of death. To give credit where credit is due, Global Research stands head and shoulders over the competition. In a breathtaking analysis of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, Michel Chossudovsky found both to be mere puppets of dark forces in Washington:

In Egypt’s “Arab Spring”, the main civil society organizations including  Kifaya (Enough) and The April 6 Youth Movement were not only supported by US based foundations, they also had the endorsement of the US State Department. (For details see Michel Chossudovsky, The Protest Movement in Egypt: “Dictators” do not Dictate, They Obey Orders, Global Research, January 29, 2011)

Several key organizations currently involved in The Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) movement played a significant role in “The Arab Spring”. Of significance, “Anonymous”, the social media “hacktivist” group, was involved in waging cyber-attacks on Egyptian government websites at the height of “The Arab Spring”.

You can see the same looking for spooks under the bed mentality in part 1 of RM’s essay:

Finally, the most damning fact against the LCCs (besides their endorsement of the SNC) is found by following the money trail: the LCCs receive funding from The Office for Syrian Opposition Support (OSOS), a creature of the State Department and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as well as the U.S. founded “Friends of Syria” group. In fact the OSOS seeks to provide training to “activists” in how to be the next “governing class” in post-Assad Syria.

Actually the most revealing facts about the Local Coordinating Councils can be read in Anand Gopal’s Harper’s Magazine article from August 2012.

In the neighboring town of Binnish, I visited the farmers’ council, a body of about a thousand members that set grain prices and adjudicated land disputes. Its leader, an old man I’ll call Abdul Hakim, explained to me that before the revolution, farmers were forced to sell grain to the government at a price that barely covered the cost of production. Following the uprising, the farmers tried to sell directly to the town at almost double the former rates. But locals balked and complained to the citywide council, which then mandated a return to the old prices—which has the farmers disgruntled, but Hakim acknowledged that in this revolution, “we have to give to each as he needs.”

It was a phrase I heard many times, even from landowners and merchants who might otherwise bristle at the revolution’s egalitarian rhetoric—they cannot ignore that many on the front lines come from society’s bottom rungs. At one point in March, the citywide council enforced price controls on rice and heating oil, undoing, locally, the most unpopular economic reforms of the previous decade.

This is the real story of the Syrian revolution, something that can only be gleaned from following a mine-laden trail from Turkey into Syria in the dead of night, not by “following the money trail”.

Since RM is obviously new to radical politics (and innocent as a virgin of Marxism altogether), it is no surprise to see the two epigraphs affixed to part two of his essay for their abstract “anti-imperialist” rhetoric yet with no inkling as to alternative readings. The first is from Mao Zedong: “When imperialism launches a war of aggression against such a country, all its various classes, except for some traitors, can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism.” This obviously means that it was correct for the Communist Party  in Syria to take its stand with Bashar al-Assad and for people like RM to fall into lock step. The second is from Samir Amin: “States want independence, Nations want liberation, and Peoples want revolution.” Well, gee whiz, who can argue with that?

Let’s take a look at Mao first. If you are one of my regular readers, you are probably aware that I drew attention to Ho Chi Minh’s ties to the OSS during WWII. What we also must recognize is that the same kind of relationship obtained with Mao. This is from “OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency” by Richard Harris Smith:

Soon after Hurley’s arrival in China, the Communists had invited him to visit Yenan. He flew to their stronghold for the first time on November 7 and was given a warm greeting. Hurley’s meetings with Mao led to the Communist acceptance of five principles of “coalition government.” Returning to Chungking in the company of Chou En-lai, the ambassador presented the proposal to the Generalissimo. He rejected it and suggested a counter-offer which was refused by the Communists. The Yenan leaders also declined participation in any further negotiations. While this political jockeying was in progress, the military situation had deteriorated so badly that Army strategists were secretly discussing contingency plans for the evacuation of Chungking. Wedenmyer’s headquarters also framed new proposals for military cooperation with the Communist armies. These were dutifully discussed with central government officials who just as dutifully rejected them out of hand. At the end of November, Colonel Heppner’s headquarters received word that General Donovan would soon visit China. Wedemeyer planned to take the occasion to present the OSS chief with some comprehensive ideas for assistance to Communist guerrilla forces. Two separate proposals emerged. The Army recommended that Five thousand American paratroopers be sent to north China to work with the Communist partisans. OSS set forth its own plan to dispatch Special Operations officers to the north on sabotage missions against the Japanese. In return for the complete cooperation and support of the Communist forces, OSS was prepared to train and outfit 25,000 Yenan guerrillas and to furnish Mao’s Army with an additional 100,000 pistols This proposal was strongly endorsed by Captain Colling at Tenan. He had already requested the immediate dispatch of two plane-loads of medical and demolitions equipment for the Communist troops.

About Samir Amin’s “States want independence, Nations want liberation, and Peoples want revolution”, all we can say is that he would be ill-disposed to hoisting the Baathists on his shoulder as is the case with RM, Michel Chossudovsky, ST McNeil/Musa al-Gharbi and countless other scoundrels in light of this comment made by Amin in an MRZine interview:

The Ba’ath regime, which enjoyed legitimacy for a long time, is no longer what it was at all: it has become more and more autocratic, increasingly a police state, and, at the same time, in substance, it has made a gigantic concession to economic liberalism. I don’t believe that this regime can transform itself into a democratic regime.

Vijay Prashad

Before looking at some of the policy proposals found in Vijay Prashad’s recent Jadaliyya article titled “Malaise Over Syria”, one observation on his role in the ongoing debate that pits Tariq Ali on one side (there are others, of course) and someone like Gilbert Achcar on the other is in order. Unlike many scholars staking out positions, Vijay at least makes the effort to spend time in places like Lebanon and Libya, making an effort to get the perspective of some of the primary actors. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, you have to give him credit for doing the spadework.

For some time now, Vijay has been arguing for an international agreement hammered out by outside powers to bring the bloodshed to an end. For example, in a Jadaliyya piece titled “Letter to a Syrian Friend”, he decries the “messianic” view that the rebels can triumph militarily. Instead, he advocates a “mediated peace alongside a process for genuine democratization guaranteed by your neighboring states” that would “strengthen the chances for the renewal of your national ambitions.”

The more recent article offers more details. To start with, it opens with an epigraph by Lebanese journalist/novelist Sahar Mandour:

During the lead up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, we took a clear position against [imperialist] war and against dictatorships: la li-al-harb, la li-al-dictatoriyat. Today, no such simple slogan is possible. That slogan is old. We need new positions, new slogans. We need to find our way out of the confusion of today.

I wonder why there should be any confusion over the need to take a position against imperialist war and against dictatorship. This is an honorable position for the left to adopt and one that corresponded to articles that appeared in the ISO, Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative press along the lines of “No support for Obama’s war. No support for Assad’s dictatorship”.

Vijay describes a situation in Syria in terms of “disarray”, one that evokes Matthew Arnold’s immortal lines from “Dover Beach”:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

He has little use for Gilbert Achcar, whose “effusions” that the rebels alone must overthrow Assad appear unmatched by their capabilities. As someone who has been confronted by Achcar’s reprimands over how I paraphrased him in the past, I was not surprised to see his comment under Vijay’s article on Jadaliyya:

This is not the first time that Vijay Prashad distorts what I say. What he calls “Gilbert Achcar’s *effusions* that [the rebels] must alone overthrow Asad” is a very peculiar way of reading what I wrote. Fortunately, the link provided clearly shows that he is misrepresenting my statement.

Anyone reading it honestly will find that what I explain is that “the regime [has] no incentive whatsoever to make any concessions” as long as it manages “to keep the upper hand militarily and thus to believe that it can win”.

Toward the conclusion of the article, Vijay offers up a kind of deus ex machina that can resolve the pain and suffering in Syria thus allowing a “salvation” that transcends Baathist tyranny as well as jihadist terror. It rests upon the possibility that a “regional approach” can be permitted to succeed, something that the US and Russia conspired against in the past.

The first part of such a plan would involve a Regional Syrian Refugee Crisis Team consisting of Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and Jordan that would tackle logistical problems and aid coordination but also get to the “political root” of the the refugee crisis. At the risk of appearing “simplistic” to Sahar Mandour, one might surmise that the “political root” is nothing less than the scorched earth policy of the Baathist dictatorship.

The next part is even more troublesome. Vijay writes:

Lebanon, Algeria, Egypt, and Iraq voted against the Gulf Arab proposal at the Arab League meeting to give backing to the US strike. These countries need to now push for a regional solution based on their refusal to allow an armed strike. Pressure needs to come on them to involve themselves as a bloc to push the Asad regime and the rebels to recognize that there is no path for either toward total victory. Negotiation is the only way.

Maybe I am missing something here but not a single one of these countries is likely to adopt any measure that would undermine Bashar al-Assad. While Lebanon’s government is a product of horse-trading between the various confessional factions in the country that went through a brutal civil war some years ago, the balance can be upset by any move that favors one camp at the expense of the other. With Hizbollah’s powerful presence in the country as an independent organization and its penetration of major state institutions, including the army, it is doubtful that Lebanon can be entrusted to act as a decisive outside arbitrator.

Since Algeria’s “secular” government conducted a reign of terror against its native “takfiris” in the 1990s that had the temerity to demand that the people’s vote for an Islamist party be respected, it is not surprising that it blasted the Arab League’s decision to seat the rebels instead of the Baathists last April.

And Egypt? The dictatorship that conducts pogroms against Syrian refugees right now? They can be expected to “push” Assad? Not likely, I’m afraid. And finally, a Shi’ite government, whose indifference to Sunni participation in all spheres of public life, has sparked a new wave of car bombings rules Iraq. It is not likely to discomfit Bashar al-Assad to the least degree.

Of course, they can be counted on—like Iran, Russia, Global Research and Mint Press—to oppose American military intervention.

Finally, there’s an ostensibly reasonable reference to Iran’s new president who might be less committed to al-Assad’s survival than his predecessor. I can certainly imagine that the dictator might be an easily sacrificed pawn in the calculations of a government suffering from the effects of punishing sanctions.

Unfortunately, what’s missing from Vijay’s calculations is Russia, the 800-pound gorilla. I have long considered it a strong possibility that Putin persuaded al-Assad to adopt the same strategy he pursued in Chechnya, one in which massive air and artillery power would be used to reduce entire urban neighborhoods to rubble and to cause civilian populations to flee for their lives and resettle in refugee camps.

In terms of horse-trading, there’s little that the US can offer Russia. With little left of the 1960s arms race and an oil export economy that affords the country a modicum of independence, Putin can thumb his nose at the West for the foreseeable future. And, just as importantly, al-Assad appears to have no problem with his country being reduced to rubble from one end to the other. Like the Adolph Hitler of “Downfall”, he is in a cocoon of his own making, the rest of the world be damned.

Just to clarify, if Achcar is anxious to dispel any notion of being effusive over a rebel victory, that goes for me as well in spades. I am deeply pessimistic about anything good coming out of the civil war in Syria. It was exactly al-Assad’s intention to militarize the conflict as quickly as possible, to transform it into a sectarian struggle, and to allow jihadist groups free rein despite claims to the contrary.

The general laws of history under late capitalism favor the powerful minority against the more populous but weaker poor. In some ways we are paying for the early “success” of the Russian Revolution that led to a counter-revolutionary movement with a revolutionary coloration. Although there is little left of the Stalinist monolith that allowed one disaster after another to unfold, there is like farce following tragedy a new kind of Stalinism that rallies around poor substitutes for the Kremlin. At least the rank-and-file CP’er of the 1930s could not be blamed for believing that they were defending socialism but the appalling intellectual and political prostitution that is conducted on behalf of the Qaddafi’s and al-Assad’s of the world is enough to make you sick. I suppose I should not insult the honorable profession of prostitution, however. A more useful analogy would be with the law.

Quirico (l), Piccinin (r)

The first time I ever post something on my blog or on Facebook or Marxmail that takes the word of a defector from the Baathist military that it used chemical weapons as good coin you have permission to seize my computer. There’s an article in the September 19, 2013 Times of Israel that begins:

High-ranking Syrian regime officials ordered soldiers to use chemical weapons against fighters and civilians in rebel-occupied areas, a former Syrian army officer and chemical warfare expert has declared.

In an interview with Abu Dhabi newspaper The National, Brigadier General Zaher Saket, a commander in the military’s 5th division who defected from President Bashar Assad’s army in March, claimed he had been instructed to attack rebels with poison gas on numerous occasions.

“I am a witness and received orders three times to use chemical gas last year,” Saket said.

I would reject this out of hand for two reasons. To start with, anything printed in an Israeli newspaper (except Haaretz, but only certain conditions) is suspect. But more importantly, aren’t defectors likely to “deliver the goods” on any military that they have fled from? During the contra war in Nicaragua, there were articles every few months about some high-level defector from the Sandinista military attesting to war crimes ordered personally by Daniel Ortega. It does not matter to me if the defector is saying something that on first blush might help me win the ongoing debate about the source of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. I only look foolish in lending credibility to such a dubious source.

Apparently the pro-Assad left has no such qualms.

A jihadist group released Domenico Quirico, a reporter for the Italian daily La Stampa, and Pierre Piccinin, a Belgian academic, from captivity on September 8^th. Upon their release, they claimed that they had overheard rebels taking credit for the Ghouta chemical attack. Since the wsws.org credibility is so low to start with, it is hard to imagine the editors worrying about how inquisitive minds would react to such an obviously ridiculous tale. (I should add that MRZine tweeted links to articles that also took these characters seriously.) WSWS reported on September 12:

Speaking to Luc Gilson of Belgium’s RTL television, Piccinin said: “It is a moral obligation to say this. It is not the government of Bashar al-Assad who used sarin or other military gases in the Damascus suburbs of Ghouta. We are sure of that, after having listened to a conversation that we overheard. I say it even though, since May 2012, I have ferociously defended the Free Syrian Army in its just struggle for democracy.”

Piccinin said he and Quirico overheard a Skype conversation, in which a Farouq Brigade commander and an FSA general took part from the facility where they were being detained. He explained, “According to the statements of officers of the opposition, it is not the regime of Bashar al-Assad that is responsible.”

I imagine that this is the same Piccinin who wrote an article lustily defending Bashar al-Assad on March 6, 2012:

The main reported cases of unrest are linked to regular attacks from Salafist bands which are of an extremely violent nature and more importantly, the Free Syrian Army. The latter counts amid its ranks numerous Qataris and Libyans, all whom have been trained in the art of urban guerilla warfare by the French army in refugee camps, which provide perfect bases from which to operate and orchestrate attacks.

So what likelihood is there that the “academic” who wrote these words in March would two months later become a “ferocious defender” of the FSA? Less than zero, in my opinion. He is what we might call a big, fat, liar to put it bluntly.

In fact Piccinin has a long record of open and virulent hostility to the rebels in Syria. On January 24, 2012, the BBC painted a portrait of a man slavishly devoted to the Baathist dictatorship:

Piccinin added that he spent a whole day with an armed group as their guest, indicating that they were 20 individuals, and that each one has certain kinds of firearms to snipe people from their hideout.

He stressed that the authorities used no force or suppression in dealing with protesters as alleged by some opposition sides, adding that no live ammunition was used except in certain circumstances, and that all that has been used was tear-gas.

He said that the government troops were strictly committed to the instructions of not using weapons against the protesters.

Piccinin concluded that what he has read in the western newspapers over months about events in Syria was not true as the country does not live in a catastrophe and the Syrian leadership is not weak to the extent that it may give up as media circulated.

One is surprised that he did not accuse the rebels themselves or shooting the protesters.

Turning to Domenico Quirico, it seems he has a penchant for getting kidnapped during civil war. Qaddafi’s troops kidnapped him in Libya in 2011 rather than the rebels but he along with some other journalists were released unharmed.

Quirico’s newspaper was one among a handful that published the Danish cartoon that depicted Mohammad as a bearded terrorist with a bomb in his turban. His own views, however, are a bit harder to pin down. In a May 1, 2012 article about the growth of Islam in Africa, he concluded:

The fundamentalism of the US Protestant sects, the Christian capitalism that seeks to buy souls by putting dictator Presidents on their payroll. In response to the interminable repetition of dilapidation, and the huge pressure of poverty which flows, branches out, and extends throughout the continent like flood water, we have proposed not an identification with those that are suffering, but the preaching of free market policies: which profits mostly us. In this world of poverty and losses, man has a hunger for faith and irrationality. But capitalism is not a credo, and is not a magnet. It is only a way of living which we, and only we, have got used to.

Maybe this relatively nuanced analysis foreshadowed Quirico’s distancing himself somewhat from the rabidly counter-revolutionary Piccinin. On September 9 the Lebanon Times reported Quirico as saying that it would be “madness” to say for sure that Assad was not culpable. Referring to the Skype conversation, in English no less, that the two captives overheard and that supposedly revealed rebel culpability, Quirico said: “I have no evidence to confirm this theory and I do not know who these people were or if they are reliable. It is impossible for me to say if this conversation was based on real events or on rumours and hearsay. It is not my habit to hold true conversations overheard through a door.”

Then there is, of course, the sheer unlikelihood that their captives would be having a Skype phone call in English within earshot. Does this make any sense?

Frankly, the supporters of Bashar al-Assad keep clutching at straws to make their case. First, the Ghouta gassings were the result a rebel accident according to Mint Press. Next, we heard from Ray McGovern that they were a false flag operation intended to cross Obama’s red line. Then, we heard from McNeil and al-Gharbi that it was no false flag, just jihadist terror directed indiscriminately at Christians in Ghouta. The latest installment jibes with McGovern but on the flimsiest basis—a Skype phone call conducted in English within earshot of two captives.

The way to proceed obviously is for the Syrian government to present the counter-evidence to the UN report or for al-Assad’s fans in the West to painstakingly gather together the evidence in the manner of Brown Moses, an independent and respected researcher. Instead, it relies on gossip and rumors, a function no doubt of the hazards to one’s mental health when carrying the Baathist banner. It rots your brain out like an advanced case of syphilis.