Month: October 2016

On Saturday October 29th, 2016, Leila Al Shami and Robin Yassin Kassab, authors of the book ‘Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War’, were invited by the London Anarchist Book Fair to give a talk on Syria. As Leila wrote yesterday night, they “had in particular wanted to focus on anti-authoritarian struggles, self-organization as well as issues of militarism, sectarianism and the rise of Islamist extremist groups.” Shortly before speaking, Robin told me that some people were going around the book fair saying that ‘a pro-Jihadi Syrian nationalist fascist’ was going to give a talk and that he must be prevented from doing so. We laughed it off.

Robin and Leila sat down and, barely having had the time to introduce themselves, they were interrupted. One man, later identified as Amir Taaki, went on stage, followed by about seven friends, one of whom was in full military garb, and started ranting about Robin’s alleged love for Jihadis, Syrian nationalism, Ahrar Al Sham and other such inanities. Robin left and Leila, who had tried to stay and reason with them, ended up leaving too. 

As for Taaki, he is a British-Iranian who was involved in the creation of BitCoin and who never misses an opportunity to boast that according to Forbes he was ‘their top 30 under 30 list for 2014’. He claims he has just returned from Rojava, an achievement he thought was enough to qualify him to speak on Syria as a whole. That an actual Syrian Kurdish Anarchist from Rojava, Shiar Neyo, was already on the panel didn’t prevent him from trying to hijack it. The self-appointed representative of Kurdistan had sent several emails to Leila demanding a spot on their panel – demanding, not asking.

Those of us familiar with this neo-colonial and racist arrogance expressed by foreigners after visiting ‘the region’ for a few months can think of a few Taakis we’ve met over the years.

When all resistance proved to be futile, the organizers were forced to let Taaki speak for a few minutes. He then proceeded to speak for as long as he wanted (10-20 minutes before people in the audience started complaining again), and what a monologue it was! He rambled on about how Kurdish culture is inherently egalitarian and how it’s a light in a dark world. He spoke of ancient Mesopotamia, of some bloody pyramids and of how all of that linked to some mystical Kurdish Shangri-La that all Anarchists and revolutionaries must defend. His rambling reminded me of what a book on Orientalism for Children would look like. Taaki told us how he ‘went there thinking that he’ll teach them’ but instead ‘they taught me so much’; ‘these people’ who he described as heroic men and women engaging in guerilla warfare in the mountains while reading Bookchin and Nietzsche (I’m not joking). ‘Kurdistan’ is apparently replacing ‘the Orient’ given that the latter has failed to satisfy westerners who got bored of Aladdin.  

Not only that, but they were profoundly racist. Taaki, in his Aladdin monologue, listed Turkey and Saudi Arabia as the two most racist countries on the planet, an odd statement given the existence of a settler colonial state, Israel, on one of Syria’s borders or, for that matter, the existence of instutitionalized racism in many countries of the region, including my own, Lebanon, and beyond. One of them even told me ‘you people’. When I asked him what people he was talking about given the fact that I was raised in a Lebanese Arab Catholic family, he went silent. When I lost my patience and yelled ‘f-ing white people’, two of them accused me of being racist against white people. They started yelling about how it’s unfair to paint all of them with the same brush. All Lives Matter, folks.

Kurdish friends who later heard about what happened were horrified at how a group of mostly white people used Kurdistan, the Kurdish struggle for autonomy and social justice and pretty much all struggles in and around Kurdistan to fit their orientalist fantasy. Kurds didn’t really exist in Taaki’s monologue. It was a bizarre manifestation of racism mixed with Islamophobia and Kurdish diaspora ultra-nationalism. In fact, when we went back in with Shiar Neyo in an attempt to confront Taaki and his cult followers, who by then had emptied the whole room of its original audience and replaced it with a dozen ‘anarchists’ who all knew one another, his cult followers shut Neyo down and called him disgusting.

Neyo soon understood that this was not a crowd that cared much about Rojava, Syria as a whole or anything for that matter. The people of Syria, Arabs or Kurds, were irrelevant to them. Neyo told them that this is not what solidarity looked like and we left. Leila and Robin’s talk was canceled. Neyo’s talk was canceled. Syrian Arabs and Syrian Kurds were not allowed to talk on Syria. Instead, some British guy who hasn’t written a single article on Syria was allowed to control the narrative because he’s been to Rojava, learned Kurdish and ‘about Kurdish culture’. By those standards, I should be Queen of England by now. Never has Said’s ‘permission to narrate’ sounded so relevant to my ears.

This was a strange event, one which Leila told me she had never witnessed despite giving countless talks with Robin on Syria. And this included talks with actual Shabbiha in the room. Taaki’s cult followers didn’t seem to have any ‘ideology’ other than engaging in orientalist fantasies. There wasn’t anything ‘anarchist’ about them given that they shut down a panel featuring a Syrian Arab anarchist, Leila, and insulted a Syrian Kurdish anarchist, Shiar. They also repeatedly harassed people, yelled at them and called them Jihadi sympathizers. They refused to stop filming people’s faces despite being repeatedly asked by the organizers and members of the audience to stop filming as this violated the very basic definition of a safe space – especially one on Syria with so many still having family in regime or ISIS-controlled areas. What a funny version of Anarchism it is in which the basic notion of solidarity is rejected.

 

As half a million souls have evaporated into smoke, largely at the hands of the Assad regime, Max Blumenthal instructs his readers to be suspicious of the organizations dedicated to putting a lid on the suffering.

He performs this by making a few salient points about the problematic nature of NGOization, funding channels and influence of big powers which tend to haunt aid organizations everywhere, particularly those operating in desperate situations. He goes on to point out that those organizations are toeing the line of Washington’s foreign policy elites who are calling for an NFZ in order to overthrow the regime.  Of course, one needn’t wonder if maybe, just maybe, the countless barrel bombs, cluster bombs, chlorine bombs, thermite bombs and bunker busters may have anything to do with compelling one to calling for an NFZ.

I don’t have to rehearse the criticism made but you can read Scott Lucas’ forceful rebuttal to his piece here and others’ here.

What I’m interested in what went on in his head before he sharpened his pencils. What is the purpose of transforming aid organizations during the time of war and genocide into objects of scrutiny and suspicion? Who does that serve?

The task is made difficult once one recalls that Blumenthal, after all, used to be one of us—that is, on the side of Syria’s democrats and revolutionaries. In 2012, he resigned from al-Akhbar over what he called the “newspaper leadership’s pro-Assad tendency”, pointing out that:

“Yet the mere existence of Western meddling does not automatically make Assad a subaltern anti-imperial hero at the helm of a “frontline resisting state,” as Ghorayeb has sought to paint him. Nor does it offer any legitimate grounds for nickel-and-diming civilian casualty counts, blaming the victims of his regime, or hyping the Muslim Threat Factor to delegitimize the internal opposition . . . Besides exploiting the Palestinian cause, the Assad apologists have eagerly played the Al Qaeda card to stoke fears of an Islamic takeover of Syria . . .In joining the Assad regime’s campaign to delegitimize the Syrian opposition by casting it as a bunch of irrational jihadis (ironically, they seem to have little problem with Hezbollah’s core Islamist values), Assad’s apologists have unwittingly adopted the “war on terror” lexicon introduced by George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon, and the neocon cabal after 9-11. Not only have they invoked the scary specter of The Terrorists (gasp!) to justify morally indefensible acts of violent repression . . . “

What bothers Blumenthal today isn’t the somewhat common silence or apologia for Assad and Putin in alt-journalism and left-wing circles, nor is it the ongoing intervention of Russia, Iran and sectarian militias on behalf of a brutal regime. What bothers him is a hypothetical regime change operation undertaken by the United States. These are classic, even caricatural, tropes that he railed against not too long ago.

Enquiring minds wish to know: how can someone who has stood on the side of justice consistently suddenly barbarize themselves this quickly?

 

“The great Indian disaster of 1947 has barely entered the public consciousness. Distance, and a sense of helplessness, presumably account nowadays for this seeming indifference, just as they account for the relative calm that greets the news from Nigeria. What can one do about it, and who cares about dead African babies anyway? Certainly not the New Left: its leaders have not uttered a sound on the subject. But then there is no political mileage to be got out of a conflict which opposes Africans (with some foreign backing) to each other. As for morality, we all know by now what the Realpolitiker of the New Left (not to mention the Old Right) think of such sickly bourgeois sentiments.”—George Lichtheim

If it has been said that the institution of slavery is war and can only be defeated by war, the same can be said about the Assad regime. No serious observer thinks that Assad will cede an inch of power to the opposition without military defeat or threat. The regime has made up its mind about a Final Solution a long time ago. “Assad or we burn the country” as a pro-regime graffiti encapsulates the logic. 

Blumenthal is forcefully aware of all of this. In fact, he’s written about it and has likely concluded that the war of extermination will continue unabated unless there’s some limited form of foreign intervention. 

But he’s grown torn between maintaining an internationalist commitment to Syrian democrats and the fear of being in the bad company of neocons. It’s clear that Blumenthal simply sees no other way—or lacks the confidence to do so—to appear to be in such bad company without compromising himself morally.

Knowing this, he inserts his head and hands into the pillory. Thinking to himself that only by earning the scorn of neoconseratives—whom he could represent as the spear of the backlash—can he turn himself into a victim deserving commiseration and, in his mind, self-exoneration from the guilt of silence. And here’s something he could really believe in. But what he doesn’t know is that in the process he has doubly compromised himself by turning the figure of the neocon into a straw man that can be hung over the head of the defenceless and their advocates in the West.

Hence why I don’t think what he wrote is journalism. It’s an exercise in a sort of secularized Catholic penance for the white man’s burden. In other words, he has contrived an all-too solipsistic performance of self-flaeggelation that has effectively shut Syrians’ voices out, hence why he didn’t interview a single Syrian for his piece. The issue isn’t what Syrians think, the issue is that John McCain happens to agree with some of their demands.

Blumenthal wants to have it both ways. He, and his contemporaries, think they can sustain a politics of Realpolitik while avoiding the impression that they are callous. He wants to maintain the commitment of refusing a compromise with U.S. imperialism in a world far from ideal (such virtue! such courage!) while avoiding an uneasy conscience. Why call for some form of limited intervention when it can fail and perhaps haunt your career forever? After all, it’s only dead Syrians.

 

“I was right to be wrong, while you and your kind were wrong to be right”—Pierre Coutrade

But he sees a bigger payoff with what he’s written. He’s banking on the likelihood that sooner or later the United States and its European allies will intervene to put a halt to the carnage that is tearing not just the Middle-East apart, but at the very fabric of European democracy. In other words, he wants the United States to intervene.

That is the only way he can be redeemed for what he wrote. And when that happens, he’d like to be there to tell us that despite his Machiavellian cynicism that was fiercely criticized, he was right all along. He has crucified himself on the cross, and like the Christ’s body, he carries within him the prospect of redemption. In his mind, he may be wrong but he’s wrong for the right reasons.

Cynical, right?

It is worth noting that Christopher Hitchens took such a gamble too when he decided to support the invasion of Iraq—betraying his own principles and friends in the process. Like Hitchens, he carries a violently contemptuous attitude towards his former comrades whom he derides for their naïveté, principle and “idealism.” Despite adopting the symbols of liberation and inverting the signs, Hitchens after all still considered himself a leftist, even a Marxist, as late as 2010. Because isn’t that an effective prophylactic against an uneasy conscience?

By attacking the only groups and individuals who are committed to the protection of civilians in Syria, Blumenthal has found a target to sublimate and project what he called his “anguish” at the carnival of apologia and conspicuous silence from those on the Left After all, we—those who stress political and arms support for Syria’s democrats—have been fighting a lost battle for the hearts and minds of progressives in the West. Not knowing how to help without committing the Great Apostasy of demanding that the liberal democracies pull their weight around Syria’s democrats, Blumenthal has come to be tired of the despair and discomfort of calling for help from the imperium—who wouldn’t? What he wants instead is to make sense of it all. He wants to give his life and its place in History meaning.

That’s why he thinks it’s 2003. Those were simpler times, when the world was divided between the Good and the Neocon. When opposing your government’s war assured you immunity from moral conundrums. And if you buy the thesis that history does indeed repeat itself, you can avoid ruminating on the constantly terrifying novelty of the present.

Such farce.

Shorn of all substance, all that remains is the affect and optics of interrogating imperialism. But if you look past the optics, you realize that the ontology at play remains deeply entrenched in a colonial unconscious. “We are the prime movers of History” is a fairly therapeutic thought amidst the chaos.