En Passant

The U.S. involvement in Syria has nothing to do with democracy or even chemical weapons — it is about protecting and extending U.S. military and economic power, says John Passant  

For Trump, Turnbull and others, Assad killing his own people is okay, as long as it’s not with chemical weapons because then it constitutes ‘war crimes’, I write in Independent Australia.

To read the whole article click here: Syria: Trump’s bombs and Turnbull’s crocodile tears

Much of the left internationally has given open or covert support to the Assad regime in Syria. The Morning Star in Britain went so far as to call the defeat of Aleppo a “liberation”. Why do left-wingers support a murderous regime instead of people fighting for their freedom? What is the role of Islamist forces […]

Syrian socialist Ghayath Naisse, a member of the Revolutionary Left Current, spoke to Simon Assaf in International Socialism about the brutalisation of Syria, the goals of those intervening and the prospects for socialists in the region.

This is from an article written in October this year but is even more relevant today as Aleppo and its people are destroyed and the Stalino-Assadists ramp up support for ‘their’ war criminals.

The Syrian regime and its Russian ally are in the last barbaric stages of an onslaught against Aleppo. In Socialist Worker US Ashley Smith analyzes the consequences of the rebel stronghold’s fall.

The Syrian war is not just a tragedy writes Corey Oakley in Red Flag. It is a crime of immense proportions. And it is clear as day who is culpable.

For the left to be relevant in the future, we need to solidarise with movements of the oppressed in the Arab world (and beyond), and at the same time form the alliances necessary in the West to take on the oligarchs that rule our countries for the 1 percent. The old “anti-imperialism” that targeted only the West will not do. And neither will a politics that subordinates domestic questions in the West to litmus tests of international politics, or allows hostility to Russia to turn into accommodation with Western imperialism.

The Syrian war is an obscenity, a brutal meat-grinder that consumes mainly the innocent, writes Alex Callinicos in Socialist Worker UK. The initial popular revolutionary impulse that dictator Bashar al-Assad tried to crush by brute force still weakly survives. But it is now subsumed by the rivalries of imperialist powers and their local clients and allies. The fighting goes on because it is in these powers’ interests.

In a response to articles by journalist Max Blumenthal, Ashley Smith in Socialist Worker US challenges the view that the Syrian Revolution has been manipulated by the U.S. from the beginning. We must stand in solidarity with genuine liberation struggles from below, regardless of which imperial camp they are challenging. Our slogan is neither Washington, nor Moscow, nor Beijing, nor Damascus, nor Tehran, nor Riyadh, but self-determination for oppressed nations and international socialism.

Our first response must be to defend Kurdish Australian journalist Renas Lelikan. Our second response must be to try to build a mass movement against the normalisation of racism and right wing terrorism, driven by the State and the media, in Australian society today.