It’s time for the American left to stop the handwringing and throw its support fully behind the Syrian opposition movement. For a political group that ostensibly supports equality, democracy, and freedom for all, both in the U.S. and internationally, the American left’s ambivalence toward a popular movement of the oppressed against a brutal, repressive government is hardly understandable. Callous attitudes and opposition to international action in support of self-determination are no surprise when coming from China and Russia, or the now-isolationist Republican Party, but why from the far left? Where there should be open support, there are any number of excuses given to support the status quo, i.e. the continued presence of one of the world’s worst dictatorships.
In reality, the left began with a not-well-thought-out knee-jerk reaction to “U.S. imperialism,” meaning anything the U.S. does. By this logic, if the U.S. sides with the Syrian people over the dictatorship, then the people must be flawed. With a worldview like this, though, a whole process of justification, either consciously or sub-consciously, becomes necessary. This is just what the far left is doing now: they are grasping at flimsy excuses to not support the Syrian people.
The flimsiest of excuses is perhaps the most hypocritical. Years ago, the left railed against the Bush administration and neoconservatives in general for not grasping that Islam and even political Islam was not monolithic; they also spared nothing in an attempt to prove that the moderate left and Bush’s followers were overstating the threat from Al Qaeda. Now that Osama bin Laden and other top leaders have been killed (in the military actions they opposed, no less) and that terrorist organization has been weakened, they see its shadow everywhere. Indeed, many seem to have conflated all Islamist political groupings, at least the Sunni ones, as the same.
When Jean Marie Le Pen, the French fascist who ran for president of France on the National Front ticket, got into the runoffs, that country’s Communist Party endorsed Jacques Chirac, the Conservative Party politician who went on to win the elections. No serious person could say that this gave Chirac Marxist-Leninist credentials. The same goes for the Syrian opposition. Al Qaeda took a position on Syria because it had to. As an increasingly irrelevant organization, it simply could not be seen as absent from one of the greatest conflicts going on in the “Muslim world.” But now the left does not see that. Perhaps they should also give up their position that Palestinians deserve the right of self-determination, as Al Qaeda has also voiced support for that?
These left isolationists also warn that the Muslim Brotherhood supports the people of Syria. But this is just as flimsy an excuse to demand that the U.S. sit on its hands as the Al Qaeda babble. The “Brotherhood” has moved away from the fanatic fringe and towards a free-market center. Articles in publications left and right – pun not intended, but a pleasant surprise – have chronicled its move towards becoming an establishment conservative group, at least in some countries. In Egypt, the Brotherhood’s political party is a free market group that held a meeting with Sen. John McCain, who said that the U.S. could work with them. While those of us interested in justice and international solidarity won’t like an organization promising to become subservient to the IMF, we shouldn’t find in them the threat of an Islamic caliphate. Also, the Muslim Brotherhood is, to say the least, divided internationally.
Further, the idea that the Assad dictatorship in Syria is not helping to build radical Islam is as absurd as anything else spewed by those echoing the official Syrian line. Can it really be said that one of the two biggest funders of Hamas and Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” is a force for secular democracy? It would be very hard to argue that.
In fact, even in the dictatorship’s “secular” guise, it helps to promote radical Islam amongst its population. When people have no other options, they turn to religion; this is demonstrably true. In Syria, that religion is Islam. It would be nice if animosity towards oppression could come through democratic, secular channels, but that’s not likely to happen in Syria, precisely because of the government itself. It claims to be the secular and democratic movement in Syria. It claims to operate in the interests of the Syrian people. It claims to be left; its ally in parliament is the Syrian Communist Party. In short, it is ruining the left democratic “brand” for the Syrian people. And it is this non-democratic government that massacred more than 100,000 Muslims at one time in the 1980s.
Siding with so-called “secular” governments like those of Egypt and Syria over the wishes and interests of the people they should be serving has gone on too long. In Egypt, it was the U.S. that cozied up with the Mubarak dictatorship; in Syria it was the Soviet Union and is now a section of the “peace movement,” as when Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich went to Syria at the beginning of the uprising for a friendly little chad with Assad.
The Arab world is now in open revolt. The people have been under the oppression of U.S. and Soviet-then-Russian backed dictators for far too long. Under President Obama, America’s policy is changing, even if only slowly. It’s the job of those who value equality, democracy, and international justice to help assist in this change for the better, to not act as Know-Nothing isolationists, and to support the rising Arab people. Revolutions are messy, and sometimes unsavory groups try to exploit them. Nonetheless, sweeping away these “secular” dictatorships will pave the way for real, secular democracy in the long run.
Nation-reading western liberals should not embarrass themselves by emulating Pat Buchanan and excusing state violence against a people yearning to be free. We should fully support their aspirations for democracy. We should push our own government to aid them and, when the revolution is complete, to help build up these new nations’ economy and infrastructure.
Our Arab brothers and sisters deserve nothing less.
Originally published in Dirty Honest.
