Decolonising Syria: why the tankie meltdown matters

How to de-programme the "anti-imperialist" far left [Updated version]

[This is an updated version of a post on Medium this morning. The updates are flagged in bold, and interesting.]

---

Syrian Girl is so angry she wants to gas the Israelis. Richard Medhurst is convinced the Syrian revolution is a NATO/Israeli “occupation”. Craig Murray thinks it’s a tragedy that Assad’s “flawed but pluralist regime” is gone. Vijay Prashad predicts it will all end like Libya.

It’s only a few hours since Bashar Al Assad fled Damascus but there is a full-scale tankie meltdown under way. And rightly so.

For the “journalists” who spent more than a decade defaming the Syrian revolution of 2011; for the politicians who claimed Assad’s gas attacks were a Western fabrication; and for the Leninist re-enactment groups who have become ensnared in global Putinism — this is a very bad moment.

And given the amount of Assadist money that’s been flowing around the West, it could get considerably worse once the forensic accountancy begins.

At this critical moment for the future of the Middle East it might seem perverse to concentrate on the reactions of a few toxic figures on Twitter. But here’s why settling accounts with them matters.

To observe the extreme wing of the campus-based “anti-Zionist” left since 7 October has been to watch a process of entrapment. Their outrage at Israel’s breaches of the laws of war in Gaza is justified, as is their anger over Western double standards. But some have been successfully co-opted into a support network for the self-declared “Axis of Resistance”.

Their willingness to see Hamas as a liberation movement, the evolution of this into support for the fascist Hezbollah and Houthi movements, and thus to the full-blown tankie position that the CRINK/Axis of Resistance is some kind of progressive force in the world — all this has proved a catastrophic political education for some Gen Z leftists.

We saw its results at the Oxford Union last month, when 75% of students in the room reportedly indicated that they would not have told the authorities if they’d known Hamas was about to launch its murder spree.

To make sense of the Syrian uprisings — for today’s victory involved multiple forces — while sticking to this world view, you have to make yourself believe that it is, indeed, all an Israeli plot; and that, because this could rock Russian geopolitical influence in the region to its foundations, it also has to be classed as “NATO aggression”.

Once Hamas surrenders, and when the Iranian regime then falls, things are going to get even more disorienting for this brand of leftism.

Update: One of the most telling reactions to Bashar’s fall came from Rania Khalek, a left wing “critical friend” of the Assad regime. I post it in full because, despite its distortions, it is “from the horse’s mouth”:

The resistance axis era is over. Regionally Israel/US won this battle and we have to recognize that and reflect internally on why and how. That goes beyond just blaming imperialism. They didn’t and can’t take southern Lebanon, we know that much

I hope the best for Syria but of course I worry how HTS will govern, whether they will normalize with Israel, expand into the Golan and what the likely ongoing fight for power between the Arabs, Turks and Kurds will look like moving forward. That said, please end the sanctions so people can live. As for resistance, it’s weaker but not dead. It will take different forms and needs to evolve with the times both tactically and ideologically.

Translated: the CRINK/Axis of Resistance conceit is over. We lost. Extrapolated - the Khameneni regime and Hezbollah are also doomed, as are everyone who shilled for them in the west

Continuing….

So what’s at stake is whether an entire generation of the Western left can learn to walk and chew gum at the same time: to fight for justice for the Palestinians, a two-state solution and the release of hostages, while seeing an uprising by hundreds of thousands of oppressed Syrian people as something worth celebrating — despite the risks it now opens.

If you have woken up confused, wondering why all your favourite left outlets have suddenly gone tumbleweed about a mass popular uprising, here’s a short guide to deprogramming your brain.

It’s Leninism, stupid…

What’s ultimately wrong with the tankie left is what was ultimately wrong with Leninism. It doesn’t believe in working class agency.

In 1902, in What is To Be Done, Lenin spelled out clearly that the working class were incapable of anything more than “trade union consciousness” and would need to be led to power by a disciplined vanguard party whose ideas originate from outside working class experience. But that’s only the first part of the formula.

The second part was expressed once the Bolsheviks were in power. Not only are the Western working class incapable of anti-capitalist revolution, said the Comintern, but in a world where capitalism is synonymous with imperialism, and cannot survive without colonial domination, everything anti-colonisalist is de facto anti-capitalist.

This, said Lenin, makes even petit-bourgeois nationalists like the KMT leader Chiang Kai Shek objectively “anti-imperialist”. Only anti-colonial revolutions in the global south can remove the conditions that bind the Western working class to capital. It’s all there in black and white in the Second Congress of the Comintern minutes.

[Of course at this point they were mainly dealing with secular, petit-bourgeois nationalist movements who like Chiang were happy to clothe themselves with the rhetoric of the left. The days of the far left vaunting people like Khomeini and Sinwar were yet to come.]

The third pillar of modern tankism was laid after 1989, once even the most die-hard Stalinists were forced to acknowledge that the USSR had, in fact, been a monstrous tyrrany and that Mao had killed tens of millions of people.

The choice that confronted Stalinism was either revisionism or re-enactment. There was a large available tradition of critical, humanist, democratic socialism that had labelled itself “Western Marxism”. Or there was the discredited and inhuman anti-rationalism of Soviet and PRC state doctrine.

In order to rationalise choosing the latter, figures associated with Monthly Review magazine on the US left explicitly created a dichotomy between two Leninist objectives: the “withering away of the state” and the economic development of the global south.

Given it’s been proved that the only path to economic development — both in Russia and China — was a brutal one-party dictatorship with open disregard for the Enlightement principles of universality and human rights, then, said the tankies, we choose the path of development over the path of democracy.

It’s a quite explicit choice, in the writings of people like the late Domenico Losurdo and the tankies’ expert-on-everything John Bellamy Foster. Western Marxism, for them, was simply an “agent of imperialism” in its “efforts to denigrate the achievements of actually existing socialism”.

When tankism was invented “decolonisation” was barely present in academia. But over the past decade the tankies have quickly (forgive the pun) colonised it.

As I’ve written here before, there is value in the anti-colonial framework, including the insight it gives to the lived experience of immigrants and indigenous people in the West. I don’t dismiss it. But I do criticise the use to which it has been put to create an entirely false framing for the Israel-Palestine conflict (where the >3,000 year old Jewish presence in the Middle East is classed as “settler colonialism”).

What it shares with Leninism however is the belief that the Western working class cannot be the agents of their own liberation and that Western Marxism (therefore social democracy) is — with its insistence on humanism and universality — “imperialist”.

People who’ve drunk the kool aid of the extreme decolonisation thesis, and its concomitant — the necessity of “multipolarity” to replace a rules based global order — face a choice today.

If the Syrian revolution is just an Israel-NATO plot designed to limit Iran’s power in the Middle East, then logically they must support the forces trying to crush it: Assad and his bunch of torturers, Putin and the hijab-enforcing regime in Iran.

But these forces look like a busted flush. The line peddled by the tankies for the past 48 hours “we’re only retreating to hit back harder” turned out to be self-deception.

But if this is, in fact, a genuine revolt of the Syrian people, spearheaded by the Turkish-backed Islamist militia HTS, synergising with a US-backed secular Kurdish militia, organic opposition movements within the Alawite community and indeed factions from within the Assad regime, then suddenly the world is more complicated.

Who can prevent chaos in Syria?

What everyone wants to avoid is the whole of Syria descending into the hell that the Da’esh caliphate inflicted on eastern Syria and northern Iraq; or a more violent version of Lebanon, as a semi-failed state; and of course a war between the rebel groups and Israel.

There are huge risks, given the Islamist politics of some of the victorious armed groups — risks for all ethnic and religious minorities in a situation where power suddenly collapses and groups of armed men are in charge.

But who can help stabilise things? Who can ensure that breaches of international law are punished — both those perpetrated by Assad in the past and any in the future perpetrated by the rebels? Who, indeed, can ensure that Syria does not face a “Libyan future”?

The answer is: the rules based global order. Yes, the very thing that the tankies have told you is anathema, and “imperialist”.

Unless Russia wants to invade Syria on top of Ukraine, the only force that is going to stabilise both Syria and the region is one claiming legitimacy from the UN and from international law. That will be, realistically, a force reliant largely on Western countries who possess the armies, development agencies and money to make stabilisation happen (here I am using the word stabilisation in its a technical sense, as understood by the British FCDO).

But there is another alternative: chaos. That will ensue if Russia, as it routinely does, blocks UN action — or, worse, tries to carve out some kind of colonial enclave around Latakia by force (an eventuality I look forward to seeing the doyens of decolonisation theory explain).

If Syria now descends into chaos, that will be because the much-admired “multipolar world” advocated by figures like Prashad is a recipe for chaos. Because China, the string puller behind the great unravelling, can’t yet bring itself to retake an island 160km off its own shores, let alone exert itself as a new global hegemon to replace failing US willpower in the Middle East.

Trump, meanwhile, is urging the USA to wash its hands of the situation.

Yes, compañeros, the only force that stands a cat in hell’s chance of helping the Syrian people achieve self-determination and justice, and avoid another Taliban/Da’esh scenario, is “the West”, in the form of the Sykes-Picot signatories Britain and France, the UN, EU, NATO member Turkey, the despised state of Israel plus old Joe Biden in America, for the four weeks he has left.

I don’t celebrate this fact. I would rather Russia were still in collaboration mode with Western powers, rather than led by an ethno-nationalist lunatic fantasising about nuking Europe. I would rather China, instead of promoting fascism in the Romanian elections via TikTok, used its soft power to build stability in regions like the Middle East.

But we start from where we are.

One final thought on this excruciating day for global Stalinism. If the fall of Assad has been triggered by Israel’s victory over Hezbollah; if it the clerics of Iran suddenly at the mercy of women who don’t want to wear the hijab, and trade unionists who don’t fancy a spell in Evin prison… whose fault is all this?

Could the whole unravelling of Iranian and Russian power perhaps have been triggered by Hamas’ reckless and genocidal decision to invade Israel?

If you’re looking for scapegoats — and I know Stalinists love scapegoats — why not start there?

---

Update: That’s where my original post ended. But in a remarkable turn of events, George Galloway, one of the biggest cheerleaders of Assad and Putin, has tonight posted this.

Yes, you read it right. The pro-Putin/Assadist left are now going to claim that Hamas’ attack on Israel was an Israeli operation all along. This is where your brain is headed if you continue to embrace the premises of this bullsh*t.

For added cope, here’s the Russian far right ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, also in a state of mourning.

In case it’s not obvious, he is promising a war to the death against the society you live in, probably involving nuclear weapons (because the weak Russian army isn’t coming our way anytime soon after this). On this cheery note…

---

Please subscribe if you can, and share…I’m making this a free post in commemoration of the journalists lost to my profession getting to this point.