Thousands and thousands of Syrians of all ages dancing and embracing, weeping and singing, waving the country’s new flag and celebrating the end of tyranny, in the center of Syrian cities but also in Paris, Istanbul and Moscow, in Berlin or Stockholm, everywhere in the world where the almost 7 million Syrians driven from their country since 2011 have taken refuge. And thousands of Syrians who cross borders, even on foot, and return to their country after a very long forced exile. But also, thousands of Syrians searching for their loved ones imprisoned, tortured or missing in the jails and in the countless mass graves of the regime!
These terrible scenes of joy, but also of unspeakable human suffering, which can only deeply upset and move any human being with even the slightest sensitivity, nevertheless leave unmoved those around the world – on the right, the far right and the left – who fear and hate popular revolts, and see in them only the “plots” of more or less occult powers. Showing total insensitivity, they prefer to say nothing about these scenes of joy and pain of the Syrian people in flesh and blood. Not a word. Nothing but conspiracy theories that lead them to invent a Syria without Syrians, where only… foreign geostrategic interests clash. Exactly as they invented and defended yesterday a dream Syria where the Assad clan did not massacre its subjects, but enjoyed their enthusiastic support! And in so doing, they are posing as negationists, worthy successors and clones of their infamous ancestors who saw nothing, some of them of the Nazi extermination camps, others of the Stalinist gulags!…
Obviously, they don’t see anything because they don’t want to see what invalidates their vision of the world. So they replace the class struggle with the struggle of the opposing imperialist camps, even going so far as to discover progressive and…anti-imperialist virtues in one of these camps which is no less barbaric and imperialist than the other! And since they want their actions to conform to their theories, they become the worshippers and propagandists of these barbaric and obscurantist “anti-imperialist” dictators, and don’t hesitate to put themselves at their service by defending their reactionary rantings and crimes!
So it’s not at all surprising that at the root of their drift, which makes them auxiliaries to bloodthirsty, reactionary dictators, lies the fact that they don’t believe in the ability of those below to revolt and make revolutions. That’s why they see popular uprisings as nothing more than “plots” and manipulations of the ignorant masses by the powerful! As in the case of the popular uprisings of the “Arab Spring”, which they reduce to a… “conspiracy” of the American services. This leads them to proclaim that the masses of the oppressed are, and can only be, mere extras in history. And, above all, that only the all-powerful imperialist secret services are capable of making history! Clearly, such a conspiratorial profession of faith is the antithesis of Marx’s assertion that “men make their own history”…
So it’s no coincidence that what characterizes the way they think about the world today, and act accordingly, is their police-style conception of history. That’s why their first reaction to any popular movement is to ask… “who’s behind it?“. Because it’s impossible for them to admit that those from below- workers, women, young people or oppressed peoples – could rise up to take their fate into their own hands, without being manipulated by anyone. This, moreover, explains – at least in part – their aversion to social and alterglobalization movements, which they always regard with suspicion, being unable to detect… “who’s behind them”…
However, it has to be said that their police-style conception of history and their insensitivity are quite selective. For example, those who usually claim to be anti-fascist and don’t hesitate to label those who don’t like it as “fascist” (e.g. Ukrainian President Zelensky), “forget” and pass over in silence the – by no means insignificant – fact that the organizer of the Assad regime’s terrible repressive apparatus was Alois Brunner, the most wanted Nazi leader after the fall of the Third Reich. Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand man and rightly described as the “Butcher of Salonika” by the very few survivors (only 4% of the total!) of the large Jewish community in this city, also known as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans”, Brunner, who found asylum in Damascus with Hafez Assad, who protected him tooth and nail until his death in 2010, was a sadistic monster who loved to torture with his hands, and personally “taught” the worst tortures to Syrian torturers…
And now, all those conspiracy “amnesiacs” and fellow travelers of the bloodthirsty and corrupt Assad regime, whose horrors they systematically “forgot”, are turning a deaf ear to the celebrations of the Syrian people finally freed from their torturers. Without doubt, this is the height of hypocrisy.(1) Yes, the martyred people of Syria will have an ordeal to overcome. But who would dare to claim that those, Putin’s Russia in the lead, who have kept this regime alive by razing Syrian cities to the ground and massacring their inhabitants by the hundreds of thousands, are not the first and greatest responsible for its misfortunes, past and present?
Note
1. It was enough for Deutsche Welle to denounce, with supporting evidence, the broadcasting by Tik Tok of a few doctored photos and videos of Syrian regime prisons, for most of the major Greek media to headline that everything said and shown about the Assad “butchery” jails is a lie. Obviously, these Greek media, which have long been sympathetic to Trump, Netanyahu and above all Mr. Putin, “forgot” to quote the conclusion of DW’s investigation. The attentive reader will understand the reason for this “oversight” by reading this highly instructive conclusion: “”Spreading false information about atrocities not only undermines efforts to document and investigate them but also hinders accountability for perpetrators. Such misinformation can lead to a phenomenon known as atrocity denial, where the credibility of genuine human rights abuses is questioned, ultimately weakening justice efforts and obscuring the truth”.
A more than eloquent detail which shows that this “disinformation” is, unfortunately, a hit in Greece: according to the latest poll, the most popular foreign leaders in Greece are first Mr. Putin and then Mr. Trump…
