#1321
Imagine four balls on the edge of a cliff. Say a direct copy of the ball nearest the cliff is sent to the back of the line of balls and takes the place of the first ball. The formerly first ball becomes the second, the second becomes the third, and the fourth falls off the cliff.

Syria works the same way.
#1322
an interesting article would be to track the rapid proliferation of office space for region-specific charities and "news media" around K Street that are actually lobbying and PR firms whenever the US gets into a conflict with that country. probably a bunch of iraq focused stuff around 2001-2002, libya around 2011, and now syria the last few years
#1323

xipe posted:

interview with a syrian soldier
https://soundcloud.com/21wire/interview-patrice-on-aleppos-front-line

meanwhile...




more:
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/nikki-haley-bassar-al-assad-syria-priority-236710

Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, declared Thursday that the Trump administration does not consider it a priority that Syrian President Bashar Assad be removed from power — overtly signaling a U.S. policy shift that observers say quietly began under the Obama administration.

#1324
#1325

ilmdge posted:

xipe posted:

interview with a syrian soldier
https://soundcloud.com/21wire/interview-patrice-on-aleppos-front-line

meanwhile...



more:
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/nikki-haley-bassar-al-assad-syria-priority-236710

Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, declared Thursday that the Trump administration does not consider it a priority that Syrian President Bashar Assad be removed from power — overtly signaling a U.S. policy shift that observers say quietly began under the Obama administration.



Which MegaMan game was this again?

#1326
Butts at Stake In the Battle for Syria
#1327
MKLP rage against russian imperialism, reactionary iran and the colonial assad regime sowing chaos in the middle east

https://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=tr&u=http://www.icor.info/2017/ortadogu-ve-bolgesel-devrim&prev=search

the 'communist movement party' seem to provide sensible analysis but are dismissed as 'revisionists' by rojava fans

https://m.facebook.com/notes/communist-movement-party-of-turkey/declaration-on-the-kurdish-question-newroz-fire-should-be-ignited-against-imperi/1377555392313592/

we have a state of the left in europe thread going on, similar for the M-E region would handy
#1328


editor of one of the main german tabloids regularly makes use of nazi & holocaust language & imagery to describe syria ... while also consistently promoting ukrainian nazi-collaborators
#1329

xipe posted:

the 'communist movement party' seem to provide sensible analysis but are dismissed as 'revisionists' by rojava fans



I think their issue with them is that they're 'Left-Kemalists', but I don't know Turkish so I can't comment.

#1330
so i finally tried to dig back into a critical reading of Burning Country, and came across this

‘Assad’s Syria’ (as state propaganda called it) was fascist in the most correct sense of the word. It sought to replace class conflict with devotion to the absolute state. Following the fascist corporatist model, the peasants and workers unions, the professional associations, the youth and women’s unions, as well as Party and army, were entirely absorbed into the state machinery. A facade of pluralism was provided by the National Progressive Front, set up in 1976, comprising the Baath and nine smaller parties which accepted the Baath’s leadership – and by the People’s Assembly, where two-thirds of seats were reserved for Baathists. Beneath the froth, Syria’s was a one-party system, and the party was controlled by one man. The state cultivated a surveillance society, everyone spying on everyone else and no one secure in position, not even the top generals and security officers. Hafez stood alone at the apex – the Struggling Comrade, the Sanctified One, the Hero of War and Peace – a rarely seen yet omnipresent leader who governed by telephone



"fascist" is a common characterization of syria among people with a garbage understanding of fascism. even if the syrian government were a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and every hostile account of it were true, a nationalist, class-collaborationist formation does not fascism make (e.g., poulantzas would probably suggest bonapartism or military dictatorship as more apt). but even this presupposition of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie bears investigation. i've seen some comrades instead submit that syria should be considered socialist. take for instance Stephen Gowans (whose book on the war on Syria will be coming out soon):

Socialism can be defined in many ways, but if it is defined as public-ownership of the commanding heights of the economy accompanied by economic planning, then Syria under its 1973 and 2012 constitutions clearly meets the definition of socialism. However, the Syrian Arab Republic had never been a working-class socialist state, of the category Marxists would recognize. It was, instead, an Arab socialist state inspired by the goal of achieving Arab political independence and overcoming the legacy of the Arab nation’s underdevelopment. The framers of the constitution saw socialism as a means to achieve national liberation and economic development. “The march toward the establishment of a socialist order,” the 1973 constitution’s framers wrote, is a “fundamental necessity for mobilizing the potentialities of the Arab masses in their battle with Zionism and imperialism.” Marxist socialism concerned itself with the struggle between an exploiting owning class and exploited working class, while Arab socialism addressed the struggle between exploiting and exploited nations. While these two different socialisms operated at different levels of exploitation, the distinctions were of no moment for Westerns banks, corporations and major investors as they cast their gaze across the globe in pursuit of profit. Socialism was against the profit-making interests of US industrial and financial capital, whether it was aimed at ending the exploitation of the working class or overcoming the imperialist oppression of national groups.



i don't dismiss the idea of "socialist syria" out of hand, but to be honest it's not something i've considered deeply -- partly because its technical classification here is aside from the question of whether it should (and it should) be supported against imperialism.

i found this article not too long ago, discussing the state of the bourgeoisie in syria as of 1991. some interesting exposition in there (from the liquidation of industrial bourgeoisie via nationalizations to the persistence and growth of private merchant capital), but it's also a quarter-century out of date. more recent data indicates that anywhere from 60-75% of syrians are employed by the state -- more suggestive than definitive, but it's a strong suggestion nevertheless. actual communists in syria speak disdainfully of the liberalizing tendencies of the state in recent decades, but whether these represent a preponderance of "capitalist roaders" or the status quo under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is not clear from the remarks i've read. the idea of unity under an "Arab socialist" banner seems odd when the party of Khalid Bakdash had to spend so much time underground, but on the other hand there can be no denying that said party supports the state to the hilt under the present conditions.

and of course, when people rattle off lists of "actually existing socialist states" they generally mean Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, and the DPRK. so, then, Syria would probably fall somewhere closer to, e.g., Venezuela? Certainly Chavez and Assad seemed pretty tight.

anyway, i'm getting all rambly, here, but has anyone in here come across any particularly meaty analyses of class dictatorship in syria?

Edited by Constantignoble ()

#1331
i either forgot or never noticed that consortium news published a highly critical review of RYK's book last summer, which i just found very good

i was planning to wait until i had more to add to it before linking it, but then i saw a commenter saying that "Yassin-Kassab has a critique of Lazare" and "readers should check it out and then form their own opinion."

in a blow from which the reviewer's arguments surely won't recover, Yassin-Kassab reveals that Lazare is, in fact, Extremely Mad About Stuff, and "probably" has "mental problems." also, Stalin.

this is chilling
#1332

Some audiences were large , some were small. A couple contained a preponderance of anarchists, a couple included people from the State Department.



This overlap is hilariously common

#1333
looks like the SAA is dropping sarin gas again now obama's gone
#1334
The day before the "friends of Syria" meet and just as the terrorist lines are in collapse, how unexpected

https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/news_corner/news/brussels-conference-supporting-future-syria-and-region-4-5-april-2017_en

The SAA was bombing terrorist weapons depos near the Turkish border, I suspect an alqaeda-Turkish chemical weapons store got hit
#1335
yeah i dared a peek into the D&D thread and it's got all the shrill calls for Bashar & family to be flayed alive you'd expect, DON'T QUESTION DON'T THINK IT'S KIDS etc. usually it's not a bad barometer for the tenor of mainstream liberal discourse

you'd think they would have learned from the last time not to rush to judgment, but then again Brown Moses is right there so of course it's also taken as given that Ghouta was the government's fault
#1336
"Syria" waited until Obama announced USA would invade if chemical weapons were used to supposedly use them days later in order to force intervention on itself.

Weird how Syrians love killing their own children more than they love not being killed by America, not worth further investigation or thought tho
#1337

Constantignoble posted:

and of course, when people rattle off lists of "actually existing socialist states" they generally mean Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, and the DPRK. so, then, Syria would probably fall somewhere closer to, e.g., Venezuela?


Are any of these places more socialist than Belarus?

#1338

ilmdge posted:

Are any of these places more socialist than Belarus?



honestly i couldn't tell you. ditto with turkmenistan, which by my calculations has had the best overall economic growth of any nation in the 21st century so far, and still appears to strongly endorse central planning

I mean, assuming "more/less socialist" is even a useful metric; surely the DoP is the main thing we're watching for?

Edited by Constantignoble ()

#1339

Panopticon posted:

looks like the SAA is dropping sarin gas again now obama's gone



showing nefarious consistency with their supposed use of sarin gas when obama was still there & attempting to muster support to destroy them

#1340

#1341

marimite posted:



god bless MI5 for rooting out opponents of president bashar al-assad

cars posted:

showing nefarious consistency with their supposed use of sarin gas when obama was still there & attempting to muster support to destroy them



the lion assad is truly a shrew political operator to push the imperialists to their limits

#1342
spent a few seconds glancing through some videos BM posted, various shots & angles and such. left me wondering about the degree to which the very framing of the footage can play into this or that narrative, especially when AQ & pals have had years to learn the dynamics of having "citizen journalists" pore over media as a first line of seemingly credible reports in their favor. i mean, there's every reason to suspect that psyops (by now so rhetorically tainted a phrase that some part of my mind winces just typing it, even though i know better) become more sophisticated with time and technology, especially when they have a great reason to be so, such as an imperial venture foundering after years of heavy investment

but the more sophisticated these things get, the more wildly implausible they become to the general public, even when you have literal agencies whose whole fat-budget job is to sit around conspiring. and as a bonus to them, intel and the monsters they train hardly ever have to do the whole job; they just prime the engine and give the cord a few tugs, and then ideology fortified with sentiment takes over, and you get people inventing and deploying thought-stopping cliches like "ghouta truther" all on their own

rather than my usual tack of "run into the brick wall of trying to teach epistemology to racists who just love to hate an Oriental Despot," i'm considering an alternative strategy:

1. throw up your hands because the fact is we just don't have the evidence we'd need not to seem deranged at this moment in time

2. wait a few years after syria is purged of all alawites, shiites, christians, druze, etc., until the House of Commons or the like assembles a scathing report that removes all doubt that the whole thing was a big whoopsie

3. try in vain to use that report to convince people that syria was a bad move, and moreover that the new casus belli for the next upcoming imperial humanitarian intervention likewise deserves greater scrutiny & skepticism

4. wait 3 or 4 decades for enough leaks to trickle out to finally assemble a bulletproof case that we shouldn't have destabilized & invaded syria

5. get to plug your findings on democracy now, in exchange for being gummed to death by a radioactive mutant amy goodman

6. some crackpots pass the clip around in their travels across the desiccated wastes of the world bygone. you will know them by the strangely Slavic way their shadows dance. heed me, son: you mustn't pay their conspiracy-talk any a mind, for forked are their tongues and fake is their news

that's,, like, a praxis, right? god i'm angry and worried as hell.

Edited by Constantignoble ()

#1343
this may be short, but i think it is front page material. maybe im just delirous from lack of sleep but I really liked the above psot.
#1344
this sort of thing is precisely what is meant by PSYOPS, you're right about htat, and lurkers would do well to purge themselves of the insanely diluted idea of what is constituted by the term received from immersion in garbage trash hell
#1345
it's cool and fun that all the front page reporting on this is literally "international community ineffective, silent on yet another gas attack by Syria (or its ally, Russia) on kids". how odd that every major news organization has someone writing an article about how tragic it is that countries around the world just won't act to stop these Syrian (or Russian) atrocities. truly a watershed moment in kill me
#1346
i think it's almost as bad as using chemical weapons on a city
#1347
good thing panopticon is here to argue against all those posters who were saying that chemical weapons are good.
#1348

Panopticon posted:

i think it's almost as bad as using chemical weapons on a city



moderate rebels are the only groups to admit they use chemical weapons in the city of aleppo.
their suppliers the USA are currently using chemical weapons in the city of Raqqa

#1349
the Rhizgime continues to allow barbaric & illegal panopticon posts while the international community Do Nothing
#1350

xipe posted:

moderate rebels are the only groups to admit they use chemical weapons in the city of aleppo.
their suppliers the USA are currently using chemical weapons in the city of Raqqa



agreed, the islamists, americans and baathists are just as bad as one another

#1351

Panopticon posted:

xipe posted:

moderate rebels are the only groups to admit they use chemical weapons in the city of aleppo.
their suppliers the USA are currently using chemical weapons in the city of Raqqa

agreed, the islamists, americans and baathists are just as bad as one another



For more in this series of ridiculous moral equivalencies, see:
MLK is just as bad as the KKK for disrupting society
The miners at Ludlow had no business arming themselves, they only escalated the conflict
That Native American land was lawfully bought
Matthew Shepard should have understood the risks of flirting with a straight man

#1352

Panopticon posted:

the islamists, americans and baathists are just as bad as one another


are you for real mate

#1353

Panopticon posted:

[the lion assad is truly a shrew political operator to push the imperialists to their limits








pogfan1996 posted:

For more in this series of ridiculous moral equivalencies, see:
MLK is just as bad as the KKK for disrupting society



thats unfair to moderate Whites.
MLK was worse than KKK because he was disrupting society as a Kremlin agent.

i was worried the democrats would never spend 8 years of obamas political capital, so glad they've used it up these past few months on the trump-russian agent conspiracy.
hopefully it will bear fruit by forcing trump to bomb more of syria's infrastructure and extend sanctions for another year

#1354
we're gonna invade syria probably. libs are bloodthirsty
#1355
alqaeda were on the road to elimination in syria but they (& deep state) now seem to be forcing the trump regime into a flip flop?

The United States warned Wednesday that it could take unilateral action if the United Nations fails to respond to a suspected chemical attack in Syria that has left scores dead, including children.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-envoy-un-slams-russia-over-suspected-syria-165413855.html



when the zionist entity threated lebanon recently, nasrallah pointed out their ammonia stores and dimona nuclear plant are vulnerabilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhttc_7HZ4I

what would deter the US from making attacks?
what kind of a 'deal'/concession would placate the US?
#1356
the deal that would have placated the us would have been cessation of chemical weapons attacks, but that deal was made and then broken, so i don't think anything will stop an american invasion. i hope putin cuts his losses and leaves assad to his fate because trump is the demented madman nixon wanted to be
#1357

Panopticon posted:

the deal that would have placated the us would have been cessation of chemical weapons attacks


I dont think thats how imperialism works

#1358
the deal that would have placated the us would have been if saddam had given up his stockpile of WMDs, but that deal was made and then broken, so i don't think anything will stop an american invasion.
#1359
to make up for the krackers racist blood-lust for syrian children, here is an interview i did with a syrian man in damascus.

the 2 questions i asked people were 1. "the story in the West is: assad = hitler and rebels = freedom fighters. is this true?" and 2. what are the effects of sanctions in your country?

http://vocaroo.com/i/s0b4aLUwUu7d

i regretted mentioning assad in the Question as it caused people to talk about him (i should have asked about "Syrian army = babykillers?" instead because that is where the syrian people have signed up to fight & die in) .... however it does help show that, uncomfortable & unfathomable as it might be in the west, Assad really does have popular support in syria.

syrians can rattle off loads of good (and bad) policies that assad & syrian government have done while ignorant kkracker pigs believe the most insane conspiracies ('assad created isis and gave them all syrias oil, industry and food infrastructure in order to make the moderate salafi opposition look bad' etc etc blah blah) fuck off creepo
#1360
transcribing a to-the-point twitter thread:

Many people refer to the chemical weapons attack coming days after America said Assad can stay as somehow being proof that the SAA is responsible for the attack in Khan Sheikhoun. The 'logic' behind this is beyond absurd.

America: Assad can Stay.
Syrian Gov: Great, we’ll use those chemical weapons we said we destroyed and do the one thing possible to sabotage this.

Furthermore, no one seems to mention that this attack comes directly after America ‘reactivated’ support for 'rebel' factions in Idlib. This in turn comes after Tillerson's visit to Ankara after talks between YPG Afrin + Russia on a possible operation against rebels in Idlib. The recent reversal of most ‘rebel’ gains in the Turkish sponsored Hama Offensive also needs to be taken into consideration.

Islamist rebels have used chemical weapons before (see Sheikh Maqsoud, If I recall correctly it was chlorine gas used both times). Numerous rebel stockpiles of chemical weapons were uncovered by both the SAA and YPG in East Aleppo. There are also instances of chemicals/materials used in the construction of chemical weapons being smuggled from Turkey to rebels.

Whether the Syrian Gov is capable of this and whether they are stupid enough to do it at this point in time are two different questions. Given the current climate wherein Western belligerents are gradually and begrudgingly coming to accept that Assad can stay in power, and this semi-acceptance remains extremely precarious and subject to reversal at any time, the reactions from the West and calls for unilateral action against Syria based on these unconfirmed accusations is testimony to this.

To assume that the Syrian Government could not foresee the detrimental effects this would have on them is either to be a) incredibly naive or b) to deliberately overlook this in order to further a preferred narrative (to be manipulative).



also probably relevant is How US Flooded the World with Psyops. short excerpt:

Robert Parry posted:

Newly declassified documents from the Reagan presidential library help explain how the U.S. government developed its sophisticated psychological operations capabilities that – over the past three decades – have created an alternative reality both for people in targeted countries and for American citizens, a structure that expanded U.S. influence abroad and quieted dissent at home.

The documents reveal the formation of a psyops bureaucracy under the direction of Walter Raymond Jr., a senior CIA covert operations specialist who was assigned to President Reagan’s National Security Council staff to enhance the importance of propaganda and psyops in undermining U.S. adversaries around the world and ensuring sufficient public support for foreign policies inside the United States.

Raymond, who has been compared to a character from a John LeCarré novel slipping easily into the woodwork, spent his years inside Reagan’s White House as a shadowy puppet master who tried his best to avoid public attention or – it seems – even having his picture taken. From the tens of thousands of photographs from meetings at Reagan’s White House, I found only a couple showing Raymond – and he is seated in groups, partially concealed by other officials.

But Raymond appears to have grasped his true importance. In his NSC files, I found a doodle of an organizational chart that had Raymond at the top holding what looks like the crossed handles used by puppeteers to control the puppets below them. Although it’s impossible to know exactly what the doodler had in mind, the drawing fits the reality of Raymond as the behind-the-curtains operative who was controlling the various inter-agency task forces that were responsible for implementing various propaganda and psyops strategies.

Until the 1980s, psyops were normally regarded as a military technique for undermining the will of an enemy force by spreading lies, confusion and terror. A classic case was Gen. Edward Lansdale — considered the father of modern psyops — draining the blood from a dead Filipino rebel in such a way so the dead rebel’s superstitious comrades would think that a vampire-like creature was on the prowl. In Vietnam, Lansdale’s psyops team supplied fake and dire astrological predictions for the fate of North Vietnamese and Vietcong leaders.

Essentially, the psyops idea was to play on the cultural weaknesses of a target population so they could be more easily manipulated and controlled. But the challenges facing the Reagan administration in the 1980s led to its determination that peacetime psyops were also needed and that the target populations had to include the American public.

The Reagan administration was obsessed with the problems left behind by the 1970s’ disclosures of government lying about the Vietnam War and revelations about CIA abuses both in overthrowing democratically elected governments and spying on American dissidents. This so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” produced profound skepticism from regular American citizens as well as journalists and politicians when President Reagan tried to sell his plans for intervention in the civil wars then underway in Central America, Africa and elsewhere.

While Reagan saw Central America as a “Soviet beachhead,” many Americans saw brutal Central American oligarchs and their bloody security forces slaughtering priests, nuns, labor activists, students, peasants and indigenous populations. Reagan and his advisers realized that they had to turn those perceptions around if they hoped to get sustained funding for the militaries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras as well as for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, the CIA-organized paramilitary force marauding around leftist-ruled Nicaragua.

So, it became a high priority to reshape public perceptions to gain support for Reagan’s Central American military operations both inside those targeted countries and among Americans.