Political Captagon: on the Far Right and Far Left’s addiction to Assadism in the 2010s

 

I.    Introduction: Why write on Syria? 

For decades, men of our political persuasion have paid scant attention to Syrian politics. We were not that concerned, because Syrians are Arab and for the most part Muslim; and Syria belongs to what Spengler calls the Magian Culture – the civilisation that first sprang up in the Middle East and one that is primarily Jewish, Muslim, and Christian – whereas we belong to the Faustian or Western or Occidental Culture. We are mostly concerned with our own destiny, for our worldview is particularist, not universal, and it does not pretend to apply in all times and all places; and the amount of our emotional investment in any war involving Syria matches that of any war involving the Congo. Contemplating the possibility of war between America and Russia, Yockey writes in 1949 that ‘Europe is no more interested in this projected war than in a struggle between two negro tribes in the Sudan’.

That indifference vanished in the 2010s. Following the Arab Spring uprisings, a number of Arab rulers – most of whom had been in power for decades – were forced to stand down or make concessions, and in the three most backward of the Arab states – Libya, Egypt, and Syria – the rulers attempted to brutally suppress the uprisings; and in two out the three, the rulers dug in, refusing any concessions and preferring instead to plunge their countries into civil war. But whereas the Libyan War ended after a few months, the Syrian War ended after thirteen years, and whereas the West felt no compunction towards the ouster of Ghaddafi, it felt squeamish towards an ouster of Assad. And so, Assad lingered throughout the 2010s, and in a bizarre turn of events, wound up becoming a hero to certain prominent sections of the Far Right and the Far Left; many of those on the political fringes – including some of my comrades in good standing – became heavily invested in the survival of the Assad regime.

At this point I will digress and stop to remark upon the Syria after Assad’s ouster. I want the new Syria to do well, for entirely selfish reasons that I shall soon relate; and to the friends of the new Syria – and many of those friends disagree with my politics – I recommend but one course of action. I will detail it in the below paragraph, which should be skipped by those who want to read about the politics of the 2010s.

In 2025, Syria can extricate itself from its difficulties if it straightens out its money. A weak currency means a weak State, and monetary disorder leads to political disorder, and conversely; for how many regimes and how many empires have perished because of debased currencies, and how many civil wars have been fomented by inflation, currency weakness, and economic turmoil? Syria’s haphazard monetary regimen contributed both to the fall of Assad and to the sectarian and ethnic conflicts of 2025; and given that, the central bank of the new Syria must end fluctuations. The Central Bank of Syria ought to adopt a currency board arrangement, in which the pound is fixed to the euro at the rate of, say, £SYP15,000 to €EUR, and in its day-to-day operations, the currency board would work as follows. If you present €EUR1 to the Syrian Central Bank, you get £SYP15,000 in exchange, and vice versa, with the Syrian Central Bank adding or subtracting pounds in circulation with a view to maintaining the fixed rate. For the intellectual underpinnings of this arrangement, read this Wall Street Journal editorial from fifty years ago, one that draws upon the ideas of Nobel-winning economist Robert Mundell (the architect of the euro) and Art Laffer (of Laffer curve fame); it justifies fixed exchange rates and by extension currency boards. I will forestall objections by pointing out that Syria already labours under a fixed exchange rate regime: the value of one pound in Homs, for instance, equals the value of one pound in Daraa; by taking up a currency board, Syria will only be doing what it already does, but more effectively. And such are the advantages of fixed exchange rates that all the Levant is best advised to adopt a common currency, and Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria ought to dispense with (what Mundell would have called) their junk currencies. But such a wish, for now, is a pipe dream.

To return to Alt-Right politics. Up until 2011, our side of politics largely ignored any happenings in Syria; and after 2011, it took an interest. That occurred for two reasons. The first was that the Assad regime launched a well-crafted and brilliantly executed propaganda campaign that portrayed Assad as a moderate Muslim and Arab leader, one who had been tasked with protecting Christians and minority Muslim sects such as the Alawites, whom in the Assadist narrative were being persecuted. The second reason was that, as often happens to a country embroiled in a civil war, Syria was partitioned, like Poland in the 18^th century; other powers who were stronger and more cohesive intervened; Turkey, Iran, the US, Russia, and the newly formed Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) all took their cut; and as to why this carving up mattered to the Far Right and Far Left, we need look to Russia, which in 2015 threw its weight behind the Assad regime; thanks in no small part to Russian arms, Assad in the second half of the war saved his rump state, the political centers of which were located in Damascus and the coastal province Latakia; and in the eyes of the Far Right – and Left – Assad had been anointed by Putin, and that counted. In the 2010s, one on the Alt-Right or Left could have devised complex intellectual arguments on behalf of the Russian intervention, and one could have justified support for Russia by declaring that Russia was anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, or whatever; but in the last analysis, what mattered to the Far Right and Far Left was that the Putin regime conveyed strength; brute force carried the day.

An eventful year, 2015 saw significant developments. In the Republican primaries, Trump declared that the US should team up with Assad, ‘destroy ISIS’, and make friends with Russia. Trump was not departing all that much from the establishment line, for Trump’s doctrine hardly differed from Obama’s: the Obama administration, by 2015, wanted to crush ISIS, and to that end, it supported the Kurds, who were to be used as a club to beat ISIS into submission. The anti-Assad rebels were not to be selected for such a purpose; for these rebels were routinely castigated as ‘jihadis’, and many of the Western elite looked down their noses at these bearded, scruffy, and narrow-minded insurgents; and many sections of the Far Left favoured the Kurds because the Kurds were progressive, the ‘jihadis’ reactionary.

Also in 2015, the Trump campaign closely watched events in Europe, events that were exploited by Trump with great success. Merkel brought over a million Muslim refugees, mostly male, mostly of fighting age, and mostly Syrian. Merkel did so out of ill will: she transported these men into Germany to cause as much inconvenience, pain, and misery to the Germans as possible. She succeeded, and within a short time, Syrian man won notoriety. The Syrian refugees, who numbered in the millions, had already become a thorny political problem in Turkey; and if Syrians behaved badly in Turkey, a Muslim nation, one could only imagine how they would behave in Germany.

               

Why would Merkel and other members of the European power elite make such a decision, one that would lead to such disastrous consequences, consequences that could be easily foreseen? The answer is simple: hatred. Suppose that some misanthropic mayor of a small town in America’s Pacific Northwest had decided to release 200 starving grizzlies: he would be acting in the spirit of malice, clearly enough. But in his own mind, he was only doing what was right; for his compatriots deserved to be punished; the townsfolk needed to be scourged. And as to what motivated him, perhaps it was religion and a belief that he was meting out divine justice. Regardless, the mayor knew how to cover his tracks, and he urged the townsfolk to accept the aggressive and marauding bears; he remonstrated with his constituents to place the welfare of beasts of prey, starving, needy, and aggressive, above their own. In the same spirit, Merkel made the slogan ‘Wir schaffen das!’ (‘We can do it!’). To understand the mentality, we must delve deep into Merkel’s lizard-like brain, and after returning from our exploration of the depths, we shall conclude that the Merkels saw Syrians not as human beings but as pawns on a chessboard, and as walking bioweapons.

               

Merkel’s million-man invasion put Syrians on the map, and not in the manner that the advocates of a free Syria would like. And of course, the Far Left was not disturbed by the violence – even the sexual violence – of Syrian man in the slightest. The reluctance to condemn can be proven by asking the Marxist: are there any circumstances, any whatsoever, in which these men should be deported? Each time, the Marxist will answer: none.

               

Thanks to Merkel, those of our political persuasion were forced to confront Syria; but even if Merkel’s million-man invasion had not occurred, would a study of Syrian and Middle Eastern politics have been worth it? I argue that the answer is yes. An acquaintance with Syria, the Syrian question, and ‘Third World’ politics, benefits us, for it can supply interesting perspectives. Take, for example, the phenomenon of Syria’s prisons. The Assads imprisoned tens of thousands, and these political prisoners were held in jails that were among the worst in the Middle East. Up until 2024, this state of affairs was considered by the prisoners and their relatives to be immutable; but within the space of a few days in December 2024, the structure was transformed, negated. One day, a jailer represents the mighty Syrian state; the next, he is some random fellow who owns a key to a room with some people locked inside. After Assad fled Syria, the jailer fled his jail, and the rebels broke down the doors and freed the prisoners, some of whom had been locked up for decades (and some of the women prisoners, raped by guards, had given birth to children who were now teenagers). A political scientist could write a thesis on the change of status and loss of legitimacy of the jailer, and the thesis would raise serious philosophical questions: is legitimacy real, or is it the product of a fiction, a sort of game played between the ruler and the ruled?

               

When discussing these subjects, we are stepping outside the confines of white nationalism, dissident Rightism, ‘Neo-Nazism’, etc.; but sooner or later, we must return to the subject of race. And it is here we shall begin.

 

II.           The Levant, the Arab character, and ‘Arab socialism’

 

So, who are the Arabs, and in particular, the Arabs of the Levant – what is their culture, what are their customs, values, practices, ways of going about things?

As part of a fact-finding mission, you can watch this 15-part documentary on the Lebanese civil war, in which prominent Lebanese, Jordanian, Palestinian, and Syrian personalities – many of them big names in Levantine politics – are interviewed and combat footage is featured. From this remarkable piece of history, we can deduce a number of truths.

One of these truths is that the Levantine Arab shows two faces. As we can see from the documentary, the Levantine expresses himself warmly, floridly – the Arabs are a theatrical people – and with a degree of grandiloquence; and that attracts Westerners. In the 1970s and 1980s, many left-leaning Westerners were drawn in; for Arab political activists, even the guerrillas, insurgents, and terrorists, always do a splendid job selling themselves.

   

On the other side of the ledger, when sifting through the footage we find a different Levantine, one who is instrumentalist, rationalist, cruel, and ruthless; one who thinks nothing of exterminating an entire family because it belongs to a different faith or different sect within a faith. When, in the documentary, the Levantine admits to crimes, the atmosphere turns cold, and we are shaken awake. The Arab warmth, fellow-feeling, and sentimentalism disappears, and the Western viewer is disconcerted by the sudden shift – by the turn to a brutal frankness and an indifference to suffering.

The Levantine mentality pits ‘us’ against ‘the world’ – but who is the ‘us’? In Lebanon, it is the powerful families – the Jumblatt, Gemayel, Chamoun clans, each led by a charismatic patriarch – who dominate Lebanese state and society. The same model is replicated in Syria, where powerful families stand at the head of religious and ethnic communities. Like those of our pious European forefathers five hundred years ago, religious and national groupings abide by Carl Schmitt’s Friend / Enemy distinction: that is, they constitute themselves as political units.

The two attributes – the elevating of charismatic leaders and the forming of political units along sectarian lines – make up a composite. The third attribute can be found whenever one community interacts with the other, and that attribute is a gift for intrigue. The Arab politician, whether he be a guerilla leader, a religious leader, or the leader of a state, excels in deal-making, treachery, and back-stabbing; and in the quest for power, Levantine politicians, being political in the Schmittian sense, always turn to war as the last and first resort. Carefully and over time, the Levantine political actor builds up a militia, and to strengthen it and himself, he builds relationships with foreigners. He never considers himself above making alliances with foreign powers; going back at least forty to fifty years, Levantine militia leaders have entreated the Soviet Union, the Iran of the Mullahs, the Iraq of Saddam and Ba’ath, etc.; which is why, in the second half of the Syrian Civil War, we were presented with the spectacle of one Syrian army wholly controlled by Turks, another by Americans, another by Iranians and Russians, and so forth. Perhaps only ISIS and Al-Nusra / HTS stood for a truly sovereign Syria.

               

All the above characterises the political side of the Levantine aptly enough but does little to convey the Levantine’s physiognomy. The members of all High Cultures, according to Spengler, moved, spoke, gestured, in ways that were peculiar to their Culture: they run, swim, dance, fight, etc., in a unique fashion, and unique expressions alight upon their countenances. But because all High Cultures at some point – usually after 2000 or 2500 years – perish, the historian in nearly every instance will never experience the peoples of a Culture as a living reality; the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Peruvians, Romans and Greeks vanished, leaving behind nothing but monuments and ruins. And as for the ancient Chinese and Indians, who is to say that they and the inhabitants of today’s China and India are the one and same people?

               

Fortunately for the purposes of study, the Muslims, Jews, and Christians who belonged to the Magian Culture are still with us; Spengler believed that the Magian Culture’s decline and dissolution were comparatively recent; an insufficient amount of time had passed for the remnant peoples of the Culture – the fellahin – to disperse like dust in the wind. The consequence is that we can see, thanks to the mediums of film and TV, how the Levantine deports himself in his natural habitat.

               

A handful of instances, recorded on TV news, give us insight. Recall from the Lebanese civil war documentary the Palestinian soldiers who were standing in uniform at the Beirut docks, at the time of the PLO’s expulsion from Lebanon; the scruffy, ill-dressed, bearded men, trying to put a brave face on it, treated the event as a celebration and fired their Kalashnikov rifles in the air, thereby wasting precious ammunition. And then, forty-two years later, we were treated to the scenes of the jubilant Syrian populace cavorting and dancing in the street, the Syrian women ululating, after the Assad regime was overthrown. The two spectacles accentuate the differences in conduct and bearing of the Arabs and the Germans, particularly the Germans of the old Reich (Second and Third); and they prove the falsity of the equivalence, so beloved by American conservatives, of the Arabs – especially the Arabs who belong to Hamas and other jihadi organisations – with the ‘Nazis’.

               

Equally enlightening is the TV footage of that other Levantine people – the Israeli Jews. As an amateur ethnologist, I am captivated whenever Israelis appear; the differences in physiognomy between them and Europeans become readily apparent, as do the differences in motion; when the Israeli Jews dance their Jewish dances (in celebration, for instance, of returned Israeli hostages), and clap hands, sing, bounce up and down, gesticulate, they deport themselves in a most un-Western manner, which is to say, they caper like the Levantines that they are.

               

In this context, Israel matters for reasons geopolitical as well as racial. It is the presence of the Jewish State that helped create our attitude towards Syria; otherwise, little exists in Syria to attract us. A peripheral theater in WWII, it along with Lebanon was invaded by the British, the Australians, and the Free French in 1941. In 1946, Syria won its independence from the French, but its elected government – a rarity in the Middle East – was overthrown in a military coup in 1949, and after that, Syria went through more coups than an African republic.

In this period, a legend was born: the legend of Germans (former ‘Nazis’) taking refuge in the Arab post-colonial states and plotting with Arab governments to destroy Israel. You can read about the myth in The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists (1997) by Martin E. Lee, who was a liberal antifascist (the book reads as though it were written by some hack at the Southern Poverty Law Centre). One man more than any other bears responsibility for loosing this conspiracy theory upon the world, and that is the late British airport novelist Frederick Forsyth, whose The Odessa File (1972) undammed a flood of imitations.

             

But as Hitler and the Third Reich moved further away in time, great ideological changes occurred, in both Syria and Germany.

After the 1963 coup in Syria, Ba’athists took power. The Ba’athist ideology, one of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, was conceived by Arab intellectuals in the 1930s, whom had been at least partially influenced by the example of National Socialist Germany. I would not make too much of this – we must not fuse, as many American conservatives do, the ideology of the Arabs and ideology of the ‘Nazis’; for Hitler’s influence in the first half of the 20^th century was as inescapable as Napoleon’s in the first half of the 19^th; and in the first few years after 1945, the influence lingered; Yockey writes in The Enemy of Europe (1953): ‘After the Second World War, the opponents of the Hero [Hitler] of that War were still dominated by his compelling personality’ and ‘Either they took up his ideas and declared them their own, or they continued to fight against him’; Yockey asserts, ‘Of a new Idea, independent of that Hero, there was not a trace’.

Yockey died in 1960; had he lived until the end of the 1960s, he would have recognised that the mood had shifted. After Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 Arab Israeli war, Nassar’s star had fallen, and Arafat’s – and that of the PLO fedayeen – had risen. In 1966, a palace coup in Syria had steered Ba’athist rulers closer to the Far Left; the old Arab nationalist faction of Ba’athism was usurped, a new ‘Neo-Ba’athist’ faction, heavily influenced by Lenin and Mao, taking its place. In 1970, after yet another palace coup, Hafez al-Assad seized power, and he transformed the ideology of Syrian Ba’ath into something called Assadism. One year later, Nixon abolished the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, and with disastrous consequences; and so, the tumultuous decade that was the 1970s began.

               

At this turning point, we see a 20^th century divided into halves, the divide being summed up by the contrast of Arafat and Nasser. 

The suave and debonair Nasser, who dresses like a man of the 1940s and 1950s, is set off against the scruffy and bearded Arafat, who wears combat fatigues – like Fidel Castro or Che Guevara – and the keffiyeh, which is today worn by pro-Palestinian demonstrators the world over. Clearly, the ‘Nazis’ belong to the first half of the century, the Nasser half, whereas the children of the ‘Nazis’ – the members of the pro-Palestinian Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, for instance – belong to the second, the Arafat half. It is the visual, the aesthetic, that determines the difference. By the late 1970s, the Palestinians and certain elements of the New Left had become associated with international terrorism; and the seventies terrorist, perhaps following the theory of Guy Debord and the Situationists, sought to make a spectacle of himself, projecting his theatrical feats and crimes through the media across vast distances, as the British literary critic John Sullivan points out; the terrorist, Sullivan observed, had accomplished what Heidegger called ‘de-severance’, that is, a shortening of the distance between himself and others, the stunt being performed by electronic means.

               

What happened to Syria in this period? After the 1970 coup, Hafez had in effect crowned himself king; and for all intents and purposes, Syria, Libya, and Egypt had become monarchies.

Superficially, Syria was treading a ‘left’ path; it took on the mantle of repressive and progressive states such as communist Cuba, North Korea, and Romania; it became more and more isolated, like North Korea – a hermit kingdom, but a hermit kingdom of the Arab world. And in another significant development, one most pertinent to the Syria of forty years later, Syria under Assad militarised to an extent that was unusual for a poor Arab and Muslim country. To give one example: in order to shoot down Israeli jets, Syria and Egypt acquired enormous quantities of anti-air missiles in the lead-up to the 1973 Arab Israeli war, the stockpiles exceeding those of NATO and the Warsaw Pact; the Levant had become the most militarised place on Earth.

After its defeat – which was a narrow one – in the 1973 war, Syria was embroiled in Arab crises; Lebanon was splitting apart at the seams, engulfed in sectarian violence; and so, the rulers of Lebanon invited the Syrians in.

The Lebanese crisis broke out at the same time as the capitalist crisis. By 1973, markets belatedly recognised that the US’ departure from gold was permanent, not temporary, and so collapsed; and inflation overtook the world. The inflation led to an extraordinary rise in commodity prices (including oil prices) and the enrichment of the Arabs of the Gulf states. In movies, TV shows, and novels, Arabs were portrayed as greedy gougers with too much money, and as men of great power who were backwards, sexually depraved, cruel, and worst of all, infected by anti-Semitism (whatever ‘Semitism’ is). In Western popular culture, the Arabs of the Gulf and the Levant were depicted as loathsome, and the Jews of Israel as brave, indomitable.

By the early 1980s, the image of Israel and the Jews had changed, as had the relations between the economies of the West and the Middle East. In a stunning reversal, commodity prices, including gold and oil, fell and fell hard; and the countries that made a living out of exporting commodities – countries such as Chile and Australia – suffered the most. The effect of the deflation was compounded in Third World countries, especially those that made a living out of selling oil; and as a result of economic strain, Iran and Iraq went to war. In Lebanon, the civil war took a turn for the worse, and the Maronite Christian government invited Israel into Lebanon in the hope that the Israelis would extirpate the Palestinians, rout the Syrians, and entrench the Maronites. In Lebanon in 1982, Syria and Israel fought their last conventional battle, and Israel won after a brief fight; and afterwards, military victory turned into political defeat.

Even though the Arabs committed most of the notorious atrocities – the Sabra-Chatila massacre, for instance – of the Lebanon war, Israel’s wanton and destructive campaign, including the siege of Beirut, led to left-wing world opinion turning against the Jewish State. Arab terrorism of the spectacular variety continued into the mid-eighties, but the symbolic character that was the jet-setting, jet-hijacking terrorist, who had a romantic and horrifying aura, gradually faded out of consciousness and went the way of disco and bellbottoms. And a new image of Israel sprang up: Israel the cruel, Israel the strong, Israel the occupier, Israel the oppressor – Israel, always lavishly equipped with the latest in US weapons and equipment gratis.

Or perhaps that unstinting US military aid and diplomatic support did cost Israel something: increased scrutiny. In the meantime, Hafez al-Assad’s Syria lived on in the dark. A Muslim Brotherhood revolt shook Hafez’ hold on power in the early eighties, and Hafez punished the rebels of the city of Hama by turning Hama into rubble and massacring thousands? tens of thousands? of its inhabitants without the world, for the most part, noticing and condemning.

By 1990, the Lebanon civil war had ended, and by 1993 – after the signing of the Oslo Accords – an uneasy peace reigned in the Levant, for in the West, economic conditions had improved, and the beneficial effects made themselves felt worldwide. The gold / US dollar price stopped bounding up and down, and for the next two decades it stayed within a more or less fixed band; and the US stock market staged a remarkable recovery. By the late eighties, communism in the US – and in other Western countries – had shrivelled up and all but breathed its last.

Appropriately enough, Hafez al-Assad – that Cold War relic – died at the start of the 21^st century. Power passed on to his son, and now Ba’athism, ‘Arab socialism’, would face its biggest challenge.

 

III.          The Syrian Autumn, 9/11, The Arab Spring, and the Syrian Civil War

 

Wrongly, as it turned out, many believed that Bashar, the new ruler, would reform Syria and do so because of his youth and his cosmopolitan, ‘Europeanised’ outlook. A new age dawned – the ‘Syrian Autumn’, which was precursor to the ‘Arab Spring’.

             

To understand this false dawn, one must understand the zeitgeist, which shall explain why it is that the West – and the Syrians – were taken in by the fresh and youthful Assad.

I have long argued that to know an epoch, you must know its popular culture. For example, if you want to know the 2000s, watch 2000s television – particularly American daytime television (for in this period, as America went, so the world went). In these productions, Americans are clean, well-dressed, smart, well-groomed, stylish; admittedly, some Americans who are obese put in a showing now and then (and oddly enough, Syria, like the US, had become one of the most obese countries in the world); but by and large, most Americans made the effort to look healthy and attractive. And the décor of their homes, cafés, restaurants, and bars pleases the eye; Americans lived well; you detect an air of crispness and stylishness; to grasp it, compare TV shows of the 2000s to those of the 1970s, which was the ‘decade that taste forgot’.

               

Hafez belonged to the 1970s, and Bashar to the 2000s – or so it seemed.

 

Bashar, who speaks French and English and has a British-born wife, was said to have "inspired hopes" for reform, and a "Damascus Spring" of intense political and social debate took place from July 2000 to August 2001.[18] The period was characterized by the emergence of numerous political forums or salons where groups of like minded people met in private houses to debate political and social issues. The phenomenon of salons spread rapidly in Damascus and to a lesser extent in other cities. Political activists, such as, Riad Seif, Haitham al-Maleh, Kamal al-Labwani, Riyad al-Turk, and Aref Dalila were important in mobilizing the movement.[19] The most famous of the forums were the Riad Seif Forum and the Jamal al-Atassi Forum. The Damascus Spring ended in August 2001 with the arrest and imprisonment of ten leading activists who had called for democratic elections and a campaign of civil disobedience.[20]

 

The ‘Damascus Spring’ ended on a sour note, but one could not fault the Syrian liberals for holding high hopes. In the early 2000s, the main American capital markets – the DJIA and the S&P 500 – were situated on the tail-end of the late nineties economic boom, an expansion that had been unprecedented. In the Levant at the turn of the century, the American success of the 1990s reinforced the lesson, partly drawn from Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis, that any socialism whatsoever – even Arab socialism – needed to be abandoned. And so, in this spirit, it was hoped by the modernisers that Bashar would usher in ‘free-market reforms’; and economic liberalism leads to political liberalism, or so the argument goes.

               

Then 9/11 happened. Overnight, US geopolitics changed.

When assessing this era, we on the dissident Right can say that Bush 45, when responding to 9/11, made two mistakes.

The first of these was to refrain from doing a Trump and failing to introduce – right after 9/11, when the time was perfect for it – a ban on all Muslims entering the US. Hardly any American of consequence would have opposed such a ban, but Bush 45 failed to strike while the iron was hot; and paradoxically, Muslim immigration only increased after 9/11.

Bush made a second mistake by invading Afghanistan and Iraq. One could understand why the US invaded Afghanistan; for Bush, along with most of the world, believed that Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda perpetrated 9/11. At the time, I and many others on the dissident Right were unconvinced; but we could not explain incontrovertibly what had happened and who the guilty parties were; and besides which, we inhabited the fringes, and our opinions carried no weight. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were adrift; reeling in shock, America, on the eve of the invasion of Afghanistan, found itself in the same position as Austria-Hungary after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. We will recall that after the assassination, Serbia refused Austria-Hungary’s demands, which were quite reasonable, and the result was that Austria-Hungary invaded. Like the Serbs in 1914, the Taliban in 2001 proved to be intractable; the Taliban refused to hand Bin Laden over, for the Taliban valued loyalty to Bin Laden, a fellow jihadist, above the well-being of Afghanis; and so, the US invaded.

               

In the weeks after 9/11, America enjoyed the world’s sympathy, a sympathy that Bush squandered. As the 2000s progressed, the Taliban and then the Iraqi Ba’athists became folk heroes to the anti-war Left and Right, and Bush the world’s most hated man. In the first weeks after 9/11, Assad saw a political opportunity and exploited it:

 

During a state visit by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Syria in October 2001, Bashar publicly condemned the United States invasion of Afghanistan in a joint press conference, stating that "[w]e cannot accept what we see every day on our television screens – the killing of innocent civilians. There are hundreds dying every day." Assad also praised Palestinian militant groups as "freedom fighters" and criticised Israel and the Western world during the conference. British officials subsequently described Assad's political views as being more conciliatory in private, claiming that he criticised the September 11 attacks and accepted the legitimacy of the State of Israel.[77]

 

Bashar fitted into the third of Bush’s biggest mistakes: the pursuit of a ‘War on Terror’ without clear objectives and the prosecution of the war using methods that would tarnish the US’ reputation.

 

Following the September 11 attacks and during the early stages of the US-led war on terror, "Syria had emerged as one of the CIA's most effective intelligence allies in the fight against al-Qaeda,"[78] with "the quality and quantity of information from Syria [having] exceeded the Agency's expectations."[78] Syria closely cooperated with the CIA's detention and interrogation program of people deemed "illegal enemy combatants"; Syrian prisons were a major site of extraordinary rendition by the CIA of alleged al-Qaeda members where they were tortured by Syrian interrogators on behalf of the CIA.[79][80][81] According to a 2013 report by the Open Society Foundations, Syria was one of the "most common destinations for rendered suspects" under the CIA's program.[82]

 

We can say ‘Homo homini lupus’ – ‘Man is a wolf to man’ – and paraphrase: ‘Arab is a wolf to Arab’. Assad, along with Ghaddafi and Putin, managed to play all sides off against the other; and the three adopted the pose of the progressive, the friend of the Arabs, the champion of the Third World against Western imperialism, colonialism, racism, etc.

These conflicts – between the West and the Muslim world, the West and the Arabs – revived the Far Left. The Stop the War marches and the activism against Israel accomplished little; but to the Far Left, the agitation served as a shot in the arm.

              

Left-wing activism was directed against US foreign policy – what of the domestic? US capital markets started the decade strong, and then declined, in real terms – that is, terms adjusted for inflation, which by the end of the decade had increased dramatically. In 2000, gold cost $USD250 an ounce; in 2008, $USD1000. By the late 2000s, the US dollar was losing value, as was many a loan portfolio held by many a bank; and markets sagged as lenders began to realise that borrowers, because of deteriorating economic circumstances, would be unable to repay loans. And suddenly and without warning, the inflation came to an end: towards the end of 2008, the dollar appreciated, commodity prices (including the gold price) fell and fell hard, and a deflationary episode ensued, one resembling that of the early 1980s; and almost overnight, liquidity dried up, and banks were unable to repay borrowings from other banks. Hence the global financial crisis, which affected not only America but Syria. The world financial crisis, in conjunction with a Syrian drought, pushed Syria to the brink and helped turn the populace against the Assad regime.

               

I now come to the Arab Spring, and I will preface my comments by pointing out that when dealing with it, we are dealing with certain elements that are unquantifiable. The Arabs had put up with the Ghaddafis, the Mubaraks, the Assads, for a long time, and had experienced a great deal of economic hardship; but they had never cracked – until 2011. What drove them to this point? Furthermore, at what juncture does a ‘revolutionary’ leader such as Ghaddafi pass from being ‘young’ and ‘fresh’ to ‘old’ and ‘sclerotic’? How and when does a leader become a symbol of stagnation and decadence? Political science cannot answer.  

               

With that in mind, let us narrate how the Arab Spring played out in Syria. If you want a recounting of the first few weeks, turn to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which provides this timeline. Given that the Syrian War went on for the thirteen years, I will not reproduce Britannica’s summary; it is enough to say that the Arab Spring presented all the rulers of the Levant – Assad included – with a dilemma. You are faced with a rebellious populace, and if you want to hang on to power, you need to accommodate. But being the men that they were, the Mubaraks, Assads, Ghaddafis, lacked the ability. Assad responded to the protests by sending in the SAA (Syrian Arab Army). And as could be expected, the SAA shot up ‘soft’ targets: it used machine guns, mortars, tank cannons, and artillery against crowds of civilians, crowds that were much like the crowds of Palestinians queuing outside aid centres in Gaza in 2025, the crowds that were shot and shelled by the Israeli army. Consequently, the Syrian civil protest became militarised. And China and Russia made that possible: for they saw how the US and Europe, equipped with UN Security Council resolutions, had acted against Ghaddafi, and they made sure to stymie any efforts to oust Assad.

In 2025, the war is a historical curio, meaning that we may discount its importance; but we should understand that, at the time, many on the Far Left – and the Far Right – took it seriously.

Those on the ‘extremes’ of politics interpreted the war in two ways. The first school of thought believed that the protests and the riots against Assad were a contrivance – the work of the CIA, Mossad, and the Soros Foundation – and it opined that the Syrian masses were puppets dancing on a string, puppets manipulated by masters in Tel Aviv and Washington, DC.

In opposition to this view, some on the Far Left welcomed the Arab Spring, venerated its martyrs (including the boy Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, who was tortured to death by Assad’s security forces), and saw in the Arab Spring an Incipient Arab revolution, one that would perhaps turn communist. This faction of the Left understood it was being divisive, but it pressed on regardless, because Marxism of any sort thrives on division; siding against Assad and the ‘anti-imperialists’ (that is, Iran, Russia, and China) invigorated the faction; and the Syrian war, which dragged on without, apparently, an end, gave it plenty of fuel.  

In the 2010s, the Syrian war provided much fodder because the war was not resolved: for the West did not want to resolve it. The Libyan civil war finished quickly, thanks to Western intervention, and it finished before the West had time to take stock of the Libyan rebels; in the dramatic days of 2011, the Western powers assumed – vaguely, hopefully – that the rebels were aligned with them ideologically – that the rebels wanted liberal democracy and free and fair democratic elections, held in the best Jimmy Carter-approved tradition. Events proceeded at such a dizzying pace that the West could be forgiven for failing to gauge the rebels accurately; but in the case of the Syrian war, Western policy makers and intellectuals – including Marxist intellectuals – had more time to take the measure of the ideological content of the Syrian revolution. And the West did not like what it saw. True, the anti-Assad Syrians, perhaps influenced by libertarian and anarchist theory, carried out a decentralised and grass-roots rebellion; but all the same, the rebels who came to fore adhered to Islam and a coarse jihadi brand of Islam at that. For the first time, distinctions were drawn by opinion makers in the West between good and bad Islamic sects; Assad belonged to the Alawite sect, and that made Assad, in the words of Mike Enoch, the most ‘civilised’ actor in the conflict. Prominent thinkers on the Far Right and Far Left agreed on the importance of being ‘civilised’, as did the US, UK, and European political establishments, which grudgingly supplied some rebel groups – the ‘decent’, ‘vetted’ ones – but not nearly enough; the Kurds, who were suitably progressive, reaped the lion’s share.

Looking back on the war, we can make a number of observations about the Levantines. One observation is that Levantines possess a genius for forming small but active fighting organisations: in the course of the Syrian war, we encounter a bewildering alphabet soup of miniature armies, forming, splitting, and re-forming, and even a Syrian keeps track of it all with difficulty. The Levantine jihadist who formed a new organisation was entering a crowded and competitive market; and the question he posed to himself was, ‘How can I distinguish myself from my rivals?’. From its first appearance, ISIS overcame the hurdle of market differentiation in a startling and effective way.

Another observation that arises is that Syria is composed of multifarious groups that deeply dislike one another, and this phenomenon gives the lie, perhaps, to any notions of Syrian unity and nationalism. We see it in the vitriolic discourse on social media after the fall of the Assad regime; the Alawites, the Druze, the Kurds, etc., are locked in combat, and none of them appear to want Syria as such to do well. It goes without saying that these tensions were exacerbated in the 2010s; Assad, fighting for his survival, turned Syria into a sectarian state; but Assad did not invent these contradictions – they dwelled underneath the surface well before the war, and after the war, they broke out into the open.

In the course of the war, we in the West were instructed by Assad and his Russian sponsors in the differences between good and bad Islam, good and bad jihadism; Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and pro-Assad Islamist militias (drawn from various Islamic countries) were considered good, and ISIS and anti-Assadist Islamists bad. This had consequences: Hezbollah helped the Russians, Iranians, and the SAA lay waste to towns and cities, and by doing so, Hezbollah damaged its reputation irreparably. In 2006, Hezbollah had fought Israel to a standstill and had become heroes in the eyes of the Arabs; but after 2011, Hezbollah set to work repressing the Arab Spring and the anti-Assad rebellion, and earned the enmity of the Arabs who had come to see Assad as a pariah.

This brings us to some of the peculiarities of the war that may be of interest to the political scientist who prioritises technical elements. In the battle for Syria and Lebanon in WWII, a front line separated the two belligerents, as was standard; and in the battle for Syria in the 21^st century war, we see not neat front lines but blobs that appear, expand, and contract behind enemy lines, sometimes adjacent even to Damascus. The ebb and flow recalls that of the insurgent wars of the 20^th century, but in Syria, the belligerents battled not for the possession of ‘hearts and minds’ but for the possession of cities – charming old cities, the oldest in the world – and the highways connecting them.

 

End of Part I.