Now ain't the time for your tears

 Bashar al-Assad killed 1500 people, on the night of August 21st 2013, with sarin gas in Volcano rockets, fired by his troops into the Eastern suburbs of Damascus. A lot of the dead were children, because their smaller lungs could less resist asphyxiation, and because their parents had got them to sleep closer to the ground, for fear that they would die from the relentless conventional shelling of civilians by Assad’s forces.



 I remember seeing one report of a possible attack that night. Within a day or so pictures of the victims appeared on our screens. That they had no conventional wounds, but were dying in their droves, made it obvious that this was a chemical attack. Still the news reported it as a claim made by activists, with the Syrian government claiming first that no attack had occurred, then that they had found weapons in a tunnel with Islamic terrorists that they had captured. This followed the [pattern of the entire conflict. Far from there being a Western conspiracy to besmirch Assad, the media gave his excuse for murder parity of esteem. In 2011 when his forces were shooting down demonstrators outside mosques, the claim that he was fighting terrorism was met with an editorial line that we don’t know who the opposition is. When his forces were carrying out massacres like that in Houla in 2012, the lie machine gave an alternative narrative whereby the rebels had done it themselves, and the media told us that nothing is certain in the fog of war. No matter that the Assad narrative was exposed again as a lie, the news cycle moved on without a care. After Marie Colvin was killed reporting the constant shelling of civilian areas by the régime, it became difficult to report the opposition story, and most of the reporting came from those who accepted Assad’s hospitality and largely or entirely gave his version, like Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk and Jeremy Bowen.



 At the time of the sarin attack I didn’t think the lies that important to deconstruct, as they were so thin. I waited to see if anyone from the attack site challenged the idea that Assad was responsible, one thing that would indicate that any other suspect was remotely plausible, and nobody ever did. There are a number of other ways those with a knowledge of the situation on the ground could see it would be impossible for the rebels to have committed the crime, from the impossibility of one group sneaking into Damascus to fire the weapon without other fighters or civilians knowing or caring, to the absurdity of Islamic extremists carrying out false flag attacks on Muslims to get the West to intervene.



 But the genocide deniers are not working from knowledge, but as much ignorance as they can muster. Like Holocaust denial, it isn’t really purposed for itself, but to achieve a political objective, to deny the threat of the real perpetrator. In some ways Holocaust denial is more offensive, it’s designed to rehabilitate the Nazis, while today’s version is more so that its practitioners can be smartarses who can think themselves superior for seeing through the justification for another Middle East war. In some ways it is worse, the Holocaust was 70 years ago, you could see Assad’s chemical attack on your TV.
Some of the excuses for reasoning were pitiful. Tariq Ali wrote on his blog at the London Review of Books, “Cui prodest? as the Romans used to inquire. Who profits? Clearly, not the Syrian regime.” Of course it did. It frightened more opposition civilians to flight, it reinforced the belief that Assad could survive, it shifted the world’s attention to how to stop the US from intervening.



 Which it was never going to do. Since the First World War there have been laws against the use of chemical weapons, and so the international community is forced to pay attention in some manner. If you deny such massacres as this, it isn’t going to stop humanitarian imperialists using massacres as an excuse for American intervention, it will rehabilitate American power as the seeming only way to stop them. The alternative, that the Syrian people be given the means to stop the massacres and remove the cause, never gets on the table, if the racist belief that those struggling against Assad are all crazy jihadis who will kill you as soon as look at you prevails. Far from the opposition being a sectarian force well-funded by Turkey and the Gulf, the Free Syrian Army and other moderate brigades were the only people in the region suffering from a lack of arms, because the truth is that they have no imperial sponsor. Their weakness has allowed Islamists to fill the gap, especially those like ISIS who merely parasite on the revolution and spent no time fighting Assad. 



 So because he had to be seen to do something, Obama declared red lines, and promised there would be action against Assad if he continued to violate them, especially by using “a whole bunch of chemical weapons”. When he did that, when the US proclaimed itself convinced that he had, nothing was done. Obama went to Congress to pass the buck, without any firm proposal as to how the US would respond, allowing the most lurid tales as to what would transpire to be circulated, and nothing was done. John McCain was one of the few to propose practical steps to fight Assad, giving anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the FSA and bombing Assad’s airfields, and he was portrayed as a dangerous warmonger for it.



 There will be demonstrations in a couple of weeks around the world to commemorate the worst massacre of the worst genocide of the 21st Century. They will be small demonstrations, because Syrians have largely been abandoned by the world. The idea that we should avoid this issue because the Western leaders are constantly inciting against Assad, and they are the bigger enemy, is a sick joke to Syrians. They have faced three years of terror, of constantly hearing of the murder of their fellow Syrians by the government, of fear that they or their relatives could always be next. They have learned to hate the Russians and Iranians who have assisted in the rape of their country. They have looked on with bemusement and anger as they are told that they are just a proxy in an American backed sectarian war, and that they need to be protected from an American attack. 



 If you have been demonstrating over Gaza, and don’t like pro-Israelis asking what about Syria, go to one of the vigils this August, and you will be able to ask them why they don’t demonstrate against massacres in Gaza or in Syria. If you can’t make it to a demonstration find some way of letting it be known that you mourn for the people of the Eastern Ghouta. Now is the time for your tears.