They’d rather be right

 This was originally written for Muftah Magazine's Syria Collection in 2016, in which a heavily edited version appeared under the title 'Some Leftists Would Rather Be “Right” Than Principled on Syria'.


 If you are in a left-wing group, try this bit of stage magic on your friends. Ask them what they would like to see happen in Syria, and I’ll tell what their answer will be. Half of them will say, “the victory of the revolution”, those are the hacks who think they know something about Syria. The other half will say “peace”, and these liberals have bothered to learn nothing. What you won’t hear any of them say is the answer that most Syrians would give if they could articulate it, “the victory of the rebels over the Assad régime”. And therein lies the gross failure of the left, not even to answer the right question on Syria, but to know what the question is, and that they are failing. Even as they compete with other left-wing groups for who has the best line, each one thinks their organisation has done right by Syrians.


 When the revolution broke out in 2011, I had the good fortune to follow the writing of my friend of 20 years, Robin Yassin-Kassab. From the beginning I see could see the shape of the pro-revolution and the anti-revolution narratives. Free Syrians saw their struggle as a simple one for freedom and dignity, while their enemies presented it as a complicated one we couldn’t hope to understand, based on religious hatred, where the problem was that neighbouring states had turned it into a proxy war by arming the opposition.
I started writing a blog, News of the Revolution in Syria because I could see that much of the left was accepting the anti-revolution narrative by default, or even, like the leaders of the Stop the War Coalition, actively promoting it. All along I could see that even those on the left who thought they were better than that would accept parts of this reactionary message. As a result, Syrians have been appalled at the behaviour of the left, a process that has gone unnoticed by much of the Western left, and those who have noticed, always think they themselves are immune to the criticism because they have done enough. So I would find myself appalled by the behaviour of leftists, and fear for the future of the left when Syria was such a gaping hole in their conduct. Whenever I thought I might be too hard, I would look at what my friend Robin was saying, and it would inevitably be harsher, and given that most Syrians are not as secular or leftist as he is, I could assume that even his contempt was mild compared to the average.

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 A few weeks ago the BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet said on the news, “We have been told that peace requires that the US and Russia come together.” Yes we have, by her, and by the rest of the Western media. Which has constructed an image of the conflict where the problem is that each side is arming its own proxies, and the role of the Great Powers has to be to bring them to the conference table to talk peace. As Syrians know, the truth is that Russia and Iran have been behind Assad’s efforts to crush them from the first, while the Americans have been stopping any friendly nation from providing Free Syrians with the weaponry they need to defend themselves. It requires some careful analysis to see where the interests of Russia and America differ, as the one benefits from Assad continuing in power while the other is responding to its previous imperial over-reach by handing Syrians over to their oppressors, but the Left (with a handful of exceptions) has nothing of the ability to comprehend this, stuck as it is in a world where everyone is bombing Syria just the same, and we might as well concentrate on stopping Britain bombing ISIS, even if that is almost entirely irrelevant to the life and death of Syrians.


 There are other aspects that the left misses out on. The wave of disinformation that comes directly out of Damascus, Tehran and Moscow, the way this is given prominence in mainstream Western media as a reliable source, whereas opposition sources are always unverified, and all too often it is the US administration’s spin that is presented as the alternative to Damascus. The way supposedly alternative media just laps up or creates its own additions to the Assad narrative, how it is the West that made ISIS what it is, how the Israelis run it, how the Saudis and Qataris fund it. We can see how the left groups fail because their methodology of looking for anti-Western sources to tell them the real story in this case just leads them to those like Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk who present the partially concealed and almost straightforwardly lunatic versions of the Assadist narrative. But those individuals outside the left groups are often no better, thinking that RT or Global research are wakening them to the real powers in the world when they are peddling the least subtle of lies.

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 Almost all of the left groups have their history on Syria bookended by their support for Hands Off Assad demonstrations in the wake of his chemical attacks in 2013, and their support today for Jeremy Corbyn. Just as then they simply wouldn’t listen to the argument that they were disrespecting Syrians by pretending the threat against them was US action against Assad, they simply won’t hear it when it’s pointed out that Jeremy Corbyn is pro-Assad, he called the SAA the credible and acceptable force without whose support we shouldn’t attack ISIS, pro-Iran, six out of his seven PMQs to Cameron on Syria in 2012-13 were asking for an increase in Iran’s participation in the debate over Syria’s future, and pro-Russia, he welcomed the Russian intervention. 99% of Corbynites simply won’t engage with the facts, including those who shouted down a speaker at yesterday’s Stop the War conference who challenged Corbyn over his inaction over Syria by chanting “No more war.”

 

 There was a Middle East / North Africa solidarity conference this year at which one speaker pointed out how much the left had failed over Syria, prompting Judith Orr of the SWP to say she didn’t know what he was on about, they had written lots of articles for Socialist Worker on the revolution. The SWP does encapsulate the failure of left groups quite well, as its insularity makes it unaware that it might do anything wrong. Simon Assaf of the SWP went to the first Syrian solidarity conference, and then stayed in the hallway selling books and not engaging with anyone. They have attended no anti-Assad demonstrations, their leader Alex Callinicos has consistently promoted Patrick Cockburn’s views on Syria, Anne Alexander wrote a piece for the International Socialism Journal in which she claimed the Free Syrian Army was seeking an alliance with ISIS. Callincos also defended the Stop the War Coalition leadership over its refusal to allow any Syrians on its platforms, calling its critics “supporters of Western airpower.”

 RS21 split from the SWP in 2013, and initially said even less about Syria. In late 2014 they put an article by Andy Cunningham up on their website that said we shouldn’t support the Free Syrian Army because it might let Islamic extremists win power. In 2015 they discovered the refugee crisis, but only as a way of bashing the Tories for not letting those stuck in Calais into Britain. One of their members Miriam Asfar joined the Syrian Solidarity Campaign Organisers group (I’d been asked to join by the existing organisers, despite my reluctance to get more politically active) on Facebook, and immediately denounced all the supporters of a no fly zone as imperialists. I pointed her to a piece called Blanket Thinkers on my blog where there is a discussion with Robin Yassin-Kassab and a couple of other Syrians in which we discover that if leftists start their pitch to Syrians by telling them how terrible Western imperialism, they are going to be written off as pro-Assad. She responded by claiming I’d called her pro-Assad, and flounced off. The following year she apparently told an rs21 meeting it might have been a mistake to write off all no fly zone supporters. A couple of their members have done some Syrian solidarity work, but the other members seem to think that they can justify doing less than nothing themselves by taking credit for that.

 Socialist Resistance think they are much better, and in having links to Gilbert Achcar, they do have contact with some of the better leftist thinking on Syria. Still they think of it as one issue among many, so when related issues come up, like the abuse meted out to Michael Weiss by supposed pro-Palestinian activist Richard Silverstein, their members are on the wrong side. Or Tony Greenstein, who accuses the rebels of being Israel supported and users of chemical weapons, they defend without ever mentioning his views on Syria. And their support for Corbyn infects everything else they do, so they were on the side of those claiming that the 70,000 moderate rebels were just an invention of David Cameron’s.

 Similarly Workers Power formally have the best position of the small left groups on Syria, demanding the arming of the Free Syrian Army with anti-aircraft weapons. But when I read Marcus Halaby’s pamphlet on Syria, it took the situation and turns it into an apologia for their own narrow splinter of politics. So instead of attacking Stop the War, they attack the same people in their political group guise as Counterfire, because that is who Workers Power compete with for members, while they think Stop the War is a good thing. The pamphlet also attacks unnamed FSA commanders who might want Western intervention, and claims the Syrian National Coalition wasn’t really trying to displace the regime, but would be happy with obtaining some ministerial posts. It has nothing to say about the actual debates going on inside or outside Syria, just promotes Workers Power. And when I talked to other members of Workers Power, the understanding seemed to be very shallow, it wasn’t hard for them to veer off into seeing the US as the main problem in Syria. As a smaller cult, they seem to let one member to write the policy and everyone else to memorise it. This wasn’t so bad on Syria, but when their leader Richard Brenner decided the policy on Ukraine was that the Ukrainians were fascists, it destroyed any credibility they had built up. They used to come to Syrian solidarity demonstrations, but then they got too busy supporting Corbyn, including aggressively attacking anyone in the Labour Party that didn’t support Corbyn’s policy on Syria.

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 Across the Atlantic, the International Socialist Organization has been better. They have organised marches and demonstrations*, and co-ordinated with other Syrian solidarity activists, even if occasionally thinking they can decide who is part of the movement or not. Stanley Heller wrote an excellent piece in Socialist Worker ending with what can be done to show solidarity, from protests to challenging the Assadist narrative wherever it appears. They have enthusiastically picked up on Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami’s book Burning Country, and its message of the Syrian revolution and its betrayal.

 But still, they seem stuck in the same mentality as other far left groups. Indeed their members were shocked to find that the British SWP was so bad on Syria, just about the time they had signed a joint statement on Syria, which equated the Russian and US bombing and told Syrians they shouldn’t accept support from Islamists or anyone who asked for Western arms. I read a piece by Ashley Smith in Socialist Worker, and it starts very well with extensive praise for and quoting from Burning Country, but then it goes on to say that Saudi Arabia and Qatar want to arm the rebels, but they are never going to defy the US, so Syrians have to forget about them and look to the international working class, which seems very detached from reality in the way that left groups are. They also have continued to support the PKK/YPG attacks on Turkey which weaken its ability to support the Syrian revolution against Assad, and conversely deny there is anything progressive about Turkey’s policy at all, as they enable the FSA to retake 1000 sq km around Jarablus. Or they will say that Jabhat al-Nusra as was and even Ahrar al-Sham are just as reactionary as the regime, when Syrians have always seen them as better, even if they didn’t want to be ruled by Islamists, and certainly after they broke the siege of Aleppo, Syrians refuse to fall into the trap of seeing them as a legitimate target. When régime propaganda claimed a massacre had taken place when Islamist groups conquered the Alawite village of al-Zaraa, they condemned them even though it proved not to have happened.

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 I haven’t bothered to talk about the worst of the left, the Tariq Alis, the George Galloways. But they will be what is thrown at the left when Syria is done with. The world isn’t forgiving when the Left makes mistakes, it doesn’t have the money to buy good PR. When the Left made the mistake of supporting Stalinist tyranny it produced a generation of anti-communism, which even those like the Trotskyists who opposed Stalin were not immune to. When there is no longer the need to keep quiet about Syria to protect the Obama administration’s disengagement from the Middle East, the association of the left with every aspect of Assad’s genocide will begin. Unless the Left understands they not only have to show proper solidarity, to look at Syria the way Syrians do, to distinguish themselves from not only the grotesquely pro-Assad, but all the clueless leftists who offer nothing but slogans about revolution, then everyone is going to be caught up in the association between leftism, torture, rape and other atrocities. But that isn’t going to happen, because if they were listening to that sort of message, they would have heard it already. I fear for the future, when someone who wants a better world will be perceived as the worst evil. It will make it harder to fight for any sort of freedom and dignity, to defend the rights we have already. Indeed, by failing Syrians, the left has ensured that we are all likely to be treated like Syrians.

*I may have been overpraising the ISO there.