Actual Genocide Happening in Syria

TheAdultInTheRoom wrote:

SB wrote:

Sorry, but this is just dumb. You clearly don't actually read any sources from the actual left. Again, you talking about liberal Democrats, who, by any international or historical standard, are centrists at most-- though I get that by the standards of today's unhinged US conservatives, everyone but themselves, including Liz Cheney, is now "the left"!

It is a very common position on the left to argue that leaving Saddam (or Assad, or Gaddafi) in power would have been preferable to the consequences of removing them-- e.g. murder, mayhem, failed states, and the regional spread of extremism. But we on the serious left are also aware that these consequences are not always seen as unintended or unwanted by their perpetrators. Israel in particular, seems to prefer murder and mayhem in Syria and Lebanon in particular. Maybe your beef is with Israel, the US, and the EU and not "the left".

I don't know what this imaginary "actual left" of yours is but the hivemind left in the United States doesn't have any diversity of thought.

Some guy on X or Reddit that has zero political influence can declare he's on the left all he likes but the people that actually have power are very uniform in their thinking.

I do not care what the left in Europe thinks about anything. Europe is completely irrelevant on the global stage and it's getting more and more irrelevant every day.

SB wrote:

TheAdultInTheRoom wrote:

I don't know what this imaginary "actual left" of yours is but the hivemind left in the United States doesn't have any diversity of thought.

Some guy on X or Reddit that has zero political influence can declare he's on the left all he likes but the people that actually have power are very uniform in their thinking.

I do not care what the left in Europe thinks about anything. Europe is completely irrelevant on the global stage and it's getting more and more irrelevant every day.

If you're only talking about people with "power and influence" you're referring to a miniscule spectrum of opinion on the biggest questions, represented by a few thousand people in a global population of billions.

There very much IS a left in the world, including in the US (it's the people the Dems are always holding back and blaming for their losses!), with ideas that are both distinct from those of liberal centrists and easily accessible.

Here are a handful of sources from just the English speaking world to get you started:

-Jacobin Mag (US based with 75,000 print subs and 3 million monthly web vistors).

-Mondowiess

-Zeteo

-Greyzone

-Diem25

There's no excuse for the kind of angry, brazen ignorance you bring to these discussions. There's a greater spectrum of opinion and depth of knowledge in these forums than you like to assume. And you've never said a thing that even remotely represents an original take. Your ideas are 100% boilerplate far right positions these days.

Precious Roy wrote:

The Syrian government has actually recognized that the some of the fighting with the Assadist holdouts went to far and crimes were committed. Whether the government follows through with promises to hold people accountable or not will be a big signal as to whether this was just an isolated episode or the preview of a campaign of revenge against the Alawites living along the coast.

The Syrian government has signed an agreement with the Kurds to integrate them into the government. That is a big deal as the Kurds have long wanted independence and could have started a very bloody war with the Turks itching for any excuse to bomb the Kurds. But this comes as the PKK has negotiated a cease fire with Turkey. The Kurds seem to recognize that Iran has been marginalized and Turkey is now calling the shots. Whether this holds or not is to be seen.

Holding Syria together is an all but impossible task. Syria was formed out of Ottoman Empire leftovers and never had a coherent ethnic national identity. Getting people to go along to get along after decades of murderous Assadist rule is something that probably won't happen. But if it does happen, there will be many events like this along the way.

TheAdultInTheRoom wrote:

Ha ha clown wrote:

Hysterical coming from the poster that claimed the COVID vaccine did nothing. Err... well, it reduced severity of COVID, but didn't reduce transmission. Err... well, it reduced transmission by 40%, but I know somebody that was vaccinated and still got COVID so the government shouldn't mandate it because it doesn't do anything.

You're a f*cking joke and nobody here or in real life takes you seriously. I just crapped out a turd that's less ignorant than you.

40% effective within a week of injection and basically useless a month later.

For a diseases that's effectively harmless to healthy people.

EVERYONE I know was vaccinated and still got COVID. Even the people who wore their mask alone in their cars and got multiple boosters.

If a real pandemic ever hits humanity is absolutely screwed because people like you sh*t the bed to thoroughly on COVID.

TheAdultInTheRoom wrote:

SB wrote:

If you're only talking about people with "power and influence" you're referring to a miniscule spectrum of opinion on the biggest questions, represented by a few thousand people in a global population of billions.

There very much IS a left in the world, including in the US (it's the people the Dems are always holding back and blaming for their losses!), with ideas that are both distinct from those of liberal centrists and easily accessible.

Here are a handful of sources from just the English speaking world to get you started:

-Jacobin Mag (US based with 75,000 print subs and 3 million monthly web vistors).

-Mondowiess

-Zeteo

-Greyzone

-Diem25

There's no excuse for the kind of angry, brazen ignorance you bring to these discussions. There's a greater spectrum of opinion and depth of knowledge in these forums than you like to assume. And you've never said a thing that even remotely represents an original take. Your ideas are 100% boilerplate far right positions these days.

Surely you can see how absurd it is to call the people who actually represent you in government a "miniscule spectrum of opinion"... lol....

You're so busy pretending you're ideas are nuanced and sophisticated that you've lost the plot.

SB wrote:

Cheshire Cheater wrote:

@SB - a few questions, mostly non-rhetorical:

"A free Palestine would have to entail a peaceful, democratic, self-determining Syria-- something that Israel lives in greater fear of than it does of a Syria run by genocidal maniacs." - Can you explain this a bit more? If by "free Palestine" you mean a Palestinian state, Israel has offered them versions of that many times over, all without a peaceful, democratic Syria. I'm not clear on the connection between a peaeceful Syria and Palestinian statehood.

"Everyone on the actual left, including those listed above, see Israeli apartheid/genocide and a destabilized Syria and Lebanon as linked and to the advantage of Israel (they are great pretexts for Greater Israeli expansionism)." - Re: Greater Israeli expansionism, how do you square this with the actual history of Israel returning the Sinai, withdrawing from Gaza and taking down all settlements (and offering Gaza to Egypt in the 70s), making numerous offers of Gaza and nearly all the West Bank to Palestinians for a state, etc.? There's no denying there're some crazy, ethnic-cleansing-loving wackos in Israel, but that's far from the whole story. The history is a lot more complicated.

And re: apartheid/genocide, yes, what's happening in the west bank sure seems like apartheid, but what is your case for the genocide charge? There are numerous wars this century with way higher death tolls that aren't considered genocides. And in this one, the ratio of civilians to combatants killed is much lower than the norm for urban warfare. In fact, that ratio is no higher than the US battles against ISIS in places like Mosul, and possibly quite a bit lower. And of course it's in Hamas's best interests for Gazan civilians to get killed, and they've fought the war with that as their main goal.

Okay, so some of these questions are a bit rhetorical, but I ask them out of genuine curiosity and actually want to hear your views.

I'm going to thank PCRF-Guy for doing most of the work to answer the questions about the history of Israel/Palestine "peace talks". His answers are detailed, accurate, and very well grounded in the history.

I would add the following general statements:

1. The struggle for Palestinian statehood has always depended on the strength of support emanating from neighboring countries (esp, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt). Thus, the US and Israel, prior to entering into any kind of diplomatic process with the Palestinians, did its utmost to weaken this support by almost any means necessary, including support for violent suppression of Palestinian resistance politics in the named countries. These means ranged from taking on Egypt as a client state and inducing Sadat to finally abandon the Palestinian Revolution, to encouraging Assad the father to massacre supporters of Palestinian liberation in Syria (see the Hama Massacre in 1982). In fact, Palestinian liberation remains extremely popular in the middle east in general, and the authoritarianism on the part of most regimes in the region is based in part on keeping this popular support from ever being expressed in policy.

2. With the US acting as both mediator and material supporter of the enemies of full Palestinian statehood, there was never any chance of a deal that would involve anything but the complete betrayal of the cause. The one offered to Yasser Arafat was so far from acceptable that even some Israeli officials could see that it was impossible for him to accept it without going down in history as a complete sellout of the movement.

3. The recourse to "complexity" is a tired ploy by Israel apologists. It relies on a complete de-historicization and de-politicization of the 100 year old Palestinian liberation struggle by reducing Palestinians to a perpetual "problem" to be solved by Israel and the imperial US, when in fact Palestinians are behaving in exactly the way any colonized people would under the similar circumstances. They are refusing to let their legitimate claim to territory taken from them in 1948 simply lapse with the passage of time. The "problem" here is not a complex one: It is the very idea of an ethnostate on colonized land. The success of a project like this eventually relies on either the permanent control of the disqualified and non-compliant indigenous peoples, or their removal by means of expulsion or murder. All the talk of "complexity" eventually boils down to racist claims about the inability of Palestinians to ever, under any circumstances, live peaceably alongside Jewish settlers. We have seen these assumptions made before about whole categories of people, from indigenous North Americans, to freed African slaves, to colonized Africans, to European Jews, and it always ends the same way-- with terror, repression, and sometimes genocide.