So much of the corruption of political theory began to emerge around Hugo Chavez & Venezuela. His Bolivarian-style socialism became cause célèbre for old-school Stalinists & the emerging forces of libertarianism. Criticizing him or his policies became regarded as heresy & all political opposition to his regime in Venezuela was excoriated as orchestrated by US operatives. Political sycophancy replaced political analysis, precisely as Stalinists related to the Soviet Union, to the Dilma Rousseff regime in Brazil, & as they now do to the Assad regime.

That political method–because Stalinism did not die with the collapse of the USSR & is not primarily a cult of personality so much as a political method involving obsequiousness to power–was simply transposed to the uprisings of the Arab Spring which were all indicted as street theater orchestrated by US undercover operatives.

Political analysis, which necessarily involves criticism, is not a form of one-up-man-ship or a way to display intellectual detachment & superiority. It is an essential process & part of understanding how to wrest power from the exploiters & change the world to the advantage of the oppressed, how to rid the world of inequality & the massive human suffering generated by it. Hero worship gets in the way of analysis just as uncritical adulation of Castro has blunted an understanding of Cuba.

When most of the left went gaga over Chavez & his Bolivarian revolution, when all political dissent within Venezuela was denounced as right-wing, it signaled the transition to libertarian theoretical methods & thuggish Stalinist political bullying against those who took exception to Chavez.

Now that we know such theoretics led to the full-blown capitulation before Assad’s dictatorship in Syria, we can take the rubbish about Venezuela on within a context it previously lacked. We now know the matrix of the degeneration into Stalinism-cum-libertarianism began with kissing the ass of Chavez rather than trying to understand the complexities & process unfolding in Venezuelan politics which so profoundly affected all of Latin American politics.

This is the April 19th protest in Caracas called by opponents of President Nicolás Maduro which they named “the mother of all protests.” Will these hundreds of thousands be denounced as liberals & fascists for protesting the Maduro regime even though it donated $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration committee (through Citgo Petroleum, a US affiliate of Venezuela’s state oil company), making it one of the largest corporate donors to that event? Or will political dissent in Venezuela be respected & championed as a democratic right? Unfortunately the Stalinist-cum-libertarian left is already calling for Maduro to crack down on protesters with the full weight of repression, just as they endorse carpet bombing of civilians in Syria.

We stand with the democracy activists in Venezuela.
Venceremos!

(Photo by Ariana Cubillos/AP)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQX7Q1glbco

Those who love Rollie Mukherjee’s art & honor her commitment to Kashmiri self-determination will love this video which features her art.

Many probably object to the harshness of my polemics against Assadists & would prefer a more pedagogical tone, less ridicule. But in my now 51 years of political activism, I’ve never encountered such political debasement, such theoretical corruption where wing-nut conspiracies, hating on Muslims & Jews, vilifying freedom fighters, & lionizing dictators & armies has been the norm.

In those five decades, I’ve seen the antiwar, socialist, & Palestinian solidarity movements grow & decline & have seen plenty of crazy-pants nonsense since dissent attracts the deranged like a home away from the asylum. But I have never seen anything like what libertarianism & Assadism are doing to those movements. They’re a wrecking ball that have laid those movements waste.

My polemics aren’t going to soften up. What is at stake to my mind is the future of dissent, of democracy, not just in Syria but in all of the Middle East, & quite frankly the future of humanity against the predations of neoliberal capitalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism.

This Syrian child is a clarion call to either stand with equality & democracy or take your place with the armies terrorizing the globe & making children the majority of victims.

This year I’ll be 73 years old & I’ll be damned if I’ll grow old without fighting this all the way to the grave whether anyone likes it or not.

(Photo from Free Syria Media Hub)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8YOcdvCYis

Vanessa Beeley, Assad’s version of Leni Riefenstahl, flew to Aleppo to get the line straight on what happened with the suicide bomber. She really has to be heard to grasp her corruption & viciousness for which she is well-remunerated.

Nobody plays distraught & outrage quite so melodramatically. No one lies for Assad with quite the same aplomb. Probably diplomatic arts she learned from her father, the British diplomat who helped broker the partition of Palestine.

In her litany of accusations against the White Helmets for the suicide bombing, Beeley neglected to answer two questions:

–Why did Assad negotiate the forced relocation of thousands of civilians if he could not guarantee their safe passage with cordons of Syrian soldiers?

–How did the suicide bomber get within ten miles of the bus convoy with a cracker delivery van without arousing some suspicion from Assad’s military or without being stopped & searched?

The video is posted here because no one discredits Beeley quite like Beeley herself:

Got a problem with Pope Francis calling the suicide bombing near Aleppo “ignoble.” I’ve heard stronger condemnations of nose-picking in public.

As I’ve pointed out before, Pope Francis is a case study in the politics of ambiguity. About Syria, he speaks in passionate abstractions, takes no sides, makes no condemnations.

But perhaps Pope Francis isn’t so equivocal after all. In October 2016 he made Mario Zenari, an archbishop & the papal envoy to Syria, a new cardinal which makes him eligible to be pope. Zenari is an unapologetic supporter of Assad & the counter-revolution.

This is one of the bombed out busses near Aleppo which was filled with children & women. Would you call this act “ignoble” or would your range of epithets go beyond the wimpy?

The English journalist Robert Fisk speaks English & Arabic but it’s no use since he has marbles in his head. He’s always been patronizing & orientalist about Arabs & Muslims but ever since he was embedded up the ass of the Syrian army he’s become a pathetic figure in journalism & apologist for Assad. Not unlike Tariq Ali on FB posting hateful Islamophobic bloggers, US generals, Eva Bartlett the David Icke apostle, Mint Press, & Global Research for his resources on Syria.

Fisk’s new piece of Assad apologetics is titled “If Trump cares so much about Syrian babies, why is he not condemning the rebels who slaughtered children?” He nailed Trump. Skewered him politically. Took him down & Ivanka too. But what did he expect from the orange pumpkin? Isn’t Fisk concerned that all the Assad libertarians will be offended by this article since most of them are strong supporters of Trump? What about Assad gassing civilians?

Fisk portrays the conflict in Syria as a civil war between Assad & “jihadi head-choppers” so we would like him to explain this iconic photo of 23-year-old Abd Alkader Habak, a Syrian revolutionist who was taking photos of Syrians being evacuated near Aleppo when the suicide bomb exploded. He was thrown to the ground by the blast but got up to rescue injured & dying children. The politics of their parents were of no interest to him. Their humanity was.

(Photo by Muhammad Alrageb)

A revolution not a civil war
Is the message of the Syrian revolution to the world
رسالة الثّوار السّوريّين إلى العالم :
By Khaled Salama

https://twitter.com/Linashamy/status/854213952355672064

Bill O’Reilly was meeting the pope today when Fox News announced his firing for sexual harassment. This is actually the second time several women have accused him of sexual harassment but Fox let it pass the first time.

We wish he would have been publicly humiliated in a courtroom & forever banned from ever opening his big fat mouth again but firing is good. It will be a matter of time before some other media picks him up: Global Research or Mint Press, maybe even RT, since their politics are indistinguishable.

Asma Al-Assad is so classy, so Euro that she’d fit right in to London or New York socialite circles. Her & Bashar make such an adorable couple & they’re so in love. How could anyone say mean things about them?

It took a few weeks of adjustment, but now torturing dissidents, hanging them, & bombing civilians isn’t unnerving if they stay on their medications & only talk about revolutionists as jihadi head-choppers. All the adulation from libertarians around the world, the memes from Tim Anderson, the videos from Syrian Girl, the support of old CIA & FBI agents, really help with the psycho stuff. Even Tariq Ali, Robert Fisk, Seymour Hersh, Patrick Cockburn are in their corner now.

What could go wrong?

There’s no point in my attempting a scientific rebuttal to Theodore Postol, the retired MIT professor who claims Assad did not use sarin gas on civilians in August 2013 or on April 4th, 2017, but that civilians on the ground gassed themselves. The guy knows physics, nuclear engineering, neutrons, molecular dynamics, anti-ballistic missile systems, & other stuff like that. You can’t take him down with scientific rebuttals if you flunked Physics 101.

Of course the Assadists & libertarians passing the guy’s articles around explaining how Assad couldn’t have done it don’t know any more science than I do. They’re just clinging for dear life to a guy with credentials so their claims that the attack never happened or that White Helmets murdered their own children to make a “snuff movie of dead kids” will seem less deranged.

Nuclear physics & anti-ballistic missile systems aren’t my forte but political investigation is so I’m gonna take a go at the old boy my way. We can dispense with journalist apologists for Assad like Seymour Hersh who deny the gassing; he doesn’t know much about politics anymore, let alone physics. My first encounter with Hersh was with antiwar activists reaming him in Minneapolis in 1970 when he tried to blame the My Lai massacre entirely on Lt. Calley’s psychology & excluded the US government from his indictment.

Postol’s most authoritative allies include Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a small US group of retired CIA agents, FBI agents, military officers, & US diplomats, including Ray McGovern, Ann Wright, Coleen Rowley who now presume authority & leadership of the US antiwar movement. Their leadership explains why the antiwar movement is lilliputian, libertarian, pro-Assad’s dictatorship, & why no sane people want to associate with it.

It may be time to interrogate why so many spies & military officials are playing principled antiwar advocates. That’s a new one for me in 51 years of antiwar activism. Why the hell did the antiwar movement, even in its weakened state, give such disreputable people authority & a platform to peddle their libertarian approach to politics? Of course they oppose the Syrian revolution; for heaven’s sakes, they conducted US wars against revolutions & spied on antiwar & other political activists for all their working lives. If they’re sincere in their post-retirement transubstantiation to rebels, they should learn to take the bleachers like every new activist to listen & learn & stop pretending they have something to teach. If they don’t come clean on what they did as spies & generals, who can trust them anyway?

One of Postol’s longtime champions is David Icke who’s been publishing the guy’s rubbish since 2013. Who knows? Maybe their association began with Postol’s conversion to Icke’s ideology of obscurantism, anti-papism, obsessions with Lucifer, reptilian Jewish bankers & the Illuminati. The writer Alice Walker seemed sane until we knew she went along with all this crap.

Our man Postol isn’t leaving any paper trails back to David Icke but his association & collaboration with Syrian Girl, an outspoken disciple of Icke, doesn’t do his scientific credentials any service. Just because you have a PhD in physics doesn’t mean you haven’t lost your marbles some where along the way. David Duke has a PhD. So do Henry Kissinger & Madeleine Albright.

This photo is a man carrying the body of a child after Assad’s sarin gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun, April 4, 2017. If there are any authorities about who gassed civilians, let the civilian survivors speak & denounce Assad.

(Photo by Ammar Abdullah/Reuters)