The feminist in me is having a hissy fit eruption. Why is it that big men with booming voices can pontificate mousey ideas & be treated as oracles? Over five decades as a feminist & I still don’t have a grasp on what makes fools so appealing under patriarchy.

A tribute to the Arab Spring uprisings

Let me just express my profound objections to the prevailing belief, expressed in so many pernicious ways, that the peoples of the Middle East, in particular Arabs, are incapable of democracy. They’re portrayed as bovine peoples suited to & content with living under dictatorship. Some, shaking their heads in pity, will say ‘that’s the regrettable heritage of colonialism.’

To rebut this rubbish, it isn’t necessary to speak of racism though that is the heart of such a belief. One only need consider the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2011 all over the Middle East, most powerfully in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, with strong reverberations in Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan. What is going on in the Middle East with massive repression in Egypt & Bahrain, with carpet bombing in Yemen & Syria is the international response to destroy every vestige of those powerful democratic movements against dictators, military juntas, feudal monarchs.

What pity is due is only to those who deny those uprisings, who mock them as CIA orchestrated, who scorned them as “Islamist,” who never understood what the hell was going on when millions of people rose up in the most powerful, fearless ways to demand democracy. And by the way, those revolutions ain’t over till the peoples of those countries say they are over.

Charlottesville exposes associations between fascists & Assad supporters

The more astute Assadist ideologues have torn themselves away from vilifying the White Helmet rescue workers to address the associations between white supremacists, fascists, & Assad supporters made so apparent in Charlottesville. The obtuse among them don’t see the association between fascists & Assadists as a problem.

It’s called being between a rock & a hard place because in fact the social base of Assad’s supporters are the extreme rightwing: libertarians, Islamophobes, anti-Semites, & fascists. The Assad regime isn’t the least bit shy about politically associating with those forces. Bartlett & Beeley who get their marching orders from the regime regularly report about their associations with European fascist individuals & groups. They are both entirely open about their associations with David Icke who believes extraterrestrial reptiles in the form of Rothschild bankers called the Illuminati run the world & sees Syria (which no longer has Jewish citizens) as a battleground for defeating the Illuminati. (No one said their ideas were rational; obscurantism is a feature of fascism.)

The more astute among this bad lot recognize the problems of being outed as fascists. Sarah Abed, who writes more political rubbish that anyone should be allowed in a lifetime, tweeted: “Supporting President Assad has nothing to do with fascism & everything to do with being against terrorism, imperialism, & western intervention.” Abed kind of gets it because she also said if fascists “support Assad & Putin against terrorism & imperialism why is that a bad thing?” But unlike most in the Hands Off Syria Coalition crowd, she gets that association with fascism is at least a public relations problem. She has no objections to the associations since she is a fascist.

Assadists have been able to garner thousands of ill-informed, sometimes well-meaning supporters because they don’t know how to probe behind apologetics & propaganda to find the truth about the brutal political character of the Assad regime, about the massive, popular revolution against his dictatorship, about what political forces are funding, training, arming militias like ISIS & Al-Qaeda. They’ve been sold a bill of goods that Syria is only about defeating US militarism when in fact it is about an alliance of counter-revolutionary forces defeating revolution.

We need to use the tragedy of Charlottesville to educate about the deep affinities between fascist forces internationally & the Assad dictatorship & to build support for the popular revolutionary forces against him who during carpet bombing ceasefires come out in force with placards denouncing both the Assad regime & ISIS & Al-Qaeda.