I don’t remember when I began studying the Syrian revolution in any detail.  I know that in its early years I pretty much accepted what had been handed down to me from commonplace sources on the left. I formed a quite typical image; Assad, for all his faults – was a secular leader in the image of a progressive pan-Arab-nationalism harkening back to figures such as Nasser – and his regime was, ultimately, a last stand against a toxic ISIS type religious extremism threatening to overwhelm Syria.

Once I started looking at the situation in more detail, however; once I started consulting accounts from Syrian activists locked into a life and death struggle against the regime, I began to form a very different picture.  I learnt that – contrary to his ‘secular’ credentials – Assad had released leading members of ISIS from Syrian prisons after the revolution had broken out.  I learnt that he had done this to help infect the revolution with the spore of religious fundamentalism.  But more importantly, he had done this so he could bomb hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians into oblivion to secure his grotesque form of power, a repression which could then be couched in the language of a war against Muslim extremism – now where have we heard that before?

One of the few figures on the radical left in the western world who engaged with Syrian voices and made a systematic attempt to really understand and get to grips with the history of the Syrian revolution was my friend and comrade, Louis Proyect.  Truly an unrepentant Marxist, he was someone who always placed the self-determination of the masses at the core of his analysis whether it be on Syria or Ukraine or Nicaragua or anywhere else.   In his own grouchy, belligerent and brilliant way, he helped keep Marxism true to itself, rooted in the dictum ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves’.

For Louis Proyect – as for Marx – freedom wasn’t something which could be handed to one from above; it was something which was called into being in the very act of fighting for it.  So many on the left have forgotten that deeply important and deeply human point; so many have regarded murderous dictators such as Putin as some type of antidote to the horrors of capitalism projected out from the American heartlands, much in the same way that their ossified, wax-work predecessors regarded the crushing of the Hungarian workers and students in 1956 by Soviet tanks as a great leap forward in the story of human emancipation.

And, of course, such a conception passed across into the ‘radical’ left’s analysis of Syria. Its leading lights declared that Assad’s war on his own population was not, fundamentally, about the repression of a revolution but, ultimately, about Islamic fundamentalism.   From absolute charlatans and publicity-hungry whores like Slavoj Zizek to genuinely decent and conscientious figures like Noam Chomsky, the view that the Syrian masses were inevitably and inexorably held in the grip of the most reactionary Islamic fundamentalism was the order of the day.

Those same figures would, now and then, make some sorrowful, handwringing concessions to the brutality of Assad, but the gist was always the same; the hundreds of thousands of Syrian dead were the collateral damage that comes from having to root out the fundamentalists sponsored by western imperialism.  It is painful and sad to realise that a very similar defence is mobilized by Israel in its extinguishing of Palestinian lives in Gaza ‘ they are all terrorists, they are all Hamas’.  The noble and worthwhile defence of Palestinian civilians mounted on the part of the international left was never carried across to the Syrians.

But, in my research on the real Syrian revolution, I would learn that the rebels who opposed Assad were not, in fact, all fundamentalists.  I learnt that many were secular in their politics, creating the first free trade unions in Syria.  I learnt that the rebels actually drove ISIS out of Syria, with a fury, in 2013.  I suspect most people wont even have heard of these events such is the identification of the rebels with ISIS.     But my point is a Leninist one; within the context of any great revolution there are all sorts of tendencies and forms struggling for expression.  What a strong international left-wing movement should do is support and encourage the truly radical elements over and against the reactionary ones.  It has let Syria down so badly in this respect.

I don’t know what is going to happen in Syria now.    I know that HTS (the leaders of a coalition of forces that have overthrown the Assad regime) is an offshoot of Jabhat al-Nusra, a group that had strong ties with Al-Qaeda  It evolved out of it politically, but I also know that it has broken with those same politics, repressing elements connected with Al -Qaeda and offering up the possibility of a more pluralistic and secular struggle.

Now maybe it (HTS) has been pushed to the left by broader and more democratic tendencies within in the revolution itself.  Or maybe it’s just seeking cover as a way to later impose a religious dictatorship.   I don’t know.  But if the latter is true, if HTS seeks to disguise its true fundamentalist nature, by masquerading in more democratic clothes, doesn’t that mean that there are deep democratic and radical tendencies in the revolution which have once again broken out in Syria and which must be appeased for the HTS to behave this way?

And, once more, isn’t the job of the internationalist left to encourage and strengthen these tendencies in the Syrian Revolution?  Rather than simply dismiss them.   Rather than to declare in advance that the Syrian resistance and revolution is doomed to the most primitive form of backward religious extremism.  The notion that the Syrian protestors across the board in a country where so many have been murdered by the government – the notion that all of these people are and can only ever be propelled toward Islamic fundamentalism – that notion in itself smacks of a racial categorisation of Arab backwardness that has been fed on the ‘logic’ and brutality of western imperialism.    The very thing the radical left is supposedly struggling against.

In truth, the same people on the left who are giving some nod toward the sheer genocidal awfulness of Assad while asserting that the people who are fighting against him are simply the fundamentalist excretions of western imperialism, are inevitably the same people who assert that masses of Ukraine – in fighting and dying against a murderous strain of Russian imperialism – have no content of their own, no sense of self determination, but are merely the ‘proxies’ of Western and US power.

But however bloated windbags like George Galloway or Tariq Ali who form a rather perverse aristocracy on the left – or any other VERY IMPORTANT FIGURES – however high these people are on the sense of their own historical grandeur and importance – don’t buy into it.  They are selling you the same type of Stalinism their predecessors did when Soviets tanks crushed workers and students in Hungary in 56.  I imagine a faithlessness in the masses – in people living and dying far away – is an inevitable corollary when you are a VERY IMPORTANT FIGURE (and a rather wealthy individual like Tariq or George) , and you  can’t help but realise yourself to be so far above the people you purport to be fighting for.

The post On the Syrian Revolution appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.