Can Non-Europeans Think? by Hamid Dabashi

Author:Hamid Dabashi [Dabashi, Hamid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783604203
Amazon: 1783604190
Barnesnoble: 1783604190
Goodreads: 23258448
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2015-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

On Syria: Where the Left is Right and the Right is Wrong

When the Green Movement started in Iran in June 2009, there was a recalcitrant fraction of the left (taken in a very generic sense) that went on a rampage against it and denounced the civil rights uprising as a Saudi–US plot to dismantle the Islamic Republic, appease Israel, and pave the way for neoliberal imperialism. “I am only for revolutions that make Israel angry,” one such sophomoric detractor of the Green Movement famously said at the time. “If Israel is happy with an uprising I am not happy.”

More than two years after the Green Movement and a year into the Arab Spring, the selfsame segment of the left faces an even more crippling dilemma trying to formulate a sensible position vis-à-vis the bloody drama in Syria.

The dilemma that this component of the left faces in Syria is rooted in a more fundamental failure to read the Arab Spring in general; for if they denounced the Green Movement because the US had allocated millions of dollars for “regime change” in Iran, that sum was peanuts compared with the money that it had invested in the Egyptian army, and that the Saudis had committed to ensuring the Islamists had the upper hand in post-Mubarak Egyptian elections. So, what to do with the Egyptian revolution? Dismiss the whole thing just because the US and the Saudis were trying to control its outcome?

To be fair and to understand the predicament of the left vis-à-vis the Arab Spring in general and the Syrian uprising in particular, we must first have a clear conception of the right (understood equally in a generic sense) – to which the left is in part reacting.

No left turn

The position of the right is now self-evident: the Syrian regime is a murderous tyranny, it is butchering its own citizens, and “the international community” (by which they mean the US, its European and regional allies, through their machinations at the UN, the GCC, and the Arab League) must intervene to prevent the bloodbath, and anyone raising the slightest question about that narrative is an accomplice in the murderous acts of Bashar al-Assad. That the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia are actively involved in dismantling the Syrian regime for their own advantage either does not enter the calculations of the Right or, if it does, is considered a plus.

The right accuses anyone critical of the US–Saudi design for the region in general, or for Syria in particular, of being in cahoots with the ruling regime in Syria and/or Iran. People are risking their lives against tyranny, they charge on their moral high horses, and the left is not allowed to assume a “puritanical position” and pass judgment on what is right or wrong for these uprisings. The UN and the bombers of NATO and the US must be encouraged to do the job and get rid of these tyrants. For them, NATO and US interventions are forces of good, and the local tyrants are evil.

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