A really somber "Tankie Therapy" episode from The East is a Podcast on the fall of Syria. I was personally waiting for the crew to give their views because they know how important revolutionary optimism is for how we as leftists should think about the world, but they also keep it grounded in material reality. The way they manage to resist slipping into either forms of delusional optimistic idealism or some doom-and-gloom self-flagellation, especially in completely uncertain times like this, and are able to give a broad and pragmatic perspective is something I really admire.

That post US election narrative, where all these shitty mainstream media talking heads threw trans people under the bus by claiming the Democrats lost because they were "too progressive" and pandered to "woke LGBT," is really letting all these companies go fully mask off and openly embrace it. Got the same thing last month with HBO/WB going "TERF islander has the right to express her personal views" when just a year ago with that Hogswart's Legacy game, the same company was still promising that Rowling had no involvement.

I mean, fuck me, I shouldn't have expected anything else really and it's ultimately unsurprising how artificial all this corporate America LGBT "solidarity" is turning out to be, but, genuinely, it's so unnerving how synchronized these collective mask off moments always end up being. Same exact hivemind media-in-lockstep shit they do in foreign policy like with disavowing Palestinians after Oct 7 and now supporting Syrian Al-Qaeda. Turns out, all they were waiting for is for something to "normalize it" and that's exactly what this whole "we lost the popular vote because we weren't parading around that war criminal spawn Liz Cheney enough" spin from the DNC ratfuckers has done.

πρᾶξις with 🍔 characteristics

Bummer plot twist, could do with a bit more originality, same ole' "The Swerve" storyline from the writers once again ngl but phew. Every time a new headline dropped, his basedness went up like 10 notches, and I felt like I was starting to question my sexuality again. But now that he might be a reactionary goober, balance has been restored to the world. The hero flew a little too close to the chud sun, but the idea’s still there for me to hyperfixate on—and honestly, ideas can be so gay.

Unsurprising, especially given what's been alleged about Nigeria's current President:

The CIA, FBI, and DEA jointly filed a statement opposing the release of unredacted files on Tinubu’s background, again citing national security concerns. According to the filing, disclosing these details could endanger U.S. interests abroad.

Court documents from a Chicago case claim that in the early 1990s, Tinubu was linked to bank accounts allegedly used to launder money for a heroin ring in Chicago. Records from 1993 reveal that Tinubu, then a prominent figure in Lagos, agreed to forfeit assets to U.S. authorities in a plea bargain, sidestepping a potential trial on drug trafficking and money laundering charges.

Nigerian journalist David Hundeyin, a vocal advocate for transparency on the issue, posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the CIA, FBI, and DEA had recently submitted a memorandum opposing the release of Tinubu’s records. Intelligence officials argued that revealing such connections could “compromise U.S. national security” and referenced Tinubu’s possible status as a CIA asset.

Amid public demands for transparency, the DEA echoed the CIA’s stance, maintaining that citizens are not entitled to unrestricted access to intelligence files. “We oppose the full, unredacted release of the DEA’s Bola Tinubu heroin trafficking investigation records because… they do not have a right to know what their president is up to,” the DEA stated.

https://archive.ph/UXvQk

I only know about this from a Nigerian IRL friend and it's pretty wild: there's no public record of either his age, birth name nor what he did for the first 20 years of his life. Hundeyin has a substack going over his investigation. Incidentally, he also recently wrote a piece about his persecution by the US State Department. It's a great read, a touching piece on what shaped his journalistic career and informative writing on the immense corruption and malignant US foreign influence in Nigeria. He calls Blinken a "supreme wanker" and ends by saying that "if there is an afterlife, all I would like is to go one-on-one with Anthony Blinken." Relatable.

Fuck. I hope all comrades with family or friends in Syria have their loved ones stay safe. I was about to post another Syria essay but seeing this sudden outcome where the Syrian people that lived formerly under the Damascus government will now have to contend with a new regime that at "best" will likely resemble something like the 2021 Taliban and at worst will return to their 2015 ISIS roots leaves me numb. I'll just leave this quote from the Abrams book as a prediction from 2021 that now seems chillingly prescient and also something I hope will, by any means possible, not come to pass:

A subjugated and jihadist dominated Syria, much like Afghanistan which had seen its government toppled twenty years earlier using many of the same methods, would serve as an effective hub for jihadist operations abroad – whether into Iraq to keep check on Iranian influence, into southern Lebanon targeting Hezbollah, or against Iran itself. Projection of jihadist power further afield, including against western China, Russia and Central Asian states, was also a significant possibility, should terror groups such as IS and Al Qaeda be able to operate freely from Syrian territory. It was estimated that 9,000 fighters from Russia and Central Asia alone had joined jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq, while an estimated 5000 from China’s Uighur Turkic minority had also joined the frontlines in Syria alone. The potential value of turning Syria into a wellpositioned hub of operations against others which resisted Western hegemonic ambitions, much as Afghanistan had been, provided a fifth major incentive for the Western Bloc to undertake operations against the Syrian government.

Oof, that's on me. Edited, thanks for calling it out. Full support for Anti-Brainworm Aktion.

Thank you! There's a ton of writing and I found it hard to parse through it all! I know some Syrian refugees IRL but I try not to talk interrogate them about politics so all of my "insights" are just from reading what others wrote. I think Abrams' book covers much of the political points on Syria fairly well and from a clear anti-imperialist position too. I checked out the "Clarity Press" publisher's site and their web UI is pretty janky but much of their books seem to be fairly solidly on the anti-imperialist side of things.

Edit! Also I forgot to say, for anyone else who feels overwhelmed by the recent events in West Asia, I found the latest episode of "The East is a Podcast" by Sina Rahmani with Adnan Husain to be both informative and also providing some sorely needed revolutionary optimism. Edit again: Here's a link for their video stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuoJJm0uLTY

That's the end of my word dump, hope someone here can find it informative in some way! Wish the best for all our Syrian comrades. Syria is a beautiful country with a proud history and a dignified people, it doesn't deserve anything of what's happening and been happening for an entire generation now. If any Syrian comrades here are in need, I saw how there's an incredible mutual aid sub here so please make a post and I'll be happy to make an anonymous contribution!

Here are the book sources on Libgen:

https://libgen.st/book/index.php?md5=259DEB82CB107F3E766FAC3A7FE269C2

https://libgen.st/book/index.php?md5=2ED4589824F3E4FF7875F206BAB378EC

Part 2: In March 2011, the Civil War began. What happened after?

• Why did the Syrian "Arab Spring" occur?: Three primary socio-economic factors were: The Great Recession. Historic Crop Failures. Shock Therapy. An untimely trifecta but only the third was really entirely the doing of the government. Bashar Al Assad was the second pick as his father's successor. The story goes that he was in his opthamology practice in London curing black eyes for Arsenal football rioters when his father from Syria rang him up and told Bashar that his military education-groomed elder brother Bassel got himself killed in a car accident and that Bashar would be the new heir to Syria. Western analysts were initially thrilled at the selection of the Western-educated Assad Junior and had their eyes gleaming at a potential "Syrian Gorbachev." Bashar would disappoint on the geopolitical front, but he would completely take up the role with his domestic reforms: replacing from his father's government "nearly every economic official in cabinet, [...] privatization of universities, banks and media, reducing subsidies on a number of basic goods, reducing tariff protections for domestic industries and the breaking the state monopoly on education which the party had maintained since 1963. Government funding for education was cut, and the influence of the party was undermined with party flags featured much less prominently at state events – often not at all – and non-party officials promoted to senior positions in government." Abrams writes:

  As has been widely observed since 2011, popular discontent in Syria was largely fuelled by opposition to its Western-style neo-liberal reforms moving Syria away from a state centred economy and towards privatisation. Former chair of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group and Oxford University lecturer in modern history, Dr. Mark Almond, was one of many to observe to this effect: “One of the big causes of discontent in Syria is precisely the transfer of the state assets into private hands.” This contrasted strongly with Western portrayals of discontent motivated primarily by calls for greater Westernisation of the country’s political system.

  As such, Bashar Al Assad basically recreated the same socioeconomic material conditions that led to the overthrow of the USSR and the appropriation of popular mass discontent in response to shock therapy towards the agenda of regime change by the West mirrored near perfectly the same context of the failed Tiananmen counter-revolution: resistance to neoliberal reform was then subverted in the Western narrative as a "pro-democracy uprising." The privatization of Syrian media and the entrenchment of Western discourse propagation mechanisms within the country meant that, just like every other color revolution, the initial causes for popular protest became irrelevant as the West's "pro-democracy" regime change narrative took over and became all-encompassing. The role of Facebook in the concurrent Egyptian Tahrir Square protests is well known and similarly, the adoption of Western social media platforms and Gulf State news media by the Syrian population meant that, once the initial protests began, they were susceptible to the same atrocity propaganda feedback loop seen in Ukraine 2014, Hong Kong 2019 and elsewhere. Initial reports of police brutality, then tear gas, then murders, then mass killings, then chemical gas. Combined with a manipulation of the ethno-religious and socio-economic divides in Syrian society, the West created an image of the Assad government that became demonic in the eyes of the population, providing the support for anti-Assad militant forces to emerge.

• Why did protests lead to civil war? It became possible with covert military infiltration by foreign entities including the US, UK, France, Turkey and the inbred monarchist comprador Gaza Genocide abetting shits in Jordan. Abrams:

  There was little illusion among Syria’s foreign adversaries that mass protests could topple the Ba’ath Party by themselves, with the protesting minority, no matter how well trained and vocal their organisers were, still relegated to outlying areas and holding few prospects of gaining support in the capital. What the protests did achieve, however, was to create enough confusion and disruption to allow Western-trained militants flowing across the borders to make serious gains. Al Qaeda commander Abu Mohammad Al Julani, (Yes, the same one being paraded around the Western press circuit right now) who would later lead the most powerful antigovernment militant group with strong foreign support, stated to this effect regarding the protests paving the way for a Syrian jihad: “Syria would not have been ready for us if not for the Syrian revolution… The revolution removed many of the obstacles and paved the way for us to enter this blessed land.”

• Who are the "Free Syrian Army”/"Syrian ‘Moderate’ Rebels”/"Syrian Opposition?”: The onset of the Syrian Civil War pitted a thousand different little anti-Assad and Islamist factions against Damascus. The Western brain is incapable of comprehending a conflict beyond that of a Manichean Good vs. Evil and so all the opposition forces to the Syrian government were clumped together for the sake of Western news coverage in a nominal "coalition" called the “Free Syrian Army.” For most of the Civil War, this allowed the West to present the conflict in an artificial David vs. Goliath angle, allowing for sucker Westoids to become volunteer Amnesty mouthpieces with an comprehensible story to sell. This avoids the “it’s complicated” aneurysms that would otherwise appear like you see currently with mainstream western media trying to grasp Myanmar’s civil war and watching them undergo mental contortions trying to calculate which of the multitude factions there would potentially be the biggest US toadie and stick it to China the most. Eventually, this became untenable with Al-Qaeda offshoot Al-Nusra and ISIS becoming the only operating contingents of this FSA “coalition" and that gave birth to the idea of the “moderate rebel.” There’s been enough said over the course of the civil war debunking this and I’ll just add the commentary of Cato Institute neocon John Glaser, who noted how remarkable it was that ISIS in 2017 “imploded right after external support for the ‘moderate’ rebels dried up.”

• Did Assad use Chemical Weapons?: There is no concrete evidence linking the Syrian forces with any chemical attack in the Civil War. This is the big one, the original sin for why "Assad must go" and the West has had over a decade of time to provide some definitive evidence, but they haven't because they can't. Though it hasn't stopped them from repeating it to this day. From a pragmatic standpoint, conducting mass atrocities of any kind would have been detrimental to the Syrian government when there’s such a long history of Western attempts to use allegations of such actions as pretexts for their military intervention, for example, in Yugoslavia. Regime change means you lose your government, while being pinned with atrocities by the West means you get a tribunal like Milosevic. Atrocity propaganda against the Syrian government had its pre-chemical attack precursors. In August 2012, a massacre of 245 in Daraya was scapegoated as done by “Assad’s army.” Independent UK journalist Robert Fisk investigated and later revealed it was done by the FSA. In December 2012, a massacre of 120-150 in Aqrab was blamed on Assad by the NYT. British journalist Alex Thompson revealed that "the Free Syrian Army had been the perpetrator and had held 500 villagers from the president’s Alawite religious minority hostage for nine days before carrying out mass executions.” In 2013, following months of Syrian government military successes, the Western objective became that of imposing a “no-fly zone” as they did with Libya to level the playing field for their “moderate rebels.” This was when the first breathless accounts of a “chemical attack” in the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta. Abrams' books cover the later copycat allegations but this first is the one that created the "Chemical Assad" propaganda narrative and so I'll focus on this:

  Theodore A. Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Richard M. Lloyd, an analyst at the military contractor Tesla Laboratories, which was published by the New York Times in December […] concluded based on the calculated maximum ranges for the sarin-filled rockets that the attack could not have come from Syrian Arab Army positions, and that Islamist insurgents were the most likely perpetrators. Evidence implicating Al Nusra mounted quickly […] reports indicated that the sarin used had been supplied by Saudi Arabian intelligence services, which had provided significant material support to the insurgency since early 2011.

  Seymour Hersh wrote a scathing indictment of the US narrative that Obama was waving around, reporting that:

  A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”

Hey all, long time lurker, first time commenter. I used to spam up my geopolitics addiction-brained "effort posts" back on r/genzedong but finally decided to leave R*ddit after seeing how large parts of the site turned on LGBT as a scapegoat after the US election.

Just wanted to post some thoughts on the Syrian tragedy. It’s personal to me in that back when I was a little snot shitlib teenager, I used to volunteer for Amnesty International to fundraise and spread awareness for the “heroic Syrian rebels” fighting for democracy against the “Assad regime” (aka extort white-guilt tithes from schoolmate parents and propagandize for the US State Department). Of course, then Al-Qaeda/ISIS came along with more rebrands than Blackwater, United Fruit and the "formerly known as Twitter" company combined and showed everyone who cared to pay attention whom exactly the “Syrian opposition” really were. Ever since becoming a leftist and a Marxist-Leninist, I’ve tried to keep up with this conflict as best I can and so since I’ve been lurking for a while now and saw some people lost on the complexities of this 13 year long humanitarian catastrophe, so I'll try to fill in some information about the conflict insofar as I understand it. My sources are primarily A.B. Abrams' two books “World War in Syria” and “Atrocity Propaganda Fabrication and its Consequences” (Both on Z-Library and Libgen, both fantastic works that I highly recommend, we seem to be getting an outpouring of actually anti-imperialist published books nowadays when we used to have to scroll through random-ass substacks and twitter threads just to get any information)

Part 1: Target Syria: Origins of the Syrian Civil War

As can be expected, nothing about the “Arab Spring” which led to the outbreak of the conflict in March 2011 was organic. Being notorious self-plagiarists, this was the same playbook the West always uses: taking advantage of strained socio-economic material conditions within a designated adversary's society and funneling that discontent into the direction of regime change.

The origins of Western motives for Syrian regime change:

• Anti-Imperialist Geopolitics: For such a “small” country, Syria has been the bastion of West Asian anti-imperialism during the Cold War. Since the dissolution of the United Arab Republic after Nasser’s successor Sadat swung Egypt’s foreign policy away from the Soviet Union and towards the comprador role it diligently upholds today under Sisi, Syria "quickly emerged as the primary opponent of the imposition of Western hegemony in the Middle East.” After the collapse of the USSR, Syria began its alignment with the Axis of Resistance (Iran, Hezbollah) and with the DPRK for its Hwasung missiles to counter Israel. Later, this alignment expanded to Russia and China, hosting Russia’s sole Mediterranean naval base and signing onto China’s BRI.

• Syrian Secularism as Islamist target: The naked alignment of Al-Qaeda and ISIS with the US in Syria at the present moment, closely examined, is actually a long continuation of Western ties with the Islamist groups in the 20th century Cold War that "received considerable support from NATO member states, enabling them to more effectively target a number of Soviet-aligned and neutral governments.” In 1979, the Muslim Brotherhood targetted Syria with a Islamist uprising that occupied the city of Hama, killing over 1000 Syrian personnel before the restoration of the city. This is the origin of the West’s Islamist underlings’ particular hatred for the Damascus government and the lightbulb moment for the West in how they could be used against Syria. Following 1979, "Israeli and Western experts would notably highlight the presence of radical Islamist elements as an asset to undermine Damascus which “would not be difficult to operate again” and offered “increased U.S. opportunities for destabilization activities if this form of pressure proves necessary.””

• Pipeline Diplomacy: Its closer relationship with Iran in the post-USSR period led to Assad deciding to reject a Qatari oil pipeline project to Europe in 2009 that would have led from Qatar’s North Field through Saudi Arabia-Jordan-Syria-Turkey in favor of a Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline that would ship out via the Mediterranean through the Syrian port and oil refinery of Baniyas in Tartous Governorate without the need for Turkey. Tellingly, the major regional sponsors of Syria’s regime change in the 2010s became precisely those same countries in the Qatari project that Assad sunk. As America's imminent Healthcare Wormbrained Genius RFK Jr. once wrote for Politico:

  Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link […] the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria. It is important to note that this was well before the Arab Spring-engendered uprising against Assad

• Syrian sovereignty: Ultimately, Syria’s stance as a sovereign West Asian country unbeholden to the West just like Hussein's Iraq and Gaddafi's Libya was the primary Western rationale. Once again, it goes to show that Western hegemonic chauvinism is the root of it all. I’ll just let Abrams conclude this section:

  While there were multiple converging casus belli which led the Syrian state to be targeted for destabilisation and eventual overthrow by the Western Bloc and its partners, one common factor underlying every rationale for targeting Syria was the country’s position as an independent state under a single ruling party which was outside the Western sphere of influence. All states of this nature, from the Soviet Union and Ba’athist Iraq to Cuba, Afghanistan (pre-1992) and North Korea among many others, have been targeted for various economic, military and information warfare efforts. The final goal of these efforts has been to bring about their downfall, placing Western soldiers permanently on their soil and placing their territories and populations firmly within the Western sphere of influence. All reasons for targeting Syria are in some way consequences of this one single fact.

There's a lot of moments where Hoyoverse's writing for its female cast could have been just as obnoxiously gendered as many anime are but it doesn't. I'm talking about tha whole "I'm a fighter/strong/performing a traditionally masculine-delineated role and this has erased my femininity! Woe is me, who never experienced being a 'woman!'" garbo genre. There used to be a manga called "A Story About Treating a Female Knight, Who Has Never Been Treated as a Woman, as a Woman" and it had hundreds of chapters and would get posted on the r/manga subr*ddit every week. I would smash the downvote button everytime I saw that long-winded gasbag title show up on the feed.

It is absolutely a shame that Hoyoverse is unable to resist whitewashing characters from non-white inspired cultural backgrounds because it does a lot of the other things right. Hoyo gets the game dev's dream of building up a truly international playerbase and they can't even give them representation in the game. Ironically, speaking now as a leftist, Genshin is probably the biggest modern soft power cultural export from China and Hoyo instead built up a global audience only to use that platform to tell everyone how obscenely colorist the company is. Also, now there's a reverse racism problem where global players are using Genshin to scapegoat the entirety of the Chinese population as racist just because of Hoyo's colorist design team leads.

Ugh. I stopped following the company after Natlan when it seemed like all three of their games were just spamming streetwear character designs. Obviously playing it safe with modern motorcycles for Natlan is better than racist tribal loincloths that some people were worried about but it would have been even better to see Aztec/Incan character designs, with the skin tone to match.

Also, Melusines are objectively the perfect potential communards and it's a travesty that there's somehow 200K Genshin fanfics on AO3 and not a single one is about a Melusine-led Fontaine Commune.