Anti imperialism and The Question of Syria - Max Ajl

Speaker 1: As far as I'm concerned, as long as that same respect and recognition is not shown toward every one of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me. And during the few moments that we have left, we want to have just an off-the-cuff chat. We want to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.

Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of The Malcolm Effect. Joining me today is a good friend and comrade, Max Ayo, a voice you have heard on here before. And joining me is my co-host, Adam. This has been a topic. that still remains contentious, specifically in Muslim and Arab circles. It was the cause of, I remember distinctly, this was almost like the divorce of the left and Muslims in the UK when I was in the UK. And I've actually, I'll be honest, I've not known how to approach this topic and I've avoided it. I have not once spoken about Syria publicly and I've not once had an episode in Syria because I know how high tensions run when speaking about this topic until now. And I understand that it's a sensitive topic for many people. So I do want to approach this topic with care and sensitivity that it requires. But I also think we need to have a sober analysis given what has happened in Syria and where we are now in the day. So Max, welcome to the Malcolm FX and I hope you're well. Thank you for joining us. Thank you both for having me. Yeah, I think, I mean, given what I just said in my intro, and I think I remember seeing you speak about Syria at a conference we both attended. I think before we maybe go into the nitty gritty of it, do you want to just situate Syria for us in terms of geopolitics? Sure.

Max Ajl: So historically, Syria has been since the late 1950s and early 1960s under successive governments varying ideological stripes, Syria was considered one of what were then identified as the Arab Republican states that is juxtaposed with the monarchies, that is, countries which obviously did not have liberal democratic forms of internal governance, but in one way or another were constituted in with some form of pan-Arabist theology, some form of commitment to internal redistribution, and some form of non-alignment with respect to the USSR and the United States, but also eventually moving into a more openly oppositional stance to the United States. The exact texture and balance of these ingredients in each of the Arab republics changed over time in response to internal and external pressures. But largely, most Arab nationalists were considering Syria historically an ally of the Palestinian cause. You can find this, of course, in the foundational documents, for example, of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. This isn't because people, depending on the time and the nature of the governments in thought that these were the same type of governments, for example, that ruled over communist China. But it's because people were actually fighting and continue to fight an active war of national liberation and needed to pick their friends and their enemies of their struggle accordingly based on the resources that were being put in front of them. So starting in 1967, Israel, basically on behalf of the U.S., dealt a very savage blow to the Syrian attempt to fuse internal redistribution with policy of confrontation with Israel. And, you know, thereafter, Syria remained neutral. more or less considered an ally, although with some deviations, certainly, to the Palestinian cause. And that was both under, of course, it was under the very radical Ba'ath government, which no one discusses anymore, which lost power in 1970, and under the relatively much more moderate government of Hafez al-Assad. And then also under Bashar, who has had more ideological wavering, but nevertheless remained constant in its support from the 2000s, remained constant in its support for the Lebanese resistance, continued to actually be a base for Hamas, continued to actually allow the PFLP to operate openly in Damascus and to organize elsewhere, whereas, of course, this is obviously... banned in the United States, for example. And especially in 2006, after what was called the redirection, that is, after the Hezbollah thrashed the Israeli assault on it in 2006, the U.S. began to pour money into right-wing contracts, into right-wing counterinsurgency operations, both vis-a-vis armed groups and vis-a-vis civil society destabilization operations, operations that would kind of converge and culminate in 2011 with what came to be known as the Arab Spring, which we'll discuss more. But in the Syrian case was an attempt, most basically, to take advantage of legitimate grievances that some people had with the Syrian government and to channel them into political forums, which combined with a massive amount of external mercenary apparatus contributed to burn down the country.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much. And I think, okay, before we go into the uprisings, could we further unpack what role does Syria play within the region? And more widely, why is it such a concern for U.S. imperialism?

Max Ajl: Sure. I mean, Syria is situated behind Lebanon, which means it's a land corridor for Hezbollah, And it also shares an armistice line with Israel. And so Syria, after the peace accords, first with Egypt and then with Jordan, although they were mostly unnecessary with Jordan, along with Lebanon, was the only remaining frontline state. That is a state that was capable, that shared a border with all of the military capacities that come with sharing a border. or an armistice line. So I think we can go into more, but we clearly see the difference between the efforts, the great efforts that Ansar Allah has to take if it wishes to enter into military confrontation with Israel and what Hezbollah is able to do. Or, for example, the threat Hamas was able to pose on October 7th, that is, territory still matters, strategic location matters, the sharing of a land border in the case of a hot war with the enemy matters. All of these things matter when you're actually waging a war, whether it be a hot war or a cold war against an enemy. Now, Syria basically had a Therefore, Syria was also a developmental state. Syria had some level of extant industrialization. Syria was also allied with the Soviet Union, an alliance which Russia inherited from the Soviet Union. It has a naval port at which Russian ships can operate in Latakia and so forth. And it also, of course, has sovereign control over its own airport, something that, of course, Hezbollah does not, although Hezbollah probably has aerial means of supply but the the great bulk of the military the material that Hezbollah uses in its confrontations with Israel come in either through its own indigenous industrials supplies or much more of it though is coming through airports that in Syria that are then used then ferried over land to Hezbollah through the Lebanon Syria border and So in this sense, although it's obvious that Syria has not engaged in direct hostilities with Israel, it has played a very important logistical role in terms of not only supplying arms and also being a kind of rear base for the Lebanese resistance forces. But furthermore, of course, has also been a place where Palestinian factions have been able to operate with relative freedom as compared to how they can operate in other Arab states, although not without contradictions, which are worth discussing and, of course, have been cynically instrumentalized in all kinds of ways. So in this sense, Syria has been... very central. And we see the centrality, of course, now when hot war is basically occurring region-wide, right? Israel is in a blessed situation for itself, for its own security, because it's able to, because of the amount of de-development and devastation that's imposed on Syria, it doesn't have to worry about the Syrian front, right? It more or less doesn't. Now, it's continuing to attack and destabilize the Syrian front. It has a lot to worry about with the Syrian front vis-a-vis the convoying of ammunition and even a potential retreat zone for Hezbollah if it needed to retreat there. But it doesn't have to worry about the opening of a hot war, a hot front from Syria. And so this is also, this is very central. And all of this, of course, was part of the reason that a war was set in motion in 2011, which ended up having a goal of, paralyzing the Syrian military capacity and de-developing its productive capacity.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much for that important context. Okay, so people then say, and this episode is going to be probably slightly more polemical than usual, because I've actually fielded questions from people to have a discussion about Syria. I wanted to make sure that the most common questions that are asked or critiques that are asked about Syria are responded to. So people say, okay, well, there was genuine uprisings. There was genuine folks that felt a type of way or folks that felt discontent with Assad's government. So these were genuine kind of uprisings against a quote-unquote harsh dictatorship rule, right? And this is the way it's characterized and narrativized. So the question I have then, okay, so what led up to these uprisings in the first place? And what were the groups at the time? And if they shifted, how did they shift?

Max Ajl: Sure. So, you know, the question of a genuine or a non-genuine uprising probably blocks from view understanding what actually happens in general in terms of any uprising in a in the modern period in general and in the Arab region in particular. So we talk this way about uprisings because it's kind of erased from people's cognitive horizons that we could actually have disciplined parties with open and clearly declared political lines that help give organizational forum to mass movements of the population that either negotiate power share agreements or take state power with clearly declared programs and begin to implement some portion of their programs.

Speaker 2: This was the standard narrative of political change

Max Ajl: throughout the 20th century. You had the communist movements, you had the national movements, but it was shared that the agenda was to take state power. And if you wanted to know someone's program, they would hand out a 12-point program and tell you exactly what their program was. And many of them operated with all sincerity to try to implement that program. So with the fall of the Soviet Union, people's ideological coordinates got completely scrambled. And you saw these kind of fetishisms of horizontalism. You saw the fetishisms of leaderless movements and so forth. And, you know, this is a scam, in fact, right, because there are no leaderless movements. There's people that are acting maybe without clear leaders that are, in fact, being led by one or another ideology because people obviously have thoughts in their brains and or they're being they are in a position to be taken advantage of somebody who does have a clear political program. Right. And, you know, in Syria, as in a lot of the Arab countries, people had a more or less Not entirely, but people often had a negative program. They were like, Bashar has to go. If Bashar has to go, then what's going to take his place? It was considered, in fact, what is the positive content of your program and on what basis are you appealing for solidarity of that program? And to raise that point was to be considered an apologist for Bashar al-Assad. And you can see that this actually paralyzes politics itself. If politics is understood... as the process of thinking about your location in the world, thinking about the world you wish to see, and kind of rationally adjudicating Adi M. Different paths in order to get there right, I mean if to say what is the future going to look like based on your program is actually considered. Adi M. To apologize for the state of things as it is you've actually foreclosed the process of a masturbatory politics altogether right rational masturbatory politics is therefore off the table right now. What happened in a lot of the Arab region, right? I mean, you had a systematic, you had decades of depoliticization. You had decades of the suppression of communist movements. You had decades of disorganization. You had decades of infudation of certain forms of politics. opposition parties, either to the ruling governments themselves or alternatively for certain forms of infudation to the United States. And it's kind of Russian doll level style counterinsurgency, for example. I mean, you can think, for example, of something like the UJIT today, which is closely associated with Western trade unions and is apparently in the last years has been funded by Saudi Arabia to some extent. Right. as an example of that in Tunisia itself. And then you have a kind of downwardly mobile layer of university students and young people who have been born or grew up in the shadow of the fall of the Soviet, where communism had disappeared as a legitimizing ideology, where Arab nationalism was extremely tarnished as a lodestar for anti-systemic thought in the region, both justly and unjustly, and where people said, okay, we don't like our Latin life, which it was a legitimate form, a legitimate understanding of the world that they were in. And meanwhile, to say, okay, if you don't like it, well, what do you, you know, then what is to be done, right? It's actually the classic Lenin question. What is to be done was, say, often, I mean, in the case of Syria, it was very much like a negative demand or a demand for like civil demand for a democratic state or a liberal state, right? I mean, this was often a demand, sometimes lacquered with rhetoric of social justice, sometimes much more problematically covered with discussion of anti-sectarianism, despite the sectarian content of most of the protests from the very outset and so forth, right? So in a sense, you had people rising up. You had people asserting agency internally, but you have them trying to make history not under conditions of their own choosing, including under the conditions of their own kind of ideological inheritance itself, right? They're kind of trying to make history in a situation both of an internal... largely an internal ideological vacuum, right? But also at the same time as the U.S. has been pumping huge amounts of resources into networks that are capable of channeling that discontent into pro-systemic directions from the jump, right? Which happened all over the Arab Spring, generally, we can really say with the exception of Yemen. Right. Which which if you pay attention to the discussion, no one talks about Ansar Allah as part of the Arab Spring or no one talks about what happened in Yemen anymore as part of the Arab Spring. Even while it was happening, it was very seldom discussed. Right. And I think this is very revealing. So you can go back to you can examine, for example. WikiLeaks documents that are now publicly that have been that have been released and so forth, stating that the U.S. was funding to the tunes of millions of dollars to Syrian so-called opposition in order to kind of create this discourse of opposition. liberal democracy amongst a certain layer of the Syrian opposition, while at the same time there were several other layers of the opposition who maybe did not adopt that discourse or looked the other way when elements of those espousing this discourse were also extremely sectarian. They were imagining a future of liberal civil society that was exclusively Sunni, right? Even though Syria has multiple sects of Islam and multiple religions. It's a multi-confessional country historically and still is and so forth, right? So when people say, okay, there was an uprising, of course, there's discontent. I mean, the politics is an expression of discontent, period, right? I mean, there's discontent with the world as it is, and there is unease with the state of things. So anyone engaging in any form of political or social mobilization is, of course, expressing discontent. But it's also very normal to say, what is the program by which you are channeling that discontent into changing the world? And when asked, of course, again, you were called in Assadists, right? And you can see that as soon as this led into the alliance of these kind of liberal youths, some of whom were very naive, I think, and other of whom were cynical or opportunists or mercenaries, And of course, now a lot of them are in Germany, in the United States. You can see that this led into kind of forms of organization and political organization that were conducive to lubricating the regime change operations, which we can talk about, we will be talking about, and which are why we can see kind of military operations against the Syrian government starting as early as March 2011. Thank you. Adel?

Adam: Yeah, I think... I mean, you're hinting to a certain degree to the political attitudes that the Syrian revolution has towards questions such as the future of Syria, what would happen if a regime change had succeeded. And I think a lot of this is expropriated towards the axis of resistance when we get into discussions of the axis's role in the region. So I guess, especially after Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah's martyrdom, we saw a lot of supporters of the Syrian opposition coming out to tarnish his legacy and to tarnish the legacy of Hezbollah. So I'd like to ask then, what is Hezbollah and the Axis' role that it played in Syria? How did they come in during this war?

Max Ajl: Right.

Adam: So the Syrian government was never going to collapse.

Max Ajl: It was never going to collapse because the forces that were interested in some form of endurance of the Syrian government cared more about it than the U.S. cared to affect a regime change, a full regime change. This is the bottom line, that if Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, considered the survival of the Syrian government a red line. They considered it completely non-negotiable. That's the overall panorama. Once we understand this as our overall framework, It then it became a discussion amongst these forces themselves of which was going to assume which role in in the armed defense of Syria and the Syrian state. Right. Which is then caricatured as a defense of Bashar. Which is, again, not helpful for our understanding of reality, because what it suggests is that the state is pure repression. An approach that's only applied to non-Western target states, the idea that the state is pure repression. And this is just ludicrous, right? The state is repression. social reproduction. The state is managing hospitals. The state is managing borders. The state is the civil control over airports. The state is the electricity grid. The state is rural extension. The state is hospitals and medical clinics and so forth, right? But let us bracket this for a second. I mean, so Hezbollah understood one very quickly that what was going on was a war that was intended to target Syria primarily for its support for Hezbollah, right? That is the war on Syria was a war on Hezbollah, right? On the other hand, Hezbollah has been very conscious of the difficult issues it faces of having emerged as an anti-colonial, force that is anchored in terms of its direct kind of social base. It's anchored because of the nature of the Lebanese confessional system. It's anchored in the Shiasat, right? And so this creates great difficulties as a simple function of the social structures inherited from French colonialism and then again solidified through the post-colonial Lebanese state and then further re-solidified. Taif Accords and so forth, that this created great difficulties for Hezbollah to kind of put forward an image of itself as a pan-Arab resistance force in the same way that Nasserism, for example, could find its echoes in Jordan and in Lebanon in 1958, for example, right? To the point that Nasserism became, was an extremely popular pan-Arab mobilizing ideology across the region itself. Hezbollah could really only achieve that when it was in direct kinetic, that is armed, militarized, and hot confrontation with Israel. This is when it's able to acquire this kind of pan-Arab valence in juxtaposition with or in opposition to the kind of understanding of Israel as a foreign invading force against any form kind of Arab civilization or Arab dignity or territorial integrity and so forth, right? So after 2006, the stature of Hezbollah, the stature of Nasrallah was kind of at an all-time high. But then what happened is that you began to see various modalities, counterinsurgency begin to creep into play. I mean, part of it, again, is that sect plays a structuring role, not a primordial structuring role, but because of the nature of social structures that are inherited from colonialism. And it plays a role in the Arab East, right? I mean, this is just simply a fact. Now, and it would be, this isn't like to adopt some Orientalist fantasy where Sunni and Shia are like battling with one another. No, but, you know, the way social power, for example, is historically allocated, you know, you had a comparative richness, for example, of the Christians in Lebanon. You had a comparative, a disproportionate share of the land in the hands of Sunni landholders, for example, in Syria and so forth. And so this mattered in terms of the subsequent trajectory, both of post-colonial national developmentalism, but also this is the tableau against which Hezbollah was able to represent itself with this kind of pan-Arab anti-Zionist force in 2006. had trouble because it didn't have a cross-sect mobilizing ideology. Because if you want to speak across a non-sectarian mobilizing ideology and a sect as an identity, the language you would speak is normally the language of class. This doesn't mean class is against Islam, for example, but it does mean class as opposed to a kind of narrower forms of belonging and identity. And the sectarian belonging tends to be a cross-class belonging, right? There have been times when it's been more influenced, for example, by Islamic liberation theology. Some of that went into the constitution of Hezbollah itself. Some of that you see in Islamic jihad. Some of that you see especially in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which doesn't confront the same kind of endogenous sectarian problems that Hezbollah does and so forth. But nevertheless, Hezbollah was not speaking a language class. And this was one amongst many things that her force prevented it from being something that it never was, which is like a revolutionary force in the Arab-Iranian region. Now, that doesn't mean it's not a liberatory force or an emancipatory force, but I say a revolutionary force, just to be very specific.

Speaker 2: Now, this kind of created a situation that

Max Ajl: there was starting to be propaganda portraying Bashar al-Assad as this Alawi ruler, right? Which was a deeply problematic depiction of reality in the sense that you always had substantial portions of the Sunni urban, upper middle, upper classes aligning with Bashar. You always had portions of the Syrian Arab Army who still believed in some kind of Syrian project, who, with all of the problems in the Syrian Arab Army, were Sunni and aligned with Bashar. And of course, you had the Palestinians aligned with Syria and the Axis of Resistance. Nevertheless, the fact that you had a core element that was Syria ruled by an Alawi, you had Hezbollah, Shia, and you had Iran, Shia, And this allowed for a representation of the Axis as sectarian project. I mean, and also as a... And this kind of... Its very nature and its limits, which were limits that... it's fruitless to call these limits its own fault, these were just in the nature of things, allowed the Gulf states, and of course I consider the Gulf states in America more or less a contiguous unit, to take a kind of clear role in advancing a sectarian discourse of division against Syria, against Nasrallah, against Hezbollah, against Iran, which we also see And so behind a lot of the liberal revolutionary discourse is a sectarian subtext. Sometimes it's overt, sometimes it's covert. They've been very deliberate, of course, when they happen to find a Christian or an Alawi spokesperson to use them to the maximum. But in essence, once Hezbollah started to go in, it became easier for the U.S., the Gulf, the mercenary Syrian opposition to portray it as a sectarian intervention, right? And Hezbollah itself went in initially to say it was protecting certain Shia shrines and so forth. Now, It was, to some extent, doing so, and it was kind of justifying it with respect to its own people, its own social base, by claiming that it was a necessary defense of religious symbols, which is, of course, natural if you're mobilizing base is, if you're mobilizing discourse, if your discourse of mobilizing discourse is religious, it's natural that you would justify it in that way. But on the other hand, Nasrallah began also to be very consistent and say, we are defending Lebanon, against Nusra, for example, when Nusra became to be a more prominent player in the Syrian opposition, so-called, we are defending Lebanon against these takfiris who are a danger to all Lebanese, right? So again, Nasrallah tried to use, and this was Nasrallah's true gift, was this kind of communicator, not only internal to Lebanon, but also to the whole world. I mean, he was able to adopt this kind of incredibly erudite, but also often humorous and charming and charismatic discourse to kind of be this master communicator and this weaver of a front of Hezbollah with other forces worldwide. And so he also was portraying Hezbollah accurately, in my opinion, as a defender of Lebanon from this kind of sectarian Takfiri plague, which had been unleashed region wide. So nevertheless, like the intervention, which was at the behest of the Syrian government, began in 2012 in earnest and escalated in 2013. And by, I think, 2016, 2017, you know, on a person for, you know, Hezbollah fighters on a person-for-person basis were probably carrying out the greatest share of the lion's share of the kind of recovery of the country from Takfiri forces because they were much more, you know, they had not been bled out like the Syrian Arab Army had, which had been fighting on, 100 internal fronts for years by then. And they also had been hardened by over, you know, several decades of fighting Israel and just had a greater experience with warfare. So this is kind of the context for understanding Hezbollah's intervention. Now, you know, I want to go back a little bit to this question that people began to hate Hezbollah. I think we need to ask why, you know, this speaks to a much bigger question, which is why did the tempers fly, get so hot in the West about these issues, right? You know, the most natural thing is that there was a war going on in Syria, right? There was an actual hot war in Syria, which, although it would never have began without external intervention, it would have never continued without external intervention on the part of the United States and the Gulf, it would have ended much, much quicker. It would have ended in some months rather than still going on today. There was a war in which Syrians were still killing others, right? And it is natural if within a nation, people sharing the same nationalism are killing one another, that the war of words would be running at a very high temperature externally, right? I mean, it's kind of the natural corollary of it. not to mention the fact that people were being fed this narrative of a dictator who is kind of an Arab Hitler and was killing hundreds of thousands of his own people, mercilessly killing civilians and so forth. And to the extent people chose to believe this or didn't know better, then it's natural that emotions would run extremely hot.

Adam: Yeah, thanks for that. And I think, you know, the slandering of Hezbollah from the backers of the Syrian opposition, a lot of the time in the West specifically, comes with a citation that Hamas had backed the rebel forces and split from Bashar. So could you expand on that portion too? What was Hamas' initial... Yeah, sure.

Max Ajl: Sure. Sure. I mean, Hamas, I think Hamas messed up, right? I mean, I think Hamas made a mistake when it decamped from Damascus to Qatar, and it was thinking... that it would be able then to, it would be the kind of regional Muslim Brotherhood with Qatar as a kind of financial and media capital of it, and so forth, was kind of going to erect a new regional hegemony. And so, of course, Hamas was doing what was logical. It was also doing something that was agreed upon amongst a lot of its base. And although there were splits in Hamas, not everyone in Hamas agreed with this decision. A lot of the Hamas armed brigades in Gaza retained constant connections with Syria, with Iran, with PFLP, with Hezbollah, with Islamic Jihad. Those connections, to my knowledge, were never ruptured. But other portions of Hamas, including Hamas in Syria, were partisans of the Syrian mobilizations, including the armed movements. Although, again, this was not universal amongst the Palestinian population, right? The Palestinian PFLP in Syria, the PLA, a lot of the traditionally Syrian government-aligned factions and so forth were either pro-government or were calling for neutrality. despite in spite of what was going on in Syria. Right. So, you know, it's I think it's it doesn't help anything. And it also means, you know, I think that people online these days often argue in like memes and with kind of the intellectual rigor of a quote tweet be like, well, Hamas believes this. So we believe that or Nasrallah believes that Israel is a tool of the U.S. Therefore, we should believe it. And I'm like, OK, like, Of course, some people just don't have time for politics beyond that. But if you do have time for politics beyond that, and if you're on Twitter, you do have time probably for politics beyond that. We got to be able to think and learn for ourselves beyond this kind of argument by authority, which is the same type of argument saying, okay, Hamas was with the Syrian opposition, or Hamas in Syria was with the Syrian opposition, so therefore it was a just Actually, like that was a big mistake they made. That was a huge mistake and one that they paid for. And so I think we have to we have to keep that in mind. And we also have to keep in mind the Syrian opposition. There's kind of a notorious I mean, there's also notorious, you know, film of the Syrian opposition, you know, beheading a Palestinian child, for example. I mean, there is, you know, what the Syrian opposition was carrying out all sorts of depredations also against non-opposition-aligned Syrians. So again, the Syrian, the Palestinians, just like Syrians themselves, were internally split about the future of Syria and what was miscellaneously called an uprising and the nature of that uprising. So I think all of that needs to be kept in mind. I mean, on the other hand, you know, since 2018, Hezbollah has been trying to play kind of an active brokering role in terms of healing the relationships and also, of course, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front, which... where the Popular Front was not at all in favor of the uprising and jihad, although they had some They had some sharp critiques, did not go all in. And this is also why they retained their material and financial flows from the Iranian government. All of these were trying to play these brokering roles in terms of kind of sewing shut the ripped relationships that Hamas had with the Syrian government in the interest of a united front against Israel and behind Israel, the U.S. and the Gulf.

Speaker 2: Thank you. I want to speak to once again the narrative that is dominant or maybe perhaps more acceptable now and maybe if you can have some comments or response to this. So once again, it's characterized as there was social unrest and discontent with Bashar al-Assad. There was a genuine, quote-unquote, uprising from the, quote-unquote, the people of Syria. And then somewhere along the way, the U.S. got involved and they co-opted it. And I think people kind of accept that, say, oh, people say, okay, yes, but, you know, Assad was a dictator and then... Therefore, we had people on the ground who were rising up due to the nature of that, due to other political uprisings, namely the Arab Spring. But then along the way, America took advantage of it and co-opted it. But it doesn't discount the original kind of genuine or social base or it coming from the ground. How do you respond? I mean, I think there's a few points that we need to unpack based on that, right?

Max Ajl: I mean, again, this goes back to this idea of a genuine uprising and so forth. I mean, and I would think, I would rather we go to the idea of genuine grievances. Because the idea is to not, you know, the idea is to not say that people are these marionettes getting pulled like hither and yon by puppet strings. I mean, people are people, which also means people can make mistakes and do the wrong thing or end up caught up in the wrong thing as a result of even a large, a somewhat correct apprehension of their world around them. That is, people do not like the limits on the future or the current system, yet ultimately think that the U.S. could be at least neutral, if not an ally, in their route to a better world, for example. Now, you know, this question of the hijacking, right? This is a very convenient rewriting, which is being sold, of course, by many of these people themselves. Now, I remember sitting with someone, a youth leader in one of the Arab youth movements. I don't want to give that many details because it's actually, I don't want to indicate who it was. And who considered themselves an anti-imperialist, but said it is OK to take aid from the U.S. state. OK, I mean, if that's your position, then you're not not only you're not an anti-imperialist, but you're an accomplice of Hitler, actually.

Speaker 1: And that's one thing.

Max Ajl: Right. And this was a very common discourse in the Syrian opposition that you could take that aid without being so-called hijacked. That's one thing. Another is the narrative that these people sold. So they sell this narrative. You can find quotations from that. From liberal Syrian opposition basically calling for U.S. saying, OK, we don't mind if it becomes militarized because then the U.S. will intervene the same way it did in Libya. You can find people saying that. Right. So that's not really a hijacking. That's kind of the hijacking is kind of an after the fact recomposition of history itself to fit in ideologically acceptable frame.

Speaker 2: That's just one example.

Max Ajl: I mean, another example is that people, these kind of, a lot of these liberals, right, who are non-sectarian themselves, turned a blind eye to the sectarian nature of the uprisings themselves, right? And they'll say, oh, you're attacking it as sectarian? Are you, well, they were meeting in masks. Where else were they supposed to meet? And it's like, no, The issue is not whether they're in mosques or not in mosques. The issue is that these protests basically stopped when they hit Alawi and Christian neighborhoods. Why did that happen?

Speaker 2: With some scarce exceptions, right?

Max Ajl: And so basically, these people thought that they could surf essentially sectarian mobilizations. in order to negotiate with the Syrian government, right? So in this sense, they continue to lie about the nature of this mobilization that they themselves were involved in. I mean, there was also this kind of volcano of, you know, Nebel Baladi and all this, you know, U.S.-funded, U.S. aid-funded movement any defunded media apparatuses that were talking and lifting up the discourse of the liberal democratic Syrian uprising, even though that was, even with all of its flaws, it itself was not the dominant strain of the people who are actually expressing discontent with the Syrian government, right? You had this strain as well, and these people would be like, well, yes, we weren't hijacked even when they knew where the money was coming from. They just turned a blind eye to that. But the real issue is the militarization, right? The real issue is the militarization. This is a story it's going to take decades to fully come out because the black ops, a militarization on that scale doesn't just happen. And you don't launch that. That degree of militarization doesn't happen when young people from the cities and the countryside break into military bases and start using weapons. This is bonkers, right? This is a fantasy narrative, right? I mean, maybe this is okay for people, for kids who are playing like urban insurrection on their PlayStation or something. This is This isn't really how the world works, right? I mean, there is footage that Hassan bin Jiddah, who left al-Jazeera to start al-Mayadeen, had people from mercenaries from the future movement moving from Lebanon into Syria in February, March 2011. That is well before the formation of the so-called Free Syrian Army in July 2011. So you had, one, you had an external militarization, external armed attacks, right? And there's a UN commission of inquiry about what had happened in Syria, I believe from March to May or March to June 2011, that was finding things like armed insurgent attacks on police stations, on buses, on oil refineries, and so forth. The idea that these were kind of just people expressing discontent with the government, I mean, these were people trying to manufacture the whole-scale militarization of the country. I mean, if you look at the number of deaths through that period, right, I mean, You can find it if you look hard enough at the death counts in various places. You find two sets of estimates. You'd find rather a range of deaths during that period when 3,000 people have been killed. You find between 300 and 1,200 deaths. That is 300, the most minimal claim paid by the kind of dubiously funded human rights organizations that were counting deaths. 1,200, according to the Syrian government, say the truth is somewhere between those two numbers of dead amongst the 3,000 who had died. Now, a kind of young people who suddenly get a few defections from the military or throw rocks at police and so forth don't manage to kill 300 security officers out of a 3,000 total dead in a period of three months. Like, that doesn't happen. I mean, look what happened in 2008, 2009. when you actually had the beginnings of a guerrilla army in Gaza, and I believe the resistance managed to kill like 12 Israeli soldiers during that period in the face of 1,400 deaths, some with the majority civilian and a portion of them armed Hamas guerrillas, right? So these numbers by themselves tell you that something much more nefarious was going on. That is, You had a civil society protest, which was broken up into, for example, a small urban liberal wing and a larger sectarian wing, and then intermingled with that, with varying degrees of distance or proximity, you had an armed movement that was both made up of Syrians, but also made up of a lot of non-Syrians, to an extent that it will take years for us to actually understand, with the goal of the armed overthrow of the Syrian government, which, as it metastasized through the carcinogenic injections from the US, the Gulf, Turkey, to the Lebanese right, it eventually metastasized into a force that was capable of that was causing grave harm to Syria itself and led to the destruction of much of the country and say 500,000 people dead, right? And again, like this is why, you know, 500,000 people dead, those are people's families, right? So, or their cousins, even if they had the wrong idea, like what happened there is a huge tragedy. But this idea, this idea that the Syrian government bears the bulk of responsibility for that tragedy is is very absurd and also can only, it kind of recapitulates the U.S. narrative. And I think we need to reject this idea that the uprising was hijacked. I mean, there were elements that had a vision for what the so-called Syrian democracy movement would be that was nefarious from the outset or naive from the outset or negligent from the outset. And they were able to more or less set the trajectory of it. And the result was what it was.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much. And you mentioned the toll the death toll that's often cited, 500,000, which obviously is a tragedy, right? It's a tragedy. I think we can agree on that. So one of the questions I fielded, actually, this is, and I want to make, please feel free to either reframe the question if you think it's an unhelpful framing, which I suspect you may, but someone did say, okay, ask these deaths questions. worth protecting the acts of resistance? And someone said, in addition to that, what is the cost of anti-imperialism in relation to the death and destruction that we saw in Syria?

Max Ajl: Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't accept the premises of the question, of course, because I think that, you know, I don't think the U.S. and the Gulf and Israel, you know, Israel doesn't have the right to be there in the first place. And these political and social forces on the whole don't have the right to insert themselves into the shape and contours of what Syria will be, right? So is 500,000 dead worth Is it acceptable that they have the power to impose that price on Syria? This is how I would reframe the question. If the question had an answer and the answer was no, that price isn't worth it, what does that mean actually? Does that mean... we should have been calling on Bashar to step down. Well, he would have never done that. If he had, all of Lebanon would have been a war zone, right? And probably we would be seeing Iran fighting on its own borders. So a different question is, is it worth it to fight imperialism at all? That's what that person is really asking with that question. Is it worth it to fight colonization? Is it worth it to fight imperialism? First of all, it's a question people themselves have to, who are going to bear the cost. They're the ones who have to ask and answer that question, right? It was, you know, a combination with imperialism is a survival strategy. This is Abdel Zawad Omar's point. Accommodation with imperialism and colonialism is a survival strategy, and emancipation is a survival strategy. People in that position have to take their choices and bear the consequences of them. I think it's a mystifying question. It doesn't help us understand how to act in this world or what the consequences are of acting differently. I mean, is the question to me, Max, if it was worth it to say that the U.S. should I have said the U.S. does have the right to decide the future of Syria? Well, the U.S. is always presenting itself as the lesser evil, right? Why doesn't the U.S. have the right to decide then the future of Palestine? Is 200,000 dead in Palestine worth the cost? I mean, you know, it's the same type of question, really. And this isn't a question for anti-imperialists to answer.

Speaker 2: No, I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. I think, as I said, I filled the questions, which I think people often ask. And I think it's important that if we're going to have a discussion about Syria, we somehow like respond. And I think, and so I do appreciate.

Max Ajl: But actually like, let me just add one thing, right? You know, You know, it was interesting, you know, and I followed Syria very, very closely. I should have written a book about it because I was following it day to day during the war. And, you know, you kind of saw... in the beginning, that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights was the dominant source of death statistics in Syria for a period, right? Until a certain point, at a certain point at which it kind of somehow became discredited. And I think, you know, it discredited by the opposition. Now, it's interesting that if you, you know, from the beginning, from the beginning, you know, people like Sharmin Narwani were stating that, in fact, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights at the outset was biased in favor of the opposition, right? And that it was kind of counting civilian, it was counting Syrian armed deaths as civilians and counting Syrian deaths People in the Syrian armed army, not counting them accurately and so forth, right? So this is one thing. At a certain point, they stopped being, and in fact, people linked with it were even linked to U.S. funding between 2006, 2011. Now, at a certain point, people stopped using the statistics. Why? Now, for some reason, I don't really know. I don't really know. For some reason, the their statistics were perceived as too friendly to the government. Right. Which tells you that the you know, the the as we see in the case of Gaza. Right. This struggle over truth is, in fact, the fundamental part of the war itself. So what you see if, for example, and I didn't have the numbers at hand, so sorry for my slow speaking just now. I was just Googling it to see what would come up. In their 2021 summation, which is quite insane, if you will. You know, their 221 summation mid-June said over 606,000 people were killed in Syria, including 495,000 documented by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Now, what a breakdown of the total deaths, overall death toll was as follows, right? And this is according to SOHR, which was early on considered very pro-opposition, right? civilians, 160,000 Syrians, Syrian fighters of rebel and Islamic factions, 80,000. I'm rounding. Syrian Democratic Forces and Kurdish units, 13,000. Defectors, 3,600. Government forces, 91,000. National Defense Forces and Syrian regime loyalists, 66,000. ISIS members, 40,000. Jihadists of Hayat al-Hirshan, 27,000, right? Not counting over 40,000 civilians killed under torture in the detention centers and prisons. Now, what that tells you right there is a very different picture than the common narrative, right? Just the aggregate numbers themselves make the common argument of the Syrian opposition untenable in its very nature. I mean... There are numbers on civilians. Some of it has been examined. It's quite dubious. This kind of ratio between men, children, and women is incoherent. They say 120,000 men, 25,000 children, 15,000 women over the age of 18. There are complex patriarchal structures operating in Syrian society, but nevertheless, that type of count plus The qualitative information we know from people who have actually examined these things tells you that they're obviously counting armed people, armed opposition as civilians, right? It's very clear when you have that type of extreme gendering of the death counts, okay? But what this basically tells you is that basically at most a third, but probably less of the dead are civilians. Right. Say at most a third and probably like quite a bit fewer than that. Right. You actually have it is an armed confrontation in which armed people from the pro-Syrian side and the anti-Syrian and eventually Syrian. pro-US side, are the majority of the deaths, right? So you have a war. In fact, you have a war that's killing a lot fewer civilians as a percentage of the war, for example, the colonial war that is operating in Palestine. Now, If that's the nature of it, who benefited from the militarization of the war itself is basically the U.S., Israel, and the Gulf states, and Turkey. I mean, they're the ones who militarized the conflict. And there's kind of this narrative that Bashar is the one who militarized this conflict through the use of militarized repression. That's not what militarizing a conflict is. If you have an army and you have an internal security force and you have a non-democratic form of politics in your country, then when you have rebellion against it and you put it down with violence, which obviously happened, I mean, no one disputes this, that is not the militarization of a conflict. The militarization of a conflict is when you actually engage in a state of warfare against a state with the previous monopoly of armed force, right? That's when a conflict... becomes militarized. And the choice to militarize was not inevitability. It was kind of forced. It was a decision made by the Syrian opposition for the reasons that I articulated earlier in our discussion. And so, you know, did they think this number of deaths is worth a liberal democratic Syria, a liberal democratic sectarian U.S.-aligned Syria? Is that what they think, right?

Speaker 2: That's the question that should be asked. I think that's a great question. Thank you. Thank you for that. Another critique that is leveled at those who call themselves anti-imperialists is saying that, well, how do you say Bashar was an anti-imperialist? There's times, quote unquote, he worked with the US and... they say, and his alignment with Russia, for example, and again, I think that's, I think we obviously have to separate, we obviously have to separate Bashar working, Putin's intervention from quote-unquote Bashar was working with US. But they say, okay, for these reasons, how do people call him an anti-imperialist? Is it that the position is that, oh, this is an anti-imperialist figure and leader, or just by the very historical circumstances that have produced Syria and its relation to The region and its position it holds in geopolitics makes it by necessity an anti-imperialist struggle.

Max Ajl: Yeah, I mean, I think you're framing and then you're reframing answer the question itself, right? I mean, anti-imperialism is not really something someone is. It's something someone does, right? You know, you can read like Lenin on the national question, for example. You know, and it's all very clear that if you are making this point exactly, and you know, if you are, if you're fighting against the US, you are engaged in an anti-imperialist struggle. Now, we can have a different question over whether it's a struggle for national liberation. It's a very fair question. conversation. And I'm open for it, basically meaning the freedom, the liberation of the productive forces from the grip of monopoly capital and socialism and the national revolution, following Cabral. Obviously not, right? Anyone with a brain should be able to tell you that's not what was being fought for. What was being fought was a struggle against imperialism, because if you are fighting somebody who, let's take the case of the Southern Front in Syria, Right. Which was being armed and literally had 40,000 of its fighters directly, not directly, I should say, because many of these people were directly on the payroll. These people, and I swear, like foreign policy was reporting on them being openly on the payroll of the U.S. government and them arranging local peace treaties with the Syrian government when those salaries ceased, because Jordan wanted to kind of didn't want this act of war on its northern front anymore. And neither did the U.S. was willing to let it wind down. And have the bulk of the arms kind of destabilization be occurring from the north. This was openly reported. If your salary is being paid by imperialism, and if you are carrying a gun that's been given to you by imperialism, then what you're doing is acting as a literal agent. I mean both agent in the nefarious sense, but also agent in the literal sense of the word agent, You are acting as an agent of imperialism and the person fighting you is resisting imperialism because the social forces that you incarnate in your actual material, physical, kinetic actions are the agenda of imperialism as it is financing, funding, and determining the ideological direction and happy with the way you're pointing your guns. And if you stop firing those guns, then you would cease to be an agent of imperialism. I mean, it's mind-boggling that this is up for discussion. I mean, what else is imperialism but the things that imperialism, as the rule of monopoly capital, carries out in terms of the political agenda that it delineates, that it programs, and that it then implements? And so if that includes the arming and the ideological preparation, the arming, the political organization, and the salaries of proxy forces in a sovereign country, That is literally the agenda of imperialism. The people fighting a war against them are carrying out an anti-imperialist struggle. We can then talk about the ideological programmatic limits of that anti-imperialist struggle. Sure, it's a very important conversation. And everybody should be having it. But to say then that the Syrian Arab Army or Hezbollah is not engaging in anti-imperialism is a very ludicrous argument that actually relies on a kind of a boggling series of arguments. misdirections at the ideological and analytical level that I think are not productive, again, for our work. In terms of the connivance with Russia, the post-colonial state system means that states which was achieved in the face of monopoly capital in the face of imperialism, right? And it was the historic victory of the anti-colonial movements in the shadow of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, right? These victories, which kind of reconstituted the political architecture of the world system and imposed the, and the achievement of the political sovereignty regime was The achievement of formal de jure equality of states within the world system. This was a defeat of colonialism. This was a defeat of imperialism. And this was a defeat of monopoly capital, which they are now trying to roll back very aggressively since 1990, right? And sanctions are one element of that. Hot wars worldwide are an aspect of that what's going on in the Arab world. Iranian region is an aspect of that. Part of that means that you have the same rights as other states within the world system. And that includes calling on your allies for support when you are facing an externally sponsored assault, right? So Russia, and this isn't a question of accepting kind of liberal categories as allies. replacing them with Marxist ones, but actually understanding that if we understand that the achievement of formal political sovereignty was actually an advance for proletarian forces and popular forces and for the women question, for the internal minorities question, if we accepted the achievement of political sovereignty represented an important carapace for the advance of further struggles, that is, that the national question represented an unmistakable advance on the previous colonial system, And in turn, that it's a protective carcass with which many struggles against internal contradictions must be successful for further advance. If we understand that, then you don't get to disbundle the elements of national sovereignty and say, this I agree with, that I disagree. OK, then that country has the right to call an external force when its sovereignty is threatened. I mean, that is the nature of sovereignty itself, is that sovereignty is one, it's relational. And two, it means that you can call on other forces to help uphold your sovereignty when external forces are threatening. This is very normal. I mean, this is, in fact, what backstops the entire political sovereignty regime and the nature of that external force itself. in fact, certainly affects the future of the world system in the sense that we were all better off when the Soviet Union was an external force or when Cuba was in a position that was able to carry out these interventions, right? It adds the cachet of communism as an anti-systemic mobilizing horizon on a world scale, which is a great thing for most of humanity. But the fact that it's Russia is not It means the situation is not as great, but these are the buttresses for national sovereignty that exist within the current world system and that themselves demand to be filled with emancipatory social content. But this doesn't mean it should be rejected outright. It also means that it represented limits. I mean, in the sense that Russia itself is a vacillating force. Russia itself wanted to maintain the thought that it could achieve independence. some form of non-dependent, relatively non-hierarchical integration into the U.S.-dominated and Europe-allied world trading system, right? This was the thinking of the Russian leadership. As part and parcel of that, Russia allowed Israel to have free reign over Syria and to bomb Damascus, Syria and Damascus, hundreds if not thousands of times over the course of the war when Russia had the air defense batteries that were available, but it chose not to put an offer for a variety of reasons, but I think mostly because it did not want to go for help in defense of Syrian sovereignty. Now, that was a limit represented by the limits of Russia itself in terms of its class basis, in terms of its regnant ideology within the government itself and so forth, in terms of the fact that even in Ukraine, it really thought the U.S. and Europe, the EU, were willing to play ball with it until they weren't and so forth, right? So, of course, there's huge limits that were historically incarnated in the Russian Federation. And hopefully the Russian elite, which is the Russian political leadership, has metabolized some of those lessons after seeing what this war has been inflicted upon it by the U.S. arming of its military base in the Ukraine. But none of that delegitimates the idea that Russia had the right to go in if it was the invitation of the sovereign Syrian government. It's not like people in the U.S. and the U.K., whatever their ethnic or national belonging of their grandparents, their citizens of the imperial core, are deciding which rights accrue to a sovereign government and which rights do not. Like, that is literally colonialism. That is literally colonialism.

Adam: Thanks for that. And I think to expand a little bit more on the external aid that Russia and the Axis provided for Syria, it's often painted as alien by those sympathizing in its support of the Syrian opposition, whereas those same people will more nefariously omit, I think we've kind of hinted to throughout the show, but like the Salafi aspects of the opposition that are being armed and pushed on by other contents of the region, including the Gulf. And so I guess a question too is, can you outline this kind of Salafi American and Zionist alliance here? that has come about, especially focalized in Syria and how it's focalizing and how we can see it moving around in other parts of the region, too.

Max Ajl: Yeah, of course. So for decades now, Saudi Arabia, we can say for decades, but maybe especially since since 1979, it's been accelerated. Saudi Arabia has been a major exporter of regressive ideology. And I don't say this to separate Saudi Arabia from the U.S., to be clear. Saudi Arabia is built practically by the U.S. Saudi state formation is unthinkable without the U.S. power. This is something that Bob Vitalis wrote decently on before he came out as a full-on kind of... Zionist vampire, but his book on America's Kingdom, okay, it's not a bad primer. It's not like this feat of historiography, but you had a sense of the U.S. role in building up modern Saudi Arabia. The U.S. was very happy with this kind of export, reactionary, anti-communist, and sectarian ideology on a world scale, which of course was happening in Afghanistan, was happening in in Pakistan, which happened in most Muslim countries, obviously, like not in Iran, the Shia, which kind of a book that remains to be, you know, it remains to be fully written about, but also became kind of the ideological fuel that went along with the geopolitics that were promoted by primarily, first of all, by the U.S., but also by these other forces, that worked to rip apart all other forms of anti-systemic mobilization in Muslim-majority countries. Arab nationalism or certain Shia forms of liberation theology that could have potentially spread beyond their Shia base, threatened to occur, for example, in Tunisia in the 1980s, when, um, she was, um, very interested in the liberation theology that was, uh, coming out of, out of Iran in that period and so forth. Right. And so this kind of, this project is an imperial class project, right? I mean, you, you, uh, these kind of, uh, sectarian, you know, these kind of like most parties, reactionary, uh, ideologies and these reactionary projects, um, are attacking anti-imperialism and are promoting sectarianism within the Muslim working class, which actually creates another line of fragmentation and division. And even kind of promotes, for example, in the Palestinian community itself, to the extent that this became a dominant force, kind of helped promote certain forms of separatism and even promoted war making or destabilization against Hamas in Gaza. This was the case even in 2010, 2011, before Hamas really cleaned up over there. So this is a project, which is kind of the ideological spear point of an actual imperialist method of social disruption region-wide, right? Which you know, had its birth, of course, in the war against Arab nations, right? And also was promoted by dependent client states, for example, and the war against the left. I mean, this is why the Muslim Brotherhood was promoted, for example, in Egypt, in Tunisia. This was meant to really discredit the left, which was kind of enjoying its high noon with the the influence of Maoism, the radicalization that emerged out of the limits of state-based pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism. This became the glue holding together all of these very projects of of counter-revolution and really of, we can even say, of de-development, right? And, you know, I think like, but, you know, a lot of these people are very simply mercenaries as well, right? I mean, when has ISIS, when has Nusra fired one bullet at the Israelis? When have they fired one bullet at the American bases, right? They don't do it. Meanwhile, who fought ISIS, right? Hezbollah, Who fought ISIS, engineered the defeat of ISIS in Iraq?

Speaker 1: Soleimani.

Max Ajl: So again, they actually burn up the region's military forces through consolidating control over their own territories, rather than entering a frontal confrontation with Israel. This is like then the fact that they don't confront Israel is kind of retroactively activated as impugning their anti-imperialist credentials. So this is something you hear from this kind of continuum of people ranging from people who just don't know better to kind of the tracts who are a very active plague that is active in the UK, where I know you guys had to spend a lot of time, and certain forms of the mother brotherhood, thinkers who are very aligned with the trots on a lot of things, I mean, a lot of support for US imperialism. And they say, oh, well, these people never go to war with Israel. Oh, the resistance never goes to war with Israel. Oh, the resistance never goes to America. Well, did you notice that they're actually don't even have sovereign control over their own national territories, or they have to keep a reserve force, a massive reserve force in place domestically, precisely because there's a constant threat of indigenous insurrection, which is being incited by the imperialist forces, right? I mean, there's certainly, no one can doubt that there's proxy arming going on of the Lebanese right, right now at this very second, by the US, by Israel, by Saudi Arabia, right? And Turkey, and behind Turkey, the US, you know, remains carrying out all forms of destabilization all over northern Syria and so forth, right? So I think, you know, this is part of a larger project, which is actually an attack on the state. And this is borrowing from Dr. Al-Aqadri. You know, the state is even a theoretical unifier of identity, of belonging, and as the political mediator for a project of national popular development, right? If the state is both discredited as something that is a reasonable mechanism for those things, because the state becomes identified with the most repressive practices of the governing party that controls the state, right, in the propaganda system, and then war is made both on the repressive and the reproductive aspects of the state itself through the operations of U.S. imperialism, then you don't have to worry that much about the popularity of Marxism or whatever amongst the constituent populations or their intellectuals because the actual mechanism through which to convert Marxism into a social project of emancipation has actually been raised from the earth. Right. And this is kind of this is why they don't even care. They see these people going on about the Amin and this new kind of scholarly interest in the Arab left. And then all the people studying this support regime change. Ninety percent. You know, I don't. And like there's a few other people who don't. But like this whole industry of people who are doing this research on the Arab left and kind of writing introductions for. you know, the collected works of, the selected works of Mahdi Amil. I mean, Gilbert Ashkar is a literal muhabarat for the UK Ministry of Defense, right? And he's actually writing introductions for the Arab Left. This tells you that something very nefarious is going on at the ideological and at the level of ideological production, right?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I'm just wary of the time. So yeah, Max, final thoughts, given, again, once again, I can imagine the I would hope this episode will be received well, but I can imagine people are going to find it still contentious because tensions do run high. And I've said that, you know, as I started this episode, I have not spoken about Syria publicly. I didn't know how to, right? So I guess, yeah, final thoughts or things, or maybe like perhaps you can leave us with things people should consider when we think about Syria.

Max Ajl: I mean, you know, what I want people to leave with is that the point of a conversation like this is not to justify the world as it is. Right. And it's not to set causes against one another. Right. In fact, that's what the US does. And the point is not to say one person's emancipation is the price of another person's emancipation. emancipation. Again, this is kind of the poison that's placed in front of us by the U.S. and its ideological apparatuses. And it's not to say people should just take things either, right? The point is none of that, right? The point is none of those things. The point is that, you know, me as a communist who makes my home in the Arab region also and He's a longtime supporter of the Palestinian cause for over two decades. I mean, Jesus, longer, I guess, which is crazy. The point is not that we want to have illusions about the forces who somewhat accuse us of being partisan of. But rather, what is an analysis of the situation that lets us see how catastrophes happen that really does say that we cannot trust the U.S. because the U.S. will take people's legitimate grievances, take the kind of constituent molecules and reshape them into a knife with which to cut their own throats. Right. That's what the U.S. does, because the U.S. is an evil project and deserves all of our hate. And, you know, so for the people who are very annoyed at what I've been saying, and I'm sure they will be there, you know, the point is actually. What type of analysis of the situation and realism and honesty about the situation could lead in the direction of re-understanding what had happened in the service of actually creating a world that's big enough For people, including the families of those who have suffered on all sides of these horrible wars, except for the Israelis, right? That's what we need to be thinking about. And that's what I would like to leave people with. Thank you so much. Until next time, peace and blessings.