U.S.-led Imperialism and Syria with Max Ajl (Part 1)

Speaker 1: So welcome to JDPod, where we spell America with three Ks.

Speaker 2: This is a podcast where we, Joma and Nate, discuss current events from a third worldist perspective.

Speaker 1: Okay, and today this is part two of an episode with Max Eil. So if you haven't listened to part one, please do that because we, or Max does a lot of groundwork to make this episode start to make sense. And so we're recording this on Sunday, December 15th. And as events are rapidly unfolding, things may have already changed when you listen to this. Actually, things will likely have changed when you've listened to this. So without further ado though, we're going to begin.

Speaker 2: All right, so Max, if you could tell us what's happened in Syria in the last couple of weeks. We've seen reports of Israel dropping at least 1,800 bombs, annexing an area over six times the size of Gaza, destroying government buildings, academic buildings, research facilities. The new so-called transitional government led by HTS has called for Palestinian resistance forces such as the PFLP, the PFLP-GC, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, to disarm and close their camps in Syria. So what is the significance of the past few weeks for the region, for the Axis of Resistance, and for anti-systemic movements as a whole?

Max Ajl: Right. So first I want to just share my perspective on the facts about what we know, as opposed to speculation about what we know, or speculation about what has happened. You know, First, we know that Netanyahu with the winding down of this phase of the war on Lebanon announced that Bashar in Syria would soon have to pay. This was publicly announced. Around mid-November, I couldn't find the exact date, there was a serious bombing of defense installations around Aleppo, which the Syrian government did not disclose what precisely had been affected. The day the ceasefire, practically the day the ceasefire was announced, HTS, which had been harbored in Idlib and protected by the Turkish government for some years, launched a blitzkrieg assault on Aleppo. Aleppo saw only pockets of resistance and what was reported to be a lot of fading and evaporation of the armed forces who were either given real or faked withdrawal orders, right? Like either their communication systems were hacked and they were given withdrawal orders through the hacking operation, or in fact, there was senior military leadership that gave them withdrawal orders. Be that as it may, we don't really know about that. They were also well equipped with Ukrainian drone operators and drone technology. And of course, Ukraine is a neo-colony and the Ukrainian military is a creature of the United States, right? And this is kind of openly admitted in the military press in the United States, right? It's denied only in the left, actually. That's the left's job is to deny these things. So this kind of advance kept encountering very little resistance. I mean, there were it took it started taking major Syrian cities. There were small amounts of bombing. There were certain helicopter paratrooper operations into the Hama countryside. There were allegedly consolidated defensive lines around Hama and Damascus. And then suddenly all of that melted away. And this Golani, who's now a al-Sharra, took over the country and basically dismantled the Syrian Arab Army, which actually left a great deal of weapons on the street, which were just picked up even by, you know, apparently children were picking up the weapons of the Syrian Arab Army. So Syria, which was already a heavily armed country because of this many years of war. And in fact, even more armed in a very dispersed and decontrolled way, right? Almost immediately, several things happened. One, Israel carried out a comprehensive attack, aerial and ground, on the military defense infrastructure of the Syrian state. The overwhelming majority of it was destroyed with the largest bombing operation that Israel has engaged in, in years. And the result is that a couple of days ago, I believe, they reported they had taken out 90% of the Syrian defense infrastructure. By now, it's probably close to 100. They didn't take out missile silos, actually. Those required on-the-ground operations in order to take out many of the missile silos. So Syria was left so undefended that they were able to send in paratroopers to take out missile silos and then carry out extraction operations. Right. This is while an allegedly revolutionary force is taking over the country. What else? They took out all of the air defense systems. They took out all of the Air Force, the planes. They took out the Navy. They took out a smaller military. They took out mobile air defense systems. They took out tanks. They basically left small arms, Kalashnikovs and so forth, which are useful if you've incited a sectarian war. within the population. That's what these small arms are useful for, for people to kill one another. So this was a massive operation, in fact. And it's there's actually in simultaneous with it. Every time the US carries out one of these operations anywhere in the world, it carries out a dual-track operation, right? One, it carries out a kinetic process of military warfare, and then it carries out a process of ideological warfare that's meant to diffuse and confuse opposition, even understanding, let alone opposition, to what the U.S. is doing, right? So this is like, there was a narrative that was launched both on the right and also the left to state that, in fact, the U.S. was that Israel was only doing this because it considered the nascent Syrian government a threat to itself, and it hadn't done it to the Syrian Arab Army, the Syrian Arab Republic, because they had not considered those forces a threat. So this is actually something I didn't mention before, which is of course that there were hundreds, if not probably thousands of sorties carried out by the Israeli Air Force from 2011 to the present. which against Syria, which was very much occupied with defending itself from Contras and an insurgency, and only partially was able to defend itself against these raids. Nevertheless, there were reports of the Syrian Arab Army shooting some of these planes down. There were definitely many instances of them shooting missiles down. I mean, you can see footage of the effective use of a multi-layered air cover on the part of the Syrian Arab Army's air defense forces and so forth so this was a permeable air defense layer the same way by the way that the israeli air defense layer with all the resources the entire planet is permeable but the fact that an air defense system is permeable doesn't mean it doesn't do anything it means that we don't live you know the world is not like a nintendo video game where you press the red button and it shoots down all the missiles, right? Like I swear the people have actually had their brain shattered into like, you know, little brain dead particles because they've been watching video games their whole life. And they think that's actually how an air defense system works, especially when it's done by an enemy state, right? So, in fact, this was a functional air defense system with a complicated role played by Russia, which allowed a certain amount of attacks against Iranian and Hezbollah assets within Syria, but nevertheless was said that these Israeli attacks have to be below a certain threshold. they will elicit a defensive response that will be greater in scale by the syrians right all of this is very it's very clear that the defense system was partial and yet protected syrian assets from their destruction by the israelis now the israelis basically took advantage of the fact that one that uh basically a friendly asset was in power in Syria, an asset which had been armed and enabled and trained and which basically shares an ideology with the United States that has promised not to enter any form of confrontation with Israel. And it took advantage of this, of its friendly forces basically taking over the castles of state power in Damascus to basically prevent any potential force that could ever take power in Syria from actually having an advanced industrially made defense infrastructure that could defend Syria in the event of a future conflict. So actually the idea is that Israel rules the skies, right? There's no sovereign, of course, but Israel rules the skies, right? As it does over Lebanon, as it does over Palestine. Now it also does over Syria, right? This is what's actually happened. And so if there's arrest or if there is some form of popular guerrilla insurgency that expels the U.S. Turkish Contras from Syria, they can be eliminated, right? by the Israelis. That's what actually happened. Or if they took back the military or reconstituted a military in opposition to HTS and the SNA and the Southern Command and all of these forces, which have literally, many of them, especially the Southern Command, literally took salaries from the US government, were literally taking orders from an operations room in Jordan. That if these forces are defeated at some future point, and I hope they are, there won't be any capacity for those forces that fight them to actually protect Syria from the Israelis. In other words, the Americans. So Syria is devastated. Now, this has a clear... The interest of the U.S. and Israeli governments is very clear in this. I mean, first of all, you know, the U.S. and Israeli governments basically are interested in reducing most of the Arab population and the Arab lands to a wasteland unless there is a U.S.-aligned capitalist infrastructure in those countries, namely like Qatar or Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and so forth, right? Then the U.S. is allowing some kind of measure of development of the productive forces, some kind of partial industrialization, and so forth, because those are huge purchasers of U.S. weapons. They can be relied on to use U.S. weapons where the U.S. wants those guns to be pointed, and they recycle a lot of the oil monies back to the US, they make sure that the dollar keeps being denominated, the oil keeps being denominated, oil sales keep being denominated in the dollar and so forth. Even if there are some fractures, perhaps amidst the rise of China. So this is the goal. And so if the state exist as even a theoretical container for articulating popular interests in a non-sectarian way that is a kind of republican expression of shared interests on the part of a population that's able to identify itself and articulate a belonging along a kind of partial but yet partial universal grounds, for example, identifying as Syrian, identifying as Arab and so forth, the state is an articulator of those interests in a way of alchemizing those interests into a policy, for example, satisfying basic needs, sovereign industrialization, agricultural reform, health, pharmaceuticals, things that even in its very decayed form were actually provided by the Syrian state, which actually had a very strong, for example, health And in comparative levels, in comparative developmental levels relative to GDP per capita and overall its overall level of income per capita, Syria was actually able to achieve excellent health outcomes. And its surgeons and doctors were amongst the best trained in the world relative to national GDP. Right. All of that is finished. Right. Syria is done. And the wealth of Syria, but where are the doctors? They're all in Europe. The doctors are on Europe and so are the engineers and so forth. That's where they'll be for the foreseeable future. Actually, they become enfolded as a hidden subsidy to European social democracy, which of course was a party to this war on the Syrian state itself. Meanwhile, the idea of liberating Palestine received a setback. The Syrian armed factions are not allowed to operate. their training camps and so forth, are no longer allowed to operate in Syria, right? It's now becoming an unfriendly territory for them. Now, of course, HDS has to make certain gestures so that, especially for the purpose of U.S. and European propaganda, it has to make gestures to continue to confuse the Palestine movement. because, of course, its sponsors, of course, want to use any and all available means to reintroduce a sectarian way of thinking into the Palestine movement, and one of that is to use Syria as a cleaving issue. So it has to pretend to be doing things for Palestine, or it's doing it slowly, it's doing things casually. But in essence, there is no more. The supply lines from Iran to Lebanon are, for the moment, they're severed. At some level, they'll probably be reconstituted, but right now they're severed. At a moment when Lebanon actually, when Hezbollah needed those supply lines in order to resupply after expending a large portion of its reserves in the war with Israel. That can no longer be done. This was done deliberately as part of a movement to both destroy the basis of the material capacity to actually fight an asymmetric war of resistance in the first place. But in the second place, the air defense capacities of Israel and also the dominance of Israel over the skies received a great boost because they now have a high point, which used to be a blind spot. Now they have a high point in the mountains. in the previous Syrian occupied lands, right, next to the Golan Heights. And so this is a strategic position from which they can carry out surveillance, can gather signal intelligence, and can also carry out eventually, once they put in the infrastructure, they can carry out attacks on Syria, on Lebanon. And finally, of course, the air route to Iran is now much shorter, right? So they lubricated their attack path to Iran which is, of course, one of the next targets. It's not clear if Iraq will be an immediate target or Yemen will be an immediate target before Iran is hit. But Iran is definitely closer to being hit now than it was three months ago. There's not even a question about that. So the situation just got a lot more dangerous for the people of the region.

Speaker 1: Thank you for that. Could you speak more to the national question? You were starting to talk about the state as an articulator of popular development. So I wanted to talk about social reproduction, the role of the state, and at a point when, at least in America with three Ks, you have many leftists celebrating the de-development, the implosion, and the destruction of the Syrian state in the name of this sort of petty tyrant or this evil dictator being overthrown. So the question is, what is the national question? Why is it relevant in its relationship to the state as well?

Max Ajl: Right. I mean, I just want to I think what's important is that a lot of people are celebrating this because there was a very successful campaign to paint Assad as Hitler. Right. Which was based on an inability to discuss basic facts about what happened in Syria over the last 13 years. And the result was to create a picture of Hitler. I mean, so it's normal that people are going to be happy that Hitler is gone. Right. And then they're presented with the prison uh the the prisons being ripped apart uh on the assumption that you know this kind of abolitionist future is being applied in syria i mean i personally i think abolition is bullshit right i think you need to take state power and then you need to decide who is and isn't going to be in jail in any society in the world there are certain people who don't have a right anymore to live in uh to share a kind of safe space with other human beings. Like humans need to be kept safe from them because these other people are pathological, right? This is what I would say in the United States. I believe in community control over policing. I believe in community control over the judicial system. I think the idea that you don't have a coercive judicial system is ridiculous, right? I think this is just a baby talk as though like people are just going to be like, it's like Sesame Street and everyone's just going to be chilling and getting along and being super nice to one another in a communist society. No, a communist society is going to be dealing with all the pathologies inherited from capitalism. It's going to be ugly, right? Same way people can be ugly under capitalism. Okay, so this kind of abolitionist thing was used to accelerate the consent building around the fall of the Syrian government. Even though people, I think people really understand. I think the idea that HTS is a liberatory force, I don't think people accept that, to be honest. I think people are sort of like, well, on channel one, it's good that Assad is gone. On channel two, HTS sucks. But these are separate television channels, so I'm not going to be... understanding that they're part of one piece of historical cloth, right? Actually, their ability to synthesize and digest the fact that historical events are part of a holistic historical moment is kind of non-existent. The people who are accepting this propaganda, unfortunately, right? And that's a kind of deliberately cultivated breaking of people's minds by propagandists, right, who kind of are like, well, that's removal of Assad over there. But the people who did that are over there, and the way they took power, that's in yet a third place. And you're like, but these are, this is like a sequence of historical events. Aren't they related to one another? Like, aren't the authors of the historical events the ones who we should understand to now be controlling history in this geographical region? I just want to make this point because I think this kind of is a propaganda device that we should be able to identify when we're confronted with it, and then we can dismantle it. Now, the national question is the set of questions concerned classically with the struggle for political sovereignty or the struggle for self-determination, including the struggle for self-determination amongst embattled minorities within a multinational nation state. So the question as articulated in the Soviet Union or for that matter, modern Turkey, how do we address the fact that there are these people who want a certain form of self-determination? What does that mean? There's very good literature actually in the historical Turkish communist movement about this very question. Now the national question is like, do you need to achieve state power? What is the value of political sovereignty in a kind of late neo-colonial world system and so forth? Now, unfortunately, again, because of the aggressive demonization of the state that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union, and the attendant unpopularity of communism and Marxist-Leninism and the ascendance of anarchism. I actually don't mean to cast shade on anarchists, some of whom can be really great comrades. But I think this idea that you don't need a state is a bad idea. Right. In the third world. I mean, the state is has a lot of problems because it's made by people and people produce problematic things. But the state is historically a way for social labor to be used for socially determined ends. Right. So it's a state and it's and Almost everyone agrees with this, that the state is the agency that's best able to administer a health care system. Almost everyone agrees that the state should be responsible for that. Almost everyone agrees that the state should be responsible for some form of social security, which is basically a way of stating that social labor in the present should be taking care of social reproduction for people who are no longer able to contribute a great deal to the process of the reproduction of society because they're old or because the degree of their disability prevents them from active participation in, I don't want to say the workforce, but any form of social reproduction. The only way you can organize that on the scale of millions and millions and millions of people is a state. Now, You also need a state because we live in a world where if you carry out too many of those policies and you also use the state, and this is like classic Lenin, you use the state as a weapon against your class enemy, then the powers that be on a world scale are going to try to collapse that state, identifying that you're using it as a weapon. The idea that you don't then need a state, the idea that you can cede the battleground to your enemy when your enemy is hating how you're maneuvering on that battleground and the vehicles within which you're maneuvering on that battleground. And you should say, okay, we're going to leave that battleground and we're going to leave the vehicles we're in because... they have some flaws in them because they are like the topography is uneven or we've taken some wrong turns or the vehicle, you know, sometimes gets flat tires and so forth. This is a crazy idea, in my opinion. Right. You actually need to defend the political sovereignty regime, that is, which is basically stating that you should have a quality of political systems within the world system, that every state within the world system has the right to not just the seat at the UN, and not just the national flag, but also has the right to not be invaded by other states within the world system when they are carrying out the agenda of imperialism, that states should be able to regulate the economic planning and decide how their currency is going to be used and should be able to incur sovereign debts, which is basically and use those debts in order to carry out programs of economic development. I mean, this is how But it's basically how prosperity was achieved through these mechanisms by every single state in the global north, not only through these mechanisms internally, but also, of course, through the depredation of regions and countries that did not really have adequate especially popular political systems of their own that could protect them from these depredations or that were fully colonized and therefore just became direct conduits for the transmission of the class interests articulated through states in the global north. This is how people achieve development. And this is how people achieve prosperity for their people so that they don't have to worry about things in certain states in the world system. Anyway, they don't have to worry about premature death. People don't have to worry in the northern Scandinavian social democracies of sorts. about not having healthcare when they're sick. They don't have to worry about not having an adequate public transport system to get around. The state takes care of those things for them and yet these are the same regions in the world system where the state is represented as a repository of evil when third world people want the same developmental outcomes, not the same developmental paths as northern states. And again, I don't think this is helpful for orienting our understanding of the world. I think that when we think about the national question, therefore, we should say the national question is a cornerstone for further advance. This is the quotation from uh samuel pedersen the national question that is the achievement of the political sovereignty regime is something that has to be filled with substantive meaning and should also be placed under direct democratic control you can't omit the democratic question you can't omit the social question that is the ends to which the political sovereignty regime is used but it doesn't mean you can treat political sovereignty as just a new shell for uh capital accumulation. This is an ahistorical reading of the deployment of state sovereignty, and it's also imperialism blind reading of the agenda of imperialism, which actually proceeds to accumulate based on state collapse. That is, it accumulates through collapsing states using the lack of any regulatory mechanism for embedding accumulation locally and carrying out processes of democratic planning, it collapses them, dislocates people from a kind of inter-sector or some type of nationally based accumulation that's based on any form of internal articulation and literally For example, to take the example I was talking about, takes these kind of products of social labor, which is what a doctor is. A doctor is a product of a society's social labor that it invests through a decision that for sure was not democratic in Syria, but nevertheless, in my opinion, was a good thing, invest in training doctors, invest in training engineers, that product of social labor because of the workings of the world price system says, and where world imperialism sows chaos and sows order says, oh, I'm going to go get a job in Europe and go be a doctor in Europe. But all the social labor that was invested in producing that doctor took place in the South. So actually, through the transportation of that doctor to the North, through the mechanism of the political sovereignty regime in the North, which is constituted through imperialism, you actually abet a specific pattern of polarized accumulation. And the only defense against that, even in Syria was a strong state system. Now it doesn't mean you accept the state system as it is. And you know, this is where people get hung up. I think it doesn't mean you say, okay, sovereignty is above democracy. Sovereignty is above social development is that political sovereignty, including the nation state itself needs to be improved and defended and maybe reconstituted, but it can't be abandoned. You can't abandon it to the imperialists.

Speaker 1: That was excellent. Thank you. And I hope that folks relisten to that section, because I think it's so central to the age of U.S.-led imperialism and late-stage sort of neocolonialism.

Max Ajl: And we should tell them to read Ali Qadri, who that's all taken from.

Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely. All throughout this, actually, Ali Qadri's work is important, especially when we talk about people leaving, forced to leave Syria, the doctors, the engineers, the de-development that's happening and how that plays into the development of these social democratic parties in Europe and social formations in Europe. And the other thing is, and I believe it's in Palestine in the End of Theory, your essay, you talk about Cabral's formation, Amilcar Cabral's formation of the national question being about the breaking of monopoly capital over the social, over the productive forces, but also the reinstating of people into history. So I think that's another articulation that is important when we talk about the national question.

Max Ajl: Of course, I mean, in the classic literature on this, you know, of course, it was a big debate in the historical pan-African movement, you know, Nkrumah, Cabral was an improvement on Nkrumah, but was also empowered and enabled by Nkrumah because he had someone to be in dialogue with who was a giant like Nkrumah. who, by the way, was slandered by Robert Vitalis, who said that one of his books was written by Israelis. So you understand that these counterinsurgents are everywhere. You have open racists feeding you what's called leftist thought. The US university system is a sore. Okay, so I wanted to give a little interlude for your listeners on that. But Cabral differentiated between political sovereignty because he understood, he had seen history happen, he had seen that political sovereignty itself was not achieving success. a liberated future, or it's not a path that was not an uncomplicated path to a liberated future for their people, you know, that there were systems that neocolonialism, and this is, again, building on Nkrumah, neocolonialism was being deployed as a new mechanism for kind of a foreshortening and control of the lives of people in Africa, right? And that with monopoly power intact and maintaining control over the productive forces, that is maintaining control over what was done on national agricultural land, maintaining control over financial systems, for example, as was the case in currency systems, as was the case in all over West Africa, also North Africa, to be honest, where the French maintained very substantial control through banks and even currency after independence of Tunisia and also, to a lesser extent, Algeria. Because these mechanisms, which were actually the substance of state sovereignty, for example, remained under foreign control, that the state was unable to play this role of actually developing the productive forces in the interest of the popular classes, but also because the agricultural lands often remained under foreign monopoly control, for example, as was the case in Tunisia until 1964, right? And even to the extent that they weren't, that they were, Tunisia paid for the repatriation of its own land that had been stolen by French settlers, right? It actually had to pay In 1964, eight years after independence, for eight years, the land, the products of the land were being absconded with by French landed capital, right, for eight years. And then the French were allowed restitution for... And imposed in Haiti as well. imposed in Haiti as well, right? So what Cabral was stating is that you actually have to break the control of foreign monopoly capital over the national productive forces if you want to move on from national sovereignty to national liberation. Now, the thing that I think is super important also to go back is that also again, unfortunately, people are more receptive to the national liberation and the national sovereignty part, even though Cabral and Fanon were both very clear they were never against national sovereignty. Even though Fanon really like, Fanon crapped on national, the post-colonial bourgeoisie and how they use national sovereignty. But that was a debate, endogenous, internal to the national movements. He was stating like, what are you guys doing? You guys are allowing your achievements to be hollowed out. But he wasn't saying your achievements don't matter and give them back. he was adopting a polemical tone in a political struggle over the direction of colonized, previously colonized societies. And so this is so often missed in this discussion of Fanon Cabral, where people are just, they're kind of, can be retroactively interjected into this anti-statist discourse, which I think, I can't say it's hegemonic anymore, right? It's still present, but it's not like what it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago. It just is present. And I think that it's very important to keep in mind that they were able to hold these varying perspectives within one referential frame, which was the necessity of defending and advancing on the political sovereignty regime. It was a given that you needed to do both for them.

Speaker 1: Right. Excellent. All right.

Speaker 2: Thank you. And my apologies, because as you're answering this question, I may need to step out. But I just wanted to say that in advance. But finally, I wanted to ask, so what does all of this mean for communists, for anti-imperialists, for people who want to support national liberation struggles, and really specifically those in the imperial core? Similarly, what is the role, if any, of anti-imperialist intellectuals and organizations in the imperialist core, given how deeply people's principles have fallen short in this moment and how, you know, it has, you know, broadly throughout the recent history and broader history of the left in the imperial court.

Max Ajl: Right. You know, I think we need to persist in identifying imperialism as a contradiction facing the world's people, right? You know, just today I was kind of refreshing my memory on the effects of sanctions on Syria. The effect, for example, was that Wheat yields, for example, yields on irrigated land went down 50%. And the national pharmaceutical system, including both the capacity to import, but even more cruelly, a more or less competent national system for producing generic drugs was destroyed through the Caesar sanctions, right? These sanctions that are imposed by the U.S. government on the people, on the state of Syria, target its people and make their lives worse. And, you know, I don't know about intellectuals or not, like, I'm just like, people need to be aware of that. And if you're in a position where other people, you have time and resources to be studying and reading about this, although, let's be honest, a lot of people now in the US have time to be reading about these things, share it and make it a priority in your organizing. Right. Like organized for all sorts of important domestic issues. Definitely. Right. But raise the, you know, people are learning not to be silent on Palestine, but also then why would you be silent on these sanctions that are hurting poor people in this other country. Like, you don't have a right to hurt them. You're responsible for hurting them. It doesn't mean that you should self-flagellate. It means that you need to identify to you and your comrades that there's a complicity, that it's part of an imperial plan to hurt these people, and that you need to stop and you need to get the government to stop. And that begins by making people more aware of what's going on. Right. This is like it's actually it's like very simple. Right. And, you know, we need to identify the intellectuals who are erasing this. Now, if you're talking to me about Syrian authoritarianism, autocracy, war economies, the kind of autochthonous, you know, germination of alleged Alawi sectarianism in Syria. And you haven't said things that are one misdescriptions often, but two are presented as though they're occurring within this kind of hermetically sealed cage called Syria. But you're not acknowledging the fact that actually, yes, it is a hermetically sealed cage because you're you've created a cage to asphyxiate Syrians and you haven't acknowledged that in your discourse, then People who are intellectuals need to say to other people who are intellectuals, what on earth are you doing? What is your priority in this world? What are you doing? Why are you pretending? Why are you cosplaying like you're like a revolutionary in Syria? When really you are here in America and you have a government whose policy you need to change. That should be your priority. And that's not campist. It's not Assadist. It's not tankist. It's not Stalinist, although Stalin is a good dude. But this is what you need to do. if you want to make the world a better place than it is now, like that's your actual mandate and responsibility. So I have like a super simple message for people more interested in theory, which is that like, and public propaganda and messaging and thought is that you need to, you need to step it up and, you know, stop making your aspiration in life to get published in like Dissent magazine with like, an Israeli settler, Josh Leifer, on the masthead. That's not an aspiration. Actually, that's like that's like looking that's like thinking that you want to celebrate your birthday party in an outhouse. Like that's not something to aspire to in life. Sorry. Right. What you know, I would love to say, oh, I helped lift those sanctions on Syria. That that's like something to aspire to. That would be a beautiful thing. Right. Not, you know, not not celebrating a pile of intellectual excrement.

Speaker 1: Excellent. So last question, which is a perfect segue for it. Who or what do you recommend people read or follow to stay up to date on developments in Syria and the broader region in Palestine? I know you named Ali Qadri, but some others that may. And we'll put in the show notes for folks to begin to do their own reading.

Max Ajl: Sure. I mean, you know, in terms of in terms of. Media, you know, you should be checking out The Cradle, you should be checking out Al Mayadeen English, you should be checking out Al Mayadeen Arabic and Al Akbar Arabic and, you know, subscribing to their Instagram and... Facebook and Twitter and whatever, I mean, and just use automatic translation and you're going to get a clearer picture of the world than you will reading this crap. Just if you want to read, you know, your your left wing American stuff like hate, read it and read it to know what the opposition is saying, but not to understand social reality. Right. You know, so read that journalism that comes from all of these sources. Get a sense of who their columnists are. And, you know, in terms of intellectual stuff that's working at the more theoretical level, Middle East Critique publishes a huge amount of good stuff. Of course, I recommend that. I recommend Agrarian South. I recommend Journal of Labor and Society. These are all very important resources that are putting out all sorts of information, particularly, but not only on the Middle East or the Arab Iranian region. I don't agree with him on a lot of things, but Asar Abu Khalil is an excellent resource, Joseph Massad, lots of Patrick Higgins, It's not so, you know, there's lots of people doing, there's lots of people doing very good work and you'll kind of know who they are if you're on social media and everyone's on social media who's listening to this podcast probably. So, you know, and plug in and figure out who's offering good information and, you know, reflexively distrust most prominent people, right? Reflexively distrust anything that's presented to you by the prominent kind of mainstream left media too. Because the fractured depiction of reality that it's going to present to you is just going to hurt your brain and confuse your soul. And it's not very helpful to try to fix the world.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and make you inevitably complicit. talking about. Well, thank you so much for your time, Max. You're really generous with it. Thank you so much, everyone. Thanks for tuning in and we'll talk to you soon.