All the lefties I know were excited about rojava/ aanes. I’ve never met a lefty in real life that was pro assad, not saying they don’t exist, but like: fuck em, assad sucked.
I think the “left” they are talking about are more like tankies or at least socialists who lean towards authoritarianism.
I know some people in my local DSA who uncritically support the idea that Russia is incapable of imperialism and who probably would have supported Assad because they were an ally of Russia.
I know this probably comes across as “no true Scotsman”, but I have a really hard time believing anyone who legitimately holds those views can also be socialist
It doesn’t for me, I personally think authoritarianism is a contradiction of “leftist” values.
It’s like “cultural feminism” which espouses the supremacy of women over men - if you aren’t advocating for the equality of the sexes, you aren’t really a feminist. :-/
I mean, I’m not disagreeing, that’s what I’m saying I trouble believing, a “socialist” authoritarian.
And like you, I don’t really get how leftist values are remotely compatible with authoritarianism.
A common starting place for trying to understand it would be reading: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
I’m not convinced by his argument, but it’s commonly pointed to and worth being familiar with.
Either way, “left communism” ftw.
Yeah, fuck 'em. This poor fellow is from Twitter, and unfortunately, there are definitely a bunch of brainrotted self-proclaimed ‘leftists’ there mourning Assad’s fall and calling Rojava a CIA plot even now.
I hope Rojava prevails and perseveres.
Yes and now probably Rojava is going to get slaughtered by Erdogan
I’m not sure what your point is? Assad wasn’t really stopping that, given that it seems turkey backed some militias that were able to mop him up in like a week with a surprise offensive.
Turkey has already been waging war against rojava for years now, and has been perpetrating a genocide against the kurds more broadly for decades. Their situation has always been dire, but its not over for them.
What leftist is out there supporting Assad?
Those who think “left” is whatever Russia does
I call it geopolitical jetlag
Tankies, in other words
“people I disagree with”, in other words
There are more than a few on lemmy.ml, of course.
Assad is a friend of Russia and enemy of the West. Therefore tankies support Assad.
Are the tankies in the room with you now?
Yeah, there’s a bunch of them around, actually. Just look at the most downvoted comments and you’ll find the clowns.
If I’m going to infer political attitudes I try to make sure there’s a little more evidence than “I disagree with you”.
And that’s what “tankies” has become - a pejorative meaning “people I disagree with”
Go head downvote all you want but it’s true.
Lots of them. Usually buy into the whole axis of resistance crap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campism
Campism is the belief that the world is divided into large, competing political groups of countries (“camps”) and that people with left-wing politics should support one camp over the other camps.[1] Unlike nationalists, campists do not support any countries for reasons such as ethnicity or national identity. Instead, campists support their camp for ideological reasons, because they believe their camp promotes their ideology, such as socialism or anti-imperialism.
TIL, thank you!
Campism is basically a pejorative like neoliberal, I don’t know anyone who claims to be campist.
The wikipedia page is a pet article by some Youtuber named SocDoneLeft
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Campism&action=history
“Neoliberal” is not just pejorative and not only do people self-identify as neoliberals, but it is a term used in a neutral way in plenty of contexts.
Still, good call-out about the author of the article - thanks!
I tried but couldnt parse this post. Idk whos side this guy is on and i dont know whos side he thinks im on. Very confusing lol.
"Assad falling is good, because Assad is a dictator. The left should be against dictators, yet many on Twitter proclaimed that supporting the dictator was Good Leftism, Actually.
Syrians and Ukrainians should be supported by the left. Just because Assad and Russia are enemies of the capitalist West doesn’t mean that they should get a free pass from the left to oppress Syrians and Ukrainians.
Palestinians should be supported by Americans. Just because Israel is a nominal ally of the US doesn’t mean that they should get a free pass from Americans to oppress Palestinians.
Reject tribalism. Embrace moral consistency."
Ahh i get it. But ive never heard a single person say assad was good for the left. Probably the tankies and the us left.
The tankie communities are definitely seeing the fall of Assad as a very bad thing. I was surprised at first, but then not surprised that they’d be supportive of dictator that aligns with Russia.
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It’s a double edged sword. Assad gone is a good thing, however it remains to be seen that it’s a good thing for the people of Syria, only time will tell. But you can’t cling onto a shitty dictator on the off chance that things might be worse. The people of Syria certainly seem to be happy about it.
From the Tankie perspective, they couldn’t give a flying fuck about the people of Syria, only what it means for the “unity” of anti-US aligned countries such as Iran & Russia.
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Why?
You’re asking why a dictator who uses chemical weapons on people being removed is a good thing?
Strawman
I was basing it on threads I saw on Lemmygrad and Hexbear. Their only concern is about the impact is has on Russia, Iran & China.
“yet many on Twitter proclaimed that supporting the dictator was Good Leftism”
Well this is news.
What’s there to say. Twitter’s a shithole.
Unfortunately, many people still use it to communicate and organize, some of whom do not belong in said shithole.
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What is “Woke ISIS” 😭
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Thanks. I thought you were literally referring to ISIS as ‘woke’. Completely missed that you were talking about HTS. (Apologies; I have autism.)
Jesus fucking Christ.
Assad has killed hundreds of thousands of his own people including using poison gas on civilians and operated a gigantic torture prison. Russia and Hezbollah helped him murder Syrians all day every day for the last decade at least. Assad also occupied parts of Lebanon for decades and murdered Lebanese politicians.
As long as Arabs kill Arabs, people in the west don’t give a shit.
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I will let the Syrians be the judge of that.
Given HTS historical ties to exteemist groups like Al Qaeda I do hope this is a good thing for all Syrians. Time will tell.
The best thing they could do is break Syria apart based on ethnic lines, and create a federated alliance. They could also do the anarchic strategy, especially since the rest of the world is in chaos. Relying less on industry might be an advantage.
Undoing the vestiges of colonialism is bloody work, but the current system of dictatorship/oil-cartel is hardly sunshine and roses for the locals.
I truly hope the people living there get to decide their future and the Kurds carve out a real state, not just autonomous zones that Turkey bombs at will. The way we abandoned them was disgusting after they led the fight on the ground against IS/Daesh.
Sadly though I don’t think whoever grabs power will be eager to give up land and resources to competing factions. Hoping it doesn’t end up this way, but I think ethnic conflict is going to be more likely than cooperation.
Idk that sounds a lot like just creating more regional division. At the end of the day they are all Syrian, regardless of religion or ethnicity. I’m not knowledgeable enough to say your solution won’t work or is a bad idea, just a bit doubtful.
Most middle eastern borders were drawn by imperialist powers in an effort to cause division. They need to throw those borders out to avoid constant war.
I mean sure, but redrawing them based on ethnic backgrounds isn’t the way to go either.
I can see no way that this would cause more war.
Is this X implying that Zelensky oppressing the Ukrainian people?
Talking about Russia, I presume
But then what is this enemy of our enemy?
The United States and her western allies
The post is talking about tankies that think because US bad -> Russia is the enemy of the US -> Russia good. Which is obviously asinine
The post is referring to leftists who supported Assad because he was backed by Russia and Russia is hostile to the West.
Enemy (Russia/Assad) of our (tankies) enemy (the west)
Edit: I should say that I’m taking specifically about what the post has to say in regards to Ukraine. IDK that there are many tankies out here supporting Israel.
*tweet
Yes he fucking is, as is every bourgeois politician, including putin. And don’t forget the gratitude HTS expressed towards the Zionists. The Syrian revolution had an immense progressive potential in 2011-13 but nowadays I’m just glad the war is over but at the same time I’m concerned about what happens next to Kurds, since HTS also had a substantial backing from the genocidal irredentist Ankara government.
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Kurdistan is the solution to all your problems
Did someone say Kurdistan? I heard they learned a lot from a guy with a book for a chin?
I’ll just leave this here.
Pretty much every geopolitical action we take is for our oligarch’s profit. Sabotaging regimes that wouldn’t be friendly to exploitation, installing regimes friendly to resource extraction for a song, defending good business partners doing genocide and human rights violations, etc.
Don’t mistake a broken clock like helping Ukraine with benevolence. We never have been benevolent.
We didn’t even enter WW2 as some benevolent heroes, our pacific fleet was decimated, the war came to us so we went to war to fight back. The US practiced eugenics prior to and even post WW2 though involuntary sterilization of those seen as undesirables. Had the Axis not thankfully committed the greatest strategic blunder of the 20th century, we wouldn’t have for a lot longer, if at all.
“Reject campism”
Allonzee: “But what about the BAD camp???”
What part of ‘reject campism’ did you not understand
I’m not refuting the point, I’m adding to it.
Russia, the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and China are all the worst of actors. Moral consistancy means being on none of their sides.
Your immediate response to someone pointing out that campism is bad whether it’s American (pointing out Israel) or anti-American (pointing out Russia and Assad) is to go on a rant about America Bad™, including the curious inclusion of eugenics as if that wasn’t supported in most corners pre-WW2.
Not sure that’s ‘adding to the point’ so much as ‘using it as a springboard to do the exact opposite’.
I don’t think you’d find many here overtly in Russias or China’s camps, but there are still many in the US’s in the social media primarily used by the west.
Part of being against campism is speaking out against the camp you’re physically in and more expected to go rah rah for out of nationalism.
I don’t think you’d find many here overtly in Russias or China’s camps, but there are still many in the US’s in the social media primarily used by the west.
Man, even putting Lemmy, where we currently are, aside, you can still find plenty of very loud and very popular nuts in places like Reddit and Twatter who are full-throated in their support of Russia and China. I could show you posts all day long, and have depression and fatigue set in long before I ran short of examples.
Part of being against campism is speaking out against the camp you’re physically in and more expected to go rah rah for out of nationalism.
So part of being against campism is picking a camp to be extra against because you were born there.
Believe me when I say, I’m an anticapitalist who believes all lower conflicts are either created by or heavily informed by the global class occupation being waged by the 30k or so hundred-million-plusinaires families spreading global misery through their greed disease, infecting world governments with their venom.
If you want to define me as in a camp, my camp is against those 30k global oligarchs with no allegiance to any nation they exploit, only their sociopathic ego scores. That includes Putin and Xi and Trump.
And yes, you need to extra proactively reject the camp you were born in, because the default is to assume you support where you’re from out of tribalism and selfish self-interest overriding moral consistancy.
Man, unironically, I do believe you. I don’t think you’re some fuckwad who uses ‘anti-imperialism’ as an excuse to play apologist for other imperialists. I’ve seen you around. I could be wrong, but you don’t seem like the type.
But at the same time, you do have to understand how it looks when someone says “America supporting oppressors is bad, and Russia supporting oppressors is bad”, and your response is to bring out the list of grudges on America, and then to say that it’s justified because there aren’t many supporters of Russia and China ‘on here’ (when both on the source of the original pic and on this site itself, there very much are), looks more like an attempt to focus the discussion on ‘bad camp’.
When the discussion is started based on “Bad Camp being Bad does NOT justify supporting other shitheads”, can you see how an immediate response of “I want to emphasize that Bad Camp is REALLY bad!” comes off as grating?
And yes, you need to extra proactively reject the camp you were born in, because the default is to assume you support where you’re from out of tribalism and selfish self-interest overriding moral consistancy.
You need to be extra proactive in watching for unintended campism in yourself and in your statements. Not extra proactive in the sense of disproportionate focus or changing every discussion to how the camp you were born in is Really Bad. Otherwise you’re just replacing the standard of beating the drum of “My camp is bad, but THEIR camp is worse!” with “Their camp is bad, but MY camp is worse!” in practical effect.
Once again, Venezuela 2002 is not the same as the others
