Solidarity With the People of Syria! Build the Antiwar Movement!
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- Published on Friday, 18 November 2016 02:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1332 .... November 18, 2016
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Solidarity With the People of Syria!
Build the Antiwar Movement!
Richard Fidler
David Bush's article "Syria and the Antiwar Tradition," in the November 3 issue of The Bullet, is a commendable attempt to debate what antiwar activists in Canada and other "Western" countries should be saying and doing about the current war in Syria.
In that country, the rebel cities that rose up four years ago in revolt against the brutal Bashar al-Assad dictatorship are now under a genocidal siege, bombed and assaulted from the air by Assad's military, aided and abetted by Russian fighter jets and bombers. Their desperate fight for survival, if unsuccessful, will put paid to the Arab Spring and with it the potential for building a democratic, anti-imperialist governmental alternative... in the Middle East for an extended period to come. Socialists everywhere have every interest in supporting the Syrian people and opposing that war.
David Bush correctly calls for building a broad antiwar movement in this country and he cites as precedents the powerful movements against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and ’70s and the Iraq war in 2003. Oddly, however, in discussing how the antiwar movement should address the war in Syria, he wants to impose limits on the political message and alignments of the movement that in my view would contradict the goal of building a united front of opposition to the war. In doing so, he -- unwittingly -- reveals one of the major reasons why such a movement is lacking.
David takes issue in particular with "sections of the international left" that seek to build a movement of support to the anti-Assad opposition and opposition to the brutal military assault on it by the regime and its allies, chiefly Putin's Russia. They are framing the complex situation in Syria "in ways that are completely off the mark in terms of guiding an appropriate response at home," he charges.