The manipulator, the killer, and the left

It is common in Western leftist circles that the current high tension with Russia is attributed to the likes of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson who want to pressure and isolate Russia, driven by selfish calculations of their own, and not to Russia’s expansionist tendencies in Ukraine and the entire former Soviet sphere, and the world. Biden and Johnson are not devoid of private, national and personal accounts, but returning the explosive problem in and around Ukraine to their aspirations, and not to Putin's expansionist nationalist policy, anti-democratic in Russia and the world, and supportive of far-right organizations in Europe, is an aberration in vision that has precedents that push To suspect a defect in the configuration. The most famous of these precedents is the communist skepticism in the days of the Comintern of the intentions of the liberal democracies in the decade prior to the Second World War, and the view of Nazism as a mere variety of other bourgeois policies, and the adoption of narrow tactics of the type of class against class, which returns various political expressions to a rigid class dualism, which places the working class against the bourgeoisie. These tactics undermined potential alliances based on democracy and pluralism, which led to the weakening of everyone in the face of Hitlerism. There are really selfish manipulators, but there are fascist killers, the former exploit and deceive, while the latter seize, rob and can kill millions, and distinguishing between them is a priority over what the Second World War will prove after a few years of this controversy.

However, these two examples from the contemporary and current history of Europe have parallels from our recent history in Lebanon and Syria. Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has long been criticized for his neo-liberal economic policy, which changed the urban character of Beirut and enriched a narrow segment of the Lebanese, and was compatible with regional policies that relied at the time on an "Arab-Israeli peace" and the economic benefits accrued from it. This is while a young ghoul named Hezbollah was growing in Lebanon, stronger since that time than the Lebanese army, and professed that it was funded by Iran and loyal to its regime. This changed the sectarian formation of the subordinate, and the Assad regime that is similar to it in Syria. After a while, Rafik Hariri was assassinated by the Syrian-Lebanese security regime in a horrific crime, in which more than twenty people were killed with him. The young ghoul has developed into a full-fledged ghoul, Assad from the sovereign Lebanese state, and will, after years, intervene in neighboring Syria in the interest of an expansionist nation-state, kill, imprison and trade drugs, and strain the situation in Lebanon, Syria and the region for the sake of his Iranian reference. Here, too, the traditional leftist sensitivity found itself on the side of the murderer against the exploiter, alongside the force of assassination, intimidation, and war against the power of exploitation and distorted construction, in the absence of an ancient distinction between the exploiter and the murderer, or between the selfish manipulator who exploits others for his benefit and the selfish fascist who kills others if they oppose him. .

Today, Lebanon is experiencing conditions that may be the worst since the emergence of its modern entity after the First World War, and it is directly related to the presence of a murderous party affiliated with a foreign country, which made the silencers a weapon of assassination and the silencers its identity. This armed sectarian party is the guardian of the Lebanese regime today, and it was it that stood against the Lebanese uprising in the fall of 2019.

In the history of the Syrian revolution, we have an additional example of the same significance. In 2013 and 2014, at a time when the Free Army was still an umbrella for popular national forces, united by the issue of confronting the regime, the emerging Salafi Islamic groups, concerned with imposing their model wherever they controlled, began to challenge it as the bearer of a “blind banner” and a “thief” at the same time. The Islamists raised a chanting slogan, saying: The Free Army is a thief/We want the Islamic Army! The matter was not without examples of violations and the appropriation of private and public resources by various members of the Free Army, but the objection here came from formations with a fascist willingness, taking over society itself, such as Assad’s rule, and modeling it on its own, and killing those who do not agree with its model. The subsequent years of the Salafist groups are years of debauchery and debauchery in the appropriation of public and private resources, as well as killing and disappearance.

Rafic Hariri and the Free Army, as well as the European governments in the interwar years, and the American and British governments today, deserve criticism and opposition from liberation and revolutionary positions. But what distinguishes them from both Hezbollah and the Salafi militias, as well as from Putinism today and the Nazis of yesterday, is that the policy of the latter can hardly be influenced. It is possible to influence Hariri, not Hezbollah, the Free Army, not ISIS, Al-Nusra, and the Army of Islam, the bourgeois democracies, not Hitler and the Nazi party, the Johnson government and the Biden administration, not Putin, with whom the pillars of his regime in particular stammer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3Z-ZoGreNI

And it is, the effect, that occurs through popular protests that are not suppressed, with critical voices in pluralistic media, with multilateral consultations internally and internationally. In all of these cases, there is a kind of pluralism, and therefore internal dialogue is possible in the parties that cannot be influenced, that is, political deliberation with them, while this does not seem the case in organizations or authorities that are monolithic and anti-democratic. At the height of their power, the Hitlers and the Salafists, the Putinists and the Hezbollah, seemed to be in a state of intoxication in which the knot was mixed with force, which prevented them from listening to others and searching for political solutions with others. These forces do not change by politics, they change only if they are defeated.

Added to this important political difference is a moral difference, which can be based on to determine the correct position, which does not require, in any case, to stand with Hariri or the Free Army, nor with Johnson and Biden, nor with the bourgeois democracies prior to World War II. I mean looking at the conflict fields in the aforementioned examples from the site of the victims, from the site of the Ukrainians today, the Syrians resisting Assad's genocidal rule, the Lebanese aspiring to the independence of their country and the state's monopoly on violence in it, the smaller European countries in the days of the rise of Nazism (Czechoslovakia, Poland...) as well as the most religious and ethnic groups Fragility in Germany itself, and in Europe as a whole.

Regarding the Ukrainian crisis, which is the occasion of this writing, the traditional leftist sensitivity in the West seems to be a continuation of the communist sensibility prior to the arrival of the Nazis to power, that is, against the well-known manipulator and a lack of caution towards the fanatical nationalist tyrant, who poisons, arrests and tortures his opponents, when some campaigners of this sensitivity are not enthusiastic him rather. This raises the question of the possibility of a left that struggles against the exploitative manipulator, but is not tempted by a mass murderer in its own country or in other countries. Before Ukraine, Syria was a test in which this type of left presented a great failure in understanding, in feeling, and in politics, its roots in what seems to be a well-established formation of the Western left and its thinking in international affairs:

This configuration failed. The group has problems with the elites of their countries, and they are rarely able to look at the problems of other countries from a position that places their problems in their countries in brackets, even if temporarily and with the aim of understanding. This leads them steadily closer to the killer, out of objection to the selfish manipulator. The victims are not seen.