Galloway on Assad. Damo on Starmer

In a footnote to the previous post I wrote:

More on Sykes-Picot here. For why I doubt that a third way, neither empire nor Ba’athism, was ever on the cards, see Syria – how Trotskyism got it so wrong. As for a balanced reckoning of Syria’s half century of Ba’athist rule, I don’t say a fifty-nine second clip of George Galloway with Piers Morgan could fit the bill – and George is way too reductive on why the US empire worked so hard to take out Assad – but for all who bought the ‘new Hitler’ propaganda hook, line and sinker it’s a useful corrective. ¹

Here’s the twenty-five minute interview from which that clip was taken. Disregard the clickbait caption. Piers is not ‘walloped’. Painfully limited though his worldview is, he does engage and hear out such scourges of empire as Galloway. That Morgan is paid handsomely for doing so is neither here nor there. The fact remains he gives a platform to those, like Lowkey, Roger Waters and Iranian Professor Mohammad Marandi, who do not mince words on the horrors of empire.

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I happened on the above while gathering material on the gas crisis about to engulf Europe, both in the EU sense and the wider one that includes basket case Britain. Speaking of which, I found a takedown of its current leader by a chap who only showed on my radar a few months ago. In podcasts averaging ten minutes, Kernow Damo delivers withering appraisals of events in the Ukraine and Middle East. Here though he stays closer to home.

This is a man who feels entitled … a man with absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. There is every reason for us to dislike him and every reason to believe there is no way he can turn his ever growing unpopularity with the British populace around. He just doesn’t have it in him. He’s incapable of being anything other than unpopular, dull, dishonest and downright cruel.

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1. Assad junior, the wannabe eye surgeon who became Syria’s president by default, after his elder and more ruthless brother was killed in a car crash, wanted to liberalise his country. That was naive. First, liberalisation, always dangerous, is vastly more so in a state slated for regime change, as Syria had been since 2003. Second, whether Syria liberalised or stayed a dictatorship like every other Arab state could never be determined by one man. Widespread belief to the contrary I chalk up to a public spoon-fed emotionally gratifying but politically infantilising myths of Great Men and Boo-Hiss villains as history’s primary agents. Our understandings consequently remain – conveniently for ruling elites – those of a toddler. Third, even if we allow that on occasion one man may be decisive in driving through change, in a Syria ruled by a Ba’athist Party hardened but faction-riven, Bashar lacked the qualities to be that man.