News from Syria

A number of items from Syria have been in the news lately, some but not all of which impinge more or less on the class analysis and speculative philosophy of the Arab Spring.

Mr. Shadid. I read the local paper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, not the New York Times. I’m not studying the journalism of the Arab Spring the way Marx studied that of the 1848 revolution, a study that helped him write his book on Louis Bonaparte and his missives to that self-same New York Times. I’m just mining some of it.

But I did find insight in a few of the articles the Journal Sentinel published, insights crucial to the operations of speculative philosophy. Seems these were mostly authored by Shadid, and reproduced locally by permission of the Times. Such insights are hard to come by, even as subtext, and usually have to be read into the journalism – a process that is prone to the errors I am well aware I have not avoided. So I will miss him personally.

Seems also there are a lot of ways to die that would look like an asthma attack….

If you wanted to assassinate the judges and officials of a despotic regime with which you were at war, you would do well to have inside information on their whereabouts. The elementary inference that this may already have happened has certainly been made by the juvenile Bashar. What is the upshot?

Well, now perhaps Bashar cannot trust, and therefore has to fear, even those close associates who have been deeply involved in his crimes. Whether they or their subordinates might be informants only affects the degree, not the subjective possibility, of suspicion and fear. Now, with that kind of help, even he could become the target of the Free Syrian Army. Worse still, anyone who would help your enemies assassinate your minions, might nearly as likely, in their own proper persons, try to assassinate you.

When I say “nearly” as likely, I am speaking of the merely subjective calculations of an individual, in this case an individual who is already under a lot of stress. Fear is coming back around. Maybe the despot will begin to purge his inner circle. Maybe some of them will purge him first, particularly if they fear to become a target in a purge. They can calculate too.

Concerns were expressed at as high a level as the Cabinet about how Al Qaida might profit by the “destabilization” of the Assad regime. But they’re not concerns about the revolutionary progress of the Syrian people, are they? Neither could Al Qaida hope to destabilize this distracted nation measurably more than it already is, and to profit thereby. Just fishing in troubled waters, without any real chance, as in, say, Yemen or Somalia, of obtaining a legal or quasi-legal status as an arm of or party to the (legitimate?) government.

No, just stealing weapons they’d try to use against the West in general and the U.S. in particular. Acts of terror of the kind Al Qaida is capable of are as flea bites on the Syrian revolution. They can hold no terror for people who no longer fear the physical power of a despot stronger by several orders of magnitude.

The fears expressed by U.S. officials are petty and pusillanimous by comparison.

Speaking of fear, how about Damascus? Is it really possible the middle classes are no longer afraid to demonstrate in the streets against the excesses of the regime?

Of all the bad news Bashar has had this month, this might be the worst – no, it’s a lot worse to know you have to fear even your partners in crime.

The last item is, where’d Bashar get the ordnance for the redoubled violence of this new assault? Were the journalists watching the ports? Did the ship come in from Russia? from Iran? Maybe all the buzz in the Straights of Hormuz was a cover for a shipment of death to the Syrian people. Yet, it’d be easier to get through the Bosporus than the Suez unnoticed, wouldn’t it? Don’t know how long it would take to go around by the Cape of Good Hope. Or sail from, say, Shanghai. How long has it been since Bashar has been able to loose so many shells per day, per hour, per household?

Egyptians in Parliament: The Salafists

The Muslim Brotherhood, even if the perception that it represents conservative Islam is true, is nevertheless by definition a revolutionary party. The same applies to the Salafists, though there can be no doubt about their deep ideological conservatism.

Having once been outlawed, the now legal position of these parties in the formation of the new sate represents a revolution in the old state. According to my working definition, a revolution is an extralegal (usually violent) action against the state for the purpose of obliterating it, replacing it, or changing it fundamentally. It differs from counter-revolution because the latter, even when it would like to obliterate the state, would do so in favor of the few, or for the restoration of the former state, or one essentially the same.

The Brotherhood, and with them the Salafists, achieved their revolution in the fundamental law of the legal status of parties: they helped establish a new political liberty. That makes them revolutionary parties. Maybe that’s as far in revolution as the Salafist ideology will allow them to go. As I understand it, it’s already hypocrisy for a Salafist even to vote. The only reason they could stoop to participate in such an innovation is that it gives them a chance to restore the Caliphate. Which makes them right opportunists, correct? And, if that’s the only reason for their revolution, counter-revolutionaries.

Now the people can vote for them, so they can restore the Caliphate – a condition under which it would be illegal to vote for anything else. Or indeed to vote at all, once the Caliphate had been reestablished.

Or again, there can be only one caliph, can’t there? A caliphate is, in other words, a despotism, and, worse still, a caliph is a religious as well as a political figure. Voting against the caliph, even if it were somehow possible, would be a sin as well as a crime.

The Shariah presents the same kind of difficulty. When one would like to appeal to the courts, who can appeal to a higher authority than God? Using priests for judges is the kind of category confusion that prevailed in simpler, but not necessarily more humane times.

If this is counter-revolution, how does it serve the few? For that is what the class analysis expects. In general, for a despot to become wealthy, he has to sell favors to someone. A caliph could become, and they did become, wealthy in the same way. (It helps too if people consider it a religious duty to give you money.) The previous Egyptian despot was a secular, but that would not prevent the few from…embracing the Shariah – unless they were concerned about their wives, daughters, and sisters for some reason.

The big bourgeoisie were comfortable with secular despotism. Could they get in bed with the caliph? The question answers itself. They’ve done worse things in the history of the modern world than manipulate bigoted religious sentiment. They’ve taken worse risks than the one they would take by backing a Salafist caliphate.

So…where are the levers by which the Salafists could be manipulated? But there’s no need; the contradictions are too great. There are other and likelier levers to pull – and they no doubt are being pulled.

Egyptians in Parliament

The media were not so interested in Egypt when the violence was only occasional and at a low level. Then came the soccer riot, with its aftermath, and so that got some attention – a lot more than their parliament, busy as it is with the comparatively mundane matters of forming a coalition to govern, and convening a body to write a constitution.

You could see the former as an extended metaphor for the latter, where the real interest lies. This is a vital passage for the revolution, so it’s a shame for the student of revolutions to have to speculate – not as in speculative philosophy, which reasons by the application of principles to a (usually fairly small) set of determinate facts – but just to wonder what the case might be as the Muslim Brotherhood goes about its business.

Enough has been reported to know that the initiative lies with them, and that they represent a centrist, near majority element between the (right opportunist?) Salafist party and the (left adventurist?) secular parties. Maybe we know there are waverings too, as I’ve already posted, and maybe we can speculate where party coalitions or splits might arise. So I’ve projected a series of three new posts, on the Salafists, the seculars, and the Brotherhood in parliament.

Hopefully the coverage will catch up with my speculations. Meanwhile, there are imponderables, including the discontinuity between objective economic and political interests, and the state as an instrument or expression of mere belief.

In a Dangerous Place

Libya is in a dangerous place. Some countries seem too need a strong man who is strong enough to keep them from flying apart from the outside in. That situation has been reached by the revolutionary militias and their rivals, which are local, in some cases tribal, and in the worst cases, still loyal to the family of the despot.

At least Libya has oil. Oil grounds the possibilities of the middle class, which in turn grounds the possibilities for political and civil liberties in Libya.

This much can’t be said for Yemen. It was chosen by al Qaida for the same reason they choose all their other bolt holes (Iraq excepted, but Iraq was a mistake): it has little or no economic life. Tribal and regional rivalries antedate the Saleh regime – by centuries, even millennia. They drove the very course of the revolution. Saleh’s mastery of those relations was the prime reason he was so difficult to oust.

Worse still, with Saleh gone, what does the revolution do next? Is there anything on its agenda, the demand for which is strong enough to overcome the tendency to relapse into conflicts based on ancient rivalries? The people still carry rifles so they can protect their water holes from rival bands and tribes. Even if the revolution could coalesce around principles and programs, would it be able to govern until they were achieved?

All of which just goes to show that the departure of the despot in normally closer to the beginning than the end of a revolution – particularly a successful one.