The Ba’athist Apologist Noise Machine Marches On

Harold's List

Reform Party of Syria

Washington DC, September 24, 2005/RPS - Oubai Shahbandar/ -- To what extent has the Ba’ath party been a standard bearer of Arab Nationalism? And to what extent has such an ostensible ideology been truly representative of Syrian national needs and beneficial to national progress? Many commentators on Syria from Patrick Seale to Josh Landis have echoed the idea that the Ba’ath have been instrumental as guardians of Arab nationalism, thereby granting their respective rule in Iraq and Syria a measure of legitimacy.

That is, Assad I and the inheritor of the Ba’ath throne Assad the second, have played important roles in keeping the flames of Arab nationalism alive, particularly with the cascade of peace treaties signed between Israel and prominent Arab states in the past two decades. Now, with the destruction of the Ba’ath regime in Iraq, many such apologists of the Ba’athist Minority rule in Syria evince an underlying nostalgia for the upkeep of what is more than evidently clear a dead ideology.

Much like how international communism in general and Stalinism in particular found their most vocal cheerleaders among those that never had to suffer their rule (Lenin's 'useful idiots'), we are witnessing a distributing phenomenon amongst a new elite of revisionists that have managed to transform substantive objective analysis of history into willful subordination to a corrupt and cynical tyranny that has proven more than happy to delegate the task of whitewashing its crimes to a willing cadre of righteous proxies.

Arab pan-nationalism is nothing more than an oxymoronic idiom. It is a chimera, a nonstarter, a code word abused by faux-medicine men by which the Syrian populace may be enabled to sleepwalk through the naked brutality and ineptness of a regime that came to overlord a people who desired and deserved better.

Syrian national identity has never profited from this ostensible ideology that in the end remained a doctrine based on the tenants of chauvinistic aggression, hostility to liberalism, the West, and innately anti-Semitic.

History is rife with evidence of what awaits nations taken over by those that sing the siren songs of chauvinistic glory. They have always been doomed to failure. In the end, whatever national benefit that such ideologies as Arab pan-nationalism promise, they have always betrayed the core interests of their people for that of an exclusive ruling elite. The Ba’ath have proved no different, no better.

Besides, whatever genuine adherence there might have been within the Ba’athist ranks for ’arab pan-nationalism has long since denigrated into political opportunism and lust for the brute assumption of power.

In the end, it is likely that many of those that posit ’practical’ and ’realist’ arguments in defense of the Ba’athist entity today are in fact one of those rare breed of people that have not only clung onto the supposed ideological impetus of a regime during the heights of its atrocities, but remain steadfastly supportive even in its time of dimming twilight.