The nearly two-year effort to overturn the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by the U.S. and other desperate European governments is fast entering a new period that suggests the probability of open military intervention.
The up-to-now proxy war that has already killed thousands in Syria is motivated by the need of the U.S. and other European parasitic capitalist powers to halt a shifting balance of world power that is increasingly undermining the future of imperialism as it currently exists.
All the imperialists were caught off balance by the infectious Tunisian and Egyptian mass uprisings.
Beginning in December 2010 and characterized as the “Arab Spring,” masses of the oppressed also rose up against imperialist lackeys in Yemen and Dubai and even initiated challenges to the reactionary Saudi regime that has always done the bidding of international white power since its 1932 creation.
Already pushed back by the popular nationalist movements in South America, such as those in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and others; losing influence to the fast-growing political and economic power of China in Africa, the Asian Pacific Basin and elsewhere, Europe and the U.S. were frantic about the loss of other geopolitical terrain that exposed capitalist reliance on 500 years of imperialist rape and plunder.
The frightening possibility of Egypt falling into the hands of the people was more than the U.S. and the other white power imperialist powers could willingly tolerate. And, as soon as they caught their breath, under U.S. leadership, they moved to salvage their status of wealth and wellbeing at the expense of the rights and future of the rest of us.
With the masses attempting to intervene in their own affairs in Egypt, and Israel exposed to greater isolation in the region and Saudi Arabia and the other reactionary Arab regimes increasingly revealed as servants of imperialism, Iran, an implacable foe of Israel is poised to become a powerful regional force.
This is one of the reasons for the attack on Syria by the U.S. and a host of other imperialist countries and their allies, including Turkey and reactionary Arab regimes that benefit from a status quo that leaves the masses of their people hungry and oppressed.
This is also the reason an undeclared war is being fought against Iran by the U.S., Israel and other imperialists.
The Syrian “rebels”
Since the inception of the imperialist offensive against the Syrian government, efforts were made to cover this aggression with the fig leaf of a so-called Syrian rebel group, now known as the National Coalition of Forces of the Syrian Revolution and Opposition.
This “rebel” force is a motley grouping of reactionary scum scraped from the bottom of the barrel of colonial servility and corruption, politically backward and willing to sacrifice the dignity of their people on the alter of self-interest.
Just as in Libya, this crew has had the services of an assortment of imperialist regimes, including the white nationalist Jewish State of Israel whom is reputed to have Israeli troops on the ground assisting the “rebels.”
Israel has launched a public attack on Syria, claiming it was a response to a stray shell that landed in the Golan Heights, which is land seized from Syria and occupied by the Jewish entity since 1967.
Turkey has also opened its borders to the Syrian “rebels," allowing them a safe-haven, a protected zone from which to launch attacks in northern Syria and the ability to claim occupation in Syrian territory under Turkish military protection.
On Monday, December 10, 2012, the London Independent reported on the plan being drawn up to support the efforts to overthrow the Assad regime with training and air and naval power.
The Independent article clearly shows who is in the driver’s seat in this effort to dislodge the current government.
According to the Independent:
“The prospect of Western intervention comes as opposition groups, which have been disorganized and divided, at long last formed an umbrella political group and a command structure for their militias. Their foreign backers are said to believe that the 22-month-long civil war has now reached a tipping point and it has become imperative to offer help to the revolutionaries to enable them to make a final push against the regime.
“The head of Britain’s armed forces, General Sir David Richards, hosted a confidential meeting in London a few weeks ago attended by the military chiefs of France, Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and the UAE, and a three-star American general, in which the strategy was discussed at length…”
Contradictions exposed
A fundamental contradiction in the middle of this obvious colonial war against Syria is the glaring weakness of the international anti-imperialist movement, especially in the U.S. and Europe.
Where is the outcry by anti-war and peace activists? If it exists at all it is more like a whimper than an outcry. When there appeared to be a possibility of white boys and girls going off to die in wars in far off places, there have been massive mobilizations in opposition to imperialist wars.
The imperialists have learned, however.
Now, they use mercenaries called “contractors” in the U.S. and many colonial and semi-colonial “volunteers” fighting under their own flags to fight and die for them.
While many within the U.S. and Europe often claim to be anti-imperialists, their anti-imperialism is opposition to an imperialism that affects white people primarily, either directly or indirectly.
It is based on the false assumption that imperialism is capitalism, to which they admit a relationship, developed to its highest expression.
If, like African Internationalists, they recognized that capitalism has its foundation in imperialism, the rape and pillage of the world that raised Europe from feudal barbarism at the expense of the rest of us, opposition to capitalism would require them to fight their governments’ attacks on the rest of us—in Syria as well as the barrios and colonial ghettos of Europe and North America.
There is also the fact that within the African liberation movement in various places of the world there is a misconception of the nature of our struggle for freedom.
There are those who believe that liberation can be found within the borders defined for us as our national homeland by the imperialists who enslaved us and created the borders to facilitate our national oppression and exploitation.
Still, there are others who contribute to a split within the struggle against a bloodthirsty social system that was born of slavery and colonialism, by a subjective response to Arabs who participated in the trans-Saharan slave trade for several hundred years before the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
These Africans often cheer the attacks by the imperialists on the Arabs and when they do not cheer the attacks, they are indifferent, having the attitude that there is no difference in the Arabs and imperialist white power.
The weakness of both these positions is to be found in the fact that capitalism, spawned by imperialist attacks on Africa and the rest of the world outside Europe, was born as a world economy that united Europe culturally and economically through slavery and colonialism that provided the parasitic start-up for the capitalist system at the expense of the unity of Africa, Africans and much of the world.
Moreover, the system we are confronted with at this moment in history is a world capitalist system experiencing the greatest crisis since its inception.
Place imperialism in its grave
This is the system that has to be overturned in order for freedom for Africa, Africans, Arabs and the world is to be achieved.
There is no freedom to be found in fighting a battle against Arabs as a subjective response to something that happened in the past but which, as a social system has no bearing on today.
Currently the African People’s Socialist Party is engaged in a campaign called One People! One Party! One Destiny! that is designed to bring thousands of members into our Party at this critical historical moment.
This is in recognition of our responsibility to the peoples of the world that are engaged in the struggle against imperialism globally.
It is a response to a historical moment that is ripe with the possibility for the liberation and unification of Africa and Africans worldwide under the leadership of the African working class and poor peasantry.
We have assumed the responsibility to lead, to govern and to win.
By time this issue of The Burning Spear goes to press the fate of the Assad regime will be much clearer to everyone.
Regardless of the fate of the regime of the Syrian government, whether the U.S. and other imperialists succeed in ridding itself of Assad, the handwriting is on the wall.
There is nothing that the imperialists can do, even with the billion dollar Negro in the White House, to change the fate of a dying imperialist system.
The peoples of the world, half of whom exist on $2.50 a day, eighty percent of whom exist on $10 or less a day, are determined to be free.
Africa and African people must be liberated and united.
The changing balance of power in the world is moving the world in the trajectory of freedom and liberation for the broad mass of humanity that has served as a footstool for imperialist white power.
This is the direction of human progress that threatens the survival of the capitalist parasite that feasted on our dignity, lives, sovereignty and resources for the last 500 years.
Victory to the people of Syria against U.S. and European imperialism!
African and Arab workers and peasants, seize the reins of history in your own hands!
We will win!
