Talking about critical analysis of history and current events (or not), and some ancient Chinese philosophy.
Thousands of years before Karl Marx was writing about dialectical materialism, Lao Tzu was also approaching the subject of how best to navigate the real world, armed with a deep understanding of the kinds of changes that take place in the world, and how best to relate to these changes.
In the ancient Chinese text, The Book of Changes, the I Ching, we get a very good lesson in the ins and outs of applying nuanced thought to real life.
The idea is basically if you take the metaphor of the world as the banks of a river, and the people as the water, if the goal in life is to navigate the riverbanks as gracefully as the river does, then we must know how to act like the water does. We have to know, as the water does, when to be calm, when to surge ahead, when to slowly work away at smoothing surfaces, when to smash through them, when to flood.
In the old translations of the I Ching that I read when I was young, there was much talk of "the superior man" and "the inferior man." In a given situation, the superior man does this, while the inferior man does that.
When traveling, for example, the superior man keeps a low profile, observes, and learns from his new surroundings. The inferior man makes a spectacle of himself, even though he doesn't yet understand the society he's traveling in.
The book is full of lots more advice along these lines. Sometimes it's a good time to take the initiative, other times it's a good time to keep preparing to do that. Time to build alliances and network, time to go forward and fight. At some point your ally can become your enemy, and vice versa. The united front may be the way to go in many instances, in others, striking out on your own.
For people who maybe think there's only one correct way to behave in every circumstance you might encounter in life, the advice within the pages of the I Ching may seem devious, or Machiavellian (which is the term we use for "devious" when it's on a grand scale).
Rather than devious, I would suggest that the I Ching represents the idea of nuanced thinking, and having an appropriately complex, nuanced approach to complex, nuanced realities. It's an approach to nuanced thinking and action that also holds much in common with Marx's dialectical materialism, and Mao Zedong's talk of primary, secondary, and tertiary contradictions, and how the revolution or the revolutionary needs to reorient depending on how the lines of the contradictions may be changing.
It seems to me that the world has not gotten any less complex in recent years, compared with how it was in Mao's, Marx's, or Lao Tzu's times. No less complex, and no fewer reasons to abandon nuanced thought or critical analysis.
Black-and-white thinking today, however, seems to be more prevalent than at any time in my life, and I see few signs of this situation improving, given the basic reasons for the worsening of the trend further and further away from critical analysis or complex thought.
The revolution in Syria is the most recent major case I'd put out there to illustrate some of what goes on, and why modern systems of communication make real communication harder.
For people who might benefit from a little backgrounder, though:
After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire after World War 1, the victorious colonial powers did what colonial powers had already been doing in other parts of the world, and drew borders between countries they now ruled, in such a way as to exacerbate ethnic and religious tensions, and to give the colonial powers a more compliant group within the country in question that would do the work of ruling the country on their behalf, and that would benefit slightly from the arrangement as a group.
In Iraq this group was the Sunni minority. In Lebanon it was the Maronite minority. In Syria it was the Alawite minority. (It's always a minority, by design, with this kind of colonial arrangement.)
In the century since the borders were drawn by the colonial powers, obviously a lot has happened. But despite all kinds of wars, coups, revolutions and other notable developments that have taken place in the interim, the comparative privilege of the Alawite minority in Syria has persisted. It's been much the same with the Maronites in Lebanon and the Sunnis in Iraq.
Under the rule of the secular nationalists in countries like Egypt, Iraq, and Syria for more than a half century there has been a lot of industrial development, development of institutions of higher learning, health care, etc. But class divisions based on ethnic and religious lines continued to be a problem, as did political corruption, with family members of political leaders benefitting from their positions in obvious ways.
Given the many fundamental issues with the setup that a lot of folks in these societies had with various forms of inequality, the perception of a lack of political representation for many groups, and various forms of repression people experienced coming from the authorities, the past half century has featured a fair bit of violent instability.
There have been other reasons for the violent instability, too, such as massive interference in the national affairs of all of these countries by regional and global powers with different agendas. Generally this meant exacerbating pre-existing divisions, rather than creating entirely new ones, however.
Without understating the role of outside interference in destabilizing everything in Syria over the past many decades and in particular since 2011, or the role outside powers had in setting in motion events that led to violent crackdowns against popular movements, what can be said regardless is the regime was corrupt and used a lot of violence against its citizens, including torturing huge numbers of them in prison.
Long before 2011, and especially since 2011, the nations of Iran, Russia, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, the US, Israel, and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement have been the countries or groups most active in funding, training, arming, bombing, and/or protecting various elements involved with the Syrian Civil War. (Obviously the use of the term "civil war" does not imply that outside forces are not involved, since outside forces being involved with civil wars is not the exception historically, but the norm. If most of the people fighting on both sides are from the same country, it's a civil war.)
When there's an actual war going on, this is the classic example of the point at which a lot of people in a country and beyond the borders of the country have to take sides, in one way or another, or in many different ways.
Whatever anyone may think of a corrupt secular dictatorship, the Kurdish struggle for autonomy, Islamic State, or the coalition of rebel groups that weren't Islamic State or the Kurds, these have basically been the main poles in the conflict for the past decade or so, along with fighters or armies and others involved from outside of Syria aligned with all of these different sides, including troops, tanks, and planes from Turkiye, the US, and Russia.
Individuals, movements, and other countries that got involved did so for lots of reasons. Sometimes to protect a community that was under attack, and often to oppose the side whose potential victory seemed most threatening. The way to do that is generally to pick a side to support that isn't the one you oppose.
Naturally, the relevant PR departments are going to lionize the leaders of every faction. In reality, the leadership of the different factions vary wildly, from principled supporters of feminism and democracy to those who would prefer to cut off the heads of the feminists, from grassroots movements engaging in widespread solidarity to those seeking power and control.
A long time ago, when Russia was part of the Soviet Union, the Syrian government was less corrupt and more believable in laying claim to having a socialist orientation, and it was viewed by many leftists around the world as being part of the pan-Arabist wing of global socialism, which was a phenomenon seen to be led by central committees in Moscow or Beijing by many people.
Even way back when, when it was still possible to be back in the USSR, a lot of people, movements, and national leaders around the world were very critical of domestic and/or international Soviet policies, but they critically supported or sought help from or otherwise aligned themselves with the Soviet Union or with China, because having a strong relationship with them was often considered far better than the alternative of domination by the US.
There's your backgrounder.
Now, there's been another revolution in Syria.
I'm not there, and I'm entirely dependent on what I hear from the various journalists that are over there covering events to know what's really going on. But certainly what's coming through certain major pipelines on anti-social media among the English-language commentariat is a whole lot of outrage, of a sort which I think deserves some examination.
The outrage rhetoric might be confusing, even to people who are closely following developments in Syria in the past few decades, because in order to understand the basis of it, we really have to go further back in time, to when the struggle, for many, was characterized as one between socialism and capitalism, between solidarity and imperialism, between humanity and barbarism.
Most countries in the world in the twentieth century were part of the Nonaligned Movement, attempting to carve out a neutral position in between what the western media referred to as the superpower rivalry. Other countries, especially those that were being bombed, sanctioned, or threatened by American, British or French imperialism, tended to abandon the whole neutrality gig and aligned themselves with the Soviet Union, in the hope of having a trade relationship with a country that grew wheat and made steel and other essential things for the survival of a people and the development of a country.
Most sensible people on the planet may have opposed US imperialism, but in so doing, they didn't necessarily embrace Soviet socialism. They had different orientations towards that, and a wide variety of ideas about how a country can best organize itself economically, politically, and in other ways. They might recognize that the US was playing an obviously villainous role in engaging in genocidal warfare against the population of one country after another, and in supporting so many dictatorships in the name of "fighting communism." But this rejection of US villainy didn't automatically translate into a blanket support for anyone who opposed it.
Well, for some it did, for others it didn't. For some, whichever political camp they aligned with, and the leaders of it, could do no wrong, or if they could, it was counter-revolutionary to publicly admit that they had any flaws.
This same socialism vs. capitalism mindset continues, confusingly, to be the framework through which certain people with an outsized presence on anti-social media view reality.
Of course it's not just on the platforms where they're waging their information wars, but that's mainly where it's visible to anyone who isn't attending one of the small gatherings of people who turn out for a protest organized by PSL or a similar group, so they can stand around and get yelled at.
The framework being pushed involves the idea that the leadership of Russia, China, and Iran represent socialism and solidarity in the world today, while the US and NATO represent capitalism and empire. And any country that sees fit for one reason or another to align themselves politically with either of these poles is then seen entirely through this lens, with their leadership either becoming paragons of good or paragons of evil.
Reality is so much more complex, however, than what the crowd that is lamenting the fall of the house of Assad and condemning the crimes committed by various participants in the Syrian Civil War/revolution would have us believe.
What I find especially terrifying is how, at least in progressive/left circles in the US, this kind of black-and-white thinking used to be more or less relegated to certain small, cultish parties such as the Party of Socialism and Liberation or Worker's World, but with the help of the platforms that reward anyone who's good at creating drama and stirring up controversy within the confines of 240 characters, the weight of the opinions of the black-and-white thinkers represented by such parties seems massive, and tends to relegate any more nuanced conversations anyone might be trying to have to the internet's dustbin.
On anti-social media today, the attacks against people involved with the Syrian Revolution that are coming from Zionists and the attacks that are coming from American or British pro-Assad leftists are completely indistinguishable from each other -- incidentally in exactly the same way as attacks on me on social media coming from Zionists or from self-styled leftists are impossible to distinguish from each other.
In reality, today, as in the twentieth century, the countries that align themselves in one way or another with what we could increasingly call "the east" vs. "the west" not only do this for different reasons, but these countries vary tremendously in terms of how they function, and how they treat their citizens.
Within the US/NATO/capitalist orbit you have some of the most egalitarian countries in the world represented by some of NATO's newest Scandinavian members, you have corrupt dictatorships that engage in widespread torture of their many prisoners, such as Egypt, and you have countries currently engaged in genocide, such as Israel. You also have nominally democratic countries that imprison the highest numbers of their citizens and engage in widespread torture of them, such as the US.
Within the Russia/China/Iran orbit you also have astounding numbers of prisoners. You have countries like Cuba within this orbit, which is one of the most egalitarian countries on Earth in terms of wealth distribution, and you have countries like Syria, which was run for decades by a corrupt family dynasty of one-time billionaires siphoning off the country's wealth. And when the corrupt billionaires in Syria or Ukraine can't get along at home anymore, they flee to Russia, just as the deposed US-sponsored dictators flee to Saudi Arabia -- or Florida, depending.
There are conclusions to be drawn from reading Lao Tzu, and from Syrian politics, the Syrian Civil War, and the Syrian revolution. Also from what countries or groups align themselves in different ways with which outside powers.
One of them is that reality is complex, and the ability to understand in which ways this is the case, and how you want to try to move forward under the circumstances, whoever "you" may be, is probably the most relevant question. Who's the good guy and who's the bad guy probably isn't.
There are conclusions to be drawn from the way the anti-social media platforms dominate our communications, and from the way they are organized to promote conflict and suppress reasonable discourse, regardless of whether posts are being censored or not. One of them is that if you allow a bunch of billionaires to hijack your means of communication, reasonable discourse and any kind of nuanced understanding of reality will suffer.
And we can be absolutely certain that whatever forms of sectarian goading, disinformation, and algorithm-boosted, incendiary lies that can be found on X or on Facebook or on VK in English can be found on those very platforms on a far more pernicious scale in Arabic.
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