COMMENT: We’ve seen any number of pictures of Sunni Islamofascists and Shiite Islamofascists. The picture at the link below shows supporters of embattled Syrian leader Bashar Assad pledging to fight for him and his Baathist party.
Secular in orientation, the Baathists nonetheless draw overtly on fascist tradition. There is no gesture in Muslim or Arab history or culture resembling this all too distinctive salute.
For some background on the historical development of the Arab/fascist connection, it is recommended that listeners download and read Cairo to Damascus, available for download for free on this website.
Here’s the link to the picture of the pro-Assad rally: http://www.daylife.com/photo/01gl0fggTX7l0
I guess it just goes to show that fascists don’t always trust each other, do they? Nice post, Dave. :)
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I’ve stopped hunting for the good guys here. Racist elements in Turkey probably see EU membership as an obstacle in the pursuit of a Turkic speaking empire. They are not up to the patient ethnic parsing and financial takeovers that Germany prefers. Nato airstrikes are quicker. Turkophiles have their eyes on northern Syria and northern Iran and points east. An emerging but probably unimportant enemy-of-my-enemy alliance is that of Greece and Iran. Meanwhile, the people of the region get to choose between left and right versions of fascism. Assad, like Nixon, has to go — he’s a fascist but still not hard right enough. He spends too much on bread subsidies that could be better spent elsewhere on gold bathroom fixtures.
@Dwight: I don’t see any good guys, either. In fact, if you want my opinion, all 3 of these of these countries have governments who are really just sides on the same rotten dice.
Allow me Dave, please, to pontificate a little bit. It is true that a picture is worth a thousand words. While surfing on the web, I stumbled upon some pictures from the Saintsations, the New Orleans Saints Cheerleaders.
In a nutshell, one has to remember that the French presence in Louisiana is due to the deportation of French colonists living in what is called today Nova Scottia, Canada, when the French Crown abandoned North America to the British.
What is absolutely striking about theses cheerleaders is that they wear...a golden lily on their chest! Symbolically, it’s incredible. The fleur-de-lis is not new on the Saints’ jersey apparently but to see it like that, on these beautiful women, hit me like a train. God that it would make me a great army! It is for these women that we have to continue the fight to protect and defend our civilization. Only freedom allow women to become so beautiful, not religion, totalitarianism or authoritarianism.
My blog is never mentioned anywhere nor is my name but I have the impression sometimes that I have an impact. It made my day anyway and I hope you will enjoy it too.
http://saintsations.net/main/meet_the_team.php?page=meet_the_team
The spigot is about to open:
Roving bands of radical Islamist fighters: one of those magic ingredients that can can take any situation, no matter how messed up it it already is, and make it even worse.
From an internet definition of the Ba’ath party — main ideological objectives are secularism, socialism, and pan-Arab unionism. Gaddafi wasn’t Ba’ath party but he worked its platform. He became a danger in the eyes of western intelligence agencies only when he stopped promoting terrorism.
Of Hussein, Gaddafi, and now Assad, none of them were poster boys for democracy but their real crime was trying to hold together a sovereign nation whose interests did not always coincide with the global corporate model.
Without Western interference some sort of secular pan-Arab movement might have succeeded, threatening the reign of the region’s depraved oil sheiks and emirs and forcing Israel to be reasonable.
It’s a strange, almost blasphemous thought to consider that the world might be in a much worse place by now if Russia and China did not have nuclear weapons.
While this is a predictable eventual development, the timing is rather surprising. Normally the Islamists would maintain their alliance with the secular rebels until after Assad falls. They might be getting ahead of themselves: