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Yesterday I retweeted a NY Times story about the rise of mass government rape, torture & murder in Syria in areas now taken back by the regime, and suggested anyone who supports the regime should read & think about what they're validating. The responses were fascinating.
2/ one was to insist that anything the NY Times says must be a lie, implying it wasn't happening, though in fact the article was largely just adding individualised detail to what basically all HR orgs have been reporting for years
3/ this response makes no sense, since Syria was notorious as perhaps the most brutal torture state on earth back when it was a US ally on the war on terror, & anyway completely fails to understand how media propaganda works.
4/ obviously the NYTimes is a biased source, but it's not like it simply makes up stories of mass atrocities like this entirely, or massively fakes the scale, the propaganda lies in ignoring or writing subtle justifications for some & not others
5/ another suggested I read Chomsky, unaware that Chomsky's actual position on Syria is almost identical to my own: Assad runs one of the most brutal regimes on earth, therefore principled people should support the revolutionaries & oppose imperial intervention in the conflict
6/ Chomsky also makes the lucid points that 1. even if a Syrian revolution resulted in an Islamic govt it would still be better than Assad, & 2. imperial powers (US, Israel) could easily have intervened in ways that helped the rebels & didn't, suggesting they want Assad in place
7/ perhaps the main point I was making is that Syria seems to be deploying a new approach to dealing with a massive non-violent popular uprising: first militarise it, then use industrial scale rape, torture, & murder against huge swaths of the population.
8/ this shifts the bar for what's considered ok for states to do in the face of civil opposition everywhere, in just the same way Guantanamo did. Those that scream "but the US tortures too" don't seem to understand their attitude is actually making it easier for the US to torture
9/ states draw on each other's experience & techniques, even those that are in theory (at the moment) opposed to one another, & imperial forces tend to be much more suspicious of popular movements than to any states, even those they describe as anathema right now
10/ another weird response was to pretend that saying "those who support Assad" should read about the torture is saying that anyone who opposes intervention supports Assad - i.e., that I think my own position is impossible
11/ in fact there are plenty leftists who support Assad either explicitly, or effectively (by uncritically & aggressively repeating the Assad propaganda line of the moment: what torture? anyway everyone does it! anyway it was justified by imperial subversion...).
12/ but what especially fascinates me is the underlying assumption that imperial intervention is not intrinsically wrong. Of course they say the opposite. But if they really believed imp intervention was always wrong they wouldn't feel obliged to deny Syrian regime atrocities
13/ the British empire expanded into a lot of Africa & SE Asia on the pretext of abolishing the slave trade & freeing slaves. Nowadays we have no problem saying that both imperialism and slavery were wrong.
14/ but what they are doing is the equivalent of a 19C "anti-imperialist" declaring that accounts of, say, Omani-run slave plantations in Zanzibar were clearly fabricated, or saying anyway wage slavery is just as bad so it was wrong to condemn slavery in particular
15/ because they assumed that IF slaves in Zanzibar actually did suffer horrible exploitation & abuse, then it WOULD be justifiable for a country halfway around the world to invade to stop it. It's the "anti-imperialist" Assad apologists who basically accept imperialist logic
