Thread by @SashRu88

1/ In a confrontation with the protagonists of the WG on #Syria, it is inevitable to deal with their underlying world view, which, as in this case, is revealed again and again through individual narrative plots, depriving the discourse of any scientific objectivity.

2/ This world view is already noticeable in their working papers, in which they question not only Douma but also other incidents of CW attacks & link their true cause with their managed massacre theory. A massacre conducted by Jihadists to provoke a western intervention.

3/ It is particularly striking how the protagonists are led by this view, but at the same time, how they try to isolate the discourse from the political context in #Syria by restricting the discourse only to the purely technical details of the leaked Henderson report,

4/ which, however,

a) raises a lot of unresolved questions:

claysbeach.blogspot.com/2019/05/lies-d…

c) whose basic message is very close to Russia's assertions:

al-bab.com/blog/2019/05/o…

and therefore cannot constitute a fertile basis for such an presumptuous theory.

/5 They call it evasion. But is it really a evasion to refer to the political context? Does it do justice to the complexity of the conflict to analyse such events independently of the political environment, independently of the historical & power relations of the actors involved?

/6 Or does such isolation not run the risk of becoming the starting point for using false assumptions about a violent actor as the basis for the thesis? Assumptions that are simply fundamentally contradictory to any other research on Syria? Like we can see here on Haywards blog.

7/ Or would a scientist, after a thorough analysis of Syria's political system, showing the centrality as well as symbolism of violence for the ruling clan, not be essentially suspicious & would slow down his conviction to formulate or elaborate such a thesis in the first place?

8/ This analysis would in fact take into account that it is very unlikely that of 336 officially verified CW attacks, the regime is not responsible for at least one. It would have to recognize the strategic advantage of using CW against an urban insurgency gppi.net/2019/02/17/the…

9/ A publication by Tobias Schneider and Theresa Lütkefend, supported by the German Foreign Ministry, shows in great detail which operational factors are central to their use and to what extent they complement the conventional warfare of the regime forces.

10/ Another crucial factor in this strategy of collective punishment of the oppositional population, in addition to the actual physical or lethal consequence, is the psychological impact on the resilience of civilians. carnegieendowment.org/sada/75809

11/ Besides all this strategic logic, it's important to acknowledge that the WG on #Syria provides the seemingly scientific power to the narrative of the Assad regime. A narrative that it has always tried to fully control & manipulate for its own purposes. serval.unil.ch/resource/serva…

12/ Shouldn't a scientific claim with the goal to warn of the dangers of propaganda of warmongering elements in western media recognize that the Assad regime has its own history of manipulating events for its own political purposes?

13/ What we can see in the WG in an almost international framework was also implied by the regime at the national level. With the Watan Document Foundation, founded by Dr. Shaaban, the regime tries to launder the narrative through a scientific apparition.
aljumhuriya.net/en/content/nar…

14/ A proper scientific consideration would have to give space to the research that currently exists on the complexity of the work of the Syrian secret services. It would acknowledge how lawless and autonomous these units have been operating for decades.

https://twitter.com/SashRu88/status/1128253282579898368

15/ One would have to consider how violence under the rule of house of Assad serves not only as an instrument of subjugation, but how it determines the entire citizen-ruler relationship and what symbolism violence finds in its extreme form of the politics of massacre.

16/ It would have to consider that these branches are designed to use the Stasi propaganda techniques of Zersetzung (decomposition) to discredit the opposition. That they are endowed with the most sophisticated methods to identify & infiltrate the enemy. omranstudies.org/publications/p…

17/ An instinct for propaganda would recognize a pattern behind the violence. The pattern of interchangeability of victims & perpetrators. Here the intelligence agents of the regime reflect the circumstances & reject blame for these acts of violence in order to blame the enemy.

18/ If the WG doesn't live in a parallel universe, it would have to recognise that this was the playbook in al-Houla,

ohchr.org/Documents/HRBo…

this was the playbook in the Queiq river massacre,

newyorker.com/magazine/2013/…

this was the pattern in Haswiya,

bbc.co.uk/news/world-mid…

19/ The purpose of this narrative distortion, in addition to an active implementation of the observer's doubts & passivity, is a execution of violence in which the observer's perception is to be influenced & altered. The political uncanny as a tool of authoritarian subjectivation

20/ The cardinal sin of this interchangeability for the uprising is exemplified with Zaynab al-Hosni, whose mystery from a cruel death at the hands of Assad’s torturers to a mysterious resurrection on state TV had caused a media uproar at the beginning of the protests in #Syria.

21/ An incident that has been interpreted by some as a staged event by the security services of the regime & which serves a prime example of the Zersetzungs tactics: a staging of violence and atrocities in order to get leverage on the narrative & the perception of the population

22/ A tradition of staging events that already served the regime during the UN investigation of its involvement in the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri as a leverage in controlling the narrative.

opendemocracy.net/en/article_234…

cfr.org/interview/cook…

23/ An expert for propaganda should then recognize in which muddy waters he is wading here. He should know that with a thesis of a staged massacre he enters into the direct advocacy of this regime. He would know that hes another tool in the full expression of the rule of violence

24/ And even if his world view does not allow him to accept the notion that this regime change attempt was another myth of this manipulation of narrative or was never really in the strategic interest of the great powers...

aljumhuriya.net/en/content/reg…

25/ ...he would, for the sake of his credibility, refrain from placing his mission in the name of the victims without acknowledging that the Assad regime once deliberately opened this Pandora's box.