Gerry Joseph Downing
Spot on, Tariq Ali . I'm shocked, all over again, at the leftists, some of them self-proclaimed Trotskyists, who celebrate US imperialism's and Zionism's colour revolution in Syria like they did in Libya and Iraq.
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Culled from Facebook: Tariq Ali, what is your attitude when dictators are toppled in Iraq, Libya and now Syria?
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Dec 30, 2024, 2:30:27 AM12/30/24
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Tariq Ali was asked, "What is your attitude when dictators are toppled in Iraq, Libya and now Syria?
Tariq Ali, what is your attitude when dictators are toppled in Iraq, Libya and now Syria?
There is no cause for celebration when these acts are carried out by Western imperialisms under the leadership of the United States.When they are toppled by their own people I celebrate. The West removes the people it doesn't like at a particular moment. Saddam of Iraq was a hero when he acted for the US and started a war with Iran. He became a 'Hitler' only when he invaded Kuwait imagining he had a green light from the US. Then after 9/11 they finished off him and a million other Iraqis. Five million orphans. Then they lynched Saddam,. Cause for celebration? I wrote against him produced a documentary mocking him when he was alive.
In Libya NATO killed over 30,000 Libyans to push through regime change and lynch Ghaddafi. 'We came, we saw, he died' was Hilary Clinton's celebration. French and British politicians took money from him. The LSE begged for a big donation and its professors wrote young Ghaddafi's PhD for him. Lord Giddens compared his work to Tony Blair's own great ideas. The same people supported NATO's assault. I criticised him severely for many years. I did not celebrate his death. What is there to celebrate in the antics of Western imperialism. The same for Syria. Iraq has not yet recovered. Libya is a wreck, ruled by rival jihadis. Syria has already been divided. The huge triumph of the West is still playing itself out. They are no longer ashamed of displaying their double standards as we observe in the Israeli genocide in Palestine, but NATO's useful idiots in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, adornments of the bourgeois media and their supporters in the barely existent left, still pretend that advances are being made. In one of his remarks on theatre, Brech stressed that he preferred to start withe new bad things not the old good ones. There are no longer any good ones left. Centuries before him, Spinoza who has just had his sentence of expulsion rescinded by the Synagogue in Amsterdam offered his own advice: 'Neither to laugh nor to cry but to understand'. NATO liberals should reflect on it.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Jan 2, 2025, 12:39:09 AMJan 2
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Richard Medhurst : The Syrian Revolution Was a Lie
The saying is,” If you can't beat them, join them”.Therefore, it should not come as a great surprise that after Israel has bombed Syria to their heart's content in the first week of the so called Syrian Revolution, and have now finished completely destroying all the military targets that they set out to destroy in Syria , the so called revolutionary leaders of Syria are now saying (also praying?) that Syria wants help from Israel
Hopefully, it should still be too far-fetched to imagine a so-called revolution in Iran , after which the so-called revolutionary leaders would be praying and begging for help from their enemies, the Great and the little Satan.
The only parallels I can imagine just now are
( a) The concluding chapter of Animal Farm: A Fairy Story by George Orwell (Chapter 10) - more specifically, the last line of Animal Farm : "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
(b) From page 509 of “The Life of Graham Greene (Vol. 3 ) By Norman Sherry of the account given of Graham Greene’s visit to Sierra Leone in late 1967:
Greene: “ Coming back to Freetown and Sierra Leone last Christmas; I thought I belonged to a bizarre past which no one else shared. It was a shock to be addressed by my first name on my first night, to feel a hand squeeze my arm, and a voice say, “ Don’t you remember me, we met in Pujehun? Let's have a drink at the City.” ( The City Hotel - also featured in his The Heart of the Matter )
Further down the page,
“ Greene and Soldati went to Midnight Mass, and he recalled the priest he knew during the war, Father Mackie (Who used to teach Creole)…..And Greene, always observant noticed:
“ The girl in front of me wore one of the surrealist Manchester cotton dresses which are really seen…….the word “Soup sweet” was printed over her shoulder, but I had to wait until she stood up before I could confirm another phrase: “FENELLA LAK GOOD POKE”
Father Mackie would have been amused, I thought, and what better description could there be of this poor lazy lovely country than “Soup Sweet” ?”
Dr. Oohay
Jan 2, 2025, 10:37:52 PMJan 2
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What CRUCIAL difference does it make if one’s homeboy rather than one’s foreign enemy eloped with one’s wife? Deontology v. Teleology? Or Neither?
Oohay
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Jan 4, 2025, 12:08:53 AMJan 4
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Dr Oohay,
Hmmm…Syria was once a province in what was the Ottoman Empire - and all of the land area being claimed as Israel and Palestine was but a province of Syria.
We are now at the cusp of witnessing the possible dismemberment of what was once Syria - but have no fear, Türkiye is the strongman in that area.
I’m sure that after Trump takes over, Israel is going to stay out of the melee.
This conjecture is based on what can be gleaned from Israpundit and JCPA
Some wishful thinking : In a future era when the United Nations has been displaced by a World Government with someone like Trump as the father / godfather of the troika, and Elon Musk as the son, all these local upheavals would be regarded as rebellions against the central authority.
And this too reminds me that many years ago, in a discussion about religion ( we had been discussing Cheikh Anta Diop and the Fulani as one of the lost tribes of Israel) when my dear friend Koro Sallah, one of the founders of MOJA told me that in both the heavenly and the earthly spheres, those who espouse monotheism are adherents of centralised government, human or divine, strong, omnipotent one-man dictatorship.
According to this documentary How Rome Invented Christianity, apparently your man the late Emperor Constantine understood this, although this does not gainsay the fact that on the whole, the polytheists (shirk) are more at home with the the devolution of the power and responsibilities that come with a more decentralised state of affairs, in the case of the Catholic Church, with Jesus as the head and His Holiness Pope Francis as his visible Vicar on earth supported by his cardinals etc at the Vatican - and in the outside world his main critic
With regard to your analogy, here’s another one Doctor Faustus Scenes 5 and 6 -call out for God and the devil turns up instead ( could be subtitled The Art of the Bad Deal
Of course, in such a situation that you allude to - God forbid - (one’s homeboy rather than one’s foreign enemy “eloping” with one’s wife) - in the case of the former, the idiot, vermin, treacherous son of a bitch obviously deserves the death penalty and he can choose between execution by firing squad and being hanged upside down; in the case of the latter (one’s foreign enemy) especially if he’s a God forsaken genocidal choir boi-boi from the precincts of Owerri, both of them he , and God forbid wifey deserve instant liquidation by decapitation as punishment, to put them out of their misery - and needless to say, that kind of scenario is not exactly reminiscent of what the Prophet Nathan said to his King David, that got David to wince at the denouement :” You are that man !”
Miles Davis : Kind of Blue
Dr. Oohay
Jan 6, 2025, 2:16:49 AMJan 6
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Yes, indeed: neither!
And thanks for the coda (Kind of Blue); the other time Coltrane, and now Davis — perhaps, still the two most creative jazz artists.
Oohay
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