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Sir, – Your editorial “The Irish Times view on Syria’s war: a call that must be heard” (March 9th), urging all parties to heed the pleas of NGOs appealing for aid, while commendable, will unfortunately not address the reason preventing the rebuilding of the country.
President Bashar al-Assad destroyed Syria to hold onto to power by adopting an exclusively and extreme military response in crushing the peaceful uprising in 2011 and has been indicted for crimes against humanity on multiple occasions since then by all of the leading independent human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria established by the UN Human Rights Council.

Author
Protesters at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. waving the Syrian rebel flag. November 25, 2019. Photo by Miki Jourdan / Flickr
The cycle of protests that collectively became known as the “Arab Spring” were triggered by a desperate event outside a government building in the small Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid in late December 2010, when Mohamad Bouazizi set fire to himself in an act of protest.
Mass demonstrations followed across Tunisia and quickly ricocheted across the Middle East and North Africa — expressions of young and old, men and women asserting their right to a life of dignity.
By early February, huge mobilizations had forced Tunisian and Egyptian dictators Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak to resign. However, it’s a long road from regime change to social transformation as would become clear over the following years. And even such a preliminary victory would prove elusive for other countries in the region.

By Mike Cummings
August 25, 2020
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In March, Yale political scientist Elizabeth Nugent was about to start a post-election survey in Tunisia to better understand the effects of repression on political partisanship following a revolution. COVID-19 upended those plans. 
Elizabeth Nugent
Nugent, whose work explores the psychology of political behavior in the Middle East, had to shift gears. She postponed the survey and turned her attention to a book project she’d been planning about the activists who mobilized uprisings in Egypt and Syria during the Arab Spring of 2011.

Caleb Maupin
People wonder if the Democratic Socialists of America represent a real socialist option for Americans. The answer is NO. The DSA is —at best— a social democracy type of formation, that is a collaborator with capitalism, not an ideological enemy of it.  The DSA is as reliable as Bernie Sanders, who, by now, should be recognized for what he is, a de facto member of the Democrat party, and—twice already—a betrayer of millions of people's aspirations who put their trust in him. The DSA is like a native version of SYRIZA, Greece's so-called coalition of the radical left", which, upon assuming power, promptly turned out to be neither radical nor left.  The DSA is a witting tool of the Democratic Party, providing support and political cover to US imperialism. As such, the DSA, like the Dems, supports imperialist interventions in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, etc., and is vocal in its support of Russiagate, and the new war on China, both extremely dangerous

My attitude about voting has been like the old Jewish joke about chicken soup when you’ve got a cold—it may not help very much, but it can’t hurt. The more ideological argue that voting legitimizes the system, and they’ve got …

  FIRST PUBLISHED 6 JULY 2019 • REPOSTED DUE TO RENEWED RELEVANCE  
The 2019 Socialism Conference, sponsored by American leftist juggernauts the DSA, Jacobin magazine, and ISO’s Haymarket Books, features regime-change activists from multiple US government-funded NGOs.
Socialism is now apparently brought to you by the US State Department.
From July 4 to 7, thousands of left-wing activists from across the United States are gathering in Chicago for the 2019 Socialism Conference.
At this event, some of the most powerful institutions on the American socialist — but avowedly anti-communist — left have brought together a motley crew of regime-change activists to demonize Official Enemies of Washington.
One anti-China panel at the conference features speakers from two different organizations that are both bankrolled by the US government’s soft-power arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a group founded out of Ronald Reagan’s CIA in the 1980s to grease the wheels of right-wing regime-change efforts and promote “free markets” across the planet.

PERHAPS MORE THAN any other recent question, the Syrian Revolution confused and divided the international left. Many dismissed the revolt as a “color revolution” orchestrated by the United States, and some became willing spokespeople for Bashar al-Assad's regime, recycling its talking points and conspiracy theories.

Tuesday, 8 September 2020, 10:18 am | Fightback
Aotearoa New Zealand, and particularly its Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, has been
widely praised in the media for its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The government
announced a state of emergency and Alert Level Four – the highest on the COVID-19 ... More >>
Monday, 27 January 2020, 9:15 am | Fightback
A study by the United Nations has found climate change could drive 122 million more
people into extreme poverty in the next 15 years, in part due to the impact it is
already having on small-scale farmers. We now know that for decades, beginning in ... More >>
Wednesday, 15 January 2020, 12:24 pm | Fightback
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