Nick G.VANGUARD - Expressing the viewpoint of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)
For National Independence and Socialism • www.cpaml.org
Nick G.
The significance of the liberation of Aleppo cannot be underestimated.
It is a major blow for US imperialism’s plans for a “New Middle East”, a Middle East of US client states working in concert to protect US global interests and to shore up the faltering US economy.
Six years ago, a movement for political reform and working class rights developed as Syrian people confronted the Assad government’s deregulation of some key economic areas.
The US saw the opportunity for a Libyan-style regime change, and encouraged armed terrorists aligned with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State to infiltrate the people’s mass movement and turn it from a focus on changing government policy to one of overthrowing the government.
US imperialism supplied weapons to anti-Assad terrorists, in some cases directly, and in other cases to so-called “moderate rebels” who then defected, one after another, with their US weapons to the terrorists.
The US strategy was born of a profound weakness of its ability to continue waging war against peoples and governments willing to defend their sovereignty and independence.
Speaking yesterday, Obama decried the fact that there had been “no public appetite” for a large-scale US military invasion of Syria and that it was “going to be impossible to do this on the cheap”.
Instead, the US had to rely on the only force potentially capable of toppling Assad - the vicious assassins flying the flag of the Islamic State.
US disinformation on Syria
What it could not control on the ground, the US made sure to control in the realm of public opinion, with a mass media prepared to lend the righteous word “rebels” to the armed fanatics fighting the Syrian Army, and to always describe as “civilians” the casualties amongst the terrorists.
The anti-Assad paradigm framing the bourgeois media’s reporting of events in Syria has Assad as the evil tyrant bent on waging war on his own people and gassing and massacring civilians by the thousands, while the terrorists are “moderates” and “rebels” brought into the conflict as a consequence of the Syrian government’s violent crackdown on a popular movement.
Thus, the chieftain of US imperialism, Barack Obama, is able to keep a straight face as he tells a news conference: "The world as we speak is united in horror at the savage assault by the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian allies on the city of Aleppo. This blood and these atrocities are on their hands."
So thorough is the US control of international news media that quite a few progressive and humanitarian peoples and organisations are decrying what they are told is Assad’s latest crime – defeating the terrorists who are committing every possible real crime to intimidate government supporters and bring Assad down.
This even extends to some on the so-called “Left”, mainly some of the Trotskyite groups such as those associated with the International Socialist Organisation. In its paper the Socialist Worker, the ISO bemoans the liberation of Aleppo, describing it as a “reconquering” by “ Bashar al-Assad's regime, Russian air power and Iranian-backed Shia death squads”.
In their inverted world-view where black is white and wrong is right, the ISO maintains that Aleppo had been “liberated by the Syrian Revolution” rather than seized by IS and al-Nusra (recently rebadged as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), and that its liberation from these terrorists is a setback for “the revolution from below”.
Syrian Communists welcome the liberation of Aleppo and the defeat of US-backed terrorists
In direct contrast to the bourgeois and ISO media war on Assad is the view of the Syrian Communist Party (Unified). In a statement released on December 7, the Party said:
As is well known, our party, along with other progressive and patriotic parties of Syria, is struggling against what is nowadays considered one of most barbarous imperialist aggressions of the period since World War Two, a struggle against the most extremist and fundamentalist radical movements of this century like al-Nusra Front, ISIS and al-Qaeda which have been condemned internationally.
This struggle is the practical embodiment of confrontation against the imperialist projects of domination in the world and in the region – the U.S. drive to create the so-called “New Middle East.”
Tens of thousands of people have been killed, hundreds of thousands others have been wounded, and thousands of families were forced to migrate to more peaceful areas inside and outside Syria. The damages are countless, thousands of workshops and factories of middle and small industries have been destroyed as well as many large industrial structures, infrastructure, schools and hospitals. Archaeological treasures and ancient cities have been crushed. Syrian oil and other wealth of the Syrian people are being stolen and smuggled to Turkey whose regime is allied with terrorist organizations. The value of these damages is estimated at around 200 billion dollars.
The Syrian people, along with the government, Syrian army and progressive political forces of the country, has been bravely resisting this aggression since its beginning in 2011.
Terrorists who fulfill this attack on Syria have come from more than 80 countries, supported by the imperial powers of the world and their allies.
The Party asked the international community to acknowledge the following facts:
1. It is not acceptable to put the offender and the victim on an equal footing.
2. International law does not allow any county to interfere in the internal affairs of any other country, which is what the terrorists and their supporters do in Syria. Demanding President Assad step down is an affair to be decided only by the Syrian people.
3. The aggressors are the only side who carry the full responsibility for the losses and damages in the country.
4. The aggression against Syria is going along with mass media/imperialist campaign, on which billions of dollars are spent by the USA and Saudi Arabia. Through this media facts about events in the country are falsified and this information is spread around the world.
5. Iraq is also under the same aggression and the Iraqi people are resisting it. It is the duty of all progressive forces of the world to supported the brave resistance of the Iraqi and Syrian peoples against the international terrorist aggressors.