socialist secular Arab nationalists
According to
Sami al-Jundi, one of the co-founders of the
Arab Ba'ath Partyestablished by
Zaki Arsuzi, the party's emblem was the tiger because it would "excite the imagination of the youth, in the tradition of Nazism and Fascism, but taking into consideration the fact that the Arab is in his nature distant from
pagan symbols [like the
swastika]".
[89]Arsuzi's Ba'ath Party believed in the virtues of "one leader" and Arsuzi himself personally believed in the racial superiority of the Arabs. The party's members read Nazi literature, such as The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century; they were one of the first groups to plan the translation of Mein Kampf into Arabic; and they also actively searched for a copy of The Myth of the Twentieth Century—according to Moshe Ma'oz, the only copy of it was in Damascus and it was owned by Aflaq.[89] Arsuzi did not support the Axis powers and refused Italy's advances for party-to-party relations,[90] but he was also influenced by the racial theories of racialist philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain.[91] Arsuzi claimed that historically, Islam and Muhammad had reinforced the nobility and purity of the Arabs, which had both degenerated because Islam had been adopted by other peoples.[91] He was associated with the
League of Nationalist Action, a political party which existed in Syria from 1932 to 1939 and was strongly influenced by fascism and Nazism, as evidenced by its paramilitary "Ironshirts".
[92]
en.m.wikipedia.org
Assad literally jailed and tortured communists
Yassin al-Haj Saleh is one of the pivotal figures in the Syrian Revolution. He has a long history of activism in the country. Arrested by the Syrian regime in 1980 for the crime of political activism and membership of the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau) while in medical school at the age of 20, he spent the next 16 years in jail, including a final year in the infamous prison Tadmor, which the poet Faraj Bayradqdar called “the kingdom of death and madness.”
Released from prison in 1996, Saleh finished his interrupted medical studies, after which he became a political journalist and independent activist unaffiliated to any political party. Upon the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution, he went into hiding so he could tell the story of the revolution in newspapers and on a website he cofounded on the first anniversary of the Syrian Revolution: al-Jumhuriya (
https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en).
At the same time, Saleh, along with his wife and political collaborator Samira Khalil, played an active role in the revolution, working with a team of activists including the legendary Razan Zeitouneh. They found themselves caught between the hammer of Bashar al-Assad’s counter-revolution and the anvil of his reactionary Islamic fundamentalist opponents such as al Qaeda, Jaysh al-Islam and ISIS (also known by its acronym in Arabic, Daesh).
Tragically, Samira Khalil along with Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hamada, and Nazem Hamadi were abducted in 2013 and have not been heard from since. Saleh, who had moved from Eastern Ghouta to Raqqa, his native city, where he lived for two and a half months, again went into hiding, this time not from the regime, but from Daesh.
The group abducted two of his brothers. Nothing is known about Feras, his youngest brother who was abducted in July 2013. Two months before Samira, Razan, Wael, and Nazem were abducted, Saleh was forced to flee the country for Turkey.
The
ISR’s Ashley Smith interviewed Yassin al-Haj Saleh in October to coincide with the publication of his first book in English,
The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (Haymarket Books).
