Echoes of Hitler

From: Washington's Long War on Syria

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There were echoes of Hitler in Syria’s conflict, but they had nothing whatever to do with Bashar al-Assad, who, as we have seen, was falsely depicted as a dictator in order to manufacture consent for Western efforts to force a political transition in Syria. Instead, echoes of Hitler were to be found in the arguments the United States and its allies used to undermine Syrian pan-Arabist ideology by representing it as an instrument of Alawite rule. The practice of insinuating that a political ideology is a concealed instrument for the oppression of a majority by a religious minority parallels Hitler’s propaganda campaign against Marxist internationalism, articulated in his Mein Kampf. Parallel ideas lurked beneath the surface of Western discourse on the conflict in Syria and the war on secular Arab nationalist Iraq. In the Western media, the Assads and Saddam were hardly ever called Arab nationalists. Instead, they were defined as members of minority sects and leaders of sectarian regimes, even though they didn’t self-identify as members of a sect or lead governments with sectarian agendas. To the contrary, they led governments with explicitly anti-sectarian goals. Similar to Marxist internationalists, who sought to build unity among workers across national lines to pursue their common interests, the Assads and Saddam embraced Arab “internationalism,” which sought to build unity among Arabs across sectarian and all other lines, including across the arbitrary frontiers drawn up in imperial map rooms which divided the Arab nation into dozens of states. Similarly, Washington wanted secular Arab nationalists to be understood by Syria’s Sunni majority as Alawites and by Iraq’s Shi’ite majority as Sunnis, and not as leaders of a pan-Arabic movement against domination by the West. And so both Nazi propaganda and Western propaganda portrayed ideologies of emancipation as ideologies of racial and sectarian domination.

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