Articles

On Ukraine-Syria Solidarity and the ‘Anti-Imperialism of Idiots’, by Elia J. Ayoub – 25 May 2022

From Shado-Mag

How many Leftists are failing those caught in the crossfire of oppressive regimes

I recently moderated a conversation called “Our wounds can be bridges: the threads that bind us from Syria to Ukraine” as part of Post-Extractive Futures series, co-produced by War on Want, Tipping Point UK, JunteGente and my podcast, The Fire These Times. 

The panellists were Ukrainian writer and historian Taras Bilous, Syrian writer and activist Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, Ukrainian academic Yuliya Yurchenko and Syrian activist and writer Wafa Ali Mustafa. 

In the two hours of conversation, an overwhelming topic we kept coming back to was pain. They spoke of the pain that comes not just from having to deal with impossibly difficult situations, but from also seeing people they thought would be allies – people on the Left – deny the legitimacy of their struggles. 

The anti-imperialism of idiots

Instead of allyship and support, they’ve seen prominent Left groups downplay or even sympathise with the oppressive regimes they have been fighting – in this case, the Russian and Syrian ones. 

In the words of Taras, “the Western Left, with some notable exceptions, has been failing at standing in genuine solidarity with victims of non-Western imperialism and authoritarianism.” 

This phenomenon is not new on the Left. Thinkers from George Orwell to Aimé Césaire to Zygmunt Bauman to Moishe Postone have criticised Leftist sympathies of authoritarianism in the context of Stalinist tyranny (and post-Stalinist nostalgia). The term ‘Tankie’, which has become more prominent in recent years to describe authoritarians in online Left spaces, has been used since 1956 to describe the British communists who stood by official party line and supported the USSR  tanks sent to crush the Hungarian Revolution. 

The conversation between Taras, Yassin, Yuliya and Wafa was made possible by a shared feeling of betrayal and abandonment, albeit to different extent. This same feeling has been expressed by many Syrian and Ukrainian activists recently and over the past few years. 

Whether it be with Ukrainians’ 2014 Revolution of Dignity (also known as the Maidan revolution) or with Syrians’ 2011 Revolution – both of which the four guests acknowledged as part of a global wave of pro-democracy protests – we saw a significant part of the Western Left meet these incredible events with suspicion and even outright hostility.

Incidentally, Taras, who wrote ‘a Letter to the Western Left‘ the day after Russia’s large-scale invasion began, cited British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami’s 2018 piece on ‘the anti-imperialism of idiots. 

Al-Shami, writing in the context of Syria, was referring to a tendency on the Western Left to dismiss or even excuse non-Western authoritarian governments in the name of cold war-era ‘campism’. Which is, in essence, an enemy-of-my-enemy attitude which downplays governments that purport to be opposed to the West, and which divides world governments into ‘camps’. 

Reflecting on this reaction to the conflicts in both Ukraine and Syria, Sri Lankan feminist Rohini Hensman called it ‘pseudo-anti-imperialism‘. In contrast with genuine anti-imperialism, which opposes all forms of imperialism, regardless of who is doing it, this ‘campist’ attitude effectively cheers on states like Russia or China in the name of ‘opposing the West’.

The ‘war on terror’, but on the Left

The irony here is that those Leftists who deny the crimes of regimes like Russia’s or Syria’s don’t seem to want to accept that those regimes’ first victims are often Leftists and activists themselves. A reality which was faced by both Yassin and Wafa. 

[READ THE REST]

Reading list:

Books:

Articles: 

Podcasts:

Elia J. Ayoub is a UK-based Palestinian-Lebanese writer and researcher whose work focuses on authoritarianism, hauntings, and alternative futurities. He holds a PhD in Cultural Analysis from the University of Zurich on postwar Lebanon and an MA on the politics of Hebrew and Yiddish. He is the co-founder of From The Periphery media collective which includes his podcast The Fire These Times. He can be found on Bluesky, and he runs the Hauntologies.net newsletter.

, , , , , , , ,
Views: 1
More content from this blog
, , , , , , , ,