BY NICHOLAS AYALA

Recently, a leaked internal memo from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, OPCW, proved the chemical weapons attack the West claimed was carried out by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Douma on April 2018 was in fact, untrue.

Evidence proved that it was impossible for the Assad government to have dropped chemical weapons into Douma from a plane, but rather, the chemical weapons were placed there. It turns out this claimed attack, like all the previous claims of chemical weapons attacks, was a false flag coordinated by the imperialist powers to portray Assad as an evil dictator. As the United States considers preparing another false claim that Assad will carry out a chemical weapons attack, let’s not forget the numerous other false flags and statements made not only in Syria, but in every imperialist war of aggression, including Venezuela.

The continual attacks on Syria dating back to 2011 should teach us a lesson about the attempted coups and imperialist aggressions on Latin American nations. In April of this year, Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs Jorge Arreaza met with Assad in Syria to discuss the ongoing attacks from the U.S. empire both nations were fighting. The solidarity between nations must not be overlooked by us here in the Empire’s core or anywhere across the globe. In order to combat the global imperialist system, we must build a cross-national movement led by its survivors. The masses of people fighting together will overcome the power of the few exploiting states and the imperialists within.

Before the war, Syria made great advancements, especially in healthcare. In about 30 years, Syria’s life expectancy went up from 56 to 73; infant mortality decreased drastically; maternal mortality was reduced dramatically; and healthcare access was greatly expanded across the rural regions of the country. What we learn from Syria is a lesson often learned from imperialist wars of aggression: the empire will do whatever it takes, commit whatever atrocity it wants, to ensure its victory. The imperialist war on Syria has led to over 400,000 casualties, 13.5 million in need of humanitarian assistance, six million internally displaced refugees and five million refugees outside of Syria, according to U.N. reports.

Tens of thousands in Damascus, Syria participate in pro-Assad, anti-imperialist rally. | Source: Associated Press

The so-called “rebels” — which Western governments and their imperialist media outlets like CNN, BBC and Sky News refer to as “freedom fighters” — are groups like al-Nusra, otherwise known as al-Qaeda. They have now rebranded themselves as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. These groups have destroyed the progress made by Assad’s Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. They are directly linked to Western governments as Syrian and Russian forces found large caches of Western weapons in terrorist hideouts in Eastern and Western Syria. Some Western states like the U.S. and U.K. have gone so far as to insert their own special operatives into terrorist-controlled regions in Eastern Syria, to fight off the Syrian Arab Army trying to liberate their lands from these murderers. Airstrikes from the imperialist West rarely target these terrorist groups, instead inflicting damage on the Syrian soldiers attempting to rescue the people suffering under the occupation of Western terrorist proxies.

The terrorist forces of the West have replaced the progress achieved by Syria’s government with beheadings, forced slavery, genocide, kidnappings, murder and countless other atrocities. They work with other imperialist proxy groups like the White Helmets, who have received countless praise in Western imperialist society for aiding al-Qaeda fighters. The White Helmets are complicit in organ trafficking, acting as snipers for al-Qaeda, robbing civilians and staging chemical attacks for Western propaganda outlets, according to a U.N. panel that exposed their crimes to the international community. Journalists like Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett, along with many others, outed these groups long ago for the evils they commit.

Despite the interviews, evidence, photographs and numerous other accounts of these atrocities, there are still liberals, conservatives, anarchists and so-called “socialists” who parrot the lies of the Western media. They still believe that Assad is a dictator, despite the fact he was democratically elected in June 2014 with 88 percent of the vote, in an election which saw 73 percent voter turnout. Sound familiar? In Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro was elected with over 60 percent of the vote, yet Western media ignore or outright lie about these elections. The Venezuelan opposition acts as the terrorists in Syria do. They murder their own people, burn Chavistas alive, threaten families, steal from the people and stage fake propaganda for the media outlets of the West.

Some think that they can support the imperialist proxy terrorists in Syria, while claiming to defend Venezuela from U.S. aggression. However, support for imperialism in one part of the world is support for imperialism everywhere. Because imperialism is a system that connects the globe by forcing all developing economies into business with the imperialist core, there can be no division between the struggles in one region from the other.

Venezuelans rally in solidarity with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party in Caracas, Venezuela. | Source: VTV

As Syrian and Russian forces advance on some of the last terrorist strongholds, it is important to keep in mind Fidel Castro’s words in the Second Declaration of Havana: “No nation in Latin America is weak ­because each forms part of a family of 200 million brothers, who suffer the same miseries, who harbor the same sentiments, who have the same enemy, who dream about the same better future and who count upon the solidarity of all honest men and women throughout the world.”

The same could be said of nations throughout the world. States suffering from imperialist attacks by enemies utilizing the political, military, and economic power of the imperialist exploiting nations of the West have interconnected struggles. The nations of the Global South will never be weak when the solidarity between the billions suffering from imperialism unites to struggle for freedom and equality in the face of capitalist exploitation. We must learn from these fights that international solidarity to resist global imperialism is the key to defeating the bourgeois enemies.

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