April 25, 2018

By Stephen Gowans

I was recently alerted to Sonali Kolhatkar’s Truth Dig article, “Why Are Some on the Left Falling for Fake News on Syria?”, which Counterpunch found important enough to republish under the title, “The Left, Syria and Fake News.” Kolhatkar’s article was introduced to me as the work of a “beautiful soul.”

There’s certainly reason to believe the Truth Dig columnist fits the description. She urges us to consider “nonmilitary alternatives to ending the complex [Syrian] war”, but can’t think of any, much as Mehdi Hasan, in his rant against supporters of the Syrian government’s struggle against the aggressions of what he concedes are rapacious US foreign policy, Saudi extremism, and Israeli opportunism, can’t think of the benign alternatives the Syrian government should employ to defend itself (but thinks Assad should come up with some, all the same.)

And like Hasan, Kolhatkar claims neutrality in the US neo-colonial war on Syria, protesting that she’s on neither the side of Washington or Damascus, but (like Counterpunch’s Eric Draitser) is on the side of the Syrian people, the beautiful souls’ escape from the clash of real social forces into an amorphous “humanity.”

The beautiful soul is consumed with “philanthropic fantasies and sentimental phrases about fraternity”, Engels once remarked. They advocate “edifying humanism” and “generic, vague, moral appeals” not “concrete political action” to challenge “a specific social system”.* It’s not clear what Counterpunch is counterpunching, but in the case of Draitser and Kolhatkar, it’s certainly not US imperialism.

Beautiful souls appear not to recognize that the war in Syria is a concrete political struggle connected to a specific social system related to empire; it is the struggle of the United States to extend its dictatorship over all of the Arab world and of Arab nationalists in Damascus and their allies to counter US imperial designs. All the beautiful soul recognizes is that people are being killed, families are being uprooted, small children are being terrorized, and they wish it would all just end. They’re not for justice, or an end to oppression and the dictatorship of the United States, or for equality; they’re for the absence of conflict. And they don’t seem to particularly care how it’s brought about.

Kolhatkar accepts US-orchestrated war propaganda against Syria as true, and brands the challenges to it (which she deems fake news) as false. She deploys illogic (the White Helmets may be funded by the US but that means nothing because so are other groups) and then says our analysis “needs to be far more sophisticated.”

To clarify her position, consider an analogy with the struggle of slave owners against the slave rebellion.

In the war between slave owners and the slave rebellion, Kolhatkar profess neutrality, protesting that she’s for neither, but for humanity. If that weren’t bad enough, she undermines her compromised moral position further by demonstrating that her professed neutrality is a sham and that she’s really for the slave owners.

She accepts as true all the slurs the slave owners hurl at the slave rebellion, urging those who challenge the slave owners’ account to be more sophisticated (i.e., to accept it as incontestable), and to consider nonviolent alternatives to “the complex issue of slavery” (i.e., abandonment of the rebellion.) The effect of her advocacy, were it successful, would be the defeat of the rebellion and the perpetuation of a system of oppression.

Kolhatkar’s professions of neutrality notwithstanding, it’s clear whose side she’s on in the matter of the US war to impose neo-colonial slavery on Syria (and after Syria, Iran), but it’s not clear why. She certainly hasn’t arrived at her position by reasoned analysis; none is offered. Her disquisition is embarrassingly unsophisticated. She appears to be unaware of the issues that lie at the root of the conflict. She’s oblivious to the reality that mass media are jingoistic. And she’s incapable of recognizing glaring lapses of her own logic. We can only wonder what Counterpunch saw in her piece.

What’s more, Kolhatkar’s article is barely distinguishable in its broad strokes and intent from a recent Haaretz editorial, “How Assad’s War Crimes Bring Far Left and Right Together – Under Putin’s Benevolent Gaze,” which Media Lens has called part of “a global assault on dissent.” That an Israeli newspaper should smear supporters of Syria’s struggle against the unlawful, predatory, US-led, Saudi- and Israeli-supported neo-colonial aggression is hardly a surprise. Kolhatkar may have approached the task more gently, but it’s difficult to see how she (or for that matter Counterpunch) parts company with Haaretz.

In any event, whatever left Kolhatka is part of, is not a left that has much to do with challenging and overcoming a real world system of domination, oppression and exploitation. It’s a left whose goal is the absence of conflict, not the presence of justice; it’s for pious expressions of benevolence, not engagement with a real world struggle against dictatorship on an international level.

* Domenico Losurdo. Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History. Palgrave MacMillan. 2016. P 79-80.