November 2, 2024

Speech by Abu Muhajer

Good afternoon to all comrades. Good evening to those who are in other parts of the planet connected to this meeting.

When we talk about “Marxism and war” in the Middle East, the image that immediately comes to mind is Palestine. There are 60,000 dead. In fact, it's being said that the death toll reaches 200,000. Every day there are thousands more dead at the hands of Zionism. We think of the bombings that Zionism is carrying out in southern Lebanon. It is a war of total extermination against the Palestinian people.
But this is only part of the picture.  Now we want to see the whole picture and to state that our current is not telling this picture as a mere spectator: the lessons, the programs, the books that we published like Syria Under Fire, volume I, and volume II, Journal of a Syrian Writer, were written as part of that history.

To begin understanding this, I will start by saying that in 2008 a brutal economic crisis broke out. The stock markets crashed everywhere. The big banks, especially in the US, went bankrupt. The same thing happened with the European banks.

They had increased the value on the houses in comparison to their actual worth and they made double, triple, quadruple mortgages on the mortgages, boosting and writing down values on their balance sheets that those properties were not worth. In other words, they are a bunch of parasites who invented fictitious values. And it was clear that all of those 90 trillion dollars had been “eaten” without generating any value.

 And that bunch of parasites withdrew from this business —from what was called the "real estate bubble”—,  and got into the "commodity bubble". The prices of food, grain, corn, wheat...
The wheat which bread is made with, which is the basic food in the Middle East. And one wonders, Wheat in the Middle East? Yes, wheat. And are there any plantations? No, they are importers. They have lots of oil. It is the area where almost 80% of the oil that provides the energy that supplies the world is produced. They export the oil, and from that money they buy the wheat to make bread, which is what they eat and we eat, basically.

Thus, in 2011, when the comrades went to buy bread they found that its price had increased by 200%; 250% in Libya; 400% in Egypt;  200% in Tunisia and in all the countries of the Middle East, prices rose and went on rising, and a situation was created that could no longer be endured.
The tragedy of the masses was symbolized by a young man in Tunisia, a computer engineer, unemployed, with no prospects for the future, who took a cart with fruit and vegetables to sell and at least have some income. The police came and forbade him from selling. They took away the cart with the fruit and vegetables, and the young man had no choice but to sacrifice himself. His name was Mohamed Bouazizi.
Mohamed Bouazizi was the spark that ignited a whole chain of revolutions in the Maghreb and the Middle East.

In Tunisia, the masses took to the streets by the thousands, marching to the police stations to free the political prisoners, kicking in and taking them out. The miners went on strike.
Immediately in Egypt, the masses attacked the “Pharaoh” Mubarak, occupying the central square of Cairo, called Tahrir.  They called on everyone to say “Pharaoh must fall”. The textile workers, the Suez Canal workers, the workers who transport Egyptian gas, paralyzed everything. Mubarak out!
But it didn't stop there... They want us to forget that there were huge revolutions. In Sudan the masses overthrew the Omar Al Bashir Dictatorship, a brutal dictatorship.

Faced with all these revolutions, the bourgeoisie came together and said: “We are going to act to save our property.” They had accomplices who dressed up these revolutions as “Peoples’ springs,” as “democratic revolutions.” They said: “Constituent Assemblies,” “free elections,” “Let there be more democracy.”
They even said that Tunisia was the example of the “Arab springs,” where “democracy had succeed.” And today in Tunisia there is again a regime of a terrible autocracy of 24 years as with Ben Ali who had been overthrown by the masses. The president dissolved parliament and all opponents are imprisoned.

In Egypt, General Al Sisi, commander-in-chief of the army, is now the president, with tens of thousands people sentenced to death and hundreds of thousands political prisoners.
In other words, the “democracies” were a detour for the counterrevolutions to come.

In Sudan, the Communist Party made an agreement with the bourgeois opposition and part of the army, and entered the government. And today the army is divided and they are fighting among themselves. In the middle, the masses are suffering one of the worst tragedies of deaths, hunger and misery.

These revolutions also had had a start in 2008, when the Iraqi resistance and the American working class, in their fight against the war, forced the US to withdraw from Iraq.

Bush left and they had to put on Obama's "good-natured" face, saying: "I extend my hand to the Muslim world." The US troops had to leave Iraq and from then on, the US could not intervene directly with its troops. It could not invade again as Bush had done in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The masses imposed the "Vietnam syndrome." In the US there was a Vietnam, and we have to be clear about that because when the revolutions broke out in the Maghreb and the Middle East, the US could not intervene directly.  Nor could it use its gendarme, its armed wing, its aircraft carrier on land, which is the Zionist state of occupation of Israel.

Because if Zionism intervened, it would have united all the Arab masses against it and would have led to a direct combat in Jerusalem. This would have been a strategic defeat for imperialism and a strategic victory for the masses.
So, imperialism sharpened all the class senses that property gives to it; the counterrevolutionary consciousness that it has.
In Libya it saw the masses arm themselves, split up the army and even cut off the head of the dictator Khadafy, who had been in power for 42 years. Imperialism contained this revolution by ordering the pro-Khadafy bourgeoisie to become “opposition” and before the masses came to power, they set themselves up as a “transitional government.”

In Syria, the masses had taken the same path as in Libya. They split the army and in a chain of insurrections through cities they advanced towards Damascus. They came to fight just blocks away from the government residence in Damascus. They set up their organizations, the Coordination Committees of workers and soldiers. It was a revolution that went very far.
The problem for imperialism was that if they had won in Syria, they would advance to fight alongside the Palestinian masses to expel the Zionist State. That revolution would have succeeded in Jerusalem.
In fact, 15,000 Libyans, after having arrived in Tripoli, went to Syria, because they said: "We will win our revolution in Syria and from there we are going to Palestine to liberate it and liberate Jerusalem.”

So imperialism said: “There can be no more democratic detour, no more democratic trap.  In Syria, it will be a question of directly smashing and genocide”, and they ordered al-Assad to massacre with everything he had.
That was not enough and he did the same as in Libya: he ordered the generals of the Sunni bourgeoisie of Syria to dress up as “democrats”, to form the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to control the weapons of the masses and to set up a bourgeois army to try to turn the mass civil war into a war of bourgeois armies to try to contain the exploited.

But that was not enough, because in 2013 al-Assad was in danger in Damascus. There was a huge workers' uprising in Damascus, which took over 300 factories in the working-class areas.
In response to this, imperialism sent Hezbollah and Iran to massacre the masses. They themselves boast that “if it were not for us, al-Assad would have fallen in the  2013”.

Al Assad surrounded by the Iranian counter-revolutionary guard and the Hezbollah militias was able to survive. And they began to direct their fire against the Syrian masses, guarding the borders of Zionism.
It is enough to see the statements of the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah themselves, saying that the enemy was the Syrian masses and no longer Zionism, with which they had to make arrangements and pacts.