In Syria, more than 7 years have passed since the beginning of the revolution. More than 600,000 have been massacred ... there are 15 million refugees ... A brutal counterrevolutionary genocide took place to drown it in blood. Today, al-Assad and Putin under the command of US imperialism are finishing massacring the last trenches of the revolution, which have been all along betrayed and surrendered from within by the bourgeois generals of the FSA, under the command of Turkey. We are witnessing the final chapters of the Syrian revolution. From the conference of Geneva, the powers and their lackeys hasten to consummate its defeat, and to assure the invasion and partition of Syria, distributing the booty of bloodied Syria. In the first place, the USA, with more than 10 military bases and 2000 marines in the place, occupies Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor and most of northern and eastern Syria, where all the oil wells are located. That is to say, most of the booty has already been left directly to the US.
The lion has already caught the most profitable of the prey. And the hyenas enter to nibble on the remaining pieces. Turkey occupies the northern places of Syria through which the oil pipelines pass, since it is the NATO gendarme and the custodian of them and of the trade routes. Thus, it has invaded Syria west of the Euphrates River, like the city of Azaz and has recently entered Afrin after al-Assad opened the doors of that city. That is because they had already agreed in Geneva that this would be the case, with Erdogan taking the FSA forces to Afrin so that they are well away from Ghouta and the last trenches of the revolution that al-Assad and Putin are massacring, leaving them at the mercy of these genocidal beasts.
Now Turkey has marked that it will go for Tel Rafat and also sought to go to Membej, but as we will see later, France also seeks to enter the oil routes business there and has sent 50 soldiers of its foreign legion to that town.
As for Putin, he has already sold and tested his weapons in Syria against the masses, and keeps his military bases in place, establishing himself as a gendarme of imperialism against the masses of Eurasia ... But his role is as a hitman, so he has kept no portion of Syrian territory.
Everyone is dividing the business, over graveyard Syria. The masses fought along 7 years of struggle, where there was no lack of heroism of the masses to resist and fight for their revolution. The armed masses had the triumph within reach, with more than 70% of the territory liberated, while al-Assad’s army’s private soldiers had passed to the side of revolution, Bashar was encircled in Damascus, surrounded by the combats of the working class of the Syrian capital and confined only to its palace of government and surroundings ...
If the triumph was not reached, it was because there were too many leaders who, while claiming of the working class, worked to fence and isolate the Syrian masses, preventing their unity with the world working class, leaving them at the mercy of the enormous counterrevolutionary forces that did concentrate there to support Bashar and assured that he ruthlessly slaughtered the masses. They gave these genocidal forces a free hand to make Syria a cemetery. Some supported him directly and others supported the Sunni bourgeois generals who gave in the revolution from within. A betrayal paid for by the masses in Syria, the Middle East and the whole world today.
The NPA: defender of the French imperialist bourgeoisie
Since the revolution began in Syria, there were two distinct sectors within the world left: one was directly pro- al-Assad, and supported the massacre, as the Communist parties and the Bolivarians. They argued that al-Assad was "anti-imperialist" and called all around the world to support him, and denounced the revolution "because it is an ISIS’s deed" or "it has been prepared and supported by the US" ... and ended up supporting the fascist crushing of the Syrian revolution.
Another sector said that it defended the Syrian revolution, but that was only by word of mouth. They actually said that in Syria a "democratic revolution" was developing and that the "democratic generals" of the Free Syrian Army had to be supported, who ended up negotiating their business in Geneva and delivering one by one the rebellious cities.
Within this last sector, we find the so-called "anti-capitalists" of France, the NPA. They hosted the tour of the FSA generals around the world when they met with the imperialist governments to ask for weapons. They made statements and appeals and advocated that the imperialist governments send them arms. They argued that the FSA was not well armed ... while these generals were very well armed, since they were left with the weapons that the masses had conquered from the al-Assad army with their insurrections in 2011. These Sunni bourgeois generals disarmed the masses, kept this armament well away from them and then, as happened in Aleppo –as denounced even by the same FSA rank and file fighters- it was handed over to al-Assad and as “prodigal sons” the FSA generals re-entered his army, from where they had left.
What the NPA, along with all this sector of the world reformist left was doing, was to demand that imperialism intervene in favor of the Syrian masses, giving weapons to the latter, and even some of them came up with the idea of establishing a no-fly zone... as if the imperialist powers were to support revolutions!
They never relied on the forces of the world working class, nor called to mobilize them, or established effective class solidarity. In 7 years they did nothing for the Syrian revolution, because they just sat on their hands waiting for the imperialist powers to intervene in favor of the Syrian masses.
The latest novelty of the NPA is that it now openly asks France to intervene with its army in Syria, taking its troops to the ground itself.
Thus, in its declaration on March 13, this pro-imperialist current raises: "the French government remained passive and did nothing to stop the massacre announced. The population of Afrin and the YPG launch a call for help and we must go to it”
Let's talk clearly. Denouncing that the French government does not do anything and afterwards asking France to intervene in Syria means demanding from this imperialist bourgeoisie that it invades Syria as well, along with the other invading armies. That is to say, they are asking that France be counted among the invading forces that are coordinated from the Geneva conference, where the distribution of Syria's business takes place.
It is no accident then that the NPA does not denounce the massacres in Ghouta or Idlib. At the same time they were issuing that statement, Ghouta was reduced to ashes by the bombings of al-Assad and Putin; the NPA stood quiet about it. The NPA has “entered Geneva”, and is one more pillar of this conference, from where the massacre is directed over the last trenches of the revolution. And more precisely, it has entered as a defender of Total -the French imperialist oil company- so that it obtains a better slice of business in Syria.
For some time now, the NPA has raised pro-imperialist positions that supported the counterrevolutionary adventures of French imperialism and its search for businesses throughout its backyard. The NPA openly raised the program "the enemy is ISIS". It lost no opportunity to make the workers of the world believe that the problem was "ISIS terrorism". It came to denounce it in the Paris self-inflicted “terrorist” attacks of Bataclan and others on 13/Nov/2015 or in the World Social Forum that met in Tunisia also in 2015, which condemned ISIS as the enemy of the Middle East after another self-attack in a museum in the latter city.
With this, NPA not only hid the counterrevolution in Syria from view by saying that the problem was ISIS and not al-Assad, but it also made French and world workers believe that the Syrian and Middle Eastern masses were all terrorist jihadists and that their allies were in the Élysée Palace while Hollande (and today Macron) stood as the standard-bearer of the "fight against terrorism."
Thus, they slandered the Syrian resistance saying that they were terrorists and belonged in ISIS; they allowed them to be isolated and massacred by al-Assad; but that is not all. They helped strengthen imperialist governments to achieve social base and cover the largest genocides on the planet.
In 2013 France invaded Mali, strengthened its military presence and bases in Chad to secure the uranium; in 2015-2016, it bombed Iraq, where today the Total has obtained a share of the oil business in agreement with the Anglo-US oil companies ... and also bombed Syria, its former colony, where it wants to secure a greater share of the business.
But the services of the NPA did not end there. With its "anti-ISIS" campaign, it infused Islamophobia among European and French workers, separating them from immigrants and the hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving from Syria and the Middle East to Europe. The more they were separated, the more the refugees were persecuted, imprisoned and deported (and today they are in concentration camps, an issue the NPA silences) and French imperialism was given a free hand to attack its own working class and snatch their conquests, as the weekly 36 work hours.
The NPA has rendered a great service to French imperialism. Thus ends its position that in the Middle East in 2011 there were "democratic revolutions", called "Arab springs", and that these could only reach victory in the hand of some "democratic" imperialisms.
Today, after seven years we see that the only thing that these imperialisms have brought has been massacre, hunger, looting and destruction for the masses that rose for bread in the heroic Syrian revolution; and profitable business for imperialism.
Though, after seven years, NPA continue insisting that imperialism has to intervene and that is why, in the meeting held last January of the International Union Net of Solidarity and Struggle, which brings together more than 70 unions in the world, the NPA, which headed it together with CSP-Conlutas of Brazil and the CGT of the Spanish State, again turned its back on the Syrian masses. The NPA did not want to take the defense of the Syrian revolution in its hands, as thousands of workers had voted in a convention of Conlutas in Brazil; NPA let this great opportunity pass. Secondly, NPA did not even take into account the motion that was made from the newspaper of the Syrian socialists The Truth of the Oppressed, along with other organizations, i.e., that from each union in the world a motion should be voted to set up a large fund of struggle composed of one-day-wage per worker to conquer humanitarian aid for Syria.
They are defenders of Geneva and only bet on the intervention of France and the "international community" in general... which as we saw is not the workers' organizations or the struggle of the masses, but imperialism, the UN, etc.
The NPA has aligned with Stalinism
As we mentioned before, with the issue of Afrin, the NPA concealed the terrible massacre that in Ghouta hovered over children, women and men. It kept a resounding silence about what was happening there, without calling for any action to defend the masses that were being exterminated after almost five years of siege. It was not part even of any of the concentrations or demonstrations that were made in the world. It only asked for solidarity with Afrin. That is, they located next to the YPG and PKK ... raising exactly the same policy, of making Afrin a "smoke screen" to hide the massacre in Ghouta from view.
They ended up together with those Stalinists who gave Afrin’s keys to al-Assad, who agreed to surrender them to Erdogan, while the FSA generals left with Turkey to Afrin and withdrew their forces from Ghouta leaving this city at the mercy of the brutal attacks of Bashar and Putin.
It is so evident both have the same policy that just a few days after the NPA took out the aforementioned statement where it demands French imperialism to send its troops "in defense of the Kurds", the own YPG leadership met with Macron to request exactly the same. And of course Macron missed no opportunity to heed their call and sent 50 soldiers to Menbej, as part of the business dispute around split Syria.
This front with Stalinism is not new. Already a few years ago, in 2016, when a huge struggle of the French working class against the "el-Khomri" bill that aimed to liquidate the conquest of 36 work hours a week, the NPA, from the leadership of the trade union center Solidaires made a united front with the maximum bureaucrat of the CGT, Martinez, a man directly from Stalinism.
Because it happened that the NPA, speaking from the left, supported Martinez. He called to support him and make a front behind him, in a moment Martinez was responsible for reducing the struggle of the working class to a pressure on the French parliament and when the latter voted the el-Khomri bill into a law, Martinez made the working class believe that they had been defeated, the struggle had been lost, that nothing could be done ... and the NPA accepted that.
That is because the NPA is part of the "New Left", a united party of the Stalinists and the renegades of Trotskyism at the service of Big Capital. A world counterrevolutionary leadership, like yesterday was the World Social Forum, of which the NPA was a member.
And it is no small detail to point out that in the 2013 meeting of this World Social Forum, the NPA already had showed its submission to Stalinism by silencing the Syrian question (when it claimed to defend it). Prior to this meeting, the NPA was part of an International Trade Union Meeting where 250 delegates from trade union organizations from 32 countries met. There, in order not to annoy their Stalinist friends, they argued that "Syria was divisive" and for that reason they kept quiet and hid it behind a campaign for the Palestinian prisoners. And for that reason they did not take any motion for Syria to that meeting of the WSF; on the contrary, they did dedicate themselves to paying homage to Chávez, the friend of al-Assad.
The NPA, a social-chauvinist current that crossed the Rubicon long ago
In short, the NPA supported its own imperialism in its invasion of Mali, its military bases in Chad, the attack of its own imperialist bourgeoisie on the French working class, refugees and immigrants. NPA is a defender of the participation of Total oil company in the businesses of Iraq, Libya, etc. and now also in Syria, clamoring to deepen imperialist intervention there, in spite of the imperialist powers never entering with bread and freedom in their hands, but with shootings to massacre, oppress, exploit and plunder.
The NPA does not want France, its boss, to be left out of the oil business, which is being discussed in Geneva. They are social-chauvinists, that is, they defend the interests of their imperialism, and not at all those of the Syrian masses, whom they do not call to defend against the brutal massacre as we saw in Ghouta and as we see today in Idlib, where the bombings by al-Assad and Putin’s planes continue.
The NPA has crossed the Rubicon long ago. It is another among the currents that, according to Lenin, feed on the crumbs of the super-profits of their own imperialism. They are social-imperialist parties that have tied their fate not to that of the working class, but to that of their own bourgeoisie.
They refuse, as does the English SWP or the United States Anti-War Movement to raise the slogan of "The enemy is at home!” They are light-years away from the great struggle of the powerful US Anti-war Movement of some years past that was the most important political and military instrument that all the oppressed peoples of the world had to confront and defeat the US imperialist beast. This happened in Korea in the 1950s and in Vietnam. And it also happened in Iraq, from where US imperialism had to flee like a rat in 2008 because the American people did not accept to die more for Bush, for Cheney or for Halliburton, the same as the workers of the Spanish State, of England, of France and of all Europe in that year.
For all these people it is the other way around. For them, in the imperialist headquarters there are not those who oppress and plunder the Middle East, the organizers of the massacres there, nor the leaders of all the lackeys who were used to outsource the repression, such as the Iranian guard, Putin's white army and the mercenaries of al-Assad. There they only see “democratic liberating friends” who can be required to go to help the masses in their "struggle for democracy."
Messrs. Social-imperialist NPA democrats and friends: there is no longer room for your "democracy" in Syria. What must succeed in Syria and everything in the Middle East, like yesterday happened in Vietnam, is the revolution to conquer the bread, expropriating the expropriators and murderers of the people. It is about putting the French workers at the level of these tasks, as they have the same demand for bread and welfare as the oppressed of Syria.
