Capital city of Idaho
And the West hasn’t lifted the sanctions yet, and they’ll use the excuse that Julaninsky is a head-chopping jihadist and doesn’t respect human rightsTM to keep the sanctions.
So the question can be rephrased: Was Assad so unpopular domestically that Syrians would cheer for his removal despite knowing the sanctions aren’t going away?
At the height of the Sino-Soviet split, China shared borders with three countries that it had border skirmishes with: the Soviet Union, India, and Vietnam. Afghanistan and Mongolia were Soviet aligned states during the 70s, so that’s at least 5 states that were openly hostile to the PRC. Add in the First Island chain, and 1970s China was truly encircled on top of being a bit of a pariah state. Modern day China in comparison is fine.
Was Assad so bad domestically that Syrians would cheer for his removal despite knowing what the Zionist entity would do to Syria the day after?
Me coping by saying that at least HTS won’t have access to those jets either.
I’m not sure what the point of your comment since you praise DPRK’s courgage but also repeat Chinese nuclear fear mongering so please excuse me for that. Either way IMO as I said socialists need to move away completely from Chinese excuses.
I could say the exact same about your comment lmao. You just used my comment to soapbox about why you think modern China sucks. If you don’t like China, it’s very obvious that both Russia and Iran are also timid because of nukes. Are you going to blame “Chinese nuclear fearmongering” for that as well? Iran and Ansarallah both don’t have nukes, but it’s very clear one of them is a lot braver than the another. Ansarallah is already going after US aircraft carriers while Iran has not done so despite being more than technologically capable.
At the end of the day, they are scared of getting nuked. Their grand strategy, from Russia to China to Iran, is essentially boiling the frog. They want to slowly turn up the heat so the frog inside the pot doesn’t know it’s being boiled alive until it’s too late. The reason is that if the frog were to know it’s being boiled alive, the frog (ie the US) will quickly escalate to nukes and begin nuking their capital cities. They want to quietly and slowly move, hoping that while they make small and incremental gains, the US will not escalate that fast before falling apart due to internal contradictions as a settler-colony hollowed by austerity. I don’t blame them for pursuing anti-imperialism (or counter-hegemony if you don’t think their motives are pure) in this way. Just going “What is a few hundreds of millions of people dead compared to the defeat of Western imperialism? Just don’t be scared of nukes bruh lmao.” is deranged armchairism.
But perhaps we’re seeing the flaws and limitations of the slowly boiling the frog strategy. If you think about it, if the US had a crystal ball that could predict the future, and the crystal ball guarantees that no country will nuke the US even if the US uses nukes on them, then the US basically won. They don’t even have to rely on dollar hegemony anymore since they could pretty much transition to a new mode of production away from capitalism to we’ll-nuke-you-if-you-don’t-give-us-your-shit-ism. M-C-M’ becomes C-
-C’.
People have said much about Mao. And I know you’re well aware of what Mao thought about the prospect of China getting nuked. People have also commented about why the PRC had it in them to send the PVA into the DPRK. A big part of it was that Mao was willing to risk the prospect of China getting nuked by the US for the sake of anti-imperialism (plus a whole bunch of geopolitical reasons, but it doesn’t detract from the broader point). When Truman was threatening that China would be nuked if the PVA crossed the Yalu river, Mao made the correct prediction that if the US wanted to nuke China, they would’ve done so already, so the fact that they didn’t get nuked meant that they weren’t going to do shit. And so, Mao called their bluff and the PVA crossed the Yalu river.
We can all praise Mao for being a big-brained commie reincarnation of Liu Bang who can predict how his opponents will act, but at the end of the day, Mao was willing to gamble and risk China getting nuked. It’s not like the US was somehow incapable of nuking China. And not only that, China didn’t even have nukes until a decade after the Korean War, so there was no MAD. If China got nuked, China got nuked end of story. And Mao was still brave enough to gamble.
Dare to struggle, dare to win. And part of that dare involves risking it all. From what I’ve seen, the only group today that has that daring, that courage, that guts is Ansarallah and possibly the DPRK. No other country, party, or org has that amount of daring. If every single country, party, and org, even ones not necessarily counter-hegemonic like Turkey and India, had the daring of Mao or Ansarallah, Western imperialism would probably be defeated in less than 3 decades. Of course, part of the defeat of Western imperialism includes the possibility of the US starting a nuclear exchange which triggers MAD and leads to the complete extermination of humanity where not a trance of Western imperialism or any other signs of human life survives. But if everyone had that daring, there will be no Western imperialism by 2050, whether it’s through MAD, the replacement of Western imperialism with other forms of imperialism, or the triumph of the international proletariat and socialism.
However, are people willing to spend the next 25+ years with the knowledge that there’s a 30% chance the US will just begin a nuclear exchange and end humanity? If not, then they better be emotionally prepared for more disappointments and missed opportunities from Russia, China, and Iran being too passive.
Interesting thread on Salafism with respect to Islamic jurisprudence:
https://xcancel.com/revdefeated/status/1866019539672297609
No heat in the winter.
There are accounts of them turning on the AC during the middle of winter and turning on the heater during the middle of summer in order to torture prisoners.
Machiavelli malding about mercenaries vindicated once again.
The world: Assad must go!
Assad: Who must go?
The world: Completely ravaged by climate change and nuclear holocaust.
And the blame game commences:
https://xcancel.com/iQMidEastCentre/status/1865927168745697644
Assad shift in alliances during last year was kept a secret
Interesting commentary by a Vietnamese communist:
https://xcancel.com/darrion_nguyen/status/1865962973455634668
What happened in Syria vindicated Ho Chi Minh famous teaching “A nation who does not want to fight for its independence does not deserve it”. That’s why even though we got support from our allies (materials, technical), it was the Vietnamese to decide our struggle.
We got “negotiated” by big nation (incl. so called allies like the USSR / China) during Geneva and we learned our lesson. Le Duan famously said if we want unification, we must not fear the US, and also not fear the USSR and China, which means if our allies don’t agree to our course of action (let’s say fully liberate the south), be prepared to get supply cut off and fought on our own term if we want unification.
Reality shows that was correct decision, culminating in Paris 1972 where we negotiate directly with the US. In the last days of south Vietnam, the West called the USSR and China to talk to Hanoi to halt our operation, but it was all in vain.
Reminds me how Iran didn’t want Ansarallah to seize Sanaa, but Ansarallah did it anyways.
Awfully touchy about a total stranger you’ve never met before, are we?
: Oi you, tell us the number of nukes you have, yeah.
: No
Anti-Soviet Assad warrior puts his army on the road to peace:
https://xcancel.com/USEmbassySyria/status/864144602584035328
We remain committed to bringing leading AQS figures in HTS to justice. #Syria
Uh huh. Very curious that you would know their choice of pronouns when both of their accounts just had none/use name flair, the default pronoun flair. Do you happen to know Boredom/Halloweenbean on a personal level or something?
It’s one of those things that we will never know unless someone releases a memoir decades later.
He really has a way with words.
This is the real lesson for any leader or org. You can have a good geopolitical stance or good ideology or just good ideas on paper, but if nobody on the floor fucking likes you, your days are numbered, and you will one day be unceremoniously replaced by someone else. No one will write your obituary, and no one will come to your funeral.
So for many Syrians, it really boils down to them hating Julaninsky less because “well, at least he’s a Sunni Arab and he’ll chop the heads off of the Kurds/Alawites/Druze/Christians/Shia before focusing on us?” Asking genuinely. I don’t know a lot about Syria, especially its internal contradictions.