Bashar Hafez al-Assad (born in Damascus, September 11, 1965) is the current president of the Syrian Arab Republic, ruling since July 17, 2000 after succeeding his father, Hafez al-Assad. He has also been the president of the Syrian Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party since July 24, 2000, also upon succeeding his father.
Al-Assad graduated from Damascus University Medical School in 1988, and began working as a military doctor in the Syrian Arab Army. Four years later, he attended postgraduate studies in London, specializing in Ophthalmology. In 1994 his older brother, Basel, was killed in a traffic accident. Bashar returned to Syria to resume his brother's role as heir apparent. He entered the military academy, and took charge of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon in 1998. In December 2000, Assad married Asma al-Assad, a computer science graduate and economic analyst at Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan.
At the beginning of his mandate, he proposed a policy of democratic change and a liberal economic opening. After 2012, he revived his liberal policies by promoting privatizations and winning new international partners such as China. He also started to promote tourism on the Syrian Mediterranean coasts.
Faced with the threat of the idea of preemptive war carried out by the US administration, the instability in Lebanon (where Syria maintained a strong military presence) and the constant tensions with neighboring Israel, Bashar al-Assad tried to have a reformist discourse that could satisfy the wishes of the European Union and the United States.
Since 2011, with the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, different Arab countries, the European Union, the United States, Turkey and other governments have demanded the resignation of Bashar al-Assad, while governments of other countries such as Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Cuba condemn or do not support foreign intervention or a change of government in Syria.
Today he is still the President of Syria and the government controls the majority of the country, thanks mainly to Russian support and intervention in the war against ISIS, and is slowly being accepted by international organizations such as the Arab League and the UN, which had denounced him at the beginning of the civil war.
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what's this about "stalin didn't go far enough with purges" seriously what the fuck is this sentiment 'ah yes, it would've been better if the entire red army was hollowed out, 4 million casualties in 1941 was far too little!'
hey look at this giant pile of false convictions we found in the purges? what if it was bigger? like do people seriously believe the ills of the party in the 80's could've been alleviated by murdering more soviets in the fucking 30s?
When it isn't just contrarianism, I think the main thrust of the argument is that Khrushchev and future leaders partially dismantled Stalin's economic structure, the same one which allowed the USSR to transform into a superpower in two decades, and so the USSR might have survived to the present day and onwards if this had not occurred, and the consequences of the decline and then fall of the USSR have produced vast amounts of death all around the world, far in excess of the purges. So it's a "kill X people now to save many more later" thing.
But as you say, the purges already killed many innocent people. He should have killed far less people but targeted the actual problematic people more precisely, rather than kill a shitload of people and hope to catch a few traitors in the crowd.
it smacks of Great Man Theory to lay it at the feet of Khruschev, if only the purge had specifically gotten him--everything would be dandy. i think the chilling effect of the purge and the dogmatism against internal party opposition even in peacetime have more to do with how an opportunist could rise in the party and institute dangerous reforms. Khruschev after all not only survived the purge, he thrived, and used the purge hammer to solidify his position.
but with the 'precision' argument, no-one at the time knew the future, so how could they know which persons would have the capacity to do the wrong reforms in 30 years? the entire purge hysteria was instigated from an overblown and falsified narrative that opportunists leapt on for personal advancement, in such an environment the idea of an even-handed investigation that'd catch the 'right' guys is talking about an entirely different historical event than the great purge.
edgy teenage contrarianism i assume
it better be
I don't get that sentiment with the purges (wishing they went harder), plus there's plenty of other examples of stalin really not going far enough.
Take the percentages agreement, by ceding control of greece the way he did when he actually had the upper hand it instead set the stage for a brutal civil war, the Truman doctrine and containment plan of the USSR
no more half measures walter
But who is it who was saying these convictions were false? Khrushchev and a bunch of other revisionists decades after the fact? Why should I believe any of that.
Obviously just killing more people wouldn't have fixed things, that's kinda just a meme. Basically, IMO, although the Soviet Union was far more democratic than liberal "democracies" ever have been, even at the USSR's worst, It wasn't democratic enough. The great purges were, in many ways, a struggle of the lower level party members against the entrenched party bureaucracy, and not something personally directed by Stalin. Unfortunately, the bureaucrats ultimately won, the party became disconnected from the masses, and several decades later, the party elite dissolved the USSR against the will of the people. So what I wish had happened was that the people had won, not that more people were killed per se.
I should further point out that Stalin was pro democracy, and often in the later years worked through the state apparatus and not the party apparatus because of this. Ironically, because of this, he was than slandered as being undemocratic by the party revisionists.