I honestly can not say I have a deep knowledge of the Syrian civil war except for a few things.
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Multiple groups including Isis and the Syrian army are involved, some of which are US backed
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Rojava and the Kurds seem genuinely unproblematic and cool, and are currently being attacked by Syria and Turkey, and their support was withdrawn by trump.
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The resulting refugee crisis is a big deal, etc etc. I’ve actually been fortunate enough to talk with several refugees as my mother works in local government helping sponsor them, and one family threw a party and invited us. The food was delicious, but I felt like asking a family who had just been reunited with a family member after years about the civil war would not be a good idea. So I can’t say I learned much from the conversations I’ve had.
I see lots of Assad memes. Is it ironic? Is it unironic? Is it a big critical support deal like Kim Jong un? What’s the consensus? Can someone educate me or?
Thanks.
friendly reminder that max blumenthal used to spam anti-assad stuff until he magically switched sides after the rt gala invitation
https://medium.com/@_alhamra/documenting-max-blumenthals-regime-change-from-assad-opponent-to-assad-apologist-8715eb9d941b
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Bruh that's literally a Russiagate conspiracy theorist, they're citing accounts named "#DroneAssad" and defending the fucking White Helmets, like come on.
I sincerely wonder what your thought process is here. Did you think the author faked 500 tweets for the medium article? Did you not bother to check it out properly?
meme for you: https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/100706368041914368
Sudden and radical changes of heart are entirely plausible within incredibly short amounts of time without resorting to hysterical accusations of foreign influence. Especially when you already work within a corrupt edifice. The propaganda offensive supporting the Syrian War was incredibly elaborate and overwhelming, Max probably realized he was acting as a cog in a massive, evil machine.
Like no joke I went from "Hillary stan" to the kind of liberal who unironically believed the best way to help minorities in the era of Trump was to join the local police, to a radicalized anarcho-socialist in the span of 7 months. Today I'm a hardline Marxist-Leninist.
I very much think this is a product of short-term cultural memory. 2012-2015 were very incoherent times in terms of ideological ferment. The far right was very much on the rise (for example, the Tea Party IRL and GamerGate online) while the "left" was in a big awful tent under the thrall of Obama. Occupy was a very recent memory, a memory that had been brutally crushed, and Occupy itself had been an event very much within the confines of liberal discourse. The resurgence of socialism, communism, and anti-imperialism was really not a thing until 2015 at the earliest.
Does this dude not realize the war itself changed? The jihadists did take over as the dominant opposition. I also couldn't find any instance there of Blumenthal being an "Assad apologist" like is claimed. Since he put in quite a lot of effort to compile his anti-Assad views but has none for this supposed praise of Assad, I'm going to continue to assume it's a baseless smear.
H.. hello? How can you possible perceive this as "a baseless smear", this is evidently a crystal clear documentation of the switch in editorial stance, the discourse, the actors targeted, the objectives focused on etc.
Now the reason I posted this is because it seems like a lot of our fellows here are tightly devoted to the grayzone-network reportings, so it is very much needed to show that there is a questionable intransparancy at play here. Getting corrections on fake news is well and good, but one should never rely solely on this source for an opinion on Syria. That's how you get upvoted comments on here praising "assads progressive government".
Where are the tweets of him praising Assad? I didn't see any, hence it's a smear