Khrushchev’s Revisionism

Nikita-KhrushchevTIME Khrushchev’s revisionism refers to claims by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that:

• Socialism can be brought about by peaceful, constitutional means within capitalist democracies.
• Socialist and capitalist countries can coexist peacefully.

Was he right? Did he really believe these claims?

Socialism, if it is understood as a publicly owned, planned economy, has yet to be brought about through peaceful, constitutional means within capitalist democracies, or elsewhere, and it is difficult to imagine conditions under which it ever could be. In order for socialism to be achieved at the ballot box, the wealthy and powerful who dominate the state, including its police, security, and military apparatus, would have to stand idly by as their private productive property—the basis of their wealth and privileges—was denied them and brought under public control. This is unrealistic. We cannot imagine slave owners peacefully standing by, as their slaves set themselves free, nor feudal lords peacefully accepting their serfs’ expropriation of their estates. Unless we believe that capital-owners are somehow unique, we should not imagine that they would be any less likely than other ruling classes to use the repressive apparatus of the state to preserve their privileges and beat back challenges from a subordinate class that seeks to abolish private productive property.

Did Khrushchev really believe what he was saying? Perhaps. But his arguments may have had less to do with what is true, and more to do with what suited the interests of the Soviet Union at the time (and some might also say what Soviet leaders believed was best for advancing the interests of the international working class given the formidable obstacles in its path.)

The USSR desperately needed space to develop its economy, free from the continual threat of military aggression from the United States and its NATO allies. For his part, Stalin had dissuaded communists in France and Italy from making insurrectionary bids for power at the end of WWII, when communism’s reputation was strong and war-torn Europe leaned toward socialism. He also refused aid to the Greek communists in their guerrilla struggle against British occupation. These efforts to put the brakes on communist advance in the West were taken in order to maintain friendly relations with the USSR’s wartime allies and also because Soviet-supported revolutions in France and Italy would likely have been crushed by the Americans and British, who would have then turned their guns on the Soviet Union. Stalin’s understanding was that a quid-pro-quo had been worked out with his wartime allies. He would not interfere in Western Europe and in return, they would allow him to establish friendly “buffer” states in Eastern Europe as a safeguard against another invasion of the USSR from the west. Likewise, Stalin exercised extreme caution in helping Kim Il Sung in the Korean civil war for fear of being drawn into war with the United States. The Soviet Union could ill-afford a war with the Americans, and Stalin therefore refused to support revolutionary movements in his allies’ sphere of influence and acted with caution in supporting revolutionary movements elsewhere. There is a considerable continuity in Stalin’s efforts to keep the hostility of capitalist powers at bay, and Khrushchev’s call for peaceful coexistence.

Since it was Khrushchev who proposed peaceful co-existence, he had to offer an incentive to interest the Americans. The incentive was the idea of a peaceful transition to socialism—in effect, a promise that communist parties in advanced industrialized countries would work within the rules of capitalist democracies, and renounce violent, extra-constitutional bids for power. To put it another way, they would surrender any possibility of being a threat. This was very much like the bargain Stalin tried to strike with his wartime allies. Refrain from interfering in my sphere and I will refrain from interfering in yours.

While it irked some communists in the West, peaceful transition was a concession of little significance. Most communist parties, most of all those in North America, Western Europe and Japan, were not in a position to make violent, extra-constitutional bids for power. Therefore, if the Americans took the bait, Khrushchev would get space to continue to build socialism for the small price of giving up revolution in the advanced countries, which was not on the radar anyway.

Was this a betrayal of the working class outside the Soviet sphere? It depends on what you think the chances of revolution were in the advanced, industrialized countries. After the failure of a revolution to come off in Germany following the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Russia—a revolution Lenin and his followers had fervently hoped for and expected, even depended on—the Soviets were never again sanguine about the prospects of the working class in the West overthrowing its capitalist masters. Therefore, beginning with Stalin, the Soviet Union redefined the idea of internationalism to recognize this depressing reality. Moscow would refrain from vigorously supporting working class struggles in the West, first because the pay-off was likely to be slim to non-existent, and second because the costs were too high, namely the risk that Germany, Britain and France, and later the United States, would retaliate and threaten the USSR’s very existence.

Instead, the Soviets turned their gaze to seemingly more promising and safer horizons, one on their periphery and the other in the national liberation movements. They would expand socialism gradually, by drawing more and more of these countries and movements into their orbit. Meanwhile, the appeal of socialism in the industrialized countries would be heightened by creating within the Soviet Union a living, breathing, example of socialism. If the Soviet Union could overtake the United States economically, and produce a society of plenty with a growing array of publicly provided goods and services delivered according to need, workers in the West might be galvanized to overthrow the capitalist class, which stood in the way of their achieving the same. However, the only way that this could be brought about would be to set the US-USSR relationship on a footing of peaceful co-existence and economic, rather than military, competition, allowing Moscow to divert capital and manpower from the military to the civilian economy so that it could advance toward a society of plenty.

Khrushchev’s revisionism, then, can be seen as a clever detour around hazards that blocked the Soviet Union’s path toward building a stronger socialism, and eventually, socialism on a global scale. Clever as it was, it had a fatal flaw: it was too successful. Peaceful co-existence and detente gave the Soviets space to do two things:

• Beat the United States into space.
• Produce economic growth so rapid that the United States believed it would be overtaken economically.

Alarmed, the Americans resolved to deny the Soviet Union the space it needed to continue along this path. Eventually, Washington used an arms race to severely retard growth in the Soviet economy, and force the USSR into submission.

To sum up: There is no substance to the idea that capitalism can be abolished within capitalist institutions while capitalists stand by idly and allow their property to be expropriated. Nor is it reasonable to suppose that capitalist powers are prepared to co-exist peacefully with socialist ones on a permanent basis. They may do so for a time, if the costs of war are too high, but they will be forever driven to capture the economic space socialist countries deny them. All the same, Khrushchev’s peaceful co-existence proposal was less a statement of fact and more a proposal for a modus vivendi—you let us be, and we will let you be. The merits of the proposal can be evaluated on the grounds of whether it achieved what it was supposed to achieve. It did, for a time, reduce tensions between the two powers, but failed inasmuch as the United States eventually abandoned detente. Still, we need to ask whether the alternative—allowing tensions to escalate and trying to foment revolutions in the West—would have worked out better. This seems unlikely. While the Soviet military was formidable, the economy of the USSR was still smaller than that of the United States and was therefore incapable of supporting Soviet participation in the Cold War indefinitely. Eventually the Cold War took a heavy toll on the Soviet economy. Moreover, workers in the West showed no strong inclination to overthrow their capitalist masters.

We should be clear, too, that Khrushchev represented no discontinuity with Stalin. Stalin too was interested in a live-and-let-live foreign policy if it contained tensions and allowed the USSR breathing room to grow stronger. There were, then, good reasons why the Soviet Union should have worked for detente, and Moscow’s demanding that communist parties in advanced industrialized countries adopt a non-revolutionary politics for non-revolutionary times was hardly a high price to pay.

A final point. The problem with the idea of “non-revolutionary politics for non-revolutionary times” is that revolutionary times can creep up unannounced, creating missed opportunities for parties that are contingently practicing non-revolutionary politics, or have institutionalized them. The trick, obviously, is to avoid either of the following errors:

• Practicing non-revolutionary politics in revolutionary times.
• Practicing revolutionary politics in non-revolutionary times.

Of the two, the first, of course, is the gravest error. It could be said that Khrushchev’s revisionism guaranteed that if any error were to be made, it would be this one.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Srephen Gowans is a Canadian activist and political analyst. He is the founding editor of What’s Left.

A Nation Armed to the Teeth but Living in Fear

Dave Lindorff, This Can’t Be Happening

A new study by researchers at the University of Illinois in Urbana, showing that young children who are fearful in childhood are likely to be conservative when they grow up got me to thinking.

It’s not just that a whole generation of kids who get regularly belted by their parents, who are warned that if they behave in a certain manner they’ll go to hell, or that their faces will freeze in some horrible contorted way, or that they will be thrown out of the house, are becoming Republicans. It’s that virtually the whole country is populated by adults who have been raised in a climate of fear by a media and a government that are hell-bent on scaring the shit out of everyone.

The result is that a nation that once, for better or worse, was full of people who could strike out for unknown regions to stake a claim on land when they didn’t even know how to farm (land admittedly belonging to native Americans who could understandably be expected to react with aggressive hostility to being expropriated), who could weather brutal winters with nothing to get them through but a musket and a store of root vegetables in the cellar, who could stand up to the mightiest military of its day and throw off a colonial yoke and boldly create a new country, now cowers in fear at the imagined threats of a landlocked group of uneducated and incredibly poor people living in a country that is a throwback to the 16th century.

America is supposedly the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,” as our unsingable national anthem puts it at its most unsingable point, but to tell the truth, it is no longer either of those things. Don’t believe me? Just try telling a cop who stops you for standing off the side of the road with your thumb out and says you are breaking the law against hitchhiking, that he is wrong and that the law does not in fact bar thumbing. For exercising your right of free speech, even if you were polite about it, he will in response threaten you with arrest. Argue (which is your right), and you’re likely to be slammed against his vehicle, cuffed, and dragged off to the slammer. Never mind that the cop is wrong about the law, and that your charges will be tossed out later. If you resist, or mouth off further during this arrest process, you might even be tased. In the end, you are busted, probably bruised, too, and you’ll be detained for a couple of hours until your family can come spring you by paying an extortionate bail.

In an environment like this, you’re not free, and the cop is certainly anything but brave. And that is the situation we’re in today in the U.S.

When the Twin Towers in New York City were attacked and struck by two planes and collapsed, I agree it was a horrible shock, but at no point was the survival of the United States, or even of the American people, threatened. Even if you throw in the attack by a third plane on the Pentagon, which collapsed a section of the world’s biggest building, the US wasn’t facing any existential risk. But the reaction of the American public to this attack on 9-11-2001, encouraged mightily by the US government, was to hunker down, beg for police-state laws, and to stop all normal activity. (In fact, any serious damage to the US following those attacks was caused by the reaction of government, business and the people of the US to the event, not by the events themselves.)

Americans have been put in a state of mindless fear

In my town, the local school board cancelled all school trips for the rest of the 2001-2 school year, claiming, with the full support of most of the parents in the school district, that there was a risk that terrorists might attack school buses!

This is not rational behavior. It is irrational fear.

The same fear that has led to public support for bi-partisan funding of the most bloated, grotesquely over-armed military in the history of the world. That porkbarrel military is not any good at fighting wars, as the defeat in Iraq, and the looming defeat in Afghanistan by forces armed with AK-47 rifles and home-made mines has proved, and it’s not any good at fighting terrorism, as the spreading of fundamentalist Muslim terror groups across the Middle East and northern Africa demonstrate, but it creates a warm feeling of comfort for terrified Americans to see those huge nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, bristling with heavily armed fighter bombers on their decks, plowing through the ocean, just as it makes people comfortable to see US troops, puffed out with body armor so that they look like pro-football players on a gridiron, standing at the ready at some far off desert outpost.

They’re “keeping us safe,” people think, even as they rush out to buy guns in record numbers.

The depths to which this nation has sunk in this miasma of mindless fear became apparent when President Obama, at both the first abysmal debate and the third, opened his remarks by declaring that it was his primary duty as president “to keep Americans safe.”

Huh?

I thought the primary responsibility of the president of the United States was to defend the Constitution. In fact, here’s the presidential oath:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Note that it doesn’t say anything in this oath of office about keeping Americans “safe.”

It’s our Constitution and our freedom that the president is supposed to be defending, not our safety!

Imagine President George Washington, or President Abraham Lincoln, saying that their “number one goal” was to “keep Americans safe”!

I was at a gathering of journalists last night — the annual dinner of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship program. Actually it was a gathering of journalists, bankers, public relations executives and media tycoons, all of the latter of whom help to fund this program at Columbia University designed to train journalists to report on financial and economic affairs. A former director, Pauline Tai, from Hong Kong, an old friend, was talking with me and said that she was amazed in her visits back to the US, at how afraid Americans have become.

We remarked on how bizarre that was. America is far and away the most powerful nation in the world, favored in so many ways with abundant resources, with a diverse culture and population, and yet its people cower in fear — fear of the outside world and, sadly, even fear of each other. People in Hong Kong aren’t afraid. People in Taiwan and China aren’t afraid, and yet objectively they all live in much more vulnerable places — Hong Kong right next to a totalitarian government that could snuff out its civil liberties overnight, Taiwan under the threat of Chinese missiles just across a narrow strait — missiles that were test fired into adjacent shipping lanes during a crisis in 1995. And China itself a kind of pressure cooker of public frustration and anger held at bay by a sclerotic Communist Party elite that doesn’t really know how to change and reform without losing its grip in an uncontrolled explosion.

The same can be said of much of the rest of the world, from what I have seen in my own travels. Look at Greece. It is seeing its economy destroyed and pillaged by the greedy demands of banks in northern Europe and by the governments of the more powerful economies in the European Union, yet far from cowering in fear, its people are fighting back in massive public demonstrations.

Americans, worried about their own country’s economic future, go out and buy more and bigger guns and huddle in their homes in fear of the future. And then they vote for politicians who tell them they should be afraid –whether of terrorists, “death panels” in Obamacare, a bankrupt Social Security program, the budget deficit, regulations, or a black president — and who, to public applause, hand ever more power over to an intrusive and increasingly violent domestic police/army.

The worst thing about all this fear and fear-mongering is that it has turned the US into a nation of conspiracy theorists, so ready to believe the most far-fetched plots and schemes by the rich and powerful that we Americans are unable to see the real challenge facing not just us, but the entire world: the threat of catastrophic climate change. And that is a very real threat that cannot be avoided by cowering in a basement or by electing some tough-talking chief executive, or by buying guns. It can only be tackled by taking bold united action as a people to change the whole basis of the socio-economic system from one premised on encouraging wasteful consumption to one based upon utility and on bettering the lot of all as efficiently as possible — and doing this not just as a nation, but in collaboration with the rest of the world.

It is time for Americans to reject the fear-mongering, and to take responsibility for our own society and government. We don’t need a leader who will “keep us safe.” We need a leader who will denounce fear, who will declare that the freedoms that are enshrined in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights are the foundation of this nation, and that we will rely on them, not police and armies, to move the country forward to face the real challenges of the future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Lindorff is an American investigative reporter, a columnist for CounterPunch, and a contributor to Businessweek, The Nation, Extra! and Salon.com. He received two Project Censored awards in 2004 and 2011. Lindorff graduated from Wesleyan University in 1972 with a BA in Chinese language. He then received an MS in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1975. A two-time Fulbright Scholar (Shanghai, 1991-2 and Taiwan, 2004), he was also a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University in 1978-79. A former bureau chief covering Los Angeles County government for the Los Angeles Daily News, and a reporter-producer for PBS station KCET in Los Angeles, Lindorff was also a founder and editor of the weekly Los Angeles Vanguard newspaper, established in 1976, where he won the Grand Prize of the Los Angeles Press Club for his reporting. Lindorff also worked at the Minneapolis Tribune (now the Star Tribune), the Santa Monica Evening Outlook and the Middletown Press in Connecticut.

He is the author of four books, the most recent being The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office, written with attorney Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

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Iris Vander Pluym Discovers, Classifies and Explores Prospects of Treating A Terrible New Malady – CPD!

The Well Infidel

Iris Vander Pluym Discovers, Classifies and Explores Prospects of Treating A Terrible New Malady – CPD!

Donald B. Ardell – [Originally March 06, 2011]

Paul Ryan: an incurable case.

“Iris Vander Pluym” is a pseudonym adopted by an “an unapologetic, godless, feminist liberal who lives in New York City.” (This is her self-description.) I have not asked, but from reading her blog, I’m pretty sure she would caution that as bad as things are in American extremist politics, they can always get worse. Much worse. See her incisive website –http://perrystreetpalace.wordpress.com/author/irisvanderpluym/

On February 14 of this year, Iris penned a pretty cool tongue-in-cheek blog suggesting that new research offers a promising treatment for CPD, the dreaded “Conservative Personality Disorder.” It was a send-up, of course – there is NO treatment, cure or even hope for a cure for a malady this dreadful. But, it’s interesting and wicked fun to consider a partial list of CPD symptoms:

* superficiality;

* hierarchical worldview

* willful ignorance

* irrationality

* hyper-religiousness

* global warming denialism

* unwavering belief in young earth creationism and the efficacy of prayer

* anti-intellectualism

* emotionality

* authoritarianism

* bullying; controlling and manipulative behavior

* tribalism

* sense of entitlement

* misogyny

* support for “traditional family values”

* anti-choice and anti-contraception

* constant reinforcement of unexamined privilege or bias

* consistent viewership of Fox News

* outright rejection of others’ rights to privacy and personal autonomy

* self-righteousness while judgmental, hypercritical, scornful and disdainful of out-groups

* delusions of persecution and martyrdom

* sadism and vindictiveness

* amoral

* rigid

* poor facility with native language

* limited dimensionality of thought

* little critical thinking ability

* stunted self-awareness

* compulsive political behavior in the service of extreme right-wing views

These are indeed frightful symptoms. There seems little hope for those so afflicted? These behaviors are “counterproductive and dysfunctional in the personal, interpersonal, and societal dimensions.” Sufferers destroy “relationships, communities, entire nations and vast swaths of the planet.” She terms the toll from unchecked, untreated CPD as “truly staggering.” I don’t doubt it for an instant.

Ms. Pluym acknowledges that while we all display some of these symptoms some of the time, few other than sufferers of the disorder display most all the symptoms nearly all the time. She is a tender-hearted and compassionate observer, it seems to me, for she goes so far as to grant that many of the behaviors are “appropriate and quite healthy in certain contexts.” If only all commentators left and right were so gracious. The criteria for the presence of CPD are two-fold: persistence of noted symptoms over many years, and pervasiveness. All aspects of personality are affected.

So, what is the new research that seems to offer hope of a treatment for CPD? It’s all about our evolving understanding of the brain. Learning more about how the brain works, where certain functions reside and what triggers one thing or another. Even CPD sufferers carrying around a wondrous organic supercomputer more powerful than anything IBM or other engineering wizards of the most futuristic technology can managed to design. Unfortunately, all kinds of wires and synapses and other factors can lead to serious malfunctions, as we see in the CPD-afflicted leaders serving in the U.S. Congress, legislatures and state-houses across the land.

The research, which was focused on the effects of meditation, show the following:

* Learning and memory. Meditation helps boost both. Perhaps meditating would mitigate one of the worst symptoms of CPD – forgetting the values the sufferers claim to cherish while improving consistency between their arguments and their actual practices.

* Emotional control. Meditation calms, which anyone who has witnessed CPD sufferers on Fox News and other conservative, wingnut outlets knows is an obvious sign of the affliction.

* Empathy. Meditation has an effect on the brain that seems to induce more feelings for and identification with the experiences of others. Certain regions of the brains of CPD victims where this quality is headquartered clearly not functioning but meditation seems to turn it on, a bit.

Other problems areas are improved because of benefits that meditation brings to selected brain regions. These include perspective and anxiety reduction, accordingly to Ms. Pluym’s critique of brain research with meditation as a treatment of CPD.

However, until such time as more studies are done which prove supportive of these early hopeful findings, exercise great care around CPD sufferers. Compassion and concern are in order, but so is caution and even trepidation.

Until this awful malaise can be brought under control, do not approach sufferers without caution. And, for the love of god (s) and country and all that is good, sacred and/or secular, please don’t vote for them under any circumstances. The disorder is disastrous, dangerous and to those not heavily armed with predispositions of skepticism, reason, science and secular values, possibly lethal. Support further research on meditation and other promising treatments and hope for the best.

Donald B. Ardell is the Well Infidel. He favors evidence over faith, reason over revelation and meaning and purpose over spirituality. His enthusiasm for reason, exuberance and liberty are reflected in his books (14), newsletter (566 editions of a weekly report) and lectures across North America and a dozen other countries. Write Don at awr.realwellness@gmail.com

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Al-Qaeda flags fly over rebel-held Syria

By John Rosenthal, Transatlantic Intelligencer

There has recently been a small stir in the American media, as media organizations from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Associated Press have finally gotten around to acknowledging a “presence” of al-Qaeda and like-minded jihadist groups among the Syrian rebel forces seeking to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

It is difficult to see what the cause of the excitement is. After all, such a presence has been blindingly obvious for many months: whether as a result of the dozens of suicide attacks that have plagued Syria or the numerous videos that have emerged showing rebel forces or supporters proudly displaying the distinctive black flag of al-Qaeda.

But observations made by German journalist Daniel Etter during a recent visit to rebel-controlled towns near the embattled city of Aleppo suggest that there is no mere “presence” of jihadists among the rebels: religiously-inspired mujahideen is what the rebels are. The real question is whether there is a presence of anything else. Etter’s report, which appeared in the leading German daily Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, also provides evidence that rebel authorities are subjecting civilians to arbitrary detention and torture and summarily executing captured members of the regular Syrian armed forces.

In the town of Maraa, north of Aleppo, Etter saw some 120 prisoners, apparently civilians, “herded into a large classroom” in what had previously been a school. Many of the prisoners showed signs of abuse. The prison director, whom Etter identifies only as “Jumbo,” refused to allow Etter to speak with them alone. Etter notes that Jumbo “looks like his name.” “Jumbo is not someone with whom you would like to pick a fight,” Etter writes:
[N]ot someone whom as a prisoner you would like to have as your jail keeper. Thus the detainees say that their wounds and bruises are the product of falls or shrapnel. They say how well they are treated here, and they swear loyalty to the Free Syrian Army. Much of what they say is not credible.

The most gruesome wounds that Etter describes involve a certain “Tamer” from Aleppo: until recently an enthusiastic supporter of Assad – so enthusiastic that he had a portrait of the Syrian president tattooed on his chest. In the meanwhile, the tattoo has been excised from Tamer’s body with a razor blade. Tamer insists that he did the deed himself after rebel forces entered Aleppo. He says that he ran to the rebels’ headquarters and sliced at the tattoo while yelling, “I give my blood for the Free Syrian Army!”

In a remarkable journalistic leap of faith, Etter writes, “Tamer’s story cannot be independently verified either, but it is unlikely that Jumbo would have let a journalist speak with him if his scars were the result of abuse.” As made clear by Etter’s own description of the circumstances under which he was able to speak with the detainees, it is surely far more unlikely that Tamer would have accused his captors with “Jumbo” present.

Moreover, even supposing that Tamer did indeed inflict his own wounds, why would he commit such an act of self-mutilation if he did not expect worse from the “new authorities,” as Etter puts it, if the tattoo was discovered? Rebel groups have repeatedly made clear that they feel entitled to target any and all supporters of the ancien regime.

Jumbo says that Tamer was a member of a pro-Assad militia: a so-called “shabiha”. But there is no evidence presented for this in the article. “I have no proof that he killed anyone,” Jumbo concedes.

It is equally unclear what “crimes” the other detainees are supposed to have committed. But their daily routine makes clear, at any rate, the ideological orientation of their captors. “They pray five times a day,” Etter writes:
[A]nd study the Quran. Perhaps out of a sense of remorse, perhaps to please their jailers, perhaps because they are forced to do so. Jumbo seems to be convinced that their turn to God is doing good. “They are happier and they are changing their attitude,” he says.

In the neighboring town of Azaz, Etter encountered a less didactic form of Islamism: namely, in the person of rebel commander Abu Anas. Etter describes meeting Abu Anas in his office: a Koran and a “silver sword” were lying on his desk and a black flag hung over it. An Arabic inscription on the flag proclaimed, ‘There is no God but God. Mohammed is his Prophet” “It is the flag that al-Qaeda also used,” Etter remarks.

Seemingly taking his cue from Western supporters – or perhaps indeed advisors – Abu Anas emphasized that the black flag was also used before al-Qaeda. But if it is the distinctive black flag with the circular white “seal of Mohammed” in the middle, there appears to be no evidence that this is the case.

This is the flag made famous by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq: notably, as a result of the group’s notoriously harrowing videos documenting the executions of captured Iraqi security personnel and American and other hostages. Indeed, even Zarqawi’s group went through various versions of its flag before settling on the version that has since become the standard banner of al-Qaeda affiliates around the world.

In any case, it is not only the choice of flag that appears to have been inspired by al-Qaeda in Iraq. The rebel leader tells Etter that his forces captured Syrian government troops in the battle for Azaz. Asked what became of the government soldiers, Abu Anas responds, “We could not take care of them. Most of them are dead.”

“Earlier,” Etter explains, “when Abu Anas was not yet in the room, a smiling subordinate of his showed with gestures how they bound prisoners and shot them.”

While there is not much he can do to put a positive spin on the actions of Abu Anas and his men, Etter labors mightily to try at least to cast “Jumbo” and his prison in Maara in a more positive light. In one somewhat surreal paragraph, he even praises the rebels for their supposed efforts to build a “fairer” system of justice in Maara – after he has raised the specter of prisoner abuse in Jumbo’s prison.

Jumbo tells him about one case involving a group of Alawites who were detained by the rebels, but then later released since “we had no evidence against them”. Etter does not ask: evidence of what? But even supposing that Jumbo’s claim is true, it amounts to an admission that Alawites are being detained in rebel-controlled territories simply because they are Alawites.

In the language of international humanitarian law, what Etter has described in his article are clearly war crimes and probably too crimes against humanity. But when it is a matter of the crimes of the Syrian rebels, the West’s otherwise supposedly so acute moral sensibilities appear to have become dull.

John Rosenthal is a journalist who specializes on European politics and transatlantic security issues. His website is Transatlantic Intelligencer

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