U.S. Congressman Lloyd Smucker reposted on X a Newsweek article penned by Enes Kanter, a sociopathic cult member, who alleged a new set of human rights violations about Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) investigations in Türkiye. Of course, the article was carefully curated for those who did not and could not have any local perspective on Turkish society and politics, as these have evolved over the last few decades. From the outside, the situation could easily be made to look like as though Kanter and his affiliates in FETÖ were completely innocent victims, wrongly accused and convicted by a handful of “authoritarian” politicians in the Turkish government, chief among them being the president himself.
However, if instead a local perspective was taken, it would be virtually unanimously agreed that FETÖ, whose deceased leader Fetullah Gülen once took a sip from his glass of tea and offered the remainder to Kanter almost as a religious blessing, was a vicious cult and a destructive terrorist organization whose activities harmed, both directly and indirectly, many millions of people in the country. From the local perspective, the only debate would have been about whether FETÖ grew during the current government or whether the current government was really the only government that tried and finally managed to crush it.
Perhaps the readers of that article could be excused for their naivete. After all, how could they be expected to know every little detail about the internal affairs of a country thousands of miles away? In fact, the same mistake is sometimes committed by those who are otherwise acute in their understanding of how the world works, i.e., those who have a fairly good grasp of geopolitics from a global perspective.
Syria is a perfect example of this discrepancy. Syrian regime leader Bashar Assad’s occasional criticisms of the Western empire and Israel and the international positioning of some of his allies may have given the impression that if only he had the power, he would have stood firmly against the tyranny of the global hegemon and its “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the region. He would have “defended Syria from Israel’s frequent unprovoked attacks.” Perhaps not surprisingly, however, this was far from the truth.
For one reason or another, Assad was dismissed as a valuable asset to the Western empire, destined to fall completely or at least suffer tremendously – a fate that seems inescapable for those who fall out of favor with the U.S. This led him inevitably to adopt a discourse that could attract sympathy from the rightful critics of the global hegemon and its satrapies around the world. Was Assad an anti-imperialist hero by any stretch of the imagination? Of course not, but the critics of the Western empire thought, perhaps with some plausibility, that he was nevertheless an obstacle to the ambitions of the empire and must be supported for this reason. Thus, the insincerity of his discourse could be neglected.
It appears as though Assad adopted that anti-imperialist discourse simply out of desperation, but really not on principle. Another desperate politician, Özgür Özel, who is currently leading the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) in Türkiye, had called for dialogue with Assad mere days before the ultimate toppling of the latter, urging that “Türkiye could not walk the path laid out by those holding HTS in one hand and the YPG in the other.” He was clearly referring to the U.S. Now, from a global perspective, the anti-imperialist sentiment might lead one to find Özel’s words appealing and one might even imagine that he is strongly against the tyranny of the global hegemon. And, of course, this too could not be further from the truth, as Özel’s party was tacitly supported by that very hegemon in the last presidential elections in Türkiye and they have always represented the Western-leaning faction of Turkish politics.
Who are we supposed to support if we are to maintain a meaningful anti-imperialist stance, then? A truly anti-imperialist Syria would be possible not with Assad in government but with the people of that country governing themselves. For it is the people of the region who understand and, if they had the means, would stand against the tyranny of the global hegemon and its unsinkable aircraft carrier.
In 1958, former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower diagnosed this “trouble” as follows: “We have a campaign of hatred against us, not by the governments but by the people.” Most of the regional governments could easily be bought, or at least conveniently silenced, by the U.S. Those governments, in turn, could oppress the locals so that the locals would not rise against the demands of the Western empire. Another former U.S. President Barack Obama, in his famous speech in Cairo in 2009, also acknowledged the negative perception of the U.S. in the eyes of the locals: “America has a dual legacy in the region: the U.S. has often aligned with oppressive regimes for the sake of stability and access to resources, which has fuelled resentment and suspicion toward American intentions.” And a democratic Syria, if it is indeed democratic, would certainly be suspicious of American intentions.