The Metamorphosis of Bashar al-Assad

by Thierry Meyssan

Since the retirement of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez’s death and the interdiction of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to nominate a candidate in Iran’s presidential election, the revolutionary movement is absent a world leader. Or rather, was absent a world leader. However, the incredible tenacity and composure of Bashar al-Assad has made him the only chief executive in the world surviving a concerted attack by a vast colonial coalition led by Washington and being largely re-elected by his people.

Bashar al-Assad did not want to enter politics. He destined himself to be an ophthalmologist. However, upon the death of his brother Bassel, he returned from the United Kingdom where he was continuing his studies and agreed to serve his country and his father. On the death of the latter, he consented to be his successor to maintain the unity of the country. His early years of government were an attempt to change the composition of social classes in order to make a democratic system possible, a goal that nobody expected of him. Patiently, he dismantled the authoritarian system of the past and began to involve people in public life.

However, barely had he come to power, was he informed that the United States had decided to destroy Syria. In this way, his presidency was mainly directed towards strengthening the Syrian Arab Army, the development of external alliances and attempts to foil the plot. Starting in 2005, with the Mehlis commission, he had to face the opposition of the entire world which accused him of the assassination of Rafik Hariri. But it was not until 2011 that the colonial powers united against both him personally and against Syria.

To his great surprise, at the onset of events, when hosting a delegation from the Syrian town where the largest demonstration had been held, he heard a call for the expulsion of the Alawites from the city. Disgusted, he ended the interview and decided to defend to the end the Syrian civilization of “living together”.

For three years, the shy doctor turned into a war chief. First supported almost exclusively by his army, and then gradually joined by his people, he was elected for a third term with 88.7% of the votes cast, representing 65% of the electorate when the war was in full swing. His inauguration speech expresses how much he had changed during the course of events.

The ideal he expressed therein was one of service to the Republican homeland. He fought to defend men and women who would have been destined to live under the rule of a religious dictatorship in the service of imperialism. And sometimes, he fought for them, and against their will. He fought for them while doubting whether he would achieve victory, preferring to die for Justice rather than to accept a golden but shameful exile offered by the “Westerners”.

However, shortly before, the dictators Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak had given in at once to early orders from Washington and left their country in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. Worse, the autocrat Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani had abdicated, like an obedient child, at the first frown from Barack Obama, preferring to enjoy his stolen wealth rather than fighting.

In the beginning is was all about Bashar al-Assad withstanding the blows of imperialism. But as victory approached, he gained the will to go further, to challenge world disorder. He turned out to be a true revolutionary leader, just as Hugo Chávez had predicted, while the world was still taking him for a simple papa’s boy. And as such, and regardless of the felonies of some politicians, he cannot fail to defend the Palestinian as the Israeli occupation massacre them in Gaza.

Bashar al-Assad’s Revolution is primarily a liberation struggle against religious obscurantism, against the Wahhabi monarchies embodied by Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the Arab world. It aims to guarantee the free development of each regardless of religion and affirms itself therefore as secular, that is to say, it opposes religious conformity. It proposes that God does not endorse any particular religion, but common Justice for all. In fact, it returns the belief in God to the private sphere, to make it the source of strength that allows everyone to fight against an enemy superior in strength and to overcome collectively.

As anyone who has gone through a war, Bashar al-Assad could not accept the idea that the horrors were being committed by bad men plunging “their fangs into the Syrian body, causing widespread death and destruction, devouring hearts and human livers, slaughtering and beheading.” To accept this would be to lose all hope in the human race. So he saw behind their actions the Devil’s influence, manipulated through the so-called “Muslim Brotherhood.”

The name of the “Devil” etymologically refers to his double-talk. President al-Assad therefore deconstructed the slogan of the “Arab Spring”, created by the State Department to place the Muslim Brotherhood in power throughout North Africa, the Levant and the Gulf. Everywhere subservience to imperialism followed the colonial flags, that of the Wahhabi monarchy of the Senoussi in Libya, that of the French mandate in Syria, all the while paradoxically claiming ” Revolution” alongside the tyrants of Riyadh and Doha.

The war was for him a long personal journey. He lived through it guided by his moral compass: the “service of the public interest,” which the Romans called “the Republic”, but which the British consider to be a chimera masking authoritarian ambitions. Like Robespierre “the Incorruptible”, he understood that service suffered no betrayal, therefore no corruption. Like his father, Hafez al-Assad, he lives simply and is wary of the ostentatious luxury of some captains of commerce and industry, be they even his relatives.

He became a revolutionary leader; the only chief executive in the world having survived a concerted attack by a large colonial coalition led by Washington, and who has been widely re-elected by his people. In doing so, he enters History.

Source: voltairenet/ Al-Watan (Syria)

Transkation: Roger Lagassé

M. Wassouf