Syria today has become a court of meetings for all international and local barbarisms. Friends of the Syrian people, friends of the regime and enemies of civilization all gather in a unique blend that brings together all forms of civilizational and historical clashes in one court. This type of clash has exceeded the Huntingtonean Clash of Civilizations and its mechanisms, heading towards the pre-historic and post-modernist Clash of Barbarisms at the same time.
At the same time, the ongoing events in Syria represent a kind of cultural, political, ideological, imperial, national and civil clash. Imperialism, socialism and national liberation movements meet without contradiction and even sometimes without distinction. The worst type of racism meets with the democracies that defend human rights. Harmonious relations are witnessed between the multipolarity and the unipolarity; the center and the periphery; the unifying globalization and the creative chaos.
It is a world war, in which every side wants to play the role of the protagonist. Every side is playing violently, whilst it is being played with, on and through at the same time. The only big loser is the Syrian people, the peoples of the Arab region. And the entire “Arab Spring” at the short and medium levels.
Bashar Assad is the main player and the main producer of all the destruction in Syria. He has exploited the local militias, the Syrian army, the sectarian trans-national militias, in the same way that he has used Iran and Russia in his war against the Syrians. However; all those who were mentioned here also use Bashar as a means to achieve their own interests that cannot be achieved without him. The international players are also using him. Putin, the over inflated Caesar had said literally two years ago: “This boy has brought the whole world for me”!
The main counterpart of Assad in strength and in smashing Syria and its revolution is Abu Bakr Baghdadi, who facilitated the international intervention against the Syrian revolution. We don’t need to exert much effort to say that he is the second barbarian player after Assad. He is exploiting the Syrian grievances and international intervention to attract Muslims all over the world. The other barbarians have given him way to extend his imagined state with the goal to use him as an excuse for their intervention and attack on Syria. Everyone is fighting him to give themselves an excuse for attacking schools, bakeries, and children. He is their excuse for besieging afflicted cities, occupying land and displacing citizens.
The Russian organic, but pragmatic, correlation with the regime, and using ISIS, is being repeated by the Americans – though in a different formula with the Kurds in northern Syria. For America, all the other parties are no more than puppets it can move easily as it wishes. It supports the Kurds and exploits them in their long land war against ISIS. It pushed them to return to their dreams of the establishment of Great Kurdistan that is impossible to realize, on one hand, and their dream of independence and autonomy, which is possible. They even started dreaming of the “Kurdization” of some Arab areas by force, in revenge of the previous regime’s Arabization of Kurdish areas.
The Syrians are not fond of war, of course. If the non-beneficiary regime allies have the opportunity to choose today, they won’t choose Assad. In his first address in front of the People’s Council, Assad made it clear that he prefers the military option, giving no way for any political alternative, neither for his supporters nor for his opponents. The idea of an alternative that has been hovering over the heads of his allies and enemies so far cannot bear more than two options:
The first option is that Assad adopts the political option to make way for any other person to substitute him. In this case, any beginner politician can be the substitute because naturally and historically, politics means the creation of alternatives.
The second option is that Assad chooses war. In this case, alternatives become subject to the balance of power, since the only serious alternative is destroying Assad and his regime, state and security structure. In fact, that was his option from the beginning. This option was paid for by his allies, and it drove the Syrian society to the ongoing destruction.
The war that is making and leading politics in Syria is also drawing its skinny borders, presenting very fragile political solutions. The international crowds, gathering in Syria are gradually relinquishing civilization and heading to barbarism, embedded in the civilization itself. Concerned about security and peace of countries, the international community is fighting terror with terror, in a mass party to counter these concerns with panic, killing and barbarism.
The war in Syria is being internationalized with many different countries are involved and many world peoples are affected either by terrorism that extends from Jakarta to California, or by the migration and its demographic, economic and social implications. This internationalization of the war in Syria makes it impossible for the underway clash of civilizations at the cultural and religious levels to take place during the era of globalization without the transformation into barbarism and the clash of barbarisms. If the Syrians today are the crematory and ashes, through and over which the history is being written, the fire that is burning them will overpass their own homes to reach the whole globe being such a small village.
A Syrian writer and researcher. He carries a Master degree in Western Philosophy.
