Imperialism, despotism, and democracy in Syria

In the context of the US invasion of the Gulf in 1991, British academic Fred Halliday announced his new right-wing affiliations in the British newspaper the New Statesman by declaring: “If I have to choose between imperialism and fascism, I choose imperialism.” It never occurred to Halliday that he could have opposed both and supported home-grown democratic struggles instead.

This was indeed a watershed moment for Arab, American, and European anti-imperialist leftists who would become turncoats, moving from a principled opposition to imperialism to a principled and financially more rewarding support of it. Like much of the scholarly and journalistic output of turncoats, Halliday’s sober and academically valuable studies, written before his transformation into a pro-imperial apologist, were followed by forgettable and mediocre studies after it, so much so that he did not publish a single study after 1991 that had academic merit or even a shelf life beyond a few weeks (though his Arab turncoat comrades saw fit to translate these later studies to Arabic!).

The stark opposition that Halliday drew between American imperialism and Saddam’s despotic rule preceded the events of 9/11 and the re-introduction of the term “fascism” in a slightly altered form to fit US imperialism’s new enemies, namely the neologism “Islamofascism”, which another British turncoat, Christopher Hitchens, had done so much to disseminate. 

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