Better you should listen to someone with fifty years of world experience, over half of which has been spent studying and opposing despotism -- it's why I'm a libertarian in spite of any naysaying the likes of Kitsune or Radar can come up with -- than to two callow youths, one of college age, the other not yet out of high school, who are in the perfect demographic to be seduced by fascism's blandishments -- this type of philosophy has kid-appeal. Heck, I've been in the world longer than both of them put together, and I've a good memory of what undemocracy has wrought over the last century. It's good memory, but the memories themselves aren't nice.
Nondemocracies don't stop misbehaving, and defending and rationalizing the misbehavior is merely disgusting.
Here's a little something citing the fascist model the Baathist Party uses.
Some more from the same source right here.
Academic Anatol Lievin gives ammunition to several views of the conflict in
this interview, which I will quote one paragraph from in support of my understanding of things:
Quote:
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Now, that is not saying in any way that the Ba'ath regime in Iraq was not a savage and at least would-be totalitarian one. The Ba'ath are a mixture of communism and fascism. They're ultra-nationalists. They're national socialists, if you will. But it's also a modernizing ideology, like communism and fascism. It's all about developing the state as a modern state with modern armies, but also with modern services to the population. And above all, from its inception, Ba'ath nationalism, like Nazism or fascism, by the way, or communism, were savagely anti-religious. The leading founding ideologue of the Ba'ath was a Christian, Michel Aflaq, and like his equivalents in Europe, he hated the world of religion because he saw it as precisely hampering progress, dividing the nation. The most savage repressions by the Ba'ath in the past were not just of Kurds and not just of Shias, but also, based in Iraq and Syria, precisely of religious fundamentalist groups now allied to al Qaeda.
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He does however offer something for just about everyone on that page alone, and I suppose on the other pages of the interview as well. It ought to be interesting reading.
It should also be noted that the Ba'athist record on providing those modern services isn't very successful. It takes big piles of nice capitalist capital to make a successful socialist regime, and the best way to make a small fortune in socialism is to begin with a large one.
A little reading on
what Zionists themselves say of Zionism will help, I'm sure, to cut down on inaccurate statements.