Al-Jazeera broadcaster Faisal Al-Qaseem shows a poll that reads: "Did the Alawites in Syria Bring This Upon Themselves? Yes: 96.2% No: 3.8%." Photo: X/@Marwa_Osman.
By Sedki Ashour – Mar 20, 2025
I was surprised after reading the American researcher Heather Cox Richardson’s book How the South Won the Civil War.
I am familiar with how Noam Chomsky employs the hypothesis of the “long-term victor” to describe Vietnam’s recent history. Although the Vietnamese expelled the Americans from their country, the United States has emerged as the “long-term victor” of the war. This is particularly evident in Vietnam’s contemporary pivot towards the US and against China.
Richardson’s book applies the “long-term victor” hypothesis to US history in a manner that mirrors our methodology for understanding Lebanese-Palestinian history specifically and Levantine history more broadly. This approach recognizes that while the Lebanese right wing was militarily defeated, it ultimately prevailed in the battle of consciousness, not just within Lebanon but throughout most of the Levant.
Richardson contends that although the Southern Confederacy suffered military defeat, its racist ideology triumphed in the US over the subsequent two centuries. Before the Civil War, Southern landowners weaponized “white identity” to convince white laborers that they shared an identity trench against the Black “other,” enabling wealthy whites to exploit poor whites without accountability or developing class consciousness. Even after the conclusion of the United States Civil War and subsequent Black emancipation, the US capitalist class continued to manipulate racial and identity divisions to maintain control over the lower classes.
A similar distortion of consciousness emerged following the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, when the alliance between capital and the militarized state fabricated a comparable ideological construct to counter communism.
While German socialists championed the concept of “Kameradschaft” (society of comrades), the German Nazis promoted “Volksgemeinschaft” (racial community) as a competing framework designed to undermine European working-class solidarity. This strategy placed impoverished and wealthy Germans in a shared identity trench positioned against all others.
This white supremacist ideology functions remarkably similarly to Sunni supremacist ideology in the Levant. The relationship between wealthy white slave owners and cotton plantation magnates with poor whites parallels the dynamic between Sunni oil and gas elites in the Gulf states and impoverished Sunnis throughout the Levant. This relationship serves to replace class conflict with sectarian division, effectively deceiving poor Sunnis into believing that they share common cause with wealthy Sunnis against an external sectarian enemy.
Herein lies the crisis of political Sunnism. When presented with the concept of Arab unity based on Sunnis being part of the Arab majority in our region, they respond that “Arabism is a heresy and a pre-Islamic concept. How dare you include me in a majority that encompasses Christian Arabs, Druze Arabs, and Shiite Arabs?” These proponents seek to construct a “majority” that is narrower and more exclusionary to address the question of democratic majority representation in our countries. This emerges from their fundamentally flawed definition of “majority,” as they insist on religious and sectarian parameters rather than recognizing its true nature as the broad working-class populace confronting the alliance between capital and the security apparatus.
On the opposing side stands an equally dangerous and authoritarian form of racism: the concept of an “alliance of minorities.” Following the massacres on the Syrian coast, this discourse has gained traction even among “pro-resistance leftists” who have abandoned strategic thinking and level-headedness, finding themselves aligned with “Israeli” discourse.
Some comrades attempt to persuade me that the “alliance of minorities” in the Levant represents a progressive ideology, matching the Soviet Union’s “Council of Nationalities.” This rhetoric is “not even worth a franc” as Syrians would say colloquially. In practical terms, the “alliance of minorities” in Palestine manifests as being detained at checkpoints by Bedouin, Druze, or Ethiopian soldiers, or by “feminist” female soldiers of the IOF—all serving the same oppressive system.
If the Republican Party in the United States is deemed reactionary for championing white-majority supremacist policies, then the Democratic Party—the party overseeing Gaza’s genocide—is equally reactionary for embracing an “alliance of minorities.” This alliance represents not a genuine political project but rather a narcissistic coalition of victimhoods founded on what psychologists term “trauma bonding,” or as colloquially expressed, “comfort me and I’ll comfort you.”
It bears emphasizing that the “alliance of minorities” concept is fundamentally colonial in origin. Throughout our region’s history, individual sects have produced both principled Arab resistance fighters against colonialism and opportunists who aspired for their sons to become “world-class officers” serving under the British crown alongside Indian, Afghan, and Balochi officers, or under French commandants alongside Senegalese conscripts. Indeed, the Zionist project itself emerged as a product of colonial exploitation, advancing a European (and Levantine) minority at the expense of the Arab majority.
In his proclamation about the “demise” of Arab nationalism, far-right Lebanese-American academic Fouad Ajami celebrates Hafez al-Assad’s membership in a sectarian minority as a factor that rendered him a “pragmatic” leader who prioritized regional policies over pan-Arab aspirations.
This stance enabled Hafez al-Assad to forge an alliance with right-wing minorities against the National Movement during the Lebanese Civil War. The consequences were profound: it dismantled the concept of Palestine as a unified Arab front against imperialism, reduced Palestinians from regional political actors to a cultural minority of oppressed “indigenous people” soliciting “protection” from the international community, and ultimately prevented Lebanon’s Druze community from participating in the Arab majority project through the Ba’athist Arab Socialist Party, compelling them to acquiesce to the sectarian structure of Lebanon’s political system.
While Saudi Arabia, and to an even greater degree Qatar, exploit the ideology of “Sunni supremacy” to advance their strategic interests, the UAE has instead embraced the policy of an “alliance of minorities.” This is evidenced in their support for Kurdish separatist movements in Iraq, the southern secessionist movement in Yemen, and their engagement with “Israel” through what Abdul Jawad Omar aptly terms the “alliance of the fearful” embodied in the so-called Abraham Accords. “Israel,” naturally, claims the predominant position within this alliance. What is truly ironic is when certain Syrian “normalization revolutionaries” suggest that the way to counter potential partition projects is by having Syria’s Sunni majority compete with its minority communities in a race to establish normalization ties with “Israel”—essentially fighting fragmentation by collectively embracing the very power that benefits from Syria’s division.
There are elements seeking to draw the Lebanese resistance back into the Syrian conflict—from Damascus’s current divisive “leadership” to those “allies” of Hezbollah who perceive it not as a vital social movement within the contemporary Arab context, but merely as a “guardian” of the “alliance of minorities” in the Eastern Mediterranean against what they characterize as the “obscurantist ocean.” Yet following the establishment of the support front eighteen months ago, Hezbollah has consecrated its allegiance to something far more dignified and sacred: the “alliance of resistances.”
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/DZ/SC
