‘Dehumanized, discounted, marginalized’: Syria’s victors defying airbrushed US narrative

The war in Syria has lasted more than seven years, bringing with it a devastation and bloodshed which has thrown a prosperous and stable Middle Eastern nation into chaos and uncertainty.

In the West we are used to reading a history of such conflicts written by the victor. The imperialist narrative is the dominant one. History is distorted to preserve the perceived moral prowess of the conqueror.

The reality is this: A proud nation is brought to its knees by sanctions, hostile media attention and the inevitable military campaign waged directly or indirectly via proxy forces chosen from viable opposition elements. Power is multiplied by the US and her partners in the UK and France with assorted NATO-member vassal states hanging onto their coat tails.

Crimes against humanity are glorified in Hollywood. The dirty underbelly of these lawless, vigilante military campaigns is concealed beneath the mantra of “democracy.” What does it matter if Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was sodomized and murdered, publicly torn apart, if it was done to make the world a “better place”?

History will omit the fact that Libya is now a den of iniquity, a failed state battling slavery, mass migration, prostitution, drug cartels and the inevitable sectarian, extremist warlords who rule mafia-style over the vanquished nation. Hell, this is “Democracy”!

I guess, for the American exceptionalist nation, bombing to bring peace has its downsides after all, but history will put that right when it’s written by the perpetrators who heaped universal misery on the Libyan people in the sacrosanct name of “democracy.”

Syria is another story. The Syrians have confounded the US and its allies. At every turn, every plan B, Syria has responded with unity, resistance and pride in its independence and territorial integrity. Syria has upheld international law, it has called upon its historical allies and they have responded, to the consternation of the Western policy designers. The multitude of aligned narrative-pushers and history-writers cut their Syrian cloth long ago, but they failed to incorporate the rich tapestry of Syrian society which has survived centuries of foreign invasion and influence and emerged victorious.

While history-writers in the West have been poised to sketch the fall of the Syrian government – torn asunder by the prefabricated ‘Arab Spring’ uprising – the Syrian people have pushed back against the stream of invective that threatened their secular existence, their right to determine their own future. They have refused to succumb to the narrative concocted for them by the war hawks and the neocons in Congress. The Syrian people have fought back and sacrificed everything to make their history their own.

What we see now is a desperate scramble by the policy-makers in the US, aided and abetted by their aligned media, think tanks and policy institutions, to respond to the truth expansion that is stealing their lies and burying them beneath an awakened public consensus. What can they do to regain the moral high ground? They built their foreign policy hopes on a morass of extremist and terrorist groups which have converted Syria’s landscape into a shattered, craggy lunar warscape, littered with reminders of the US coalition’s failure to bring this proud nation to her knees.

The history-writers are floundering, their ability to respond is flailing under fire from quarters they never expected to have ammunition. Comments have been selectively removed from the ‘Comment is Free’ Guardian – in some cases comments are not allowed at all. The history-writers don’t like their version of events being corrected and contradicted by a Western ‘Media Spring’ uprising that is not funded by the state but is a genuine expression of disgust at the lies being marketed as “truth.”

Recently, a number of the history-writers have attempted a counter coup to suppress the ‘Media Spring’ storm which threatens to engulf them. Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty International UK’s campaign manager battled furiously against logic and rational debate on Twitter with little support or success: