Spain and Syria Civil War: Propaganda Circle Unbroken

Many cite Orwell especially when his warnings about the various machinations of the police state seem prophetic today. His explanation of how and why Spain's Civil War ended certainly failed to echo the dominant narrative. Orwell's non-conventional explanation of why Franco prevailed alienated him from both the political right and left voices. From the former ,T.S. Eliot explained in a letter to Orwell that in Animal Farm his perceived "Trotskyite" view is "not convincing."* Next, Victor Gollancz (owner of the the Left Book Club) refused to publish Orwell's account because it was too anti-Stalin.*The established explanation claims Franco's brutality triumphed over a democratic and enlightened Republican Army whose lack of sufficient means and excess virtue prevented their resorting to the barbarity necessary to win. This was oversimplified. And, the western media's reporting on the war in Syria also suffers from trying to interpret events insofar as they promote the narrative of Assad being the primary cause of this tragedy.

Similar to many events that generate any media attention, wars are seen through the observer's ideologically- distorted-eyes. In this setting, the observers somehow believe the subject war vindicates their worldview. Henceforth, these ideologues repeat more and more this apparent vindication of their worldview, quickly establishing it as the Truth. Orwell recounts in his memoir Homage to Catalonia that:

If you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: 'Common decency.' I had accepted  the News Chronicle-New Statesman version of the war as the defence of civilization against a maniacal outbreak by an army of Colonel Blimps in the pay of Hitler. [1]. 

In his initial view Spain was besieged by fascists, requiring good Socialists whose consciences should stir their defending their fellow travelers. Like all "civil wars" the social and political milieu is more complicated than that presented in many media exposes:

The revolutionary atmosphere of Barcelona had attracted me deeply, but I had made no attempt to understand it. As for the kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions, with their tiresome names-PSUC, POUM, FAI, CNT, UGT, JCI, JCI, JSU, AIT-they merely exasperated me. It looked a first sight as though Spain were suffering from a plague of initials. I knew that I was serving in something called the POUM militia rather than any other because I happened to arrive in Barcelona with ILP papers), but I did not realize that there were serious differences between the political parties At Monte Pocero when they pointed to the position on our left and said: 'Those are the Socialists?', I was puzzled and said: 'Aren't we all Socialists?' I thought it idiotic that people fighting for their lives should have separate parties; my attitude always was, 'Why can't we drop all this political nonsense and get on with this war?' This of course was the correct 'anti-Fascist' attitude which had been carefully disseminated by the English newspapers, largely in order to prevent people from grasping the real nature of the struggle. [2] 

Orwell learned this lesson that the romantic intentions of the apparent moral clarity felt from "fighting Fascism...Hitler" is obscured by allied groups opportunistically devouring each other. This devouring results not from allied groups arguing over petty differences thereby conceding decisive advantages to their enemy. Rather, certain groups such as Stalin and the Communists deliberately armed and supported certain groups while excluding others all of which are members of a common alliance opposing Franco. Orwell's experiences have failed to stop the media from presenting this overly simplified milieu to us when covering the Syrian "Civil War."

Still mind-numbed from the myopia of the "Arab Spring" in early 2011, major Western media outlets were convinced that protests in the city of Dara'a in southern Syria were common people following the example set by Tunisians and Egyptians. As the New York Times reported in March 2011:

Military troops opened fire during protests in the southern part of Syria on Friday and killed peaceful demonstrators, according to witnesses and news reports, hurtling the strategically important nation along the same trajectory that has altered the landscape of power across the Arab world. [3]     

The NYT reported this event as moving "along the same trajectory" but neglected to focus on other events that occurred at these protests. Rather than seeing this event as just a dramatic echo of the Arab Spring, it should have noticed other important facts that would provide a more accurate picture:

Seven police officers and at least four demonstrators in Syria have been killed in continuing violent clashes that erupted in the southern town of Daraa last Thursday. … and the Baath Party Headquarters and courthouse were torched, in renewed violence on Sunday. [4] 

This violence suffered by both police and the protesters suggests we should examine the dynamics of this event in more depth before demanding "Assad must go." Their establishing the battle cry creates a premature conclusion that Assad is responsible for all subsequent bloodshed.

In that vein Anti-Assad voices' use statistics to support their narrative-shaping propaganda. Supposedly Western culture promotes diversity. Yet diversity of sources is not their objective when tallying the casualties in Syria from 2011-present. Whenever they publish casualty figures they usually cite 1 or 2 sources: Syrian Observatory on Human Rights (SOHR) and the Violations Documentation Centre (VDC).

One notable example of this reduction of sources compiling casualty figures is the U.N.ceasing tracking this figure because they claim "lack of access to the ground." [5]. Consequently, the number of information sources has dwindled, resulting in the SOHR becoming a frequently cited authority on casualty figures. Just how reliable is SOHR's data?

Also, VDC publishes figures that if true would impugn Assad as the primary cause of deaths. Their statistical inference though is weakened by their definitions used to categorize the casualties. For example:

Among adult males civilians are 53%, and combatants are 28 percent meaning that adults males together, who are roughly a third of Syria’s population, make up 81% of the total death toll.

There are two main reasons to suggest that large numbers of deaths listed as adult male civilians are indeed armed combatants

Firstly, of the 32,772 adult male combatants, ~87% are listed as FSA – ‘Free Syrian Army’.

This proportion appears unusually high especially since the majority of the SAA’s battles these days are against other more prominent militias such as the Islamic State (ISIS), the Islamic Front, and the Al-Nusra Front.

Whatever their motives, it’s quite possible the VDC are listing fighters from other militias as civilians. [6]

These groupings imply that only deaths of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) account for a significant amount of anti regime opponents. Moreover, the study ignores the fact that Assad's main military clashes involve al-Nusra and ISIS. Thus it is possible that these two groups comprise a significant amount of the "male civilian casualties." SOHR's and VDC's attributing most of the casualties directly to Assad and the Syrian National Army renders their conclusions questionable. 

The Syrian war and Spanish Civil War do not identically mirror each other. Both tragedies feature events not seen in the other. But, both wars serve as tragic reminders that the so called civilized world uses propaganda to condition the public to accept the media's selective demonization of a person or regime (Assad and Franco) as a mortal threat. Orwell cautions his readers in an essay published in 1937 shortly after he returned to England from Spain:

When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are those dreadful revolutionaries at whose very name Garvin quakes in his galoshes – the Communists. [7]

This tragic reality remained hidden from the public following from abroad the Spanish Civil War:

Meanwhile the war against Franco continues, but, except for the poor devils in the front-line trenches, nobody in Government Spain thinks of it as the real war. The real struggle is between revolution and counter-revolution; between the workers who are vainly trying to hold on to a little of what they won in 1936, and the Liberal-Communist bloc who are so successfully taking it away from them. It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies. [8] 

The communists marginalized and persecuted constituent groups who were allies in the fight against Fascism. Orwell's warning was mostly unheard. Meanwhile, today Western elites continue to deny or just ignore Assad's legitimacy as Syria's President even though he won the most recent election in 2014. The Brookings Institute recently published a report entitled Deconstructing Syria: Towards a regionalized strategy for a confederal country wherein they advocate partitioning Syria into several parts (shades of the Yinon plan?):

The ultimate end-game for these zones would not have to be determined in advance. The interim goal might be a confederal Syria, with several highly autonomous zones. One of those zones might be for Alawites. But none could be for ISIL, al-Nusra, or Assad (my italics) and his inner circle. [9] 

Western elite voices speak many nuances to the complexities and moving parts in Syria. Nonetheless, they manage to coalesce around a simple rallying cry: Assad Must Go.

Regardless of the communication technology at our disposal to expose empire's propaganda, it continues presenting to us various devils from whom we must be saved. Thus, the empire sets the scene for another humanitarian effort of "peace through war."

* see introduction to Animal Farm. Alfred Knopf. New York. 1993.

[1]. Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. Mariner Books. Boston. 2015. Kindle edition. location 2877 of 3710.

[2]. Ibid. location 2880-84.

[3]. Slackman, Michael. "Syrian Troops Open Fire on Protesters in Several Cities." The New York Times. March 25, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/world/middleeast/26syria.html?_r=1

[4]. Chossudovsky, Michel. "Syria, The War Started Four Years Ago in March 2011: Who Was Behind The Protest Movement? Fabricating a Pretext for a U.S.-NATO "Humanitarian Intervention." March 15, 2015. Global Research: Centre for Research on Globalization. http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-who-is-behind-the-protest-movement-fabricating-a-pretext-for-a-us-nato-humanitarian-intervention/24591

[5]. Heilprin, John. "UN Decides To Stop Updating Syria Death Toll." The World Post A Partnership Of The Huffington Post And Berggruen Institute. 01/25/2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/07/un-stops-updating-syria-death-toll_n_4554226.html 

[6]. Tharappel, Jay. "Who's responsible for the civilian death toll in Syria?" thewallwillfall. June 01, 2015. https://thewallwillfall.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/whos-responsible-for-the-civilian-death-toll-in-syria-jay-tharappel/

[7]. Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: volume 1 An Age Like This 1920-1940. "Spilling the Spanish Beans." Harcourt. New York. 1968. p. 270.

[8]. Ibid.

[9]. O'Hanlon, Michael. Deconstructing Syria: Towards a regionalized strategy for a confederal country. Foreign Policy at Brookings Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence. June 2015. http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/06/23-syria-strategy-ohanlon/23syriastrategyohanlon.pdf