Anti-Imperialism Without Principles

The Syrian Case

The Syrian Revolution began in 2011 as grassroots protests against the Assad regime. But the regime’s brutal crackdown quickly transformed peaceful protests into a protracted and complex conflict. Over time, the conversation around the Revolution, especially among Western leftists, grew more divided. Some saw it for what it was: a grassroots movement led by Syrians. Others focused almost entirely on foreign involvement, pushing aside the people who started the Revolution.

Some Western leftists have defended Assad by calling the war a fight against imperialism. But this view misses the point. It overlooks the real reasons people protested in the first place: decades of economic inequality, neoliberal reforms, repression, and widespread corruption. It also ignores how the regime’s violent crackdown turned those peaceful protests into a full-blown conflict distinct and separate from Western interference.

Much has been written about this, including analyses of concepts like Campism and terms like Tankism. To avoid redundancy, this essay examines the mechanisms behind the phenomenon by analyzing key frameworks, figures, perceptions, and contexts within the broader Western left while exploring possible ways forward.

The term “Western left” is admittedly broad and not intended to encompass all individuals or groups, including myself. It's been chosen to avoid derailing discussion into finger-pointing. This critique is meant to be a constructive contribution and self-reflection.

Post-post-colonialism

One of the key analytical challenges in understanding the Syrian Revolution was the reliance on post-colonial frameworks, which framed struggles regarding resistance to direct Western domination. However, this perspective failed to account for what Sahar Amarir calls a post-post-colonial reality. Amarir writes:

“We should understand the post-colonial moment as a critical analysis of the political and social environment that centers the colonizer… When local voices began to advocate for more systems of accountability, pluralism, and the right to express dissent within their own communities, they were in reality creating the real fertile ground to transition from a state of reaction to a state of action—a state of action that centers the formerly colonized as the main subject and recipient of social, political, and economic progress.”

This transition begins when the formerly colonized move beyond reacting to colonial power and instead act with independent political agency, even when doing so brings them into conflict with the post-independence regime or movement that once stood with them against the colonizer.

Syria demonstrates this dynamic through the history of the Ba’ath Party, which, despite its early roots in pan-Arabism, revolutionary socialism, anti-Zionism, and anti-imperialism, transitioned into a dynastic autocracy after Hafez al-Assad’s Corrective Movement coup in 1970. Assad’s rule had little to do with the Ba'ath Party’s original principles and came to power long after Syria’s independence in 1946. The old slogans were leveraged for propaganda, especially to those outside Syria who either couldn’t see the contradictions firsthand or were willing to overlook them from a distance. The party’s motto, “Unity, Freedom, Socialism,” still sounded revolutionary, even as the government’s actions moved further and further away from those ideals.

The Syrian Revolution was not against a colonial occupier but against a regime that itself had long used anti-imperialist rhetoric as a means of legitimizing its rule. The Assad government positioned itself as an inheritor of national liberation while simultaneously maintaining an authoritarian structure that suppressed political dissent. Failure to recognize how post-colonial states could themselves become oppressive actors within a globalized system led many on the left to misinterpret the Syrian Revolution.

Identifying the Western View

Reflecting on the Syrian Revolution highlights the need for leftist self-critique and reassessment of entrenched concepts. A key example is Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model. Although many Western leftists distrust mainstream media, regardless of their familiarity with the model, its structured critique continues to serve as a reference point for understanding media influence.

The Propaganda Model has long served as a framework for understanding structural biases in traditional mass media and created a formal representation of what many skeptics innately felt by focusing on factors such as ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and ideological control. Designed to critique centralized, elite-driven news production, this model’s explanatory power, however, is limited when applied to today’s decentralized, algorithm-driven platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Creators and engagement metrics supplant centralized editorial control, with algorithms prioritizing sensational or viral content over accuracy or journalistic integrity.

The Propaganda Model’s structural critique of media bias remains valuable but doesn’t account for how alternative media ecosystems can produce distortions. These limitations have been reflected in the approaches of many leftists, leading to skepticism of mainstream media that is not always accompanied by critical engagement with alternative sources.

Early in the uprising, President Obama declared that “Assad must go,” and media coverage focused on the regime’s violence and the scale of the protests. Applying the Propaganda Model to this case might lead viewers to question whether U.S. foreign policy objectives overly influenced coverage. They might ask whose interests are being served by focusing primarily on Assad’s brutality and whether alternative narratives offer a different perspective. Some might even question whether depictions of protesters are biased, portraying them as noble freedom fighters to manufacture a narrative for military intervention. While useful for domestic media critique, these practices erase the agency of the actual protesters. At worst, it smears them as tools of empire, further isolating them and enabling authoritarian crackdowns.

In other words, an approach grounded solely in domestic skepticism automatically positions Syrians “or other global actors” under suspicion, rather than in solidarity. The Propaganda Model does not account for cases like Syria, where genuine popular movements may align with U.S. foreign policy objectives despite having entirely independent origins and aims. Nor does it explain how reliance on the model has led some to conflate any Western media coverage with propaganda, resulting in the conspiratorial dismissal of Syrian protesters as U.S. assets and the elevation of Assad as their supposed antithesis.

At times, alternative media sources exploited these distortions. They embraced contrarian narratives rather than correcting them for algorithmic boost. These outlets downplayed or denied Assad’s crimes and amplified regime talking points. As Emmi Bevensee noted, this “red-brown” media ecosystem blurred the lines between leftist, antiwar, and authoritarian perspectives, often legitimizing illiberal forces under the guise of anti-imperialism. However, it is precisely in these media spaces that skeptical viewers can readily find perspectives that challenge dominant narratives.

Like corporate media, alternative platforms are shaped by economic incentives and political agendas. Many rely on advertising revenue and ideological patrons. In some cases, state actors have manipulated these spaces to promote Assad-aligned narratives. The Propaganda Model can apply to these sources, but it’s not often used to analyze alternative media outlets. This may be because the model was designed for centralized media institutions.

There are also fundamental differences in how digital media “encompassing social media and alternative media” operates from traditional media systems. The Propaganda Model focuses on control through ownership, government influence, and editorial gatekeeping. But today’s platforms, like YouTube and Facebook, operate differently. Engagement-based algorithms push the most sensational or controversial content. These alternative media ecosystems spread information in ways that don’t fit the old model’s structure.

X shows this shift clearly. Elon Musk has changed the algorithm to boost his tweets and promote other content he personally supports. This is more direct and hands-on than the structural controls described by the Propaganda Model. These platforms operate in a fragmented digital space, where control is exercised by many actors, and misinformation spreads both through centralized decisions and independently of them.

While misinformation is a big problem in alternative media and social platforms, traditional media usually plays a key role in tracking and reporting it. This creates a feedback loop. People who are deeply skeptical of mainstream media, holding an anti-establishment worldview, may dismiss real evidence of disinformation or even start to see the falsehoods as more believable.

A Guardian investigation revealed that Kremlin-backed networks actively promoted pro-Assad conspiracy theorists in Western media. These networks promoted Assad as a bulwark against Western imperialism while discrediting Syrian activists and humanitarian groups as agents of foreign powers. This narrative appealed to segments of the Western left already skeptical of mainstream reporting, reinforcing a view of Assad’s repression as defensive rather than authoritarian.

This convergence between uncritical media skepticism and conspiratorial contrarianism produced flawed leftist analyses. Many equated anti-Westernism with support for Assad, whether by echoing the regime’s rhetoric or by dismissing documentation of its crimes as propaganda. However, much of that documentation came not from Western governments but from Syrians themselves.

Organizations such as the Violations Documentation Center, founded by Razan Zaitouneh before her abduction, compiled extensive evidence of the regime’s abuses. The Syrian Network for Human Rights tracked disappearances and chemical attacks. The Syrian Archive and Syria Justice and Accountability Center continue to preserve digital and legal records of war crimes. These were not imperialist fabrications but efforts to expose state violence from within.

Another aspect of Chomsky’s thought holds particular significance due to its influence, especially in the West. His book Hegemony or Survival has been very influential in the West. However, its epistemology doesn’t address the complexity of conflicts like the war in Syria, where power doesn’t always fall along apparent dichotomies. While his critiques of Western dominance are strong, the larger anti-hegemonic approach doesn’t offer a clear framework for what to support, only what to oppose. This leads to an anti-hegemonic stance that collapses into ambiguity, lacking clear guiding principles. Simply being against the US isn’t inherently leftist. This concept will be revisited later.

Framing Assad’s Syria primarily as a victim of imperialist aggression within an anti-hegemonic analysis led some segments of the Western left to become receptive to pro-Assad, populist, and even syncretic politics. At times, leftist opposition to Western power overlapped with right-wing talking points.

A more nuanced framework is needed that moves beyond binary readings of imperialism versus resistance and grapples with the complexities of postcolonial realities and shifting power structures. This is where the concept of post-post-colonialism becomes vital.

Post-post-colonialism in the Assad Regime

A strong starting point is the concept of anti-colonialism, which has long been a foundational principle for many on the Western left, particularly as they navigate their positions within empire. Two defining moments of Western leftist solidarity were Vietnam War protests and the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement. In both cases Western nations positioned themselves against movements that resisted colonial rule. This historical backdrop, combined with the U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, offers a lens through which calls for solidarity in Syria might be seen as extensions of Western interventionism. Like Vietnam, Syria experienced French control, though in Syria’s case, this took the form of a French Mandate rather than a formal colony. Whether or not these sentiments were explicitly stated matters less than the narrative and optics they create. For many Westerners, anti-colonialism is inherently tied to anti-interventionism, often extending to a “hands off” approach. This shapes an anti-imperialism that focuses critique solely on the West.

The problem is that Syrians were not engaged in a traditional anti-colonial struggle. They were not resisting foreign rule or a puppet regime installed by imperialist powers, nor was their uprising a Western-backed plot for regime change. Instead, Syria’s Revolution was part of the broader Arab Spring, a wave of uprisings challenging authoritarian systems that had emerged from the post-independence order. However, the Assad regime deliberately framed the Revolution as a foreign-led conspiracy. Some Western leftists adopted this view as it flooded their social media feeds.

In this sense, the Syrian Revolution represents post-post-colonialism, a stage beyond the initial anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century, where the fight for liberation is not against foreign rulers but against domestic autocrats. To understand this shift, we must rethink how we approach revolutions in the 21st century. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth offers insight into how post-colonial states can end up reproducing the same systems of power they once fought against. His analysis of post-independence elites describes how many newly liberated states, rather than embracing true revolutionary transformation, replicated the same authoritarian and exploitative structures as their former colonial rulers. Instead of redistributing wealth or empowering the masses, ruling elites often engaged in self-enrichment, using nationalist rhetoric to justify continued repression. Fanon warned:

The national government, if it wants to be national, ought to govern by the people, for the people, for the outcasts, and by the outcasts. No leader, however valuable he may be, can substitute himself for the popular will, and the national government, before concerning itself with international prestige, ought first to give back its dignity to all citizens, fill their minds, and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein. [1]

This vision was precisely what Syrians were fighting for. However, Assad’s Syria illustrated Fanon’s warnings. A key difference is that Assad’s regime was even further removed from the era of independence, manifesting these warnings in more advanced forms. The Syrian Ba’athist regime initially presented itself as a champion of Arab socialism, anti-imperialism, and modernization. But instead of meeting those hopes, the system broke down from within and became a family-run dictatorship. The Assad family and their close allies held onto the country’s wealth and power, using loyalty networks, violence, and nationalist messaging to shut down dissent.

A contemporary author focused on Syria, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, expands on Fanon’s post-colonial critique. Saleh’s The Syrian Shabiha and Their State - Statehood & Participation explains how the Assad regime not only sustained its rule through violence and repression but also deepened and evolved these authoritarian structures. He describes the shabiha as operating “outside the law, living in the shadows, both figuratively and literally, materializing and vanishing with bewildering speed.” This shows their role as enforcers operating outside the law, free from moral or legal limits. Their job wasn’t to serve the people but to keep power in the hands of those already in control.

While Fanon criticized the post-colonial bourgeoisie for replicating colonial oppression, Saleh’s analysis highlights a deeper degradation of state power. In Syria, the regime didn’t just carry on with old forms of repression. It went further by bringing criminal networks into the heart of the state. This dynamic of state violence against citizens, starkly contrasting with Ba'athist rhetoric of anti-imperialism and liberation socialism, is significant.

Amarir’s post-post-colonial concept explains what happened in Syria, where years of growing frustration culminated in mass protests. Syrians did not take to the streets in reaction to the US or NATO. They organized through self-agency, and their demands stood in stark contrast to the Assad regime’s authoritarian rule.

The Trajectory Toward Authoritarianism

In its early years, the Ba’athist movement sought to build unity through ideology, using Arab nationalist and socialist language to unite diverse groups under one party. Yet real political participation was minimal, especially after the 1966 intra-Ba’athist coup. The state’s authoritarian structure concentrated power in the hands of a few, so the vision of Gramscian hegemony, where the regime secured broad consent and legitimacy, was never fully achieved.

Despite maintaining a façade of legitimacy for some time, the ideological project gradually unraveled. By the 2000s, the Assad regime had abandoned even the appearance of supposed Ba’athist principles. Neoliberal reforms enriched a small elite while alienating much of the population. The regime then collaborated with Western powers during the US invasion of Iraq. Syria participated in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, where detainees were transferred from Iraq to Syria. Once relocated to Syria, prisoners would be subjected to torturous interrogations.

Assad claimed to support Palestinians but his actions often contradicted this claim. Hamas eventually cut ties with the regime in response to Assad’s brutal crackdown on protesters and his force's actions in Palestinian refugee camps like Yarmouk.

Although Hamas engaged in a tacit reconciliation with the Assad regime in 2022 under pressure from Iran, by December 2024, following Assad’s ousting, it publicly congratulated the Syrian people on achieving their aspirations for freedom and justice, expressing hope that the new government would support the Palestinian cause.

As Assad’s policies stripped away any remaining sense of ideological legitimacy, his grip on power came to depend more and more on violence, foreign backing, and fear. What once presented itself as a nationalist and socialist project became, in the end, a regime-held together by raw repression. In Gramscian terms, this marked a full-scale crisis of hegemony. He describes such moments as the point where the ruling class no longer leads but merely dominates, sustaining itself through coercion rather than ideological consent:

“If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e., is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant,’ holding pure coercive power, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from traditional ideologies and no longer believe what they used to believe previously.”[2]

By the time the Syrian Revolution began in 2011, the Assad regime had already entered this crisis of hegemony. Initially, the government attempted a passive revolution that offered superficial reforms to diffuse unrest. These token gestures, however, were neither meaningful steps toward democracy nor in re-establishing popular legitimacy. As protests escalated into a mass revolutionary movement, the regime abandoned the pretense of reform and turned fully to repression. Gramsci’s notion of the interregnum captures this collapse: “The old is dying, and the new cannot be born.” As the Assad regime lost its grip on ideological control, the country descended into fragmentation and instability, what Gramsci described as a time of “morbid symptoms,” where competing forces struggle without resolution.[3]

Recognizing Syrian Revolutionaries

An aspect of the Syrian Revolution remains largely overlooked in Western discourse. This missing component is the recognition of Syrian revolutionary figures and democratic opposition structures. Figures such as Suheir Atassi, a leading activist and vice president of the Syrian National Coalition; Razan Zaitouneh, a human rights lawyer and founder of the Violations Documentation Center; Omar Aziz, a Syrian anarchist who advocated for the establishment of autonomous local councils before he died in Assad’s prison; and Mazen Darwish, a journalist and human rights advocate who was imprisoned and tortured by the regime, are inspirational figures offering vital lessons.

The Local Coordination Committees of Syria (LCC’s) were among the most significant grassroots organizations of the Revolution, helping to coordinate protests, disseminate information, and organize civil resistance in the face of brutal regime repression. While the Kurdish project in Rojava attracted significant attention, the LCC’s were largely overlooked. These committees and broader opposition coalitions, such as the Syrian National Council (SNC) and the Syrian Revolution General Commission, provided an alternative vision for Syria rooted in participatory democracy rather than authoritarian rule. Many opposition groups weren’t just political; they played a key role in humanitarian relief and civic organizing, helping communities survive state violence.

This form of civic participation and mutual aid can provide lessons in broader global organizing efforts. Still, some international communist parties aligned with Assad's government, not merely out of anti-hegemony analyses but due to a historically rooted ideological affinity with the Ba'ath regime.

For instance, following the fall of Damascus to opposition forces in December 2024, several communist parties issued statements condemning what they framed as foreign intervention and expressing solidarity with the Syrian government. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) denounced the role of the United States, NATO, Turkey, and Israel, claiming that imperialist forces deliberately engineered the conflict to expand their influence in the Middle East. Similarly, the Tudeh Party of Iran characterized Assad’s downfall as part of a broader US imperialist strategy to dominate the region. None speak of the Syrian Revolutionaries, LCC’s or other forms of grassroots organizing against authoritarianism.

“Bothsideism”

A consistent materialist analysis recognizes that Assad’s dynastic rule, concentration of power, and economic policies resembled capitalist exploitation far more than socialist governance or leftist ethics.

Nevertheless, some have argued that standing with Assad or remaining neutral aligns with anti-imperialist thought. Lenin argued that socialists should oppose all sides in inter-imperialist conflicts, such as World War I, stating, “During a reactionary war, a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.” This interpretation has been applied to Syria when viewed solely through a narrow geopolitical lens, reducing the conflict to a rivalry between great powers.

However, Lenin also distinguished between imperialist wars and struggles for national liberation, asserting that “Socialists cannot, without ceasing to be socialists, be opposed to all war” and must support genuine movements for self-determination. The Syrian Revolution aligns more with the latter than with Lenin’s critique of inter-imperialist wars, though Assad’s militarization of the conflict later complicated its trajectory.

The misapplication of Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism, combined with a general anti-hegemonic perspective, transforms criticism of Assad or other intervening powers, such as Russia or Iran, into a form of bothsidesism. Their actions are downplayed or excused simply because of the dominance of Western imperialism. This logic generates an inverted argument, framing criticism of regimes like Assad’s as “punching down” or unfairly engaging in “bothsideism” since Western imperialism is perceived as the real global antagonist due to its overwhelming power. Even though Assad’s regime was brutal, this reasoning holds that because it supposedly opposed the US as part of the “Axis of Resistance,” it must be seen as the lesser evil, regardless of the cost to Syrians.

This is important because it fundamentally undermines efforts toward genuine international solidarity. You cannot claim solidarity with people while simultaneously advocating for or tacitly supporting the source of their immediate oppression.

Lenin is included because much of the argumentation used to justify support for Assad draws from Marxist-Leninist frameworks. Regardless of personal opinions about these ideologies, showing that such an application is fundamentally incoherent is important. Historical revisionism is necessary to retrofit the Leninist framework to Syria’s context, effectively erasing the material conditions that led to the Syrian Revolution and the broader Arab Spring while downplaying the actions of the Assad regime.

Syrians did not ask Western leftists to “support their government’s imperialist wars.” They sought solidarity in their fight against an authoritarian regime. They did not call for ignoring Western imperialism but for recognition of their Revolution as a legitimate struggle for self-determination. Nor did they ask Western leftists to weigh imperialism on a scale to determine their worthiness for solidarity. Instead, they sought acknowledgment of their lived reality, one shaped by violence from Assad’s forces.

Aside from the voices of Syrians, another key missing element in the conversation is that of grounding principles. Without clear values to guide them, anti-hegemonic politics can be pulled off course. They can get co-opted or start to overlap with reactionary and authoritarian movements, leading some leftists to support agendas that go against what they believe.

Nihilistic anti-hegemony

Nowhere is this clearer than in the anti-hegemonic rhetoric of Alexander Dugin. Dugin, a Russian far-right political theorist, has long championed a multipolar world to dismantle US hegemony and replace it with a coalition of nations opposed to liberal democracy. His Fourth Political Theory explicitly rejects liberalism, advocating for an alternative ideological framework that merges elements of leftist, conservative, nationalist, and theocratic thought in opposition to Western global influence. Without clear values to guide it, an anti-hegemonic stance can easily overlap with reactionary politics, not always explicitly, but in practice, nonetheless.

This raises Chomsky’s criticism of Western hegemony. While he is not a reactionary like Dugin, his analysis does not offer a clear material or ethical alternative. Instead, it relies heavily on structuralist ideas, distancing his critique from the concrete realities and ethical principles that should give it weight. And that’s the problem. Without firm principles, his readers, or those generally influenced by similar thought, risk siding with reactionary voices who claim to oppose Western imperialism but carry dangerous baggage.

These dynamics echo the core thesis of Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory: forging alliances across ideological divides in a shared struggle against Western liberal hegemony. Chomsky would undoubtedly disagree with Dugin’s conclusions. Yet, given the context of anti-globalization movements followed by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and beyond, it’s easy to see how a rigid form of anti-hegemony became the focal point for many in the West. The question is: at whose expense, and to what ends?

Beyond the networks of Duginist thought that have actively sought to infiltrate leftist spaces, there is a broader reality. Anti-hegemony has increasingly taken the place of genuine international solidarity. This can be seen in how some leftist movements selectively engage with global struggles. Causes that don’t align neatly with opposition to Western hegemony, such as the popular uprisings in Syria and Belarus, have been marginalized or dismissed. Syrian protesters were framed as pawns in a supposed imperialist plot or generalized into an Islamic fundamentalist catch-all. Belarusian activists faced similar dismissals, with their struggle against Lukashenko’s regime reduced to Cold War narratives. By contrast, the Palestinian cause continues to receive significant solidarity, as Israel is frequently portrayed as a US client state and an extension of Western imperialism.

This framework also helps explain why some segments of the Western left have misread the Ukrainian struggle against Russian invasion as well. Rather than seeing it as imperialist aggression, they reduce it to a NATO-Russia proxy war, disregarding the agency and aspirations of Ukrainians themselves, like Syria. In these cases, anti-hegemony has displaced the nuanced, principled solidarity that should unite struggles against oppression, no matter the source.

As mentioned earlier, merely opposing U.S. imperialism doesn’t make a position leftist. Without grounding in clear principles, such opposition can easily slide into support for authoritarian regimes, even if that’s not the intent. This isn’t just an abstract theoretical issue; it has real-world consequences, as shown by how certain Western leftists and the far-right have both defended regimes like Assad’s. After all, many fascist, Third Positionist, and other reactionary groups have produced anti-Western propaganda.

A principled leftist critique of US imperialism would recognize that while the US is indeed the dominant global power, it is not the only imperial force in the world. Other acts of global oppression cannot be dismissed as “necessary evils,” reduced to “bothsidesism,” or brushed aside as Western propaganda if we are to uphold the values of true international solidarity. Yet, when anti-hegemony becomes an unthinking reflex, it leads to absurd conclusions, such as leftists defending Assad. This anti-hegemonic politics becomes nihilistic, its sole purpose being opposition to the West without articulating a more profound meaning or vision. It stops asking who is fighting for freedom and who is simply using anti-imperialist rhetoric to retain power. As a result, any state that opposes the West, regardless of its brutality, can be mistaken for an ally.

Supporting movements like the Syrian Revolution means prioritizing local voices. It means recognizing that revolutionary change is complex but ultimately rooted in material circumstances and universal values like freedom. As the world moves further from mid-20th-century independence struggles, new waves of resistance emerge against regimes that once cloaked themselves in anti-colonial or liberation rhetoric. This has created an environment ripe for post-post-colonial reaction.

New Perspectives and The Peoples Want

Critiquing aspects of the Western left is not meant to disavow or completely condemn it. It is important to remain critical of Western military intervention. This is especially true for those living in the West. While numerous examples of alternative media contribute to biased conclusions and state actors insert propaganda into messaging, we must also acknowledge the reverse is true. Recognizing the limitations of some Western leftist analysis should not lead to ignoring or dismissing the very real issues and injustices rooted in Western power.

But that focus can’t come at the cost of standing with people facing oppression. Solidarity means holding both things simultaneously, challenging unjust foreign policy while supporting those fighting for their freedom. Support should not be withheld simply because a struggle or its methods do not align neatly with Western leftist frameworks, especially when such judgments are shaped by perspectives from outside the region rather than the voices of those directly affected.

The Western left’s response to Syria points to a deeper problem: its struggle to stay connected to global revolutionary movements. If Western leftists continue to dismiss real revolutions, they will lose the trust of those involved. This will weaken their credibility and, ultimately, their global relevancy. It will also diminish their capacity to play a significant role from within the imperialist core. This would be a loss for everyone, as there are essential roles that individuals in the West can play from their positions.

It is a complicated subject, as reactions will inevitably range from general agreement to accusations of overgeneralization or vagueness. I have purposefully avoided naming too many specific groups or individuals because these discussions devolve into personal jousting matches rather than focusing on the issues at hand. Of course, this is not meant to represent all the Western left, and the desire to keep the emphasis on the topic rather than individuals may unintentionally obscure that nuance.

While it is tempting to focus on rebuttals, doing so would deflect from the core purpose of this discussion. Instead, the better response is to offer a grounded alternative. A prime example is The People’s Want Manifesto, which weaves together lessons and insights drawn from the experiences of Syrian refugees with reflections from previous internationalist gatherings they’ve organized.

It is an excellent example because it was created by people directly impacted by the events it discusses, not outside intellectuals. Unlike vague theoretical frameworks or structuralist abstractions, it is action-oriented, grounded in the lived experiences of Syrian exiles practicing mutual aid and solidarity. In addition, it is profoundly internationalist. This makes it a strong model that directly challenges much of the critique raised in this essay.

Conclusion

These critiques, common in some segments of the Western left, reflect a pattern where skepticism of Western imperialism becomes so rigid and reflexive that it dismisses legitimate popular struggles as compromised or orchestrated by imperialist forces. Arguments dismissing Syrians as CIA pawns or labeling popular uprisings in places like Syria or Belarus as reactionary mirror the same flawed logic: that any opposition to anti-Western regimes must be suspect if it appears to align with US geopolitical interests. This misreads the fundamental nature of these uprisings. Syrians did not rise because of US machinations but because of systemic repression, corruption, and violence inflicted by their government. Similarly, internal demands for political rights drove Belarusian protests.

Reducing complex, global struggles to Western plots isn't principled anti-imperialism. Instead, such an approach collapses into a nihilistic anti-hegemony that erases oppressed peoples. It stops asking who is fighting for freedom and who is simply using anti-imperialist rhetoric to retain power.

Like other uprisings in the 21st century, the Syrian Revolution challenges existing frameworks for understanding global struggles. Concepts rooted in post-colonial theory, Cold War-era anti-imperialism, and traditional media critiques have struggled to account for the dynamics of modern authoritarianism, the role of alternative media, and the complexities of multipolar interventionism. Such shifts, including evolving authoritarian tactics, the changing role of media, and the complexity of multipolar interventions, suggest refining how revolutionary movements are analyzed. While anti-colonial struggles were often understood in terms of resisting foreign domination, many post-colonial governments themselves evolved into entrenched authoritarian regimes that co-opted anti-imperialist rhetoric to maintain control. The concept of post-post-colonialism helps us understand the struggles of people resisting such regimes.

Solidarity structures, when rooted in direct engagement with revolutionary movements, have historically provided meaningful support in past struggles. The experiences of the Spanish Civil War’s international brigades, anti-apartheid networks, and transnational labor movements offer historical examples of how solidarity can move beyond rhetorical support to material assistance, organizing, and coalition-building. More recently, efforts in Palestinian solidarity organizing, Kurdish self-governance support, and refugee aid networks have demonstrated how engagement can take different forms, whether through advocacy, logistical support, or amplifying local voices. These approaches emphasize that meaningful solidarity is not solely about positioning within geopolitical debates but building relationships with those leading struggles for justice.

As new uprisings emerge, this perspective can offer a more flexible and principled way forward that stays rooted in solidarity and connected to the people living through these struggles. To achieve this, better media literacy and willingness to examine both mainstream and alternative narratives critically are needed. It requires a rejection of the tendency to treat anti-hegemony as an end in itself and instead a commitment to standing with those fighting for justice, regardless of the geopolitical alignments involved. We can only avoid the traps of abstract anti-imperialism and nihilistic opposition by centering the agency and lived experiences of those directly affected. We can achieve these things together, in solidarity with one another.

[1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963) pg.205.

[2] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), Pg. 556.

[3] Ibid