While most see the collapse of Syria as just another Middle East country thrown into chaos by the American government, it is a good lesson in the dangers that come when a distinct minority rules over the majority. The ISIS rebels get the credit, but the real blame lies with the way in which the Syria state was structured. Until now, Syria was ruled by one of the many minorities in the region. That minority is a mysterious ethnoreligious group called the Alawites.
The place to start is with the people. Syria has some of the oldest communities in the world, dating back to the ancient world. Maaloula, a village in western Syria, is one of the last remaining places where Aramaic is spoken. There are Christian communities that date back to Rome. Of course, Islam has been in the area now called Syria since the time of Mohamed. There is also the ethnoreligious group called the Alawites, which split from Shia Islam at some unknown point in the past.
The origins and identity of the Alawites are a mystery. There are roughly four million of them in the region. Their legends say they are descendants of the followers of the eleventh Imam, Hasan al-Askari. The reason he is called the eleventh Iman is because he was one of the twelve imams who claimed to be the spiritual and biological successors of the Mohamed. These are the founders of Shia Islam. Exactly how they became this distinct subgroup within Islam remains a mystery.
Now, Shia Islam is itself a minority within Islam. Roughly ten percent of all Muslim belong to a sect within the Shia designation. The vast majority of Muslims, especially in the Arab world, are Sunnis. Unsurprisingly, the relations between the Sunnis and Shia have never been good. One result of this enmity between the two camps is that the Sunnis, who make up seventy percent of Syria, claim the Alawites are not just heretics and non-believers, but not even Arabs.
That last claim is not without some merit. There has been a great deal of effort to gloss over the ethnic realities in that part of the world. Western experts are sure that there is no such thing as biological reality, so differences in people, even genetic differences, are explained as cultural differences. The locals, however, understand that the Levant has been the land of invaders, and they left behind more than just their buildings and some of their cultural practices.
That aside, the Alawites have been a highly clannish and resourceful group, often creating problems for the local rulers. The Ottomans tried to suppress them on multiple occasions, but also found them useful in roles requiring skill, like tax farming and managing the empire’s finances. When the Europeans came to dominate the region in the 19th century, the Alawites proved useful to their new rulers. It turns out that every ruler needs smart and clever people.
It is this ability to run complex systems that eventually allowed the Alawites to take control of Syria. That and their clannishness. Under the French, the Alawites played a key role, which gave them access to power and resources. After independence, their resourcefulness and understanding of the systems left by the Europeans allowed Hafez al-Assad and his Ba’ath Party to seize power. The Alawites, despite their numbers, were smarter than their rivals.
As an aside, one of the many claims about the Alawites by the Muslim majority is that they supported Israeli independence and had a long working relationship with the Jews in the region. This is generally considered a smear, but it is clear that the Alawites were willing to work with other minority groups in the region. The Assad family famously protected the Christian communities in Syria, for example. Minorities have a funny habit of sticking together against the majority.
That aside, a country run by a distinct and distrusted minority is never going to be stable, especially when the minority is tiny. This is why the Assad government had been ruthless at times when dealing with the Sunni majority. To keep the peace, the government had to make clear to anyone thinking otherwise that the government would use maximum force to maintain the peace. Minority rule is always made worse by the tactics necessary to maintain it.
Of course, the Assad led Syria had been useful to the West for a long time, so they got the support they needed to maintain themselves. Until now, it had been assumed that chaos in Syria would be bad for the region and bad for Israel. As a rule, confident countries seek stability in their diplomacy. Now that the official policy of the United States is to spread chaos around the world, Assad was an easy target for the now familiar regime change operation.
Regime change was possible in Syria because it was a minority government ruling a hostile majority. Western sanctions starved Syria of the cash it needed to bribe enough of the majority into supporting them. Turkish and American terror groups operating within Syria put constant pressure on the government. The reason Assad fell so quickly to this hodgepodge of ISIS radicals is the Alawite system collapsed. The ISIS mob was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.
This is what makes Syria a timeless lesson. No society run by a distinct minority can be stable, as the majority will always distrust that minority. Even when minority rule results in good times, as in the case of colonial Africa, the majority will find reasons to resent that minority. In fact, the good times allows that resentment to slowly build under the surface of apparent tranquility. As soon as bad times come, the majority revolts and the laws of large numbers takes its course.
Syria is why the Israelis have no interest in ruling over Arabs. They could take control of Gaza and the West Bank, for example, but they would be viewed as a minority ruling a hostile majority, so expulsion is their preferred option. In the oldest part of the world, the people still understand the oldest lessons. One of those is that a minority ruling a majority must always be a temporary condition. In the end, numbers always matter more than even human capital. The majority wins in the end.
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It’s similar to to how Saddam’s Tikriti clan, a minority within the Sunnis, who were a minority in majority-Shia Iraq, were put in power by the Brits. He then became a client of the Americans, who helped him in the Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s. When Washington got tired of him, he was lured by Ambassador April Glaspie into invading Kuwait, which sparked the 1990-91 Gulf War and all the rest.
I kinda seems like we’re ruled over, or at least heavily influenced by a minority or two in this place. Will the declining White majority ever rebel? Time is running out.
Good comment! Whites in the US are in the process of becoming a mere plurality. Whether the “minority group” that presently governs the US can continue to rule over a brown-black majority is an open question, but my guess is no. I have heard reports that Israeli tanks are rather close to Damascus and that the US and Israel continue to systematically bomb Syrian military assets. I’m not certain how these new “liberators of Syria” will fare against an Israeli offensive, backed by the US. And I’ve also heard there is already fighting between Turks and Kurds in Syria. Sometimes… Read more »
Yes, apparently the Russians got tired of supporting the Alawites and their corrupt generals, who were probably bribed to stand down against the head-choppers…According to Martynov, the Assad Regime treated the Russians and their journalists poorly, despite Putin having saved their bacon twice in the last 15 years…And it’s clearly true that a battalion or two of Russian (or Ukrainian) troops would have sent HTS and the other terrorist groups packing very quickly…
Seems obvious that the Syrian senior officers were bribed and / or blackmailed into standing down. Since Arab enlisted have zero initiative on their own, they took off running when they realized they’d been betrayed.
I think the Russians tried to make the best of things, but there was no saving Assad. The Syrian army was a mess and no amount of Russian military support would fix that problem. They will make the best of what comes next, which is most likely a regional war.
That aside, a country run by a distinct and distrusted minority is never going to be stable, especially when the minority is tiny.
Unless it is backed up by a colonial empire: there’s a limit to the oppressive excesses a minority government will risk, while an empire-backed majority will often just wipe out the competition and start scheming against their Western benefactor.
That’s why colonial powers usually choose to empower a minor local tribe over the dominant, like in Syria and Saudi and Libya.
Of course, once the empire leaves, demographic realities will kick back in.
Ultimately, a ruling minority has one and only one strategy to maintain power- genocide. This can be accomplished either through subtraction or addition, or both.
Not when the minority is small enough to rely on the cooperation of the majority. Rule by ethnic minority is quite normal throughout history. Norman Britain, Macedon Egypt, Viking Rus, Visigothic Spain etc.
I find this somewhat ironic; the population of a certain group of peoples is estimated at 2.2%, yet this minority seeks eminence and authority of all world governments. Will they too fail?
“That aside, a country run by a distinct and distrusted minority is never going to be stable, especially when the minority is tiny.” Under Hafez Assad, there were some progressive reforms. For example state-subsidized electrification, made possible by the Euphrates dam. I got this nugget from Tariq Ali’s recent essay on Syria, who argues that these progressive reforms are what ensured the stability of the regime: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-roads-to-damascus But for the last so many years, this carrot-and-stick approach has been off the table as sanctions have eliminated the possibility of any carrot. There’s another informative essay at RT: https://www.rt.com/news/609099-assad-syria-collapse-crisis/ And if… Read more »
Here is a video on the Chinese perspective of the events in Syria, that I happen to agree with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPyzL7EnD9I
I don’t buy the argument that Russians got tired of supporting them. They are going to lose their military bases in Syria, if USrael succeeds in installing a US friendly government, which is now a real possibility.
Its really up to the Turks to decide how much US/Foreign interference they want in the new protectorate. We don’t have the greatest history managing stable regimes in that part of the world. The Israelis and the Turks will have to come to some sort of accommodation.
Tom Luongo this morning talking about how the Russians had been offering Assad a deal with stronger commitments, but he kept trying to play them off against the Arab League and others.
https://rumble.com/v5y5eh5-760-tom-luongo-and-dave-collum.html
Russian policy is to always make the most of the conditions that exist. There was not much they could do to change things. As to what happens next, just assume that whatever you want to happen, will not happen and whatever you fear will happen, will not happen. The Turks and the United States are about to learn it is never good to create chaos.
That aside, a country run by a distinct and distrusted minority is never going to be stable, especially when the minority is tiny.
Unless that minority can pretend to be a part of the majority. Neat trick.
Yes. But recent events with Buh-Buh-Buh-Buh Benjamin’s Buh-Buh-Buh-Buh foreign media star and reservation gatekeeper agent show that the enlisted minorities are hip to the game. Even if the fading and as yet cowed majority will not dare say things much less even dare to claim they are a distinct ethnic/racial group, these enlisted minority coalition partners smell blood and they are setting fires in the bushes to flush out the game. As enraging as it is that the still majority doesn’t have a single person with the moral courage to explicitly declare themselves a champion of a distinct ethnic/racial group,… Read more »
The internet has helped awaken a lot of people. It doesn’t take a lot to show the deception, and there’s not really a response to prove otherwise. It’s why the gatekeepers have such a hard time and do everything that they can to change the subject rather refute the claim.
There’s also the rise of other minorities. The Indians are coming, indeed have arrived. They know who they’re deal with. Heck, they use them as role model. There’s already tension. King Cobra doesn’t want to be some lawn jockey.
I doubt a very high percentage of AINO residents could answer with any accuracy the question of who rules over them. Certainly a ridiculously high percentage would say the president, or congress, or something stupid like that. Even the ones who know it is not those entities (including me) still have a tough time pinning it down with any specificity. Thus it is somewhat superfluous that they pretend to be part of the majority, since nobody knows they (or which of them) are in charge anyway.
Which factor is the most important, in your opinion — the Alawites as a cultural, genetic, or ideological minority? I think the best lens through which to view late-stage Soviet America is the lens of theocracy. They tried conversion through persuasion (the schools). They tried conversion by the sword (replacing the native population with foreigners). But they — the stupid, evil clowns who rule us — did seem to consciously realize that they’re a minority (of lunatics, in a majority of sane people). If that’s really the case, then AINO’s collapse will break along ideological lines. If it’s the other… Read more »
If you are right, and AINO’s collapse breaks along ideological lines, this implies that some significant proportion of non-whites will align with traditional whites instead of their racial tribes, because of the Christianity or conservatism that they share with whites.
I find it hard to imagine that many non-whites will side with traditional whites because of Christianity or liberty. Of course, there will be a few, but their proportions will be small, say, less than 5%. Maybe I’m wrong.
Do you envision lots of blacks, mestizos, or asians casting their lot with white Christians, for example, against their own tribes?
Although its a footnote now, its also the end of Ba’athism in the Arab world.
The saddest thing about learning about American involvement in the Middle East, hell with Muslims generally, is that the Iranians may have a point with this “Great Satan” business.
At every chance, if the USG can fuck over the native Christians, that’s the option chosen. Always.
I was looking that up today – the decimation of Christian populations in places the (((United States))) creates chaos.
Syria’s Christian population has declined 75% since 2011
Iraq’s Christian population has declined from ~1.5MM to less than 250k since 2003
And of course, for (((OUR GREATEST ALLY))), Christian population was near 8% in 1948, now less than 2%