Posted on 03/01/2010 11:18:12 PM PST by Masti
The Ba'ath Party's Way to Totalitarianism: Hizb al-Ba'ath al-Arabi
...some in this pan-Arabist circle later created the Ba'ath Party, with a branch emerging in neighbouring Syria in the 1940s. The Christian Arab Michel Aflaq and the Sunni Muslim Salah ad-Din al-Bitar were equally fascinated by leftist and fascist ideas when they created their 'Arab socialism', an anti-imperialist compilation of socialist and fascist ideologies. This connection of left and extreme right-wing ideas that seems to be a specific characteristic of Ba'athism is, in fact, not as unusual as it seems. Classic European fascism also partially has its roots in the Left. Mussolini, who came from the Socialist Party in Italy, as well as the former anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel were ideological fathers of the classic fascist movement in Europe. Even the Nazis had their 'left wing' with the Strasser brothers and some parts of the Sturmabteiung (SA). Sorel and Mussolini's position moved from the left to the extreme right by the changes of their revolutionary subject.. Aflaq saw the Arab nation as the future revolutionary subject... the European fascists, the Ba'ath Party of Aflaq and Bitar, saw their movement as revolutionary and nationalist.
An alliance between the mob and the elite is a common phenomenon of totalitarian movements on their way to take state power, whereas once in power they depend on the spiebrger (philistines), as Hannah Arendt showed in her study on the origins of totalitarianism. The Ba'ath Party in Iraq formed this type of alliance between pan-Arabist intellectuals and the mob. In order to unite the Arab nation into a pan-Arab national state, the new pan-Arabist party tried to build up 'regional commands' in all Arab countries...
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a915370873&fulltext=713240928
Source: Tyrants and Terrorists: Reflections on the Connection between Totalitarianism, Neo-liberalism, Civil War and the Failure of the State in Iraq and Sudan (Author: Thomas Schmidinger a Affiliation: a Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, Austria, DOI: 10.1080/13698240903157594)
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