Swastikas in Damascus

New Line ^ | March 17, 2021 | Asser Khattab

[Conservat1]

Syria under the Assads has long harbored a soft spot for Nazism. The revolution is changing that

Those around me who sported some vague admiration for Hitler almost always supported the Assads, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Some of them sought to join the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), established by Antoun Saadeh, a 20th century politician who spoke of the superiority of Middle Eastern Arabs over Africans and Syrians over neighboring peoples. Unlike the Assads’ Arab Socialist Baath Party and the many other political and social movements that called for a unity of Arab nations, the SSNP believed in the Syrian nation, a Greater Syria that would include modern Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Jordan. Saadeh himself was Lebanese. The anthem of the SSNP, its flag, and its own version of Führerkult around Saadeh seem to some as the closest one could get to a Nazi ideology that is alive and well in the region, though today’s SSNP tries to distance itself from some of Saadeh’s right-wing racial theories. I’ve tried understanding where some of this right-wing sentiment, of a seemingly Nazi-esque flavor, may have originated. In 1939, Hitler and his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbles, launched the Radio Berlin Arabic-language program. The program broadcast across the Middle East and North Africa and told Arab listeners that everything they had heard about Hitler hating Arabs and assigning them a low “racial status” was wrong. It even broadcast Quran recitations, in what seemed to have been an attempt to steal listeners from the BBC’s Arabic-language radio service.

The Nazis also developed relations with Muslim public figures, most notably Hajj Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem at the time. Husseini knew Hitler personally. And, despite what Radio Berlin used to say, Arabs suffered because of Nazism too. Hundreds of Arab nationals, Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike, were led to concentration camps under Hitler... We  were never taught this. And yet at some point, I began hearing a startling number of Syrians quoting Hitler and discussing his views and political career. Some would mutter the common, and not altogether accurate, claims that Germany “rose from the ashes” of World War I and from the confines of the Treaty of Versailles and that the lives of German citizens greatly improved under Hitler before World War II began in September 1939. Those were mostly teenagers who had seen a clip of the dictator delivering a tirade and went about glorifying him without any real knowledge of who he was. Some might have heard a quote out of context and went about repeating it. Others, perhaps, were filtering their world through a warped understanding of anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, cornerstones of the ruling Baath Party, whose ideologies we learned at school. “I could have killed all Jews, but I left some of them alive in order to show you why I was killing them.” Hitler never once said these words, but I remember the made-up quote circulating on Facebook since the site gained popularity among Syrians around 2009. It was usually paired with a black background and a photo of Hitler himself.

[beethovenfan]

“Damascus.....shall be a ruinous heap.” Isaiah 17:1. Coming soon.

[Conservat1]

Incidentally, about that fake quote from Hitler, a Pakistani decried his countrymen about it.

[ETCM]

I’ve tried understanding where some of this right-wing sentiment, of a seemingly Nazi-esque flavor, may have originated.

Baathism is essentially "Arab Nazism", founded by the Vichy in collaboration with Nazi Germany in 1943. So they learned how to be Nazis from French Nazis with guidance from German Nazis.