During the social media age, the most effective form of narrative manipulation Zionists have used has not been to deny that they’re committing a genocide. The digital age has made it all the more easy for the Zionist state’s crimes to be shown to the world, rendering their PR efforts in response to these revelations so often ineffectual. An “Israeli” spokesperson changing the subject after somebody brings up the IDF’s on-camera war crimes is easy to see through. What’s not so obvious is the type of manipulation which “Israel,” and the broader network of U.S. imperialist influence, has carried out to sell their hybrid war against Syria. And they’re now utilizing this method to try to render the pro-Palestine movement divided from its global allies, and divorced from the broad masses of people.
Since the new cold war got started, and social media became the central force within leftist discourse, the goal of these propagandists has been to split the anti-imperialist struggle along arbitrary ideological barriers. They want there to be a faction that supports Palestine, yet is against Russia’s operation against Ukrainian fascism. They want a faction that claims to support all the global anti-imperialist struggles, yet rejects all antiwar coalitions with people or groups who are outside of “leftism.” They want a faction that’s supposedly pro-Palestine, while being against Iran, even though Iran is providing crucial assistance to the effort at defeating Zionism. And these types of divisions are only the ones within the most radical elements of the pseudo-left. There are also the “leftist” liberal gatekeepers, who disavow Netanyahu while insisting Zionism can be redeemed through better “Israeli” leadership. As well as the more soft pro-Palestine people who denounce the crimes of “Israel,” while arguing on the terms of the Zionists by condemning Hamas.
As I see our enemies work to destroy our cause via movement balkanization, providing people with all these different imperialism-compatible orientations, my mind goes back to the big deception I was confronting during the late 2010s: the Syria psyop. That piece of narrative manipulation depended on the exact same tactic we’re seeing the psyop machine employ today, where leftists got funneled into groups which are hostile towards any consistent anti-imperialist stance. While Syria was the primary dividing barrier on the left, so many leftists forsook the effort to counter this hybrid war. Sometimes it was because they were worried that this would detract from the Palestinian cause, other times it was for more cynical reasons. The pro-war Syrian influence network’s tactics for corralling leftists then became used for different foreign policy debates, with even more success.
In February 2022, Ukraine replaced Syria as the main left-wing point of contention. It was then that many of the same forces which had taken a principled stance on Syria showed their true priorities, and acted towards Ukraine in the same way that many others had acted towards Syria.
In 2016, the PSL wrote that “Experts from western countries and financiers from Arab reactionary regimes, mainly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, provide support and sponsorship to terrorist organization with the cooperation of Turkey. Facing this complicated and hard situation, Syria had to request help from the Russian Federation. Moscow provided Syria with the support it needed to resist this barbarous aggression.” This put them in opposition to the Trotskyists, anarchists, Maoists, and social democrats, who opposed Russia’s action in Syria no matter how much evidence there was for the intervention having been justified. In response to Ukraine, though, the PSL affirmed the imperialism-compatible left’s idea that Russia was wrong to take action.
At first, this wasn’t seen by myself and other pro-Russian communists as a reason not to collaborate with PSL. Then, when the pro-Russian orgs started working towards substantial antiwar actions, the PSL began outwardly attacking the efforts of these orgs as part of the promotion for its own March 18 antiwar event. This created a totally needless fissure within the movement, though it’s at least made me able to outwardly decry PSL’s abandonment of the Donbass people. It’s apparent that for most of the USA’s socialist groups, including the ones which have acted principled in the past, Palestine matters but the Donbass doesn’t. It’s considered acceptable when the Palestinians resist the Zionist state’s ethnic cleansing effort. Yet it’s not acceptable when the Russian people mobilize to save the Donbass Russian speakers from the Kiev regime’s own ethnic cleansing attempts.
Part of this double standard has come from a crude understanding of what imperialism means, wherein many have looked at the sheer physical size of Russia and believed this means its actions must be imperialist. The PSL knows Russia isn’t imperialist, though, so its reasoning for disavowing Russia comes purely from how it seeks to appease liberals.
This act of opportunism on PSL’s part is so significant because PSL, through its group ANSWER, is the predominant source of organizational leadership for the pro-Palestine protests. It’s been able to monopolize the protest cage, which means today’s demonstrations are guided more by its ideology than by that of any other group. And we’re seeing the negative impacts of this right now. ANSWER is reinforcing the adventuristic and anti-popular ideas which many under-experienced activists come to. It’s organizing the blocking of roads, which is not an effective strategy under our conditions, and it’s nurturing a broader protest tone of hostility towards the people. A tone that’s based around repeating today’s standard “leftist” culture war slogans, rather than appealing towards the people’s shared economic grievances, is one which renders the movement isolated.
All of these issues are connected to the manipulations which imperialism’s influence networks have carried out in relation to Syria, because the Syria psyop was designed to have a maximum impact on the modern left. To counter the narrative threats towards the pro-Palestine movement, we need to understand how these manipulations have worked, and where they’ve come from.
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The historical uniqueness of the Syria psyop came from how the methods behind it were developed in reaction to the Iraq psyop’s failures. In the long term, the imperialists weren’t able to keep the majority of the USA’s people in support of the Iraq war, and it made the figure responsible for this war one of the most hated presidents in history. The U.S. empire could no longer sell wars of the kind where Washington simply sends ground troops, it needed to switch towards hybrid warfare as its main strategy. With the U.S. geopolitical strategists now finding a need to revive the cold war, they had to adapt to this new age. That was where social media became helpful for them, at least in certain ways. Social media has made it easier than ever to expose the crimes of the imperialists, but the imperialists can use it to better manipulate their enemies or potential enemies.
With social media, the psyop agents can nurture divisions in the left. They can fuel the impulses of the non Marxist-Leninist factions to hold a tribalistic hatred towards those with consistent anti-imperialist stances. They were so effective at instilling the online left with such pro-imperialist attitudes that the Marxist-Leninist orgs which are pan-leftist, such as PSL, have since capitulated to those attitudes out of desire not to be divisive within the “left.”
By doing so, these pan-leftist communists have fulfilled the long-term hope of the people behind the Syria psyop: to assimilate every major part of the ideological spectrum into some variation of pro-imperialist dogma. They haven’t needed to convince the people on the spectrum’s left end to support “Israel.” They’ve only needed to convince them to be anti-Russia, and sectarian towards the pro-Russian orgs. That way, they can prevent a sufficiently effective organized anti-Zionist movement from emerging, even though most of the U.S. public is now against the actions of “Israel.”
The anti-Soviet currents within leftism, i.e. the Trotskyists, the anarchists, and so on, were of course already inclined to take the side of the State Department on many issues. As Michael Parenti observed, they had supported NATO’s destruction of socialist Yugoslavia because this was a blow against “Stalinism.” But aside from the kinds of Cold War-era Trots who had since went neocon, such as Christopher Hitchens, essentially no who had ever called themselves a socialist supported the Iraq invasion. When the imperialists started the Syrian war, they were able to get many “socialists” behind this, because this assault against the Syrian people was designed to be so much more complex and multifaceted than the assault on the Iraqis.
Before the U.S. sent any troops into Syria, it backed jihadists to prepare for an instigation of civil conflict. It seized upon the right moment, and launched a campaign of gargantuan destruction. It created an opportunity for Turkey to get involved, which let Washington deflect from its own role in the crisis. It made ISIS able to rise within Syria, creating an excuse for the U.S. to militarily occupy the country. It backed the Zionist-inspired project of Kurdish ethno-nationalists, and sold this project as something “leftist” by emphasizing its anarchist fighters. It forced Syria to defend against the terrorists, and forced Russia to assist Assad. This let the empire’s propagandists vilify the leaders of these countries as bloodthirsty tyrants.
The consensus which most of the “left” came to was that Assad should be opposed, even though his government represented the only anti-imperialist force within Syria. There were even leftists, like Noam Chomsky, who supported U.S. involvement in Syria because this was supposedly necessary to protect the Kurds. The irony of this was disgusting. Because Chomsky and those in his anarcho-syndicalist camp had been against the Iraq invasion, and they hadn’t accepted the narrative from Christopher Hitchens about “protecting the Kurds” justifying Bush’s act of imperialist aggression.
The Syria psyop had now expanded the range of imperialism-compatible “socialist.” It was so much more widely acceptable on the “left” to side with the State Department. Because the State Department’s new big lie provided a way for socialists to accept the USA’s narratives, while claiming they weren’t on Washington’s side. The U.S. military was just one among the numerous other forces which had seized territory from the Syrian government. So a leftist could repeat the “gas attack” lies about Assad, while saying they didn’t side with the USA. They could point to the anarchists fighting in Syria, and declare “I’m not like the neocons, I want Assad to be defeated by the leftists!” Even though those “leftists” were working for a U.S.-backed Kurdish fascist force that’s committing ethnic cleansing.
The stance of the imperialism-compatible left on Syria was totally incoherent, and was based around absurd expectations. (Do the pro-YPG anarchists believe the ethnic cleansing and the U.S. occupation will simply go away on their own?) And that was the point of the Syria psyop in regard to the left: to create ideological factions that are utterly confused, and have totally backward priorities. If you’re in the United States, your foremost political concern should be ending the imperialist policies of your government. Get sidetracked from this being your central goal, and you end up a tool for imperialism. That’s where the leftists who’ve supported the hybrid war on Syria are.
We’ve seen the same thing happen with the left on Ukraine, except now the actors who’ve gotten sidetracked are even more numerous. We don’t just have anarchists who’ve been fighting to defend the fascist Kiev regime, which was predictable. We also have “red lib” communists who’ve been working to police our organizing spaces, so that anybody who supports the Russian people against this regime isn’t allowed to have a seat at the table.
Should the pro-Palestine movement remain under the control of these left counter-gangs, it’s going to fail. The Zionists and the imperialists are going to succeed at separating Palestine supporters from Russia, Iran, Syria, China, Korea, and the other countries which are seen as contentious within the western left. The solution is to take the pro-Palestine struggle out of the movement and into the masses, making it no longer confined to the “left.”
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As the empire tries to crush the domestic resistance towards the Gaza genocide, it’s working to bring as much destruction as it can to the other countries within the “Axis of Resistance.” The only limits to Washington’s aggression are the ways that these countries have been able to resist its onslaught with armed force, or receive economic assistance from powerful countries like China. Washington’s “Israeli” servants are escalating their proxy war with Iran, while the U.S. intensifies its bombings of Arab countries. The anti-Syria lobby, led by the umbrella organization the American Coalition for Syria, has been working to increase the severity of Washington’s sanctions. All while the country struggles to rebuild.
With the strategic victory of the October 7 operation, the Houthi Red Sea blockade, and Iran’s success at creating a deterrent against “Israel,” it’s a desperate race to weaken the Axis of Resistance. And the effort at dividing the pro-Palestine struggle is an instrumental part of this goal, because if this struggle is able to gain enough strength, U.S. foreign policy itself will be threatened.
This campaign to undermine the U.S. pro-Palestine cause is really a campaign to keep the cause confined to leftism. It’s a given that the predominant parts of the left will take the opportunistic path, and do the State Department’s work; the material incentive is for them to do so. Since the death of the old left, the imperialists have created an abundant series of NGOs that are ready to finance anybody who advances “leftism” with a pro-imperialist slant. Ukraine was the moment that proved the established left orgs can’t be brought away from these NGOs, and it’s not like Palestine has since gotten these orgs and their partisans to change their stance.
We’re still seeing the groups and individuals which support multipolarity get vilified and ostracized by these orgs. We’re still seeing the anti-imperialist movement exist in a state of confusion. Many of the people who support Palestine have been led to only selectively stand with anti-imperialist forces, and to view many of their domestic allies in this fight as enemies. To render the imperial state unable to effectively run interference within the pro-Palestine struggle, we have to make the struggle big enough that the state’s servants have become marginal.
In addition to the police brutality against the protesters, and the efforts to censor opposition to the genocide, the empire wants to make the demonstrations themselves utterly dominated by the same social element which acted as the Syria psyop’s “leftist” footsoldiers. We know how the NGOs mobilize this element. As Caleb Maupin wrote about in 2016, what they do is spin narratives in which pro-imperialist causes are framed as being on the side of “progress,” and then rally these volunteers:
The western governments continue to actively assist their Saudi “allies” as they violate international law in Yemen, while demonizing Russia’s cooperation with Syria against terrorism. When speaking of Aleppo, western leaders employ language that is quite similar to the kind often used by left-wing anti-war activists. The British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, even called for anti-war protests targeting Russia when speaking before parliament on October 11th…On November 3rd, a group of 25 people wearing “Save Aleppo” T-Shirt presented themselves outside of the Russian embassy in London…who were the individuals in the T-shirts? Very few of them appeared to be of Syrian origin, but one cannot assume they were merely hired stooges either. The answer to this question can be found in the name of an organization that co-sponsored the malicious provocation. The organization “Syria Solidarity UK,” which took credit for the action on its website, is well known to be a front group for the Socialist Workers Party of Britain. This “socialist” organization follows the teachings of Tony Cliff and Leon Trotsky, [and] has its grip on Britain’s “Stop The War Coalition” as well. It is safe to surmise that a decent percentage of those who barricaded the Russian embassy’s entrance were Trotskyites.
The class character of the types who join with imperialist front groups like this one is not the same as that of the typical worker. Historically, the leftist forces that have done the work of the imperialists draw from the radical intelligentsia. From the element of young people, typically students, who go into radical politics with a mentality of wanting to rebel and tear down the existing order.
“Among the political left, the primary and constant current is an extremely alienated minority from within the privileged sectors of society,” wrote Maupin to explain which social conditions produced the volunteers for the “socialist” NATO propaganda ops around Syria. “Whether it is due to their unique access to education, or the fact that they encouraged to ponder political and philosophical questions while other strata are not; regardless of the reason, a section of the most privileged people always seems to be drawn to revolutionary anti-capitalist politics…The second current, which constitutes a very solid majority of those attracted to leftist and anti-capitalist currents around the world, are those among the working and impoverished classes. While in times of prosperity they are less politicized, as they see their conditions deteriorating, they become motivated to take action and embrace anti-capitalist and revolutionary ideology.”
These are the two social forces that are vying for control over the pro-Palestine movement: the types of students or professional managerial class individuals who hold a hostile view towards the people, and the working-class individuals who Lenin was talking about when he said we must go “lower and deeper” to find the “real masses.” Because Maupin has aligned himself with the latter, the former group has hated him for going into the protest spaces to do reporting. He’s described how these radicals have threatened to beat him up if he goes to these places again, which shows how skewed their priorities are. The intensification of U.S. imperialism’s violence both abroad and at home isn’t motivating the left counter-gangs to put aside their sectarianism. It’s making them even more entrenched, and filled with misdirected anger.
If it’s not possible to unify with these forces, our only option is to make new allies among that majority current within the masses. Among the people who get drawn to radical politics not so that they can fight a culture war, but so that they can do what’s necessary for winning the struggle.
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