The only people who don’t seem to welcome the collapse of the Assad regime are the members and retainers of the Assad family, the state officials said who may be brought to trial for torture, Islamophobes (see Twitter for details) and sections of the left.

The Morning Star, a sometimes useful publication despite its barely hidden Stalinophilia, carried a piece saying “activists labelled yesterday’s collapse of President Bashar Assad’s Syrian government a “victory for imperialism” and “This is not a triumph of democracy or self-determination; it is a victory for imperialism and reaction.” It ran an editorial  titled “Assad’s downfall was part of imperialism’s region-wide plan”.

What you do not find is any description of how Assad destroyed a democratic uprising and killed half a million Syrians.

Good luck finding anything on the Stop The War Coalition site expressing opposition to Assad or solidarity with the movement that tried to bring him down.

The most sophisticated attempt to justify this indifference or hostility to the movement against Assad was offered by John Rees in a 2012 article when it seems that there was a possibility that mass action would bring down the Syrian government:

“Those who cry most about the ‘internationalist’ duty to support the Syrian revolution and refer only to the internal forces of the revolution are precisely those who have forgotten that internationalism must include the imperial dimension, as it affects domestic forces, or else it is simply moralism.”

It is garnished with references to Robespierre, Trotsky, and Lukacs, but the bottom line is that internationalism begins at home, all that foreign stuff is messy, and the goodies aren’t likely to win. I’m paraphrasing slightly but you can read the original to see if I have seriously misrepresented the views expressed. Every revolutionary process has the potential of victory of defeat.

Is Galloway still on the left? He seems to think so and some people who should know better still cut him far too much slack and he is still able to draw a bit of a crowd on occasion. A delicate constitution prevents me from watching the whole of this broadcast and finding out if the butcher’s indefatigability is saluted, but his main criticism of Assad seems to be that he didn’t say a proper goodbye to the Syrian people before flying off to his gilded cage in Moscow.

It is not possible to predict what is going to happen inside Syria. As Simon Sebag-Montefiore points out Assad used the Islamists to destroy and discredit the popular movement against him, a movement much of the European left shunned: “As the revolution spread, Assad deliberately released jihadist terrorists to taint the liberal revolution, complicating the uprising in which Islamist paramilitaries now fought alongside liberal revolutionaries and Kurdish fighters.”

There are some positive early indicators. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) would not be the first organisation to undergo a significant ideological transformation and they have made positive statements about women and pluralism. They also seem to have learned the lesson about preserving parts of the state apparatus from Libya and Iran. However, the spectre of the Iranian counter-revolution is also present where an unrealistic assessment of the religious factions was repaid with mass executions.

Assad’s boot has been lifted off the throat of the Syrian people. I agree with Leila Al-Shami who writes:

“But for millions of Syrians nothing can be worse than this genocidal fascist regime which has murdered hundreds of thousands, completely destroyed the country, handed it over to foreign powers, devastated the economy, caused half the population to flee their homes, and which now runs the country as a drugs cartel exporting the amphetamine Captagon.   

Should the regime fall, millions of Syrians will be able to return home, allowing civil activism to resume once more. If Assad falls, there is a chance to hope, and hope has been in short supply amongst Syrians.”

Internationalism consists of offering moral, political and material support to those people inside Syria and the diaspora who will try to build a society free from Assadism and imperialist intervention, not seeing them as simply pawns in a geo-strategic game while bemoaning the fall of a butcher. This is a version of what Lenin described as an outburst of the “petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices,… of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression.” He was in favour of those.