[ An English woman once asked me: “why are we here?” I answered: “I am more interested in how we got here and where we are going to.” In the context of Syria and the MENA region as a whole, by historicizing everything, as Walter Benjamin advised, we understand how Syria got to where it is today. In the following Munif rightly makes the role of class relations in the Syrian society fundamental, especially class conflict and alliances after independence. The conclusion is: a weak bourgeoisie that is unable to carry out economic development a nationalist regime that is unable to pursue an alternative path to capitalism due to the failure of economic development resorts to repression to maintain its rule a regime that pacifies significant layers of the population and contains active discontent through subsidised commodities, namely bread, and ideological means but it cannot sustain itself when a crisis hits. “The state and capitalist assemblages became ineffective when the 2011 revolt...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51