Decolonising Syria: the tankie meltdown explained

Why the pro-Putin left is in mourning over Assad

Syrian Girl is so angry she wants to gas the Israelis. Richard Medhurst is convinced the Syrian revolution is a NATO/Israeli “occupation”. Craig Murray thinks it’s a tragedy that Assad’s “flawed but pluralist regime” is gone. Vijay Prashad predicts it will all end like Libya.

It’s only a few hours since Bashar Al Assad fled Damascus but there is a full-scale tankie meltdown under way. And rightly so.

For the “journalists” who spent more than a decade defaming the Syrian revolution of 2011; for the politicians who claimed Assad’s gas attacks were a Western fabrication; and for the Leninist re-enactment groups who have become ensnared in global Putinism — this is a very bad moment.

And given the amount of Assadist money that’s been flowing around the West, it could get considerably worse once the forensic accountancy begins.

At this critical moment for the future of the Middle East it might seem perverse to concentrate on the reactions of a few toxic figures on Twitter. But here’s why settling accounts with them matters.

To observe the extreme wing of the campus-based “anti-Zionist” left since 7 October has been to watch a process of entrapment. Their…