Hovig John Heghinian in the Comments section pointed to this article about Michel Aflaq, founder of the Ba’ath Party. It’s not a new article, but it is worth reading anyway since it explains the ideological foundations of Syria, the old Iraq, and the Iraqi “resistance.”
MICHEL AFLAQ was born in Damascus in 1910, a Greek Orthodox Christian. He won a scholarship to study philosophy at the Sorbonne sometime between 1928 and 1930 (biographies differ), and there he studied Marx, Nietzsche, Lenin, Mazzini, and a range of German nationalists and proto-Nazis. Aflaq became active in Arab student politics with his countryman Salah Bitar, a Sunni Muslim. Together, they were thrilled by the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, but they also came to admire the organizational structure Lenin had created within the Russian Communist party.
Paul Berman describes the Terror War as a continuation of the awful thing that got started in Europe more than 80 years ago and has never come to an end. This is one of the reasons why.
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