The War On Syria Can Show You What’s Happening In Our World

Caitlin Johnstone
5 min readOct 30, 2017

People sometimes ask me why I don’t write more about this or that nation, about Israel or Saudi Arabia or the UK, or my own country Australia. The reason for this is pretty simple: the more I learn about our world, the less interested I am in writing about nations. What interests me is writing about the nationless group of oligarchs that uses governments as tools and weapons to facilitate its various agendas.

I focus on the US government because that happens to be the largest and most influential tool of that nationless oligarchy at this time, but it’s ultimately only ever to draw attention to the arm which wields it. Some very powerful people figured out long ago that you can rule far more effectively when you’re unseen in the shadows than you can seated on a throne with a crown upon your head. For this reason these plutocratic elites are often like the wind: you can’t see it, but you can see its effects. America is a tree I often point to to show how the wind blows. Perhaps an even better tree for this purpose is Syria.

A brilliant new article has been published by Zero Hedge that I’d like to direct your attention to, because everyone on earth should read it. The article shows how an interview with former Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani constitutes a high-level “public admission to collusion and coordination between four countries to destabilize an independent state, [including] possible support for Nusra/al-Qaeda” from the very beginning of the conflict in 2011.

It’s interesting that in the above rush translation Prime Minister Thani says “we were fighting over the lady, and now the lady is gone and we are still fighting” to describe the various groups which gathered with the goal of toppling the Assad government, whereas Zero Hedge’s translator asserts that a better translation is “fighting over the prey”. As a woman I find it interesting not only because the meanings of “lady” and “prey” are so disturbingly interchangeable here, but also because the international convergence upon Syria has long reminded me of a gang rape, for which either word would suffice.

What else am I supposed to picture when told of how the United States, along with Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey collaborated with the help of Jordan to ship arms to jihadist factions from the very beginning of the Syrian conflict with the goal of overthrowing Assad? When Israel has launched repeated military strikes on the Syrian government and its allies within its borders? When the most esteemed mainstream news outlets in the US and UK are promoting the following blatant war propaganda psyops to manufacture support for further military intervention in that nation?

The article then points out the recent Intercept publication of a document it’s been suspiciously holding onto for years revealing that a “rebel” attack on Damascus “was directly supplied and commanded by Saudi Arabia with full prior awareness of US intelligence.” It discusses the CIA’s arming of known terrorist factions and the memo Hillary Clinton received acknowledging Qatari and Saudi support for ISIS in the region.

Gang rape. This is gang rape.

Why though? Why did this happen? Why have such diverse nations been conspiring from all over the world against a nation with a population lower than Florida? What percentage of Americans or Britons were waking up every morning in 2011 thinking “My government should really help overthrow Bashar al-Assad”? Pretty much zero, I’m certain. The public didn’t begin supporting Syrian interventionism until the talking heads on TV started telling them it was about rescuing children, like in the propaganda videos featured above. These manipulations have nothing to do with the will of the people or the governments meant to serve them.

This all makes sense when you stop thinking in terms of nations and governments and realize that multinational corporations and banks have no borders and are not loyal to any government. Money is power, and moneyed interests have investments in the crucial strategic region that Syria happens to occupy. The ruling elites don’t see Syria’s borders, and they certainly don’t see the Syrian people; they see profit and geopolitical influence which will go to the power structures in Russia and China if they don’t secure it for themselves. So they use the governments they control, whose borders and people they also don’t see, to secure it.

Or at least, they try to.

I’m titling this article “The War On Syria Can Show You What’s Happening In Our World”, and the takeaway is not that what’s happening is an unbeatable cabal of elites conquering and manipulating until our species snuffs itself out via climate chaos or nuclear holocaust. The takeaway is that these creeps are very beatable. The elites who rule over you are the same elites who failed in Syria.

The propaganda campaign against the Syrian government has failed. The plutocrats did not succeed in manufacturing the necessary public support for more aggressive intervention in that nation, which they need in order to act without provoking unrest and risking damage to their power structure and domestic investments. This meant that Russia’s involvement in the Syrian conflict would be able to keep Assad in power and restore the region to stability, which is why Putin is a high priority target in the deep state’s crosshairs now. Despite occasional comments from scumbags like Rex Tillerson, there is a general consensus that Assad will likely be staying in power, displaced Syrians will continue to return home as peace prevails, and the nation will continue to rebuild.

A sweet and simple Activist Post article by Brandon Turbeville titled “On Returning From Syria: More Convinced Than Ever Western Media Narrative Is Bullshit” describes the discrepancies in what we’re told about Syria vs. what’s actually happening there, and it concludes with the following interaction:

Later on, in discussions with a Syrian man, the question was asked how Syrians seem to be able to get back up on their feet and start living again, sending their children to school, working, rebuilding even as the war continues two miles away. The answer was simple: “This is Syria.” When it was suggested that the Western powers do not understand the Syrian connection to their country and their unmatched resolve to continue living and rebuilding what was lost, he agreed.

“That’s right,” he said. “They don’t understand us. And that is why they lost.”

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