Syrian Demonstrators March with Defecting Troops in Idlib

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU1pY2VECDE&feature=player_embedded]

Pretty intense video here. Shows Syrian demonstrators marching with defecting Syrian soldiers in a city called Trbes, in Idlib Province, Syria. And no, I am not sure where that is. As you can see, some troops have definitely defected to the other side.

Look at those nice apartment blocks. That’s probably an achievement of Syrian socialism. There are few if any horrific capitalist slums in the Arab World as you see in the capitalist paradises of Latin America, Africa or India. I have seen some claims that there are terrible slums in Cairo, but looking at them, they don’t look nearly as bad as the slums of Mumbai, Nairobi, Rio de Janiero, Bogota, San Salvador, Managua, Port au Prince, Mexico City, Lima or Santiago.

Arab socialism has been an experiment that has worked quite well. Radical free market neoliberal capitalism goes against the Arab mindset, and it is also somewhat anti-Islamic.

The fact that horrific poverty and feudalism persists in some parts of the world is due to the fact that these areas were either not much Arabized or because they suffer from the culture of the surrounding region.

For instance, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, India and Bangladesh still have feudalism (though recently gone in Iran) because of a general South Asian feudal culture and a lack of Arabization. The feudal culture may in part be due to Hinduism or may just be South Asian regionalism. South Philippines suffers from the Latin American style feudalism that all Spanish colonies inherited.

Indonesia suffers from the feudalism that characterized all of mainland SE Asia (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) before revolutions took it out. A revolution would have taken it out in Indonesia too, but the revolutionaries were tagged as atheists by the feudalists, who used the Islamists to “kill the Commies.” A similar thing happened in Malaysia, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

The Arab World was able to take out feudalism quite easily, because feudalism is in a sense contrary to Arab culture itself. Feudalism is always going to be a hard sell in a desert climate where most folks can die of hunger or thirst quite quickly without cooperating. The Arab World is built on cooperation, not competition. Ruthless competition won’t get you far in a desert.