The intellectual origins of the Baath
A fascinating post from Iraqi Shirko Mula Qadir detailing the history and crimes of the Baath. There was a lot of good information covering the fascist and continental race theory influences of the Baath and other totalitartian tendencies in Paul Berman’s excellent Terror and Liberalism, but over all I have seen very little coverage of the intellectual grounding of these aberrations of the 21st century (such arrangements were all to standard for the 20th).
Every time we study the Baath Party’s ideas we become more and more certain that it is a cretinous replica of the German Nazis, Italian Fascists, and other racist movements in the world.
This is supported by researchers who study the Baath Party such as Hana Batatu who wrote about the life and ideas of Sati’al-Husri, the godather of the Arab Nationalist movement. The Baath Party can fairly be described as an extremist copy of that.
Al-Husri considers German philosophers Johann Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel the professors of the Arab Islamic Intellect. He used Fichte as a source of inspiration instead of the Quran. Baath Party founder Michel Aflaq also was heavily influenced by Fichte, who was an early proponent of German nationalism.
Ouda Wahib explains that the Baathists don’t have any ideas of their own. They imported Nazism and modified it with Arab and Islamic labels. This is obvious in the writings of Aflaq and other Baath writers.
The important outcome from understanding this is a more complete grasp of how atrocious the Baath regime was, and how atrocious the Baath remnants continue to be. Read the whole post as it does a good job of detailing the the nature of the Baath-branded National Socialism.
It’s great to see this material direct from an Iraqi researcher, publishing online in Iraq. Kudos to Friends of Democracy for making this available in English.