[Political Interest]

To what extent can Ba'athism be described as fascism? Is it true that Michael Aflaq and other ideological founders of the party were influenced by European fascism or is this only a way of blackening their image?

[starman2003]

Dunno but if/when Assad goes, baathism will be extinct. It has already been stamped out in Iraq.

[Preston Cole]

There was a relevant thread here a year ago.

[Orestes]

Is it true that Michael Aflaq and other ideological founders of the party were influenced by European fascism or is this only a way of blackening their image?

He was influenced by Sati' al-Husri, who in turn took inspiration from German nationalism and at least on occasions self-identified as a fascist.

However it seems to me from reading some later writings by Aflaq that philosophically he didn't have so much in common with the likes of European fascists and perhaps would be considered ideologically misguided and soft by them. For example in 1956 he wrote:

Humanism is in nationalism. It comes neither before nor after it. There is not nationalism and humanism, only human nationalism that is the correct one; the other is deviationist and distorted nationalism because it is separated from humanism.

It is neither strange nor accidental that our relation to humanity should become clear and at the same time the constituent parts of our Arab unity become solidified as we become increasingly more eager to achieve this unity. The closer we get to ourselves, the nearer we get to humanity, the more we become confident of our identity, the more this identity becomes open to others.

If you want something closer to actual fascism, you probably should look at Ba'ath's rival - the Syrian Social Nationalist Party of Antoun Saadeh, whose nationalism was ethnically exclusive and anti-pan-Arabist (he hated the Arabs and Islam). Saadeh adhered to a variation of Blood and Soil and Lebensraum concepts, claiming that inhabitants of Syria are a unique, biologically superior mixture of ancient pagan peoples of the Fertile Crescent, and thought they should reconquer their old lands, creating a Greater Syria reaching Iraq in the East and Synai in the South. Inside the party there was a visible cult of Saadeh as the leader, referred to with the name Za'im, which could be loosely translated to mean "Duce/Fuehrer".

His philosophy of history was fascist-esque too, positing a synthesis between materialism and spiritualism as drivers of human progress.

Like Aflaq he was a Christian, who had the idea that this religion is originally a Syrian product and Jesus was really also a Syrian, which is kind of analogical to what Nazis aimed at with the Positive Christianity thing.

Here's the symbol of SSNP called Red Cyclone



Aflaq on Saadeh (p. 129):

The whole movement [Syrian Nationalism] was a mixture of modernism, of scientism, with something extremely old, even archeological; with the resurrection of the local past and grudges a thousand years old. Among the many movements of Arab rebirth, this was one which aborted and lost itself in an unhealthy romanticism, due perhaps, to the fact that Saadeh’s mind was directed towards the past. It was also an extreme right-wing movement preaching a sinister philosophy of order, a synthesis of the interests of the employers and the employees, deliberately playing down the rights of the working class under the pretext that to acknowledge them would lead to anarchy.