this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
31 points (100.0% liked)
Ask Lemmygrad
1186 readers
98 users here now
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Eh, it sorta does but it's a bit confusing to an outside observer because obviously enough Iraqi ba'athism is probably more closely related to fascism of National socialism then it is actual socialism, while typically the Ba'athism practiced in Syria was more closely aligned to actual socialism, well for a time at least (Bashar Al Assad eventually decided to drink the lib juice and effectively torpedoed the Syrian economy with liberal economic reforms, and hence kicked off the Syrian civil war so, fun.)
Either way the more accurate statement would be to say is that ba'athism is ultimately a Arab nationalist ideology that has two, almost entirely distinct branches.
Right-wing Ba'athism, the sort of Ba'athism practiced in Iraq before the Americans decided to invade and then effectively turn the country into an Iranian puppet state.
Left-wing Ba'athism, practiced in Syria which then eventually got dumptered by liberal infiltration (Bashar Al Assad) and then hit the shits at mark 8 velocity.
Either way Ba'athism is for all intense and purposes a dead ideology, that failed due to the inherent contradictions of all regimes (even socialist ones) built without a class base, this is the same reason why Nassarism failed as well, btw, so yeah, tl'dr, even your trying to make a socialist state then your first priority should be to root your politics on that of a class line, something that Nassarism, Left wing Ba'athism, and quite a few others failed to do (though Nassarism could in my opinion but still, and maybe left wing Ba'athism, maybe.)
Was Kadaffi a baathist?
Qaddafism is an Arab-African nationalist ideology of his own.
He wasn't. He was inspired by Nasser initially, but ultimately developed his own socialist theory in the 70s, called the Third Universal Theory (Green Book), which was the manifesto of the Jamahiriya, and he opposed capitalism. The Jamahiriya, which basically means a "government of the masses" was an actual socialist state which abolished private property, and proposed the end of the rule of one group over another. Gadaffi was originally highly pan-Arabist, but later on he pivoted towards pan-Africanism due to the material reality of pan-Arabism being dominated by a national bourgeois current. This made him an even bigger threat to the West than any pan-Arabist, knowing African resources sustain the West's wealth.