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The Ron Paul Revolution: A Ten Year Retrospective
Join Dr. Ron Paul and Tom Woods, plus very special guest Glenn Greenwald in Texas for an event you won’t want to miss! Ron Paul’s two campaigns for president (2008 and 2012) were watershed moments for liberty-minded people around the world. The “Ron Paul Revolution”—centered around his undiluted message of peace, property, and markets—changed the way millions thought about the American empire and the American financial system. Dr. Paul’s focus on central banking and foreign policy caught politicians and pundits off guard, forcing them to scramble for explanations of our Middle East policy and Soviet-style central planning at the Fed. Politics in America has not been the same since the “Giuliani moment” and “End the Fed.” Like the Tea Party and Bernie Bros. movements which followed, the Ron Paul Revolution was both a political and cultural phenomenon. It also helped launch the career of Senator Rand Paul. Today, the lasting effects of the Ron Paul Revolution are evident but mixed. The country seems less free and less secure than ever, divided along vicious partisan lines. So what can we learn from the Revolution to help us going forward, and what role do Paul’s prescriptions play in a landscape of progressives and populists? Where do we go from here, when peace and sanity seem impossible? This is an event you don’t want to miss, as we’ll consider the past but with an eye toward a more hopeful future! Tom Woods will provide his perspective on the Ron Paul Revolution 10 years later, and Daniel McAdams will present the case for recognizing a “Ron Paul Doctrine.” Our very special guest, journalist Glenn Greenwald, will speak remotely on the critical importance of independent media. Tentative Schedule (all times CST) 9:20 a.m. – Jeff Deist: Welcome and opening remarks 9:30 a.m. – Daniel McAdams: “The Ron Paul Doctrine” 10:00 a.m. – Tom Woods: Introduction of Glenn Greenwald 10:05 a.m. – Glenn Greenwald (remote from Brazil): “The Critical Need for Independent Media” 11:15 a.m. – Lydia Mashburn: “End the Fed! How Ron Paul Made Monetary Policy an Issue” 11:35 a.m. – Tom Woods: “Lessons from the Revolution” 12:15 p.m. – Live filming of The Ron Paul Liberty Report with Dr. Paul and Daniel McAdams: “A Retrospective on the Ron Paul Movement” 12:45 p.m. – Dr. Ron Paul
Joe Norman On Why Localism Is Coming
We don’t need “the global village”; we need a “globe of villages”.
And when I say need here I don’t mean it in an ethical, or moral, or aesthetic sense. I mean it in the most practical sense: in order to survive we must re-localize.
The global village idea is a non-starter. It misses that complex adaptive systems of a certain class typically have a characteristic scale. That is, a certain size at which they necessarily are realized. Nearly every adult human being you will ever meet will be between five and seven feet tall. And you will not find a land mammal larger than an elephant. Simply, a bigger elephant can’t exist — it would collapse on itself.
So it is with the village. You can’t just inflate it to arbitrary proportions and get the same kind of thing, or expect to get something that works at all, that doesn’t collapse on itself. In attempting to create a massive village, you destroy everything that makes something a “village” to begin with.
But it’s not just the “global village” that won’t work. It’s all of the global designs that those with large-scale agendas are trying to shove us into. They won’t work because they can’t work — something that would dissuade their architects if they understood it.
The essence of life is patterns that persist in the face of fluctuations.
The demand for a global order is often framed in a way that acknowledges this simple truth: for instance calls that we must act in unison at the global scale to combat climate change.
The problem is that most of our problems are not global, but much more local. And the danger of committing to a global order to address the large problems, are the constraints that make it impossible to address the smaller-but-no-less-crucial ones. Locally, we must be free to address problems that arise, including those that that no one foresaw. If we are over-constrained by a large-scale design we will not be able to do that.
And this is why localism is coming, whether we want it or not. And we can do this the easy way, or the hard way.
Problems don’t come in a single size: some are very small, some are very large, and crucially, many are in-between. Libertarians recognize the very-small; those who demand a global order recognize the very-large; the medium-sized problems demand that we act as local communities — relatively free from the demands of a global order but in a way that coordinates local actors for addressing threats to local sociocultural persistence.
More here
Why A Citizen Contract Is Better Than A Consitution
From their state most people demand – at least – protection of life, liberty and property. In exchange, they are willing to pay for it. So why not put the relationship between citizen and state on a purely contractual basis? Such a Citizen Contract would offer much better protection than any kind of constitution, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, because the contract cannot be changed unilaterally by one side. Constitutions are changed, even against the will of the people concerned, provided there is a respective majority. Secondly, because the Contract Citizens would have a better legal standing. Both sides would be contractual parties on an equal legal footing. As with any other service provider, citizens could sue or withhold payments to the state if they believed that the contract was not being properly fulfilled. Thirdly, because other parties would not be able to interfere with this contractual relationship. Citizens would know that they couldn’t change the content of the contracts of fellow citizens, neither through government nor parliament, and therefore would respect each other’s different views and assessments. The state would eventually morph from having a demigod and uber-father status, to having the status of a mere service-provider.
More here
The Antiwar Comic: The War Against You
“Coming to Palestine” Discussed on Podcast
I discussed my Libertarian Institute book Coming to Palestine on the podcast The Enragés (a project under the auspices of the Center for a Stateless Society).
The Paradox of Authority
Every government in human history has eventually collapsed.
Even Plato recognized this inevitability and theorized the average State lifespan was around 300 years.
Must it be this way? Is it avoidable?
Sadly, I don’t believe so.
There is no resolution for the Paradox of Authority.
What does a State desire? In a broad, “collective” sense? Leaving aside any naturally malevolent aims or outcomes, any high browed conspiracy theories, proven, admitted or otherwise. Even assuming that every State employee is a well-intentioned public servant, the collective State wants the exact same thing as any other organization or individual, generally speaking:
Relevancy. Stability. Growth.
How do you become relevant? You work tirelessly to demonstrate that not only do you solve problems for your target market, but that absent your presence in the economy or society that the problems you solve have no other viable solutions.
Striving toward relevancy works out rather advantageously in a market economy. Why? Because the election of the solutions an organization provides is Voluntary. Consumers within a market can go elsewhere if and when a solution provider materializes who solves problems differently, better, faster, more innovatively, efficiently or cheaper.
In respect to a State, a State monopolizes the services it provides and creates legally violent obstacles to any competitive provision of service. Since a State does not need to provide service differently, better, faster, more innovatively, efficiently or cheaper in order for its constituents to remain loyal, the State must rely instead on its constituent’s perception of risk for which they assign the State authority to provide protection.
Should a State do such a remarkable job that it successfully protects its constituents and solves for all possible risk within society then the State, and its employees, understand that appetite for its existence and services will inevitably wane, because the constituency doesn’t feel threatened and thus, no steady appetite for a government’s omnipresence.
To remain Relevant, a State must consistently work to identify risk for which its constituents will perceive a need for protection and then market their services to convince the public that the State is the only possible solution to the identified theater of risk.
Stability. Any organization will naturally work to insulate itself against any form of destabilization. There are millions of Americans who have constructed careers within the State. Their entire livelihoods depend on the Stability of the State. Not only would any rational individual like to ensure the Stability of their career and income, but they would also prefer to feel Relevant themselves, individually, to their mission and so will work tirelessly to grow and elevate the reach and influence of whatever position they hold within any set department. Why do you feel budgets never shrink? Relevancy. Stability. Growth.
It doesn’t matter how genius, insightful, forward thinking, or innovative one structures a government. It doesn’t matter whether it prescribes to Marxist ideals or Rothbardian. It doesn’t matter if balanced equity is realized, or income inequality is eradicated.
So long as a society grants the organization the right to possess violent authority, and that society believes, religiously, in the righteousness of that authority and so long as that society accepts that their preferred mechanism of authority holds monopolized rights to such a defined privilege, then there is no outcome other than the outcome that has always manifested over time. Reach. (for relevancy and growth) Overreach. Bloat. Collapse.
It doesn’t matter how many checks you place upon authority. It doesn’t matter how many systems of balance you design. Ultimately, every department within the organs of the State, while in theory balancing one another, all have a common interest. State relevancy. State stability. State growth. Insomuch that they all have aligned interests, they all naturally have aligned incentives and such, no mechanisms of balance possess the ability to prevent bloat and collapse. Especially considering this is a multi-generational development.
When one obtains a position of political authority during their lifetime, and uniquely recognizes threatening over-reach of contemporary State action, they will always fail to collect an appropriate degree of support and internal co-champions to put forth the work of causing real pain to those who find themselves in the current employ and career of the State at that time, if and when the size, scope, relevancy and authority of the State becomes dangerously large.
Dangerously? When I use this term, I don’t mean that in the sense that it might be dangerous to the people it’s actions impact. Petty criminals, mentally ill, speeders, parents of truant children, children caught in the crossfire of hubristic visions of Utopian prohibitionism, innocent children and non-combatants on the receiving end of falling bombs of hubristic visions of Democratarianism……though the State is particularly dangerous and efficiently deadly within reach of those victims.
No. When I state dangerous in this example, I specifically mean dangerous to the stability of the organization that is the State. So, even when the reach, size and actions of a State manifest to a point where it runs counter to the general will of the people at large and constituents begin losing patience with the largesse of the Leviathan around them, even then, State actors are powerless to curtail those actions that strive toward a perception of Stability through Growth and Relevancy.
Inevitably, as we see over and over again through history, once the largesse reaches a point of absolute obesity the people look upon the State not with reverence any longer, but with disgust. It’s this exact same social disgust that drives the Conservative mind. Conservatives are disgusted by disorder. An obese and out of control State has its disorder laid bare and transparent for all to see. Disgust fuels Revolutions.
Sadly, once the Revolution has toppled any given regime, the people go about unquestioning the validity of the unchallenged assumption as to whether the State even needs to exist to begin with. They re-order the structures of Authority, set this as the center piece of the new State and look upon their Creation with reverence and adoration. The founders are set within statures of folktale and the preaching begins.
There is generally a couple generations of calm as people are mostly left alone to carry out their individual lives. This just happens to be the secret to a calm and peaceful society; leave people alone to carry out their individual lives.
However. Right there. Wholly unnoticed to contemporary observers living in that time. Blossoming from the fertile womb of Authority itself. There is an ambitious soul looking to do right by the people who entrusted them with their reverent State. Enough time has passed that they grew up around dinner tables absent anyone who lived through the horror of bloat and collapse. Wanting to accomplish and innovate in ways never done. Wanting their names and legacy remembered as dotingly as those of the founders.
How can they do that? Certainly not by inaction! Certainly not by doing nothing. Certainly not by allowing some parts of their constituency to suffer while they have been given the authority to heroically alleviate that suffering.
Action! What action? Relevancy. Stability. Growth.
The American society is losing patience with its Leviathan. Amongst the general populace the perception frustratingly persists that it’s “others” they have little patience with. Whoever those “others” may be within any given frame of reference. Democrats. Republicans. Leftists. Right Wingers. Vaccinated. Unvaccinated. Socialists. Fascists.
What they fail to see yet is that the frustration is not with each other. It’s with the State. How is that? An overreaching State tends to find its way into all imaginable aspects to individual’s lives. As we’re seeing today, right down to medical freedom. Government policies become law. Law becomes force. Force becomes violence if one does not obey. When every aspect of every individual’s life is informed, perverted and corrupted by violent force, people get agitated and judgmental when they feel those around them are not obeying laws and thus, perhaps jeopardizing the security and safety of themselves or their families. The problem is over-politicization which brings every aspect of individual choice under scrutiny of everyone else. We’re one or two small catalytic events away from that overwhelming realization that many already see. Many already understand the common enemy of the people.
Sadly, I see us continuing with our Revolutions. We’ll revolve, like an ever-spinning wheel forever incarcerated by the unforgiving grasp of gravity, damning our offspring and many great grandchildren to the same fate we’re living through today. With any luck though, this next iteration, accompanied by all the associated human growth and innovation that pushes forward through all these transitions, these next 300 years will be even better than the last.
Even with all the ups and downs, rises and falls, human progress remains unabashed. Life is improving on planet Earth.
I may not like or agree with people’s belief in violent Authority. I may not agree with its efficacy with regard to manifesting a livable society. That said, I do respect the religious tendency, perhaps even need, that most have to adhere to these dogmatic beliefs. I just hope we keep this next turn of the wheel as free of violence as possible. Nobody’s life is worth the cause you interpret in your mind. Including your own.
Each day you go about your life in accordance with your instinctual preferences. Its these instincts and the relationships you’ve constructed around you that inform the way in which society at large blossoms and manifests up from the people. Even the physical act of constructing relationships is instinctually evolutionary. I’ve met no person who consults with local or federal code before constructing a plan for the day. With the extent of current federal code, 99% of which most of us are wholly ignorant, I’m willing to bet we’re all already felons anyway.
Live your life. Do right by the people around you to the best of your subjective judgment. You’ll already do this anyway because conveniently, doing right by the people around you is, more often than not, in your own best interest.
We’ll all be as fine as we all can be.
Syrian Christians were Quietly Warned Before the War
Years ago I wrote about my first encounter with Syria as a young twenty-something year old fresh out of active duty service in the Marines: “My first visit to the region while desiring to study Arabic in 2004, just after completion of active duty service, and while still on the inactive reserve list, began a process of undoing every assumption I’d ever imbibed concerning Middle East culture, politics, and conflict.” I introduced in that fairly widely-read essay with the provocative title, A Marine in Syria, “An initial visit to Syria from Lebanon was the start of something that my Marine buddies could hardly conceive of: Damascus became my second home through frequent travel and lengthy stays from 2004 to 2010, and was my place of true education on the real life and people of the region.”
I recounted that this first visit to Damascus was a mere one year after the US invasion of Iraq. “While fellow service members were just across Syria’s border settling in to the impossible task of occupying a country they had no understanding of, I was able view a semblance of Iraq as it once was through the prism of highly stable Ba’athist Syria.” A key personal detail I had left out of that account is that I met my now wife on that initial fateful trip. After I spent those early summers staying in Damascus, mostly seeing and traveling around the country with her, we married in 2006 at the historic St. John of Damascus Orthodox church just off ‘Straight Street’ in the walled Old City of Damascus. We began our life there during those better times.
Ironically enough our first ever fierce argument happened on just our second or third date, during that 2004 trip. Discussing the raging Iraq War then unfolding across Syria’s eastern border while strolling in a public park, Reem said, “You know… the Americans are coming here next.” My immediate haughty laughter and scoffing dismissal of such a far-fetched scenario as the U.S. ever attacking Syria had angered and annoyed her. “Impossible,” I quipped, and implied that she and other Syrians that were then warning me of a near-future war on Syria could be chalked up to “Arab paranoia” which tends to assume a U.S. hidden hand and machinations behind every bad geopolitical event. In the early evening, surrounded by random other Syrians, we had a shouting match – with me actually defending America and George W. Bush’s “good intentions” – and with her warning me that Syria is top of the U.S. war machine’s target list. “A war on Syria is coming. The Americans are coming here – whether in a few years or more, they will target Damascus,” she said. “Israel will be part of it too.”
(Image: Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch & All the East John X meeting with Russian Church representatives)
Fast-forward to today, and a horrific decade-long war in Syria later… we live in Texas, and she still on occasion reminds me of “our first fight”. She was exactly right of course, tragically. She hadn’t been the only one: many of her Syrian Christian friends had – more than a half decade before the war unfolded in 2011 – tried to warn me that Washington is actively eyeing Syria for regime change “next” after Iraq.
I believe it was when I was temporarily living in Damascus in 2005 that I began to believe her and her friends were on to something. One Friday night out we were in a big group of young professionals, and at dinner at a restaurant everyone was abuzz over the news of a very unusual government-authorized memo. It had circulated that week to all private businesses and entities in Damascus and major cities. All Syria-based companies were being warned by the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad that they must temporarily halt any new business dealings or implementing fresh contracts with US-based international companies, specifically dealings that would involve junkets where Westerners would be invited to spend any significant amount of time inside Syria.
The allegation was that US and Western spies or assets were using business contacts to infiltrate Syrian companies and even government entities. At that dinner, my Syrian friends began to joke that “Brad might be CIA” – leading to lots of laughter, and admittedly a bit of discomfort (given that one of our friends actually harbored these suspicions all the way up till I married Reem and we started having children… this was apparently finally proof enough that it wasn’t all a “front”).
Dinner table banter and speculation over “a coming war for the Middle East” aside, that was the year CNN’s Christiane Amanpour told Assad to his face that regime change is coming for him. This was in a 2005 televised and archived interview, now for all posterity to behold…
CNN in 2005 – US wants regime change in Syria
Washington was "actively looking for a new Syrian leader" looong before the civil war in Syria began
— Maria ⏳ (@ml_1maria) November 1, 2019
Amanpour, it must be remembered, was married to former US Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin (until 2018), who further advised both President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And of course it was during the Obama years that the massive CIA covert program to fund and train so-called “moderate rebels” – detailed and revealed in The New York Times as Timber Sycamore – kicked off (though given Assad is obviously still in power, the regime change efforts failed, with a brutal ‘sanctions warfare’ regimen taking its place).
The point of these personal anecdotes and memories, which I’m sure are not unique to any Westerner that spent time in Syria during those perhaps “deceptively stable” pre-war years of the mid to late 2000s, is to say that these recollections are what in large part spurred my recent efforts to interview Syrians, and especially Syrian Christians, who had experienced or fled the war.
I learned through these interviews, many of which are detailed in my new book Syria Crucified with co-author and friend Zachary Wingerd, that Syrian Christians in particular were so on edge during those opening years of the US occupation of Iraq precisely because Iraqi Christian refugees fleeing from across the border toward Damascus were actively warning Syrian Christians, “You are next!”
A number of Syrians had told us that years before the war started in 2011, they understood that not only was Syria top of the list for regime change, but that Christians in particular would be targeted in a planned sectarian war – just as in Iraq. Though it remains a story for another time, as it is still till this day too sensitive to discuss openly, I have gained confirmation from a handful of Syrian Christian individuals that in 2010 into early 2011 (just before the conflict started in Syria), U.S. intelligence officers were contacting them and very aggressively seeking their assistance – trying to make them assets. While these particular individuals are not featured or mentioned in my new book (again, given the sensitivity of the information and individual situations), I’ll just note that in every instance that I’ve been able to confirm, the U.S. case officers were told by the Syrians “screw off!” – or some variation thereof.
Suffice it to say that some Syrian Christians had been essentially tipped off by U.S. intelligence operatives that something big was coming for Syria, again, significantly prior to the actual start of the war. In one glaring instance, an official from the then existent U.S. Embassy in Damascus (it closed in February 2012) tried to convince a well-liked local Syrian Christian man who had spent a career working for major American news outlets in the Middle East (thus he had a lot of high-level media contacts across the globe) to become part of the U.S.-recognized “political opposition” in Syria. Keep in mind this was before such an “opposition” body was even brought into existence.
The focus on my own research into the plight of Christians during the war began in earnest all the way back in 2014, when I wrote the following for my now-defunct blog:
One potential map of the Middle East, created by retired Col. Ralph Peters, envisions a future division according to Shia, Sunni, Kurdish regions, with absolutely no place for Christians, who will be “cleansed” through genocide or forced immigration. One article Peters wrote was called “Blood Borders” because he admitted that minorities would have to be killed off for his map to make sense! (Yes, as in well-known FOX News contributor Ralph Peters).
Many have seen “Greater Lebanon” (which is extended far north beyond it’s actual boundaries up through Latakia in the “imagined map” below), as what would become a primarily Christian enclave after neighboring states would be emptied of the indigenous Christian presence…
Or worse, during opening years of the war in Syria maps like the below emerged, with analysts suggesting Christians would have to flee to an Alawite “rump state”…
I wrote further in that prior 2014 article about how some European Union countries were shipping weapons to jihadist insurgents while simultaneously offering Syrian Christians asylum if they left their war-torn homeland: While some might understandably benefit by France’s latest offer [of political asylum for Middle East Christians], and this might be good for those individuals and families who have already suffered enough, the Orthodox Church Patriarchate has a firm understanding of the current and future designs of Western policy makers. Ethno-religious sectarianism was not a shaping reality for 20th century Arab nationalist movements, but is the long-term strategic plan of Saudi Arabia. Through the help of its closest ally, the United States, along with other western countries, the logic of sectarianism is being implemented, and there are few who understand the nature of the game.
Syrian Church leaders had called it the West’s “Trojan Horse” plot vis-a-vis Mideast Christians: encourage Christian emigration from the region while at the same time covertly shipping in the very weapons that would be used to target Christians who tried to remain (given also that local Christians by and large stuck with the Assad government, which would prove a very “inconvenient” problem for U.S. policy given efforts to overthrow said government). This theory received some degree of validation when I wrote the below 2015 article based on a leaked classified Saudi cable – an article later circulated by WikiLeaks…
Did Saudi Arabia Barter in Christian Lives with the #Vatican? http://t.co/zDpkaOK1QR
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 14, 2015
Saudi to Vatican: Help us bring down Assad and we will ensure Christians are spared from retaliation #SaudiCables https://t.co/zSr60GOm91
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 7, 2015
Our new book, Syria Crucified: Stories of Modern Martyrdom in an Ancient Christian Land provides ample testimony and examples confirming Syrian Christian suspicions that Washington had long been OK with “throwing Christians to the lions” while seeking to topple Assad (as a 2013 NY Times article put it). For example, we quote the Antiochian Orthodox Church’s Bishop of Baghdad and Kuwait, Ghattas Hazim, who described during the height of the Iraq War that “Christians are being slaughtered in Iraq and the West does not lift a finger to protect them.”
At the height of the war, high-ranking Syrian Church leaders went to the White House to plead with then President Obama to abandon disastrous regime change policies…
Christian leaders meet Obama, discuss concerns for Mideast minorities http://t.co/3jzEtp6M8Q pic.twitter.com/x8cmJa2Fg2
— Catholic News Service (@CatholicNewsSvc) September 13, 2014
This suspicion that the West was pursuing an unspoken agenda of initiating and exacerbating a sectarian conflict that would break apart Syria, ultimately leading to the liquidation of Syria’s ancient some two-million strong Christian community (like happened to a large degree in Iraq), was echoed by a Syrian Christian physician named Shaza, who Zac and I spoke to extensively.
She had for decades been a practicing physician out of offices in Damascus, until she fled to the United States after her family was nearly killed by sniper fire and mortars as Al-Qaeda encroached on her neighborhood (the story is recounted in chapter 2), setting up checkpoints just minutes from her home and kids’ school. There are many similar stories that fill this new book, and I’ll end this meandering essay by providing one heart-wrenching example from the book below.
Below is the Syrian doctor Shaza’s story, excerpted from the book…
As Shaza mused on the catastrophic shift from an idyllic life to one of upheaval, she recounted being given a forewarning of the Syrian Christian tragedy. As a physician Shaza ministered to those displaced due to the Iraq War: “I worked with the Iraqi refugees from 2003 to 2010 in a charity center. It’s a program done by the Church, but they are accepting all the people – Christians and Muslims.” Little did Shaza foresee that less than a decade into the future it would be Syrian Christians themselves caught in dire straits.
Shaza related how a number of Iraq refugees tried to warn her:
They talk about horrible stories. They’re kidnapping, killing, raping. When they trust me after a couple of years, they keep saying, “Have a plan B. They are going to do this with Syrian Christians.” I keep saying, “No, it will not happen.” They keep saying, “No, it’s going to happen, so think about what is your next step if it’s happened.” And we didn’t think about that. We never thought that this will happen in Syria. Most of the Syrians – they keep saying that it’s protected because it’s a strong region. I have been to Iraq and to Jordan, to Egypt, in the past as a tourist – I saw poor people. We never see them in Syria. We have no homeless people in Syria. It’s a prosperous country. It was a good country, but after, I think, 2006 or ’07 till 2010, we began to notice something. Maybe politics, maybe economic, I don’t know what’s the problem, but something happened, you know. Makes the people more poor so more suffer. They have these thoughts of revolution. I think that made them easily accepted this.
Figures gathered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) showed that by 2007 the number of Iraqi refugees that fled into Syria exceeded 1.2 million. Most of these were unregistered, meaning they had trouble being reached with international humanitarian aid or accessing Syrian government services. A report cited by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) during that period underscored that displaced Iraqis were helped “mostly through local Church organizations.” The financial burden on Syria, whose population was less than twenty million, of abruptly absorbing over one million impoverished Iraqis in need of housing, health care, and education helps explain some of the economic decline just before the war that Shaza mentioned.
She then pondered the origins of the early uprising in Syria and how rapidly it became militarized and internationalized:
I keep thinking of the Free Syrian Army. I heard about some young people who have their thoughts of freedom. They believe in these thoughts, but they were like the chess pieces. Somebody is moving them for his own ideas… When they faced with the extreme Muslims, they lost their lives. Those extreme Muslims open the roads to the strangers to come. I can’t even imagine that Syrian people want to destroy our history, our old cities, our old things, because it means a lot for them as a Syrian. But for the strangers, it means nothing. It’s easy to destroy everything.
* * *
To read more, order the book Syria Crucified direct from the publisher, or through Amazon.
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