It would normally be advisable to argue that deriving a political analysis from the individual personalities of political leaders can be a distractive tool, a strategy often adopted to avoid discussing the structural conditions that define the material and ideological conditions of a country. For instance, it has long been a strategy of the Western political and intellectual apparatus to reduce the entire political history of countries of the global South to the whims and desires of a single man. For more than forty years, if we were to take the case of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Western media did everything they could do to pin all the political contradictions of the country into the figure of Mu’ammar Qaddafi. Calling him out as “a cancer or the mad dog of the Middle East,” was a rhetorical strategy aiming to present Libya as ruled by an authoritarian and power-hungry leader brutally repressing his people. By turning politics into a treatise about human Arab monsters, the objective of the strategy was to avoid discussing the progressive policies adopted by Libya since its 1969 al-Fateh revolution or to ignore the decades-long imperialist assault on the country via international sanctions, funding of opposition groups, and direct bombings. One could say that the strategy was so effective that, when 2011 came, NATO had its ground paved already to carpet bomb Libya under the pretext of “democracy”. Qaddafi is just one example in a long list of NATO-led bombings, including Syria, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and so on.
However, when a closer look at the nature of political leaders is accompanied by a structural and historical reading tracing their emergence, it can also become a useful tool to diagnose the political vitality of a country and its society. It is my contention that a juxtaposed reading of the nature of current political leaders in Western society vis-à-vis those leading the current fight against the Zionist entity reveals a political and cultural resurgence of the Arab and Muslim world; one that has, in fact, set the Palestinian homeland toward its path of liberation thanks to strategic vision of these unique leaders. There is no doubt that the legacy of Sadatism, which is the legacy of surrender, capitulation, and treason that Arab rulers pursued since Camp David, is being questioned.
Clowns and puppets in the West
In 2024, the United States will be approaching its presidential elections, and it is quite staggering to note the poor qualities of the two main political leaders offered to the American people at the ballot box. On the one hand, there is the current US President, Joe Biden, an adult male who appears to have serious difficulties remaining focused during press conferences, and he is often seen blabbering or confused in front of the cameras. In February 2024, former US counsel, Robert Hur, produced a report of 388 pages assessing Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The number of videos circulating across social media often showing Joe Biden wandering around are too many. Yet, as much as one risks being imprisoned in the West by stating that “Israel” is committing genocide in Gaza, the American courts refuse to believe that Biden is anything but senile.
On the other hand, we can find what American liberals consider as the incarnation of evil; that is, Donald Trump. However, if Trump were to incarnate something, it would be precisely American “values”. He managed to enrich himself through various illegal activities for many years and then became a celebrity-like figure thanks to a TV series called “The Apprentice”; in other words, a good communicator with the practical abilities and ethical values required to trick society for personal gains. If Western masses were lucid enough to question the limits of capitalism, they would refer to him as a trickster or a clown, at best. Yet, here we are talking about the presidential candidate for the Republican Party.
These are not inherent American characteristics. We only need to look no further than one of the most contentious areas of the world, Ukraine, to realize the depravity of Western political classes and their so-called strategists. Once a comedian, touring around to entertain people with jokes, he has now been turned into the “absolute freedom-fighter”, Volodomyr Zelensky. How is it possible that a man who spent the most formative years of his life learning how to communicate jokes to public audiences is now leading a country into a war against Russia? Similarly, how come Western civilization, and especially the US, has only been able to produce such political figures in the last decade? How can a society that claims to uphold the values of democracy and freedom so highly offer its people the choice between a “senile person” and a “clownish thug”? The answer lies in the cultural and political decline of the West.
Symptoms of decline
When asked why he had embraced Marxism, Ernesto Che Guevara replied that it had not been a personal choice. He had only embraced the spirit of History. For the Cuban revolutionaries, the fight against Yankee imperialism required them to embrace Marxist ideology and praxis. Similarly, we should not wonder how and why the Western political arena is dominated by dubious figures and unethical politicians and leaders who eagerly support the genocide of Palestinians, showering the Zionists with all kinds of weapons and ammunition. These men incarnate the spirit of History and, in particular, they are symptomatic of this impetuous tide of fascism in which Western society is drowning. One of the most striking features of this tide has been the complete rehabilitation of Nazism in Ukraine as a form of popular resistance Russia. As a result, the European ruling classes, from Giorgia Meloni in Italy to Emmanuel Macron in France, compete to show who is the most benevolent slave and vassal for the mighty US, ready to sacrifice their people and countries at all costs.
At the political and electoral level, there is hardly any progressive party left in the West, which is why the student protests struggle to turn into concrete political demands. The spectrum of political forces sits along the center-right (liberals), right, and far-right. The Left in Europe has been so infiltrated materially by the ideological weight of the US through actual military operations, i.e. Operation Gladio, to such an extent that the European ruling classes have become completely subordinate to the American project. At the intellectual level, one needs to look no further than the response given by the majority of so-called progressive intellectuals of the West (Naomi Klein, Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek) to the military operation of the Palestinian Resistance. They all rushed to condemn violence or directly support the colonizers’ right to “defend itself”, meaning: genocide. They came out discussing what should be the right amount or kind of violence, somehow feeling entitled to teach the Palestinian Resistance how to organize a movement of national liberation. Once again, these are humans incarnating their historical time, they are functionaries of American imperialism whose career was made on the plight of the masses of the Global South. They enjoy their imperialist privileges while theorizing what progressive forces in the South of the world should do or not. They constantly call for some abstract forms of ‘internationalism from below,’ distancing themselves from any actually-existing political project that have emerged to rise from the yoke of imperialist war. They have become faithful administrators of the American project. After all, they benefit from them. Yet, since 2006, the Arab and Muslim world has risen, the Zionist entity has been compromised and, in this process, real leaders have shown us the way.
Resurgence of Arab revolutionary leaders
When Al-Aqsa Flood was unleashed on the Zionist usurpers, the revolutionary masses of the world, especially Arab and Muslim ones, were forced to reckon with the nature of these leaders guiding the struggle. All attentive observers, in fact, realized the symbolic significance of the date chosen to unleash this operation, October 7. On October 6, 1981, the Egyptian masses rose and assassinated Anwar Sadat, a man who incarnated the capitulation and surrender of the Arab regimes to the whims of the imperialists and their Zionist proxies. October 7 fractures this legacy, becoming a moment of resurgence of Arab and Muslim political leadership. It is a blow to the legacy of Sadatism and treason that for too long has been showered on the masses of the region. Among the masterminds of this epic operation, in Gaza, we find the humans and leaders who incarnate the true revolutionary spirit of history. The Che Guevaras of our time are Abu Obeida, Yahya al-Sinwar, and Mohammed Deif. Al-Sinwar is a man who is constantly framed as the incarnation of evil in the Western press, yet he spent almost two decades in Zionist prisons, learning how to speak the language of the enemy while understanding perfectly the latter’s arrogant and superior mentality. He knew that the Zionists looked at Palestinians as “stupid animals”, he understood how keen the Arab regimes were to sell Palestine to the Zionists, and he gave utmost respect to the martyrs and heroes of Gaza. On this basis, he acted. Under his leadership, an army was built in Gaza, treason stopped being an acceptable political option, and a carefully crafted operation was launched that compromised “Israel”, just as Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah had done in 2006. Al-Sinwar, like Deif, Abu Obeida, and many others, is not a superhero, the latter are only the products of American cultural industry, Hollywood.
These are the leaders of our time, those who understood the decline of the West, and patiently and fearlessly dedicated their lives to the struggle against the Zionist usurpers. They assessed that the most favorable circumstances appeared, and they decided to strike a blow to the imperialist proxy. These are humans who are paving the necessary conditions for the revolutionary masses of the world, especially the Arab and Muslim ones, to regain control of their History. It does not matter what the Arabs of America tell us, whether armed resistance is to be supported or not, the revolution has already found its leaders, it is only time for us to support them.
Matteo Gladio
Al Mayadeen