This begs the question of what it means to “fight for revolutionary transformation” in a context where defensive struggles over reforms (NHS, opposing the bedroom tax”)? Meaning, how can there be talk of revolutionary transformation when we are losing reform fights?

Comrades may be interested in my critique of the capitalist realist argument as well: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=8095

The Christian community is not 100% behind the regime. If they were, they wouldn’t be in the FSA: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=2528
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DkzmKOBNcA

Furthermore, the Sunnis who were ethnically cleansed from Banias just recently found shelter in three nearby Christian villages.

Please, educate yourself about what is actually going on before accusing me of working for the CIA. You’re only embarrassing yourself in this.

I am not as you say “flummoxed” history is full of tricks like these. But each time and place is different. Socialists should seek to be aware of context at all times in my view. In the case of Syria we know that the Christian minority is either supportive of the regime or acquiescent out of fear of what might come next. And its a real fear. Look at what’s happened to the once large Christian minority in Iraq. The Alawite minority support Assad because they see him as one of their own and because of the benefits they have received in recent years. Without them it seems to me the regime must fall, but if they are backed into a corner fearful of a Sunni backlash? Of course it has not always been thus. Forty or so years ago the Alawites were treated as inferiors by the more “sophisticated” urban middle class Sunnis of the cities. I am not as you say to others “running scared” of the Salafist extremists, but unlike you I do not ignore their presence.

In the 1940s Greek resistance movement the resistance was largely done by ELAS/EAM which was communist influenced. The nominal Stalinist leaders hid in Athens. The nationalist resistance group EDES was notorious not just for its monarchist tendencies and ambivalent view to the Germans but also its unwillingness to co-operate with EAM. True EAM received some support from the British but this was often reluctant and with many strings attached. As is well documented some SOE operatives parachuted into the mountains “went native” sometimes in exasperation at the cynicism of British policy. Patrick Leigh-Fermor, in Crete, remained a loyal monarchist and rightist. As the Nazis withdrew EAM was betrayed not just by the British who supported the monarchists who had been training far right battalions often drawn from Nazi sympathisers and elements of EDES, but also by the Stalinists who ordered the resistance movement to disarm. In 1944, for example Aris Velouchiotis, a leader of EAM, refused to disarm and was abandoned by the Stalinists to his fate. Chased by rightists through the mountains to be caught and be-headed. British troops were used to put down a putative communist uprising in Athens. With friends like these?