It is really nice to read your comment comrade, I really appreciate it. I hope to see peace and prosperity for our peoples one day ❤️

The Ba’ath did not exactly fail the people, it just lost (similar to how soviet union just “lost”). We could argue that Bashar himself failed Syrians, especially in the 2019-2025 period. But by then, he was as far from Ba’ath as was Gorbachev from Communist party.

To add, in mid 20th century, communist parties in Syria and much of the Arab world were unconditional followers of USSR and influential foreign communist parties, even in matters that like the early support of Israel, or the French communist party supporting the french occupation of Syria. The Ba’ath party emerged instead as an Arab implementation of socialism, where Arab liberation was centered, and dependence or blind following of foreign bodies was rejected. It was only opposed to Communism in that sense. If you look at the Ba’ath congress of 1966, you’ll see it was even more revolutionary than the communists.

it depends what you mean exactly by less oppressive. Do you mean of minority ethnic and religious groups ?

Why things are going bad, I don’t think there is one single comprehensive answer. The closest is probably that the country has undergone a devastating and long war for 14 years, and many of the events of this war had sectarian elements which agitated sectarianism in the population. That’s the closest thing to factual I can give.

My own analysis is that the imperial core saw the agitation of sectarian violence as the best way to “disable” syria (in the sense of disabling its struggle against israel and other imperialist aims), similar to how they did Iraq and Lebanon, and I think a lot of sectarian propaganda probably came in with foreign funding. But that’s just my own reading.

Sectarian propaganda combined with war leads to sectarian interpretations of the war and hence agitations. Sectarian violence only leads to more sectarian violence, agitating the other side, and it is just a runaway effect from there.

Doesn’t matter. Banks are evil but forced on us by capitalism. There’s no ethical bank afaik. They wouldn’t survive competition.