Three weeks after the fall of the Bashar Assad dictatorship [13], the only fighting in Syria [22] remains between Arab and Kurdish militias [14]—holding grim potential for destabilization of the democratic revolution. Kurds had been persecuted and even denied citizenship under the Assad regime, but the invasion of their autonomous territory [14] of Rojava by the Turkish-backed rebels of the Syrian National Army (SNA [14]) drove them into a paradoxical tactical alliance [15] with the dictatorship. The tragic situation in Burma's Rakhine state mirrors this disturbing reality. The Muslim Rohingya [16] people had been persecuted, denied citizenship and finally targeted in a campaign of genocide by the military, but are now facing attacks by the Buddhist-supremacist rebels of the Arakan Army [16]—driving some Rohingya into a paradoxical tactical alliance [16] with the military junta. In Episode 258 [17] of the CounterVortex podcast [18], Bill Weinberg offers this comparison in the hope that the peoples of Burma can unite across religious lines to defeat the junta, and that Syrians can find a way toward co-existence in the new revolutionary order and avoid ethnic war [14].
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Production by Chris Rywalt [23]
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