Ruba Mansour, Samir Sadek: 
The fact that most chronic dictatorships are concentrated in Muslim societies indicates a relationship between history shaped by religion and dictatorship. Caliph Uthman was astonished about 1440 years ago when the people asked him to step down, asking, “How can I take off a garment that God has clothed me with?” Since God was the one who gave Uthman the position and the garment, there was no need for the people to pledge allegiance to him, He was God’s representative on earth, and there was no need to pledge allegiance to God’s shadow on earth!
The word “allegiance” was absent from local literature for a long time, then it returned three or four decades ago. In this context, it was said that the people pledged allegiance to the Assad family, father and son, We thought there was a kind of partial similarity between the caliphs, the presidents, the kings, and the princes, whether it was Assad, or brother Muammar, or Ali’s son, or Ali Abdullah Saleh, or Mubarak, or Saddam, or others. Rather, we thought that republican systems were better than monarchies, because republican systems in general are better than monarchies.
We used to think that kings and princes were worse than presidents, In monarchies, sperm determines the new king or even the new caliph, especially after the fourth Rightly Guided Caliph, Theoretically, the results of elections determine presidents, but it has been proven that those who determine presidents are also human animals, such as henchmen, lackeys, and corrupt individuals. The presidency has known inheritance and electoral fraud in this region, whose people God has blessed with the true religion, and whose presidents, caliphs, and kings have been blessed with the land and what is on it and in it.
Theoretically, republics have political parties, but were there political parties that influenced, controlled, and ruled in this region? Or were those parties representative of and adopting a religious ideology? Rather, they represented forms worse than religious parties, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, In some aspects, those parties were more primitive than the Muslim Brotherhood, as the Muslim Brotherhood does not inherit or pledge allegiance. As for nationalist and internationalist parties, such as the Ba’ath, the Communist Party, and the like, they were formally nationalist or internationalist, especially at the beginning, These parties adapted to the general religious atmosphere and became religious in their structure and foundation, based on the perpetual veneration of the leader, like Bakdash and Assad.
There is a paradox that must be disguised between the formal president and the actual king, and the disguise was done, as we said in a previous article, by using a mask, The mask of the “party claiming secularism” was placed on the face of the party-sect, and the mask of the “sect” was placed on the face of the family, and the mask of the “family” was placed on the face of the household, and the mask of the “household” was placed on the face of the person, There was a one-way development from the party to the person, The party shrank and the person swelled until the person became everything, and thus he was able to move the withered, personalized, dwarfed party as he moved the pawns, castles, and knights of chess, The ease of moving the pieces required turning the people of the party into henchmen and slaves of the god of the party or the leader of the state, henchmen and slaves without mind or thought, but rather with a rent paid by the people by force while they were humiliated.
As we said before, there is no need for the henchmen to be ideological, The ideological follower is tiring compared to the opportunistic, privileged follower, In some parties, not a single ideologue remains,Most of them, or the overwhelming majority, have turned into privileged or opportunistic individuals. They are united by the drum and dispersed by the stick, They live off the terrorism of the security services and corruption, like religion, which lives off intimidation and enticement. Religion sat on the book and the verses, and the republican king, i.e., the republican king, sat on Article Eight and the rest of the emergency laws and wore the shirt of Uthman, The result was the deification of the king-president and his perpetuation alongside the eternal religion, gods that have replaced each other!!
One of the most important parties in the East was the Ba’ath Party, in its Iraqi and Syrian branches, without significant differences between the two, There, Saddam ruled for 35 years, and here, the Assad regime ruled for half a century, There and here, the dictatorship was absolute and subject to the rules of inheritance and allegiance, As a result, there and here were the wreckage of two states eaten away by the worm of sectarianism and deification,Saddam gathered around him a chorus of religious men, and the banner of “God is Great” was attached to the national flag, especially in his last days,And Assad had al-Bouti, al-Hassoun, the singing one, the Minister of Endowments, the Sayyid, then the Qubaysiyat, and the religious youth team. Where is the difference between these and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia or Prince Shakhbut of Oman???
In Syria and Lebanon, Antoun Saadeh founded the Syrian National Party, which distanced itself greatly from the details of religious thought, It was and still is secular and widespread among civil intellectuals. However, its cadres still intellectually depend on Saadeh, whom they practically turned into a prophet. Consequently, the party fell into the trap of the methodology of sanctification, which is completely incompatible with any secular civil thought, Secular civility does not sanctify, but rather respects reason and abides by it. Therefore, the activity of the Syrian National Party members should not be limited to transmission; they should have thought and created as Saadeh thought and created.
Syrian nationalists were not afflicted by sectarianism, and this guaranteed them intellectual freedom,They were not bound by religion or sect, and therefore enjoyed freedom of their own socio-political conscience. They should at least have answered the following question: What if Saadeh had lived during the time of Hezbollah and Nasrallah in the last half-century? Would he have been an ally of Hezbollah or an opponent? Saadeh was not a turbaned sheikh, nor did he ever ally himself with sheikhs, He was a realist, and had he lived through what has happened from 1950 until now, he would have changed his view of Palestine and the reality of the Middle East, and he would have freed himself from the illusion of liberating Palestine in the manner of the Palestinian cause’s merchants—the incompetent rulers and the misguided, deceived populists.