A Syrian artist living in Berlin posted a video now trending across Germany.

Germany welcomed Syrian refugees during and after the civil war and have no colonial past in Syria to atone for. What do they get in return? Resentment, a Third-Worldist rant basically about Western colonizers as eternal oppressors.

The contrast with Syria itself is what makes this interesting. Syrians inside Syria today want the West. They want a peaceful Damascus, a functioning banking system, trade, integration into the global economy. The loudest anticolonial voices and movements now sit in Western capitals advocating for things their own people aren’t aligned with.

Many Middle Eastern countries are trying to move beyond the colonial past and confront their own histories of conquest, domination, and repression. The endless fixation on the West as the source of every failure brought little except stagnation and misery, something the history of Pan-Arabist movements demonstrates quite clearly. This constant victimhood mindset is at odds even with the Arab mindset. Odd all around.

open.substack.com/pub/zinebribou…