I don’t know much about the ideology other than it allegedly fuses Arab Nationalism with Socialism and is divided between a Syrian and an Iraqi interpretation.
Beyond that I’ve heard a lot of claims about it ranging from accusations of it basically being Arab Fascism to being a genuinely non-Marxist Socialist project to being simply an anti-colonial bourgeois revolutionary movement.
English sources that aren’t inherently biased against it (thanks Langley) are rare so I’m looking for an actually informed take on Ba’athism both as a theory and as a practice. Was it good? Was it bad? Was it good but flawed? Was it bad but had some genuine upsides? Was it good in context but bad generally (e.g. deserves critical support)?
What’s the deal, exactly?
Was Kadaffi a baathist?
He wasn’t. He was inspired by Nasser initially, but ultimately developed his own socialist theory in the 70s, called the Third Universal Theory (Green Book), which was the manifesto of the Jamahiriya, and he opposed capitalism. The Jamahiriya, which basically means a “government of the masses” was an actual socialist state which abolished private property, and proposed the end of the rule of one group over another. Gadaffi was originally highly pan-Arabist, but later on he pivoted towards pan-Africanism due to the material reality of pan-Arabism being dominated by a national bourgeois current. This made him an even bigger threat to the West than any pan-Arabist, knowing African resources sustain the West’s wealth.
Qaddafism is an Arab-African nationalist ideology of his own.