Michel Aflaq - Legacy

Legacy

Fouad Ajami criticised Aflaq for a lack of real substance, stating, "Nearly three hundred pages of text yield no insight, on his part, into what went wrong and what needed to be done; there is only the visible infatuation with words" and "Aflaq summons the party to renounce power and go back to its 'pure essence'". There is some truth in this critique. Aflaq spent much time writing optimistically about the future, and the past, of the Arab Nation, and how the Arab World could be unified. As Kanan Makiya, the author of Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, notes: for "Aflaq, reality is confined to the inner world of the party." In contrast to other philosophers, such as Karl Marx or John Locke, Aflaq's ideological view of the world makes no clear stand on the materialistic or socioeconomic behavior of humanity. While other philosophers usually separate between what is real and what is not real, Aflaq does not define what is and what ought to be, instead both are molded into the same category, what is attainable.

In contrast to his longtime friend and colleague Salah al-Din al-Bitar, who was more practical when it came to politics, Aflaq was a "visionary, the dreamer rather unfitted for political life". Aflaq was described by his associates as an "ascetic, shy and intense figure living a simple and upretensious life." He has been accused of seeking help from other people instead of fulfilling his goal by himself or with others he led; Aflaq collaborated with Gamal Abdel Nasser, Abd al-Karim Qasim and Abdul Rahman Arif in 1958, to Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and Ali Salih al-Sadi in 1963 and finally in the 1970s to Saddam Hussein. There are several Ba'athists, mostly from the Syrian-led Ba'ath Party, who believe Aflaq stole Ba'athist ideology from its original founder, Zaki al-Arsuzi. These individuals have denounced, and labelled, Aflaq as a "thief".

In his writings Aflaq had been stridently in favor of free speech and other human rights and aid for the lower classes. During the Military Committee's gradual take over of power in Syria, Aflaq rallied against what he saw as the establishment of a military dictatorship, instead of the democracy for which Aflaq had planned. These ideals were never realized by the regimes that used his ideology. Most scholars see the Assad regime in Syria and Saddam's regime in Iraq to have only employed Aflaq's ideology as a pretense for dictatorship. In short, Aflaq's Ba'athism was used to create dictatorships in Syria and Iraq.