Revolutionary Unification (Greece)
The untimely passing of Comrade Ammar Khaled Bakdash, Secretary-General of the Syrian Communist Party, on the fateful evening of July 12, 2025, in Athens, starkly reveals the alarming escalation of aggression from the USA-NATO-EU axis across all theatres of operations of the ongoing Third World War (WWIII). Since 2011, Syria has endured relentless assaults from this coalition and its mercenary forces. The emergence of a regime comprised of Islamofascist terrorists―spawned by the machinations of the USA-NATO-EU and backed by the regimes of Turkey and Israel―has tragically dominated in Syria since November 2024. This regime has systematically perpetrated grievous atrocities against civilians of opposing jihadist factions and has waged war on political dissenters, with a particular focus on communists.
The racist Zionist state of Israel, as a proxy instrument of this imperialist axis in West Asia, is escalating the genocide / ethnic cleansing in Palestine, continues its military aggression against Lebanon, and the expansion its illegal occupation of Syrian territories under the guise of “new authorities”, to unleash new attacks on Iran and Yemen, with the absolute support of the USA-NATO-EU.
With the takeover of Syria by jihadists in late 2024, we witnessed a dreadful escalation of persecutions and massacres targeting political opponents, as well as ethnic and religious minorities. Under these dire circumstances, “Comrade Bagdache became a target of the jihadists and, together with his family, found refuge in Athens thanks to the high level of internationalist solidarity between the Syrian Communist Party and the KKE. On 29 January, 2025, the Damascus authorities announced the dissolution of the Syrian Communist Party and the confiscation of its assets, escalating the persecution”. [1]
Who was Comrade Baghdas?
Comrade Ammar Baghdas served as Secretary-General from 2010 until the end of his life. He was the son of the founder of the Syrian C.P., Khaled Baghdas, and held a Doctorate in Economic Sciences from the Lomonosov State University of Moscow. He was elected to the Syrian parliament from 2003 to 2024, where he served as head of the Committee on Economic Laws. As a revolutionary intellectual, Comrade Baghdas critically examined the structure and history of Syria through the lens of Marxism-Leninism, researched the structure and history of his people and country within the framework of global developments.
In exile, Comrade Baghdas undertook a thorough analysis of the social-class dynamics that contributed to the defeat, dissolution, and occupation of his country. He considered the necessity of frontal struggle of the Syrian communists under the conditions of the oppressive “reactionary black wave”. He and his party adopted popular-front, patriotic, anti-fascist, national liberation, and internationalist positions, against imperialist intervention-invasion and its local organs. Mutatis mutandis [allowing for necessary differences], Baghdas and his comrades have carried forward the noble tradition of the Third International, drawing inspiration from the First Letter of Zachariadis [1940] and the heroic Popular Front in Syria during World War III.
Comrade Baghdas identified three critical allies in the armed struggle for freedom and justice in Syria: Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah.
It is therefore clear that the positions of the Syrian comrades are clearly opposite to the irrational metaphysical ideological construct of the so-called “imperialist pyramid”. An ideological construct which the bureaucratic leadership [of KKE] brazenly handles as a criterion to exorcise and characterize communists and fighters, parties and organizations with clear anti-imperialist frontal theory and practice as supposedly “opportunists” and “revisionists”.
Comrade Baghdas spent eight months in Athens before his untimely death. He died faithful to the revolutionary duty, persecuted by the imperialism of the axis, on the soil of a NATO country, after having already requested asylum. The granting of asylum was never secured for him, essentially leaving him a hostage to international conditions, which are cut and sewn according to the plans of the imperialists.
Comrade Baghdas was a live information bomb and a pole of attraction; he was a leader who could awaken and rally a mass militant anti-imperialist movement. However, the eight-month presence of the comrade in Athens and the positions of the Syrian CP did not receive the required publicity. It is reasonable, therefore, out of a sense of comradely and internationalist solidarity, to also express our concerns about how Comrade Baghdas’s time in Athens was managed by the KKE, with which he had established close ties.
The questions raised by Comrade Dimitrios Patelis in his online post aimed precisely to highlight this. The inability on the part of the KKE to utilize a communist significant for his country in highlighting and propagandizing extremely important aspects, but also contradictions, of the anti-imperialist struggle in Syria and the wider region of West Asia. The fact that some formulations in the said post were utilized by “well-wishers” for the “character assassination” of our comrade, in no way justifies the inability to answer the fundamental theoretical and practical questions regarding the positions of the KKE leadership on the “imperialist pyramid”, “equal distances”, etc., which have been raised by himself and Revolutionary Unification.
Communists, even if they deeply disagree, even if they publicly oppose each other, always focus on the essence and content of the disagreement, on public, honest, and open rational exchange of scientific arguments and counterarguments. Conversely, the excessively bureaucratic officials [from KKE], in a crisis of self-mastery, resort to personal vilification, to “character assassination” [2].
Since when is Comrade D. Patelis a “Notorious provocateur Patelis, acting on orders”? Perhaps when he was a member of the KNE [Communist Youth of Greece] and the KKE? When he excelled as a scholarship recipient of the KKE for his studies in the USSR? Or maybe when he was aligned with the KKE from 2019 until early 2022? It’s crucial to acknowledge that for the current leadership of the KKE, comrade D. Patelis has been labeled a “Notorious provocateur, acting on orders” when he exposed the anti-scientific, anti-Leninist ideological construct of the “imperialist pyramid” and “equal distances”, as well as highlighting the KKE’s role in weakening the consistent anti-imperialist struggle amidst WWIII.
Personal attacks, insults, slanders, and labels have no relation to polemical rhetoric, which can often be welcome, they have no relation to the development of meaningful argumentation. The unabashed deceit of resorting to ad hominem pseudo-arguments, the systematic “character assassination” constitute, by all indications, recognized and tested practices, internationally and throughout time, of the deep state-parastate.
Does such behavior reflect the values of a party that claims to uphold our heroic communist tradition? The relentless retrospective revision of our party’s history, the assessment of the Popular Fronts of the Third International and by extension the EAM-ELAS [Greek World War II resistance movements] as a “right turn”, and the vilification of comrades who adhere to this legacy as “opportunists” are manifestations of a harsh revision of Marxism and Leninist political economy of imperialism. This approach, marked by irrational doctrines such as the “imperialist pyramid” and “equal distances”, which whitewash imperialism, while even whitewashing the crimes of the proxy Nazis by saying that “Ukraine is waging a just war”.
Notes
[1] Statement on the sudden passing of comrade Ammar Bagdache, GS of the CC of the Syrian Communist Party, 2025.7.13.
[2] “Some people are constantly trying to strike a blow against the KKE, even resorting to dirty and unethical means in the process. The spokesperson for the non-existent “Collective Struggle for the Revolutionary Unification of Humanity” (D. Patelis), which never had and still has no ties to the working class and the popular forces of our country, launched yet another provocative attack, which was reproduced by other groups of the so-called “World Anti-Imperialist Platform””. In: CP of Greece, In response to the despicable attack on the KKE following the passing of comrade A. Bagdache.
