An Old Arab Debate Resurfaces in Venezuela’s Battle for Freedom

Debates born of Syria’s uprising now echo in Latin America, showing how ideology can distort even sharp political minds. The issue is no longer who rebels, but who we deem legitimate.

Few words in modern Arabic and postcolonial discourse have been praised, invoked, and misunderstood as much as revolution. It has inspired generations who hoped it could deliver both renewal and deliverance. Yet beneath that hope sits an old tension: some imagine revolution as a transformation of meaning, others as a transformation of lived reality. That divide shapes not only the disagreements between the Syrian poet Adonis and the anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, but also the inconsistencies of Subhi Hadidi, one of Syria’s sharpest exiled intellectuals. Hadidi’s embrace of the Syrian uprising, followed by his recent dismissal of Venezuela’s María Corina Machado, shows how even the most discerning critics can become captive to their own assumptions when events run counter to their expectations.

For Adonis, revolution begins not in public squares but in language, imagination, and myth. His body of work—from al-Thābit wa al-Mutahawwil to his post-2011 interviews—treats it as a civilizational rupture and a renewal of cultural foundations that must precede political change. That belief guided his 2011 open letter to Bashar al-Assad, where he addressed the ruler not as a culprit but as someone capable of leading Syria’s “renewal.” The demonstrations rising from mosques signaled to him a society not yet ready: without a secular consciousness, he argued, genuine change could not take hold. “Nothing will change unless there is a separation between religion and the state,” he said in 2016, insisting that without such distinctions, Arab decline would deepen.

His project has always been aimed at the underlying symbols and assumptions that shape the possibility of democracy and citizenship. In his 2019 Kalam al-Bidayāt, he wrote: “Revolution is not about overthrowing a regime so as to establish another in its place; rather it is about abolishing the regime insofar as it is law—that is, insofar as it is the instrument and symbol and justification of oppression, and insofar as it stands between the human being and his/her self-creation.” It is an almost theological hierarchy: the word must be transformed before the world can be. But when real people finally demanded change in Daraa and Homs, he hesitated, unable to see in their actions the very opening he had long described.

Fanon started from the opposite direction. In The Wretched of the Earth, he wrote: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

Those who live under it do not wait for clarity or consensus. Their existence is denied, and liberation only begins with reclaiming that existence through struggle. Meaning emerges through action, not before it. Revolution, in Fanon’s vision, is not the fulfillment of a philosophy but the moment when one is born.

Hadidi once wrote with Fanon’s instinct. From exile in France, he condemned Adonis for distancing himself from the Syrian uprising, accusing him of siding with authority over the people’s demand for dignity. In columns for Al-Quds al-Arabi, he celebrated the Syrian revolt as an assertion of life that required no prior justification, and he pushed for sanctions and isolation of the Assad regime. He rejected the posture of the “neutral intellectual” who tries to balance oppressor and oppressed.

Yet in 2025, when the Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader who mobilized millions against Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship, Hadidi’s tone shifted. In a scathing column, he derided Machado as a puppet of Washington and a disciple of Israel’s Likud, mocking the Nobel Committee for “humiliating nations and cheapening words like democracy and opposition.” The same writer who demanded recognition of Syrian agency now denied Venezuelan agency altogether. The critic of metaphysical distance became a gatekeeper of ideological correctness.

This reversal exposes a larger pattern. Hadidi faulted Adonis for letting fears of Islamism cloud his judgment; yet he now allows fears of imperialism to do the same. Both assume that revolution must meet a standard of purity before it counts. For Adonis, the Syrian uprising’s religious undertones contaminated it. For Hadidi, Machado’s liberal language and Western ties make her untrustworthy. Both use purity tests that reduce complex human struggles to ideological archetypes. And in both cases, the people disappear. What Adonis denied the Syrian demonstrator, Hadidi now denies the Venezuelan protester the right to define the meaning of their own rebellion.

This blindness also ignores reality on the ground. Machado enjoys broad popular support. In 2023, she won the opposition primary with over 90 percent of the vote. When barred from running, she backed Edmundo González Urrutia, who went on to win the 2024 presidential election by a wide margin according to independent monitors. Unlike many exiled leaders, Machado stayed in Venezuela until recently, often in hiding, working with citizens despite constant threats. Her presence and her insistence on acting before theorizing match what Fanon described as the first gesture of liberation. To call her a “hawk of war” is to confuse discomfort with clarity.

The parallel between Adonis and Hadidi points to a deeper ailment in Arab intellectual life: the struggle to reconcile universal principles with the specific contexts in which people fight for them. The leftist fears imperialism, the secular poet fears religion, and the Islamist fears modernity; each reacts to inherited anxieties rather than contemporary realities. Their revolutions remain hypothetical, always waiting for conditions that never arrive.

Fanon, despite his flaws, grasped something elemental: liberation is lived first and explained later. The task of the intellectual is not to bless or veto revolutions from above, but to accompany them critically and humbly, aware that meaning follows being, not the other way around. Adonis’s task was not to lament the Syrian revolution’s lack of meaning, but to participate in its creation—to seize the opportunity that history had offered him, to help breathe life into the very debates that were striving to shape the better future he claimed to desire.

Recovering that humility is one of the great challenges of our time. The new wave of uprisings—from Caracas to Tehran to Damascus—calls for a different ethic of solidarity, one that moves beyond the old binaries of Islamism and secularism, imperialism and resistance. Adonis demanded metaphysical perfection, and now Hadidi demands ideological alignment. Both are responding to their own fears. Yet history, as Fanon reminds us, is never tidy. The work of the intellectual is not to decide a revolution’s meaning from above, but to listen to what people are trying to bring to fruition—and then add their voice to that unfolding effort.

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