Syrian Social Nationalist Party
According to Johnson, Saadeh was strongly influenced by national socialism and fascism. His party symbol was reversed swastika and party's anthem was sung with music of German anthem. Within the party, Saadeh gained cult of personality and advocated totalitarian system of government and at the same time glorifying pre-Christian past of Syrian people. Saadeh was named party's leader for life. However, according to Haytham, Saadeh states that European fascism didn't influenced him. He claims that Saadeh's Syrian Social Nationalist ideology came at rather opposing ends with National Socialism, whereas Social Nationalism bases itself on a dynamic social entity (which is composed of many elements from religion, to language, to culture, to history, to need, and mainly human interaction) defining its national identity and not the imposition of one ideal identity (ex: blond blue eyes) on the many factions.
Saadeh emphasized the role of philosophy and social science in the development of his social ideology. He viewed social nationalism, his version of nationalism, as a tool to transform traditional society into a dynamic and progressive one. He also opposed colonization that broke up Greater Syria into sub-states. Secularization played an important role in his ideology. Secularization is taken by him beyond the socio-political aspects of the question into its philosophical dimensions.
Saadeh rejected Arab Nationalism (the idea that the speakers of the Arabic language form a single, unified nation), and argued instead for the creation of the state of United Syrian Nation or Natural Syria encompassing the Fertile Crescent, making up a Syrian homeland that "extends from the Taurus range in the northwest and the Zagros mountains in the northeast to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea in the south and includes the Sinai peninsula and the Gulf of Aqaba, and from the Syrian Sea in the west, including the island of Cyprus, to the arch of the Arabian Desert and the Persian Gulf in the east." (Kader, H. A.).
Saadeh rejected both language and religion as defining characteristics of a nation, and instead argued that nations develop through the common development of a people inhabiting a specific geographical region. He was thus a strong opponent of both Arab nationalism and Pan-Islamism. He argued that Syria was historically, culturally, and geographically distinct from the rest of the Arab world, which he divided into four parts. He traced Syrian history as a distinct entity back to the Phoenicians, Canaanites, Assyrians, Babylonians etc. and argued that Syrianism transcended religious distinctions.
These claims of alleged Nazi and Fascist ideology of his party were refused by Saadeh himself. During a 1935 speech, Saadeh himself said: "I want to use this opportunity to say that the system of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party is neither a Hitlerite nor a Fascist one, but a pure social nationalist one. It is not based on useless imitation, but is instead the result of an authentic invention -- which is a virtue of our people".
Read more about this topic: Antun Saadeh
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