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Syrian National PartyThe Syrian National Party was a quasi-fascist party that advocated Syrian dominance over a wide swath of the Middle East. It was founded by Antun Saada, who was executed in 1949 after a failed coup in Lebanon; however, the party was still active in Syria in the mid-1950s. The party's vision of Greater Syria included Syria, Lebanon, Cilicia, Palestine, Cyprus, Jordan and Iraq. 24 Saada believed that Syria's greatness had been tarnished through a series of invasions, especially the invasion of Arab Muslims shortly after the founding of Islam. Saada in his writings often dismissed the Arabic influence on Syria as being "of the East". To him, Syria was a "Western" nation, and its people "Syrians", never "Arabs". The Party was a product of the widespread uncertainty of the 1930s, and its ideology drew heavily on the European fascists of the period, especially Benito Mussolini. Many young men who joined the Party were of the poor working classes from the hill country or of the urban slums looking for a deeper meaning to their lives and for their country. The party drew its support mainly from Orthodox Christians, Druze and Shia Muslims. Although Saada never explicitly decried Arabs or Muslims as being a problem in Syria, his view of history largely alienated the vast majority of Syria's inhabitants, who were mostly Sunni Muslim and Arab. Neither were many Maronites drawn to its message. The Party's message sounded to many like a revival of a kind of atheistic, secular Byzantine Empire. Without support of either Maronites or Sunni Muslims, the Party was short-lived. Many of the party's followers gravitated towards Arab nationalism, particularly that of the Ba'ath Party and the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Although Saada claimed that Greater Syria was historically unified, in fact Syria and, most especially, Lebanon had long been divided along lines of ethnicity, religion, and even tribe. Syria was and is a land of various ethnic groups and, at least until the establishment of the present Syrian state, there had been no group called "Syrians"; rather there had been Druze, Arab, Maronite Christian, Shia, Orthodox Christian, etc. Religious and ethnic wars had ravaged the region from antiquity, and have continued in Lebanon down to the Druze-Maronite wars of the 19th century and the still-prevalent Maronite-Muslim tensions, only partially cooled since the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). References - Irwin, Robert "An Arab Surrealist". The Nation, January 3, 2005, 23–24, 37–38.
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