The question of international norms or international resolutions, you know, coming from Mr. Obama is not really about whether there are international norms or resolutions to uphold.

Over the last two or so decades, there's been an increase in thinking among the Left, liberals, intellectuals in the direction of so-called spontaneity. In other words that uprisings happen spontaneously, people are frustrated, angry, then they spontaneously rise up. And what they don't require is preparation, or what we used to call leadership.

Interestingly, what the bourgeois women's groups in India wanted to do in the nationalist period is to have the peasant women essentially follow them... They would be the leaders and the peasant women would be the masses.

There's no UN resolution that allows the United States to carry out operations in Syria. You'll remember that in Libya in 2011 there was a great hoopla made about the importance of getting a UN resolution. Here there was no attempt to get any resolution. They simply bombed in Syria.

To build a mass movement, nonviolence is indispensable.

Mr. Assad is not going to be able to feel like there is a moderate opposition that actually threatens him. Currently, the Assad government looks out at the landscape, sees the rise of ISIS, sees that much of the rebel force has become largely Islamist, and then turns to the West and says, well, you know, they look toward the West and say, well, look, what you have is a terrorist group that's fighting against us. So in this context, I think, to talk about moderate opposition being created to put pressure on Damascus is rather illusionary.

Where there is a living memory of struggle, they have a living memory of the rebellion. Where there's no struggle afterward the rebellion is forgotten.