ABSTRACT
The military’s awareness that national power sprang from modernization made it an advocate of social reform and rapid economic development, and hence impatient of the old regime. Aflaq rejected the military coup as a route to power and the class struggle as antithetical to national solidarity. He insisted that regeneration required an tnqilab—overthrow—of the old society, but he seems to have had in mind a moral transformation rather than a violent seizure of power; his followers, however, were to take him much more literally. The Barth’s ideology would have a powerful and broad appeal to a multitude of social forces. In the mid-forties, the Ba‘th Party was itself a tiny minority of a few hundred on the fringes of political power, agitating in favor of greater militancy against the French, then against the corruption and repression of political opposition by the Quwatli government, and in favor of preparation for the coming showdown in Palestine.
