page_title: Ba'athism
section_title: Saddamism
hierarchical_section_title: Ba'athism / Neo-Baathism / Saddamism
caption_attribution_description: English: Baath Party founder Michel Aflaq (left) with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (right) in 1988
context_page_description: Baathism is an Arab nationalist ideology that promotes the development and creation of a unified Arab state through the leadership of a vanguard party over a progressive revolutionary government. The ideology is officially based on the theories of the Syrian intellectuals Michel Aflaq, Zaki al-Arsuzi, and Salah al-Din al-Bitar.
  A Baathist society seeks enlightenment, renaissance of Arab culture, values and society. It supports the creation of one-party states and rejects political pluralism in an unspecified length of time – the Baath party theoretically uses an unspecified amount of time to develop an enlightened Arabic society. Baathism is based on principles of Arab nationalism, pan-Arabism, and Arab socialism, as well as social progress. It is a secular ideology. A Baathist state supports socialist economics to a varying degree and supports public ownership over the commanding heights of the economy, but opposes confiscatory policies with regard to private property. In Baathist ideology, socialism does not mean state-socialism or economic equality; rather, it has a strong current of modernization to it.
context_section_description: Saddamism (Saddamiya) is a political ideology based on the politics related to and pursued by Saddam Hussein. It has also been referred to by Iraqi politicians as Saddamist Baathism (Al-Baʽthiya Al-Saddamiyya). It is officially described as a distinct variation of Baathism. It espouses Iraqi nationalism and an Iraq-centred Arab world that calls upon Arab countries to adopt Saddamist Iraqi political discourse and to reject "the Nasserite discourse" that it claims collapsed after 1967. It is militarist and views political disputes and conflicts in a military manner as "battles" requiring: "fighting", "mobilization", "battlefields", "bastions" and "trenches". Saddamism was officially supported by Saddam's government and promoted by the Iraqi daily newspaper Babil owned by Saddam's son Uday Hussein.
  Saddam and his ideologists sought to fuse a connection between ancient Babylonian and Assyrian civilization in Iraq with Arab nationalism by claiming that the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians are the ancestors of the Arabs. Thus Saddam and his supporters claimed that there is no conflict between Mesopotamian heritage and Arab nationalism.
  Saddam's government was critical of orthodox Marxism and opposed the orthodox Marxist concepts of class conflict, dictatorship of the proletariat and state atheism as well as opposing Marxism–Leninism's claim that non-Marxist–Leninist parties are automatically bourgeois in nature – claiming that the Baath Party is a popular revolutionary movement and that as such the people rejected petit bourgeois politics. Saddam claimed that the Arab nation did not have the class structure which existed in other nations and that class divisions were more along national lines between Arabs and non-Arabs rather than within the Arab community. However, he spoke fondly of Vladimir Lenin and commended Lenin for giving Russian Marxism a uniquely Russian specificity that Marx alone was incapable of doing. He also expressed admiration for other communist leaders such as Fidel Castro, Hồ Chí Minh and Josip Broz Tito due to their spirit of asserting national independence rather than their communism.
caption: Saddam Hussein (right) talking with Aflaq (left) in 1988.
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