The Myth of the Twentieth Century
According to Sami al-Jundi, one of the co-founders of the Arab Ba'ath Party which was established by Zaki al-Arsuzi, the party's emblem was the tiger because it would "excite the imagination of the youth, in the tradition of Nazism and Fascism, but taking into consideration the fact that the Arab is in his nature distant from pagan symbols [like the swastika]". Arsuzi's Ba'ath Party believed in the virtues of "one leader" and Arsuzi himself personally believed in the racial superiority of the Arabs. The party's members read a lot of Nazi literature, such as "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century"; they were one of the first groups to plan the translation of "Mein Kampf" into Arabic; and they also actively searched for a copy of "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" – according to Moshe Ma'oz, the only copy of it was in Damascus and it was owned by Aflaq. Arsuzi did not support the Axis powers and refused Italy's advances for party-to-party relations, but he was also influenced by the racial theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Arsuzi claimed that historically Islam and Muhammad had reinforced the nobility and purity of the Arabs, which had both degenerated because Islam had been adopted by other peoples. He had been associated with the League of Nationalist Action, a political party which existed in Syria from 1932 to 1939 and was strongly influenced by fascism and Nazism as evidenced by its paramilitary "Ironshirts."