Sami al-Jundi

An older cousin of Abd al-Karim al-Jundi,{{cite book|author=Itamar Rabinovič|author-link=Itamar Rabinovich|title=Syria Under the Baʻth, 1963-66: The Army Party Symbiosis|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=KqR5eFb3xGsC&pg=PA237|access-date=14 July 2013|year=1972|publisher=Transaction Publishers|isbn=978-1-4128-3550-3|page=237}} Jundi was born to a scholarly family in Salamiyah.{{cite book|author=Fouad Ajami|title=The Syrian Rebellion|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Smc_kC5anMsC&pg=PT29|access-date=14 July 2013|year=2012|publisher=Hoover Press|isbn=978-0-8179-1506-3|page=29}} He studied dentistry at Damascus University, graduating in 1944. Initially attracted to Arab nationalism by Zaki al-Arsuzi,

he joined the Ba'ath Party of Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar in 1947. In the 1950s he joined Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalist movement, and Nasser appointed him director of information and propaganda after Egypt and Syria merged as the United Arab Republic in 1958. After the 1961 Syrian coup installed Nazim al-Qudsi, Jundi lost his job, but after the 1963 Syrian coup he became minister of information in Salah al-Bitar's cabinet. He was also official spokesman for the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC).{{cite book|author=Sami M. Moubayed|author-link=Sami Moubayed|title=Steel and Silk: Men and Women who Shaped Syria 1900-2000|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sC-xU8QHSooC&pg=PA264|access-date=14 July 2013|year=2006|publisher=Cune Press|isbn=978-1-885942-40-1|page=264}}

The RCC named Jundi prime minister, delegating him to form a cabinet on 11 May 1963, but he failed to do so and resigned three days later. He was minister of information, culture and national guidance in Prime Minister Bitar's second cabinet, and remained in government under President Amin al-Hafez until October 1964. In 1964 he became ambassador to France.

Jailed in Syria for some time in 1969, Jundi retired to Beirut, writing his memoirs. After Israeli invaded Lebanon in 1982, he returned to Syria, but worked as a dentist and was not active politically.

Jundi's account of the fate of the Ba'ath Party has been characterized as "an honest and sad portrayal of what has befallen many national anticolonial movements".{{cite book|author=Fouad Ajami|author-link=Fouad Ajami|title=The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ye5sewVWcTAC&pg=PA62|access-date=14 July 2013|year=1992|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-43833-9|pages=49–59}}

• Arab wa Yahud [Arabs and Jews], Beirut, 1968
• Sadiqi Ilyas [My friend Ilyas], Beirut, 1969
• Al Ba`th [The Ba`th], Beirut, 1969
• Athadda wa Attahim [I challenge and I accuse], Beirut, 1969

As a school student, al-Jundi attended political lectures of Arsuzi and became the secretary of a tiny group that called itself the Arab Resurrection (Ba'ath) Party.{{cite book | author = Elie Kedourie | title = Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies | publisher = Frank Cass | place = London | year = 1974 | pages = 199–201}} Of that period he wrote:

We lived through this hope, strangers in our society which gradually increased our isolation: rebels against all the old values, enemies to all the conventions of humanity, rejecting all ceremonies, relationships and religions. We sought the fight everywhere we were an unrelenting pickaxe. ...

We were racialists [’irqiyyin], admiring Nazism, reading its books and the source of its thought, particularly Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation, and H. S. Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which revolves on race.According to Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust (2010), p.69, "which revolves on race" is a mistranslation for "and Darré's The Race". We were the first to think of translating Mein Kampf.

Whoever has lived during this period in Damascus will appreciate the inclination of the Arab people to Nazism, for Nazism was the power which could serve as its champion, and he who is defeated will by nature love the victor. But our belief was rather different. ...This ellipsis appears in Kedourie's translation. Nordbruch provides a fuller translation: "But we were a different school [of thought]. Those who do not get deep into the principles of the Arab National Party – and these principles are the very principles of the Arab Ba‘th – might be misled [about the influence of Nazism]." {{cite journal | author = Götz Nordbruch | title = 'Cultural Fusion' of Thought and Ambitions? Memory, Politics and the History of Arab–Nazi German Encounters | journal = Middle East Studies | volume = 47 | issue = 1 | pages = 183–194}}

We were idealists, basing social relationships on love. The Master [Arsuzi] used to speak about Christ, and I think he was influenced by Nietzsche's The Origin of Tragedy. He took the pre-Islamic period for his ideal, calling it the golden age of the Arabs.

Arsuzi's group disbanded in 1944, but most of the members belonged as well to Michel Aflaq's group, also called the Ba'ath, that grew in the Syrian Ba'ath Party.

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Category:1921 births

Category:1995 deaths

Category:Damascus University alumni

Category:Members of the Regional Command of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party – Syria Region

Category:Syrian Arab nationalists

Category:Syrian politicians

Category:Syrian socialists

Category:Greek Orthodox Christians from Syria

Category:Syrian dentists

Category:20th-century dentists

Category:Prime ministers of Syria

Category:Ambassadors of Syria to France

Category:Ministers of culture of Syria

Category:Ministers of information of Syria