there that his mother would die, poverty-stricken. According to one of his associates, al-Arsuzi himself spent a great deal of time living in "extreme poverty", reduced "to a life of penury and persecution" by the French authorities. Al-Arsuzi's popularity within his own ranks lessened after Rashid Ali al-Gaylani's coup in Iraq. While Aflaq and al-Bitar founded the Syrian Committee to Help Iraq to support Iraq during the Anglo–Iraqi War, al-Arsuzi opposed any involvement on the grounds that al-Gaylani's policies would fail. While several Arab Ba'ath members agreed with al-Arsuzi's conclusion, the majority were attracted to Aflaq's romanticism. Another reason for the Arab Ba'ath's failure was al-Arsuzi's deep mistrust of others; when a party member had written a manifesto entitled Arab Ba'ath, al-Arsuzi "saw in it an imperialist plot to block his way to the people". The Arab Ba'ath Movement, led by Aflaq and al-Bitar, was merged into the Arab Ba'ath Party in 1947. During negotiations Wahib al-Ghanim and Jalal al-Sayyid, not al-Arsuzi, represented the Arab Ba'ath, while Aflaq and al-Bitar represented the Arab Ba'ath Movement. The only policy issue which was discussed in great detail was how socialist the party was going to be. The groups came to an agreement; the Ba'ath movement became radicalised, and moved further to the left. Al-Arsuzi did not attend the founding congress, nor was he given membership in the new party. Later life and death: 1948–1968 After his return from Baghdad in 1940, al-Arsuzi had gained a position teaching philosophy, but he was soon dismissed from it. From 1945 until 1952 he worked again as a secondary teacher, first in Hama and then in Aleppo, and from 1952 until his retirement in 1959, he taught in a teacher training college. In 1963, in the wake of the Sixth National Congress of the Ba'ath Party and the party's gradual alienation from its founders Aflaq and Bitar, Hafez al-Assad arranged for Arsuzi to help with Ba'athist ideological formation in the army, and later ensured that he was granted a state pension. Al-Arsuzi was elected to a seat in the National Command of the Ba'ath Party in 1965. Salah Jadid, the Ba'ath Party strongman at the time, opposed Aflaq's and al-Bitar's leadership of the party and, because of it, wanted al-Arsuzi to replace them as the original founder of Ba'athist thought. Following the Ba'ath Party split of 1966 (the party split into two branches, one Iraqi-led Ba'ath