Very Marginal Notes
Every time I think of Syria, my mind eventually wanders to the sight of people who’ve finally found a voice of their own, marching in the dead of night with drums; chanting, singing and raising their fists in the face of one poster that has haunted and taunted them their whole life. The collective euphoria of that night still brings a sense of serenity over me.
Another scene comes back quickly; of a morning stroll in downtown Homs. The light and the heavy sun make my eyes hurt, but they can’t wash away the anger brewing at every corner of a city preparing to bury those who died the night before. The looks of defiance, and the anticipation of things to come. A feeling of gloom, only exacerbated by the bright sizzling sun. Everywhere you looked there were tanks, APCs, armed men in uniform, armed men in leather jackets and the people they were trying to terrorize. But you knew very well that in an hour’s time, these people will be chanting at the top of their lungs, and all the guns in the world won’t keep them quiet. For we have finally reached the end of this country as we know it.
***
The uprising is far from being a success. In fact, as tales of revolutions go, Syria’s is –and will be– the saddest one. Stuck between a hammer and a hard place; a manifestation of authority and power, so criminal that its first instinct was to take the country a hostage to its own delusions. And us, everyone who identified with this uprising, betrayed by our own inexperience and our own demagoguery that we couldn’t take back that hostage.
The obvious measure of success for the uprising, wasn’t the undoing of the basic structures of state, society and power, rather manipulating how they manifest themselves; hardly a revolutionary ideal, but the safest one, we were convinced, for a country with a brutalised and traumatised identity that still can’t accept the decimation and marginalization it’s been subjected to throughout the past few centuries. We failed miserably in that.
Inadvertently or not so much, we oversaw a meltdown in the makeshift state that is Syria, and now we can hardly put it back together. But in a sense, that’s what revolutions are for; to create, from a fossil, an ungovernable, unmanageable moment in time and space that is fluid enough to reinvent, by its own volition, a new image of itself. It’s good for history to trample all over our petty compromises every once in a while.
***
For the past fortnight in Tunisia, I was asked the same question repeatedly by everyone I met. It wasn’t about the courage of those who still choose to chant under a hail of bullets; nor was it about the brutality of power; all things these people knew first hand.
They asked, how is it possible for someone to defend an oppressor against its oppressed? I find the question unanswerable, especially if one tries to replace the morally, and emotionally-charged words. How could someone defend Bashar al-Assad against Ghiath Matar?
October 20th, 2011 at 2:55 am
i am asked the same question from my Egyptian friends ,and i find it quite hypocrisy from every Arab who is asking this , as if they have been living in an ever lasting freedom of will and speech, as if they have never been to such a phase !! as if ppl in Tunisia were always those who stood up against the oppressors never encountered such a horrible thing. they were only freed yesterday , and for the past 10 years they were actually doing the same thing, ” defending the oppressor against its oppressed” so they know the answer.
i usually reply them, remember yourselves this day last year, it’s us now.
October 26th, 2011 at 7:43 pm
My left-field answer to the question: People can support Assad because, in a sad way, the System works. Whatever worked in East Germany, DPRK, Belarus, Franco’s Spain, is working in Syria now. It even works abroad. I know several cussing, hijabbed, moderately intelligent Syrian students at Canadian universities in Toronto. They use the language of Dounya, it is incorporated in their speech and thought patterns.
The System was designed to produce compliance, and beyond compliance, adhesion to the Baathi Assadist narrative. It was designed to produce a completely compliant population. That it works is no surprise — fifty years of fine-tuning.
Less, cynically, I understand (and am repelled/fascinated) but the power of the Assad Delusion, because I spent years in the 1990s battling against a strange ‘cult’ — this was something you may not have heard of, the therapy cult that emerged during a western wave of hysteria against a supposed conspiracy of Satanic Ritual Abuse.
It took me a while to find the founding documents that helped me understand. I recommend two books: Why People Believe Weird Things (by Michael Shermer) and The True Believer (by Eric Hoffer). They are only two of many books that try to explain with decent psychology and insight how groups of people can follow obvious madness and delusion to the cliff and beyond.
Thanks for sparking my response. I miss Yazan Badran’s voice out there in the seething mass of comment on Syria.
October 30th, 2011 at 12:50 am
Sorry to disagree. These ideas are not as marginal as you describe them. The manipulation of how the power of the state now manifests itself is a direct result of the ability of those who inspire your first vision to traumatize the regime and to level the playing field as much as possible. This is no small accomplishment and it is an important step in defining the sides of the conflict, their self image, and their image of each others.
I don’t think we have been betrayed. I think some of us just never expected the level of inhumanity the regime is capable of . But we should have. Karfan has told us a long time ago that father and son are one and the same.
April 6th, 2012 at 8:43 am
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May 18th, 2012 at 8:50 pm
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