The Stability of the Gulag and the Graveyard

The excellent New Zealand historian William Harris is on fire today in NOW Lebanon:

The Syrian uprising is taking place in a chillingly barren, hostile environment. Bashar al-Assad’s regime is something beyond the standard authoritarianism of the Arab world; it is a throwback to the totalitarian European states of the 1930s. The dictator is a rigid ideologue cocooned by sycophants and gangsters; he sports a massive secret police machine, established under his father in the style of the East German Stasi. Unlike Egypt, where Mubarak’s National Democratic Party specialized in packing parliament but did not have ideological aspirations, the Syrian Baath can still mobilize crowds – hirelings, coerced school-children and those who have surrendered their minds to state propaganda – to bay their adulation for the leader.

The ruling Assads have failed abysmally to deliver a decent life to most Syrians and are viscerally hostile to demands for basic freedoms. They have no hesitation in unleashing the security apparatus, rooftop snipers and gangs of thugs to kill and maim their own people, demonstrated in the prompt resort to the indiscriminate use of live ammunition in Daraa and Douma. The only constraint is the continuous external exposure of the regime’s bestiality made possible by Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media. This constraint, however, is desperately fragile and requires buttressing through vigorous expression of solidarity with the Syrian people.

But Western governments, which have always had a soft spot for the Syrian dictatorship, cannot bring themselves to support liberty for the Syrian people, preferring the deceit of identifying Bashar as a “reformer.” Put in a tight spot by a courageous uprising, the regime will resort to fake concessions, such as revoking “emergency rule” while refurbishing all its teeth and claws under other cover – or floating a fraudulent “parties law,” finessing restriction and intimidation. Such cheap tricks will no doubt excite the dictatorship’s battery of useful idiots in Washington. They will not, however, touch the entrenched reality of a fascist combine whose single fundamental law is the law of the jungle.

[…]

Obviously, the suddenly uncertain outlook in Syria must be a worry for Bashar al-Assad’s Iranian and Hezbollah allies. A new Syria would have no reason to be friendly to Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which have both fulsomely declared their backing for the Syrian autocracy and therefore for its murders, its criminality and its savage treatment of popular protest. Indeed, crowds of Syrian demonstrators have already chanted “No Hezbollah, no Iran.” A new Syria will also not quickly forget those Lebanese who have hastened to comfort Bashar al-Assad and to endorse the dictatorship in Damascus and its stability of the gulag and the graveyard.