Dawn in Syria; "On Violence;" Hegel on Revolution; "Say Nothing" on FX
Reading, Watching 12.08.24
I’m sure some of you have seen the incredible scenes coming out of Syria as the house of Assad falls. To briefly recap the news: the rebels are in Damascus, the state has collapsed, and Bashar al-Assad has fled. What follows now is anybody’s guess. Of course, the toppling of the regimes in Libya and Iraq did not bring those countries stability and peace. Abu Muhammad Al-Jolani, the most prominent leader of this final rebel push, has quite the curriculum vitae: Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, and, yes, for a time, ISIS. In an extremely savvy series of press appearances, he’s assured the world and a good segment of the Syrian people too that his move toward moderation is sincere. We’ll see. Those, like me, who’ve long admired both the bravery in battle and the revolutionary, non-sectarian political experiments of the Kurdish rebels are justifiably concerned about their fate, especially since Erdogan’s Turkey is the major backer of the victorious groups. But despite sharing these concerns I can’t help but feel deeply moved by the fall of Assad. Like others, I’ve experienced a sense of relief and even joy. After witnessing so much suffering for so long, the sights of the Syrian people celebrating in the streets, breaking out of Assad’s black holes, being reunited with family members, and coming out of hiding are overwhelming to watch. In a world where sheer aggression and massacre seem to be the only rule, this all comes as a much-needed breath of fresh air.
The civil war in Syria has been a festering wound for over a decade. It seemed to be where all the hopes of the Arab Spring were to be gradually smothered. It’s produced unspeakable horrors: the use of poison gas on civilians, the torture chambers, and the terrifying rise of ISIS, a group so frightful that even enemies decided to cooperate to eradicate it. The waves of refugees generated by the war fueled the rise of the menacing right-wing populism that now seems ascendant everywhere. And Assad’s regime became the world capital of a cruel political cynicism that sometimes seems like it might take over the entire world. Many intelligent and curious young people got their political education, as it were, by following this war online, seeing its atrocities excused, justified, or denied, and participating in what seemed, until this moment, a hopeless idealism or a nihilistic acceptance of the status quo. The final lesson turns out to be anything is possible, nothing lasts forever, and even the most brutal regimes are very brittle. To this last point, what we’re witnessing in Syria is a real revolution: the government was not defeated in battle so much as it just melted away. For the rest of the world, this is a reminder of the truth of all politics and strikes a terrific blow against the cynical power worship that idolizes dictators: brute force is never a substitute for real power, which flows from the consent of the people. We’ve seen this in South Korea over the past week, too, where the people flatly and resolutely said, “No,” to President Yoon’s coup attempt. Democracy is not embodied in this or that institution or national tradition, on some fundamental level it’s just the natural underpinning of all political orders: if the people cease to obey, they can do anything.