Tuesday, December 17, 2024
Mistakes are a fact of life. Even the saintliest among us make them. When our foibles are pointed out to us, the expectation is that we would acknowledge them and make sincere efforts to correct them. Most of us do. But there is a category of people who seem to think they are infallible. Despots are classic examples. They are too sure of themselves, and their habit is to double down on their blunders. With this character flaw, they frequently take entire societies down with them.
Through public opinion, citizens of free societies are able to convey their displeasure with whatever actions of their leaders they disagree with. Recalcitrant rulers who fail to properly heed the complaints of their disaffected constituents are routinely tossed out of office. People who live under tyranny do not have that luxury, unfortunately. They are forced to live in prison-like conditions, sometimes for decades, until the suffering becomes no longer bearable. At that point, their only option is to summon the courage to go into the streets to protest. Quite often, that is also when the vile nature of their oppressors really comes into full display.
I have read a lot in the past week about the terror that deposed Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad unleashed on his people over the last thirteen years, following their 2011 protest against his autocratic and kleptocratic rule. I encourage those who harbor any sympathy for such repulsive autocrats to read this Wall Street Journal exposé, and this and that by the New York Times. And then I urge such people to imagine how they would feel if any of their loved ones had to endure the kind of torture and death documented in these graphic accounts.
Over the past week, thousands of Syrians have been walking through filthy jails in Damascus, Aleppo, and elsewhere in Syria in a desperate search for their relatives who have been trapped there, some for as long as a decade. Fathers and mothers are looking for their sons and daughters. I am a father so I know how that must feel like. Sons and daughters want to know what happened to their mothers and fathers, and whether they will ever see them again.
I had a gut-punch a couple of days ago from watching television coverage of a mother’s reaction upon seeing the mutilated body of her son. There were signs of torture all over him. It was clear that he had suffered a gruesome death. The woman was visibly gasping for air, and it seemed as if she might suffer a cardiac arrest any minute. It was an Emmett Till moment.
The Wall Street Journal reports that there were several bloodied nooses hanging from a concrete wall in one of the prisons its journalists went through. As many as fifty people were said to have been hanged in that location each day. Reading that account should send chills down the spine of even the most callous person.
It would be one thing if all of those people who were killed or brutalized in such cruel fashion had committed heinous crimes and were being punished for them. Even if that were the case, some due process would still be required. But none of them had done anything wrong. Their only “transgression” was having the audacity to voice unhappiness about how their government was functioning.
Political leaders in free societies don’t always take kindly to criticism either. But they know that it comes with the territory so they learn to live with it. And they know not to even think about trying anything close to this Assad madness because there would be all kinds of institutional roadblocks in their pathways. For anyone whose skin is so delicate that it cannot withstand any heat, the solution is really simple: Stay out of the political kitchen. Someone should pass that message on to these despots.
Some of us have a tendency to describe monsters like Assad, and the henchmen who carried out his orders, as animals. That is a grave insult to animals. They don’t engage in this level of depravity. And they are definitely more sensible than some of these supposedly “higher-order” creatures we unjustifiably refer to as humans.