by
Some people whose interest in
the Middle East is recent think that Assad is a uniquely Syrian phenomenon. I
think the excessively harsh despotism and the equally excessive ability to
cruelly exterminate your own population while believing yourself to be setting
your nation on the road to modernity are quite unique in terms of their degree
and intensity, but Assadism is nonetheless a more widespread political
disposition in the Arab world. It can even be described as a mode of being. How
do you recognise an Assadist? Here are some helpful suggestions for the
newcomers:
• An Assadist is anyone
who pretends that the tension between a local population’s aspirations for
freedom, justice and dignity and geo-political anti-imperialist posturing
(i.e., being ‘against’ the US, ‘against’ Israel, etc…) does not exist, and does
not need to be negotiated. Assadists believe that they have ‘solved’ this
problem, or that geo-politics is all there is. Assadism is above all the
dictatorship of geo-political discourse, which, to be sure, does not
necessarily have to be geo-politically rational.
• An Assadist is anyone
for whom ‘resistance’ functions as an institutionalised ideology of
national/state legitimisation. Assadists are those who clearly see themselves
sliding into a reality where ‘resistance’ entails more ‘resisting anyone who
resists you’ than ‘resisting anyone who oppresses you’, but it doesn’t bother
them.
• An Assadist is someone
who believes in the ‘dictatorship of the seculariat’. They think that the
‘secular’ bit in the concept of ‘secular dictatorship’ far outweighs in
importance the ‘dictatorship’ bit. An Arab Assadist usually combines this
excessive modernist adoration of secularism with an excessive modernist usage
of eau de cologne — not to mention a particular adoration of this other great
modernist artifact: the sun glasses — which can help you identify them even if
they don’t say much.
• A western Assadist is
someone whose belief in the power of radical western thoughts’ ability to
‘analyse’, ‘dissect’ and ‘capture’ the political essence of a situation
anywhere in the world remains unshaken by the failures of radical western
thought to do anything of the sort throughout the twentieth century, and who
gives you top-down lectures about where the right path towards genuine
anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics lies with the same arrogance his or
her colonialist ancestors gave your ancestors top-down lectures about where the
right path towards western civilisation lied.
I am sure there’s more but I
hope this helps.
Ghassan Hage is Future Generation
Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne.
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