Bachar al-Assad’s letter to his father
Dear Dad,
I know you were very worried about me when you died. I think you were wrong. Your succession went very smoothly. Later on, I had a spot of trouble with Lebanon (I had to eliminate Hariri), but all I had to do was keep my head down and everything gradually went back to normal. Syria thrived during the first ten years of my rule. I must say cousin Rami was a great help. Everything was going well and this state of affairs could have gone on forever – though I regularly had to throw protesters in jail –, if Ben Ali and Mubarak hadn’t let unrest develop in their countries. Can you believe it? : they were actually overthrown. What’s worse, Gadhafi was hacked to pieces by his own people.
Of course, the protest eventually spread to our country. I remembered the ruthless way you handled the Brothers and I followed your example. What you did to Hama, I very nearly managed to do to all the Syrian towns. But there was one problem you didn’t have to deal with in 1982: the impossibility of sealing the country. On the strength of modern mass media, pictures of the repression spread all around the world.
At first, I was worried about it. All these democracies, which regularly came to discuss human rights with me, could just as soon decide to intervene as they did in Libya. But – it beggars belief– they didn’t bat an eyelid. Of course, they called me names: “butcher” “killer”, I heard them all. I was also subjected to ridiculous remarks about my loss of legitimacy. Strange how these leaders can’t imagine we don’t think the way they do. But they just blabbed on emptily.
I have to admit that the Russians were very helpful. You were absolutely right to enter in alliance with them. Those people think like us. And they don’t care one bit about all these ludicrous ideas of truth and lies, good and evil. They know that nothing matters when it’s a question of remaining in power. With the Chinese (who seemed less convinced, but who went along with them) they blocked the UN Security Council. The Westerners didn’t dare override them and repeat what they had done during the war in Bosnia. They even publicly stated that they would never intervene in Syria. I could not have dreamed a better scenario and I of course took the opportunity to crack down on the people as much as I could.
The Iranians were very helpful as well. Your former assistants criticized me for cozying up to Iran when things were still running smoothly in Syria. Now they see that I was right. I’m quite aware the Persians are not supporting me because they love me, but to retain their control over the region. It doesn’t really matter so long as they provide me with weapons (as do the Russians) and even soldiers. I must say that Hezbollah is a valuable ally: it was a very good idea of yours to support its creation.
The crisis is not over, far from it, but Damascus is still in my grip and the rebels don’t have as much equipment as our army. There’s still hope. Following your precepts, I think I just need to wait for the enemy to wear itself out. If worse comes to worst, we will fall back on the mountains and somehow, we will struggle on and prevent Syria and its ungrateful people from recovering.
What strikes me most is the inconsistency, the spinelessness and the cowardice of western people. Deep down, they just don’t know what they want. They condemn my policy, demand my resignation, want to bring me to justice in front of the ICC, and all the while keep sending me envoys! Can you imagine: they actually brought Kofi Annan back for the part, and then Lakhdar Brahimi!
I succeeded in manipulating them in ways worthy of you. It is so easy to confuse them by pretending that some of our actions were led by the rebels, that it is no fun at all really. They are down to giving moral lessons to rebel generals instead of arms. Because you understand, the idea that the rebel army might kill anyone, even chabbiha, is unbearable to them. On the other hand, if I order, as I did last week, to cut 400 civilians’ throats – a lot of them children –they don’t even flinch.
I also repeated your technique of the jihadist foil. It works every time. I just had to release some home-made terrorists and ask our intelligence services to spread the poison within the rebels’ ranks. A few, well-organized, car-bombing discredited the armed opposition. It succeeded beyond all my expectations! Just as our enemies were beginning to arouse sympathy in the West, the notion of an “islamist” threat was all over the western news! It’s true that jihadist brigades sell more newspapers and TV time than do my slaughters.
One last example of western weakness of character. A few months ago, Obama (the current US president) and his British and French counterparts threatened retaliation if ever I was to use chemical weapons. Strange they didn’t realize that it meant that I could, by contrast, kill as many Syrians I wanted by other means (I recently switched to SCUDS: they work pretty well) without any interference on their part. I wanted to know how far I could go – all the more since the Iranians were also interested in the test. So I ordered a small-scale launch of chemical weapons. At first, The American, the Brit and the French claimed there was no evidence of wrong-doing. So I did it again on several occasions. It was becoming difficult for Obama to maintain I had not crossed what he described as the “red-line”. As he clearly didn’t want to confront me, he added a second condition: chemical weapons had to be used on a large scale to be a “game-changer”. “Game”! So I can keep on playing about with Syria and destroying it, bit by bit. To think the US right-wing suspects Obama of being a Muslim!
As you see, dear Dad, everything is under control. I’ve learned well from the lessons you taught me and I will apply them till the end, even if that means I have to destroy the country utterly.
Your loving son,
Bashar.
(Thanks to Sarah who was a great help for the translation)
See, I agree that there are « peoples », and that this is a normal and hlhteay part of the bond shared by a national community, but I disagree that « whites » are a people in the same way that, say, the English or Polish or Chinese are peoples. »Whites » were never a people before the invention of race theory in the 18th century. Yes, there were issues with blacks not being considered « people » in the same way that European peoples were people, but this is a rather different thing. The older debate was really about whether non-European people were fully human, or had souls, or free-will, or intelligence, or whatever. That debate was addressed by promoting individual examples of « blacks » who were clearly fully human from a moral perspective.The racial theory advanced by early anthropologists was an attempt to reconcile the proved fact that there was no hard and fast distinction between the European species of humanity and non-European humanity and the obvious observation that the average intelligence and artistic inclinations of non-Europeans seemed distinctly lower. I submit that some of this effect was the result of cultural bias (in my opinion, modern Japanese culture has surpassed the West in musical achievement, while individuals of Asian extraction have shown an aptitude for music at odds with the history of its development in Asian cultures). But at least some of it is definitely born out by unbiased measures of mental capacities.Of course, one can point to certain temperamental advantages of other peoples compared with those of Europe, and say that Europeans are typically deficient in some regards when compared with other nationalities. Whether a neurophysiological difference is good or bad can sometimes be a matter of opinion (or circumstance). But that just reinforces the point that genetic differences between different peoples are real and meaningful.But the theory that there was a large difference between « whites » as a group and other groups that could also be easily identified by outward appearance has always had severe scientific difficulties despite being intuitively appealing enough to be the first theory advanced in the study of human genetic diversity. The embrace and promotion of « racism » (though now they officially only apply the term to opposition to their schemes of racial preference) by progressives is instructive. It is a ‘flexible’ theory because at its core it is self-referential.And that makes it perennially useful to progressives because it can prop up their various lies about how best to order human society.Chiu Cnun-Ling.