In many of the off-the-cuff, incidental comments about Syria after the fall of the Assad regime that I observed, quite a number of people in Europe and the Middle East skeptically focused on what they would like to see and expressed their frustration for not seeing what they wanted; or they would mention anecdotes about counterproductive incidents and events taking place in Syria. Within the Syrian universe right now, things are so fluid and formless that one can find examples of whatever one likes or dislikes. However, such tendencies are not very respectful to the Syrian people, since they repeat an all-too-common practice of imposing outsiders’ priorities and agendas on a country that has suffered tremendously in the last 14 years – or rather, for the past 54 years. They even fail to put what is being observed rightfully in perspective, because they do not really grasp what came to an end in Syria. To help remedy this, I would like to emphasize four elements of the Assadist political formation that lived for 54 years, and died only ten weeks ago.
Suffocating Eternity
First, there is the suffocating continuity of more than half a century of dominion over a young society, 96% of whose population are under 60. The regime held this continuity to be “forever”, and enshrined it as its highest principle – indeed, that was its real constitution. This principle of eternity was first introduced as a slogan to be shouted every morning by schoolchildren, and, since the 1980s, by conscripts of the army (immediately after the Hama massacre in February 1982, which claimed the lives of up to 40,000 of the city’s population). At the same time, statues of Hafez al-Assad were installed everywhere in the country to epitomize the eternity or “foreverness” of his rule.
When his son Bashar inherited the country from him in 2000, the transfer of power was merely a translation of this essentially theological principle of eternity, a variant of millenarianism. Quasi-religious themes are recurrent in the literature and self-conception of political-theological movements, and the Assad regime inscribed such a component into both its self-representation and institutions. One is reminded of the “thousand year” ambitions of the Third Reich. The logic of eternity is accompanied by a special modality of lived time: a permanent present that cancels past and future, a continuous war against change, and the extermination of any possible alternatives. Syria’s history was taught in a way that relegated to obscurity the years and decades before the Assadist era.
Genocide and Genocracy
Hence, the second element: the genocidal one. It is legitimate to debate whether what Syria witnessed between March 2011 and late 2024 was a case of genocide, but it is undeniable that there was a genocidal component to it. This element is fundamentally connected to what in Syria and the Middle East call ta’ifiyyah (sectarianism), and especially to processes of politicizing inherited confessional differences from above, thereby transforming them into exclusionary political units called sects. Sects are not “natural” communities in our “mosaic” societies, as a still dominant but outdated sociology of the Middle East would have them. They are fundamentally political constructs, introduced through processes of discrimination, the nurturing of distrust and instilling of fear, as well as torture and massacres: in a word, sectarianization.
Sectarianizing of the security function, which began soon after Hafez seized power in 1970, was crucial in the production of sects, alongside the destruction of political parties and social organizations. The production of sects undoes the demos, rendering democracy impossible, and instead foregrounds the genos, the cultural group to be securely installed, and prepares the scene for genocracy: the rule of the genos, whether by majority or minority. Now as much as undoing the demos renders democracy impossible, nurturing genocracy renders genocide not only possible but legitimate as a method of governance. To the category of genocracies belong phenomena like white supremacy, Hindutva, Zionism, Islamism, Assadist sectarianism, and many more. All of these movements have been implicated in genocidal rhetoric, genocidal massacres, and full-fledged genocides. The Assadist one had long implicitly (and then quite explicitly, to its trusted Western journalists and politicians) justified itself by protecting minorities, a colonial dogma that we have (regrettably) heard many European politicians reiterate after the fall of the regime. With genocracy introduced, genocide or genocidal massacres are always just around the corner. We started seeing them before the end of the first decade of Assad Senior.
For such reasons, it is misguided to talk about an authoritarian regime or dictatorship in Syria, as many observers in the West used to do. They overlook the essentially discriminatory character of the regime, with its genocratic-genocidal constitution. Even those who grasped this essence – the likes of Nicolas Van Dam, Joshua Landis, and many others – stopped very short from drawing conclusions about the genocidal practices related to it. Someday, a book should be written about the Western “research” on Syria in the Assadist era, now that this era is over. Many researchers share in both ethical and epistemological responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of victims in the country, probably motivated by their own genocratic reasoning and limitations.
Extreme Political Poverty
Many people in Europe, even in the Middle East, cannot imagine that their counterparts in Syria were forcefully prevented from cooperating in activities like cleaning a square or a street, calling on people not to bribe or to accept bribes, meeting in private spaces to read books, talking about organizing protests, or building independent trade unions or political parties. In Darayya, a town close to Damascus, a group of young men and women undertook to clean the streets of their town, calling on people not to smoke and not to pay or accept bribes, and to read books. They were arrested in 2003, and some of them spent more than three years in jail. Their initiative was guided by a respectable religious figure, Abd el-Akram al-Sakka, who would himself be arrested, tortured, and killed in 2011, a few months after the Syrian revolution. His family would learn about this only in August 2024.
In 2007, 37% of the Syrian population were living under the poverty line of two dollars a day. However, 100% were living under extreme political poverty for decades. By political poverty, I mean depriving people from gathering freely and from speaking for themselves. Long years in prison, torture, and massacres were the tools by which political poverty was maintained. And by the way, such tools paved the way for theological groups to become the “objective” or “organic” opposition to the Assadist apolitical polity. For there was one gathering that the regime could not disband (that of believers at a mosque for prayers) and one opinion that could not be silenced (that of the holy texts). In this way, practiced religion came to play the role of a limit to political poverty.
Cheapness and Vulgarity
The fourth element that eludes non-Syrians is the absolute, tawdry cheapness of the Assad family and the regime elite: their extreme greed, their ferocious violence (undisciplined, humiliating, vengeful, and always mixed with obscene verbal violence), and their outright vulgarity. Torture was a defining feature of Assadism just as it was the essence of Nazism, according to Jean Amery. Assadists wanted everything for themselves: power, money, valuables, real estates, women, slaves or semi-slaves working for them (mostly soldiers of the army), and arms. They had no cause other than the superegoist wish to stay in power forever, although they fraudulently claimed many altruistic causes as their own. They engineered the regime to be capable of crushing any threats by absolute violence, up to and including chemical weapons, but their regime finally collapsed with barely a shot fired in Damascus.
Immediately, people celebrated its fall, because they knew in their bodies and souls what a nightmare they had lived through for decades. Politically, we were slaves, for the Assadists did not merely rule Syria, they owned it: the state was privatized and the majority of people were consequently alienated from it. Even those who were afraid of what might come after the regime came to despise it deeply in the end. The cowardly escape of Bashar – without even addressing his supporters, let alone the Syrian people – summarizes it all.
Assadism is an amalgam of these four elements: suffocating eternity, massacres and extermination, extreme political poverty, and a deadly cheapness that combines both bloodiness and triviality. After December 8, 2024, many called for a national law to criminalize the denial of Assadist crimes the way that the denial of Nazi crimes was and still is criminalized. One may agree or disagree, fearing possible abuses of such a law, but the proposal captures well the regime’s horrible uniqueness.
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The fall of the Assad regime was a miracle that came unexpectedly after a long period of losses, displacement, and despair. The challenges are huge; back-breaking, even. Syria has now arrived at a second independence, and this poses a complex task of national creation and reconstruction. A sort of financial Marshall Plan is urgently needed for the economic engine to restart again, and to improve basic services. Electricity is now only available to homes for three hours a day. Governments, like journalists, have not yet shown an adequate response to this drastic situation. Ironically, for once it is only about us Syrians, and not about you, the leaders of rich, secure, and prosperous countries.
From a Syrian perspective, priority now goes to building an inclusive political system. This is the real infrastructure for economic growth and for better national morale. The basics of this priority should be clear: political plurality and free elections every few years, citizenship and equal rights, free organization and protest, and free media to check those in power. The era of eternity, genocracy, political poverty, and cheapness should be absolutely over. In a new era, we will have so many new battles.