A Circus of the Grotesque

The excellent Channel 4 documentary that was aired last night gave a disturbing insight as to how bad things have become in Assad's kingdom, formerly known as Syria. Perhaps what was most novel to me was how desensitized I've become to watching the horrific YouTube clips of torture, murder and death that have emerged from my country. I could tell that because of the outraged comments that I could see on Twitter and Facebook of people who had never known the full extent of the repression in Syria, and had never seen anything this horrific shown on television before. In short, I've gotten used to seeing this stuff, and I'm not happy about that. Syria has turned into a circus for sadists to satisfy their sick fetishes.

In other news, the Syrian regime is going to execute soldiers that had defected from Assad's armies. Dubbed "traitors", this news comes shortly after the regime signed an agreement with the Arab League agreeing to let in a number of observers and after 100 to 110 people were reported killed by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which, as we all know, is being bashed by so-called "leftist" sceptics who find the deaths of twenty, let alone one hundred, Syrians per day less outrageous than the "standards" of impartiality and fairness that they expect; fair play and all that. It begs the question why they think they are anti-imperialists in the first place when their outrage is only provoked by some injustices and not others.

Anyway, I digress. A fellow blogger, Razan Ghazzawi, was released recently after being arrested on her way to a conference in Amman, Jordan. She's been charged with the ridiculous crime of "weakening the national morale", as if Assad and his jolly band of desperadoes are not doing a fine job of that already. If I was her I wouldn't know what would make me angrier, the stupidity of the Assad regime, or that unflattering picture of her that is circulating widely - not her finest, bless her cotton socks.

This whole Russian interest in Syria's affairs shows just how important this tiny country is for what I like to refer to as the "anti-Western" camp. Not even Gaddafi's Libya was ever able to muster such international support from the bad boys of our present international system. In spite of all this, I am more certain that with each passing day, Assad's days are numbered. I only need to remember the rage I felt at watching Assad's thugs beating and humiliating Syrians for me to realise that the Syrians will never accept his regime again. Regardless of what some people say about involving NATO and getting some foreign power to intervene, I think that there is no such thing as a benevolent foreign intervention. Then again, I won't tell anybody that this is what should happen, because I haven't got a right to tell people who are risking their lives what I think they should do. I can only advise with whatever objective analysis that distance might offer.