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The young man from Daraa by Kodak Agfa, on Flickr
There is a lot of talk on the Right about the tyranny of the government. There is this meme that we are oppressed here in the United States and that we must be ready to “rise up” an “take back our nation”. This kind of talk always makes me mad. The reason is that it is complete and utter BS.
Let me show you what oppression is like. I know that people have not been watching it very carefully, but what oppression looks like is Syria. In the last two months there have been protests there. What do the protesters want? More services in the cities and countryside that is not near the capital Damascus. They want to have some voice in who runs the country. That’s it.
What has happened? Well more than three cities have been shelled. Saying shelled is not very descriptive because almost none of us have ever been near artillery, yet alone on the receiving end. A tank or artillery shell makes a ripping noise as it flies through the air. It is distinctive and it add to the fear because when it lands there a huge explosion. As in walls of building collapsing.
If you are out side near this, you pretty much die. If you are a little further away you are in danger of shrapnel from the shell and from debris of whatever it hits. The pressure wave can knock you down, and will certainly leave you disoriented and your ears ringing.
These are weapons designed to be used against other armor and artillery, yet the Syrian government is using them against its people, the civilian people.
This is not the first time that there has been as massive repression of the Syrian people by force. Back in 1982 the city of Hama rose up in a revolution. By the end of the fighting there were between 20,000 and 40,000 people killed. The Syrian government used aerial bombing and tanks. They then surrounded the city and shelled it for three weeks.
As you might expect it did end the uprising, but that was not the end of the repression. To this day to openly talk about what happened at Hama is to invite a visit from the secret police and perhaps lengthy torture, just so people can know that they should never learn any lesson from Hama except that it is always bad news.
This is what real repression looks like. When a causal conversation with a neighbor might get you arrested and disappeared. When the media is so tightly controlled that nothing the State does not want heard is seen on TV. If you looked at Syrian TV right now you would find that there are no scenes of unrest. There is only calm in the streets and the government talking about “isolated criminal gangs” that need to be punished for criminal activity. Not a single mention of using tanks against civilians.
It is great and tragic to see that the Syrian people are really fed up and are not backing down from this bloody oppression. The unrest continues to spread as the Assad regime is to the point of shelling one of their major cities Homs. To give you an idea of how big a deal that is, it is the third largest city in the country and it is home to one of two oil refineries in the entire nation.
All this might make you ask why in the world is the international community sitting on its collective thumbs while more and more people die in Syria at that hands of yet another brutal dictatorial fuckwit? Well, it comes down to religion.
You see the Assad family and their bloody handed cronies are Alawi, and the vast majority of Syria is Sunni. The Iranian government has close ties with them and groups like Hezbollah are headquartered in Syria. This could lead to an incredibly volatile and messy shake out if the Assad family falls with Iran wanting to maintain its influence and the Sunni population wanting a bigger say in things. All of this on a boarder with an important US and Western ally, Israel.
The EU is talking about stricter sanctions against the Assad regime as is the White House. The problem for the US is that we have had sanctions on Syria forever and there is not a lot more we can do to tighten them.
It is good that the EU, who is a much closer trading partner with Syria, is looking to cut off the flow of money, but that is not really going to do a lot for the people who are under the gun, literally, in Homs and Deraa. They will continue to die in large numbers as the shells continue to fall.
There was always a fallacy in the Neo-Cons idea of a wave of democracy sweeping the Middle East. It was that it could be controlled. That when the people their got a little taste of freedom everything would be simple and easy. Even in the mostly peaceful uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia there were deaths. To this day they still are not what you would call free and democratic by any sense of the words, yet these are the best examples we have. Syria and Libya, Bahrain and Yemen are what these things look like when they go less optimally.
It is unfortunate that we are not paying more attention to Syria. What happens there will set a tone for a long time to come, no matter what the outcome is. If the regime holds on by base brutality and ruthlessness, it will be a lesson for those Arab leaders who are facing the first rumbling of unrest in their own populations. They will strike and strike hard, convinced that the international community it spread too thin to take them to task for it.
If on the other hand there is some resolution with the Assad family losing power (I don’t rate that very likely right now) then it would show that no matter how brutal you are when the people mobilize sooner rather than later your regime will fall. This could lead to other nations putting in reforms that while painful the elite keep the lid on unrest and bring them closer to a democratic form of government.
For us here in the United States we should always remember and cherish the fact that we are not oppressed. We have problems, we have income inequity, we have a population that is aging and suspicious of expertise. These are all facts and challenges we have to face, but we do have the right to say what we think, to organize for political change and not fear that we will be jailed or tortured just for wanting a voice in the direction of our nation.
The floor is yours.
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Mohammad_Syria Mohammad Al abdallah
Heartbreaking Video: During #Daraa siege, people couldn’t even pick up dead bodies http://bit.ly/iU1aky #Daraa #Syria #Assad
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Just terrifying and heartbreaking.
but this:
“These are all facts and challenges we have to face, but we do have the right to say what we think, to organize for political change and not fear that we will be jailed or tortured just for wanting a voice in the direction of our nation.”
not so sure I…well…agree. For example, there are GOP suggestions to criminalize undercover journalism, if it involves agribusiness.
Or, maybe apples and oranges, but what about the Wikileaks folks, and other whistle blowers?
Actually, come to think of it, I think that I may see two posts here, one on Syria and another on the US, or one on Syria and another on oppression and what it means to each of us.
But thank you for bringing Syria to our closer attention. My heart goes out to the citizens of Syria.
Bill,
We have 25 to 30 million people in this country who want jobs, better paying jobs, or better jobs; they are oppressed.
We have approximately 3.5 million people who are homeless; they are oppressed.
We have 50 million people in this country who are denied health insurance because they cannot afford it; they are oppressed.
We have more than 1.5 million households that have lost their homes to the criminal banksters who have stolen them via unlawful real estate forfeitures with millions more facing forfeitures; they are oppressed.
We have a federal government that oppresses people at home and abroad by:
(1)destabilizing foreign governments, replacing them with odious puppet dictators whom it bribes with billions of taxpayer money each year, and conducting aggressive wars imprisoning, torturing, and murdering innocent civilians to gain access to and control over valuable natural resources in foreign lands;
(2) protecting massive organized criminal behavior by the banks, oil companies, and the corporations that make-up the military industrial complex;
(3) encouraging US corporations with free trade agreements, tax breaks to outsource jobs and relocate to foreign countries, and failing to collect taxes owed by those corporations and their wealthy majority shareholders;
(4) insisting on austerity and deficit reduction after irresponsibly extending billions of dollars in tax cuts and reducing the estate tax to benefit the rich while doing absolutely nothing to stimulate the economy, create jobs, and protect the oppressed from predation by the rich; and
(5) oppressing people imprisoning them for long periods of time effectively institutionalizing them for non-violent drug offenses so that they have little chance of ever being productive citizens.
Millions of We the People have lost our jobs, homes, pensions, health insurance, and in many cases our liberty. We are ignored and have no say in how we are governed. That is oppression by any definition.
All we need is a match.
I forgot to mention that when we descend on Wall Street and the White House by the millions in non-violent protest, we are likely to get shelled and many will die just like in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.
But we will succeed because failure is not an option.
I am sorry but I don’t think that you can compare any of that to what goes on in China, Syria, Mianmar or places like that. Everyone there would love to have what we have. YOu are complaining about an embarrassment of riches and you are degrading the serious life and death struggle that they have with real oppression.
Tell that to former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and Bradley Manning.
Apparently you don’t realize how racist and corrupt the criminal justice system is in this country and how often police throw down dope and guns with filed off serial numbers on suspects they decide to arrest or kill just because . . .
There have been 269 post-conviction DNA exonerations in this country. These are the fortunate few whose innocence could be conclusively established. 70% are members of minority groups. 17 were sentenced to death and awaiting execution when they were exonerated. The average amount of time served by each of the 269 is 13 years. Many of these innocent people were selected for prosecution. Estimates of the rate of wrongful convictions in cases without DNA evidence range from 22% — 25%.
Yes, Bill. We have it worse than the people in the countries that you have mentioned. The United States also goes to war against its own citizens.
Due to the War on Drugs, it incarcerates and disenfranchises more people than any other nation on earth, although violent crime rates have been decreasing since 1980. At the end of 2008, for example, 2.4 million people, or 1 out of every 100 adults were incarcerated in federal and state penitentiaries. The official rate of incarceration reported by the U.S. Bureau of Statistics at the end of 2008 is 754 per 100,000. More than half of the people in prison were convicted of nonviolent offenses.
Even though the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, it incarcerates 23.4% of the world’s prison population. In stark contrast, consider the incarceration rate per 100,000 in the following countries: United Kingdom (153), Australia (129), China (119), Canada (116), France (96), Italy (92), and Germany (88). The racial composition of the prison population in the United States suggests that racism plays a significant role in determining who goes to prison. Although 12% of the population is African American, they make up 44% of the prison population.
Our political system is irretrievably broken and non-violent revolution is the only possible chance we have to save our country and ourselves from the greedy and rapacious kleptocrats.
It is a common criminal trait to distract from their crimes by pointing at others and claiming to be less of a criminal than someone else. There is no competition. All criminals deserve prosecution. Yes Syria is worse off than us, but the problems we have are also serious and overlooking them does no good at all. All the citizens of the world must constantly guard against repression and corruption in government. This article sounds like Republican propaganda, a distraction from the real problems we face. We will not be distracted, as complacency is an enabler.
Bill, the homeless and soon to be homeless have a ” life and death” struggle which is very real.
At the end of the day, does it matter if the cause of death is artillery shells or criminal neglect?
Syria’s problems are different than ours but we do have significant problems here at home.
Agreed, we should be putting our own house in order.
Yes, the oppressed majority in Syria are suffering horribly at the hands of their dictator, a murderous monster. Of course, what is happening in Syria today doesn’t come close to matching the horror that Bashir’s father Hafez delivered to that nation’s people in the early 80′s, when once again the only Americans who raised an outcry were the DFH’s, but still: Many are dying. That being said, a much larger number of human beings in various countries have died, are currently dying, and will almost certainly continue to die because of the actions of a much more powerful and ruthless killer: the president of the United States. Sputtering with outrage at the admittedly hideous but comparatively pedestrian crimes of two-bit foreign tyrants while turning a blind eye toward the multiple monumental atrocities being systematically committed by one’s own government has always been repugnant to me. It reminds me of the transparently ridiculous picture of Hillary Clinton lecturing the Chinese on the importance of respecting human rights. Only those fiercely dedicated to denying reality can pull it off without being garroted by their own consciences.