People who live in one society often have great difficulty imagining what is happening somewhere else. For those used to the luxuriant and complex freedoms of western countries, where we have vast choices from detergents to the media, it is hard to imagine a place like Syria.
Syria is a very sophisticated. Damascus has been a city longer than anywhere else, and living together as a civitas is in the bones of the Damascenes.
But generations of oppression, of torture and fear, as well as media which anaesthetise the people, make it very difficult to read Syria. And the simplistic black and white approach which caused such chaos in Iraq seems to be in process again. The Foreign Secretary seems to see it simply as Bashar is a bad man and the rebels are good.
Bashar is a figurehead, surrounded by thugs, many of his own family. The system which holds him in power is a network of dependencies including people in every sect and ethnic group, and many of them, just like people anywhere, are capable of great evil.
And everyone lies. If not everyone, plenty of people are lying, telling half-truths, and wanting to spin data. In one sense it hardly matters who has perpetrated an atrocity; Syria, like so many countries which were part of the Ottoman Empire is now a place where people perpetrate evil on people they may or may not know, because the fear of the consequences has disappeared. And when a bomb goes off, it really could be anyone who did the deed, from so many twisted reasonings. So never admit, just lie and blamd.
For some, of course, there never were consequences. Before, any Alawites and their allies could do anything, rob a house, rape a girl, run over an old man on the main road, and know that they could walk away and no one would do anything. Now in the climate of hatred, the boundaries have been torn down for everyone.
And still there are the young men who demonstrate agains the regime. Not backed by Saudi money or arms, they want a say in their future, and they will throw stones and chant. These heroes may be forgotten in the chaos of the coming war in which Russia and Iran support the regime, and Saudi Arabia, backed by foolish westerners will wage a real, bullets and explosives and mines filled war to impose another grim oppression on these people, these Syrians who a long time ago were asking for some respect from the men who ran their country.
I won't forget them, the lads who don't want any deaths, and who are now already, many of them, dead.
