aThe situation is alarming and unsettling, with Syria's brutal president Bashar al-Assad being ousted and his wife Asma and children fleeing to Russia shortly before his death. Although this cannot be called a completed revolution, the Assad regime can be called a completed regime, bringing an end to the brutal and bloody 13-year Syrian civil war. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, 580,000 people have been killed, more than 230,000 of them civilians, with Assad's forces accounting for about 90% of non-combatant deaths.
According to foreign correspondents, he never seemed like their type. Adrian Bromfield on the telegraph He has described President Assad as “clumsy, ferocious, and reserved in his demeanor.” John Simpson found him. “Meek and eager to please.” And who can forget how bloodthirsty and out of place Asma Al Assad looked? Like the wife in the miniseries, she's neat and reserved.
When spring broke out in Syria in 2011, Vogue magazine published a profile of Asma al-Assad under the title “Desert Rose.” At the time, Asma was described as the “freshest and most attractive first lady”, her husband had already killed more than 5,000 civilians, including hundreds of children. Journalist Joan Juliet Buck went on to say that “her style is deliberately unadorned, not the haute couture and glitter of Middle Eastern powers.”
It caused an uproar at the time. Vogue initially defended the film, but later removed it from its archives, and for a long time the only online record of the work was on a now-defunct Assad fan site. Buck denied that and said he submitted the word in January. The crackdown on Assad, which led to calls for his resignation around the world, began in February. The defense was a little weak, given that President Assad has ruled Syria as a totalitarian police state since taking office in 2000, but the uproar wasn't actually about the journalists themselves — later Asma al- – Called Assad “Mrs. The world got serious, and whatever the new task of geopolitical storytelling was, postmodernism couldn't cope with it. You can no longer look at the wife of an oppressive leader and note how elegantly she accessorizes. “Aside from the Chanel agate around her neck, she wore no watch or jewelry, not even a wedding ring, but her nails were lacquered a deep teal color.”
At least, that's how the scandal felt at first. Looking back, Asma al-Assad's profile did more than just close a chapter in history. Another one was open too. It was later revealed that the Assad family had paid for it. American PR companyBrown Lloyd James, $5,000 a month to broker the article. Even if it took two more years for Assad to use chemical weapons against his own people – which was in 2013, and with even more international outrage – it would not have had the same effect. would have already been well aware that his reign did not fall under the wider one. The world will call it democratic or admirable. It was essentially a provocation against the global liberal establishment, mediated through its bible of style. How far are you prepared to turn a blind eye to the right kind of access? Of course, there was no suggestion that Vogue received any payment for this article. Rather, being allowed to press their noses against palace windows and getting close to Assad's insane wealth was initially enough for magazines to ignore the human rights abuses and focus on the glamor.
Around the same time, Vladimir Putin was trying to cast himself as an action hero. Publish your photo I see myself shirtless on a horse, on a Harley, with a tiger. Who needs to fuss about kleptocracy when it looks so fun? Even if a dictator doesn't look or act like that, he could instead look like a giraffe (as people said about Bashar al-Assad) or the Joker or a clown or a reality TV showman. If it looks like it, it probably isn't. After all, life was very bad under him.
This impunity now seems very obvious. Despots were simply mocking the international democratic order for how unstable and negotiable its values were. But at the time, I was confused.
