Sham will rise again!
Time for me to ‘fess up: I was away in Atlanta over the weekend and took the opportunity of a few days with elder son and daughter-in-law to neglect to blog for three days straight. This was my longest hiatus in 22 months or so of publishing www.peacefare.net It felt good. Atlanta also looked good:
This is not bad for a town that Union forces burned to the ground 150 years ago. The “rising up” poster was for a show of the Hale Woodruff murals from Talladega College, one set of which portray the African mutiny on the Amistad, subsequent trial and return to Africa. The other set portrays the founding of the college. Both were forms of “rising up.”
Some may consider my thinking convoluted, but Atlanta’s difficult path from the defeated confederacy to its current bustling self is the kind of thing I like to keep in mind when contemplating Syria. However profound, and profoundly wrong, its current travails are, they will pass and the historical forces that made Damascus one of the world’s oldest cities (if not the oldest) will have an opportunity to reassert themselves.
Civil war is anything but civil. We are now up around 200 Syrians per day killed. Many more are being maimed and injured. Hundreds of thousands have fled. Millions are displaced. How a ruler who claims to have the best interests of his people at heart can not only watch this happen but also cause it to happen is beyond me.
But as luck would have it, my airplane reading for the trip to and from Atlanta was Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail. They do a great job of explaining the phenomenon. Nations fail, they say, because failure serves the exploitative interests of their rulers. There is good reason why Atlanta’s renaissance occurred only after the fall of segregation and the establishment of inclusive, integrated institutions.
Bashar al Asad and his small coterie cannot survive in the kind of open, inclusive political competition his more democratically inclined opponents want to institute. Even if they could survive, they would not be able to exploit the country to enrich themselves and enable their continuing hold on power.
These are not just personal questions, but institutional ones. The institution of slavery, like the Asad regime, served the masters well. Neither served the bulk of people well. But the bulk of the people don’t count until they unite. The Talladega murals pointedly illustrate the cooperation between blacks and whites (in particular the abolitionist American Missionary Society) both in defending the Amistad mutineers and in founding Talladega.
The problem in Syria today is not only that Bashar al Asad is using homicidal methods to try to re-establish fear in the population, but also that the opposition is fracturing. I quote it too often, but Ben Franklin’s aphorism is apt:
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
Damascus has a long history of coups. The victory of one or another of Syria’s many armed factions is unlikely to establish inclusive democratic institutions. When Syrians unite, Asad is finished.
Dixie rose again because it was no longer exploitative, segregated Dixie. Ash-Sham [Damascus] will rise again when it is no longer al-Asad’s Sham.
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