Ambiguities of Domination

"No, it’s just coincidence, although Syria is very interesting. They’re very different books. Lisa Wedeen’s Ambiguities of Domination is an absolutely brilliant dissection of the role that the personality cult around Hafez al-Assad played in maintaining authoritarian rule in Syria. It shows how the ability of these states to force people to publicly say things which were absurd was a very deep form of power. This is a notion that’s familiar from Vaclav Havel’s discussion of the Soviet bloc, and even goes back to Orwell – if you can force people to say these things then, in a sense, you’ve forced them to internalise the reality of domination. She goes into this in great depth. What’s especially interesting about the book for me is not just its description of the way Arab authoritarianism worked, but also that the Internet and Al Jazeera exploded that. All of a sudden people were freely mocking Arab leaders who, in the past, they had been forced to pretend to respect. People were making jokes on Facebook, or there would be talk shows on Al Jazeera openly mocking people like Hafez Al-Assad. It really eviscerated those cults of personality, and made it not just legitimate but even encouraged to become critical in public. That’s an extremely underrated precursor of these uprisings. And the fact that people agreed with them. Then they could see that it’s not just that I think Bashar al-Assad is a moron, everybody else does too. It’s a hugely powerful thing to suddenly realise that you are not the lone misfit, that in fact almost everybody agrees with you. People talk a lot about how the uprisings broke the fear barrier. That’s very important. But what happened over the previous decade was that the Internet and Al Jazeera destroyed that public culture of conformity. I think that is one of the most profound things that set the stage for these public uprisings."