Speaker 1: Hmm, what's committing my war crimes? I'm Robert Evans hosted
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards, uh, the show where we tell you
Speaker 1: everything you don't know about very worst people in all
Speaker 1: of history. My guest today is Anna Hosnia. Anna, how
Speaker 1: are you doing? Hello? That's my that's my impression of
Speaker 1: the bastard we're talking about today. Oh good? Oh that
Speaker 1: was that was a solid one. Yeah, we're we're talking
Speaker 1: about Bashar al Assad. Did you like my did you
Speaker 1: like my themed introduction? Yeah? I did. Actually, that was
Speaker 1: really wonderful. Thank you, Thank you. A lot of war
Speaker 1: crime stands in the audience today, Uh, now, Anna is yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, man, a lot of big fans of war crimes. Uh.
Speaker 1: I'm not really sure where this joke is supposed to go.
Speaker 1: I guess I can see why you'd be a fan
Speaker 1: of a war crime. All right, go on. Weirdly enough,
Speaker 1: we're talking about a guy who has a lot of
Speaker 1: fans in spite of his war crimes. So what how
Speaker 1: do you feel about Bashar al Assad? Um? You know,
Speaker 1: if you ever listen ethnically ambigue as the podcast I host,
Speaker 1: I talk a lot about how I feel like this
Speaker 1: all one I came. It all comes down to bad
Speaker 1: parenting and having a small penis that you are ashamed of,
Speaker 1: so you take it out on murdering everyone in your country. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems like a credible explanation for his war crimes.
Speaker 1: Small penis bad dead. We'll see if you change your
Speaker 1: mind at all as we as we go through the
Speaker 1: episode and talk about his background. All right, I think
Speaker 1: this is probably the hardest episode of the show for
Speaker 1: me to write, because I get really angry whenever I
Speaker 1: read about or think about Bashar al Assad. And I
Speaker 1: got angry enough that I just like got on Twitter
Speaker 1: and provoked a fight with a bunch of tankies, which
Speaker 1: are which are people on the left who defend any
Speaker 1: war criminal who's not American, and it's it's they're very
Speaker 1: frustrating people. So that's a weird like subsection of you
Speaker 1: pull on the left. Why why would you want to
Speaker 1: die on that hill? They love Twitter though, a lot
Speaker 1: of them, a lot of them on Twitter. So I
Speaker 1: guess I'll start reading from my little scripty scripty dude
Speaker 1: here scripted. I thought you just kind of like he
Speaker 1: just free bays it off the dom. I've got. I
Speaker 1: just write some lines down on my hand and then
Speaker 1: talk for I have very small handwriting, so you can
Speaker 1: fit about an hour per hand, you know, very like
Speaker 1: me Mento, but on bastards. It is because I wake
Speaker 1: up every morning forgetting everything about every bad person in history.
Speaker 1: Like I couldn't tell you a single thing about Hitler,
Speaker 1: just the names in my head. For some reason, it's
Speaker 1: a total mystery. But you know, yeah, that's what We're
Speaker 1: too familiar. But go ahead. I'm also trying to figure
Speaker 1: out who killed my wife. Might have been Hitler. That's Memento, right, dude,
Speaker 1: where is my wife? You know? Classic Hitler line. In
Speaker 1: the summer of two thousand fifteen, I found myself crossing
Speaker 1: the Serbian Hungarian border on foot and walking along what
Speaker 1: was then known as the Refugee Trail. That year, more
Speaker 1: than a million people, mostly Syrians, fled the blood and
Speaker 1: chaos of war in the hope of a better life.
Speaker 1: Over the course of several long days, I helped hand
Speaker 1: out food and water and advice on where to find
Speaker 1: holes in the Hungarian border fence. Through it all, I
Speaker 1: interviewed at least a couple of hundred Syrians citizens, men
Speaker 1: and women, young and old, anybody who spoke English. They
Speaker 1: told me horrible stories of barrel bombs killing multiple members
Speaker 1: of their family in the same day, of torture and
Speaker 1: regime prisons, of chemical weapons attacks, and the horror of
Speaker 1: picking up pieces of their neighbors and hauling them away
Speaker 1: in bags after a bombing. I did the thing it's
Speaker 1: my job to do, and I wrote about it, and
Speaker 1: then I went home and I wrote about other things,
Speaker 1: completely unaware that inside of my own country, a sizeable
Speaker 1: number of Americans on the left and the right, we're
Speaker 1: already hard at work rewriting the story of the Syrians
Speaker 1: Civil War into a tale where the dictator but shar
Speaker 1: Al Assad was somehow the hero or at least not
Speaker 1: the very worst guy involved in the whole thing. Uh,
Speaker 1: some of my listeners may have been probably we have
Speaker 1: heard variations of that story, especially if you're you're on
Speaker 1: the far left. So if you're a fan of my
Speaker 1: show and you're you think, but Charlissa, it's an okay, dude,
Speaker 1: which is a thing. For some reason, I just asked
Speaker 1: that you you listen through this till the end and
Speaker 1: maybe maybe learn a couple of things about this fella.
Speaker 1: I'm honestly very still stuck on the fact that anyone
Speaker 1: would think he's a good guy. That's really crazy to me.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I'm going to need more in full on that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh, And I think it's more common to be
Speaker 1: a little bit fair than instead of saying he's a
Speaker 1: good guy, they'll say that like he's not nearly as
Speaker 1: bad as these Lamaster whoever. And it's like, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: isis is pretty bad, but they didn't kill nearly as
Speaker 1: many people as char Elasad, Like, I mean, just from
Speaker 1: what I remember talking about on our own show, it's like,
Speaker 1: which I'm sure you'll get into, but just like buildings
Speaker 1: full of body parts, yeah, just unexplained missing people. There's
Speaker 1: a whole genre of pictures from the Syrian Civil War
Speaker 1: that's just bags that are are very small, that is
Speaker 1: like this is a person, Like this is what's left
Speaker 1: after Yeah, anyway. Bihar al Assad was born on September eleventh,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five, So we're off to a great start
Speaker 1: with a great birth date. He was the quintessential middle child,
Speaker 1: the third of five children. His father, a dude named
Speaker 1: Hafez al Assad, was a commander in the Syrian Air
Speaker 1: Force and a powerful man in the Baths political party
Speaker 1: that had come to power in Syria in nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 1: Now the Boss are a pan Arab quasi socialist party,
Speaker 1: although trying to equate both is m directly with any
Speaker 1: Western political ideology is a little bit of a fools
Speaker 1: game in my opinion. Uh, Bashar's mother, Anissa, came from
Speaker 1: a prominent Syrian family, so Bachar grew up with power,
Speaker 1: wealth and influence. Uh never never, didn't know that, um,
Speaker 1: But he also grew up as a member of a
Speaker 1: persecuted minority. The Assad's are an olive white family, which is,
Speaker 1: the Oloids are a set active Shia Islam that a
Speaker 1: lot of other Muslims consider heretical for reasons that I
Speaker 1: don't fully understand. All whites make up about ten percent
Speaker 1: of the Syrian population. They were traditionally very poor and oppressed,
Speaker 1: and Bashar's dad, Hafez, is one of those dictators who
Speaker 1: grew up very, very poor and had to like claw
Speaker 1: for everything he got in life, kind of like Saddam Hussein.
Speaker 1: Based on my understanding, his family got into power through
Speaker 1: a kudata, right, yeah, I mean sort of. It was
Speaker 1: a little more gradual than that. So by the time.
Speaker 1: But when Bashar was born, Hafez was not in power,
Speaker 1: but Hafez was a prominent man, and the bothists were
Speaker 1: in power. Um. And because the ola Whites, you know,
Speaker 1: it's the same thing in the United States, members of
Speaker 1: minority communities, blacks and Hispanics, but also like gay and
Speaker 1: trans people serve in the military at a much higher
Speaker 1: rate than the general population because it's a route to
Speaker 1: not only better economic conditions, but also to like a
Speaker 1: societal's acceptance for traditionally persecuted groups. And it was the
Speaker 1: same with the Olive whites in pre Bath Syria so well,
Speaker 1: the Olio Whites were only about ten percent of the
Speaker 1: Syrian population that were really overrepresented in the military. And
Speaker 1: so that is part of how the boss Is coup
Speaker 1: was successful in sixty three, and Hafez wasn't in charge
Speaker 1: at that point, but during the coup he wound up
Speaker 1: in a very high position. How you do it, that's
Speaker 1: how you do it. So that's where we are right now. Um.
Speaker 1: While Bachar was still a muling little infant, his father
Speaker 1: became the Syrian defense minister. Now, Hafez was an incredibly smart,
Speaker 1: hard fisted political operator, Henry Kissinger considered him a cunning
Speaker 1: opponent at the negotiating table, and whatever else you say
Speaker 1: about Henry Kissinger that that means something. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: he's negotiated with pretty much everybody who has a Wikipedia
Speaker 1: page in the in the twentieth century, like um, Hafez
Speaker 1: seized power gradually and the chaos that came after the
Speaker 1: disastrous nineteen sixty seven Arab Israeli War and then after
Speaker 1: a failed attempt to encourage a coup in Jordan in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy. Haffez's coup at home him is generally considered
Speaker 1: to have been bloodless. It's euphemistically known as the corrective movement.
Speaker 1: So that's how Hefez comes to power, is like, we
Speaker 1: tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: make ship work. I'm gonna I'm gonna. I'm gonna fix
Speaker 1: this stuff, don't you worry. Yeah, So now Hafez is
Speaker 1: in power. Bars like five years old at this point,
Speaker 1: so such pretty pretty we Yeah, with such confidence, I
Speaker 1: would never get it well with Hafez. I get the
Speaker 1: confidence a little bit more because he's this dude who
Speaker 1: really did grow up like dirt, poor and had to
Speaker 1: like fight for political power and stuff. So you get
Speaker 1: why a guy like that, Guy like that doesn't survive
Speaker 1: unless he's got that kind of just like gut level confidence.
Speaker 1: But he's the only one in this story who worked
Speaker 1: for anything, right. Yeah. Now, prior to Heffez, Syria had
Speaker 1: suffered under a revolving door of unstable and effective regimes,
Speaker 1: beset by constant military and domestic defeats and bungles. Hafez
Speaker 1: promised to change all that, but first he promised himself
Speaker 1: that he would die as the supreme ruler of Syria.
Speaker 1: To do this, he established an intricately interwoven net of
Speaker 1: fifteen security agencies, all of them tasked one away or
Speaker 1: another with monitoring and crushing dissent both within the government
Speaker 1: and within the populace. We will be referring to this
Speaker 1: tangled web of secret and not so secret police as
Speaker 1: the mukabarat, which I hope I'm pronouncing close to correct. Uh.
Speaker 1: That's the Arabic word for intelligence. It's used generally in
Speaker 1: a number of Arabic nations to refer to repressive police
Speaker 1: state agencies. It's also the specific name of the military
Speaker 1: Intelligence Directorate of Syria. But for the purpose of this
Speaker 1: episode will be using the mukabra as a broader term
Speaker 1: for just like the secret police. You know, that's that's uh.
Speaker 1: The people in Iraq called Saddam's police by the same thing.
Speaker 1: It's still one of those terms that like, if you
Speaker 1: know any iraqis like sence chills up people's spines, just
Speaker 1: like hearing that word yeah, it's it's yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a bad word. I'd go so far as to say, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure I'm getting it more or less close
Speaker 1: to right, but you know, it's hard to say Arabic stuff.
Speaker 1: The only thing. Yeah, Anyway, Fest came to power when
Speaker 1: I was about five years old, so virtually his whole
Speaker 1: life has been as the son of a man who,
Speaker 1: for all intents and purposes, was king of Syria. I
Speaker 1: found a good Financial Times article that discusses a book
Speaker 1: called The New Lion of Damascus, which was a vaguely
Speaker 1: pro a sad book written before the Civil War by
Speaker 1: an academic named David Lesh, who will be hearing from later.
Speaker 1: In the book quote, the Syrian leader describes his upbringing
Speaker 1: as normal, insisting he played soccer with neighborhood children ping
Speaker 1: pong with his father and his friends mothers came home
Speaker 1: to chat and cook meals with his mother and Missa.
Speaker 1: We had two very caring parents, and our happiness derived
Speaker 1: from having these two caring parents. Assad tells Lesh. But
Speaker 1: to what extent was Bshar telling the truth? And what
Speaker 1: did normality mean to him? There was nothing normal about
Speaker 1: their life, quips a family friend. The children rarely saw
Speaker 1: their father and they were always protected by bodyguards. Abdel
Speaker 1: Halim Kadam, the former vice president who resigned in left
Speaker 1: Syria in two thousand and five, says, the Assad children
Speaker 1: grew up in an atmosphere where they were targets, but
Speaker 1: also felt as if they owned the country. So I
Speaker 1: got a few conflicting views there about how the Assads
Speaker 1: grew up. I know which one I find credible? Which
Speaker 1: one the one where he and his brothers and sisters
Speaker 1: felt like they owned the country and uh never saw
Speaker 1: their dad great parents. Let me tell you shocking that
Speaker 1: a dictator, You know, you don't run into a lot
Speaker 1: of dictators who were super hands on parents. Yeah, A
Speaker 1: great way to get your dictator father's attention is to
Speaker 1: um kill everyone, which is one of the weird things. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean Assad grew up to kill everyone. Um, they're
Speaker 1: not the kind of dictator kids. Like I'll say this
Speaker 1: for Hafez, like they're not the word. Well, it's hard
Speaker 1: to say because, like you, part of me wants to
Speaker 1: say that the worst case scenario for a tater's kids
Speaker 1: is like Saddam's son, who was just like raping and
Speaker 1: murdering for years, but like you know, he probably never
Speaker 1: killed more than maybe a couple of thousand people, like
Speaker 1: because he just preferred to rape and murder people with
Speaker 1: his own hands. Um, whereas Assad killed a lot more people. Um,
Speaker 1: so I guess so like who's chiller, you know, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: who's chiller? Who's the cooler dude? Do? Yeah? Do we
Speaker 1: go with like Ude Hussein orshar Al Assad? Like you know,
Speaker 1: it's really up in the air at this point because
Speaker 1: like I doubt us. I doubt al Asad's uh ever
Speaker 1: raped anybody at gunpoint, which Ude Hussein did for like breakfast. Um,
Speaker 1: but honestly I get but was a little bit more
Speaker 1: like a little more uppity. I can imagine I'm being
Speaker 1: very high mane and he's like, oh no, I need
Speaker 1: to wash my hands, Like I imagine just being very
Speaker 1: like like he just cry babing about every little aspect
Speaker 1: of his life needing to be exactly how he needs
Speaker 1: it to be. So does that, yeah, does that make
Speaker 1: him like a worse person than the day who would
Speaker 1: like at least if Ude is going to murder some people,
Speaker 1: he's going to pick up an a K forty seven
Speaker 1: and like shoot them in the face, like from three
Speaker 1: ft away because he doesn't give a fuck like we
Speaker 1: team Dream yeah, or I mean, are we team Saddam's
Speaker 1: parenting or team huff as his parenting Battle of the
Speaker 1: Dictator Dad's Yeah. So Assad was a Bashar Al Assad
Speaker 1: was a child of the Cold War. He grew up
Speaker 1: knowing that he and his people were, you know, one
Speaker 1: fairly small player in a game board dominated by the
Speaker 1: U S and the U S s r H. He
Speaker 1: also saw two Arab Israeli wars as a child, both
Speaker 1: of which were disastrous for the Arab side of that equation.
Speaker 1: All this had an impact on the growing Assad, but
Speaker 1: the most significant historical event of his childhood was probably
Speaker 1: his father's bombing of the city of Hamma. Now, this
Speaker 1: happened in night at the end of a long and
Speaker 1: grinding Sunni rebellion. As a way of ending the fighting
Speaker 1: with an exclamation point, Huffez pounded the city flat with
Speaker 1: artillery for days, and then sent bulldozers in to flatten
Speaker 1: the rubble and anyone buried underneath it. Roughly twenty thousand
Speaker 1: human beings were murdered in just a couple of incredibly
Speaker 1: bloody days. The Hamma massacre was until recently, the single
Speaker 1: deadliest assault by an Arab ruler on his own people
Speaker 1: in modern history, beating even the Halabja massacre of Saddam
Speaker 1: Hussein Um. A Guardian writer who witnessed some of the
Speaker 1: massacre titled his coverage Assad Goes Beyond the Point of
Speaker 1: No Return, which would not be the last time a
Speaker 1: reporter mistakenly believed that an Assad had gone beyond the
Speaker 1: point of no return. Um. Yeah, Like that headline could
Speaker 1: be used six hundred more times. Yeah. Yeah, there's been
Speaker 1: what three hundred chemical weapons of strikes in the Assad regime.
Speaker 1: You could really put that after each one. This has
Speaker 1: gotta be introl see control v okay, Yeah, copy past that.
Speaker 1: I do feel like as journalists we have to retire
Speaker 1: point of no return because it's the same thing with
Speaker 1: Trump that he keep doing something and be like, oh this,
Speaker 1: there's no coming back from this, and it's like stop
Speaker 1: saying that. You don't know, nobody knows. It's almost tempting
Speaker 1: them to go further, like, well no, yeah, I feel
Speaker 1: like the only time that's ever been justified is when
Speaker 1: fucking Hitler shot himself. Then that's it. Yeah, he would,
Speaker 1: that's the point in our return. Yeah, okay, fair yeah,
Speaker 1: fair use for that title. God, what a way to
Speaker 1: go out to be like, oh, I'll just let use off.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh my god, yea out here and show
Speaker 1: your face. At least Saddam went out like a g
Speaker 1: screaming at everybody before they hung him. You know, I
Speaker 1: guess I'm on. I'm definitely on team Saddam as opposed
Speaker 1: to Team Hitler. But I feel like nobody but Nazis
Speaker 1: is ever on team Hitler. So you know, that's a
Speaker 1: tough one. I don't know if I'll touch that one.
Speaker 1: It's it's really a bad one to weigh into. Whose team. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would, you know, if I had a time machine
Speaker 1: picking up these people right before their suicides or executions
Speaker 1: and then having them fight to the death in a
Speaker 1: steel cage would be pretty good TV. It should be
Speaker 1: all of them. And then just throw a dragon in
Speaker 1: there too. Yeah, just just like a Komodo dragon too,
Speaker 1: one of those ones that just like bites you with
Speaker 1: its rotting teeth and so you slowly die over the
Speaker 1: course of days. Yeah, just s dom bleeding out from
Speaker 1: a Commodo dragon bite for three days. People take bits
Speaker 1: tweet at us if you have a UM machine, Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you have a time tweeted us, or just come
Speaker 1: visit us in your time machine, assuming it also can
Speaker 1: travel through uh space as well as time. Yeah, no
Speaker 1: judgment on what era you came from your personal business.
Speaker 1: I mean probably some judgment like if if you if
Speaker 1: if you listening to this like built a time machine
Speaker 1: and like eighteen fifty nine instead of like doing something
Speaker 1: about slavery, a little bit of judgment. Don't bring your
Speaker 1: plague up in here though, yeah, yeah, don't bring your
Speaker 1: plague up in here. Uh yeah, or bed bugs either
Speaker 1: of those. No cholera please, No thanks on the cholera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we already got plenty of musing like I actually have cholera,
Speaker 1: and like I found that very offensive for you to
Speaker 1: ask me not to bring my cholera into the situation
Speaker 1: cholera pride. Yeah, what color rivet is that? I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's a brown one, right. Yeah. So the Hamma
Speaker 1: massacre helped to ensure Hafez al assad uh nearly twenty
Speaker 1: more years of uninterrupted rule. It would not be until
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven that the Syrian state when next face
Speaker 1: serious resistance. But Char was sixteen years old when his
Speaker 1: father flattened Hamma. The lesson would have been clear to him,
Speaker 1: but he was not at this point, being grew to rule.
Speaker 1: That pleasure went to his younger brother Rafat, who was
Speaker 1: the heir apparent. Young Bashar's favorite parent was clearly his mother, Anissa.
Speaker 1: One Western politician described him as a mama's boy more
Speaker 1: than a papa's boy. Now, there's a lot of debate
Speaker 1: as to whether or not Assad's mom has been one
Speaker 1: of the secretly dominant forces in his regime, but it's
Speaker 1: pretty agreed upon that he was a mama's boy up
Speaker 1: until her probable death in two thousand sixteen. He was
Speaker 1: said to call her multiple times a week. This was
Speaker 1: actually something of a running joke in Syrian society. Syrian
Speaker 1: internet satirist call him b show or baby Baschar, or
Speaker 1: at least they did before he had them all murdered.
Speaker 1: That was hilarious until they all died. And now their
Speaker 1: body parts exist in small bags. Yeah. Yeah, and now
Speaker 1: they are filling small sex. Yeah. When Bashar was nineteen,
Speaker 1: his dad had a heart attack and Rafat tried to
Speaker 1: seize power. Unfortunately for Rafat, Huffez recovered and sent his
Speaker 1: eldest boy into permanent exile for his crimes. But Shar's
Speaker 1: older brother, Bassil became their father's next successor. Now Basil
Speaker 1: al Assad seems to have been an interesting dude. I
Speaker 1: found one Psychology Today article which was written by a
Speaker 1: couple of PhDs and makes the case that Bassil's bullying
Speaker 1: was a major influence on young Bashar. I don't consider
Speaker 1: that article supercredible because it's written like ship and it
Speaker 1: doesn't jell with what people who are close to the
Speaker 1: family report, but their doctors, so I'll include their opinion
Speaker 1: on here. Now, young but Shar does seem to have
Speaker 1: had issues with his brother. Um. I'm an Abdul Noor,
Speaker 1: who knew U Bashar when he was a young adult,
Speaker 1: told Financial Times growing up, Bashar was overshadowed by Bassal
Speaker 1: that seemed to be a complex. He didn't have the
Speaker 1: charisma of Bassal, who was sporty, was liked by girls,
Speaker 1: and was the head of the Syrian Computer Society. I'm
Speaker 1: in claims young Bashar was shot. He used to speak,
Speaker 1: He used to speak softly, with a low voice. He
Speaker 1: never asked about institutions or government affairs. Yeah, yeah, Bashar
Speaker 1: was too much of a nerd to be president of
Speaker 1: the computer society. Like it's kind of unfair that his
Speaker 1: sexy athletic brothers also gets to be the computer guy.
Speaker 1: Because that's one thing everyone agrees on is Bassil was
Speaker 1: also like the smartest of the Assad boys. Um. He
Speaker 1: seems like he really got it all. You know. It's
Speaker 1: so interesting like families like that that like um in power,
Speaker 1: Like they're so easy, like there's no empathy. That's so
Speaker 1: easy for them to just drop people out of their family.
Speaker 1: It's like, how dare you try and seize power? You
Speaker 1: ain't ever coming back here again. It's like it's your son,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, Momar Kadafi would agree with you,
Speaker 1: because Kaddafi had a kid who tried to overthrow him,
Speaker 1: who he exiled for a while and then invited back in,
Speaker 1: so ground him for a while. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: feel like if my son tried to overthrow me and
Speaker 1: take over the house, yeah I would. I would exile
Speaker 1: my son. Yeah, I would exile him forever. Exiling is
Speaker 1: so aggro it's it's pretty grow. But I've always so,
Speaker 1: I mean, you and I are going to have an
Speaker 1: issue at some point because it's always been a dream
Speaker 1: of mine to exile. Uh, somebody, I'm not surprised by that.
Speaker 1: So I I really I'm a big, big fan of exiling. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's it's an art more than a science. But you know,
Speaker 1: I love it. I love the love the craft. Bashar
Speaker 1: himself would later claim that his father didn't talk about
Speaker 1: work at all with his kids. There was a complete
Speaker 1: separation between politics and family relations in our house. My
Speaker 1: parents were very keen to make us live as normal
Speaker 1: lives as we can. So I don't believe that at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you were the son of the of the
Speaker 1: king of Syria. Uh. And it's yeah, it does seem
Speaker 1: like most of of the people who knew them at
Speaker 1: that time said like they I mean, it's it's one
Speaker 1: of those things. Maybe they think they were normal because
Speaker 1: they don't have any basis for comparison because they grew
Speaker 1: up the heirs to the throne of Syria. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I see you, Sophie. Sophie's signaling that it's time for
Speaker 1: an AD break, and I see her. I was just
Speaker 1: trying to finish my sentence. Uh this is this is
Speaker 1: Sophie's in a way exiling me for well, I'm actually
Speaker 1: going to be exiling all of our listeners to an
Speaker 1: AD break. So enjoy, enjoy your exile into the the
Speaker 1: green and bountiful land of capitalist products and services. Products.
Speaker 1: We're back, We're back. We're talking about bashaw Alissa be
Speaker 1: today a b shu b shu. Yeah, little baby Bashar.
Speaker 1: If I was him, that would be my like Twitter
Speaker 1: handle at It would be amazing to get into Twitter
Speaker 1: fights about char Alissade with Bashar Alisa. Baby Bachard, you
Speaker 1: fucking loser. He's like, leave me alone, block boy. He
Speaker 1: would definitely be a blocker. Yeah yeah. Now, But Shard
Speaker 1: did not grow up wanting to be a dictator, or
Speaker 1: at least he gave no impression of having that desire.
Speaker 1: According to an article in the Atlantic based on interviews
Speaker 1: with people who knew him, at the time. Quote, but
Speaker 1: Shard did not seek out recognition or popularity. He had
Speaker 1: no interest in being in the middle of politics as
Speaker 1: his brother did. In his school days. He was perceived
Speaker 1: by the Syrian society as a shy, reserved, weak, hesitant
Speaker 1: child who did not inherit any of his father or
Speaker 1: brother's intelligence and leadership. So WHOA, that's like just reminded
Speaker 1: me of The Godfather, like al Pacino's character. How he
Speaker 1: I'm not going to be involved in his like mafia
Speaker 1: business and then like next thing, you know, he's like
Speaker 1: slapping Michelle Fifer around. It's like, yeah, a lot of
Speaker 1: people have actually compared him to Michael Corleone. Some people
Speaker 1: compare him to Fredo But yeah, yeah, well, I mean
Speaker 1: because he kind of was he was the he was
Speaker 1: the like like he wasn't really like he was the
Speaker 1: heir to a lot of money and stuff, but he
Speaker 1: was not the air like he was never considered for power,
Speaker 1: like he was literally his dad's like last choice essentially,
Speaker 1: and so he didn't really Yeah, we'll get into that
Speaker 1: a little bit more later, but that is a really
Speaker 1: apt comparison. Now. Basil, meanwhile, was exactly the kind of
Speaker 1: kid you'd expect to be a dictator's son. He was
Speaker 1: an avid parachutist. He was an infamous ladies man and
Speaker 1: a huge facet of nightlife in Damascus. I think so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the pictures I've seen him, he was a reasonably decent
Speaker 1: looking dude. Uh. He was a fit, athletic and charismatic.
Speaker 1: Pictures of Bassel playing sports and looking fly as hell
Speaker 1: worth slathered over many a wall in Syria. Basil owned
Speaker 1: a stable of sweet sports cars and torras around town
Speaker 1: on a regular basis. He had a person Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: he loved driving real fast, which we'll talk about a
Speaker 1: little bit more in a second. Uh. He had a
Speaker 1: personality cult that rivaled his father's. Uh. Magi Rafizada Raffi's
Speaker 1: it a the author of that Atlantic article and a
Speaker 1: guy who grew up in Syria around this time, recalled
Speaker 1: when I was a student in high school, I would
Speaker 1: walk the busy streets of Damascus, Aleppo or Latakia and
Speaker 1: find the walls and windows of shops and buildings papered
Speaker 1: with posters and photographs of Basil. His images even were
Speaker 1: even plastered across cars. But there was not a trace
Speaker 1: of Bashar's presence. So it's all about Basil in these days,
Speaker 1: all about Basil. Having a good set of like a
Speaker 1: good set of hair is like so key to being
Speaker 1: a dictator because bashre not a good looking dude. Not
Speaker 1: a good looking dude. Like if you, if you have
Speaker 1: any like latent bully instincts, you look at a picture
Speaker 1: of the kid and you kind of want to give
Speaker 1: him a swirly, especially when he had that that little
Speaker 1: pencil than mustache. Um, just such a nerd looking kid,
Speaker 1: which is weird because Basil was apparently better at computers
Speaker 1: to um. Yeah, Now, for what it's worth, it seems
Speaker 1: like Basil, i'll assad, was one of the better case
Speaker 1: scenarios for a dictator's son. He wasn't a mass rapist
Speaker 1: and murderer, or at least not based on what I've read.
Speaker 1: I haven't read any allegations like that. It's entirely possible
Speaker 1: that he was doing a bunch of terrible ship, but
Speaker 1: it's not like it's He's certainly not like Ude Hussein,
Speaker 1: where you hear these stories about him machine gunning people
Speaker 1: at parties and stuff. Uh, And he seemed to be
Speaker 1: more um honest in interviews like in nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: Bassel gavem an interview uh that I think he was
Speaker 1: telling the truth. Uh quote. We saw father at home,
Speaker 1: but he was so busy that three days could go
Speaker 1: by without us exchanging a word with him. We never
Speaker 1: had breakfaster dinner together, and I don't remember ever having
Speaker 1: lunch together as a family, or maybe we did once
Speaker 1: or twice when state affairs were involved. As a family,
Speaker 1: we used to spend a day or two in Latakia
Speaker 1: in the summer, but then too, he used to work
Speaker 1: in the office and we didn't get to see much
Speaker 1: of him. Like that seems totally totally likely. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems like a credible representation of like growing up
Speaker 1: as a kid whose dad was a workaholic, which you know,
Speaker 1: Bishar will never admit to. So I don't know. Uh,
Speaker 1: Basil seems like it seems like he was as decent
Speaker 1: a dude as it's possible to be and be the
Speaker 1: son of a brutal dictator who murders twenty people to
Speaker 1: make a point. I guess that's how I'll describe him.
Speaker 1: But I never knew the guy like any dictator kids. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we we never never never worked comps. Weirdly, enough. I
Speaker 1: was pin pals with Jaif al Islam, Kadafi's son. We
Speaker 1: used to we used to play sudoku over the mail.
Speaker 1: But uh, you know that is so you. I've never
Speaker 1: heard anything than what you just. I don't, I don't,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't truck with sudoku. I'm not Kiana Reeves, okay,
Speaker 1: like any dictator kid. Our sources and how Bashar grew
Speaker 1: up are incompleted best. The official party line, at least
Speaker 1: is that the Assad children had a modest upbringing. It's
Speaker 1: emphasized that Bashar's mother thought this was the right way
Speaker 1: to raise children. However modest they're upbringing. But Shar his
Speaker 1: siblings lived in almost total privacy. Pictures and reports of
Speaker 1: their lives were kept fairly mump, with the obvious exceptions
Speaker 1: of Rafat and then Bassel. All the Assad kids went
Speaker 1: to college in Syria, which is something of an oddity
Speaker 1: among an Arab dictator's children. It's more common for them
Speaker 1: to like go to school in Europe or whatever. But
Speaker 1: uh Huffez was insistent that they do their college in
Speaker 1: uh In country, So Baschar went to medical school as
Speaker 1: a young man. According to Ed Schulenberg, Bschar's former supervisor
Speaker 1: at the Western Eye Hospital in London. Baschar decided to
Speaker 1: become an ophthalmologist and eye doctor after reading a book. Quote.
Speaker 1: He read a book about blindness and the treatment of
Speaker 1: blindness and I think the psychology about being blind many
Speaker 1: years ago, and it impressed him so much that he
Speaker 1: thought he wanted to become an eye surgeon now. Bashar
Speaker 1: al Assad himself claimed, quote, I like the idea of
Speaker 1: working in the humanitarian sector, so medicine was the best
Speaker 1: thing to take up. The question that I asked my
Speaker 1: father was I would like to be a doctor. What
Speaker 1: do you think? He told me, it doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: you do. The most important thing is if you succeed
Speaker 1: or not. So whatever you do, just make sure that
Speaker 1: you succeed. Holy shit, what to turn your child into
Speaker 1: a fucking dictator. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't matter what you do,
Speaker 1: just succeed at it. If you're going to be an
Speaker 1: eye doctor, you better be the fucking best eye doctor
Speaker 1: on in Syria. I don't even know. I don't want to.
Speaker 1: I don't want there to be any blind people in
Speaker 1: the world an eye doctor. Are you kidding me? Keep
Speaker 1: the funk out of here now. Some experts on Syria
Speaker 1: and the Assad suspect that char may have had a
Speaker 1: different motivation. Dr al Zizer of Tel Aviv University believes
Speaker 1: that Bashar's medical ambitions were actually pushed on him by
Speaker 1: his father. Quote, one can only assume that Assad, who
Speaker 1: himself wanted to be a doctor when he was young,
Speaker 1: pushed him in that direction. Um so, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like there's three different totally credible, Like all of those
Speaker 1: sound very believable to me. Well, I mean, growing up
Speaker 1: in a Middle Eastern family, you don't got to tell
Speaker 1: me that I was supposed to be a doctor. As
Speaker 1: my father said quickly that I need to go to
Speaker 1: med school. And I was like, I can't look at blood.
Speaker 1: And he was like, you're gonna need to get over that.
Speaker 1: I mean you should. You should tell your dad what
Speaker 1: I tell my parents, which is that podcasting as the
Speaker 1: medicine of the century. You know, that's so true, And
Speaker 1: it's funny because like I'm such a dictator of this office.
Speaker 1: Now you know you are you are? You are? Go
Speaker 1: on before I kill you? You do say that a lot.
Speaker 1: We're getting t shirts printed up go on before I
Speaker 1: kill you. I'm a podcast dictator. That's fun, Like it's
Speaker 1: a fun theme for a podcast. Now, whatever the truth
Speaker 1: about why he got into it, But char al Assad
Speaker 1: seems to have had a real passion for being an
Speaker 1: eye doctor, and from everything I've read, it seems like
Speaker 1: he was legitimately good at it. This is not one
Speaker 1: of those stories where a dictator's kid becomes like the
Speaker 1: head of the sports system like Kadafi's kid and has
Speaker 1: like no idea how to do anything. But shar moved
Speaker 1: to London and actus medicine. Like, he wasn't under daddy's
Speaker 1: arm when he was in London, he was working at
Speaker 1: a real hospital and doing real medical work. And he,
Speaker 1: from everything I've read it seems to have been really
Speaker 1: good at it and seems to have loved it. Um so, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was a pretty solid eye doctor. Uh, he adapted
Speaker 1: fully to life in the Western world. You want to
Speaker 1: guess what his favorite musician is, Leonard Skinner, Phil Collins?
Speaker 1: Oh that is that is a clear sign. You know what?
Speaker 1: Nothing annoys me more than him? Was it? Like? What
Speaker 1: band was Phil Collins? And again, shit, oh boy, now
Speaker 1: we're gonna have the band that Peter Gabriel originally was in.
Speaker 1: I think. So. I know he's one of the musicians
Speaker 1: that uh my mom listens to like and your mom
Speaker 1: a classic dictator type. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she is the
Speaker 1: gator of Genesis. There we go, fucking Genesis, a band
Speaker 1: so bad we forgot it so bad people who liked
Speaker 1: it became bad people. Yeah. I hate to say this,
Speaker 1: but his second favorite, or at least one of his
Speaker 1: other favorite bands, is a legitimately great band, the Electric
Speaker 1: Light Orchestra, which which does break my heart a little bit. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, everyone likes LLO like that. Everybody likes the Llo.
Speaker 1: But now I have this picture in my head of
Speaker 1: Bouchard ordering the carpet bombing of of of Aleppo while
Speaker 1: listening to Mr Blue Sky, and it, uh it kills
Speaker 1: me a little bit inside, but I know it happened.
Speaker 1: I'm going to disregard that thought. Yeah. Now, the young
Speaker 1: doctor fell in love with London, and he says that
Speaker 1: seeing the West helped him to open his horizons. He
Speaker 1: has a lot of positive stuff to say about travel,
Speaker 1: which I guess is appropriate because he inadvertently caused millions
Speaker 1: of Syrians to travel and see Europe themselves. A little
Speaker 1: bit of a really a joke, just a horrible thing
Speaker 1: that happened. Uh anyway, Uh, one day, on a foggy
Speaker 1: morning in January, Basil Alissat was tearing us through Davascus
Speaker 1: in his sports car. Alright, I said he liked driving
Speaker 1: fast in his sports car. On the way to the airport,
Speaker 1: his car skidded off the road and he crashed at
Speaker 1: high speed, dying instantly. Now, yeah, that's the end of Basil. Now,
Speaker 1: whenever the air apparent of a dictator, especially a dictator
Speaker 1: whose first air apparent had tried to overthrow him, is
Speaker 1: killed mysteriously in a car crash, it's natural to be suspicious.
Speaker 1: But all the credible sources I found seemed to agree
Speaker 1: that this was really just one of those freak accidents
Speaker 1: that happens from time to time and changes the world forever.
Speaker 1: Sounds like the son of um, a king uh in
Speaker 1: a regime, thought he um was invincible. So it does
Speaker 1: sound like that himself killed because he, oh, what do
Speaker 1: you know, not invincible. Nope. Turns out that if you
Speaker 1: crash a sports car with a shitty safety rating at
Speaker 1: like a hundred miles and our uh, the same thing
Speaker 1: happens to everybody. M mmmmmm. The only one of us
Speaker 1: that's invulnerable is Keith Richards and he should have known that.
Speaker 1: He should have known that now. That same January day
Speaker 1: in nine, Bashar al Assad got a phone call in
Speaker 1: his London flat. He was told that his brother had
Speaker 1: died and that he was now the successor to Hafez
Speaker 1: al Assad, and that he would have to return home
Speaker 1: to take up the family business. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: debate as to why Hafez didn't pick Bashar's other brother,
Speaker 1: Maher to rule instead, since Maher was a lot like
Speaker 1: Basil and Bashar had expressed zero interest in ever holding power.
Speaker 1: But for whatever reason, Huffez picked Bishara and at this
Speaker 1: pla heer the daughter. No. Maher's his other brother, and
Speaker 1: he's in charge of like the Syrian Republican Guards. So
Speaker 1: he's been like one of the bloodiest military leaders of
Speaker 1: the Syrian Civil War. Um. But there's kind of a
Speaker 1: mystery among people who knew the family as to a
Speaker 1: lot of them had expected that, you know, uh, Huffez
Speaker 1: was gonna pick Maher to uh to run the country,
Speaker 1: but he went with Bashar for some reason. We don't
Speaker 1: we don't really have a clear idea why. At this
Speaker 1: point it seemed too many Syrians and to much of
Speaker 1: the outside world, almost like this might be the plot
Speaker 1: of like an unusually gritty Disney movie. Like you can
Speaker 1: kind of see the upbeat version of this, where like
Speaker 1: a brutal dictator picks his shy, bashful eye doctors son
Speaker 1: to rule in his stead and the kid has to
Speaker 1: fly back from his life in London and learn how
Speaker 1: to rule. You make a really fun movie with that
Speaker 1: premise where he realizes that like he only ever wanted
Speaker 1: to be a doctor, and he gives his country back
Speaker 1: to its people and establishes a democracy, and he and
Speaker 1: his dad fight at first, but then his dad comes
Speaker 1: to love freedom and probably writes a skateboard at the end.
Speaker 1: I'm imagining this is a nineties movie. Um, it's like
Speaker 1: the Goofy movie. Yeah, it's like the Goofy movie but
Speaker 1: with like a brutal dictator. Um. Yeah, it's like a
Speaker 1: cross between the Goofy movie and that really bad Michael
Speaker 1: Caine movie about a dictator who hides out in like
Speaker 1: a ten year old girl's house. What what is that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's this, it's a it's a on premise this like
Speaker 1: girl becomes a pinpal with a brutal dictator of like
Speaker 1: a Caribbean nation played by Michael Caine, and he gets
Speaker 1: overthrown and he like flees and winds up hiding in
Speaker 1: her like tool shad. I think dit Dear Dictator, it
Speaker 1: should have been a good movie, but it was just
Speaker 1: kind of bad. Um. Like you hear Michael Caine playing
Speaker 1: like a dictator who's best friends with the little girl.
Speaker 1: That seems like it could be a really good movie,
Speaker 1: but it was just it was not. It was not
Speaker 1: a good movie. And uh, I'm sorry because now people
Speaker 1: are gonna want it. People are gonna watch Dear Dictator,
Speaker 1: and they're not going to find it very good because
Speaker 1: it's not very good. And I'm sad about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really is now, according to Financial Times, in the
Speaker 1: real world, uh, and not the fake world of the
Speaker 1: Disney movie that I invented about this, but the real
Speaker 1: one in which hundreds of thousands of human beings have
Speaker 1: been killed in the most brutal ways possible. Hafez al
Speaker 1: Assad basically tried to remake his nerdy doctor son into
Speaker 1: the spitting image of his dead brother Bassel quote. Assad
Speaker 1: underwent a crash course in military and political affairs and
Speaker 1: a successful image making exercise that would make him palatable
Speaker 1: to Syrian society. He inherited Basil's friends, Basil's office in
Speaker 1: Mount Cossion, overlooking Damascus, and even the Syrian Computer Society,
Speaker 1: a critical tool that would help him create an image
Speaker 1: as a man who could bring progress to a country
Speaker 1: that seems stuck. In the nineteen seventies, Bachard disappeared from view.
Speaker 1: We only started seeing him again in nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 1: and he had changed. Even his voice had changed, recalls
Speaker 1: Abdel Noir. He was more confident, more muscular in his appearance.
Speaker 1: So like made him go away and get a gym membership. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like it's the male version of that makeover scene
Speaker 1: where like the curly haired girl who becomes a princess
Speaker 1: gets her hair straightened and stuff. They made him take
Speaker 1: his pushups off, and they're like, you're gorgeous. Now you're
Speaker 1: really going to kill running this country, literally kill kill.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have to literally literally kill more than anyone
Speaker 1: in this century. I wonder if they're like, dude, but
Speaker 1: char I heard the country said you weren't cute, and
Speaker 1: he was like, oh god, yeah, maybe because he's not cute. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I mean, of course he has good hair. It's
Speaker 1: not really it's got that. It's like, I mean, who
Speaker 1: knows how real it is. Maybe he lost some of
Speaker 1: it and it's hair plugs. Now that statement alone is
Speaker 1: probably gonna get me killed by bachar Ela side. But like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, no, he's got a strike cruiser heading to
Speaker 1: your house right now. Like I heard she said I
Speaker 1: had hair plugs and she's dead. I mean he has
Speaker 1: a full set of hair I'm assuming is real. So
Speaker 1: that's usually that's enough. Yeah, it's it's it's I just
Speaker 1: don't notice his hair like It's one of those things
Speaker 1: we'll say on this podcast if a if a brutal
Speaker 1: dictator is hot, like Saddam Hussein, good looking young man,
Speaker 1: fucking Joseph Stalin, good looking young guy. Hitler always super
Speaker 1: weird looking. But yeah, you know Hitler, dude, you have
Speaker 1: to you have to be honest about the hotness of
Speaker 1: terrible people. It's otherwise what are your standards? And you know,
Speaker 1: but Charli's odd as a not in the hotter knot category.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, it's just that's the hill I'll die on.
Speaker 1: He's not a good set of hair, but a face
Speaker 1: that looks like an ass crack. Yeah, face that looks
Speaker 1: like an ass crack ass crack face being another one
Speaker 1: of his popular nicknames. As the nineteen nineties near their end,
Speaker 1: Hafez al Assad was increasingly sick and clearly nearing death,
Speaker 1: he began filling Damascus in other cities with posters of
Speaker 1: Bashar al Assad labeled Hope, which is not unlike an
Speaker 1: Obama campaign poster. Shepherd Fairy got the idea, Yes, Shepherd.
Speaker 1: Shepherd Fairy is a famed Hafez al Assad stand really
Speaker 1: a big fan of his marketing uh prowess. While Hafez
Speaker 1: battled leukemia, diabetes and a shitty heart, he trained his
Speaker 1: son and stocked the heads of his security and intelligence
Speaker 1: agencies with men he could trustman one of his head
Speaker 1: spies was a guy who was picked to sell Baschar
Speaker 1: as the hope of Syria. He did this by making
Speaker 1: deals with businessmen who wanted more opportunity. He's for financial
Speaker 1: gain then the nation's socialist structure would allow, according to
Speaker 1: rue La Kleef of the Financial Times, but charl Assad
Speaker 1: became a vociferous critic of bureaucratic corruption, and those he
Speaker 1: recommended were placed in key positions in government. It was
Speaker 1: during this period that I first met him in Damascus,
Speaker 1: a few months before his father died. He was casual
Speaker 1: and inquisitive, particularly interested in whether living abroad had deluded
Speaker 1: my Arab routes. He spoke about the scourage of corruption
Speaker 1: and serious economic stagnation, and was sympathetic to the cause
Speaker 1: of an outspoken businessman who was being harassed by the
Speaker 1: regime for his political and anti corruption views. It was
Speaker 1: impossible to know whether he was sincere, so I don't know,
Speaker 1: late nineties, but he's saying the right things, you know,
Speaker 1: which one of Kadafi's kids was sort of doing the
Speaker 1: same thing where he would he got famous for, Like
Speaker 1: I think it was site actually UH where he got
Speaker 1: famous for, like criticizing the Kaddafi regime to the international
Speaker 1: press while he was the heir to the regime. UH.
Speaker 1: And some people thought he was a real reformer. But
Speaker 1: like it's become increasingly obvious three time that like, no,
Speaker 1: he was just he knew his dad was going to
Speaker 1: die eventually and wanted to be set up to be
Speaker 1: in charge and the game, playing the long game. It
Speaker 1: seems like I don't know if he if Bishar started
Speaker 1: out being like, oh, I could be a good leader
Speaker 1: and then just went full psycho or if he was, um,
Speaker 1: just full psycho, Like I don't get it because it
Speaker 1: sounds like a decent person. But then like you know,
Speaker 1: just in the Michael Corleone way of like what what
Speaker 1: tipped him over the edge? Like was it just his
Speaker 1: father being like this is how it needs to be.
Speaker 1: You need to be strong and not weak, Like you
Speaker 1: need to stand up to your people and I don't know,
Speaker 1: like cut their heads off if they don't listen to you,
Speaker 1: like I don't. I mean, I guess that's why it's
Speaker 1: so secretive. We don't know, but like, yeah, nobody, nobody
Speaker 1: really knows the answer to that question. I Mean, one
Speaker 1: of my theories is just that like there's a lot
Speaker 1: of people walking around who could be who could murder
Speaker 1: millions if you put them the position where their continued
Speaker 1: comfort was was dependent upon them maintaining in power of
Speaker 1: a regime like this. Yeah, you know, I actually now
Speaker 1: that I realized that, like I've always said, I should
Speaker 1: never be in power because I would take a like
Speaker 1: a bribe within seconds, I'm like, yeah, sure, what do
Speaker 1: you know? Nobody should be in power. That's that's really
Speaker 1: the lesson of guys like Charlie, because if he just
Speaker 1: stated an ophthalmologist probably would have just helped people have
Speaker 1: better eyes, probably would have done that for decades and
Speaker 1: it would have been fine. Power is a hell of
Speaker 1: a drug, man, It's the worst. And I'm I'm a
Speaker 1: big pro drug guy, but not power. That's the only
Speaker 1: drug that I think the d e A ought to
Speaker 1: go after. Yeah, that's me. I'm always like, if that's
Speaker 1: what the d IT was for, I would be pro
Speaker 1: d e A. If they were just like busting guys
Speaker 1: who were power tripping, Like, sorry, sir, no, you're clearly
Speaker 1: way too high on your own supply. Uh literally a
Speaker 1: group in the d A that's like the power dripping dude,
Speaker 1: because we're coming for you. The day after Trump gets elected,
Speaker 1: they arrest all of America. Uh, like you guys are
Speaker 1: you guys are dealing power to a vulnerable man like
Speaker 1: he clearly can't handle this. Our presidents arrested for just
Speaker 1: power tripping way to no, no, no, I mean you'd
Speaker 1: have to bust us all for dealing. You know, we
Speaker 1: sold him the power. If you want to get high
Speaker 1: at fuck uh, consider getting highest fun on the products
Speaker 1: and services that support this program and or show that
Speaker 1: was a good That was a good segue, right, Sylvie
Speaker 1: loved it beautiful, all right, products, We're back skis. I
Speaker 1: say skis now sometimes because I'm a cool I'm a
Speaker 1: cool dude. Because he loved to ski. Man, I've heard no,
Speaker 1: I actually don't think anyone should ski, dude, Robert, Come on, man,
Speaker 1: you don't have to hide it comes everyone sending photoshop
Speaker 1: photos Robert's You know, it's funny you say that, because
Speaker 1: when I have a bad day, the only thing that
Speaker 1: calms me down is watching hours of ski fails on
Speaker 1: you You just type that on YouTube and it's people
Speaker 1: getting horribly injured. But there's ski fails and bass jumping
Speaker 1: fails are like I spent I wonder if most of
Speaker 1: those people are dead, like sucker, and then we just
Speaker 1: don't no, because like like I spent all week this
Speaker 1: week watching god knows how many videos of barrel bombs
Speaker 1: detonating in Syrian cities and like horrible things happening to
Speaker 1: people who did nothing. If you if you're going out
Speaker 1: there to go basse jumping, you know you might funk
Speaker 1: up and kill yourself. So like, I feel like it's
Speaker 1: fine for me to watch videos of people hurting themselves
Speaker 1: if if they're putting themselves in that situation. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: watch videos of people getting hit by cars and laugh.
Speaker 1: That's horrible. But if you're going into that situation and
Speaker 1: and that like that's something like you've crashing and hurting
Speaker 1: yourself is an integral part of the sport, then it's
Speaker 1: fine for me to laugh at it. I wouldn't. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't laugh at somebody getting hurt playing golf because that's
Speaker 1: not part of the sport. If you get hit in
Speaker 1: the face of a club playing golf, that's just a
Speaker 1: horrible accident. But it is. It is a little bit funny, right,
Speaker 1: My My principles are an ironclad. Uh, we're all a
Speaker 1: little bit of a monster. This is why I shouldn't
Speaker 1: be a dictator, because I would make people ski just
Speaker 1: to watch them hurt themselves. That would be funny. You're like,
Speaker 1: all right, set up the skis, set up the skis,
Speaker 1: bury the bananas and snow. Yes, yes, just put a
Speaker 1: tree in the middle of the path. It's fine. It
Speaker 1: was clear from the beginning that the young despot in
Speaker 1: waiting was insecure. One of his friends, Walbash was being groomed,
Speaker 1: later said quote. In his early years, he was learning
Speaker 1: on the job and he wasn't confident. He spoke about
Speaker 1: some of his father's aids as enemies, and he didn't
Speaker 1: have his own advisors. The security people would tell him
Speaker 1: it would be a threat to him because they wanted
Speaker 1: to control him. So, but shars kind of a paranoid,
Speaker 1: scared guy. There's one story I heard from a guy
Speaker 1: who interviewed him who like took out his microphone and
Speaker 1: Charlotte flinched away from him because he like the microphone
Speaker 1: looked just enough like a gun that he like freaked
Speaker 1: out because he was just so high strung and paranoid. Um.
Speaker 1: So you you'll hear that a lot, that he was
Speaker 1: like incredibly high strung and paranoid and like scared all
Speaker 1: the time. Um. It does really seem like he didn't
Speaker 1: want the job at least at first, just because the
Speaker 1: risk of getting murdered was so high. He'd rather be
Speaker 1: back in London listening to E. L O and cutting
Speaker 1: open eyes us Christ. That's the feeling you get. Hafez
Speaker 1: al Assad died on June tenth two thousand, His son
Speaker 1: assumed power shortly thereafter. This was actually forbidden by the
Speaker 1: Syrian constitution, which required presidents to be at least forty,
Speaker 1: but the constitution was quickly amended to allow thirty four
Speaker 1: year olds to serve, which was but Shar's age, that's handy,
Speaker 1: very nice. Family runs everything. Yeah, yeah, why even have
Speaker 1: constitution if like, come on, Hafez, don't don't play that bullshit.
Speaker 1: But Char gave an inaugural speech that was everything you'd
Speaker 1: want to hear from the new dictator who was replacing
Speaker 1: the old dictator. He said it was time to modernize Syria,
Speaker 1: to open up the economy to new businesses and new ideas,
Speaker 1: and to institute a raft of political reforms that would
Speaker 1: allow political parties and previously unheard of levels of dissent,
Speaker 1: maybe even something that vaguely approached freedom of speech. His
Speaker 1: inaugural speech promised democracy, transparency and touted the desperate need
Speaker 1: for constructive criticism and creative thinking. And to back that up,
Speaker 1: it even included criticisms of Hafez al Assad's regime. The
Speaker 1: international media obligingly ate this up. I found an article
Speaker 1: published the day after his inauguration by Mid East Realities.
Speaker 1: It was titled Bashar al Assad. They say he's a
Speaker 1: gentle man. Okay, okay, prop prop propaganda, prop prop prop
Speaker 1: ganda um quote. He's a thirty five year old media
Speaker 1: shy ophthalmologist who loves Phil Collins, speaks fluent English and
Speaker 1: is in no rush to get married, and expresses a
Speaker 1: keen interest in Israeli high tech. Although he was never
Speaker 1: the favorite son, Bashar Asad next week will be declared
Speaker 1: heir to his father Hafez. Sounds a little bit like
Speaker 1: TM like like fucking Perez. Hilton wrote this. Yeah. What
Speaker 1: occurred next has been dubbed by some as the Damascus Spring,
Speaker 1: which is accurate and that it did not last very long.
Speaker 1: Political prisoners were freed, European advisers were brought in to
Speaker 1: help perform the government. Young technology minded Syrians who happened
Speaker 1: to be friends with Bashar Whill brought into exciting new
Speaker 1: positions within the regime. For the first time, Syria's new
Speaker 1: ruler allowed his people to access the Internet such as
Speaker 1: it existed at the turn of the millennium. New political
Speaker 1: parties were allowed to form, and liberal intellectuals were allowed
Speaker 1: to form political discussion groups and even published some literature.
Speaker 1: The months immediately after Assad's inauguration were proved to be
Speaker 1: the absolute high point of Syrian civil liberties, according to
Speaker 1: Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma's Middle East Study
Speaker 1: Center quote, of course, it didn't take more than a
Speaker 1: few weeks before people were demanding regime change because the
Speaker 1: regime was so corrupt. It's stunk. The whole thing stunk,
Speaker 1: so any kind of critique had to lead to regime change. Basically,
Speaker 1: if you start picking at the problems in Syrian society,
Speaker 1: all of them come back to the fact that an
Speaker 1: incredibly corrupt criminal regime isn't charge so like you really
Speaker 1: can't allow criticism. Sorry, this just back to the Tinder
Speaker 1: profile thing. If was on Tinder, he would probably have
Speaker 1: every woman murdered who swiped no on him. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean absolutely could I think that would be punishable by death?
Speaker 1: Yeah I could. I could imagine. I can imagine about
Speaker 1: half of the men on tender being dictators if you
Speaker 1: follow that she rates Dogs account on Twitter, where it's
Speaker 1: just like women getting threatened with murder by guys they
Speaker 1: turned down after it a bad date, like fucking boy,
Speaker 1: I believe that exists, but I feel like for my
Speaker 1: own sanity, I should not check it out. You don't
Speaker 1: need to. But I think there's a lot of people
Speaker 1: out there, a lot of men, some women, I'm sure too,
Speaker 1: but a lot of men who, if they had an
Speaker 1: air force would uh would absolutely bomb a lot of people. Um.
Speaker 1: That's why no one should have an air force except
Speaker 1: for that that that air force pilot who drew the
Speaker 1: sky dick of Washington. That guy, that guy gets an
Speaker 1: air force, he knows what to do with him. Yeah.
Speaker 1: About six months into the Damascus Spring, in January of
Speaker 1: two thousand one, Serious Information Minister declared the idea of
Speaker 1: civil society to be an American term. President Assad warrant
Speaker 1: the Reformist movement quote. When the consequences of an action
Speaker 1: affect the stability of the homeland, there are two possibilities.
Speaker 1: Either the perpetrator is a foreign agent acting on behalf
Speaker 1: of an outside power, or else he is a simple
Speaker 1: person acting unintentionally. But in both cases a service is
Speaker 1: being done to the country's enemies, and consequently both are
Speaker 1: dealt with in a similar fashion, irrespective of their intentions
Speaker 1: or motives. So anyone who is attacking the regime in
Speaker 1: any way, is either a foreigner trying to bring us
Speaker 1: down or a dumb person. But I have to deal
Speaker 1: with both foreign spies and dumb people the same way.
Speaker 1: Pay attention to that reasoning. Yeah, that reasoning will come
Speaker 1: back a little bit later in this time now. A
Speaker 1: couple of months later, Bishar imprisoned ten members of a
Speaker 1: Syria is extremely milk toast political opposition. A lot of
Speaker 1: these were like the people he'd freed at the start
Speaker 1: of the Damascus Spring. This started a trend of serious
Speaker 1: president reimprisoning all the people he'd freed. One year after
Speaker 1: assuming power, he approved a new press law which gave
Speaker 1: the government total control over everything printed in Syria, from
Speaker 1: magazines to pamphlets. Many experts now say the whole idea
Speaker 1: of the Damascus Spring was never more than a pr
Speaker 1: move to gain international support for the regime in its
Speaker 1: early days. Others say it was undertaken earnestly, but resistance
Speaker 1: from old hardliners within the Syrian government forced Bishar to
Speaker 1: back off on his youthful dreams. It's hard to say
Speaker 1: where the truth lies, but there was evidence from the
Speaker 1: earliest days of Bashar's presidency that he was going to
Speaker 1: be just as brutal as his dearly departed dad. One
Speaker 1: of his first moves was to send his security forces
Speaker 1: into the city of Latakia, which was a stronghold for
Speaker 1: his exiled brother Rifat, who for some reason was allowed
Speaker 1: to remain the vice president despite being kicked out of
Speaker 1: the country forever. But Shar had many of her fat
Speaker 1: supporters disappeared. He also deposed the Prime Minister Mahmoud al
Speaker 1: Swabi and charged him with corruption, which was probably true,
Speaker 1: but no true reform Mahmood than for any other high
Speaker 1: ranking Syrian official. Mahmood committed suicide in his cell within
Speaker 1: weeks of Bashar's inauguration, So you know, starting things off
Speaker 1: with some murder. Okay, it's foreshadowing, almost as if it's foreshadowing,
Speaker 1: but I don't. I don't foreshadow sub Texas for cowards.
Speaker 1: The Namascus Spring was short lived, but this American September
Speaker 1: of two thousand one would go on to have a
Speaker 1: much longer lasting impact on Bashar's regime. Like all Arab leaders,
Speaker 1: in the wake of nine eleven, he was forced to
Speaker 1: make some difficult decisions, but Shar had to thread the
Speaker 1: needle of working with the US just enough to not
Speaker 1: get regime changed himself, while also standing up to America
Speaker 1: enough to maintain support at home, and most importantly, doing
Speaker 1: his part to ensure that Iraq was enough of a
Speaker 1: debacle that Bush wouldn't have the political capital to funk
Speaker 1: with the Syrian regime. But char al Assad was by
Speaker 1: all accounts, very successful in this, and two dozen four
Speaker 1: the Bush administration started to slam him hard for allowing
Speaker 1: his country to basically act as a highway for foreign
Speaker 1: fighters to enter Iraq. This was somewhat overblown because only
Speaker 1: five to ten percent of Iraqs and surgeons were foreign fighters.
Speaker 1: But those foreign fighters tended to be the ones who
Speaker 1: actually killed the most people. They were the most of
Speaker 1: the suicide bombers and the really dedicated fighters, so some
Speaker 1: reason to be pissed at that, and he definitely led
Speaker 1: a lot of people through. By the time w came
Speaker 1: down really hard on Syria, he had his hands so
Speaker 1: full with the disastrous occupation of Iraq that there was
Speaker 1: really funk all he could do to Bashar al Assad,
Speaker 1: which made a sad feel safe saying things like this quote,
Speaker 1: some see me is bad, Some see me is good.
Speaker 1: We don't actually care what terms they use. It is
Speaker 1: not right to apply this term to Syria. I mean,
Speaker 1: look at the relationship that Syria has with the rest
Speaker 1: of the world. If you have good relations with most
Speaker 1: of the world, you are not a rogue state just
Speaker 1: because the United States says you are, which, you know,
Speaker 1: given the timing, not totally unfair, but anyway, Bashard's regime did,
Speaker 1: of course, allow sealfest insurgents to pass through the country.
Speaker 1: These Sunni extremists gradually built up a base of support
Speaker 1: in parts of Syria. More than a decade later, they
Speaker 1: would wind up forming the foundation of the terrorist group ISIS.
Speaker 1: At the time, letting them fester seem like a smart
Speaker 1: way for Bashar to attack America while maintaining plausible deniability.
Speaker 1: Assad was also willing to work with the United States, though,
Speaker 1: particularly when it came to exercising one of his regime's
Speaker 1: great strengths, its ability to torture the funk out of people.
Speaker 1: See in the wake of World War Two, an S
Speaker 1: s Man Alois Brunner immigrated to Syria in an effort
Speaker 1: to escape being hung for his many, many, many war crimes.
Speaker 1: Now Brunner was the number one aid and the very
Speaker 1: best man of Adolf Eichmann, the single dude most responsible
Speaker 1: for executing the Holocaust. Brunner himself was wanted for his
Speaker 1: direct complicity in the murder of a hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: thousand Jews, but Shard's father, Hafez al Assad, welcomed Brunner
Speaker 1: into the Syrian intelligence establishment with open arms. Now they
Speaker 1: later fell out, and Brunner did fortunately die horribly in
Speaker 1: a Syrian prison, but for years he was an integral
Speaker 1: part in building up serious intelligence infrastructure, and most importantly,
Speaker 1: he taught the Syrian government how to torture people. So
Speaker 1: that's cool, literal Nazi helping helping build the bones of
Speaker 1: your torture department. Now, where this gets even more fucked
Speaker 1: up is because the Syrian intelligence agencies learned Brunner's lessons
Speaker 1: about how to torture people well enough that the CIA
Speaker 1: eventually came to them for help. A lot has been
Speaker 1: written about the CIA's own terrible torture programs, but most
Speaker 1: people don't know that we outsourced awful lot, probably even
Speaker 1: the majority of the torturing we did to other nations.
Speaker 1: Syria was considered the very best of these Robert Baer,
Speaker 1: a former CIA agent who worked extensively in the Middle East,
Speaker 1: later told the Guardian quote, if you want a serious interrogation,
Speaker 1: you send a prisoner to Jordan's. If you want them tortured,
Speaker 1: you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear,
Speaker 1: never to see them again, you send them to Egypt.
Speaker 1: So Syria is the CIA is like these guys, like
Speaker 1: we can torture, Like not trying to be humble here.
Speaker 1: We can torture some dudes. But these guys, they're the Kareem,
Speaker 1: Like the CIA is the Kareem Abdul Jabbar of torture,
Speaker 1: but like Sirias, the Michael Jordan's. That's so fucking crazy.
Speaker 1: Why would you ever that ship out loud? Wait, Robert
Speaker 1: bat Yeah, he's been very critical of a lot of
Speaker 1: aspects of the intelligence. Like I think he's trying to
Speaker 1: be a decent person and tell people about things they
Speaker 1: need to know about. I thought he was. It felt
Speaker 1: like he was like bragging, Like let me tell you,
Speaker 1: I think he's very sort of cogent le and honestly
Speaker 1: talking to the Guardian about like this is how the
Speaker 1: torture program works. You go to Syria, if you want
Speaker 1: people to like, I'm glad he said it. Someone needs
Speaker 1: to like. I'm not gonna say everything Robert Bear has
Speaker 1: done in his career has been fine and above board,
Speaker 1: but I'm glad that information is out there. Oh, it
Speaker 1: gets worse. The U S would regularly send people that
Speaker 1: apprehended to Syria with lists of questions for the interrogators
Speaker 1: to work through while they brutally tortured our captives. One
Speaker 1: of these people was Maher are Are, a Syrian and
Speaker 1: Canadian citizen, on his way home to Canada after a
Speaker 1: vacation in Syria. In two thousand two, Maher was detained
Speaker 1: by US authorities at JFK Airport under charges of being brown.
Speaker 1: Mayer was not a terrorist, but the U S Intelligence
Speaker 1: agencies thought he might be, so they sent him over
Speaker 1: to Syria. Here's hell. A US judge later summarized what
Speaker 1: happened to him quote. During his first twelve days in
Speaker 1: Syrian detention, are Are was interrogated for eighteen hours per
Speaker 1: day and was physically and psychologically tortured. He was beaten
Speaker 1: on his palms hips and low, we're back with a
Speaker 1: two inch thick electric cable. His captors also used their
Speaker 1: fists to beat him on his stomach, his face, in
Speaker 1: the back of his neck. He was subjected to excruciating
Speaker 1: pain and pleaded with his captors to stop, but they
Speaker 1: would not. He was placed in a room where he
Speaker 1: could hear the screams of other detainees being tortured, and
Speaker 1: was told that he too would be placed in a
Speaker 1: spine breaking chair, hung upside down an attire for beatings,
Speaker 1: and subjected to electric shocks to lessen his exposure to
Speaker 1: the torture. Or are falsely confessed, among other things, to
Speaker 1: having trained with terrorists and Afghanistan, even though he had
Speaker 1: never been to Afghanistan and had never been involved in
Speaker 1: terrorist activity. Cool so cool. We Uh, that's one of
Speaker 1: those things. It's both like if you on the US,
Speaker 1: if you're like a patriotic American who gets like two
Speaker 1: up your own ass about how bad these Arab dictators are,
Speaker 1: like our government was happy to use them to torture people,
Speaker 1: But also like if you're a leftist getting to uppity
Speaker 1: about Bashar al Assad being an anti imperialist, he was
Speaker 1: fine to torture people for the CIA. Fuck all of them, like,
Speaker 1: fuck all of them, well, I mean just getting picked
Speaker 1: up for being brown is just you know, yeah, the
Speaker 1: fuck yeah, it's it's all very frustrating. Over the early odds,
Speaker 1: Bishar gradually grew into his role as supreme ruler of Syria.
Speaker 1: He allowed the US to forces Yeah, there we go,
Speaker 1: there's our boy. Uh. He allowed the US to forces
Speaker 1: soldiers out of their years long occupation of Lebanon, something
Speaker 1: he felt he should have received more international gratitude for doing.
Speaker 1: In two thousand six, Hezbollah, a group heavily supported by
Speaker 1: the Syrian government, went to war with Israel. It did
Speaker 1: not go well, but Hezbollah survived, which was widely seen
Speaker 1: as a victory. U Bashar saw this a proof that
Speaker 1: his regime was now safe. If America and Israel could
Speaker 1: not take out Hezbollah, they surely would not be able
Speaker 1: to remove him from power. This wound up being a
Speaker 1: completely accurate guess. Uh. David Lesh, a professor of Middle
Speaker 1: East history who met with Bishard dozens of times during
Speaker 1: this period, recalls his evolution quote in May two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: amid Bashar's reelection and a referendum to another seven year term,
Speaker 1: I noticed something in him that I had not detected before,
Speaker 1: self satisfaction. Maybe this is inevitable in a neo patrimonial
Speaker 1: authoritarian state, and maybe he was getting his due after
Speaker 1: such a tough ride. But Bashar has been a very
Speaker 1: unpretentious leader, even self deprecating. Despite being surrounded by very
Speaker 1: dangerous circumstances, he never seemed to take himself too seriously. Indeed,
Speaker 1: one time I asked him to talk about his greatest
Speaker 1: accomplishments to date, and he responded that perhaps we should
Speaker 1: spend more time on his biggest failures. He is not
Speaker 1: a commanding figure at first glance. Soft spoken, gregarious, with
Speaker 1: a childlike laugh, he does not fit the typical profile
Speaker 1: of a dictator. This was even the case when he
Speaker 1: ran unopposed in a referendum. Visiting a polling station, I
Speaker 1: observed that each voter had to check the yes or
Speaker 1: no box in public amid a band playing and people
Speaker 1: singing pro Bishar tuns. It would be an intrepid voter
Speaker 1: who would check no, especially with security personnel, no doubt
Speaker 1: watching closely. The ba Shar posters draped over almost every
Speaker 1: standing structure and out of every window, and the I
Speaker 1: love bisha are in English and Arabic pens pendance and
Speaker 1: billboards belied his issuing of such cultish popular behavior to date.
Speaker 1: But Shar understood that the vote to re elect him
Speaker 1: was not an accurate barometer of his real standing in
Speaker 1: the country. He said it was more important to look
Speaker 1: at turnout rates for voters, as those who did not
Speaker 1: vote were more than likely to have voted no. According
Speaker 1: to Syrian estimates, the voter turnout rate was still a
Speaker 1: very favorable response for Bashar. I'm so stuck on how
Speaker 1: they just described him self deprecating. You know, Lesha is
Speaker 1: an interesting figure because he wrote a very pro Bichard
Speaker 1: book before the Civil War, and then after the Civil
Speaker 1: War wrote some really anti Bashar stuff like came around
Speaker 1: to be like Okay, no, this guy is a monster
Speaker 1: and and has been one of the more useful figures
Speaker 1: in trying to analyze the question you asked earlier, like
Speaker 1: was he always a monster? Like how did this this
Speaker 1: like happen? Like what was the switch? It sounds like
Speaker 1: the way that guy described him, he's like a real
Speaker 1: Jekyl and Hide character, Like there's literally there's literally a
Speaker 1: stuff the uh called Bashar al Assad jekyl and Hide
Speaker 1: or something like yeah, like no, like it's it's what
Speaker 1: you're saying is like really valid because a lot of
Speaker 1: people have had these same sort of realizations. Um, there's
Speaker 1: enough hild like giggle, it's like the fun. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: there's enough stories about him that paint him in that
Speaker 1: light for me to think, Okay, well they're probably not.
Speaker 1: They have no reason to lie because like Lesha's you know,
Speaker 1: it's been pretty pretty decent about like, yeah, I got
Speaker 1: him wrong and stuff like either it was a facade
Speaker 1: he deliberately put up, or a guy like that is
Speaker 1: perfectly capable of killing half a million people. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: you kind of pick which one you want to believe,
Speaker 1: But one of the two seems to be the case now.
Speaker 1: But Charol Assad was optimistic about his ability to keep
Speaker 1: a sodding. During the Obama administration, US foreign policy and
Speaker 1: in public will had turned hard away from intervention. The
Speaker 1: new president had promised to withdraw troop from Iraq. Senator
Speaker 1: John Carey was sent to Damascus to meet with Bihar
Speaker 1: and restart Syrian Israeli peace negotiations. Over the next few years,
Speaker 1: Carrie and Assad hung out a lot, speaking regularly on
Speaker 1: the telephone. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie also became friends.
Speaker 1: With the Assads. This was reveal your face. What Yeah,
Speaker 1: you didn't call that one, did you? What the fuck? Oh?
Speaker 1: You are about to get what the funk here? Um?
Speaker 1: This next bit is quite quite the ride. Wait what year? This?
Speaker 1: This is two thousand, like eleven? That is the fuck,
Speaker 1: brand Jelina, Dude, I hope Bascher broke them up. I
Speaker 1: hope so too. I hope so too, and I hope
Speaker 1: that uh he provided no emotional support when they were
Speaker 1: going through that. Yeah now brand Alina's uh friendship with
Speaker 1: the Assad was revealed in a February two thousand eleven
Speaker 1: Vogue article titled A Rose in the Desert about Ozma
Speaker 1: al Assad Bashar's wife. Oh the fucking pros you're about
Speaker 1: to hear and oh it's bad quote. When Angelina Jolie
Speaker 1: came with Brad Pitt for the United Nations in two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, she was impressed by the First Lady's efforts
Speaker 1: to encourage empowerment among Iraqi and Palestinian refugees, but alarmed
Speaker 1: by the Assad's idea of safety. My husband was driving
Speaker 1: ass All to lunch, says Ozma al Asad, and out
Speaker 1: of the corner of my eye, I could see Brad
Speaker 1: Pitt was fidgeting. I turned around and asked, is anything wrong?
Speaker 1: Where's your security? Asked Pitt? So I started teasing him.
Speaker 1: See that old woman on the street, that's one of them,
Speaker 1: and that old guy crossing the road that's the other one.
Speaker 1: They both laugh. The President joins in on the punchline.
Speaker 1: Brad Pitt wanted to send his security guards here to
Speaker 1: come and get some training in that. In that funny,
Speaker 1: I can all fuck themselves. I I hate everybody in
Speaker 1: that story. That's the worst thing in that old lady.
Speaker 1: It's like, are you fucking kidding me? You're gonna murder
Speaker 1: all these people suits, Like all of these people will
Speaker 1: be dead from barrel bombs in like a year and
Speaker 1: a half now. The whole article was filled with fawning
Speaker 1: praise for sirious first Lady. In case that excerpt doesn't
Speaker 1: give you a clear idea of the tone, here's the
Speaker 1: opening paragraph, fucking strap in on a quote. Yea asm
Speaker 1: Alissad is glamorous, young, and very chic, the freshest and
Speaker 1: most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the
Speaker 1: coutra and bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power, but aliberate
Speaker 1: lack of adornment. She's a rare combination, a thin, long
Speaker 1: limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with
Speaker 1: cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her the element of light
Speaker 1: in a country full of shadow zones. She is the
Speaker 1: first Lady of Syria. How you doing there? I know
Speaker 1: that is Is this article still online? No? No, I
Speaker 1: think I think the I think they should have left
Speaker 1: it up so they could be eternally shamed. There are
Speaker 1: copies of it, and I will link you to the
Speaker 1: way Back Machine archive because people should read it and
Speaker 1: throw shame on Vogue for the rest of time. That
Speaker 1: is such a dangerous description of a human being who
Speaker 1: has made who's basically involved in some monstrous city. That
Speaker 1: is the journalistic equivalent of getting blackout drunk and then
Speaker 1: driving a truck down the main thoroughfare of town like that.
Speaker 1: That's like morally equivalent. The reason that I hope, honestly,
Speaker 1: if I saw Brad Pitt and he looked like ship
Speaker 1: and he was like, yeah, I'm just not going through
Speaker 1: a good time, I'd be like, yeah, you should never
Speaker 1: go through a good time ever again. Fucking couple. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: gross and it gets grosser. The Vogue article praise Syria
Speaker 1: for being the safest country in the Middle East. In
Speaker 1: August two thou eleven, The Hill Reports reported that lobbying
Speaker 1: firm Brown Lloyd James had been paid five thousand dollars
Speaker 1: a month by the Syrian regime to publish and manage
Speaker 1: that Vogue article. So that makes sense. The puff piece
Speaker 1: ended with a few paragraphs about the Assads celebrating Christmas
Speaker 1: in Damascus. I think you'll find this very heartwarming, Anna quote.
Speaker 1: Two hundred children dressed variously as elves, reindeers, or candy
Speaker 1: canes share the stage with members of the National Orchestra
Speaker 1: who are done up as elves. The show becomes a
Speaker 1: full on songfest, with the elves and reindeer and candy
Speaker 1: cames giving all their hallelujah and joy to the world.
Speaker 1: The carols slide into a more serpentine rhythm. An Arabic
Speaker 1: rap group takes over, and then it's back to Broadway mode.
Speaker 1: The President whispers, all of these styles belong to our culture.
Speaker 1: This is how you fight extremism through art. Breast bells
Speaker 1: are handed out. Now we're all singing jingle bell rock.
Speaker 1: Audience members shaking their bell, singing, crying and laughing. This
Speaker 1: is the diversity you want to see in the Middle East,
Speaker 1: says the president, ringing his bell. This is how you
Speaker 1: can have peace. I'm sorry, Okay, let's die first, He says.
Speaker 1: All these styles are from Syrian. Well, I mean Syria
Speaker 1: has like it's got Christians and it has you know,
Speaker 1: Arabs rapping and stuff. That he was trying to say that,
Speaker 1: like all of these religions are part of our culture
Speaker 1: and like, you know, we made that broadway. If if
Speaker 1: he had actually opened up Syria and not murdered hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of people, it would be a heartwarming story.
Speaker 1: But you know, on January twelve, less than one year
Speaker 1: and exactly one Christmas after the publication of that Vogue article,
Speaker 1: Syrian regime forces shot a hundred and two people dead
Speaker 1: in protests across the country. They shot ninety eight more
Speaker 1: people dead on January. On February four, two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: almost exactly a year after that Vogue article, Bashar al
Speaker 1: Assad ordered his artillery to fire indiscriminately at the city
Speaker 1: of Halmes, killing more than four hundred civilians in a
Speaker 1: single bloody day. Now we're getting a little bit ahead
Speaker 1: of ourselves. On part two, we'll talk about the Arab
Speaker 1: Spring and how Bashar's regime went from playing it openness
Speaker 1: to murdering hundreds of thousands of people. For now, I
Speaker 1: want to note that Vogue eventually pulled their profile of
Speaker 1: Ozma al Assad. In an interview with The Atlantic, the
Speaker 1: Stories editor, a guy named Chris Knudson, said, quote, we
Speaker 1: felt that a personal interview with Sirius first Lady would
Speaker 1: hold strong interest for our readers. We thought we could
Speaker 1: open up that very closed world a little bit. Are
Speaker 1: you fucking kidding me? Yeah? You funk off man, I
Speaker 1: have an idea. Suck my dick. Sorry I don't you know,
Speaker 1: but you fuck you. The closest thing that article gets
Speaker 1: to like acknowledging the horribly dark side of the Syrian
Speaker 1: regime is by saying it there are shadow zones and Syria.
Speaker 1: But it only mentioned shadow zones to talk about how
Speaker 1: pretty Ozma Allissada is so doesn't really count. It's like, Wow,
Speaker 1: she's so gorgeous around all these body parts. She looks
Speaker 1: so pretty next to these Macabra police torturing people. God,
Speaker 1: look at her, compared to like that, like severed head.
Speaker 1: Isn't she Gorges super good next to this pile of limbs?
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Everyone involved in that article should take
Speaker 1: a strong, hard look at themselves in the mirror. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they really ought to. Now, Anna, you feel like plugging
Speaker 1: your plugables? I feel like dying. Uh. You know you
Speaker 1: can find me Anna host me on Twitter A and
Speaker 1: and A H O S S and I E h.
Speaker 1: I will be tweeting NonStop and Angelina and Brad asking
Speaker 1: to explain themselves. Uh. And you can also listen to
Speaker 1: my podcast with sharn you Nez. We host a podcast.
Speaker 1: They're called Ethnically Ambiguous. Check it outsall Middle Eastern news
Speaker 1: and politics and hey, you know, maybe well we'll get
Speaker 1: in depth on how to get Angelina and Brad on
Speaker 1: the show and corner them. Yeah, oh man, that could
Speaker 1: be our new podcast, is just cornering Brad Pitt and
Speaker 1: Angelina Jolie and making them feel bad. I do wonder
Speaker 1: if he ever got his bodyguards out there to train,
Speaker 1: and if they're all psycho killers. Now yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: hope so, I hope. I hope for Brad's sake he did,
Speaker 1: because we are going to be throwing some rotten food
Speaker 1: at him, Um, that is the plan. So I'm Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: You can find me on Twitter at I right, okay.
Speaker 1: You can find this podcast on Twinstagram's the the both
Speaker 1: the social meds at at Bastard's pod. You can find
Speaker 1: us on the web at behind the Bastards dot com.
Speaker 1: I have another podcast called it Could Happen Here, which
Speaker 1: is about what if a civil war but in America?
Speaker 1: And it's also a real bummer like this podcast. So
Speaker 1: if you like being bummed out, maybe you like it.
Speaker 1: Let me let me guess Angelina is running like a
Speaker 1: Confederate army. Now, yes, yes, yes, Angelina Julie head of
Speaker 1: the neo Confederate forces. That is so her like. It's
Speaker 1: the obvious man. Yeah. Could you imagine a tabloid headline
Speaker 1: being like Angelina in charge of the Gate Army were
Speaker 1: like tabloid such lies? Also T shirts ke public Behind
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Speaker 1: do something decides to listen to this podcast because it's over.