I am not a Bashar al-Assad expert, but in his good days I have been to the National Museum in Damascus where the existence of Bashar al-Assad was celebrated in several rooms. It was in 2006 and he must have been ruthless even then because our tour guide kept harping on about the pleasant aspects of the man’s character without being asked during all the brightly realistic paintings, while her face told a different story.
At the time of writing, mass graves containing an estimated 100 to 150,000 opponents of his regime have been opened. According to local residents, the refrigerated trucks with corpses drove back and forth.
My brother is visually impaired, almost blind. He once gave me a tip, not recommended by the way, because in practice it is not possible to close your eyes when meeting someone for the first time. You could tell much better from the voice whether someone is a dick or a bitch. Beware of first impressions, everyone knows a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
I’ve been watching the great BBC documentary series for the past few days House of Assad looked at, about the Assad family running Syria as its own business. The focus is on the ex-dictator who has now emigrated to Russia and his wife, who answers the question of how they became this way. They come across in the archive footage as amiable, friendly people. A clumsy, lisping ophthalmologist, a stud. His wife Asma – by Vogue baptized “desert rose” in 2011 – spoke of him as “someone you can always turn to”. He never intended to become president. It contains images of the early days, visiting Queen Elizabeth, to whom he shyly told that during his time in London he used a tube stop near the palace. You don’t think for a second: here are a mass murderer and his equally ruthless wife, but the beast must have already been there.
It’s nothing new, during the Second World War it was bursting with friendly Nazis. Albert Speer survived the Nuremberg trials by character, it was said about Konrad Gemmeker, the commander of Westerbork, that he did not kick the Jews into Poland, he laughed them into Poland.
Nice people, good looking people, friendly people and decent people can just as easily be inhuman. It is not the other way around, people who look like ruthless executioners are usually just ruthless executioners.
In practice it is never easy.
Marcel van Roosmalen writes a column on Mondays and Thursdays.