Now there’s a headline.
Syrian government falls in stunning end to 50-year rule of Assad family
(If only we could say the same about the Trump family.)
The Syrian government fell early Sunday in a stunning end to the 50-year rule of the Assad family after a sudden rebel offensive sprinted across government-held territory and entered the capital in 10 days.
Syrian state television aired a video statement by a group of men saying that President Bashar Assad has been overthrown and all detainees in jails have been set free.
…
Soldiers and police officers left their posts and fled, and looters broke into the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense.
“My feelings are indescribable,” said Omar Daher, a 29-year-old lawyer. “After the fear that he (Assad) and his father made us live in for many years, and the panic and state of terror that I was living in, I can’t believe it.”
Daher said his father was killed by security forces and his brother was in detention, his fate unknown. Assad “is a criminal, a tyrant and a dog,” he said.”
Then again…
The rebels’ moves into Damascus came after the Syrian army withdrew from much of southern part of the country, leaving more areas, including several provincial capitals, under the control of opposition fighters.
The advances in the past week were by far the largest in recent years by opposition factions, led by a group that has its origins in al-Qaida and is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the United Nations.
Dictatorship or theocracy…kind of a narrow menu.
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10 responses to “New boss”
This is a quote by C.S. Lewis
“Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely more because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations”
Ironic Lewis was still a follower of the murderous eternal tyrant of the Abrahamic god
Yes, but it was the understated cuddly British eternal tyrant so that’s better somehow…
On another note and pointing out the obvious truth: everything affects everything else which is lost on the MAGA shitheads. Assad didn’t look like he was ever gonna go but the combination of Israel’s war on Lebanon and Russia having their hands full in Ukraine gave Diet al-Qaida the opening they needed. Depending this could well make the European immigration problem even worse.
I have some respect for Lewis’s literary scholarship & criticism, but none whatsoever for his ‘religious’ writings: they don’t argue, they bluster and bully, and rely on over-confident and high-sounding assertions that browbeat even intelligent people (I am thinking of an American acquaintance of mine, a linguist, a catholic and a Trump-supporter) into eager agreement. Back in Britain, oh, hundreds of years ago, I remember remarking to the poet and essayist C.H. Sisson, who at one time was an Anglican of, perhaps, a curious kind and a patriot (though in no way a nationalist) on how bad and unconvincing ‘Surprised by Joy’ was. “Yes,” he immediately responded, “No surprise, no joy.”
I was forced to read one of Lewis’ books at school. Full of fatuous arguments that even the 16-year-old me could easily see through – I suspect you must have a very particular need to find them convincing.
Major branch of the C. S. Lewis fan club up in here.
I read the Narnia books as a child. Since I was raised without religion the Christian allegory went whoosh past me. I enjoyed them except for “The Last Battle”. Having the Narnia world wrapped up after only a few millennia seemed small scale & petty. Making it a Platonic shadow of the “Real Narnia” didn’t help.
I later read “Mere Christianity”. The argument for the existence of God (how can there morality without God) struck me as *weak*. I was mildly impressed by him expressing the Trinity in a way that wasn’t obviously self-contradictory.
Here’s another member of the fan club — the historian A.L. Rowse, in Portraits & Views: Literary & Historical, on Lewis: ’that bullying Ulster dogmatist”.
Eloquent.
“Mere Christianity”. Yes, that was the one. At least I managed to erase the title from memory!