Assad, YouTube and the Banality of Evil

'I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.'
Macbeth, Act 3

If you’ve missed the goings-on in the Middle East recently, you must have been living under a really spectacularly large and sound-proof rock. Assad is pulverising an increasingly back-footed group of freedom fighters into submission, and doesn’t seem to care how many of his people he tramples along with them. Even more disturbing are the recent reports that the regime is now deliberately targeting children for torture and murder. Perhaps to stop them becoming the next generation of dissidents? Who knows. 

So far, so evil. One of the strangest developments in the year-long uprising so far, though, has been the recent exposure of the emails sent between Assad and his wife, Asma. She’s ever so pretty and refined, has graced the cover of Vogue, was described as ‘the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies’, wears Christian Louboutins, and was born in nice, normal, humble Acton. According to Nicolas Sarkozy, such qualities even served to redeem Assad himself from the label of dictator-du-jour: ‘with a wife as modern as his, he can’t be all bad.’ Of course, a few Manolos do not a liberal make, as made apparent by the frankly bizarre interweb exchange between the couple. As Homs, Mrs Assad’s family home, was shelled to rubble, she shopped online for £26,000 worth of Parisian candlesticks.

The emails have also revealed Assad’s Harley Street cardiologist father-in-law’s advice as to how to quash rumours of human rights abuses. This includes accusing the (admittedly overzealously interventionist) UK of trying to ignite a Syrian genocide.

However, such nepotism and corruption is perhaps to be expected from a man whose regime is the product of a forty year dynasty brokered on the blood of dissenting citizens (in the most recent elections, the story goes that Assad’s aide reported to him, ‘Ninety six per cent voted for you, sir! What more could you want!’ to which Assad replied, ‘Their names and addresses.’).

What is perhaps most chilling is the sheer banality of the evil that Assad seemingly represents. He has, from his iTunes account registered in the US to avoid sanctions, downloaded country and western, and LMFAO. As Ben Macintyre of The Times posited this week, ‘the possibility of Syria’s ruthless leader getting down to Sexy and I Know It is the sort of mental image that can topple tyrannies.’ Think of Mao exhorting the Chinese masses to jump aboard the Vengabus. Pol Pot taunting prisoners with Take on Me. Or Milosevic rocking out to the Spice Girls’ Wannabe. Risible. Frightening.

So, it is not just the fact that Assad enjoys a good Lolcatz picture. It is the fact that he enjoys Lolcatz and orders the torture of Syrian civilians. Bond-villain – incomprehensibly evil and vindictive – no longer. He is suddenly more like us – and for that, less so. For me, one of the strangest facts about Hitler was that he adored animals, particularly his own German Shepherd (what else?), Blondi. So gentle, so hideous. Quite the frightening contradiction.

The couple have allowed us a glimpse of their human sides, and that their humanity can co-exist alongside the murderous crackdown in Syria is unsettling, to say the least. The sheer normality has been unveiled. Suddenly, we – the ordinary, boring, largely benevolent population – find ourselves with something in common with the Assads. Apparently the appeal of Biscuit the sleepwalking dog is universal.

And yet. And yet. The common ground we share is nothing to our differences. No longer a cartoon criminal, Assad is re-fashioned into a human being – and one capable, as only a relative few of our species are, of brutal, state-sanctioned mass murder. How much more evil he becomes for the emergence of such a juxtaposition.

Mr and Mrs Assad: mass murderers and YouTube fans. So near to us but, for that, so very, very far.