Photographs by Nicolas Righetti
Text by Christopher Dickey
In the theater of tyranny, posters play a special role. They are more than symbols of the dictator, they are his iconic chameleon presence: a vision of the man who sees everything, the representations of a man who would be everyone. Here he is the soldier, there a businessman, here again the leader of a clan. “Big Brother Is Watching You,” read the legend under the posters (with eyes that followed you) in George Orwell’s 1984. But when dictators last long enough, no slogan is needed. So ubiquitous and imposing were the graven images of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein that when his regime fell in 2003 it was left to the Americans to bring down his statue in the middle of Baghdad; the Iraqis were afraid to go near it.
But Bashar al-Assad, truth be told, cannot quite carry off his role as Syria’s Big Brother. He rules by fear, to be sure, propped up by his secret police and the security apparatus in his army. An estimated 3,500 people have been killed in the months-long uprising against his regime, and there is no sign he’s going soft when it comes to shooting people down in the streets. But his face seems almost as ludicrous as it is ubiquitous. His father Hafez’s image, when it was everywhere, showed clearly the old man’s wiles behind the smile. Bashar’s brother, Basil, was the athletic Hollywood-handsome heir apparent until he crashed his Mercedes and died in 1994. Bashar, in all his incarnations, remains the second son, the second choice, the weak-chinned student of ophthalmology who inherited the dictatorship in 2000, but has lost his people.
