Syria - Insights From a New Blogger

I've added a new Syrian blogger to the blog roll. Welcome to Syria Exposed.

Syria Exposed has some unique insights into Syrian military and civilian life. For example, take this snippet of military duty.

Regardless of that fact, service at a radar station was both the most useless and most dangerous service in the Syrian Army. They were not allowed to ever turn on those junk backward radars the Russians had bullied Syria into buying. If they operate them, the Israelis would detect their location, send missiles and blow the whole thing up. You cannot think of any more useless way to spend a year and a half of your life: you have to sit inside a dead piece of junk that is supposed to detect enemy's airlines, but you cannot turn it on because if you do, it would be blown away, with you in it of course. The biggest fear was that one asshole up in the upper command, might actually take the risk and order them to turn the radars on one of those days. Every one there knew what would happen then; they code named it: The Suicide Order.

And this encounter with the outside world.

Myth No. 9: We Evolve
Karfan visited the “Outside World” on a single occasion only for a few days, and managed to communicate a little bit with people from other countries with his very limited language ability. That was when he was faced with the question [Where are you from?] that he figured out the answer to is: [From Syria] despite all the Anti-Regionalism Arabic education that he was showered with day and night by the Baathi regime (Myth No. 1). Another question that Karafan found perplexing is the one that all foreigners had asked after he said he is from Syria: [So you are a Muslim?]! The foreign people who wanted to brag a little bit more about their “thorough knowledge of all things middle-eastern” asked: [So are you Sunni or Sheia?] followed by a smile which said (You see, I know a LOT about your countries)!. The first thing that came to Karfan's mind at that time was: [Well, fuck, we are not the only ones that were stuffed with bullshit about the others]. None of the other foreigners who came from Europe or America or even Japan was asked that question. Basically, according to Karfan, the foreigners think they are human beings who evolved to being able to choose to believe in whatever the hell they want. On the other hand, we are still some sort of backward creatures who are denied the right of choosing and we have to fall under one of the few stupid categories the foreigners happen to know.

Although Karfan was a bit upset about it at the time, later when he thought about the whole matter he decided that those foreigners might be very right in deed! We have not evolved an inch. Evolution means that a person in the twenty first century should think differently from someone who lives in the tenth century. But unfortunately, if there were a time-machine that could transfer all of us here in Syria to the tenth century, there would be very few who would take more than two hours to adapt fully to that environment.

Which is why these regimes fear contact with the outside world.
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