The ‘Machinery of Death’ and Its Apologists

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

 

Bashar al-Assad’s fall is leading to the excavations of his regime’s prisons and bunkers. We are only beginning to learn of the extent of his crimes. But Syrians have, unfortunately, known the details for some time—because they were his victims.

 

And they are venting their anger at Assad’s enablers.

 

“Now you show up, after all of this, get the hell out of here… we don’t want you,” a woman in Damascus shouts at a UN vehicle while brandishing her shoe, as seen in a video posted by Joyce Karam. The UN workers were visiting the notorious—and about to become even more notorious—Sednaya prison.

 

“We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” U.S. war crimes envoy Stephen Rapp told Reuters. Rapp, who was visiting mass graves, has prosecuted war crimes cases, including some involving Rwanda. “From the secret police who disappeared people from their streets and homes, to the jailers and interrogators who starved and tortured them to death, to the truck drivers and bulldozer drivers who hid their bodies, thousands of people were working in this system of killing. We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death.”

 

Now that Syrians can speak out without fear of being added to the mass graves, information is flooding into the UN, envoys like Rapp, human-rights groups. So far, 150,000 people are considered missing. Reuters points out that by comparison, the Balkan wars of the 1990s saw about 40,000 go missing.

 

The sheer scale of the horror in Syria is going to be almost incomprehensible. And the names of many of the missing will never be known.

 

Organized mass atrocities require enormous bureaucratic systems. “The graves were prepared in an organized manner — the truck would come, unload the cargo it had, and leave,” one farmer told Reuters. He lived near a former Syrian military base and would often see refrigerated trucks full of bodies driving to a nearby cemetery with a full military escort.

 

Digging and then expanding such graves can be decade-long projects, as satellite images showed. And that means the UN is only part of the problem, because the world cannot plausibly feign ignorance. The anti-Western propaganda on campuses and in textbooks and flooding through the discourse of the activist class is being disseminated precisely for the benefit of the regimes digging those mass graves.

 

It may get tiresome to keep hearing questions like “Where were the tentifada protests and the flotillas to Syria?” But the answer is important. The students and activists marching for Gaza are not overlooking the Syrian victims; they are actively on the side of those committing the atrocities. Waving a Hezbollah flag is an act of anti-Israel incitement, yes. But it is not only that. It is also a show of support for the “machinery of death” putting Syrian civilians in the ground.

 

At moments like this we see the activists and protesters who have enabled these crimes for who they are. They aren’t just now finding out what goes on in Sednaya prison and others like it. They did not back a regime that turned out to be evil. They chose to back an evil regime, eyes wide open. The Syrian civil war has been going on for nearly a decade and a half. Eleven years ago, the Obama administration announced to the world that, yes, Assad had used poison gas on families trying to hide in their basement:

 

“The situation profoundly changed… on August 21, when Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people, including hundreds of children. The images from this massacre are sickening: Men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas. Others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath. A father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk. On that terrible night, the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons, and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off-limits — a crime against humanity, and a violation of the laws of war.”

 

The Iranian empire responsible for the barbaric crimes in Syria, in Gaza, in Lebanon may be receding, but now is not the time to look away. Now is the time to sear into our memories just how low Tehran’s apologists are capable of sinking.