"Assad's cult is a strategy of domination based on compliance rather than legitimacy. The regime produces compliance through enforced participation in rituals of obeisance that are transparently phony both to those who orchestrate them and to those who consume them. Assad's cult operates as a disciplinary device, generating a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens act as if they revere their leader ... It produces guidelines for acceptable; it defines and generalizes a specific type of national membership; it occasions the enforcement of obedience; it induces complicity by creating practices in which citizens are themselves "accomplices", upholding the norms constitutive of Assad's domination; it isolates Syrians from one another; and it clutters public space with monotonous slogans and empty gestures, which tire the minds and bodies of producers and consumers alike ... Assad is powerful because his regime can compel people to say the ridiculous and to avow the absurd."
- Lisa Wedeen, "Acting "As If": Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria"
You could substitute another five-letter leader name here and it would work just as well.
Struck me as an interesting way of describing the mechanisms of autocracy. It's like a particular authoritarian mutation of the Spectacle
The dictator forces everybody to participate as extras in a giant theatrical production that is the State
Individual mass spectacles are part of this (as in the North Korean style synchronized stadium pageants) but at the ultimate degree the spectacle encompasses the entire social field
As a subject, you simultaneously spectate the collective fakery even as you play a bit part in it
It's all for show, but it doesn't work through convincing people that it's true, it works through making people pretend, participate is a mass lie.
Does the dictator believe this pageant of make-believe? Is it the externalisation of his own grandiose inner fantasies,? Like Billy Liar imagining himself the caudillo of Ambrosia - except a dream come true, in this case, as exacted social fact.
Doesn't matter - the point is the submission to the charade that is enforced and obeyed.
