War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Following a long day of raucous demonstrations a few weeks ago, I was woken the following morning to the harsh sounds of pro-government rhetoric blaring from van-mounted speakers. “Where am I?” I asked as my mind tried to sift through the fog of waking up with little sleep. “Bi rouh, bi daam…With soul, with blood, only Syria and Bashar,” I recalled hearing the day before. “Allah, Suria, Bashar ou bes (God, Syria, and Bashar only),” it continued. A gigantic portrait of President Assad remained in Omayyad Square following an orchestrated pro-regime demonstration and the already ubiquitous pictures of him on every wall and in every shop seemed to have quadrupled. Turning to the news I discovered that the Assad Administration blamed recent protests on “foreign conspirators” such as Syria’s perpetual arch nemesis, Israel. Syria’s state-run news agency, SANA, compiled staged video footage of alleged weapons stocks in a Dara mosque while authorities deported foreign correspondents and apprehended American students who were forced to give false confessions. Dissident “thugs” were arrested and they very well might never be heard from again. I’ve woken up in 1984.

The similarities to Orwell’s timeless classic are numerous. From a young age the Syrian student is indoctrinated in the sacrosanct Baathist ideology of the dictator’s regime. As Orwell wrote in 1984, “If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed--if all records told the same tale--then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” SANA and its print counterparts continue the dirty work and take the rhetoric of spin to a whole other level. As Orwell wrote, “Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary." The state media is doing its job well. The Syrian version of thought police, the mukhabarat, are salivating for action.

The dystopia has exposed itself slowly and is something that the two-week traveler would probably miss. The veneer of a wonderful and exotic oriental façade slowly peals away to reveal a sense of fear, hopelessness, and wearing frustration. The traveler can escape the lack of free speech, inadequate access to information, and peering eyes of big brother when he leaves but the Syrian cannot. The longer you are here the more it becomes a reality weighing you down. How fortunate I am to have the luxury of escape when I want it.

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(I will be in Lebanon for a week, but I will continue to write a string of posts originating from this one as I turn a few notes into something decipherable).

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Worthwhile Reading from Foreign Policy:

When the Arab Spring Turns Summer: A must read for those interested in the Arab world

Unmasking the False Reformer: the rule of Bashar al-Assad

Syriana: A historical look at Syria and the current unrest