The Totems of Oppressed Peoples

Ibrahim Khalil

The stand point of the totemic character is they have qualities of perfection like the dualism of knowledge and power which characterizes gods and prophets throughout history, and the other physical traits (good appearance, immunity against diseases and death) are taken for granted thanks to that aforementioned dualism.
Cult of personality phenomena is not restricted to a specific country, area, or phase as much as the relationship between the awareness level and how far the people enjoy their independency and freedom within their communities. Here, it is worth mentioning that we need to differentiate between the level of educational attainment and the level of the awareness so we assure we don’t fall in the fallacy that considers all the followers of the totemic leader are a bunch of illiterate people and all his opponents are elites.
The totemic character throughout history has been marked by depending on the behavior of the crowd as Gustave le Bon has addressed that point in his book “The crowd: A study of the popular mind”, so that you can obviously find out that the leader deal with crowd differently as dealing with individuals. The ironic is totemic leader represents himself as servant of the people yet he obliterates the individuals totally.
The Syrian way of worshiping totemic leaders:
Nearly all the Syrian now cannot remember in their minds any president except Assads and the Syrian unconscious after two decades still believes that Hafez al-Assad is between them and alteration of name Hafez to Bashar brought nothing for the Syrian reality.
Hafez Assad had been successfully promoting himself as the permanent face of all time in all place (governmental, public, syndicalist, private sector and companies, stadiums, books, journals, and clothes …). And other occasions subjects of his “struggle” that are obligatory to be attended and learned by people.
The second point which helped the al-Assads to be iconic and legend is the strict behavior and speaking in standard Arabic (to the contrary of the other Arabs leaders), so that his good behavior was a barrier of being a travesty and to hide his accent (the accent of minority bearing in mind that he is from minor sect) and the as an attempt to reuse Amayah’s language.an
After having such charisma by al-Assad, the Syrian opposition was unable make another leader match the same like Hafez, knowing that all those characters were in Baath vanguards then al-Assad youth institutions and finally soldiers in Assad army, consequently there was no hope to have another leader capable of replacing Assad, and that applied on both Arabic and Kurdish opposition.
By erupting the Syrian revolution, people had the balls to destroy and tore up the pictures of “the leader”, destroy the statue of Assad that gave an obvious prove that the Syrian opposition members were a bunch of barbarians can be controlled by instinct and passion and that was obvious put an end to Arap upraising.
Regarding the northern Syria, once the spark of the revolution has hit the Kurdish regions where is considered a fertile ground to accept any alternative to Hafez al-Assad even if that alternative was the devil, meanwhile, PYD has previously engaged the Syrian political field with international ideas by the leader in 2000. The party was longing for assuming power and publishing the its own idea, the party which started at the early eighties to include whole the area along with the Turkish-Syrian borders (Roj Avay Kurdistan).
PYD has totally ignored the limited numbers of symbols of Hafez or Bashar al-Assad, and started replacing them by the new leader pictures and symbols here the propaganda started working far and wide by thousands of pictures, journals, TV, and bending all institutions for having and reciting all these books and broachers, the third phase was to create a new cadre to replace the pro-Assad governmental cadre which guarantee a bridge of Ideology to the next generations, and that is the tyrants methods like Assads.
The propaganda has achieved in record time a symbolic picture for a leader and the national scale is the love and the hate of the leader and any symbolic insult can be a sin leads to imprisoning or punishment like the case in Assads case.
No one can be assertive on the purpose of that propaganda or the need for all tyrant regimes to have a holy character and be forcibly imposed on people because the idea of embodiment a regime is imposable as building a totem to embody the idea of the God, consequently, the embodiment has been a necessary throughout the history and that what the new leaders try to do these days.