The scenes of ordinary Syrians gleefully ransacking Bashar al-Assad’s residence in Damascus may be troubling, but they certainly are not unfamiliar. That’s how dictators fall, in a paroxysm of jubilation and score settling. Decades of living in fear abruptly end, and people rush out to shred the physical symbols of power and avarice.
Some of it is simply looting, of course. But The Associated Press photos from al-Assad’s palace also show Syrians posing with smiles and peace signs, and I suspect that some of what they collect from the rubble of the palace is intended as something more than just souvenirs: It is a symbolic vengeance, a claim to a share of what was stolen from them.
Such retaliatory looting is as old as tumbling tyrants and was deemed justified and even honorable through much of history. The Bible, for example, has the prophet Isaiah quoting God about what to do with nasty enemies: “to take spoil and seize plunder, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.”
Our times have known many scenes like those being played out in Damascus as authoritarian regimes have tumbled in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Not every revolution has been accompanied by mass looting; in some cases, triumphant forces managed to secure buildings and monuments before the crowd got to them.
But the urge to secure a memento of the fallen tyranny can be satisfied elsewhere. I confess that somewhere in the stored detritus of my years as a reporter are some blank ID cards of Idi Amin’s secret police, a Soviet-era Kremlin telephone, chunks of the Berlin Wall and many similar souvenirs, not all appropriate, of places where dictatorships have been abruptly terminated.
Abruptly is, in fact, how they are usually terminated. Though many accounts of al-Assad’s fall describe it is surprisingly rapid, the nature of a dictatorship is such that it remains monolithic and impregnable until the moment it’s not. I remember thousands of young people marching with torches past the assembled Communist leadership to mark the 40th anniversary of the East German state on Oct. 7, 1989; a month later, on Nov. 9, the Berlin Wall was down.
The debris of fallen tyrannies often carries a lingering fascination. Idi Amin’s torture chambers in Kampala, where I picked up the cards, remain a tourist attraction. Many of the 1,060 shoes left behind by Imelda Marcos when she and her husband, Ferdinand, fled the Philippines in 1986 were put on display at the national museum. The vast wardrobe and other belongings of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were put up for auction a few years after they were ousted in 1989, and did quite well.
It’s al-Assad’s turn now to watch from a cold Moscow as the trophies of his and his father’s decades of corrupt and cruel rule are dispersed. At least he is not hanging from a lamppost like Benito Mussolini or batteredjilislot, impaled and bullet-riddled like Muammar el-Qaddafi.