Protest is the Heroism that tyranny can crush, but cannot wipe out from our collective memory
There came a time when the Syrian people could no longer say yes to tyranny and maintain silence, pretending that surrendering their will to the tyrants was the secret of their happiness, that living without dignity was a matter of choice, that abandoning their right to free thinking and freedom of opinion was the secret of a life of fulfilment and contentment., that the thousands of prisoners languishing in the security prisons and their disappearance without trials was a price they were happy to pay so that their masters should live in peace; that existing in fear, afraid of their own shadows, was all that they desired from their fidgety lives. They rose. That was the beginning of our protest movement, a protest leading to a revolution.
Then the killing started. The protest against tyranny became an indignant feral protest against unlawful indiscriminate killing and death. When a nation erupts in protest without previous determination or planning but in a spontaneous instinctive expression of the dormant drugged will, this is momentous, this is an upheaval that undoes the very fabric of time to redo it in the chronicles of this nation. Not only that, for it unifies time as well by stirring the past and reviving the ancient roots to extend them into the present. Let me raise my voice again and again to say that this kind of protest, the protest of a nation against its accumulated enslavement becomes impervious to extinction.
What I want to say is that the regime, supported by the immorality of an anesthetized, ambivalent and ruthless world , while indirectly given a boost and ammunition for warped publicity by rogue armed Islamist elements and International Jihadism, not to mention bands of thieves and outlaws and the mercenaries of Al Qaeda, in addition to local warlords who found their greatest opportunities in subverting and defaming the Syrian Revolution in order to implement private agendas and schemes for seizing power, the regime might defeat the Syrian Revolution, but it will never defeat the protest against tyranny that the Syrians sang and danced to. All the evils of the earth might converge on Syria but the Syrian people have chanted a song which will live in other hearts too, other minds and other souls, that will live in the conscience of the world. Even if all the Syrians die, Syria will not die.
©Alisar Itam
alisariram 