Christopher Hitchens on Fascism, Ba'athism, Assad
https://www.hrw.org/news/2012/07/03/s...
Every time I see the droopy, callow face of Bashar al-Assad — a man in possession of those two awkwardly coexisting qualities identified by Hanna Arendt, utter banality and a fantastic capacity for evil — I think of Christopher Hitchens’s spot-on description of the Syrian tyrant, which he deployed for both Assad and former Argentina dictator Jorge Videla: “Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush.”
It’s near impossible to keep up with the toothbrush’s astonishing number of human rights violations, but Human Rights Watch has done the yeoman’s work of cataloging Syria’s brutal torture centers and the testimony of victims in a new 81-page report, “Torture Archipelago: Arbitrary Arrests, Torture and Enforced Disappearances in Syria’s Underground Prisons since March 2011.” It makes for harrowing, stomach-churning reading — but none of it particularly surprising. Here, for example, is the testimony of a 31-year-old dissident tortured at Idlib Central Prison:
They forced me to undress. Then they started squeezing my fingers with pliers. They put staples in my fingers, chest and ears. I was only allowed to take them out if I spoke. The staples in the ears were the most painful. They used two wires hooked up to a car battery to give me electric shocks. They used electric stun-guns on my genitals twice. I thought I would never see my family again. They tortured me like this three times over three days.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/07/03...