“The Constitution Was Eaten by the Donkey” — Reem Turkmani on Power, Media & Cultural Resistance

Okay, that takes me nicely to the next question because when people ask me why is it that people like yourself who've been fighting for decades for human rights, environmental justice, climate justice and so on, why is it that you're not winning fast enough or big enough? The main answer I give is that I think that the mistake that activism and social change agents have made over a long period of time is that we imagine that the biggest threat we face is the repressive state apparatus, meaning army, police, formal laws, rules and regulations, and so on.

And of course, the Repressive state apparatus plays a very massive role in defining the parameters of civic and political life, right? But as has been said by many others over history, that one of the mistakes we've made is actually thinking that our biggest threat is in fact the repressive state apparatus when actually the biggest control is in fact...

like the ideological state which we mean the framework for education the framework for religion the funding of arts and culture and most importantly the framework for communications and media so give us a sense of how this played out how it was before the revolution and how in the the time when people stood up, how the media landscape has changed, and how is it today? How has it changed now in the current situation? So slightly before the media landscape, before the revolution, during and after.

Sure.

So I grew up in Syria in the 70s and 80s, and this is the period of Hafez Assad.

And that kind of what you described as the ideological apparatus of the oppressive regime, it was at its highest.

It had many different arms.

I'll speak about three of them.

One, of course, was education, which you mentioned.

And so our life was shaped with the ideology of the Baath Party, Arab National Socialist ideology.

through schooling, through the curriculum.

There were no such thing as private schools.

They're only state schools.

And from day one, you're groomed as the sprout of the Ba'ath party.

You had no choice.

You were fed into a certain curriculum.

But the most important thing was not the content of the curriculum itself, Kumi.

There was like a psychological game.

I mean, there's like a power game out there.

You often had to learn and memorize things that both you and your teacher and everyone else knew you don't believe in.

But the point was to break you and to force you to absorb this knowledge and stand up and repeat it and sing their song and their slogans even knowing you don't believe in it.

That's how they demoralize you.

I'll give you one example.

All of us had a compulsory course at school.

We had to sit at the exam in the baccalaureate called the Arab nationalism.