Just a regular guy – but will it happen here?

Article in The Guardian by Zoe Williams, 12/9/24

Headline:  “They ‘didn’t look the type’: how the media was fooled by Bashar and Asma al-Assad”

Subhead:  “Some journalists underestimated the threat of the brutal president, while his first lady was glamorised in a Vogue feature”

“When the Syrian spring erupted in 2011, Vogue magazine ran a profile of Asma al-Assad titled A Rose in the Desert. Her husband had already killed more than 5,000 civilians, including hundreds of children, when Asma was described as ‘the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies’. The journalist, Joan Juliet Buck, went on to note that ‘her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment’ ”.

“. . . Vladimir Putin was, around the same time, trying to cast himself as an action hero, releasing photos of himself on horseback, bare-chested, on a Harley, with a tiger. Who needs to have a stick up their arse about kleptocracy when it looks like so much fun? If an autocrat doesn’t look or act like one, if he looks instead like a giraffe (as people said about Bashar al-Assad), or a joker, or a clown, or a reality TV showman, maybe it won’t be such a bad life under him after all.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/09/how-media-was-fooled-bashar-asma-al-assad