Daily Inspiration Quote by Bashar al-Assad

Calling an occupation “not a disaster” is rhetorical jujitsu: it reframes catastrophe as opportunity, and despair as a failure of imagination. Assad’s line isn’t aimed at historians of Lebanon so much as at audiences living under pressure - Syrians facing upheaval, allies weighing compromise, opponents tempted by fatigue. The sentence does two things at once: it normalizes protracted conflict while laundering the costs into a moral lesson about endurance.

The subtext is an argument about agency. “It was very clear that there are ways to resist” implies that any people who remain subdued are choosing submission, or have been misled into it. That’s a potent, insinuating move: it shifts attention away from the asymmetry of power and toward the virtue of persistence. It also supplies the regime with a ready-made yardstick for legitimacy. If resistance is always available, then the state that claims to embody “resistance” can present itself as the only acceptable political form - dissent becomes not just disagreement but betrayal.

Context matters because “resist” in this region is never a neutral verb. It carries the glow of anti-occupation struggle, but also the ambiguity of proxy warfare, militias, and the instrumentalization of Palestinian and Lebanese pain by neighboring regimes. By invoking Lebanon’s experience, Assad borrows a narrative where withdrawal eventually happened, suggesting history bends toward the “steadfast” - while skirting the uncomfortable question of what resistance costs civilians when it becomes a permanent governing ideology rather than a temporary tactic.