Assad is hiding his banality, not his brutality

Far more worrying for Assad than the extravagance revealed in the 3,000 leaked e-mails is the sheer mind-numbing ordinariness of Syria’s ruling couple, the supreme triviality of their concerns as the regime is rocked by revolution. Mrs Assad is keen to get the 15 per cent discount at Harrods before the sale ends. The President sends out a YouTube clip of a man being sawn in half by a magician on America’s Got Talent. They sign off with emoticons and “I love u”.

She wants a chocolate fondue set, and the latest Harry Potter DVD. She tells him she will be home by 5.00. He is pleased: “This is the best reform that any country can have that u told me where will you be, we are going to adopt it instead of the rubbish laws of parties, elections, media . . .”

Seldom has evil seemed more utterly banal. Their feelings are straight off a cheap Valentine’s Day card: “If we stay strong together, we will overcome this together.” The President can get lyrical at times, but only with the help of the Country and Western singer Blake Shelton, whose words he cuts and pastes to his wife: “I’ve been a walking heartache/ I’ve made a mess of me/ The person that I’ve been lately/ Ain’t who I wanna be.”

Some commentators believe that this reveals Assad’s self-pity. In fact, it merely shows that he is an inarticulate egotist with the emotional depth of an emoticon and shocking taste in music. The Syrian President’s choice of downloads from iTunes is quite odd: New Order, Chris Brown and LMFAO. The possibility of Syria’s ruthless leader getting down to Sexy and I Know It is the sort of mental image that can topple tyrannies.

That is what makes the cache of intercepted e-mails so important in the bloody battle between the Syrian resistance and Assad’s security forces. The private e-mail conversations make him and his circle seem greedy and extravagant but, much more importantly, they make the Syrian President look silly and mundane.

In her 1963 book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt described the “banality of evil”, expounding the theory that the greatest crimes in history may be perpetrated by the most ordinary people. Once that banality is exposed, evil is weakened. Murderous regimes spend a great deal of time and money attempting to banish banality, dressing up dictatorship in Louboutin shoes and furnishing it with grand chandeliers. What Peter York called “dictator style” is not just maximised bad taste, but a deliberate effort to intimidate with custom-made consumption.

Opulence means power, and dictatorship needs luxury to reassure itself and cow the opposition. Dictator bling is about paranoia as much as ostentation: Elena Ceausescu opted for diamond-encrusted heels while Saddam Hussein preferred gold-plated lavatory brushes and Muammar Gaddafi splurged on a huge gold sofa shaped like a mermaid and bearing his daughter’s face.

Tyrant kitsch, however much we mock it, places the despot out of reach of the common man. For the same reason, the dictator is careful never to disclose his commonplace tastes. Mao Zedong’s reputation never quite recovered from the revelation that he was obsessed with kung fu movies: “Bruce Lee is a hero,” he once declared.

In the same way, Slobodan Milosevic, the butcher of the Balkans, mistakenly let slip that he was a fan of Walt Disney and Frank Sinatra.

Any glimpse of the ordinary being beneath the superhuman image threatens to bring the entire structure crashing down. As a consequence, the tyrant is isolated, imprisoned in his own tasteless palace, like the late Kim Jong Il of North Korea and his collection of 20,000 DVDs, including his favourite Rambo movies.

The Assads’ intercepted e-mail cache has cracked the façade of impregnability by revealing how humdrum, unexceptional and divorced from reality Syria’s ruling family really are. Assad surrounds himself with female advisers who refers to him as “the Dude” and lavish him with praise. “We love him sooooooo much,” one writes.

Another is star-struck in the US: “I am meeting Piers Morgan tomorrow ... I feel appreciated here.”

The hard man of Syria routinely asks for advice and help from Iran and Hezbollah, but still finds time to send lists of unfunny jokes to his wife; she replies with a photo of Nicolas Sarkozy standing on a box to make him the same height as George W. Bush. Subject line: “Funny”.

In a rare moment of realism Mrs Assad wonders whether to get hubby the “bullet-blocker barn coat”, an armoured blazer that every well-dressed dictator is wearing these days.

Meanwhile, she ponders what sort of curtains to buy and how to claw back the VAT on luxuries shipped to Damascus. As her husband’s forces butcher the resistance she takes the family on holiday.

Successful dictatorships depend on maintaining a fortified wall between the ruler and the ruled. Those on the outside will occasionally be allowed to glimpse the luxuries within but they may never enter. The wall surrounding the Assads has been badly — perhaps fatally — undermined by the detailed portrait of who they really are, framed by their private words.

Asma Assad is not the fragrant “Desert Rose” (as described in Vogue) but “Emma”, the middle-class cardiologist’s daughter from Acton, shopping for high heels, cocooned from the world, loyal to her husband’s repellent regime and remarkably superficial. And Bashar is no longer the unassailable autocrat, but a mawkish, walking heartache surrounded by yes-women, ordering up his favourite party music on iTunes — fiddling while Homs burns.