(via Radio Free Syria)

The revolution has been (and is being) televised – by the revolutionaries.

American Gil Scott-Heron famously sang that ‘The revolution will not be televised’. But Syrians’ historic, world-changing revolution has been and is still being televised, broadcast, reported since 2011 by the revolutionaries themselves.

In Western media, meanwhile, the revolution was overwhelmingly assiduously ignored, and rarely if ever described as a revolution; instead it was depicted as either an insurgent/terrorist uprising against the ‘legitimate’ leader’ or a civil war too complex for the public to really understand, as though a people’s struggle for freedom from a murderous hereditary dictatorship was some advanced nuclear physics equation.

Indeed, Western mainstream and alternative media often found it easier to just parrot, unquestioningly whatever uninformed slanderous disinformation, hysterical Islamophobic drivel, and conspiracy theorist gibberish (usually some combo of all those things) was contained in the day’s press releases from Assad’s palace, Khamenei’s HQ and the Kremlin – so all those opposing Assad became head-chopping Al Qaeda or ISIS cannibals (pace Assad bootlicker George Galloway), and the revolution became either a ‘Refugee Crisis’ without any apparent cause, or A Fiendish Plot to form the nucleus of a global caliphate; never mind that Syrian revolutionaries rose up for freedom, not more tyranny of any form, and that free Syrians have been the main victims of Assad, Putin, Khamenei and the other aforementioned terrorists; never mind that Assad and co are professional state and non-state terror sponsors who relied on creating and maintaining terror, never mind any of that dull reality, apparently whatever deranged psychotic totalitarian leaders said must be true because they said so and revolutionaries could be disregarded as “extremists”.

With very few noble exceptions, the only journalists and media who did televise, broadcast, write about and report every enraging, heartbreaking or (as with Assad’s fall) exhilarating moment of the revolution and centre its revolutionary nature for almost 14 long years were free Syrians. From the first days, heroic Syrian reporters and photojournalists on the ground, many without any previous media experience, risked their own lives to exhaustively report and document events, and were relentlessly targeted, tortured and killed for doing so, not to mention being vilified and slandered by Assad’s propagandists online and off.

Even free Syrian journalists outside Syria were threatened and sometimes killed for daring to oppose and expose the monstrous Assad regime’s 24/7 disinformation machine.

Free Syrian journalists and media workers are world-class heroes who’ve lived and too often died to report a historic revolution for freedom. If anyone in the West wants to know anything about televising a revolution, they need to consult the global experts – the free Syrians alerady doing it.

December 8, 2024

Photo: Free Syrian journalists, in newly liberated Hama, December 5 2024