Yesterday was the anniversary of the assassination of Syria’s first prominent post-independence strongman, Adib Shishakli. (You can read more about him in the post below.) Shishakli infamously launched a military campaign against predominantly Druze Suwayda in 1954, as part of an effort to suppress a growing opposition movement to his rule, with Suwayda serving as one of its key epicenters. This was comparable, albeit on a smaller scale, to the campaign that Syria’s current strongman launched against the same region in 2025. And much like the events of last year, the 1954 campaign was accompanied by a major propaganda effort portraying the Druze as traitors and a fifth column. The difference, though, is that the campaign galvanized the anti-Shishakli opposition and was followed almost immediately by the collapse of his rule. (The campaign began in late January 1954, and Shishakli was overthrown roughly a month later, in late February.) Alas, times have changed. Syrian society is far more polarized today, and Shishakli’s reputation has undergone something of a revival, much like the growth of a “cult of Saddam” among some Sunni Arab circles in recent years, both in Syria and beyond. Zaman al-Wasl, a popular post-2011 Syrian opposition platform, shared a post on this same anniversary, and there were dozens of supportive comments underneath portraying Shishakli as a martyr and lionizing him as a leader who knew how to “deal with minorities.” Crucially, for the Druze, one of the most consequential legacies of Shishakli’s campaign was not anything that happened in Syria per se. Much like in 2025, the campaign against the largest concentration of Druze in the world, accompanied by demonizing propaganda, left a significant impact on Druze communities elsewhere. The sympathy of significant parts of the Syrian public in 1954, together with the swift collapse of Shishakli’s regime, did soften the blow and prevent it from becoming as deep a rupture as we see today, but these events still pushed the Druze communities of the Galilee and Mount Carmel toward deeper integration into Israeli society, including the eventual acceptance of compulsory military service in the IDF. Up to that point, there had been considerable ambivalence within the community around integration and conscription, and Sheikh Amin Tarif, its leading religious authority, was initially opposed to compulsory military service. He eventually withdrew his opposition, and conscription of Druze men began in 1956, two years after Shishakli’s campaign.

It’s interesting how the relative isolation of the Covid years seems to have disrupted the mimetic contagion of in-vogue behaviors that characterized the peak Woke era, including things like LGBT self-identification. You can see something similar in how far fewer people today put their pronouns in their social media bios, how much more muted Pride celebrations have become, etc. It really does feel like the end of an era. Hopefully, the excesses of peak Woke, followed now by those of the reactionary identitarian right, will ultimately be a boon for my liberal centrist tribe and grant Sensei Fukuyama his long-awaited revenge!

Their not-so-baggy pants aside, these Kosovo Albanians look eerily like Druze men. Game recognize game. The Ottoman peasant outfit is undefeated. 🫡

The excitement over the Pope’s visit is honestly fascinating once you realize how irreligious modern French society tends to be. France is not like the US, where irreligion is more of an affluent-urban phenomenon, while the masses in “the heartland” remain deeply religious. In France, it has traditionally been almost the opposite. Continued identification with Catholicism has traditionally been more of a niche phenomenon among certain segments of the elite, while the French middle and lower classes tend to be only nominally Catholic or explicitly irreligious. This is even corroborated by national surveys, which show over 50% of French citizens identifying as having no religion, with only around 30% identifying as Catholic, and the vast majority of those Catholics being only nominally so. (We’re talking about fewer than 10% of self-identified Catholics reporting regular attendance at church services.) I don’t know if there’s a vibe shift, but for a country that is functionally ~90% either religiously unaffiliated or non-practicing, this much excitement and attendance for the Pope’s visit does seem like one.