Vogue Magazine Features Springtime for Hitler... Seriously

Dictator chic, Bashar al-Assad is just a regular guy--when he's not slaughtering his political opponents.

Photo by James Nachtwey

It would be a grave mistake to ignore fashion, relegating the business of glamour to a frivolous pursuit of the rich and idle. Fashion matters for it is one of the most visible barometers of society's values.

Seraphic Secret believes that fashion, like movies, is a moral landscape.

Front and center in Vogue Daily is a chic and glamorous woman, highly educated, involved with charity, family, and her husband, a soft-spoken head of state.

Is Joan Juliet Buck writing a profile of Michelle Obama or Carla Bruni in the pages of Vogue?

I (sorta) wish.

Buck is singing the praises of Asma-al Assad, the first lady of Syria, wife of Bashar al-Assad, perhaps the most ruthless, murderous totalitarian in the Middle East.

But according to Joan Juliet Buck's tortured prose, the Syrian first couple are a beacon of freedom and multi-culturalism.

Buck thinks that Syria's connections to Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah are, um "murky."

Well, only if you're willfully ignorant, or as Lenin phrased it, "a useful idiot."

Does Joan Juliet Buck, a red diaper baby educated in the finest private schools, mention Syria's assassination of Rafic Hariri?

No, she does not.

Does Joan Juliet Buck remind her readers that Syria, in alliance with Iran, occupies Lebanon, using the most brutal security forces?

Does Joan Juliet Buck mention Syria's alliance with North Korea and their attempts to go nuclear in order to wipe Israel off the face of the earth?

Of course not. That's just not attractive.

Joan Juliet Buck does notice that, gee willikers, the Jewish ghetto is empty. Syria is Judenrein. But no worries, the Jewish houses are all locked up because Syrians are so decent they wouldn't dream of touching private property.

It's puzzling that such an enlightened monarch and his forward-thinking spouse reign over a country where Syrian Jews--an ancient and proud community--were cruelly forced into exile after decades of the most ruthless government repression that included frequent public hangings of--what a shock--Zionist spies.

The entire story reads like a Mel Brooks screenplay, a sequel to The Producers:

Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic--the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She's a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her "the element of light in a country full of shadow zones." She is the first lady of Syria.

Read the entire story. But stay close to a bathroom so you can heave.

Okay, let's look at a clip from the original Mel Brooks comedy The Producers:

Mel Brooks is funny. He uses irony to parody the depths of evil.

Look, designer John Galliano was fired by Dior for proclaiming his love of Hitler and his hatred for Jews.

Good for Dior.

But Joan Juliet Buck, Anna Wintour and Vogue are lost in a haze of moral nothingness, unaware or unconcerned that their glamorization of this tyrant and his wife will only legitimize Assad's regime of terror, torture and murder.