Dissident Spotlight: Akram Raslan
Akram Raslan was a political cartoonist who published over 300 cartoons, many of them critical of Syria's dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

Political cartoons are devastating ways to criticize a political leader. The gap between reality and spoken words can be brought to life in a more succinct form than a journalistic investigation.
Akram Raslan was a political cartoonist in Syria during Bashar al-Assad’s reign. Al-Assad used terror to subdue Syria’s population, going so far as to use chemical weapons against his own people during the country’s civil war.
Raslan had little patience for al-Assad’s regime, and it came through in his cartoons. One of Raslan’s works is a cartoon showing a tortured detainee blaming outside powers for al-Assad’s brutality.

The contrast between the statement offered freely to the microphone and the obvious injury inflicted by the grinning guard behind him says as much about compulsory lies as a 10,000-word exposé.
On Oct. 2, 2012, Raslan was arrested. He died under torture in September 2013.
While his death was rumored, it wasn’t confirmed until 2015.
Funny People Are Natural Dissidents
One of the striking things about Raslan’s work is how funny even some of the darkest cartoons are. The contrast between the brutality of the imagery and the response to that brutality catches the viewer off guard and sometimes makes them laugh.
Some of the world’s best dissidents are people who turn that absurdity into comedy. Alexei Navalny, Volodomir Zelensky, and Akram Raslan had a sensitivity to the ridiculous gap between what dictators said and did, which helped them point out the worst features of the regimes they resisted.
Irony, meaning something different than what the speaker says, becomes a way to restore the true meaning to words the dictator mangles. When a dictator calls torture against innocent civilians “state security,” a cartoon depicting the dictator’s own actions can bring the ridiculousness of the dictator’s words to life.
One of Raslan’s greatest legacies won’t just be his sense of humor and the courage of his resistance. It’ll be the unapologetic clarity with which he saw the abuse of power, language, and innocent life al-Assad used to rule for almost a quarter of a century.