I think I'm quoting a half remembered book:
"if we want to live in a free country, we must begin by living as though we are already in a free country."
For an oppressive system to work, it doesn't need an enormous network of spies, of prisons, of torturers and so on (though to be sure they have all of those things):
it needs just one thing:
for the great majority of the people to actually _believe_ that the state is mighty and vicious and to be afraid of it.
For all my life, we have been afraid here. We have been afraid of each other, of discussing certain things ... we didn't talk about politics and barely about religion. We learned little ways of saying things without saying them: a knock on a tooth to say someone was Sunni, a mention of German for Alawis, a touch to the brow for a Kurd ... but never openly. If we did ask those sorts of things or mention them too often, we'd start worrying if people thought we were spies ...
or we would talk indirectly in other ways: we would discuss the oppression in Palestine or Iraq and we could be more open about things ...
but even then, caution ruled.
So a generation grew up pretending politics didn't matter, never having strong opinions about anything ... at least not where anyone could hear. Because we were afraid. A whole nation in effect in the closet.
And all we ever had to do was to stop being afraid. And the moment that we stopped being afraid, the earth shook.
The regime cannot long survive if the people no longer are scared.
They may be deadly but we are not afraid any longer. We are becoming free.