Aleppo, and Despair

I can watch scary movies all day long, see murders, gore, horrible monsters, scenes of torture and sexual violence without it affecting my sleep, I might not enjoy it much, particularly the last two, but they don't scare me at all. What does scare me, like, affects me on a deep emotional level and wakes me up at night, is despair.
When a person shows that they truly believe, not just believe, but know, that hope is lost, they are going to die, or suffer unimaginably, or so on, that is what gets to me more than anything.

Serenity, the Firefly movie, was not known for its horror themes, and to be honest I suspect very few people remember much about the movie itself except for the last twenty minutes or so, I certainly don't, but one scene that sticks in my mind is a, I think it was a distress call from some outpost being overrun by Reavers, the character making the call basically admits it is over for her, and during the scene the Reavers break in, she pulls a gun, and shoots once, then attempts to turn it on herself, but too late, then there are just screams.

That is the part I remember, out of an otherwise pretty forgettable movie, that comes to me when I wake up in the dark of night.

So let's talk about Aleppo. And despair.

Aleppo is, or was until recently, the largest city in Syria and the site of perhaps the worst ongoing atrocity in the world at the moment. The history of the conflict is not what I am getting into here and is pretty fucking complicated anyway, suffice it to say that the rebel forces who hold the eastern portion of the city are in dire straights at the moment and the government forces who have it under siege have shown little to no interest in preventing civilian casualties as they attempt to retake it.

Very few in east Aleppo expect to survive the week. There are a number of sites and hashtags collecting last messages that various civilians in the city are posting as they expect to die and they are all basically my exact fear. If this was a movie there would be uplifting words here, inspiring statements of resistance and memory, but this is the real world, and these are real people, and they don't want to die.

They don't want to die, and they are telling the world.

I can't read or watch most of them, which makes me a bit of a coward I guess. In that I am not alone I suppose.

There isn't precisely a "right" side in the Syrian civil war, not with regards to ideologies anyway, one can easily make the argument that the rebel coalition would create as horrible a regime as Assad currently runs, but, and this is a big but, only one side is indiscriminately killing its civilians. The people making their what they believe are their final accounts are not talking about being killed by the rebels, mostly. There is one party with most of the power here, which does have the ability to stop slaughter, and it isn't the rebels. My personal opinion is Assad is a monster and must be removed, but I am not confident the rebels can put a better leader in place.

I think we might have seen similar stuff if we could talk to the citizens of ancient cities that have experienced the same thing, sacking a city has never gone will for the occupants, even if they weren't fighters. And the last days of a siege were probably filled with the same despair and desperation.

Hope isn't entirely lost, as I write this the evacuation of the city is theoretically starting within the hour, but nothing has gone well for anyone in the conflict, and I wouldn't blame those who are there for not getting their hopes up.

There is little we can do to help, so we get to experience our own small despair as well as we watch and hope fades.