I enjoyed this long piece on why civil wars are so incredibly violent. The author suggests this undermines the liberal obsession with the “other” and how misrepresentations of the “other” leads to violence:
Somalia is perhaps the signal example of this ubiquitous fratricidal strife. As a Somalian-American professor observed, Somalia can claim a “homogeneity rarely known elsewhere in Africa.” The Somalian people “share a common language (Somali), a religion (Islam), physical characteristics, and pastoral and agropastoral customs and traditions.” This has not tempered violence. On the contrary.
The proposition that violence derives from kith and kin overturns a core liberal belief that we assault and are assaulted by those who are strangers to us. If that were so, the solution would be at hand: Get to know the stranger. Talk with the stranger. Reach out. The cure for violence is better communication, perhaps better education. Study foreign cultures and peoples. Unfortunately, however, our brother, our neighbor, enrages us precisely because we understand him. Cain knew his brother—he “talked with Abel his brother”—and slew him afterward.
We don’t like this truth. We prefer to fear strangers. We like to believe that fundamental differences pit people against one another, that world hostilities are driven by antagonistic principles about how society should be constituted. To think that scale—economic deprivation, for instance—rather than substance divides the world seems to trivialize the stakes.
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I thought the author of that article was full of it. I mean really, the guy writes as if he hasn’t read a single book since 1960. People don’t essentially define Us and Them by language, customs, etc. These are often markers used to explain Us and Them, but nowadays the differences are often national or family (clan) – in other words, based on perceived common ancestry.
It’s been known for decades that national, ethnic, and clan loyalties are typically much, much stronger than state loyalty. This guy is still getting them confused! I don’t know about the Somali civil war in particular, because it’s far away and who cares, so I don’t know whether it breaks down along ethnic or famliy (clan) lines – i.e., a pre-existing Us against Them. But typically civil wars break down along national lines. Civil wars nowadays are almost always between Us and the Other, not between brother and brother. The Libyan civil war is just one example.
Whenever someone brings up the narcissism of small differences to explain political strife, you can bet that he’s papering over some very large differences. Sure enough, we’re told that there wasn’t any big difference between Germans and Jews in the 1930s (again: ancestry doesn’t matter), and no big difference between Protestants and Catholics in 16th-century France (nobody really cared about eternal salvation or damnation back then). This kind of Freudian analysis of why “brothers” fight each other went out with the 1960s.
Reality is not as paradoxical as this guy thinks. Wars, including most definitely civil wars, are usually fought between national or religious groups, not within them. It’s been understood for decades that common citizenship is an extremely weak bond compared to common nationality.
Uh, I kinda take back that previous rant. I still think that way, but I could have expressed it a little more diplomatically. There is some good stuff in the article too, along with some things that I, uh, somewhat disagree with.
I suspect that there have been more France v. Germany wars than Mongolia v. Paraguay not because of the narcissism of small differences but because France and Germany have more to fight over than do Mongolia and Paraguay, such as Alsace and Lorraine.
Aaron I actually agree mostly with your point. Most civil wars are between two competing ideas about what the nation means, whether that meaning is ideological or a question of the dominant ethnic group or religion. In other words, there is real otherness among these fratricidal wars, but if we look at such varied wars as the Bolshevik and French revolution and even the Vietnam War, it’s not always an ethnic conflict. Ideology is highly relevant too.
I would check all of the above. Greed, fear, pride, intolerance, and misunderstanding will always find a way to make their marks.
The presence of “others”, however, does seem to provide particularly fertile ground for their development. I think the recognition of this historical fact is what fuels the Left to push multiculturalism. For if we can end strife between ethnic groups, surely we can end it everywhere.