During the discussion of The Suicidal Core of the Anti-Semite, themanthemyth left this response to one of Charles's comments:
Chas--there haven't been nearly enough Palestinian children killed. You're like the guy who laments the death of poor misunderstood Cho--after all he had a hard childhood--so who cares about the 30+ people he blew away? Islam is a potentially fatal cancer on the human race, and the sooner it can be eradicated from the planet by any means necessary the better.
As Bob helpfully pointed out, we don't feed the trolls, whether they come from the left or the right, and my initial impression was that this comment did not deserve to be directly addressed. However, upon reflection, including consideration of Charles's follow-up, it did provoke me to give some thought to a recurrent and very serious danger, one that, luckily, we have thus far avoided, but is ever-present.
It is possible to address the comment at the manifest level. The first part of the comment is true in the sense that, presumably, if the Palestinians felt enough pain they would lose the will to fight and the war would be over. In reality, advocating genocide is evil, whether it is Muslims espousing genocide of the Jews, or Westerners advocating genocide of the Islamic world. The second comment, that Islam is a cancer, which is similar to the Nazi justification for their attempted annihilation of the Jews (ie, that a victim race, culture, ethnic group represents an illness which must be eradicated) is noxious on its face and belied by the fact that there are in fact many millions of Muslims who want nothing more than to live in peace with their neighbors and join the modern world. The Kurds, who have been building a modern, relatively free society under the blanket of American protection since the first Gulf War, are an obvious example; Kurdistan is a Muslim nation. Kazakhstan is the very definition of a moderate Muslim nation and an increasingly important ally in the fight against radical Islam. Clearly the problem is not Islam but particular vicious brands of political Islam which represent as great, or greater, a danger to Moderate Muslims as it does to Americans and Israelis (not to mention non-Muslims around the globe.)
However, it is the psychology that the comment reveals that is more troubling than its overt content.
In Terror and Societal Regression, I described the process in which a Nation under duress can regress in much the same way that an individual regresses int he face of a traumatic experience:
It has long been recognized that in the face of trauma, a person tends to regress. This essentially means that when highly stressed, we tend to fall back on more primitive mental functioning to face the trauma. Once the situation has resolved, reasonably intact people, in the absence of the most severe trauma, are able to slowly reconstitute over time and regain their prior level of functioning. When people have trouble doing so, they often seek Psychiatric/Psychological assistance.
This is similar to the point I have made so many times that our rational minds are thin, fragile, veneers over the deeper, unconscious, strata of our more primitive emotional minds.
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In the same way, Societies, as highly complex structures, can regress from their optimal functioning in the face of a trauma. The American Psychoanalytic Association panel considered just this question, and while their focus was on various traumatized societies (Albania, after Hoxha, and Argentina, after the military coup of 1976 and the ensuing suppression of the left, were of special interest) there is obvious relevance for America, post 9/11.
The American Psychoanalytic Association panel listed 14 major symptoms of large-group regression, two of which are important for this post (see the original post for the full list):
3) Severe splitting. This can occur as a polarity between "us" and "them" or within society.
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10) Dehumanization. Exemplified by the Nazis, this is a two-step process. Step one is identifying undesirable humans; step two is turning them into nonhumans, as in the Hutus' degradation of the Tutsis, referred to as cafrads, or insects. Interestingly, the Tutsis were also called the "Jews" of Rwanda.
The invasion of Iraq and the Rules of Engagement under which our military labored were, perhaps unconsciously, expressly designed to avoid the kind of dehumanization and splitting that can lead to a disastrous Clash of Civilizations. The entire enterprise, attempting to show that Arab Muslims can attain a consensual participatory democracy, was meant to show the Arab world and the Western world that the Arabs are not irredeemably and monolithically lost as members of the modern world. If General Petraeus and the Iraqi leadership can create a semblance of such a political culture, the kinds of regressive thinking that pronounces "a pox on them all" can be constrained. The Muslim leaders throughout the Middle East and to a certain extent throughout the Muslim world do not clearly grasp the import of the endeavor in Iraq. They fail to recognize that if the West feels threatened, or is damaged by a future 9/11, than the regressive pull to a position of severe splitting will make it impossible to maintain the distinction between the myriad Muslim populations; all will become "all bad" devalued objects, the precise psychological transformation that paves the way for massive over-reactions and genocidal rage.
This is equally poorly understood by Western Leftists and much of the Media. Every time people see images of angry Muslims, enraged by minor provocations, carrying signs advocating "behead the infidels" and every time Western Leftist apologists make excuses for such vile sentiments, and every time Western governments and elites appease such sentiments, the communication is reinforced that "Muslims are all crazy."
It is noteworthy that opinion polls do not ask Americans for their attitude toward Sunnis, or Shia, or Wahhabis, or Sufis; they ask for attitudes toward Muslims.
When societies regress, nuance and distinctions are lost; thus are such sentiments as "nuke them all and let G-d sort them out" nourished. That is the danger of failure in Iraq and future 9/11s. Sadly, too many seem to have no awareness of the danger.
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