It's hardly at random. Most of the killing in Iraq is sectarian. IMO it related quite well to this book:
ucpress.edu
"This passionate yet reasoned book examines how religious stereotyping--in popular and official discourse--has fueled Serbian and Croatian ethnic hatreds. Sells, who is himself Serbian American, traces the cultural logic of genocide to the manipulation by Serb nationalists of the symbolism of Christ's death, in which Muslims are "Christ-killers" and Judases who must be mercilessly destroyed. He shows how "Christoslavic" religious nationalism became a central part of Croat and Serbian politics, pointing out that intellectuals and clergy were key instruments in assimilating extreme religious and political ideas."
Same thing went on in Nazi Germany, and it's going on now in Iraq- only we have Muslim sectarian violence and symbolism instead of Christian. We have plenty of historical genocides to study, and you can easily see the way hate, nationalism, factionalism and absolutism (often including a religious component) intersect to produce just the right brew to grow these sorts of events. It's hardly baffling to be able to understand that humans are easily whipped in to murderous group hate. You can see people whipped in to hate all over SI, it wouldn't be a huge step to imagine some of those people whipped in to genocidal hatred given the right impetus.
When you say something is "incomprehensible", you're going to have a hard time solving it. The murders of innocents, except where true lunatics are involved, are often completely comprehensible. Terrorists, for example, murder for all sorts of quite logical reasons. Understanding those reasons means one can get closer to solutions than throwing up one's hands and saying "It's incomprehensible!"
Honestly, you find the Nazi atrocities incomprehensible? You can see, step by step, how the Nazis massaged the German collective will, flattered the German people's vanity, catered to their prejudices, and easily steered the German people toward the course of genocide. If you can understand the Nazis, Rwanda, or India, you can understand Iraq, imo. Same dynamics at work, but tweaked in a slightly different way. |
