| | | I've spent *a lot* of time in ME and SEA and I have to pitch in.
As I have often said, ME is unlike any other place in the world and cannot be generalized. Believe it or not, for the most parts religion is not as important to the middle easterners as the people here think it is. But religion carries with it a lot of other things that when you add them up, it actually makes sense why it comes across as being important.
Say you are in Lebanon. Their constitution, written by the French, codifies what positions of power should be held by members of each religion and how they should rotate. And while it might have made sense at the time it was written (it didn't), the demographics have changed a lot since then and now they make little sense and have been a source of huge political and power struggles.
Say you are in Iraq. Religiously the Kurds are Sunnis. But when you hear the news, nobody ever identifies the Kurds as Sunnis. "Sunni" in Iraq means an Arab Sunni, whereas Shia means an Arab Shia, even though there are other ethnicities who are Sunnis or Shia. And why does this matter? Because if you were a Kurd, you were treated as a 2nd class citizen by the Arabs. And if you were a Shia Arab, then you were oppressed by Saddam. Now Saddam treated the Shia and the Kurds terribly. Not so much for religious reasons. He was secular. But because they were defiant to his authority. And when he oppressed them, obviously he did not rely on other Shia or Kurds, but used Sunni Arabs. So if you are in Iraq, religion is a shorthand for are you part of the formerly oppressed (who are now doing some oppression of their own) or part of the old oppressors (who are now victims - or getting what was due to them, depending on your perspective).
And this type of shorthand is not unique to the ME. Anyone from Ireland can tell you that what religion you are and which town you come from means more than religion and geography. Ditto (but to a smaller extent) if you are from Scotland.
The longer resentments have festered and bloodier it has been, the worse the reaction of the people is based on "religion" or "geography" even though neither are as important as they seem from the outside.
And the US has been having at it for a very long time. The saving grace has been that nobody has been killing the other side because of the rule of law, but really mostly because the living standards have not been too bad. But once that changes, say if we hit a depression or the USD drops hard and affects everyone's standard of living, or...whatever, then the reactions won't be so benign.
There are some very bad faultlines in the US that have been gathering pressure for nearly 40 years and may break up within a decade. One of them is codified rule of minority (kinda like in Lebanon). There is only so long that so many people in CA and NY will agree to contribute to the GDP and taxes way above the national average while having the same say as some states that don't even amount to a county within CA. Rather than the South choosing to secede, you might actually get CA or NY to do so. It will likely not be a full secession, but more like an aggressive form of "State's Rights" whereby the New Englanders and CA cut their own side deals and leave the Red States out.
Another is the culture of victimhood that has been building up in some areas and has been fanned by social media and talk radio.
When it really hits the fan, and chances are that some time over the next decade it will, you'd better be well armed and know how to use it. Even better, be as far away from the fault lines as possible.
Nobody should think that Americans are drastically different kinds of human beings than the Irish or Lebanese or anyone else and that the kinds of problems faced by the rest of the world could never ever happen here. |
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