The bipolar issue is a bit Cromwellian, I suppose.Originally Posted by Infanteer
Not necessarily untrue, but I do think there is a ton of crosstalk when words like ‘civility’ and ‘brutality’ are used in a cross-cultural context. The rulebook in the contemporary Western world is certainly different than in Central Asia and the Middle East. What is happening in Syria right now seems pretty sickening to most Western sensibilities, and I think not just because of the carnage involved but because most Westerners are of a mind not so much that carnage is always unacceptable but rather that carnage done in that particular fashion is always unacceptable. That seems fine to me so long as Westerners do not pat themselves too hard on the back about not perpetrating brutality (and I am not suggesting that you are doing that in the above post, Infanteer). As someone who has lived in a place where people went to bed at night with a justifiable fear that men dressed in black might break down their doors and drag them away to a hole in the ground before daybreak I do not care for the way night raids in Iraq and Afghanistan are consistently portrayed as benign technical affairs to the American public. Which is not to say that there is no argument to be made for such a strategy, just that Westerners should make an effort to face up to the fact that their chunk of the world is in on nasty things, too.
In Middle America the boogeyman is a Muslim wearing a bomb vest; in rural Afghanistan he is a Christian with a SCAR. If the residents of both places were able to take seriously that each others’ fears are legitimate we all might be in a better place. Don’t mean to drag the thread off topic; climbing off my soapbox now.
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