Linkmeister

Hatred

I didn't understand the "whys" of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, and I sure didn't understand the Rwandan catastrophe, so I'm reading Tim Judah's book The Serbs, after which it's on to Philip Gourevitch's We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families about the Rwanda genocide. This article about the Fallujah murders yesterday could have been the foreword to either book. Here's the lead paragraph:

Surgeons, pathologists, embalmers and even the corner butcher know about the little click, in the brain, that lets them look dispassionately at a living or once-living being and see, instead, just flesh, a thing, or meat. Without this shift in the moral vision, we could not heal the sick, bury the dead or eat a steak. And yet a closely related power of objectification is also the root of cruelty. To see a human being only as an object -- an enemy, an occupier or an animal -- unlocks the possibility for war, revolution and genocide.