A couple of hours from where I live, religious riots killed 20 last year [View all]

[Recursion]

Last edited Mon May 4, 2015, 04:02 AM - Edit history (1)

It didn't start over a cartoon, but over a Facebook post of a college kid standing on a shrine (the kid was one of the ones who was killed). Actually then a second round happened over some cartoons of Chhatrapati Shivaji (the 17th-century Marathi king) and Bal Thackeray (the recently deceased editorial cartoonist and founder of the radical right wing Hindu group Shiv Sena -- one of Modi's chief allied parties in this part of India, unfortunately, though he did kind of amusingly screw them out of some seats in the local legislature). The mob couldn't find the offending cartoonist in this second case, and literally walked through the streets looking for someone in a skullcap and beard, and ended up killing a 25-year-old Internet startup entrepreneur.

This wasn't some tiny rural village, but Pune, the ninth largest city in India and one of the top 10 cities worldwide by number of postgraduate degrees held per capita. (Also, I say "a couple of hours" but it's more like 5; it takes 3 hours to get out of Mumbai and then 2 more to get to Pune. It's a beautiful drive though, right over the spine of the Western Ghats and past some amazing waterfalls and wildlife refuges.) The violence also wasn't by Muslims in this case but by Marathi Hindus; and in fact many Indian Christians and Muslims argue that there is currently a new and disturbing pattern of right-wing Hindu violence, mostly vandalism of mosques and churches (not, oddly enough, synagogues) but increasingly violence against people for their religion (or perceived religion).

I also just got back from a trip to Sri Lanka (expect a Lounge thread with pics soon) because John Kerry was going there (the first Secretary-level visit since the place was called Ceylon, it turns out). That's an island that only recently finished a decades-long civil war in which, among other things, the suicide bomb vest was invented (thanks for that contribution to society, LTTE...) Although the Tamil Tigers were primarily a nationalist group, the Sinhalese Buddhist reaction was almost entirely in religious terms; mobs of violent Buddhist extremists (yes, this is a thing) would roam the countryside and kill people who didn't pay appropriate respect to Buddha icons.

Anyways, my point is: people being killed over religious offenses isn't a "strange" idea in a lot of the world. The idea of a cartoon sparking any violence (really, of people caring about any idea enough to kill someone over it) is kind of alien to the US and western Europe, but it's very much alive and (un)well in many places. Here in India, the cartoon contest would never get a permit to begin with (and you seemingly need permits for everything), and even the news that it had been suggested would probably start a "minor" riot. People really care about this stuff, in a way that's hard to relate to from our Playstation-mediated world.

Neal Stephenson, in a very prescient essay from almost 20 years ago (warning: a lot of it is about computer nerdery) touched on this idea of a morally exhausted West incapable of feeling and believing things like the rest of the world could; I suppose I would link it to Nietzsche's or Fukuyama's idea of the "last man" -- a creature that is all consumer, all stomach, no heart or soul. Nietzsche said it even more bluntly: "the ancient Christians showed their love better when they burned us." The change since then was not that Christians loved their neighbors more, but that they got lazy and apathetic like the rest of us and can't be bothered to save a village full of souls by burning the one heretic alive (and, if you actually believe that's what that did, why in the hell wouldn't you?). Nobody wants to put this forward as any sort of ideal life, but maybe that kind of gastroarchy is actually what it takes to keep people from believing in anything enough to kill over it...