HISTORY IDENTITY, HONOR

Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co., 1997) (From "The Nightmare from Which We Are Trying to Awake": "It is open to question whether justice or truth actually heals. It is an article of faith with us that knowledge, particularly self-knowledge, is a condition of psychic health, yet every society, including ours, manages to function with only the most precarious purchase on the truth of its own past. Every city has a substantial psychological investment in heroes, To discover that its heroes were guilty of war crimes is to admit that the identities they defended were themselves tarnished. . . War crimes challenge collective moral identities, and when these denies are threatened,denial is actually a defense of everything one holds dear." Id. at 164, 184. From "The Narcissism of Minor Difference": "The narcissism of minor difference may not explain why communities of fear begin to loathe each other. It is not an explanatory theory. It is only a phrase, with a certain heuristic usefulness. Its virtue is that it doesn't take ethnic antagonism as a given; it doesn't accept differing histories or origins as a fate that dictates bloody outcomes. It draws our attention to the projective and fantastic quality of ethnic identities, to their particular inauthenticity. It suggests that it is precisely their inauthenticity that triggers violent actions of defense. It also helps us to notice their dynamic nature. Ethnicity is sometimes described as if it were skin, a fate that cannot be changed. In fact, what is essential about ethnicity is it plasticity. It is not a skin, but a mask, constantly repainted." Id. at 34, 56. "Globalism scours away distinctiveness at the surface of our identities and forces us back into ever more assertive defense of the inner differences--language [e.g., English versus Spanish and just about any middle eastern language?], mentality [e.g., conservative versus liberal, republic versus democrat?], myth [e.g., American exceptionalism?], and fantasy [e.g, America as leader of the free world, or president as most power person in the world?]--that escape the surface scouring. As it brings us closer together, makes us all neighbors, destroys the old boundaries of identity marked out by national or regional consumption styles, we react by longing to the margins of difference that remain." Id. at 58. "Let us pause here and draw some implications from what Freud is arguing. If intolerance and narcissism are connected [Are use listening Donald?], one immediate and practical conclusion might be this: We are likely to be more tolerant toward other identities only if we learn to like ourselves a little less. Breaking down stereotypical images of others is likely to work only if we also break down the fantastic elements in our own self-regard. The root of intolerance lies in our tendency to overvalue our own identities; by overvalue, I mean we insist that we have nothing in common, nothing to share. At the heart of this insistence lurks the fantasy of purity, of boundaries that can never be crossed." Id  at 62. In short, intolerance is about building a wall around oneself and those who are just like you. From the title essay, "The Warrior's Honor": "The problem . . . is that more and more warriors no longer play by the rules. Modern technology has steadily increased the distance, both moral and geographic, between the warrior and his prey. What sense of honor can possibly link the technician who targets the Tomahawk cruise missile [or the drone?] and the civilians of Baghdad a thousand mile away? At the other end of the scale, the global market in small arms is breaking up the modern state's monopoly on the means of violence. The disintegrating states of the world are literally flooded with junk weapons, old Kalashnikovs for the most part, which cn be bought in the marketplace for the cost of a loaf of bread. With weapons this cheap, violence becomes impossible for the state to contain. The history of war has been about the state's confiscating violence form society and vesting it in a specialized warrior caste. But if the state loses control of war, as it has in so many of the world's red zones of insurgency and rebellion--if war becomes the preserve of private armies, gangsters, and paramilitaries--then the distinction between battle and barbarism may disappear." Id. at 109, 157-158.).