Donating Machetes

According to the AP and a lawyer, Rwanda's Director of Planning in 1994 diverted IMF and World Bank funds for use against Tutsis during the genocide. Admittedly, the charge is that he embezzled the money -- which is not as bad as actually having the fund set up to do that sort of thing officially. The former planning director has pled not guilty to the charges.

And they said that the West didn't do enough in Rwanda in 1994.

Ahmadinejad says, once again, that the Holocaust is a myth

The New York Times reports that Iranian president Mamoud Ahmadinejad has made his essentially annual declaration that the Holocaust did not occur. This time, according to the reporting, clashes broke out -- not about the discussion at hand (a pro-Palestinian rally) but rather disputes concerning this summer's Iranian election results.

Cartoon title: The Ahmadinejad Code, from Cox and Forkum, or Hugh Bradley. There is evidently a code embedded in the image.

Reading List?

I write for this blog in part so that I have a forum to write about what I'm reading. I need to expand my knowledge and thought about the subject. I'm curious to know what books that our blog readers find engaging, enraging, or of general interest along the lines of the subject matter. This plea includes my co-bloggers, if y'all have suggestions. My Amazon shopping cart is empty, waiting to be filled with fun stories of death and mayhem.

Kathleen Taylor and Crash Davis

In Cruelty, Taylor (a neuroscientist) explores why emotional beliefs are so unchanging for people while other sort of beliefs, scientific understanding, for example, are subject to change based on evidence. She observes: "beliefs which rely on reason are at risk from errors in reasoning.... Beliefs associated with strong emotions do not need to track changeable reality, nor do they need to be disturbed by errors of thinking." (p. 148, emphasis added)

Or in the immortal words from Kevin Costner's best film: "Don't think; it can only hurt the ballclub."

More on Cruelty

So I'm still reading Kathleen Taylor's Cruelty (it's been a busy summer and it's not exactly light bedtime reading) and have come to the realization that political science's emphasis on understanding ethnic mobilization within the frames of primordialism, instrumentalism, and constructivism is rather limited. That political science is limited -- as any discipline must be -- is not the most interesting observation, I guess.

Taylor contributes a cognitive and biological layer to the social sciency conception of creating "others" and defending one's position. Her argument centers on the tendency for humans to dehumanize enemies, a process that opens the door to envisioning members of other groups as less than human and -- importantly -- dangerous to one's own group or existence. This insight is not particularly new (which Taylor concedes): one need only to see the use of the term "cockroaches" for Tutsi or "lice" and "vermin" for Jews in 1930's Germany to see this sort of thing in action.

The books' portrayal of patterns of human decisionmaking, especially the sort of shortcuts the brain makes in sifting information for accuracy, has considerable impact how social scientists understand instrumentalism, however. The brain, as amazing a machine as it is, makes errors when forced to adjust to stimuli quickly.

As such, according to Taylor, people are more prone to succumb to "othering" claims when such appeals are framed in terms of self-defense and especially if they have a time pressure and urgency attached. Small wonder that genocides and cleansings occur during conditions of war or ideology construction -- both political events that have much urgency attached. This also helps us understand how ethnic boundaries can literally develop overnight -- with mobilization by trusted political leaders amidst difficult and fraught political times. So a Hutu husband may indeed turn against his Tutsi wife who just a month ago he trusted. As long as he doesn't have too much time to think about it.