This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
- Central African Republic: Christians aim to get rid of all Muslims
- Reader complaints about Central African Republic and Syria
Central African Republic: Christians aim to get rid of all Muslims
Thousands of Muslims are fleeing for their lives fromBangui, the capital city of Central African Republic, andfrom towns across the country. They’re escaping in convoysbeing guarded by troops from Chad, a Muslim country.
The violence began after a March 2013 coup that broughta Muslim to the presidency. Muslims formed “Seleka militias”and committed deadly attacks on Christians. Christiansformed “anti-balaka” (or “anti-machete”) militias and beganrevenge attacks late in 2013. By now, the revenge attacksare in full force. According to one reporter:
It’s horrific, actually. You have a country that isessentially falling apart. Neighbor killing neighbor on a dailybasis in the most brutal, horrific fashion I have everseen. Lynchings, people attacked by mobs, people having their armscut off, people burnt with tires around their necks like we saw inSouth Africa in the 1990s. …
I just saw today 10,000 Muslims forced to flee from Bangui andsurrounding towns north toward Chad, because they are in fear fortheir lives. They are getting hacked to death, attacked in streetsby mobs, the districts they live in and their houses and mosquesare being looted and burned, so they have no choice but toleave. …
But it’s the most violent and hateful environment I’ve everdocumented in 16 years. And I’ve covered every conflict in Africaover that time, but I’ve never documented anything this bad.
There is so much hatred. Yesterday I was in a town that had eightmosques and over 30,000 Muslims, but now the mosques have beenburnt and there are only 300 Muslims left there, hiding in amosque surrounded by French peacekeeping forces who are trying tokeep them alive.
France has 1,600 peacekeeping troops in CAR who are working with4,000 African Union peacekeeping troops. The United Nations expectsto send thousands more. But this is a generational crisis war, aforce of nature, which can’t be stopped by any number of troops untilit’s run its course. BBC and National Geographic
Reader complaints about Central African Republic and Syria
I’d like to address some reader complaints that have beensent to me recently when I’ve written about Central AfricanRepublic and about Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad.
Bashar al-Assad is the worst genocidal monster so far this century,comparable to Mao, Hitler, and Pol Pot of the last century. He’s aShia/Alawite Muslim who conducted “industrial strength” torture andextermination on his own civilians, who used sarin gas against his ownpeople, who is allied with the Muslim terrorist group Hezbollah, andwho is allied with Iran, which some people call the worstterrorist country on earth.
And yet when I call al-Assad a “genocidal monster,” I get bizarrecomplaints that I’m excusing al-Qaeda terrorism. That’s ridiculous,as I write about al-Qaeda terrorism all the time, especially inPakistan.
But what’s most bizarre is that many of the people who make thiscomplaint are in the community that perceive Muslims negatively,sometimes referring to all of them universally as “murderous.” That’snot true of more than a small minority, but if you really believe thatall Muslims are “murderous,” then you should be aware that al-Assad isthe most murderous one of all.
So if you’re one of those commenters who are holding those twocontradictory views simultaneously, then I suggest you ask yourdoctor for anti-psychosis pills, because the cognitive dissonance isgoing to drive you crazy.
This is actually very familiar. College kids in the 1960s praised MaoZedong as a god, even carrying copies of his “Little Red Book” intheir back pockets and quoting from it from time to time. This wasgoing on at the same time that Mao was starving, torturing, andexecuting tens of millions of Chinese people in the Great LeapForward, and then again in the Cultural Revolution.
There are still people today who consider Mao to be a god, and theystill praise him to the skies. And we all know that there areHolocaust deniers who says that the evidence of the Holocaust was allmanufactured. These are all the same to me as lovers of al-Assad.
The situation in Central African Republic is drawing a number ofcomplaints because there are Christians committing atrocities onMuslims. One accusation is that I’m excusing the atrocities ofMuslims, which is absurd.
I will agree with the commenters to the following extent: Large-scaleChristian atrocities are so rare at this time in history that there isincreased focus on the one in CAR, while there are so many Muslimjihadist atrocities that any individual situation is not a majorstory.
Another complaint was related to my contrast of the CAR war versus theSyria war, when I said that the violence in CAR was more personal.
Let’s go back to the Rwanda genocide in 1994. There were many storiessimilar to the following: Two families lived together in peace andharmony for years. Then when a Hutu leader announced over the radio,machete, went next door to the Tutsi family, killed and dismemberedthe father and children, raped the wife, and killed and dismemberedher. Similar stories came out of the Bosnian war genocide in 1995.
This is the kind of thing that’s beginning to happen in CAR, and it’sNOT happening in Syria, where something quite different is happening.Even the atrocities of Muslim jihadists are rarely as personal asdescribed in the above story about Rwanda. That’s why I’m saying thatthe atrocities in CAR are “more personal” than in Syria. This isan important distinction in generational theory, because this isone way to distinguish generational crisis wars from non-crisis wars.
Getting back to the Christians committing atrocities on Muslims, itmay not be what I want to hear or what you want to hear, but it’shappening. The Generational Dynamics methodology does not respectideological or religious beliefs, except as they define identitygroups, and analyzes what happens among the different identity groups.
If you look at the last century, you can easily find genocidal warsthat were Muslim versus Muslim (e.g., Iran/Iraq war), Christian versusChristian (e.g., World War II), and Buddhist versus Buddhist (e.g.,Cambodia’s “killing fields” civil war). Of course, there are hundredsmore examples with different kinds of populations. GenerationalDynamics looks at all of these examples, analyzes them, and uses theanalyses to try to predict what’s going to happen in the future.
And right now, we can say with some certainty that the situation inCentral African Republic is going to get very bloody, and by the timeit’s over, neither Muslims nor Christians will look good.
KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Central African Republic, Bangui,Seleka, anti-balaka,Syria, Bashar al-Assad, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot,al-Qaeda, Pakistan
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