Why the Arab World Is Lost in an Emotional Nakba - Feelings of inferiority promote honor/shame values
The article explains a lot of the Middle East mind set, and explains those who might feel inferior, and can be extrapolated into other cultures and countries, maybe some close to home
SnT
Why the Arab World Is Lost in an Emotional Nakba, and How We Keep It There
Anthropologists and legal historians have long identified certain tribal cultures—warrior, nomadic—with
a specific set of honor codes whose violation brings debilitating shame. The individual who fails to take revenge on the killer of a clansman brings shame upon himself (makes him a woman) and weakens his clan, inviting more open aggression. In World War II, the United States sought the help of anthropologists like Ruth Benedict to explain the play of honor and shame in driving Japanese military behavior, resulting in both intelligence victories in the Pacific Theater and her book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword . Taking her lead, the great classicist E.R. Dodds analyzed the millennium-long shift in Greek culture from a “shame” culture to a “guilt” culture in his Greeks and the Irrational , where he contrasted a world in which fame and reputation, rather than conscience and fear of divine retribution, drive men to act.
in
some cultures the dominant voices openly promote honor/shame values and in a way that militates against liberal society and progress. Arab political culture, to take one example—despite some liberal voices, despite noble dissidents—tends to favor ascendancy through aggression , the politics of the “strong horse ,” and the application of “Hama rules ”—which all combine to produce a Middle East caught between prison and anarchy , between Sisi’s Egypt and al-Assad’s Syria.
the very prospect of an autonomous Jewish political entity is a blasphemy against Islam,
and an insult to Arab virility, is not to say that every period of Muslim rule involved deliberate humiliation of dhimmi.
the prospect of an independent state of should-be dhimmis struck Arab leaders as more than humiliating.
It endangered all Islam. Thus Rahman Azzam Pasha, the head of the newly formed Arab League, spoke for his “honor group” when he threatened that “if the Zionists dare establish a state, the massacres we would unleash would dwarf anything which Genghis Khan and Hitler perpetrated.”
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news...-nakba?print=1
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