The warrior's honor by Michael Ignatief

The warrior's honor: ethnic war and the modern conscience

Five essays on ethnic war. Another title for the book could be "the intelligent TV-watcher's guide to understanding ethnic conflict". Tensely written, with descriptions of personal experiences of causes and treatment of ethnic conflict.

Is Nothing Sacred? The Ethics of Television

A look at how the cruelty of conflict is brought to our living rooms, and how this activates the conscience of the people. If then, television is capable of treating power as sacred, it becomes plausible for us to ask it to treat suffering with equal respect. If television can jettison its schedules and transform its discourse for the sake of a wedding or funeral, then we can ask it to do the same for a famine or genocide.

The Narcissism of Minor Difference

On how minor differences between people are magnified into hatred. He introduces the concept of nascisstic self-pity, when people see their neighbours only as the cause of their undeserved misery. To ignore differences for purposes of political deliberation, moral behaviour, and the rule of law is not to lie. But it does require us to see beneath the skin, a process that commits us to a daily exercise of the moral imagination. And this exercise of the imagination - this choice th focus on identity rather than difference - is what sustains liberal institutions.

The Seductiveness of Moral Disgust

On how easy it is to condemn participants in ethnic conflict as barbarians, using the Rwana genocide as an introduction. Most of persist to believe that while fires far away are terrible things, we can keep them from our doors, and that while they consume the roofs of our neighbours, the sparks will never leap to our own.

The Warrior's Honor

Essentially on the work of the International committee of the Red Cross, and how they enforce the Geneva Convention. While war is inevitable, the only way to reduce the horror of it is to ensure that the warriors abide by their own code of honour. To me it was an interesting reminder/introduction to the function of the Red Cross. Human rights, of course, is a recent concept. The laws of war predate it by many millennia: the idea that warriors should show compassion to their victims may be a lot older than the one that all human beings have rights and should be treated as equals.

The Nightmare from Which We Are Trying to Awake

On how history should be interpreted to avoid recurring ethnic conflict, essentially the integration of truth, reconciliation and justice. Reconciliation has no chance against vengeance unless it respects the emotions that sustain vengeance, unless it can replace the respect entailed in vengeance with rituals in which communities once at war learn to mourn their dead together.