Volume 49, Number 6 · April 11, 2002
The Blood Lust of Identity
By Ian Buruma
In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong
by Amin Maalouf, translated from the French by Barbara Bray
Arcade, 164 pp., $22.95
Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America
by Tom Hayden
Verso, 312 pp., $25.00
Identity is a bloody business. Religion, nationality, or race may not be the primary causes of war and mass murder. These are more likely to be tyranny, or greed for territory, wealth, and power. But 'identity' is what gets the blood boiling, what makes people do unspeakable things to their neighbors. It is the fuel used by agitators to set whole countries on fire. When the world is reduced to a battle between 'us and them,' Germans and Jews, Hindus and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants, Hutus and Tutsis, only mass murder will do, for 'we' can only survive if 'they' are slaughtered. Before we kill them, 'they' must be stripped of our common humanity, by humiliating them, degrading them, and giving them numbers instead of names.
Review, 3882 words
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