Honor killing
My boss used on occasion to ask me why Americans preferred football to soccer. I’d reply tongue-in-cheek that Americans were just a more violent breed and preferred a bit more bone-crunching when it came to their sports interests. But according to Randolph Roth’s “American Homicide” it’s true. The violence part at least.
By looking at murder rates from the 17th century onwards, Roth argues that the frequency of murders in the U.S. is inversely proportional to the level of trust in government.
A New Yorker review of Roth’s work takes the author to task for ascribing quantitaive methods to what are essentially unquantifiable acts of human emotion. “Roth has wandered into a no man’s land between the social sciences and the humanities… in a bar graph, atrocity yields to banality.”
Still, the New Yorker piece is a good read, touching on capital punishment and the U.S.’s disproportionately high prison population to the relationship between democracy and a propensity for taking lives.
It’s that latter one that caught my eye. Europeans have for long ascribed America’s blood lust as it were to the fact that early Americans had not undergone the “civilizing process” that allowed Europeans to accept the state as the final arbiter of authority. Democracy had, in short, come too soon to the U.S. As a result,
Colonial Americans went murderously adrift… (they) preserved for themselves not only the right to bear arms—rather than yielding that right to a strong central government—but also medieval manners: impulsiveness, crudeness, and fidelity to a culture of honor (as opposed to integrity).
Sure it’s not surprising coming from Europeans, but it did prompt thoughts of that other backwater of democracy gone awry — Afghanistan. The piece goes on to list four factors that went into Roth’s study of what contributes to a nation’s having a low murder rate.
faith that government is stable and capable of enforcing just laws; trust in the integrity of legitimately elected officials; solidarity among social groups based on race, religion, or political affiliation; and confidence that the social hierarchy allows for respect to be earned without recourse to violence.
I think just about anyone would be hard pressed to say that Afghanistan meets even one of these. And as far as murder, or the potential to commit murder, goes, reports that a South Korean contractor was attacked are just the latest sign of just how sticky Seoul’s decision to send a Provincial Reconstruction Team to the country is. The latest attack came on Oct. 8,
when a group of six armed gunmen assaulted the Korean firm’s road construction site in Faryab Province in northern Afghanistan, according to officials.
On Nov. 5, a number of armed gunmen attacked the Korean firm’s construction materials warehouse in Balkh, but retreated after exchanging gunfire with Afghan police troops for about 10 minutes, they added.
At present, the construction company has 80 South Korean workers stationed in Afghanistan and is engaged in six road construction projects.
Company executives attributed the attacks to a dispute between local contractors, ruling out Taliban involvement. Whatever the case may be, the incident demonstrates the risks that South Koreans will face if and when they are sent to the country, no matter what part of it they ultimately end up in, working to establish the foundation for a functioning democracy. If it isn’t already too soon.
Filed under: America, Politics | Tagged: Afghanistan, Korea, Politics, war
