According to this article, the latest rage in Iraq is videos of beheadings and truck bombings. The article suggest that people there have been driven to it by the “17 months of violence that seems to grow worse by the day.” Plausible. (Although one would have to ask whether it’s the foreign occupiers who are trying to set up credible elections or the car bombers and beheaders who are creating the violence.) But maybe there is something wrong at a deeper level: a social breakdown of a society that has been driven by decades of Ba’athist nationalist/fascist ideology, with all its disastrous consequences, and the rise of Jihadist fanaticism. Maybe those help to explain what would make a substantial percentage of the population think that this makes sense:
“Elsewhere, the TV set in a coffee shop was offering customers the video of foreign hostages being beheaded.”
Although there probably are, as Tom suggests, many contributing factors, a clue to the underlying problem came (for me at least) when at the very beginning, Iraqis looted their own hospitals.
For whatever combination of reasons, some Iraqis have been displaying completely anti-social behaviour from the very start, and the videos are but the latest manifestation of this.
I cannot even begin to empathise with the living conditions in Iraq, but historically conflict has not always been associated with such savegery. Recall the honourable tit-for-tat behaviour between trench soldiers in WW1. This is perhaps a clue that religion is as important a cause as the conflict itself.
Very disturbing…