Neil Gaiman on Syria - "They'd Like to Go Back."

For some reason Sara Benincasa has convinced Neil Gaiman to do a live reading of the Cheesecake Factory's menu if they can raise $500,000 for refugees, sending the money to the UNHCR. I love Neil's voice. I love the way he reads. I can think of many things I'd like him to read other than that menu, but hey, RAISE THE MONEY!

A few days ago 68 children, and over 110 people total, were killed in a bombing in Syria. It happened after the Manchester bombing and, of course, received relatively little coverage. Each horror is a horror, but I thought of those dead children in two very different parts of the world, and I wept a little that morning.

When I interviewed Gaiman for my American Gods essay, I spent awhile asking him about Syria and refugees, but couldn't fit it into the piece. But it moved me, so I offer it to you here (edited slightly to make sense as paragraphs):

The last time I saw figures, which was before the latest round of madness, there were over 6 million people had fled Syria, and more were internally displaced. We’re 6, 7, years into a nightmarish civil war. 

People should know that each of the refugees, each of the people who have made it out of Syria, has gone through a nightmare in order to get out. Making their lives worse helps nobody, making their lives worse is inhuman.

The UNHCR [UN Refugee Agency] was never built to handle a world in right now there are more displaced person than there were even at the end of World War 2. It was set up to be there for refugees, for local crises, in the assumption that it normally takes about 1 to 2 years in order for people to go home.

The other thing that people should know is that they want to go home! They like Syria. They love Syria. If there were a civil war in America … and there was no food and people were shooting at you for sport and you decided to get out. What you’d like to do is come back again, because it’s a nice place and your home.

They really just want to stay there [in Syria] and eat and educate their children which no one has been able to do for 6 years in Syria. They’d like to go back.

DONATION LINK IS HERE. Support the UNHCR if you can.

Conflicts Lasting Millennia and the State of the Union

The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia. - Barack Obama, State of the Union 2016

I've been thinking about conflicts around the globe. While many of them occur in similar places as conflicts in the past, and while superficially conflicting parties may seem the same as conflicting parties in the past, I can't think of  a single conflict where I'd be comfortable arguing that the roots are at least 2000 years old.

Or really 1000 years old.

I assume he's talking about Sunni-Shia, but maybe Kurd/Arab/Turk, or perhaps Jew-Muslim, and maybe even Christian-Muslim. At any rate, when we make these historical arguments about conflicts rooted in antiquity of some sort, we absolve ourselves of any responsibility while suggesting that they remain intractable.

Vox covered this. So did Buzzfeed. So did pretty much my whole gang of history profs and students on my Twitter feed.

Here's a piece from political science blog The Monkey Cage at Washington Post - Syria isn’t Bosnia. And no, the problem isn’t ‘ancient hatreds.’[my emphasis]

The “ancient hatreds” thesis is the idea that groups of people fight each other because they have always despised one another due to differences of identity and culture. According to this argument, if ancient hatreds drive conflict in Syria like they did in the Balkans, then the solution to Syria’s similarly intractable conflict, Stavridis suggests, should follow the Dayton Accords model, which, he argues, dealt adequately with ethnically divided Balkan populations...

Sadly, the narratives Kaplan and his followers peddled in the 1990s have found an afterlife in today’s discourse on Syria. As a result, the Syrian war, much like the Yugoslav dissolution, has been often painted as a fundamentally intractable, timeless conflict rooted in the primal urges of its respective combatants. This narrative has contributed decisively to a culture of indifference and reluctance among Western leaders to act in any meaningful capacity to aid the people of Syria. Writing off a conflict as based in “ancient hatreds” makes it easy for international actors to excuse their lack of coherent policy, or worse, to offer simplistic solutions.

This is why we need public engagement from intellectuals, to push back on this kind of analysis.