World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [3]
When I asked an uncle about the Payatas explosion, he responded with annoyance. “Why does everyone want to talk about that? It’s the worst thing for foreign investment.” I wasn’t surprised. My relatives live literally walled off from the Filipino masses, in a posh, all-Chinese residential enclave, on streets named Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. The entry points are guarded by armed, private security forces.
Each time I think of Nilo Abique—he was close to six feet and my aunt was four-feet-eleven-inches tall—I find myself welling up with a hatred and revulsion so intense it is actually consoling. But over time I have also had glimpses of how the Chinese must look to the vast majority of Filipinos, to someone like Abique: as exploiters, as foreign intruders, their wealth inexplicable, their superiority intolerable. I will never forget the entry in the police report for Abique’s “motive for murder.” The motive given was not robbery, despite the jewels and money the chauffeur was said to have taken. Instead, for motive, there was just one word—“Revenge.”
My aunt’s killing was just a pinprick in a world more violent than most of us ever imagined. In America we read about acts of mass slaughter and savagery; at first in faraway places, now coming closer and closer to home. We do not understand what connects these acts. Nor do we understand the role we have played in bringing them about.
In the Serbian concentration camps of the early 1990s, the women prisoners were raped over and over, many times a day, often with broken bottles, often together with their daughters. The men, if they were lucky, were beaten to death as their Serbian guards sang national anthems; if they were not so fortunate, they were castrated or, at gunpoint, forced to castrate their fellow prisoners, sometimes with their own teeth. In all, thousands were tortured and executed.
4
In Rwanda in 1994, ordinary Hutus killed eight hundred thousand Tutsis over a period of three months, typically hacking them to death with machetes. Young children would come home to find their mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers on the living room floor, in piles of severed heads and limbs.
5
In Jakarta in 1998, screaming Indonesian mobs torched, smashed, and looted hundreds of Chinese shops and homes, leaving over two thousand dead. One who survived—a fourteen-year-old Chinese girl—later committed suicide by taking rat poison. She had been gang-raped and genitally mutilated in front of her parents.
6
In Israel in 1998, a suicide bomber driving a car packed with explosives rammed into a school bus filled with thirty-four Jewish children between the ages of six and eight. Over the next few years such incidents intensified, becoming daily occurrences and a powerful collective expression of Palestinian hatred. “We hate you,” a senior Arafat official elaborated in April 2002. “The air hates you, the land hates you, the trees hate you, there is no purpose in your staying on this land.”
7
On September 11, 2001, Middle Eastern terrorists hijacked four American airplanes. They destroyed the World Trade Center and the southwest side of the Pentagon, crushing or incinerating approximately three thousand people. “Americans, think! Why you are hated all over the world,” proclaimed a banner held by Arab demonstrators.
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Apart from their violence, what is the connection between these episodes? The answer lies in the relationship—increasingly, the explosive collision—between the three most powerful forces operating in the world today: markets, democracy, and ethnic hatred.
This book is about a phenomenon—pervasive outside the West yet rarely acknowledged, indeed often viewed as taboo—that turns free market democracy into an engine of ethnic conflagration. The phenomenon I refer to is that