THROUGHOUT HISTORY AND ACROSS CULTURES, the most common form of
violence is that between family members and neighbors or kindred
communities--in civil wars writ large and small. From assault to
genocide, from assassination to massacre, violence usually emerges
from inside the fold. You have more to fear from a spouse, an
ex-spouse, or a coworker than you do from someone you don't know.
In this brilliant polemic, Russell Jacoby argues that violence
erupts most often, and most savagely, between those of us most
closely related. An Indian nationalist assassinated Mohandas
Gandhi, "the father" of India. An Egyptian Muslim assassinated
Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt and a recipient of the Nobel
Peace Prize. An Israeli Jew assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli
prime minister and similarly a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Genocide most often involves kindred groups. The German Christians
of the 1930s were so closely intertwined with German Jews that a
yellow star was required to tell the groups apart. Serbs and
Muslims in Bosnia, like the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, are often
indistinguishable even to one another.
This idea contradicts both common sense and the collective wisdom
of teachers and preachers, who declaim that we fear--and sometimes
should fear--the "other," the dangerous stranger. Citizens and
scholars alike believe that enemies lurk in the street and beyond,
where we confront a "clash of civilizations" with foreigners who
challenge our way of life. Jacoby offers a more unsettling truth:
it is not so much the unknown that threatens us, but the known. We
attack our brothers--our kin, our acquaintances, our
neighbors--with far greater regularity and venom than we attack
outsiders.
Weaving together the biblical story of Cain and Abel, Freud's
"narcissism of minor differences," insights on anti-Semitism and
misogyny, as well as fresh analysesof "civil" bloodbaths from the
St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in the sixteenth century to genocide
and terrorism in our own time, Jacoby turns history inside out to
offer a provocative new understanding of violentconfrontation over
the centuries. "In thinking about the bad, we reach for the good,"
he says in his Introduction. This passionate, counterintuitive
account affords us an unprecedented insight into the roots of
violence.
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