Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict

Andrew A. G. Ross Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict Chicago, IL: University of Chicago PressFor example, when this book came to my attention, I thought of the infamous date, 9/11.Fear, hatred and international conflict are all big issues. When combined not only in the abstract, but also in images searing what's left of our eye-patches through instantaneous and, incidentally, decontextualized locations, we need to be careful not to jump to conclusions.The conclusion to which many of you might already have jumped is that I was referring to the day when terrorists attacked America, bringing down the World Trade Center and killing thousands of people in an unconscionable act of willful slaughter which spilled blood in New York City, Washington, DC and a farm in Pennsylvania. If that was your conclusion, you were wrong. I meant instead an event almost three decades earlier when a democratically elected president (whether through murder or suicide remains uninteresting) was ousted with the connivance or the collusion of Richard M. Nixon, then President of the United States of America. The year was 1973. The victim was the President of Chile, Dr. Salvador Allende. The ultimate death toll in the murderous coup d'etat was about seven times the number of innocents killed by al-Qaeda in 2001 or who have died as US soldiers in the endless on terror ever since ... (never mind the hundreds of thousands who have been rendered homeless, been maimed or have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere ... but who's counting?I was also reminded of some cables (remember them?), copies of which were published in the Canadian journal, Last Post (remember it? No, not the official publication of the Canadian Legion, but the non-sectarian leftist magazine that flourished for a time, mainly in the 1970s). The communications were sent from Santiago to the government offices of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. They were written by the Canadian Ambassador to Chile at the time (I am pretty sure that his name was also Andrew Ross-small world). Canada's emissary said that General Pinochet and his associates had accepted a thankless but necessary task. I was disgusted. I don't think that the author of this book is the same Andrew Ross. I hope not. Anyway, call my disgust an emotional response. Call it affect.IThe word became important, not merely among high school curriculum consultants, but also among legitimate anthropologists (Goldschmidt, 2005). It will pop up again here.Meanwhile, from the sharpening of the first spear through the mounting of the first chariot, and on to such medical advances as blood transfusions, vaccines and prostheses for severed limbs, and on further to the civilian applications of military inventions related to global positioning systems, microwave ovens and duct tape, it would be possible?if somewhat bizarre and not a little grotesque?to interpret warfare as an overall benefit to humanity owing to the stimulus it provides for clever new methods and technologies.If war promotes human understanding and encourages the development of sciences such as chemistry, physics and technological and commercial products from the Internet to Velcro, it challenges human understanding with regard to itself. No matter what half-baked theories of human nature are advanced by theologians, social scientists, geneticists and evolutionary psychologists to describe and explain our species' penchant, not merely for murder, but for increasingly indiscriminate killings on mass and sometimes genocidal scales, the fact remains that aspirant empirical scientists and methodical historians have failed rather miserably to explain why we do what we do to our fellow humans-never mind our fellow creatures who, we might one day appreciate, are also important parts of the biosphere we inhabit... I digress.IIAfter World War II, when the grisly toll was taken, an inventory of acts of indescribably senseless cruelty caused at least a few of our philosophical and social scientific predecessors to sit back, reflect and think as seriously as they could about the causes of war. …

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