Evil good men do

I have heard such reasoning from Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews and even Communists. ‘Decent’ Muslims find solace in embroidered memories of the past. They resent the exploitative hegemony of the West but they do not see and therefore cannot rise above the violence of Muslims against the minorities in their own countries. My ‘right-wing’ Christian friends term the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia propaganda.

Jews have suffered pogroms in Christian Europe for 1,700 years. Yet many of them support the draconian Israeli policies of dispossessing Palestinians. Hindus are inheritors of some highly evolved philosophies of ancient India. Yet there are some among them who think nothing of engineering pogroms against Muslims. Many communists had seen nothing wrong with the Soviet Union and even justified its worst attacks on its own citizens.

Average, decent, good people are infected by the nefarious propaganda of the extremists. The fault is ours. It springs partly from our yearning to be temporally validated and partly from our propensity to look for quick, easy solutions to complex problems. People who are honest in personal dealings, good neighbours who help the needy, feed the hungry and can legitimately be proud of being good human beings, are taken in.

The propaganda becomes a reality, driven by the success of the reprehensible partisans from the opposing sides, turning lies into truth and making enemies out of potential friends. Good people end up supporting horrible policies and even pray for the success of their leaders who spread misery in their name.

The writer is a US-based academic