Quote:
Originally Posted by nik-
Then what is being used to determine why one group is kept down? It's not just a coincidence that all the oppressed people just happen to be Sunni/Shia. When one sect routinely marginalizes the other, with which sect is which varying between countries it seems like religion very much is the driving factor.
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Well, generally speaking a good system is when the minority has the power, as long as it's big enough to form a power base when they have all the resources. 10-30% seems to be a good number. I'm guessing a smaller group can't hold on to power and a bigger group starts to have too much infighting to be stable.
Sadddam Hussein used the same system btw, but nobody claimed it was anything but a powerplay.
Besides, history is full of oppressive systems where religion was not an issue. Religion is generally the first choice, language, ethnicity are also really popular options, as are social classes and political parties. From what I've understood North Korea has for example turned the military effectively into a social class of it's own, with all the perks that come with it. (This is pretty typical of military dictatorships really.)
It's worth remembering that even though Husseins regime also had a tendency to treat people differently according to religion, it's been well studied that yeah, lots of people didn't actually know or care about their neighbours religions, and lots of people still don't see it that way. Because it's really more complicated than sunni/shia.
Problem is, there is no understanding the whole situation of Iraq from the outside, because we don't share the language, we don't know what the political questions, we don't understand the history that well and the culture is too different. And to add to that, there's ethnic groups we don't know about and borders we can't remember but people there can and so and and so forth...
But think of North Ireland. Even though people talked about "catholics fighting protestants", everybody knew it was not a religious conflict. Both "catholics" and "protestants" were shorthands for much more complicated issues that people generally didn't quite get.
Yet you could easily enough say that "catholics and protestants have been killing each other through the ages" and be technically correct. But now there's been peace there for so long, I've started meeting kids in the university who need to look up what the IRA was.
Religion is a good flag to rally under and an important mechanism through which people form communities, but it's rarely the actual reason people start killing each other. Unfortunately once they start rallying under those flags for other reasons, religion can become a reason in it's own.
(Of course religion can also be used as an excuse, like when people were killing jews in pre-holocaust times in Europe. It was pretty much always because the jews had money, or because they were owed money, not really because they were jews.)