Initial thoughts

So something occurred to me today in class after Dr C handed out the additional readings she'd had copied for us. I started flicking through one of them and the introductory paragraphs caught my eye. They described, in gory detail, just one of the war crimes/crimes against humanity from the Yugoslavian war, Rwanda, and the Holocaust. And they described some infamous hate crimes from the 1990s in the US: James Byrd Jr, who was drug to his death by skinheads; Matthew Shepard, who was robbed, beaten and left for dead in a homophobic attack. (I remember reading these stories in the newspaper and feeling the revulsion at not only those who could do such things, but at those who essentially advocate such actions. But I digress.)

And this made my blood run cold for a minute. I mean, I'm well used to discussing every kind of man-made disaster in terms of high politics: "Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939.", "Napoleon's armies marched across Europe..." But the small details catch your eye and attention, and they stick with you.

It then occurred to me. I spent 4 years in undergrad studying the best of the human mind and capabilities: the elegance and wonder that is language. This one feature is what makes us human, in my opinion, and is what allows us to express ourselves and communicate with others so efficiently and elegantly. If you were to look at a morpheme-by-morpheme deconstruction of a sentence, you'd see the brainpower it takes just to put together a two-clause sentence. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I refer to how linguists take sentences and words apart to understand their structures and relationships. It's like looking at a piece of furniture and examining how it's built.)

And now, I have a grisly, front-row seat to the worst of the human mind and character: wanton violence, the infliction of torture and suffering on others, the use of destruction and death as a tool. This is the nature of the IR beast: not everything can always be couched in the delicate terminology of diplomacy. But it's shocking when you've been away from it for a while.