All too human

摘要

It is a depressingly familiar story. Two communities live in cheek-by-jowl harmony until, one day, they don't. Then, for reasons that may on the face of it seem quite trivial - a property dispute, or a social slight, perhaps - a rift develops. Neighbour becomes suspicious of neighbour; hostility mounts, then turns to aggression, violence and - well, the story doesn't have a happy ending. Rival sides in such conflicts describe each other in ways that deny their shared humanity: they may liken each other to vermin, or pests to be exterminated. The words onlookers use to describe such conflicts - bloody religious factionalism in the Central African Republic, for example, or the civil war in Syria - are also animalistic: perpetrators are "brutal", while their victims are "slaughtered".