by DAVID ROMANO

Syria increasingly seems to have descended into complete savagery. Most recently comes gruesome news from the battle for Qusayr and a massacre in the nearby Sunni village of Bayda. Pro-Assad militiamen surrounded Bayda and then apparently proceeded to massacre its people, including the former imam of the village who had angered his community by remaining supportive of the Assad regime. Accounts of toddlers and babies shot dead as they huddled with their mothers send a chill through any human reader. Those carrying out atrocities do not appear restricted to the regime and its allies: accounts of rebel massacres and acts of horror abound as well. The latest involves a video of a rebel commander biting into the internal organs of a slain enemy.

As I discussed these terrible events with someone, they exclaimed to me “No one kills Muslims like Muslims do. And then they declare victory.” The real issue, however, is not about religion. It’s about human behaviour in the very worst of conflicts–the sectarian struggles, the civil wars and the life-and-death contests that pit former neighbours against one another. Rwanda, the Congo, the former Yugoslavia and Columbia, among many others, knew similar savagery during their civil wars and these are not Muslim countries, of course. Until events are upon us, none of us can really know what we would or would not do in sufficiently extreme circumstances.

The best known novelist in English to address such questions was undoubtedly Joseph Conrad. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad explored the depths of human nature and the hypocrisy of colonialism and “civilization.” Peering into his own soul and unencumbered by the gloss of civilization or any checks upon his own power and impulses, the book’s anti-hero finds himself on his death bed deep in the darkest jungles of the Congo. He memorably pronounces his last words: “the horror, the horror.”

Similar themes appear in Conrad’s other works. In Lord Jim, the main character daydreams of his own heroism and chivalry. When a moment of truth arrives, however, he cravenly abandons his post as first mate on a sinking ferryboat carrying pilgrims to Mecca, leaving the passengers to perish. He spends the rest of his life fleeing his own cowardice. Lord Jim finds redemption only at the end of his life with an act of self-sacrifice, on behalf of an island community in the South Seas that adopted him and accepted him.

In The Secret Agent, a band of anarchists plot to blow things up in early twentieth-century London and justify their plans with abstract principles and ideologies. Government spies and agents provocateurs, meanwhile, end up carrying out bombings themselves in an effort to root out the anarchists, and similarly justify all their actions through abstract ideological principles devoid of empathy for their fellow humans.

Joseph Conrad, you see, never trusted governments, rebels or their ideologies. His novels and explorations of human nature served up equal doses of irony and scorn for all of them. Although he wrote in English, Conrad only learned English in his twenties. He came from Poland–and he had seen his country invaded, occupied, subjugated and divided by the Great Powers of Europe, all accompanied by the rhetoric of civilization, morality and high principles. Some Conrad scholars believe that the only value he consequently put much faith in was ‘fidelity’–duty to one’s family, community or nation. For Conrad, the rest may have been just so much hypocrisy– malleable morality and ethics that shift according to the context and the need.

People in Syria today understand this kind of ‘fidelity’ all too well. As the colonially mapped social construction of ‘Syria’ increasingly unravels, there remains only Sunnis, Alaawis, Kurds, Christians and Druze. In the most extreme of circumstances each community comes face to face with its own heart of darkness, its own cowardice and its own loss of empathy for others. Sunni massacres of countless Alaawis over the centuries, as well as a few more recent ones in the last 3 years, preceded the massacre of Sunnis in Bayda. More Sunni innocents will lose their lives in yet more atrocities, followed by more Alaawi innocents, while Syria’s other communities do their best to stay out of the storm. The gruesome spiral of violence continues until only ‘fidelity’ remains.

David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since August 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press).

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