I get the distinct sense that you're veering away from rational discussion, into something closer to theatrics. This gives me the impression that facts and arguments are being pushed onto the back-burner. Is there any point discussing things further, if we're going down that road? Have I responded to your posts in such a manner?
I do indeed veer into theatrics when presented with especially poor argumentation. You've been running on an evidence standard of "trust me bro" and repeatedly ignored requests for more information, it's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith. But if they disturb you, I'll hold back.
You seem to be dramatically misinterpreting my statement. Let me repeat, and then elaborate, to ensure that at the very least my point isn't misunderstood somehow. Leaving out some asides to make my sentence more concise, I said:
"Honour killings are about the external honour of the perpetrator. To let the person who 'shamed' him go unpunished harms the perpetrator's honour."
In a shame culture, honour is external; defined by the perception of the group. The way your group views you, and not your internal sense of 'integrity', defines whether you are 'honourable'. I know that you understand this, because you've literally written about the matter.
This sense of honour-by-perception drives honour killings. If Achmed's daughter is, by the mores of his community, acting like a slut, then the final consequence of this is that he kills her-- because otherwise, her very existence (and perceived ill behaviour) shames him as a failed father. He'll forever be "Achmed, who raised a slut". And that is unbearable to him, because in Islamic shame culture, to be known as such is to inescapably be such. By killing her, he removes the source of his shame, and thus the stain upon his honour. He proves to the group that he 'acts righly' (by their standards), which absolves him of responsibility for the shameful behaviour of his daughter.
I understand your elaboration, I just also disagree and feel it's entirely wrong. You can spin the picture of a man forced by unbearable shame in the specific case of cutting his daughter's throat. But since it's so attached to the word "Honor" let's step away from your hyperfocus on honor killings and see if your explanation holds up in other situations.
In 2019 Gökmen Tanis, a Turkish Muslim, shot up the Tram in Utresk. The notes he left indicated this was religiously motivated. What unbearable shame had these people done to him, and what ostracism had his community put on him? He couldn't live with being Gökmen the guy who
didn't shoot up a Tram station and kill several strangers? This is a perfectly understandable action if he was motivated to
cause fear, because of
fear culture. But there was nothing to shame him coming from the tram station or the random strangers he shot.
In 2018, Jawad Sultani went on a stabbing spree in the name of Allah in Amsterdam, knifing two tourists. How was he shamed by his community into doing this? Why couldn't he live with being the guy who didn't go on a stabbing spree and knife tourists who he didn't know and couldn't possibly have shamed him? But if the goal was to spread fear, his actions make sense.
How about the Charlie Hebdo bombing in 2011? The French President Chirac responded to the cartoons by trying to make them feel bad, classic guilt culture. Muslims instead firebombed them, and then when that didn't work went in and shot them. Fear culture seeks to inflict fear on those who disobey. But why? The shame hadn't been decreased or erased, absolutely nobody was personally shamed at all. Only fear had been added.
Where was the community shame in Charlie Hebdo? Who had to live with the unbearable shame of being the guy that didn't firebomb and then shoot up Charlie Hebdo? It clearly didn't exist at all in any of these cases. You can fancifully spin up a tale of cultural shame but it only applies in the very narrow case of in-family honor killings. The violence, however, isn't just aimed at family but at anyone who doesn't toe the line, who doesn't display appropriate
fear. There is no shame to an individual from his neighbors knowing he didn't shoot up a tram station in Utresk, but striking fear into the hearts of the populace is something the powerful wanted.
Pretending that this is actually just a 'social control mechanism' meant to discourage bad bhaviour is typical left-wing talk that seeks to obscure that something like Islamic culture is God-damn fucking alien to us. If it's about primitive control, you can argue that "they just need our help/education, and then they'll be fine". If you admit that their value system is intrinsically incompatible with ours, the only logical conclusion is that integration will never work. Which most modern leftists want to avoid admitting at all costs.
Just the opposite, Leftists are the ones who push against the concept of fear/power culture and emphasize shame/honor. Pushing a shame narrative let's them emphasize their favored point, that the poor downtrodden minority is being forced to act out and any problems are the result of mean white cishet men hurting their feelings, which to the left is just the same as murder.
There's no difficulty at all finding all manner of leftist articles explaining how all the problems in the middle east are because they're a proud people and bad white men have caused all the problems ever. This view slots
perfectly into their culture of victimhood and the emphasis they put towards claiming to hurt a person's feelings is akin to murdering them. OTOH, "Muslim culture is based on fear" is very much incompatible with leftist talking points.
Arab world's revulsion at Saddam Hussein's tyranny cannot overcome their sense of humiliation that he has been ousted from Iraq by Americans, whom they see as colonialists who promise freedom, democracy and self-determination but have never delivered on same promises to Palestinians; bloody...
www.nytimes.com
Since the end of the Cold War, a third wave of geopolitics is starting to take hold in the Middle East, one that will be characterized by failed states, political chaos and revolt, inter-state conflict, and foreign interventions. Yet this is not inevitable. The course of these disastrous...
www.carnegiecouncil.org
Letters: Readers critique the west’s actions in the region in response to an editorial on Arab democracies
www.theguardian.com
The Left also pushes very, very hard for the idea that conservatism is fear culture.
How did fear come to loom so large in Republican rhetoric?
newrepublic.com
Can brain differences explain conservatives' fear-driven political stances?
www.psychologytoday.com
Scientific American is the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in science and technology, explaining how they change our understanding of the world and shape our lives.
www.scientificamerican.com
The last thing they would
ever want is to suggest that Muslims have the same fear culture they castigate conservatives for, and should be viewed as part of that bloc instead of poor helpless minorities that need to be folded into their own. You are the one parroting their party line here.
I suspect in reaction to my previous point, you're probably going to itch to move on to the
next standard leftist talking point, that Muslims share a sort of "hive mind" and their shame is so strong that an insult to one Muslim is an insult to all, which is clearly balderdash given how much they insult each other but you're already deep in leftist talking points here.
Yes, Muslims themselves cite shame and honour as their motivation every fucking time. And why do you assume they lie? You suggest that honour and shame are a false-face for a wish to oppress (mostly) women... but Muslims have no qualms about telling you their views re: women and male control over them. They generally don't hide their sentiments about that at all. So the charge that they're trying to 'hide' that is off the mark.
No, "Mostly Women" is a strawman. The reason I call your argument bullshit is because you keep trying to hyperfixate on honor killings rather than the culture in general, and even then refuse to consider what the woman's motivation is and only look at the man doing the killing. The only reason it looks like "Mostly Women" is because that's where you have directed the conversation.
Why should we believe that Muslim, and not this one?
It is the fear of this violence, torture and death, wielded by extremist Muslims, that keeps every person desperate to obey. If liberals are in favor of freedom of speech, why do they turn a blind eye to Islamist governments such as Iran, which execute
www.gatestoneinstitute.org
Why do I assume they lie? I mean, aside from the fact that Muslim culture actively encourages lying? In comparison to other cultures there's entire concepts like Taqiya built around lying to outsiders.
Beyond that? The world doesn't contain Grand Moff Tarkin or Citizen O'Brien. People don't openly speak of their desire to inflict fear on their own family and allies. Even a gangster who's going to "Make an example" of a guy who crossed him will often decorate his intentions with speaking of honor, respect, and loyalty rather than saying flat out it's about terrifying everybody else who might consider crossing him. If you go only with what people say their motivations are, you must live in an incredibly happy life where even the most rabid leftists want only to do good for the poor mentally deficient conservatives and there's no greed, hatred, or evil in the universe. That's why I keep pointing out, by their fruits you will know them, not by their words.
The thing is, they very obviously don't act like a shame/honor culture. People project their values onto others. You're doing it here yourself, by assuming that other people would not want to lie. Guilt culture tries to make an offender feel bad about the offense. "Sit down and think about what you did." Shame culture tries to make an offender feel ashamed.
“The world will laugh at you.” Fear culture reacts with violence to instill fear in the offender. "Allahu Ackbar."
Muslims do not try to shame others, they violence to terrify their enemies into obedience, just like Charlie Hebdo bent the knee and promised to not mock Islam again after the shooting. And here's why your entire story falls flat: You're looking at it from the perspective of the person in power, not the person who is being made to fear. Naturally, it doesn't feel like a fear culture if you only ever look at it from the perspective of the person who isn't afraid.
The reference to Charlie Hebdo is particularly enlightening here. Not only is there no possible way the perpetrators were shamed by their neighbors as you imagine to be the primary motivation, but the reaction to parody, even mild parody, is highly illuminating. Guilt cultures are accepting of jokes and laughter. So are shame cultures, parody is an enshrined form of criticism. But parody and mockery are absolute poison to fear cultures, because you cannot both laugh at something and be afraid of it.
Fear culture cannot stand parody or even the mildest of satire and mockery. By their fruits you will know them.
The fact is that they are motivated by (their sense of) honour and shame. The serious literature in the Netherlands (notably the extensive TransAct report 'Honour Killing in the Netherlands: an accounting' from 2003) has recognised this. So it strikes me that you're turning matters around, reasoning that the importance of shame is a result of social control mechanisms; whereas I find it considerably more credible that social control mechanisms in shame cultures are actually (at least to a significant extent) motivated by the desire to avoid any behaviours that might lead to being shamed.
My position is supported, in addition to the contents of the above report, by the analysis in Clementine van Eck's case study of the Turkish community in the Netherlands (later published in English as well, under the titled Purified by Blood). She stresses that gossip in the community (and by extension, other ways in which your standing in the community is nagatively shaped) is the driving force behind honour killings. It's all about your social position. Even a leftist type like Korteweg recognises this (as applied to a more broad perspective looking at honour killings in multiple Western countries) in Understanding Honour Killing and Honour-Related Violence in the Immigration Context (2013).
If you want to claim support from a work you should link to it, or at least present actual quotes. "This whole book I can't show you supports me" isn't quality argument.
....Furthermore, I must say that in trying to make this about Fear/Power, you're stretching the applicable definition of those concepts to roughly the same degree as that guy you deride, who think that everything is a Shame culture. If we use your application of Fear/Power, then we may also argue that every structure of punitive authority is a sign of a Fear/Power culture... and thus that every culture on Earth is in fact a Fear/Power culture.
Yet as (again!) you yourself have argued: every culture has bits of all types in it. We can and should, however, look at which traits and impulses dominate. From this, it is not at all hard to infer that in Islamic culture, the motive of shame (and the avoidance thereof) is a key aspect of society. This drives, more than anything, the honour killings-- and lies at the root of the social control mechanisms that we observe.
We should indeed look at what traits and impulses dominate. And what we see, is the immediate impulse is to inflict harm and sow terror, not to shame.
For me who's dealt a lot with the Muslim community, it's fairly apparent you have only a shallow surface understanding and you're buying whatever somebody told you. Just as an example, you've painted a fanciful picture of Achmed facing the ostracism of his neighbors for having a slut daughter and being forced to honor kill her to erase the humiliation.
That's not how it works, at all. Honor Killing is a
communal decision, made as a group by the elders of the family. The assassination is often made public, sometimes even published on social media, by group decision as a warning to others (same link.)
Achmed doesn't even
have neighbors in the sense you're suggesting, that's you projecting your values onto a culture you don't understand. Muslims are organized into tight-knit family clans. This is typical of fear cultures, because trust is so low, fear is so high, and violence so prevalent, people fall back on blood relations where there's a certain amount of biological basis for minimal trust. As a result, in any fear culture people cluster into family/clan units that rule by internal fear within and make showy displays to other clans without of their dedication and strength. This is exactly how honor killings work, the family decides to make an example of somebody who disobeyed their commands, as a warning to others. They do not have "neighbors" because rival family clans are a threat to be grudgingly allied with when necessary, not people whose opinions are highly valued and whose shameful glares are a thing to be avoided.
There is an old Arab Bedouin saying: I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I my brothers and my cousins against the world. -Nafisa Haji,
The Sweetness of Tears
That's not the proverb of a people who highly value the opinions of non-family or look carefully to the esteem of their neighbors. It's the proverb of people who regard everybody else as a potential rival, as people to either be feared or to strike fear into.
Now, in conclusion: I think I've argued my point in sufficient detail. I've done this without any strange digressions, nor have I side-tracked into emotionalism or theatrics. Is that a line to pursue, or do you prefer big bolded letters and appeals to lens flares and sparkling options? Because if it's the latter, I'm not particularly interested, to be honest. I've genuinely enjoyed the conversation up until now, mais c'est le ton qui fait la musique.
You haven't argued your case at all. You have no sources, no information, and your plan is a combination of "trust me bro," projection of your own values, and "we should just blindly trust what we're told."
This is also the third time I'm forced to ask you for more details. The East Asian honor killings you used to support your point? What East Asian nation? What religion? Give us the details. Why do you keep ignoring this request?
