Product Description

A World Ignited is about the surge of anger that has swept the world in the last decade, its myriad causes, its toll in lives and human misery. This anger is amplified by modern, especially television and the Internet, and made more lethal by modern weaponry, and unprecedented tactics that strive for mass death and anguish. The authors conclude in an upbeat manner with a look at the politics of hope and what can be done to halt, and even reverse, this cacophony of hate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1207644 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Customer Reviews

An Ambitious Book That Failed
This was a very ambitious book, inevitably headed towards a series of self-defeating compromises. It started off heroic enough: "to explore the roots of rage and why it seems to have reached a fever pitch" in this post-911 world. But then, it veered off into the recognizable fare of ever more sophisticated ways of "blaming the victims" and defending Israeli and Jewish interests around the world. This was done through the structure and shape of a discourse reflecting a very restrictive "Jewish reality" and a selective marshalling of facts assumed to reflect a reality that is universal, but which with its own insulated and selective meanings, is not only not universal, but is far from even being generally accepted.

In the end, the entire book, inexorably turns into an embarrassingly weak apologia for Israeli and Jewish causes, rather than what the reader is led to believe it would be: an honest, balanced academic treatise on how to deal with world-wide hatred, spurred on mostly by a outbreak of religious fundamentalism.

I kept reading to the bitter end, expecting these well-respected scholars to find their bearings, but they never did: They burnt up most of the book railing against worldwide anti-Semitism, but failed to mention that the problems that center on Israel is one of the primary reasons for this anti-Semitism. Any pretenses that this would be a balanced book were dismissed when it was noticed that only one paragraph was devoted to the other genocides that have occurred since 1945, say in Sudan, Rwanda and Yugoslavia for instance, while about two-thirds of the book is devoted to worldwide anti-Semitism and to the genocide that occurred a half century ago in Europe. Not to minimize anti-Semitism in any way, but there is a qualitative difference between the 200,000 raped and murdered in Yugoslavia, and the million raped and murdered in Darfur and another million hacked to death in Rwanda, and the burning of a Synagogue in Paris or Argentina.

There is just too much wrong about this book to waste time critiquing it in every detail. Suffice it to say, that it left this reader, wondering out loud, what kind of reality these authors were actually living under? It was disappointing to see what could have been an important book, simple trail off into an apologia for worldwide Jewish concerns, under the guise of trying to get at a very serious problem in international relations.

In addition to the almost embarrassing one-sidedness, I had two other problems with the book. First, early on it accurately identified the general problem of historic hatred as being primarily psychological, but then it went on to center its theory of psychology "on the anger of the victims that hated," rather than "on the causes of the hatred." To anyone familiar with elementary psychology, anger and hatred are just symptoms of much larger, and always, much deeper problems, of which these are the most available and thus the most likely responses. In the context of the present book, to make such a fundamental mistake is an unforgivable sin. But more than this, the problem of anger and hatred is further compounded by the author's refusal to see that "global anger" is not just a "free-standing" existential phenomenon connected to the larger fabric of life within the societies in which it exists, but that it indeed inheres in and grows out of the circumstances of those very societies.

The simple fact of the matter is that "large-scale (such as religious generated hatred) and "small-scale hatred (such as racism or prejudice), while usually properly treated as separate and distinct phenomena, are intimately if not circuitously and complexly related. As the authors themselves have noted in a number of places throughout the manuscript: "the problem of anger is not so much hatred per se, but the ways in which both are manipulated." Each society has tools for leveraging, magnifying, and multiplying its collective anger and hatred. It is the easy propagation and the ease with which these are consciously and/or unconsciously magnified that is the real problem, and not the activities of the victims themselves.

And here the authors failed to ask themselves an important question: Why are there no corresponding tools on the other side of the societal and individual emotional ledgers? The answer of course is that the "same tools" are used to work both sides of these ledgers. Put simply, hate mongers and demagogues apply their trade on both sides of the moral street. They are opportunistic and only look different to those being excited by them: One society's religious Guru is another's terrorist, as is the case with Osama bin Laden. The tools themselves are neutral, and as the authors so carefully note, can be wielded with equal deftness on either side of the hate equation, and wielded most skillfully by the world's most respected religions themselves, including Judaism.

Thus the problem of worldwide hatred is not as these authors have portrayed it, far from it in fact. Worldwide hatred is not "a free-standing existential phenomenon," but is always culturally situated: intimately connected to the meanings within the societies from which they are derived - usually, and sadly, almost exclusively within their respective religions. Thus the problem of violence, anger and hatred lies as much "in stark societal relief," that is, in the background features of the society, as it does in the contorted faces of, and in the suffering of the victims. Each is a different side of the same societal coin. The question this book should have tried to answer but didn't is: "what are the primary sources of hatred, and how do they expand and propagate away from those sources?"

For instance, we could not have had the European holocaust without the Nazi investment in a society rooted in anti-Semitism. The Jews were angry at what was done to them, but their anger and hatred of the Nazis was not the source of the problem any more than the anger of the Palestinians is the source of the problem in the Middle East. But in the European holocaust, the Jews were not the only ones to see the Nazis as the thugs and demagogues they really were. This did not minimize the fact that the German people saw the Nazis as patriotic saviors of the German race and of German nationalism. Had Hitler won the war, the plight of this world and of Jews would certainly have been quite different than it is today, Jewish anger and hatred aside.

These authors seemed to have missed the most important lesson to be passed on from the Nazi experience: That the rule of "might is right" is a very fragile basis for enforcing a set of national values upon the world.

Two stars.

Disciples of Hate Uncovered
The Tolchins have once again proven that they are among the most astute observers of current events. Martin Tolchin is a reporter with a long and dstinguished career with the New York Times, and Susan Tolchin is a renowned academic currently at George Mason University. When they combine their considerable talents the result is a carefully researched and highly valuable contribution to our understanding of the hatred that threatens our globe. The Tolchins brilliantly explore the causes and manifestations of animosity that transend national borders. There is a commonality in the rage that includes the manipulation of anger and what the Tolchins describe as the "world owes me this" that undermines long held higher level values. In the United States it has led to a rise in homophobia and anti-imigration atitudes that encourage blaming the "other" for all social problems.
The Tolchins explore the nature of religious fundamentalism and the role it plays in igniting long held resentments. The world-wide rise of anti-semitism and the increasing Moslem anger toward the West, especially the United States, is carefully documented in a balanced and thoughtful discussion.
The Tolchins go beyond a comprehensive analysis of worldwide hatred and offer some very specific advice for understanding and minimizing its impact. The timely importance of its topic and the quality of its presentation make A WORLD IGNITED a book that merits extensive readership and thoughtful discussion

Stunning analysis
Martin and Susan Tolchin have addressed a difficult, complex and immediately relevant issue with imagination grounded in extensive research. There is no more important issue to world peace than the understanding of the roots of the anger that produces violent reactions around the world, be it in Iraq, Sierra Leone, Gaza or Rwanda. The Tolchins make a formidable case for the psychosocial genesis of violence that springs from a history of humiiliation and defeat. They make a cogent argument for the durability of those feelings lasting generations and sometimes centuries. The implication is clearly that we ignore those historical phenomena and seek the immediacy of solely military solutions at our own peril.

Throughout the book, there a theme of optimism, e.g., "...anger is a learned behavior; people more naturally gravitate toward peaceful coexistence", (or, in the words of Oscar Hammerstein II, "You've got to be carefully taught..."). The authors conclude with a series of proposed, thoughtful and common sense pathways to deal with this vicious cycle of international hatreds and violence.

Martin Tochin is an honored journalist and Susan Tolchin is a professor public policy at George Mason University. The authors combine to form a powerful creative team in producing an important work. They are to be commended and thanked for this superbly thoughtful commentary.

Edward B. Lewin, M.D.