How oversimplified, media-created memes become accepted facts.

The problems in the Middle East are not because of colonial border-drawing: How oversimplified, media-created memes become accepted facts.

This is one of my societal pet peeves.  It is a practical reality that most of us get our knowledge of the world from the media.   We were not all history majors in college.  We don’t read the original scholarly analyses that research world history.  And we have enough going on in our lives to become experts in various problems around the world, even the important ones.  So when a variety of news media all say the same thing, we tend to believe it.  This makes total sense and is a good thing as long as the media are responsible in wielding this great power. 

But they are not.

For my entire life, I have heard over and over again that one of the leading causes of sectarian violence in the Middle East is because the colonial powers drew these nice straight lines that cut through ethnic regions, putting some Kurds in Turkey, some in Syria, and some in Iraq.  Iraq was part Kurd, part Sunni, and part Shia.  If they had just drawn the borders to put each group into its own country, much of the violence over the past half-century could have been avoided.

But it turns out, this is such as oversimplification as to be virtually false.  Why are the Alawites (of Bashar al Assad) in power in Syria despite being from the minority?  It was a very smart way for the French colonialists to maintain power during the time they wanted to remain colonialists.  If the group you prop up is the smallest, they have a great motivation to keep you as colonial overlords.  If not, they lose all of that great power.  But because they are small, they need to use some harsh and often violent methods to keep order.  This sets the stage for sectarian violence once the colonialists leave.  France leaves the Alawites in power and the majority Sunnis are ready to take back power and in many cases exact revenge for genuine atrocities.  It is not because of the borders.  The same thing happened in Lebanon and elsewhere.  The Soviet Union did this when creating their Central Asian republics.  Africa too.

Second, the borders that the colonial powers drew were not completely arbitrary after all.  Many of them followed borders that had existed for centuries – through the Ottoman Empire and in some cases centuries early.  They didn’t just draw straight lines because they wanted to save ink on the maps.  Another argument is that they should have let the people who lived there set their own borders.  That is what they tried in the Balkans and we know how that turned out. 

Recently, the Atlantic had a good article on this.  I heard a story on NPR recently that made some of the same points.  These are what opened my eyes.  But since most of us get our news from Jon Stewart (who got it wrong), and the broadcast nightly news (who frequently get it wrong), most of us have it wrong too.