By Fester:
Building on Cernig's post on Iraqi civilian PTSD, I want to point out the threat of systemic social PTSD for Iraqi society as the past five years have been a massive shock to the Iraqi Arab populations with between twenty and thirty percent of the population being displaced as internal or external refugees, wounded or killed. These types of traumas are both massive personal and individual traumas and significant social traumas. For instance there is work that argues the Irish Potato Famine created a systemic breakdown in trust and social networks that is taking one hundred and fifty years to repair. The end result was a quicker willingness to turn to ineffective violence to accomplish immediate goals.
Additionally the Russian experience of the 1990s is a lost decade. Employment and production crashed, life spans shortened and Russian civil society became a mob-ocratic oligarchy. With the boom in resource prices and movement away from shock therapy, Russia is turning around but its population is still some of the heaviest drinkers in the world and its death rate is the outlier for nations of comparative wealth.
Will we see the same systemic and multi-generational shocks in Iraq as their civil society will be undergoing its own case of PTSD?
Interesting point. Russia's current problems actually have a bit more time depth to them: industrial productivity in the late Soviet Union began to fall significantly in the 1970s, and alcoholism has been a problem there for quite some time. (Yuri Andropov made it one of his principal reform targets during his brief tenure as General Secretary.) All other things being equal, Russia will take a very long time to recover from its "lost decades."
ReplyDeleteI certainly think we will. Remember, too, that Saddam's government was Iraq's major employer, particularly the major employer of Iraqis with education past elementary school.
ReplyDeleteThe analogy with Russia is good but there are probably better ones. I'm thinking of other post-national socialism societies.
I think that a factor more important than PTSD both in Russia and in post-Saddam Iraq is the paucity of viable institutions. 70 years of Communist Party rule in the Soviet Union had dismantled virtually every institution other than the party, the military, and organized crime.
Similarly, in Iraq the only institutions left standing after the 2003 invasion were those of sect and tribe and organized crime (which commonly have a tribal component to them).
Alcoholism has been a problem in Russia since the time of the Czars, if not the time of the Vikings.
ReplyDelete