The Roots Of Evil By Ervin Straub

The crisis in the Rakhine State is the result of many years of cultural divide that has been used to fuel those with the power to create chaos and destruction. These motivating factors can be an incredibly powerful driving force behind violence and can often blur the reality between what is right and what is wrong. In Ervin Straub’s book, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, he discusses how difficult life conditions and certain cultural characteristics can generate psychological processes and motives that lead a group to turn against another group.
The understanding of the role of motivation is critical to being able to rationalize why groups would seek such violent solutions to problems that should be resolved

Whether these problems arise from socio-economic shortfalls, religious differences, or differences in living standards, they can all be used to perpetuate the the idea that one group is to blame for the issues. Straub describes how these killings and the movements behind them are used as affirmation, ““The most terrible human capacity is that of profoundly devaluing others who are merely different. Often there is a reversal of morality, and killing them comes to be seen as good, right, and desirable” (18). After the military coup of 1962 that put in place a more oppressive regime, the violence escalated toward the Rohingya and the animosity was used by the ruling military to carry out these odious crimes. Raping, killing, and violence became normal parts of life for those living in Myanmar, those that did not flee were left to suffer the consequences. This animosity came as a result of a misplaced notion that the Muslim “problem” is a direct byproduct of British colonial rule and thus have no legitimate place in Myanmar. To further exacerbate the problem legitimacy for the Rohingya, a Citizen Registry was created that identified 135 races as citizens, but the Muslim group was left off the list and are still not recognized as true citizens of Burma. The idea of creating distinct barriers between one group and another is a powerful tool used to commit atrocious crimes against a population. By placing direct blame for tough life conditions on one group it makes it easier for others to rally around a common enemy and gives killing an intrinsic