What is it about large crowds of protesters that make them want to loot and destroy the businesses and homes in their own neighborhoods?
From DailyMail -- Yesterday mummies in the country's national museum were destroyed by looters attempting to steal the treasures of King Tutankhamun.
Soldiers were positioned at the Pyramids and Cairo’s Egyptian Museum – the holding place for Tutankhamun’s priceless golden mask and other artifacts – on the fifth day of anti-government demonstrations in the country’s capital.
This reminds me of the Rodney King riots when those morons burned, looted, and basically destroyed businesses and homes in their own backyards. The same every-man-for-himself pathology was on display in New Orleans after Katrina. The pharoic treasures are the pride and joy of every Egyptian....what compels them to steal it?
Is it that people who but for the threat of being caught by the police, are criminals who take advantage of the anonymity of huge crowds because the police can't arrest everybody in those situations? Are human beings really that maliciously tribal given the slightest chance?
Exit question: what percentage of adult humans would steal from another person if they knew they could get away with it? Or to put it another way, are we all potential criminals who given the opportunity, do not have the best interests of our neighbors at heart? That thought is extremely disappointing.
6 comments:
I read an interesting aspect of this today. Many nations, including Egypt, have been demanding for some years the return of cultural artifacts from museums around the world. The Greeks famously want the "Elgin Marbles" from the Brits, which would probably no longer exist if they had not been taken in the 19th Century. The same can be said for the Egyptian stuff. The heritage of the Pharaohs has been looted for almost the entire period since they were created. I had not known that the outer stones of the pyramids were taken in the 14th Century to build mosques in Cairo. Who is to say what a Muslim Brotherhood government might do? Remember the giant Buddhas that no longer exist in Afghanistan, courtesy of the Taliban?
Thugs looting residential neighborhoods and intimidating civilians are government-hires, say eyewitnesses.
"They were sent by the government. The government got them out of prison and told them to rob us," says Nameer Nashaat, a resident working alongside other youths to preserve order in the district. "When we caught them, they said that the Ministry of Interior has sent them.”
In Masr al-Qadeema, another district, scrap metal dealer Khaled Barouma, confirmed the same account. “The government let loose convicts. They let them out of prisons. We all know them in this neighborhood,” he said, adding that the neighborhood’s youth is trying to put the place in order by patrolling its streets with batons.
“The government wants people to believe that this is an uprising of convicts, which is not the case. The government is the one that is a criminal,” Khalil Fathy, a local journalist covering the events closely, said.
(Source: http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/news/eyewitnesses-say-state-sponsoring-vandalism)
We have no way of knowing who the artifact thieves are. All this is anecdotal. Sure, some of them may have been prisoners released by the Mubarak government to make the demonstrators look bad. But people behave badly whenever they believe they won't get caught or they enjoy the anonymity of the herd.
The anecdotes continue to come in.
"In Cairo, the youth in a few short days contained the activities of these thugs and arrested some of the looters. According to some reports, the neighborhood protection committees found the official Egyptian POLICE ID cards among those hooligans." [Emphasis in the original.]
(source: http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/massoud-nayeri-us-media-and-the-mighty-uprising-in-egypt.html)
Regarding your final question Ed, I think the old saw about "doing the right thing when nobody is watching" says it all. I will not claim to have always lived up to that, but find it easier as I get older to try.
I guess when people have a sense of suffering and especially having been wronged by their government, they see little wrong with taking what they feel they rightfully deserve, but have been denied, even if it comes at somebody elses cost.
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