American Zabiha

So I watched the movie Skyscraper. In it, The Rock plays Will Sawyer, an ex-military turned building security expert who has to kill people to save his family from a fire in a skyscraper. I'll just briefly share a few scenes and show how this relates to ideas proposed in Jack Donovan's book Becoming a Barbarian. Also, this post assumes that movies can teach us about human nature. Below is a trailer to get you a bit acquainted with the topic. Let's begin. Towards the beginning of the movie, Will was attacked by his former squad member for the sake of money and jealousy. Obviously he was depicted as the bad guy because he went against the principles of friendship. The audience makes no second thought as to whether the guy was good or evil: this is because we accept that honorable men are not supposed to harm their friends! Although the traitor was helping the cause of other people, we knew that to protect ones friends from harm and to harm ones enemies to protect ones...

Every man from time to time has thoughts of barbaric violence. Then the voice of civilization chimes in to reason with him. It is every man's choice which voice to choose from. Today was the first day I shot a revolver, or more broadly, today was the first day I shot a gun at all. I just want to describe the feeling I got. I pulled up on the parking lot with my uncle and dad in the car. The parking lot was obviously full of SUVs and pickup trucks. We entered the sunlit wood building slowly and predictably to trying not to cause any alarm. The center of the store had a ring of counters under which knives, pistols, machine guns, and shotguns were littered. I had always seen guns like these in the hands of guards of my neighborhood when I lived overseas, in particular light machine guns, but never in this context. The atmosphere was more dire. Being Muslim, it was as if we were entering enemy territory for some reason, at least that was what I felt. The stout white man in the mid...