The lies are so obvious they’re embarrassing, Gary Brecher (The War Nerd) says, when the mainstream media describe election riots like this:
Authorities have however argued that the rioting was not based on religion or ethnicity but was instigated by those unhappy with the victory of incumbent Goodluck Jonathan, a southern Christian.
Not based on religion or ethnicity?
In other words, the rioting is by Northern Hausa Muslims angry at the fact that a Southern Christian won, but it’s not “based on religion or ethnicity.” That settles that. Maybe it was one of those cat-fancier vs. dog-lover riots you get in Beverly Hills on a Saturday night. Give me Shar Pei or give me death!
These third-world votes are much more like 1930s plebiscites — “Who are we going to be, Austrians or Germans?” — than off-year congressional races:
They amount to a head count to decide which group is Nigeria, the Christian Southeast or the Muslim North.
There’s no individual choosing — Hell, there’s not that much in any election, people vote by ethnic group even here — but in Nigeria, it’s strictly dueling lines on a graph, us and them.
And if you lose the head count, your whole tribe has been dissed. You’ve got a few options: You can believe it was rigged. Which it may have been, I don’t know. And even if it wasn’t, you’re better off believing it was than accepting that your people aren’t the people. And you can hit the streets to let the other bunch know you’re not going to take it, to let them know that, outnumbered or not, your people want it more — to the death, like.
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When the Hausa of the North say the election was rigged, maybe they mean something a little more complicated than stuffing ballot boxes. The Hausa were accustomed to settling things by battle, like most people in the world did until this one-man-one-vote model got forced on everyone. Maybe “rigged” is warrior-tribe code for “I don’t accept that one little skulking clerk in Lagos gets the same weight as a man who’s willing to take up the machete.”I’ve heard that Sikhs in India feel the same way: “My one vote counts no more than that of each skulking Bengali coward that I could lift with one hand, and who would be afraid to insult a stray dog?”
You’ll notice it’s always warrior or ex-warrior ethnic groups rioting against the tyranny of business-oriented, merchant groups.
Maybe this whole third-world problem with voting isn’t just because they’re primitive and they don’t get it; maybe they get it way too well and don’t buy it.
That shouldn’t be too hard for an American to understand. That’s what the South said in 1860. They knew they were outnumbered in the vote, and would be outnumbered on the battlefield; that’s why they went around writing and yelling that one Southron was worth a dozen Yankees. Because that’s a different kind of arithmetic, a different kind of way of counting your support.