Indian Rapists, Arab Suicide Bombers

Yes, they do go together. In the case of the Indian rapists, like the horrible gang-rapists of Delhi last month, it's hardly about sexual expression or repression. It's about losing control and male domination at the hands of a modernity they can see but can't touch.

It's estimated that there are 200-300 million Indians, almost entirely in the cities, who have entered the global middle class. That's one of the reasons why international corporations will do almost anything to penetrate the growing Indian market: it has almost as many modern consumers as the US. They aren't the rapists.

But, India has a population that's well over a billion: that's at least 800 million who are NOT in the middle class. Rape expresses a barely repressed class war of the huge underclass, just beginning to awaken. What they see is an India they can hardly fathom and never reach, yet they see it daily on TV and in the Bollywood movies.

The traditional caste system repressed everyone, even a too numerous four-part aristocracy, but it was a stable society for almost 3500 years. Castes are still present, now, but the rules that bound them together, are not. Class often subsumes caste in "Modern India," and those left behind in India's scramble to the future are treated the way lower castes used to be. Yet, they are no longer submissive; they're rebellious, rejectionist, unmoored by tradition. Male violence against women is safer than outright revolution.

Sri Lanka's Tamils, to India's south, invented suicide bombing, which has become a signature of al Qaeda and its allies in the Middle East and North Africa. "Islamic militants," ironically, share the anger of (largely Hindu) Indian rapists; they take it out on their own people, especially women--with extreme purdah and stonings, as well as amputations and beheadings to keep the men in line. In both cases, it's the violent rejection of what they want, are terrified of and can't have: participation in modern secular society.

I don't pretend to know whether al Qaeda members are predominantly lower class, but they do have one thing in common: rejection of any trace of secular, i.e. modern, society. The savagery of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Ansar al Dine may not be just a will to destroy what their societies are becoming, but that's certainly a part of it; it's also an inexpensive means to control resisters.

What's happening now, globally, is the incipient rumblings of the left out, against the newly affluent, who are the new entrants to the global middle class. With climate change, the billions of surplus people aren't anchored to the Middle East, India, or China; eventually, they will flood lands with more moderate climates.

The angry masses could become the equivalent of the Germanic and Turkic hordes, barbarians who surged into the late Roman Empire, and finally, brought it down; Classical society fell with it.