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Comment by bb101 | Hacker News Reader

It strikes me as an example of Sigmund Freud's "Narcissism of Small Differences"[1]: "The thesis that communities with adjoining territories and close relationships are especially likely to engage in feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to details of differentiation."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...

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And by sheer coincidence, I very recently learnt on a HN linked article on big-endian and little-endianness that these terms come from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift [0], where Lilliput and Blefuscu wage war over which end should be cracked first when eating a hard-boiled egg:

> The novel further describes an intra-Lilliputian quarrel over the practice of breaking eggs. Traditionally, Lilliputians broke boiled eggs on the larger end; a few generations ago, an Emperor of Lilliput, the Present Emperor's great-grandfather, had decreed that all eggs be broken on the smaller end after his son cut himself breaking the egg on the larger end. The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to "six rebellions ... wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown". The Lilliputian religion says an egg should be broken on the convenient end, which is now interpreted by the Lilliputians as the smaller end. The Big-Endians gained favour in Blefuscu.

This seems like a perfect fictional example of the Narcissism of Small Differences, published more than a century before the birth of Sigmund Freud!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu#Satirica...

    PS: It's also a great opportunity for us to start a feud as to who should be credited with the idea, whether Freud or Swift. I declare myself Swiftian! :-D

This is brilliant. Thanks for the reference!

Ironic really, to name such a thing after a fictional pointless war!

There was a war in that HN thread too lol.

Iraq and Iran are actually pretty distinct historically. Iran is the center of the old assyrian empire, a tradiional stronghold of Shiite islam. Iraq is the traditional center of sunni islam.

They pretty much form the front line of the roman / persian forever war, so they're probably some of the most constant antagonists in recorded history. Then there's this whole fault line in islam that runs between them. Then in modern history they had a really bloody war, that left a huge number of people seriously ill and disabled because of us-supplied Iraqi chemical weapon use.

I've been trying to think of a european equivalent and I've come up short because I simply can't think of any two polities that have been so consistently at odds, or so consistently under distinct and radically opposed rulerships. There's definitely more similarity between Japan and China, for example, or the USA and Russia.

What is now Iraq was largely almost always under Sassanid/Persian rule. The old Persian capital of Ctesiphon was basically next door to modern Baghdad. The old fault line was really in eastern Anatolia.

Rome held Mesopotamia for a very brief period of time and didn't have much impact other than the occasional army passing through until the Muslim conquest.

You're right. I kind of assumed geographical continuity because there seems so much cultural continuity between shia islam and zoroastrianism, especially the socialist bent.

I thought Iraq was basically three ethnic/cultural groups. The Kurds in the North, the central region was mainly Sunni Arabs, and the South and East were mainly Shiite's who may also be of Persian descent?

Sure. Not sure how old this situation is: there's an enormous amount of migration in the ME in the last century or so.

For the modern history, part of the problem was that the Baath party, and the Iraqi state in general, was kinda a sunni-only thing. Afaik the british arranged it that way with King Faisal (II? I?).

Sweden and Denmark, or Sweden and Russia (or, occasionally, all three) comes to mind, but they've kept things civil between them for the last couple of hundred years.

Not exactly. Iraq is the oldest Shia country. Iran is the newest (15th century). Before then Iran was actually opposed to Shiism.

One launched a full-scale invasion of the other some 40 years ago. The other didn't. Big difference.

And if you're suggesting the reason for the attack was "Narcissism of Small Differences," I think you need more sources.

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