Wars of Religion By Richard Sale, author Clinton’s Secret Wars

     Today in the Middle East you have two groups of people, the Arabs and the Israelis, reared up to confront one another in animosity and suspicion, both in the grip of fear, with the zealots of each having nothing but eyes for the atrocities, the wickedness and beastliness of the other. In public both portray the other as threats to world peace. Can both be right?

     We have seen this phenomenon before: Russia versus the West, capitalism versus communism, the western love of democracy versus arbitrary dictatorship, the developed world versus the Third World. But the clearest analogous situation to the Arab-Israeli dispute is the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth and seventeen century.

     The conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism presented us with two sharply divided, openly hostile, mutually intolerant systems whose quarrel put at stake the very salvation of the human soul.  Hell was a fact. The prospect of eternal torment was your destined fate if your beliefs did not conform to those of your own religious group. Belief was not casual, it was everything.  Differences in belief put you in personal peril. Your personal safety in the next life rested on the acceptance of the correct order of certain words -- the uniform recital of doctrines dictated by the rival religious leaders. Any compromise that allowed believers in one system to consider revising or modifying their habitual formulations threatened you with destruction. Any suggestion that both parties could one day live in the same world was pronounced impossible. No tolerance, no concession, no change of outlook, could ever hope to relax the deadlock.

     Minds are open or closed. That distinction is one of the primary ways of classifying human beings. A perennial cause of much savagery in human disputes is public opinion. The public opinion in any country or group is mainly that of the average person.  What the average person believes is what he or she has been told to believe, what his or her father or mother believed, what their friends and associates believe and can recite by rote, with mere second-rate hearsay thus being taken as a statement of infallible truths for most people. The average person exhibits no great interest in general events. They are not ambitious to discuss speculations, or desire to have an impact on scientific investigations. Their minds are inert, mired in the topics of the day. They think just as their neighbors do, and like them, have no general culture that would enable them to disturb the habitual rut of thought. To such a mind, nothing is more angering or indigestible than the introduction of something that violates people’s usual ideas or impressions and awakes their unthinking slumber. Nothing incenses the ordinary mind more than the unfamiliar.

   The slaughters, mass murders, the pitiless mass rape and brutish spoliation of property and possessions of whole groups during the Wars of Religion, was, after all, due to ordinary people being ordinary. 

Land 

     Any conflict can have any number of causes, but once the conflict starts egotism rules.  Feuds are especially fuelled by grievances related to land. I remember that in 1969 China and Russia had a battle in which China tried to regain acres of land stolen by Russia a couple of hundred years earlier. The theft of land fuels resentful antagonism as almost nothing else does, short of mass slaughter. Land is held dear by the people living in it, and they are put in fear of want or wholesale displacement if their land is lost or conquered. In Palestine, the lands were Muslim for centuries and were revered and valued as Muslim, made sacred because of Islam. The coming to these lands in 1948 by the new state of Israel was alarming to the Arabs. Israel was animated by a Zionist faith whose character was colonizing and expansive. It was an ideology highly organized and motivated by the idea of a national collective.   According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, the Arabs, with a different ethic of life, “soon came to fear for their lands and their livelihoods,” when Israel was established.

    Many of the impasses in great conflicts have been due to the fact that the dominant party was never able to devise any peaceful way to revise the status quo. The dominant group usually tends to freeze a situation effectively because that group almost always takes refuge in legalism, seeing any attempt by your rival to amend the status quo as something that will put you in danger. In the past, any attempt by Arabs to improve their lot was too often seen by Israel as the actions of an aggressor who was trying to gain more power at its expense. The Arabs were portrayed as disturbers of the peace, enemies of the established order.  As a result, Israel consistently refused any substantial concessions.

     The frustration of the Arabs has steadily built as the conflict progressed because they saw Israel as unfairly enjoying benefits acquired by war and saw those benefits as immune to revision, modification or reform. As the defenders of the status quo, Israel portrayed its country’s dominance over unruly neighbors as a way of minimizing war. Israel’s hardliners always felt it would have been better to anticipate an act of violence, lash out, and hold the infinitive rather than wait for something to happen that you would regret. It was a clever and successful tactic. 

     And as masters of the status quo, Israel had another advantage -- it always had a power of veto and felt that it did not have to concede anything unless threatened with violence or confronted with a single, brutal action which mobilized world opinion in their favor. For the Israelis, the demands for their own security never stop.  New prerequisites, new conditions and preconditions pour out unendingly from Israel, baffling any authentic efforts at negotiation.  Alas, the demand for further guarantees for security can actually bring about a situation of fearful insecurity, and this is the situation today, although some Israelis cannot see this.

     Then there is the factor of fear.

     One never hears any discussion of fear because few of us ever admit to suffering from it, but fear is almost always the cause of war, and the Arabs and Israelis both live today under the domination of fear. Fear makes us misinterpret signals and leads us to errors of perception that can be fatal.  Fear is an unspoken yet silent factor in all diplomacy.   “We do not always realize – and sometimes we do not like to recognize – how often a mistaken policy, an obliquity in conduct, a braggart manner or even acts of cruelty, may be traceable to fear,” said historian Herbert Butterfield. He points out that the symptoms of fear are sometimes unlike fear and can even appear as an immunity to fear. In some cases, fear may lead people to play it safe or allow it to deaden their anxieties. Frequently people may think they are impervious to fear and don’t understand the oppressive dullness of outlook that results. 

     As the date approaches for the UN General Assembly vote on granting the Palestinians statehood, fear has become vivid and unreasoning in the region, with both sides afraid that some minor incident, “a thunder in the atmosphere,” could spin out of control and produce disaster. Clearly a sense of desperation has seized the Palestinians, who see their opportunity for gaining statehood growing narrower and narrower until the opportunity disappears.

     The question for both parties at this juncture should be this: are the policies of both sides aiming at an authentic increase of liberty in the world? Or are both refusing out of fear to try to work to revise the conditions of the old stalemate?     Blocs of rival countries are engines for self-righteousness.

     As the date for the UN vote to grant statehood to Palestine nears, one must remember one key thing:  the hatred of the Wars of Religion relented, two faiths learned to exist side by side.  More importantly, neither was forced to give up anything essential from its articles of faith and they learned to live and tolerate each other.

   Can that lesson ever be taken to heart in the Middle East?

 Richard Sale

Comments

[Babak Makkinejad]

I think that in the United States the War Between the States as well as the War against Japan were also religious in nature.

[Patrick Lang]

Babak

The case is clear for the WBS being essentially a "crusade" for secular religion waged by the North, but Japan? pl

[Babak Makkinejad]

May be this:

http://wincoast.com/forum/showthread.php?102675-Taking-skulls-as-souvenirs-from-subhumans-during-world-war-2

Nothing like that, to my knowledge, happened in Europe.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Sorry: did not include this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanese_war_dead

[Patrick Lang]

Babak

I don't think this had to do with religion. the behavior of the Japanese Army in China in the thirties set the stage for their later behavior in the Phillippines, Malaya, etc. they came to be hated at a level that people did not feel toward the Germans. The US Marines in particular developed a hatred for the Japanese that knew no bounds. i don't think tihs had anything t odo with religion. pl

[jonst]

I see it more akin to the Balkans history. And like that sad land...it may take an outside force to separate the combatants. But who? Because I count us, the US, presently in about 6-7 conflicts in the ME, depending how you want to count. I don't see the American people wanting to send 'peacekeeping' forces to the ME. And who else might there be? Then again, what the American people want, seems increasingly irrelevant to the powers that be in America. So...who knows?

[Farmer Don]

"The case is clear for the WBS being essentially a "crusade" for secular religion waged by the North, but Japan? pl"
What?
I've understood the American civil war as a contest between the industrial North and the Agrarian South, The Slave free North and the Slave holding South. The Union above State Powers North and the State Power to separate South, but never some sort of Religious contest between the South and North.
Maybe you could explain.
Sincerely,
Don S.

[YT]

I'm beginning to like atheists a whole lot.

[YT]

Mr. Sale,

Re: "hold the infinitive"

I believe either my English is getting worse or you meant "holdin' the initiative"?

[optimax]

Americans called the war against the Germans in WWII the civilized war. Eugene Sledge in his book about fighting on the Pacific Islands documents some American soldiers losing it and mutilating dead Japanese. He said it was difficult to keep your humanity amidst the enemies savagery.

Clavin Trilling(?) once wrote that as a little boy visiting the natural history museum and staring at shrunken heads, he thought, "Thank God I was born in America and not in New Guinea." I remember thinking the same when seeing the shrunken heads at the Clveland Museum of Natural History.

[YT]

Col. sir,

I can't remember in exact words what Friedrich der Große wrote in a letter to a sh*t-scared subordinate.

Something about fear in 3 steps backwards.

[Patrick Lang]

Farmer Don

It's a Southern thang. You have absorbed the received truth of Northern self-justfication so thoroughly that nothing I could say would persuade you. You read my two novels and still don't understand what I said? But then you thought I ought to make Claude Devereux a "nicer" man. Perhaps Sid will explain it to you. pl

[Walrus]

I'm afraid I do not agree with Mr. Sale that religious wars exist. Wars are about power. Religion is merely the excuse.

As for the bestiality, Sir Isiah Berlin paraphrased Bakunin: "Religion allows people to commit unspeakable cruelties against other people, then sleep well at night, safe in the knowledge they are doing the Lords work.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/34125522/God-and-the-State-Bakunin

Prior to Reformation, the Catholic Church had a monopoly on truth and salvation - what today we call "mindshare" in the West. They used this for their own benefit to increase their power and wealth by using it to legitimise, and command obedience to, a succession of earthly rulers.

What blew the doors off the Vatican were:

a) The corruption, venality and abuse of power that even their own clergy could no longer ignore (Luther et al)

b) Related discoveries by explorers and Astronomers that conclusively demonstrated that the Catholic geographical and cosmological world-view, rooted as it was in quasi mystical scriptural junk, was bullshit.

c) The rise of rulers who were on the wrong side of Vatican power plays ( The Schmalkaldic league, Britain, etc.

d) The rapid spread of what today we call "enabling technologies" that the Catholic Church almost totally ignored until it was way to late, and which made the suppression of information impossible, to wit: Increasing literacy in the vernacular among the middle classes in Northern Europe and the invention of the printing press that provided them a source of scriptural information they could read and interpret themselves. Tyndal was burned in 1536 for translating the bible into English.

As they say, the rest is history. There was no great "confrontation of opposing truths" with the implication that they were equally valid and honourable. What instead occurred was a contest to remove the filthy, rotten, fat, bejeweled, bloodstained hands of a bunch of corrupt pederasts from the levers of power and their replacement with something hopefully less inimical to ordinary people that was based on truth as revealed by scientific experiment, not mysticism - what we call today Humanism, of which I am a devotee.

Let us fast forward to the present day and look at Islam. When I first visited Indonesia around 1973 the authorities still censored images of women on the front cover of "Time" magazine. When I visited Karachi around 1979, I watched tribesmen staring with unadulterated bewilderment at Western air hostesses in uniform.

Can anyone not imagine the impact that todays enabling technology: air travel, the DVD, thumb drive, digital camera, internet, iPad and PC is having on unreformed Islam?????? Their faith is undergoing an earthquake of the size of the Christian reformation! For example, what of the status of women and education in Islam? How is suppression supportable any longer?????

And the losers are? The local mullahs, who no longer have a monopoly of information and commentary. The religious elites in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere......And their response is? Proclamation of holy war....and we are stupid enough to act as if we are engaged in one at the behest of Zionists who would dearly like our support?

We deserve everything we get if we uncritically absorb the "war of civilisations" mantra as we have done, instead of recognising it for simple grubby power politics and acting accordingly.

[J]

Walrus,

I concur, it's all about a lust for power (control, money, resources, ego, etc.), and religon is merely a 'cover' that is used for that lust for power.

[J]

Walrus,

A good example of that 'lust for power' is the Netanyahu/Likud/Shas Israeli government's quest for a 'Greater Israel'.
Land, resources (water, oil, minerals), egos, all the real underlying reasons with their so-called religious propaganda campaigns used to divert attention from their real underlying reasons.

[The Twisted Genius]

Walrus,

I think your premise is remarkably similar to that of Smedley Butler. War is a racket. It's a tragedy that the rat bastards that seek to gain power and/or treasure from war can so easily manipulate the true believers into fighting a religious war.

[FB Ali]

Walrus,

"The religious elites in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere......And their response is? Proclamation of holy war...."

You are quite right. The religious hierarchy in Muslim countries has cleverly turned the attack on their own positions of power (from the 'modernism' bred in the West) into an attack on Islam.

Osama bin Laden sought to give legs to this narrative through the response he hoped to provoke by his 9/11 attack. Unfortunately, Bush-Cheney and the Likudniks, for their own purposes, obliged. We shall all be paying the price for this folly for a long time.

[optimax]

Shakespeare probably witnessed the boweling, drawn-and quartering and that mall favorite head-on-a-stick of a distant relative, Robert Southwell, in 1595. He may mercifully been euthanized by friends pulling his legs while on the stake, easy after years of torture by a religious psychopath and a Sakespearian pun in itself, before boweling. He is a Jesuit martyr who died for being an illegal alien.

[jonst]

FB Ali,

We will be paying the price for the follies of Bush-Cheney and the Likudniks, as well as lots and lots, and lots, of other individual's follies. From all around the globe. And from all groups. There is a lot of blame to go around for this cluster-f of a War.

J,

You employ the word "ego" as an element of "power". I agree. And "ego" is an intangible. And intangibles are a big part of why people go to war. IMHO....

It is not, simply, and exclusively, about the quest for tangibles. See, IMHO, the Balkans.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Walrus & J:

The Catholic Church, with all its venality and corruption, did not setup death camps and concentration camps in order to achieve Paradise on Earth.

Those who went against the Church did not usher in a qualitatively superior system of Laws and Governance - only a more efficient one.

And now we find ourselves that the secular rulers on a number of states have the power at their disposal to annihilate all life on this planet.

Perhaps you find this state of affairs superior to the situation in Europe in the 14-th century.

[Charles I]

". . . learned to live and tolerate each other.

Can that lesson ever be taken to heart in the Middle East?"

If not learned, perhaps legislated.

"Israeli lawmakers pass West Bank settlement boycott law

. . .Under the new law those who sponsor a "geographically based boycott" - which includes any part of the Jewish state or its settlements - could be sued for damages in a civil court by the party injured in the boycott call. . .

The State of Israel has for years been dealing with boycotts from Arab nations, but now we are talking about a homegrown boycott," said the author of the legislation, lawmaker, Zeev Elvin, the Associated Press news agency reported.

"It is time to put an end to this travesty. If the State of Israel does not protect itself, we will have no moral right to ask our allies for protection from such boycotts."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-14111925

My favourite bit

"The petitioner is not required to prove that "economic, cultural or academic damage" was caused, only that it could reasonably be expected from the move."

Ergo, the test is that one's must infer that to recover damages, one's original conduct must be deemed so offensive as to be worthy of collective social, economic and/or political condemnation, resistance and deterrence.

There oughtta be a law, or at least moral protection.

[VietnamVet]

Besides the Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and the War on Drugs, don’t overlook the undeclared War on the Middle Class in America. It too is about ego, power, religion and beliefs. The GOP and Corporate Pundits are True Believers. They preach that Austerity will grow the economy. Government is evil. Tax Cuts create Jobs.

In fact, because of cuts in government programs, Middle Class Americans will have less to spend and the economy will, at best, stagnate, but more likely will fall into a Depression when combined with Europe’s PIIGS debt problems.

Thanks to unregulated Credit Default Swaps there is more bad debt on the books than the total economic productivity of the World. Sooner or later, the elites will have to take a haircut not only on their bad debt but also all their short calls and the backing Credit Default Swaps including Congressman’s Cantor's short investment against US Treasuries. The question is how much of existing wealth is stolen until the bad debts and Credit Default Swaps are wiped out and we start anew with a reformed financial system.

[J]

Babak,

IMO it all bites the big hotdog in the sky.

Our species mankind have been given such a beautiful marble on which to live, pity so many little pricks have to go and muck it for everybody.

[Babak Makkinejad]

J:

Welcome to the "Fall of Man".

[Babak Makkinejad]

VietnamVet:

My estimate of global bad debt - as you put it - is in excess of 220 trillion dollars.

This debt cannot be repaid under any circumstane. It has to be liquidated, perhaps at the rate of 10 cents on the dollar or even less.

The question the answer to which I do not know is the impact of this de-leveraging on global savings - personal funds, corporate cash, and pension funds (private and government controlled).

Last I heard, the global savings were around 148 trillion dollars. If you wipe out the retirees and the savers world-wide, you still cannot pay down this debt.

The world has to default - there is no other way; mass papuperization of an entire planet is not feasible.