In light of recent events, I have been thinking about my position on violence. I think violence is something necessary to life. I think we are all violent. That said, there are better and worse ways of expressing violence. Methods that involve useless escalation of dead-end conflicts are always worse. Terrorism is a self-defeating, stupid modus operandi, whether the people employing it are heads of state or vigilantes among the people.
Take the case of the Boston bombing that went down recently. Some civilian vigilantes get all riled up (for reasons that I have ranted about here on this blog: they feel threatened by society and its leaders, not always illegitimately). They respond by attacking a bunch of civilians. The final result is that innocent people die, and the crooks whose power the terrorists resent (no matter who they are or how innocent or guilty anyone finds them) obtain even more authority than they had before. The vigilante terrorists actually make freedom less for themselves and everyone else every time they threaten the government's sheeple. Under threat of attack, the sheeple lose what little inclination they might have to preserve the institutions that make us free: institutions like due process of law, presumed innocence, fair trial, and so on. At the end of the day, the terrorists are dead, and the people are more under the thumb of government (well-meaning or not) than ever. The resentment that led the terrorists to strike out against society terminates in a society even more likely to inspire resentment. Attacking the bear with a sharp stick just makes it more dangerous, whether it is a Russian Kodiak or an American grizzly. Stupid terrorists.
The best way to get back at the government is not to need it. The best way to use violence is not to employ it randomly against helpless civilians. The terrorists' problem is that they attack government by mimicking its worst aspects. At least government is accountable, even if only in theory, to someone every time it decides to go haywire and kill a bunch of folks. And seriously, dumb terrorists, have you not considered that governments have you utterly outmanned and outgunned? If you are going to play the game of treating people as human shields, you should be aware that your opponent can cut through the shield much better than you can. The second amendment doesn't exist to protect me from government in modern American society. I don't want a shotgun to protect me from Uncle Sam's tanks, mortars, and nukes. (What good would it be, seriously?) I want a shotgun to protect me from cretins like you. There is the place for legitimate social violence: Some punk goes to blow up a marathon and I take him out.
So much for the vigilantes who run planes into buildings or blow up marathons. Now for the terrorists in government. These people are in a tougher position in many ways than the vigilantes (who should simply stand down, since they do nothing good for themselves or anyone else: if they want to commit suicide, then they would do better to make it a private death). Government is necessary at the moment: it is something natural that all societies have. That said, it has an historical tendency to do bad stuff (e.g. kill crowds of people). I don't want to tell government how to do its job, how to "protect" citizens from themselves. I think it does this job best when we citizens don't need it much. I would rather be free than safe. I would rather be blown up by some punk on the subway than be strip-searched every time I get on. Given a choice between vigilante terrorism and government terrorism, I will always choose the vigilantes: I think they are less dangerous. Government here can do its job best when it helps me meet the vigilantes myself, preparing me to respond effectively (rather than imprisoning me in my own house for hours while it takes care of things for me--or pretends to take care of them, at any rate).
Ideally, government does not need police or military for much. It takes free citizens and turns them into its police. We become the police. We become our own government. We become the people making decisions that define our lives. We become the people who get blown up by those stupid vigilantes and keep running anyway--not because we think the police or the military will save us. We couldn't care less about that. We know life isn't safe, and we wouldn't have it any other way. We do not ask for safety or security--we know that these are illusions--but for the freedom to respond appropriately ourselves to the threats that manifest unpredictably in our lives. Good government equips us to meet those threats better, allowing and encouraging access to tools and training that will make more of us better stewards of our own mortality. Good government encourages us to have the weapons, munitions, and physical resources (food, water, shelter) to handle threats in our environment (threats that include but are not limited to idiot vigilantes who decide that the best way to make a meaningful religious or political statement is to blow other people up and bring the heavy hand of military dictatorship down to crush us all).
I have never rebelled violently against government. I never want to. I see that such rebellion would be counter-productive (making things worse for me and for everyone else, not better). If I do rebel, it will be quietly, non-violently, and inobtrusively. I believe in kindness, civility, and decency above all else. I believe in them so much that I am determined to practice them even towards historically rude government (within reason: there are regimes out there that I would oppose actively, either by fleeing the country or taking up arms, but those regimes are not the modern US one). Smart people who know what violence is know its limits. They see that they cannot force themselves unilaterally on others without getting hurt and hurting others unnecessarily in the process. They see that reality, and they respond by standing down--permanently and resolutely--from useless rebellion. Silly as those "occupy this and that" protests are, they are preferable to "blow this or that up" protests. Dumb or dangerous as the Tea Party may be, the "blow stuff up for God" party is dumber and more dangerous. If you want to rebel, do yourself a favor and take the route of Martin Luther King or Gandhi. Find something positive to do, something that isn't hurting other people. Make the beauty you cannot find in the world. You don't have to kill the world to do that. You don't have to hate it. You don't have to fear it. You don't have to care about it. Just let it go and get on with your art. Make an art of life instead of cultivating the art of death.
It doesn't matter if society is messed up. It doesn't matter if other people don't like your art. You can make it and enjoy it. If you love it enough to turn it into life (instead of death), there will always be someone willing to see value in it. Show them that value, and they will become your friends. They will love you and help you make something beautiful--a garden of liberty whose fruits do not depend on regular watering with the blood of innocents (or even of tyrants: give it your own blood before you steal any from another human being). If you cannot do this, then at least have the decency not to involve innocents in your death wish. Do what Buddhist protesters do, and burn yourself to death somewhere in a public place. Make your statement with your own blood, not mine or my kids'. The sympathy I have for your plight--your suffering, your religion, your lifestyle, your family, your art--vanishes the moment you start gunning down random strangers. I may resent the government boot-heel you bring down on my neck, but that doesn't mean I'm not glad when it breaks yours, you cowards, you dogs with no honor.
You deserve the death you get. You deserve it much more than all those people who will suffer because of you--not just the people you personally cut down, but also the other people the government will cut down needlessly because they remind somebody of you. You are an emblem of what is most wrong in all of us--a giant, festering sore on the face of humanity. As long as you persist in keeping the bear of bad government alive and angry, she will never stop tearing the meat off all our bones.
As for that bear: dear representative of the American people, the next time you wonder why vigilantes go nuts and attack you or your people viciously, take a look in the mirror. Look at the blood dripping down your face, the blood of people killed all over the world to keep us "safe" from death (that always gets us anyway), and see what it is that the dumb vigilantes fear. They are dumb because they express fear badly, not because they have it. I fear you, too. But I know better than to go poking you with sharp sticks. And I am too civilized to make others suffer unnecessarily because I am afraid. But I am afraid, more afraid of you than of the terrorists, more afraid of being "saved" than of being blown up. I value freedom over security. I do not waive my Constitutional rights. I do not want you to declare war on anyone or anything as a result of stupid vigilantes going nuts and murdering innocent people. I don't want more military and police. I don't want more laws. I don't want more security. I want you to stand down. Weep with me, if you like. Teach me ways to defend myself better. But don't pretend you can make all the violence disappear by taking absolute command of society. Don't listen to the cowards who want you to promise them the impossible--reward without risk, profit without loss, happiness without sorrow, life without death. I fear your lies more than I fear the terrorists' truth.
Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts
Monday, April 22, 2013
Friday, November 18, 2011
Useless Truth
Philip Jenkins. The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. ISBN: 9780061472800.
While at BYU, I noted a peculiar fascination with Greek Orthodoxy among some of the faculty with interest in early Christianity. One of my professors in particular mentioned that if he were not Mormon, he would be Orthodox. The Orthodox tradition was attractive for its connection to ancient Greek Christianity (or better, Christianities), the closest thing(s) to authentic primitive Christianity that objective-minded historians can find.
Jenkins tells the story of the Greek Christians, and of other Christians outside the western European tradition (though he refers freely to that tradition to illustrate his narrative). Here you will find the story of ancient Christians in Syria, Egypt, Persia, India, and China, not to mention Asia Minor (modern Turkey). You will find Nestorians, Monophysites alongside more exotic (and independent) heretics, like the Manichaeans and (inevitably) the Muslims. You will learn how the Christians conquered the East, and lost it all. You will be forced to confront how the prosperity gospel (expressed in scriptures like Deuteronomy 28 and Mosiah 2:22) does not work, as you see covenant people suffer the almost complete dissolution of their culture--in spite of every promise, in spite of every revelation, in spite of every miracle. You will find stories of religious genocide, occurring still in relatively modern times (e.g. the annihilation of millions of Greeks and Armenians by Turks in the early twentieth century). You will see the best faces of religion (the scholar, the humanitarian, the pillar of society), and the worst (the holy warrior, the sectarian, the scourge of God). You will see the power of chance, which offered the eastern Christians safety (with the possibility of a Mongol alliance against the Muslim powers) and then snatched it away, perhaps forever (when powerful Mongol chieftains converted to Islam). Notice that persecution of the Other is a non-denominational doctrine: Christians brought it to the Muslims, and vice versa. Religion knows how to be kind, and how to be cruel, regardless of who is in charge or what they claim to believe.
The best part of the book, from my perspective, is the very end, where Jenkins talks about the need in contemporary Christian thought for a theology of defeat, failure, and disaster. How do we deal with the failure of God? How do we process divine indifference to prayer, to sacrifice, to basic human decency? Historically, we tend to ignore it, an ignorance that impoverishes our perspective on reality, and cheapens our faith (leaving people like me loathe to believe anything any religious leader may say). We dismiss the losers as apostates, has-beens, divine rejects. Their stories go untold. Their thoughts are forgotten. Their experiences, the good and the bitter, teach us nothing. Jenkins calls us to repentance (pp. 261-262):
In a nutshell, modern, western Christianity suffers from the same problem that plagues modern LDS Mormonism: an inability to deal productively with its faith history, a history which is full of what Boyd K. Packer might call useless truth. But that truth is not useless. That truth is what points us toward new revelation, showing us problems that we have failed to address adequately. That truth is what keeps us humble, showing us that we do not know the mind of God, that we are (in fact) extremely ignorant of any guiding principle at the helm of the universe. We have to preserve that truth, telling the "faith-destroying" stories of heartbreak and disaster (like what really happened at Mountain Meadows, or the Council of Nicaea, or the Battle of Ankara, or the Latin sack of Constantinople, or the modern Turkish "cleansing" of Smyrna). We cannot pretend that uncomfortable truth does not exist without endangering our souls, the souls of our children, and the very heart and soul of our entire community. Whether you are Mormon, Christian, both, or something else, lying for the Lord is bad. Ignoring for the Lord is bad, too. I cannot lie, and I will not ignore. To do so would be to go against everything that I stand for as a moral human being, as a Mormon and a Christian.
Truth is healing. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32). It sets us free from pretending, free from the fear that something unknown "out there" may take away the inner strength that keeps us sane. We ignore and abjure it at our peril, especially when it tells us things that we do not want to know, showing us where our puny efforts to control reality break down. The more we harden ourselves against useless truth today, the worse we are going to feel tomorrow, when it is inevitably shouted down at us from the housetops. I cannot resist it any more, and that is why I am what I am--estranged from my faith community, without a secure job that I might have had, and generally disillusioned with "faithful" attempts by some religious to obfuscate and deny real suffering (my own and that of other people). Like better men before me, I come to you now, Internet world, "from the back of a broken dream," simultaneously shattered and inspired by my personal encounter with useless truth.
While at BYU, I noted a peculiar fascination with Greek Orthodoxy among some of the faculty with interest in early Christianity. One of my professors in particular mentioned that if he were not Mormon, he would be Orthodox. The Orthodox tradition was attractive for its connection to ancient Greek Christianity (or better, Christianities), the closest thing(s) to authentic primitive Christianity that objective-minded historians can find.
Jenkins tells the story of the Greek Christians, and of other Christians outside the western European tradition (though he refers freely to that tradition to illustrate his narrative). Here you will find the story of ancient Christians in Syria, Egypt, Persia, India, and China, not to mention Asia Minor (modern Turkey). You will find Nestorians, Monophysites alongside more exotic (and independent) heretics, like the Manichaeans and (inevitably) the Muslims. You will learn how the Christians conquered the East, and lost it all. You will be forced to confront how the prosperity gospel (expressed in scriptures like Deuteronomy 28 and Mosiah 2:22) does not work, as you see covenant people suffer the almost complete dissolution of their culture--in spite of every promise, in spite of every revelation, in spite of every miracle. You will find stories of religious genocide, occurring still in relatively modern times (e.g. the annihilation of millions of Greeks and Armenians by Turks in the early twentieth century). You will see the best faces of religion (the scholar, the humanitarian, the pillar of society), and the worst (the holy warrior, the sectarian, the scourge of God). You will see the power of chance, which offered the eastern Christians safety (with the possibility of a Mongol alliance against the Muslim powers) and then snatched it away, perhaps forever (when powerful Mongol chieftains converted to Islam). Notice that persecution of the Other is a non-denominational doctrine: Christians brought it to the Muslims, and vice versa. Religion knows how to be kind, and how to be cruel, regardless of who is in charge or what they claim to believe.
The best part of the book, from my perspective, is the very end, where Jenkins talks about the need in contemporary Christian thought for a theology of defeat, failure, and disaster. How do we deal with the failure of God? How do we process divine indifference to prayer, to sacrifice, to basic human decency? Historically, we tend to ignore it, an ignorance that impoverishes our perspective on reality, and cheapens our faith (leaving people like me loathe to believe anything any religious leader may say). We dismiss the losers as apostates, has-beens, divine rejects. Their stories go untold. Their thoughts are forgotten. Their experiences, the good and the bitter, teach us nothing. Jenkins calls us to repentance (pp. 261-262):
Christians believe that God speaks through history; and only by knowing that history can we hope to interpret momentous events like the Japanese persecutions [which annihilated Catholicism in early modern Japan] and the fall of the Asian churches. Yet Christians have systematically forgotten or ignored so very much of their own history that it is scarcely surprising that they encounter only a deafening silence. Losing the ancient churches is one thing, but losing their memory and experience so utterly is a disaster scarcely less damaging. To break the silence, we need to recover those memories, to restore that history. To borrow the title of one of Charles Olson's great poems: the chain of memory is resurrection.
In a nutshell, modern, western Christianity suffers from the same problem that plagues modern LDS Mormonism: an inability to deal productively with its faith history, a history which is full of what Boyd K. Packer might call useless truth. But that truth is not useless. That truth is what points us toward new revelation, showing us problems that we have failed to address adequately. That truth is what keeps us humble, showing us that we do not know the mind of God, that we are (in fact) extremely ignorant of any guiding principle at the helm of the universe. We have to preserve that truth, telling the "faith-destroying" stories of heartbreak and disaster (like what really happened at Mountain Meadows, or the Council of Nicaea, or the Battle of Ankara, or the Latin sack of Constantinople, or the modern Turkish "cleansing" of Smyrna). We cannot pretend that uncomfortable truth does not exist without endangering our souls, the souls of our children, and the very heart and soul of our entire community. Whether you are Mormon, Christian, both, or something else, lying for the Lord is bad. Ignoring for the Lord is bad, too. I cannot lie, and I will not ignore. To do so would be to go against everything that I stand for as a moral human being, as a Mormon and a Christian.
Truth is healing. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32). It sets us free from pretending, free from the fear that something unknown "out there" may take away the inner strength that keeps us sane. We ignore and abjure it at our peril, especially when it tells us things that we do not want to know, showing us where our puny efforts to control reality break down. The more we harden ourselves against useless truth today, the worse we are going to feel tomorrow, when it is inevitably shouted down at us from the housetops. I cannot resist it any more, and that is why I am what I am--estranged from my faith community, without a secure job that I might have had, and generally disillusioned with "faithful" attempts by some religious to obfuscate and deny real suffering (my own and that of other people). Like better men before me, I come to you now, Internet world, "from the back of a broken dream," simultaneously shattered and inspired by my personal encounter with useless truth.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Armageddon
Flogging Molly. "Screaming at the Wailing Wall." Borstal Beat Records, 2004.
Here is a musical prayer that neatly summarizes my study on terrorism.
So, God, how come every wrong's been done?
With deals no Christ should allow
Once the communist now the terrorist
With blood as thick as yours
Now a caravan of clouds
Warns us all of winter showers
Then rattle comes the rain
With each bullet, it screams your name
So how come this gatherin' storm
Pours little on the truth?
Where the smokin' gun's a familiar
song let loose
With the bombed out cars
Come the falling stars
From a heaven we'll never know
And the nameless names
On the misspelled graves grow tall
We're still screamin' at the Wailing Wall
I'll liberate your peoples' fate
Spoke the Burnin' Bush
But the songs of beasts
Grow with oil soaked teeth
Their dollar is mighty and true
Now the eagle soars the sky
Over refugee and child
And to all there is no end
Another day in perfect Hell
So how come this gatherin' storm
Pours little on the truth?
Where the smokin' gun's a familiar
song let loose
All Hail!
Now a caravan of clouds
Warns us all of deadly showers
Then a-rattle comes the rain
With each bullet, it screams your name
So how come this gatherin' storm
Pours little on the truth?
Where the smokin' gun's a familiar
song let loose
With the bombed out cars
Come the falling stars
From a heaven we'll never know
And the nameless names
On the misspelled graves grow tall
We're still screamin' at the Wailing Wall
Oh I'll liberate your peoples' fate
As we scream at the wailing wall
I think this song makes a fair bid to express all the irony, suffering, and idealism that characterize the so-called War on Terror on all its fronts. God speaks. His servants obey, and we keep waiting for the ensuing Armageddon to induce a glorious Millennium of peace and prosperity. Meantime, all hell breaks loose, over and over again, causing some of us to question our ideals that are too high to admit any compromise.
Here is a musical prayer that neatly summarizes my study on terrorism.
So, God, how come every wrong's been done?
With deals no Christ should allow
Once the communist now the terrorist
With blood as thick as yours
Now a caravan of clouds
Warns us all of winter showers
Then rattle comes the rain
With each bullet, it screams your name
So how come this gatherin' storm
Pours little on the truth?
Where the smokin' gun's a familiar
song let loose
With the bombed out cars
Come the falling stars
From a heaven we'll never know
And the nameless names
On the misspelled graves grow tall
We're still screamin' at the Wailing Wall
I'll liberate your peoples' fate
Spoke the Burnin' Bush
But the songs of beasts
Grow with oil soaked teeth
Their dollar is mighty and true
Now the eagle soars the sky
Over refugee and child
And to all there is no end
Another day in perfect Hell
So how come this gatherin' storm
Pours little on the truth?
Where the smokin' gun's a familiar
song let loose
All Hail!
Now a caravan of clouds
Warns us all of deadly showers
Then a-rattle comes the rain
With each bullet, it screams your name
So how come this gatherin' storm
Pours little on the truth?
Where the smokin' gun's a familiar
song let loose
With the bombed out cars
Come the falling stars
From a heaven we'll never know
And the nameless names
On the misspelled graves grow tall
We're still screamin' at the Wailing Wall
Oh I'll liberate your peoples' fate
As we scream at the wailing wall
I think this song makes a fair bid to express all the irony, suffering, and idealism that characterize the so-called War on Terror on all its fronts. God speaks. His servants obey, and we keep waiting for the ensuing Armageddon to induce a glorious Millennium of peace and prosperity. Meantime, all hell breaks loose, over and over again, causing some of us to question our ideals that are too high to admit any compromise.
Violence and Fragility, Summarized
Here is a metaphor that occurred to me as I finished my last post.
Violence is to the body politic what inflammation is to the body. In critical moments, it may save us from acute danger, but as a chronic condition it is utterly ruinous.
Violence is to the body politic what inflammation is to the body. In critical moments, it may save us from acute danger, but as a chronic condition it is utterly ruinous.
Violence and Fragility
This represents a continuation of my thoughts about terrorist violence.
Violence is a bad long-term solution to moral problems because it creates more trouble than it solves, eventually doing injury to the cause that it is invoked to protect. (Despite the fact that it existed nominally to protect Irish Catholics from Protestant violence, the IRA ends up being responsible for more Irish Catholic deaths than any other organization in Ireland, North or South: read Shanahan's book for references.) But the real problem is something different.
When do people get violent? Is it not when they have run out of other options, when they are "backed into a corner" (as the saying goes)? One thing that holds true across all of the terrorist groups I have looked at (Muslim zealots, Basque and Irish nationalists) is that they feel trapped: they are "oppressed" by powers to which the only sane response (in their eyes) is violence (up to and including suicide, whether by detonating themselves in public or going on hunger strikes in prison). The vision that gives meaning to the life of a terrorist gives him freedom (to think, to find meaning in life), but that freedom comes at a terrible cost, because it is inherently fragile. It depends on other people having feelings that they may not (and in the case of modern terrorists, do not) have. It demands validation that history appears very loathe to give (as the overwhelming majority of Muslims, Irish, and Basques continue to reject the visions of utopia that their less inhibited comrades proclaim). The fanatics, inspired with the holy zeal of absolute truth, cannot admit this. Even if they do, they promptly cast themselves as prophets who will "lead the way" in spite of their people's backsliding ways. If enough of us play the bloody hero, they seem to think, surely the cause of Allah will prosper, and the nations of Euskadi and Ireland will shake off Britain and Spain to become heaven on earth.
As for those who actively oppose the terrorists, they are pond scum, orcs with no real motivation backing up the mindless cruelty they inflict on true Muslims, Irish Catholics, and Basques. You don't treat with pond scum. You don't compromise. You do whatever it takes to get the orcs off your land and out of your life. If that means blowing up some of their ill-favored children (or the children of others too blind to see them for the irreparable cancer that they are), well then, so be it.
There is an important common thread here between terrorist reasoning and the ongoing financial collapse of the Western world. Banks are failing because the way we do business in a modern world is too efficient: there is only one true way to do things, the cheapest way that maximizes profit. Ideologies are failing because they are likewise too efficient: there is only one true way to exist, and that is the way of Allah (as preached by Osama bin Laden). When maximizing profits creates snafus, true believers in the modern market economy cannot think of a new way to do business: like an alcoholic who has drunk all the gin in the house, they start raiding the medicine and cleaning cabinets, grasping for anything to keep their drunken dream of happiness alive. Just so, when the violent way of Allah creates hell instead of heaven, the terrorists respond with more violence, hoping that the ideologically driven crusade that is in many ways the cause of their problems may magically turn into a solution. When Coriantumr kills Shiz (Ether 15), they may finally have their way. If there are no people left in the world, then there will be no sectarian violence! But is that the best resolution we can come up with? What is the point of heaven anyway, if the only way to have it is to raise hell?
The more I think about moral conflicts, the less useful violence seems to me. It has its place, of course, and it will not be denied. But that does not mean that that place is necessarily where past generations have put it. And there are differing degrees of violence. I can kill someone actively, or I can passively make their lives so miserable and impossible that they kill themselves. I can hurl bombs, or I can hurl insults. (Note that polite insults are still insults.) If the choice is necessarily between one and the other, I naturally prefer the insults and the passive aggression (whether I am on the giving or the receiving end). But I would actually like to maintain my distance from both kinds of violence. I want my way of life to be as nonviolent as possible. Ironically, this requires that I admit some violence, since to deny it entirely would merely lead to its appearing under some clever disguise (like the "re-education camps" employed by certain high-minded regimes). Pretending that I am utterly harmless is as silly and as wrong as indulging every opportunity I have to do harm. I have to admit the real harmfulness that is in me. I have to know it, and I have to develop real means of dealing productively with it. This is tough stuff, requiring a lot more moral fiber than many of us seem to think (to judge from our public discourse).
More on this later. For now, I'm tapped out.
Violence is a bad long-term solution to moral problems because it creates more trouble than it solves, eventually doing injury to the cause that it is invoked to protect. (Despite the fact that it existed nominally to protect Irish Catholics from Protestant violence, the IRA ends up being responsible for more Irish Catholic deaths than any other organization in Ireland, North or South: read Shanahan's book for references.) But the real problem is something different.
When do people get violent? Is it not when they have run out of other options, when they are "backed into a corner" (as the saying goes)? One thing that holds true across all of the terrorist groups I have looked at (Muslim zealots, Basque and Irish nationalists) is that they feel trapped: they are "oppressed" by powers to which the only sane response (in their eyes) is violence (up to and including suicide, whether by detonating themselves in public or going on hunger strikes in prison). The vision that gives meaning to the life of a terrorist gives him freedom (to think, to find meaning in life), but that freedom comes at a terrible cost, because it is inherently fragile. It depends on other people having feelings that they may not (and in the case of modern terrorists, do not) have. It demands validation that history appears very loathe to give (as the overwhelming majority of Muslims, Irish, and Basques continue to reject the visions of utopia that their less inhibited comrades proclaim). The fanatics, inspired with the holy zeal of absolute truth, cannot admit this. Even if they do, they promptly cast themselves as prophets who will "lead the way" in spite of their people's backsliding ways. If enough of us play the bloody hero, they seem to think, surely the cause of Allah will prosper, and the nations of Euskadi and Ireland will shake off Britain and Spain to become heaven on earth.
As for those who actively oppose the terrorists, they are pond scum, orcs with no real motivation backing up the mindless cruelty they inflict on true Muslims, Irish Catholics, and Basques. You don't treat with pond scum. You don't compromise. You do whatever it takes to get the orcs off your land and out of your life. If that means blowing up some of their ill-favored children (or the children of others too blind to see them for the irreparable cancer that they are), well then, so be it.
There is an important common thread here between terrorist reasoning and the ongoing financial collapse of the Western world. Banks are failing because the way we do business in a modern world is too efficient: there is only one true way to do things, the cheapest way that maximizes profit. Ideologies are failing because they are likewise too efficient: there is only one true way to exist, and that is the way of Allah (as preached by Osama bin Laden). When maximizing profits creates snafus, true believers in the modern market economy cannot think of a new way to do business: like an alcoholic who has drunk all the gin in the house, they start raiding the medicine and cleaning cabinets, grasping for anything to keep their drunken dream of happiness alive. Just so, when the violent way of Allah creates hell instead of heaven, the terrorists respond with more violence, hoping that the ideologically driven crusade that is in many ways the cause of their problems may magically turn into a solution. When Coriantumr kills Shiz (Ether 15), they may finally have their way. If there are no people left in the world, then there will be no sectarian violence! But is that the best resolution we can come up with? What is the point of heaven anyway, if the only way to have it is to raise hell?
The more I think about moral conflicts, the less useful violence seems to me. It has its place, of course, and it will not be denied. But that does not mean that that place is necessarily where past generations have put it. And there are differing degrees of violence. I can kill someone actively, or I can passively make their lives so miserable and impossible that they kill themselves. I can hurl bombs, or I can hurl insults. (Note that polite insults are still insults.) If the choice is necessarily between one and the other, I naturally prefer the insults and the passive aggression (whether I am on the giving or the receiving end). But I would actually like to maintain my distance from both kinds of violence. I want my way of life to be as nonviolent as possible. Ironically, this requires that I admit some violence, since to deny it entirely would merely lead to its appearing under some clever disguise (like the "re-education camps" employed by certain high-minded regimes). Pretending that I am utterly harmless is as silly and as wrong as indulging every opportunity I have to do harm. I have to admit the real harmfulness that is in me. I have to know it, and I have to develop real means of dealing productively with it. This is tough stuff, requiring a lot more moral fiber than many of us seem to think (to judge from our public discourse).
More on this later. For now, I'm tapped out.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
The Irish Republican Army
Timothy Shanahan. The Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Morality of Terrorism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. ISBN: 0748635300.
Richard English. Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0195177533.
Both of these books tell much of the modern story of the Irish civil war and its ongoing bloody aftermath. English's book is more historical (offering evidence and trying to interpret events with an eye toward understanding what really happened), while Shanahan's is more philosophical (going beyond what happened to inquire why it happened and whether it should have happened, i.e. how it can or cannot be justified). If you want a timeline (from the nineteenth-century Fenian movement to the 1916 Easter Rising to the 1969 schism that produced the Provisional IRA), English is good. If you want a discussion of moral positions, English is still good, but Shanahan is better.
Reading these books piecemeal, distracted by my real life, I cannot claim to have digested them thoroughly. But I know enough to articulate better some of insights from my study of terrorism. I am going to go through these quickly here.
(1) Terrorists are people, too. There was a point in my life when I thought of terrorists the way other Tolkien characters think of orcs. Terrorists were pond scum, whose human form was just some kind of disguise. In English and Shanahan's books, however, you see that the IRA are just people: they live, long, believe, suffer, and die the same way the rest of us do. They don't like blowing up babies. They don't do it for fun, but like many of us, they can be suckered into doing stupid things "for the greater good."
(2) Terrorists believe in absolute truth. The most frightening insight into the terrorist mind that my research has revealed is its obsession with the one "true" way of being. All terrorists are dedicated to a cause that is bigger than they are, a cause which they see as the work of God, a cause before which every knee must bow and every tongue confess. This insight is frightening because of my former belief in absolute truth. Now that time has worn off some of the initial shock of learning that absolute truth stokes some very dangerous ideological fires, I can see that the mirage of absolute truth offers some benefits too (along with stultifying mental rigidity and the occasional bomb). It helps people (especially those with truly miserable lives) find purpose and meaning in their suffering. In the case of the Irish revolutionaries, it redeems their feelings of helplessness in the face of coercion, whether from the British military (who outgun them), or from their own countrymen (who outnumber, hate, and fear them). It gives them a means for exerting some influence over the course of their own lives. Their lives are not just wastes of time and space: they are contributions to a glorious Irish destiny, which the soldiers of the IRA see as a republic uniting all the counties in perfect harmony. This harmony is entirely unhistorical and impossible, of course, since a significant number of Irish people do not believe in it. As with the Basques, so among the Irish there are deep ideological fissures separating members of a single culture.
(3) Violence is never a good long-term strategy. The real problem that terrorists consistently run into is that their way of finding meaning in life brings them into violent conflict with other people. Their meaning requires that other meanings submit or die. They cannot compromise (because their truth is absolute). They cannot back down. They cannot change their minds. What is it that gives them this impossible rigidity? It is the power of conviction. Faith in their absolute truth leads them to do and say things that cause their fellowmen significant (and even irreparable) harm. As a result, they are naturally feared and hated. Their cause falls into disrepute among non-believers, who denounce them as monsters and/or crackpots and even (in the case of the IRA) mount armed counter-resistance against them. Uncompromising hatred breeds uncompromising hatred, and the terrorist dream of heaven ends up creating hell on earth. Instead of an Ireland divided but civil, we get an Ireland divided, blown up, and extremely angry.
I think there are many important lessons to learn from terrorism. For me, the most important lesson has been that I need to make a conscious effort to find ways of dreaming and believing that do not put me on the warpath with other people. I do not want my dreams of heaven to make life on earth hell. I am not interested in fighting wars (whether the "cultural" wars we talk about today in the USA or actual shooting wars like the one fought by the IRA). In the context of Mormonism, my study in terrorism is one of the reasons I refuse to be a bitter ex-Mormon. I don't think that would make anything better, really, for me or for anyone else. It would just pile more fuel on the awful fire of uncompromising emotional enthusiasm that has destroyed so many good things in this world (including much of modern Ireland). My studies are also part of the reason I cannot ever have the faith I once had, either. I cannot believe in something so fervently that I become closed to compromise, to doubt, to mercy. I cannot believe in absolute truth. I find it immoral.
Richard English. Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0195177533.
Both of these books tell much of the modern story of the Irish civil war and its ongoing bloody aftermath. English's book is more historical (offering evidence and trying to interpret events with an eye toward understanding what really happened), while Shanahan's is more philosophical (going beyond what happened to inquire why it happened and whether it should have happened, i.e. how it can or cannot be justified). If you want a timeline (from the nineteenth-century Fenian movement to the 1916 Easter Rising to the 1969 schism that produced the Provisional IRA), English is good. If you want a discussion of moral positions, English is still good, but Shanahan is better.
Reading these books piecemeal, distracted by my real life, I cannot claim to have digested them thoroughly. But I know enough to articulate better some of insights from my study of terrorism. I am going to go through these quickly here.
(1) Terrorists are people, too. There was a point in my life when I thought of terrorists the way other Tolkien characters think of orcs. Terrorists were pond scum, whose human form was just some kind of disguise. In English and Shanahan's books, however, you see that the IRA are just people: they live, long, believe, suffer, and die the same way the rest of us do. They don't like blowing up babies. They don't do it for fun, but like many of us, they can be suckered into doing stupid things "for the greater good."
(2) Terrorists believe in absolute truth. The most frightening insight into the terrorist mind that my research has revealed is its obsession with the one "true" way of being. All terrorists are dedicated to a cause that is bigger than they are, a cause which they see as the work of God, a cause before which every knee must bow and every tongue confess. This insight is frightening because of my former belief in absolute truth. Now that time has worn off some of the initial shock of learning that absolute truth stokes some very dangerous ideological fires, I can see that the mirage of absolute truth offers some benefits too (along with stultifying mental rigidity and the occasional bomb). It helps people (especially those with truly miserable lives) find purpose and meaning in their suffering. In the case of the Irish revolutionaries, it redeems their feelings of helplessness in the face of coercion, whether from the British military (who outgun them), or from their own countrymen (who outnumber, hate, and fear them). It gives them a means for exerting some influence over the course of their own lives. Their lives are not just wastes of time and space: they are contributions to a glorious Irish destiny, which the soldiers of the IRA see as a republic uniting all the counties in perfect harmony. This harmony is entirely unhistorical and impossible, of course, since a significant number of Irish people do not believe in it. As with the Basques, so among the Irish there are deep ideological fissures separating members of a single culture.
(3) Violence is never a good long-term strategy. The real problem that terrorists consistently run into is that their way of finding meaning in life brings them into violent conflict with other people. Their meaning requires that other meanings submit or die. They cannot compromise (because their truth is absolute). They cannot back down. They cannot change their minds. What is it that gives them this impossible rigidity? It is the power of conviction. Faith in their absolute truth leads them to do and say things that cause their fellowmen significant (and even irreparable) harm. As a result, they are naturally feared and hated. Their cause falls into disrepute among non-believers, who denounce them as monsters and/or crackpots and even (in the case of the IRA) mount armed counter-resistance against them. Uncompromising hatred breeds uncompromising hatred, and the terrorist dream of heaven ends up creating hell on earth. Instead of an Ireland divided but civil, we get an Ireland divided, blown up, and extremely angry.
I think there are many important lessons to learn from terrorism. For me, the most important lesson has been that I need to make a conscious effort to find ways of dreaming and believing that do not put me on the warpath with other people. I do not want my dreams of heaven to make life on earth hell. I am not interested in fighting wars (whether the "cultural" wars we talk about today in the USA or actual shooting wars like the one fought by the IRA). In the context of Mormonism, my study in terrorism is one of the reasons I refuse to be a bitter ex-Mormon. I don't think that would make anything better, really, for me or for anyone else. It would just pile more fuel on the awful fire of uncompromising emotional enthusiasm that has destroyed so many good things in this world (including much of modern Ireland). My studies are also part of the reason I cannot ever have the faith I once had, either. I cannot believe in something so fervently that I become closed to compromise, to doubt, to mercy. I cannot believe in absolute truth. I find it immoral.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Penn Jillette's Take on Atheism, Libertarianism, Terrorism
I was getting ready to write something like this for my next essay on terrorism. Like Jillette, I too believe that I do not know what is best for other people, and that it is categorically wrong for me to dictate to them (unless I am telling them to please avoid blowing my head off, vel sim). I also really like what he said about reserving the right to change his mind about something as his experience with it evolves. For me, that is what good faith is (and always has been)--not accepting a single answer as true no matter what, but remaining open to new truth (even when it destroys the old).
Thursday, September 29, 2011
House of Submission, House of War
Bernard Lewis. The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. New York: Modern Library, 2003. ISBN: 0679642811.
A second essay on terror and holy war.
This book provides a detailed discussion of the historical background from which modern Muslim fundamentalism arose (e.g. organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the religious government of the Ayatollah Khomeini). It contains many insights, offers many different perspectives, and presents overall a complex, realistic picture of the worldwide phenomenon that is (and has been) Islam. Lewis is not anti-Muslim at all, but (like most Muslims) he cannot condone the modern guerrilla war on civilians that we in the West have lately dubbed terrorism. The Islamic thread holding the book together is jihad, the Muslim crusade, which began as actual, literal war with geographical and political conquests (undertaken during the life of Muhammad) and became a metaphor for the believer's struggle to offer his best service to God. (Remember that Islam means submission to Allah.)
Lewis emphasizes that the Muslim jihad has resisted criticism (as a historical movement) and secularization (no modern Muslim uses jihad the offhanded way we Westerners often use crusade, e.g. as a synonym for cause). Whereas Christians took up the original crusade relatively late (after suffering as a persecuted minority for centuries) and dropped it relatively early (after several military disasters), the jihad started with Muhammad and was never dropped (in part because it was met, at least initially, with unbroken success). Today, many Christians are embarrassed by the idea of holy war (which they see as barbaric and somewhat foolish); fewer Muslims are so embarrassed. Many Christians are concerned with avoiding the unnecessary imposition of their values on other people: they create walls between church and state (which some of them then doubt and want to pull down). In Muslim culture, there is (ideally) no wall between church and state. There is no church, really, only the faithful believers, who are united in obedience to God. In a good Muslim state, the law of Allah is the law of the state, and vice versa.
The Muslim world is conceptually simple. All people live in one of two "houses" -- the house of Submission (i.e. the house of Islam) or the house of War. Historically, Islam reaches out to the house of War with violence, with conquest, and with the revelation of a better way to live (which the more enlightened inhabitants of the house of War embrace willingly). This violence comes with strict rules, however, rules which Lewis (and others, including many Muslim authorities) interpret to forbid the kind of tactics (e.g. suicide missions against civilians) employed by groups like al-Quaeda. Even with this caveat, I am still not entirely comfortable with it. But I am not a Muslim, so my opinion matters little, especially to those Muslims who have already decided that I am a servant of the Great Satan (owing to the accident that I was born in the United States and raised as a Christian). This brings me to an interesting problem.
I have known or at least interacted with various Muslims personally over the years. Most of them have been really good people (moral, upstanding, respectful, helpful). I even have several American friends who have converted to Islam (including some who are at least as doubtful about the literal truth of ancient mythology as I am). What am I to make of these people? Are they secretly plotting the violent overthrow of my life? Do they only pretend to value other people, other cultures, other ways of being that do not come to us from the only God and his last Prophet? As a result of long-standing personal interactions with them, I really, really don't think so. And yet they react with pain and aversion when the state of Israel comes up in conversation, or when a discussion of the United States' historic involvement in the Middle East gets serious. What causes my good friends to flinch? Could it be the same thing that drives many of their co-religionists homicidally crazy? Lewis answered this question in the affirmative, and it was painful for me.
You see, the track record of our government in the Middle East is not that great. Terrified by every shadow of a threat against our power in a region we don't control, we supported anyone carrying gun against our perceived enemies (e.g. Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom we attempted to play against one another; and Osama bin Laden, whom we supported against the Soviets). We didn't really care if these people were nice to the rest of the neighborhood or not: it turns out, they weren't. Not only that, we didn't even support our allies reliably: when the last Shah of Iran agreed to be our puppet (as the locals saw it), we repaid his loyalty by refusing to offer any kind of aid whatsoever; when his government collapsed, we were so eager to pander to his successors that we let him go into exile outside our borders. By associating with thugs (Hussein, bin Laden, etc.) and then treating our allies like dirt (even the relatively harmless ones, like the Shah), we pretty much killed our reputation with a sizable population of foreign Muslims. These people fail to understand how it is acceptable for the United States to blow them up (or send some local thugs to blow them up), but not for them to retaliate (in some way: not all of them fly planes into buildings full of innocents). They don't see how it isn't hypocritical of us to claim the moral high ground as agents of freedom and justice and then throw our support to the likes of Saddam (whom we don't even support reliably). This does not mean that jihad is not a problematic concept, or that al-Qaeda was justified in attacking the Towers. Far from it. But it does reveal that calling such attacks unprovoked is a little naive. We knew there were religious people in the Middle East. We knew their sacred texts preached holy war. We knew they had a history of fighting for honor and religion. We knew they were outfitted with weapons and training (a lot of it from us). We knew that, and we went and kicked the beehive anyway. Is the honey really worth it?
For me, the most shocking and scary thing about Islam (including the "malfunctioning" Islam branded as terrorism in the West) is how normal it is. I grew up in a conservative Christian environment: though many Christians would deny me fellowship as a Mormon, I spent a good portion of my life living in their company, learning from their textbooks (including the King James Bible), and aspiring to be like them. I wanted to break down the wall between church and state, putting prayer in the schools and the government in the marriage bed. I thought the United States of America was a nation that depended on God the way the idealized house of Islam depends on Allah. I thought life would be better worldwide if all people converted to Christianity (and ultimately to Mormonism, the truest form of Christianity). I was not overtly violent in my enthusiasm to convert the world, but how much of that was historical accident? Many Mormons of the nineteenth century were violent (as some Christians have always been), and I personally was never provoked. What if someone had treated my leaders (religious or political) with blatant disrespect and bombed my house? Who knows how I might have reacted, especially if someone whose authority I respected had responded with a pious American, Christian, or Mormon version of the original 1996 ultimatum published to the West by al-Qaeda? The more I think about the 9/11 attacks, the more it seemed to me that I am in no way categorically different from the Muslim terrorists whose violence I naturally abhor. If the shoe were on the other foot, who knows what awful crimes I might have laid on the altar for the United States of America, for Christendom, for my God?
The attacks of 9/11 were one of many factors that ultimately forced me to re-examine my loyalty to all human institutions (and my relationship to God). As a result, I have become simultaneously less violent and less trusting. The good guys look a lot like the bad guys to me. We are all simply human, doing what we think the situation demands (in the Middle East this means blowing stuff up) and spinning stories to justify it.
A second essay on terror and holy war.
This book provides a detailed discussion of the historical background from which modern Muslim fundamentalism arose (e.g. organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the religious government of the Ayatollah Khomeini). It contains many insights, offers many different perspectives, and presents overall a complex, realistic picture of the worldwide phenomenon that is (and has been) Islam. Lewis is not anti-Muslim at all, but (like most Muslims) he cannot condone the modern guerrilla war on civilians that we in the West have lately dubbed terrorism. The Islamic thread holding the book together is jihad, the Muslim crusade, which began as actual, literal war with geographical and political conquests (undertaken during the life of Muhammad) and became a metaphor for the believer's struggle to offer his best service to God. (Remember that Islam means submission to Allah.)
Lewis emphasizes that the Muslim jihad has resisted criticism (as a historical movement) and secularization (no modern Muslim uses jihad the offhanded way we Westerners often use crusade, e.g. as a synonym for cause). Whereas Christians took up the original crusade relatively late (after suffering as a persecuted minority for centuries) and dropped it relatively early (after several military disasters), the jihad started with Muhammad and was never dropped (in part because it was met, at least initially, with unbroken success). Today, many Christians are embarrassed by the idea of holy war (which they see as barbaric and somewhat foolish); fewer Muslims are so embarrassed. Many Christians are concerned with avoiding the unnecessary imposition of their values on other people: they create walls between church and state (which some of them then doubt and want to pull down). In Muslim culture, there is (ideally) no wall between church and state. There is no church, really, only the faithful believers, who are united in obedience to God. In a good Muslim state, the law of Allah is the law of the state, and vice versa.
The Muslim world is conceptually simple. All people live in one of two "houses" -- the house of Submission (i.e. the house of Islam) or the house of War. Historically, Islam reaches out to the house of War with violence, with conquest, and with the revelation of a better way to live (which the more enlightened inhabitants of the house of War embrace willingly). This violence comes with strict rules, however, rules which Lewis (and others, including many Muslim authorities) interpret to forbid the kind of tactics (e.g. suicide missions against civilians) employed by groups like al-Quaeda. Even with this caveat, I am still not entirely comfortable with it. But I am not a Muslim, so my opinion matters little, especially to those Muslims who have already decided that I am a servant of the Great Satan (owing to the accident that I was born in the United States and raised as a Christian). This brings me to an interesting problem.
I have known or at least interacted with various Muslims personally over the years. Most of them have been really good people (moral, upstanding, respectful, helpful). I even have several American friends who have converted to Islam (including some who are at least as doubtful about the literal truth of ancient mythology as I am). What am I to make of these people? Are they secretly plotting the violent overthrow of my life? Do they only pretend to value other people, other cultures, other ways of being that do not come to us from the only God and his last Prophet? As a result of long-standing personal interactions with them, I really, really don't think so. And yet they react with pain and aversion when the state of Israel comes up in conversation, or when a discussion of the United States' historic involvement in the Middle East gets serious. What causes my good friends to flinch? Could it be the same thing that drives many of their co-religionists homicidally crazy? Lewis answered this question in the affirmative, and it was painful for me.
You see, the track record of our government in the Middle East is not that great. Terrified by every shadow of a threat against our power in a region we don't control, we supported anyone carrying gun against our perceived enemies (e.g. Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom we attempted to play against one another; and Osama bin Laden, whom we supported against the Soviets). We didn't really care if these people were nice to the rest of the neighborhood or not: it turns out, they weren't. Not only that, we didn't even support our allies reliably: when the last Shah of Iran agreed to be our puppet (as the locals saw it), we repaid his loyalty by refusing to offer any kind of aid whatsoever; when his government collapsed, we were so eager to pander to his successors that we let him go into exile outside our borders. By associating with thugs (Hussein, bin Laden, etc.) and then treating our allies like dirt (even the relatively harmless ones, like the Shah), we pretty much killed our reputation with a sizable population of foreign Muslims. These people fail to understand how it is acceptable for the United States to blow them up (or send some local thugs to blow them up), but not for them to retaliate (in some way: not all of them fly planes into buildings full of innocents). They don't see how it isn't hypocritical of us to claim the moral high ground as agents of freedom and justice and then throw our support to the likes of Saddam (whom we don't even support reliably). This does not mean that jihad is not a problematic concept, or that al-Qaeda was justified in attacking the Towers. Far from it. But it does reveal that calling such attacks unprovoked is a little naive. We knew there were religious people in the Middle East. We knew their sacred texts preached holy war. We knew they had a history of fighting for honor and religion. We knew they were outfitted with weapons and training (a lot of it from us). We knew that, and we went and kicked the beehive anyway. Is the honey really worth it?
For me, the most shocking and scary thing about Islam (including the "malfunctioning" Islam branded as terrorism in the West) is how normal it is. I grew up in a conservative Christian environment: though many Christians would deny me fellowship as a Mormon, I spent a good portion of my life living in their company, learning from their textbooks (including the King James Bible), and aspiring to be like them. I wanted to break down the wall between church and state, putting prayer in the schools and the government in the marriage bed. I thought the United States of America was a nation that depended on God the way the idealized house of Islam depends on Allah. I thought life would be better worldwide if all people converted to Christianity (and ultimately to Mormonism, the truest form of Christianity). I was not overtly violent in my enthusiasm to convert the world, but how much of that was historical accident? Many Mormons of the nineteenth century were violent (as some Christians have always been), and I personally was never provoked. What if someone had treated my leaders (religious or political) with blatant disrespect and bombed my house? Who knows how I might have reacted, especially if someone whose authority I respected had responded with a pious American, Christian, or Mormon version of the original 1996 ultimatum published to the West by al-Qaeda? The more I think about the 9/11 attacks, the more it seemed to me that I am in no way categorically different from the Muslim terrorists whose violence I naturally abhor. If the shoe were on the other foot, who knows what awful crimes I might have laid on the altar for the United States of America, for Christendom, for my God?
The attacks of 9/11 were one of many factors that ultimately forced me to re-examine my loyalty to all human institutions (and my relationship to God). As a result, I have become simultaneously less violent and less trusting. The good guys look a lot like the bad guys to me. We are all simply human, doing what we think the situation demands (in the Middle East this means blowing stuff up) and spinning stories to justify it.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Kale Borroka
Mario Onaindia. Guia para Orientarse en el Laberinto Vasco. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2000. ISBN: 8478808396.
This essay starts a series of reflections on terrorism and the concept of holy war.
Ten years ago, I was preparing to serve as an LDS missionary in northern Spain. Right before I left for Utah en route to the LDS Missionary Training Center in Provo, the Twin Towers were attacked. Living at home away from the television, it was some time before I learned of the attack, and my first reaction was not very emotional. I remember a vague fear that the attack would impede my upcoming international adventure, but when it did not I promptly ceased to care too much about the political kerfuffle that followed (as the United States declared her War on Terror): the issues of right and wrong, forgiveness and retribution, fear and loathing that the attacks raised were relegated to stew somewhere unnoticed in the back of my mind.
Less than a month later, I found myself living with three other LDS missionaries in Bilbao on the northern Spanish coast. I had not been there more than a few weeks or so when another terrorist attack disrupted my life. This time, I could not just brush it off. It had been a long day, but I was feeling happy. We had already returned to our comfortable little apartment in the Begona district, and I was standing alone in the main room, looking out at the city, which was lit up for the night. Everything was quiet and still: our window was open, I think, and the air was crisp and clear. Then, suddenly, there was a massive sonic boom, and the floor underneath me shook. I thought someone was dynamiting our building! Fortunately, I was mistaken. The next day, there was a blast crater in the park (Etxebarria Parkea) across the street (including a few shredded trees), and people were talking about how the target had been some local police (the Ertzaintza). Another attack took place several months later. A fellow missionary and I were visiting one of our local LDS sisters (with her family), and she happened to have the television on. No sooner did we reassure her that it would not destroy our ability to focus than the scene cut suddenly to downtown Bilbao, and we were upstaged: La Gran Via Don Diego Lopez de Haro was practically empty (unheard of for the hour), and all windows near the train station (and the nearby post of the Guardia Civil) were smashed. Throughout my stay in Bilbao (about six months), these events never left me: when I went to the municipal police station to hand in paperwork for my empadronamiento, the wall held a giant plaque commemorating officers killed in combat, and one of our regular walking routes took us right past an official station downtown (either police or Guardia Civil) where men with machine guns guarded the roof as well as every entrance. It was strange to see them standing there, watchful and alert, scanning the crowds of shoppers, business travelers, and schoolchildren, who parted naturally to step around their large guns, but never interrupted the flow of countless conversations. It was like they were not there. Until the terrorists blew them up, again.
Who were these terrorists? I learned quickly that they were Basque nationalists, members of a group known commonly as ETA, an acronym for Euskadi ta Askatasuna ("Basque Homeland and Freedom"). I knew they fought for freedom from Spanish and French rule (this much the graffiti told), that they targeted military and police preferentially (this much the gossip told), and that their role in Basque society was hotly contested (this much the continual demonstrations in the street told: some hotly demanded the release of political prisoners; others decried the use of violence by Basques). That was all I got. As a young foreigner still very adolescent and very much involved in my own mission (which had everything to do with sharing Mormonism and as little as possible to do with Basque terrorism), I was not exceptionally receptive to the deeper currents moving the masses of people then around me. I thought that Basque people were quirky (with traditional language, dress, and other forms of culture that came out especially on holidays), stubborn (because few of them wanted to talk religion with an American teenager determined to convert them), and good (since they seemed to value things like family, integrity, and honor). I did not really see where terrorism fit in this collage. But, years later, Mario Onaindia showed me.
Onaindia's book is a fascinating history of the nationalist movement(s) in Euskadi (Basque Country). It starts with two seminal events: (1) the abolition of the fueros vascos (roughly the Basque equivalent of the English Magna Carta) by the democratic reforms of Antonio Canovas del Castillo (1876); and (2) the creation of the Euzko Alderdi Jeltzalea (i.e. "Basque Party of the Supporters of God and Old Laws," or, more prosaically, the Partido Nacionalista Vasco) by Sabino Arana (1894). The aftermath of these events occupies an entertaining cast of historical characters all the way through the twentieth century (right up to the day I felt the floor shake under my feet!). The story is long and very dense, and I am still struggling to understand it all, but I have enough to notice some interesting things. Basically, canceling the fueros created a more or less permanent fracture in Basque society. Some Basques gave the old laws up for lost and started working to secure their place in society by other means. These people accepted more or less peaceful interaction with successive Spanish governments that came and went over the last century, using legal means to establish boundaries between Basque society and the larger Spanish commonwealth. Nationalists in this category include the current Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV), which operates today like any other political party in a modern representative democracy, attracting voters who elect officers who enact policies (which might include measures designed to secure greater autonomia for Basques in Euskadi). However, a significant minority of Basques felt that no government (neither the Spanish republic, nor Franco's dictatorship, nor the restoration government that followed under Juan Carlos I) had any right to treat with them at all without the fueros. The intransigence of these hardliners was radicalized early on as a result of the brutal industrialization of Vizcaya (starting in the nineteenth century under the republic), which destroyed not only the local landscape, but also much of the peasant culture so dear to some Basques. As a result of this action (and others like it), the tough minority lost all respect for any government, which they saw as intractably foreign and oppressive (Onaindia nicknames this caricature of the Spanish government Neguri, after the wealthy neighborhood in Bilbao where the original industrialists who destroyed the old Vizcaya built mansions with their ill-gotten gain). Thoroughly disillusioned with Spain, the radicals became warriors, kidnapping and killing targeted enemies (government officials, police, Basques who were too cooperative with the Spanish government, and even wholly innocent and helpless bystanders like Miguel Angel Blanco) and engaging in regular bouts of public mayhem (the kale borroka). ETA is the most active, high-profile group formed in modern times by these insurgents.
The result is a bizarre situation, in which passionate Basques on both sides say words that sound the same (at least to outsiders like me) even as their actions are noticeably different. One man is proud of his Basque heritage and declares that pride by voting for a local politician. Another is similarly proud and declares it by blowing up a car near the police station. Each thinks the other is nuts. Each thinks his expression of cultural pride is the only "true" one (the only one worthy of a real Basque). At certain moments in historical time, each has declared the other to be a traitor. And yet they say they want the same thing: freedom, dignity, and self-determination for Basque people. One seeks that prize through negotiation, admitting the fact that different Basque people want different things (i.e. that there is no single definition for "freedom, dignity, and self-determination" that all Basques would recognize: some of them want Euskadi to maintain affiliation with the Spanish government, and see that government as standing for something more than ruthless exploitation). The other opts for violence, even violence directed at his own people, because he thinks that his vision of "freedom, dignity, and self-determination" must prevail at all costs. (He does not see any good in the government, which is forever tainted by certain moments of its past.) If other Basques cannot see it, he must show them. If they cannot accept it, he must punish them (just as he punishes the servants of the Spanish government, e.g. politicians, policemen, and officers of the Guardia Civil). Neguri must not win: if she is brutal (killing and enslaving innocents), then he must oppose her with the same brutality. War hurts everyone, but you cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?
The warrior sees the negotiator as a compromised coward, a weakling who abandons real freedom for a specious pretense (the diluted autonomia within the larger commonwealth that the Spanish government allows). The negotiator sees the warrior as an uncompromising fool, a danger to himself and to everyone else who comes near him (like Blanco, mentioned above, whose "crime" was being in the wrong place at the wrong time: he did nothing to oppress Basques, and his death brought no obvious victory for the separatist movement). But when Onaindia stripped off the warrior's mask and showed him to me in his native habitat, with the ghosts of Neguri looming down over him, threatening his traditional way of life with a faceless and horrible modernity (the end of Spanish hegemony abroad, industrialization of the Basque countryside, and the post-modern desert of globalization in which the wealthy take all and the poor turn to bankrupt governments for economic help rather than retaining the means and skills to serve themselves), I saw that he is not necessarily an inhuman monster. Instead, he looked a lot more like a rather ordinary human being responding to a not entirely irrational fear that his whole way of life is disappearing. When democrats offer him a seat at the common table of the new Spanish order, he fears a trap (a repeat of the rape of Vizcaya). He does not want to move forward to a new society. He wants to go back to the good old days (which have only gotten better since we left them). He does not see where the emerging order created by the Spanish government and the negotiators has any room for him, really. They speak to his head (arguing that the Basque people have freedom, dignity, and self-determination now), but they have not managed to persuade his heart (which cannot help feeling that today's freedom is not what the old freedom was, before the abolition of the fueros and the coming of Neguri).
And so Euskadi remains riven, people go on dying, and visitors like me have to tread carefully.
This essay starts a series of reflections on terrorism and the concept of holy war.
Ten years ago, I was preparing to serve as an LDS missionary in northern Spain. Right before I left for Utah en route to the LDS Missionary Training Center in Provo, the Twin Towers were attacked. Living at home away from the television, it was some time before I learned of the attack, and my first reaction was not very emotional. I remember a vague fear that the attack would impede my upcoming international adventure, but when it did not I promptly ceased to care too much about the political kerfuffle that followed (as the United States declared her War on Terror): the issues of right and wrong, forgiveness and retribution, fear and loathing that the attacks raised were relegated to stew somewhere unnoticed in the back of my mind.
Less than a month later, I found myself living with three other LDS missionaries in Bilbao on the northern Spanish coast. I had not been there more than a few weeks or so when another terrorist attack disrupted my life. This time, I could not just brush it off. It had been a long day, but I was feeling happy. We had already returned to our comfortable little apartment in the Begona district, and I was standing alone in the main room, looking out at the city, which was lit up for the night. Everything was quiet and still: our window was open, I think, and the air was crisp and clear. Then, suddenly, there was a massive sonic boom, and the floor underneath me shook. I thought someone was dynamiting our building! Fortunately, I was mistaken. The next day, there was a blast crater in the park (Etxebarria Parkea) across the street (including a few shredded trees), and people were talking about how the target had been some local police (the Ertzaintza). Another attack took place several months later. A fellow missionary and I were visiting one of our local LDS sisters (with her family), and she happened to have the television on. No sooner did we reassure her that it would not destroy our ability to focus than the scene cut suddenly to downtown Bilbao, and we were upstaged: La Gran Via Don Diego Lopez de Haro was practically empty (unheard of for the hour), and all windows near the train station (and the nearby post of the Guardia Civil) were smashed. Throughout my stay in Bilbao (about six months), these events never left me: when I went to the municipal police station to hand in paperwork for my empadronamiento, the wall held a giant plaque commemorating officers killed in combat, and one of our regular walking routes took us right past an official station downtown (either police or Guardia Civil) where men with machine guns guarded the roof as well as every entrance. It was strange to see them standing there, watchful and alert, scanning the crowds of shoppers, business travelers, and schoolchildren, who parted naturally to step around their large guns, but never interrupted the flow of countless conversations. It was like they were not there. Until the terrorists blew them up, again.
Who were these terrorists? I learned quickly that they were Basque nationalists, members of a group known commonly as ETA, an acronym for Euskadi ta Askatasuna ("Basque Homeland and Freedom"). I knew they fought for freedom from Spanish and French rule (this much the graffiti told), that they targeted military and police preferentially (this much the gossip told), and that their role in Basque society was hotly contested (this much the continual demonstrations in the street told: some hotly demanded the release of political prisoners; others decried the use of violence by Basques). That was all I got. As a young foreigner still very adolescent and very much involved in my own mission (which had everything to do with sharing Mormonism and as little as possible to do with Basque terrorism), I was not exceptionally receptive to the deeper currents moving the masses of people then around me. I thought that Basque people were quirky (with traditional language, dress, and other forms of culture that came out especially on holidays), stubborn (because few of them wanted to talk religion with an American teenager determined to convert them), and good (since they seemed to value things like family, integrity, and honor). I did not really see where terrorism fit in this collage. But, years later, Mario Onaindia showed me.
Onaindia's book is a fascinating history of the nationalist movement(s) in Euskadi (Basque Country). It starts with two seminal events: (1) the abolition of the fueros vascos (roughly the Basque equivalent of the English Magna Carta) by the democratic reforms of Antonio Canovas del Castillo (1876); and (2) the creation of the Euzko Alderdi Jeltzalea (i.e. "Basque Party of the Supporters of God and Old Laws," or, more prosaically, the Partido Nacionalista Vasco) by Sabino Arana (1894). The aftermath of these events occupies an entertaining cast of historical characters all the way through the twentieth century (right up to the day I felt the floor shake under my feet!). The story is long and very dense, and I am still struggling to understand it all, but I have enough to notice some interesting things. Basically, canceling the fueros created a more or less permanent fracture in Basque society. Some Basques gave the old laws up for lost and started working to secure their place in society by other means. These people accepted more or less peaceful interaction with successive Spanish governments that came and went over the last century, using legal means to establish boundaries between Basque society and the larger Spanish commonwealth. Nationalists in this category include the current Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV), which operates today like any other political party in a modern representative democracy, attracting voters who elect officers who enact policies (which might include measures designed to secure greater autonomia for Basques in Euskadi). However, a significant minority of Basques felt that no government (neither the Spanish republic, nor Franco's dictatorship, nor the restoration government that followed under Juan Carlos I) had any right to treat with them at all without the fueros. The intransigence of these hardliners was radicalized early on as a result of the brutal industrialization of Vizcaya (starting in the nineteenth century under the republic), which destroyed not only the local landscape, but also much of the peasant culture so dear to some Basques. As a result of this action (and others like it), the tough minority lost all respect for any government, which they saw as intractably foreign and oppressive (Onaindia nicknames this caricature of the Spanish government Neguri, after the wealthy neighborhood in Bilbao where the original industrialists who destroyed the old Vizcaya built mansions with their ill-gotten gain). Thoroughly disillusioned with Spain, the radicals became warriors, kidnapping and killing targeted enemies (government officials, police, Basques who were too cooperative with the Spanish government, and even wholly innocent and helpless bystanders like Miguel Angel Blanco) and engaging in regular bouts of public mayhem (the kale borroka). ETA is the most active, high-profile group formed in modern times by these insurgents.
The result is a bizarre situation, in which passionate Basques on both sides say words that sound the same (at least to outsiders like me) even as their actions are noticeably different. One man is proud of his Basque heritage and declares that pride by voting for a local politician. Another is similarly proud and declares it by blowing up a car near the police station. Each thinks the other is nuts. Each thinks his expression of cultural pride is the only "true" one (the only one worthy of a real Basque). At certain moments in historical time, each has declared the other to be a traitor. And yet they say they want the same thing: freedom, dignity, and self-determination for Basque people. One seeks that prize through negotiation, admitting the fact that different Basque people want different things (i.e. that there is no single definition for "freedom, dignity, and self-determination" that all Basques would recognize: some of them want Euskadi to maintain affiliation with the Spanish government, and see that government as standing for something more than ruthless exploitation). The other opts for violence, even violence directed at his own people, because he thinks that his vision of "freedom, dignity, and self-determination" must prevail at all costs. (He does not see any good in the government, which is forever tainted by certain moments of its past.) If other Basques cannot see it, he must show them. If they cannot accept it, he must punish them (just as he punishes the servants of the Spanish government, e.g. politicians, policemen, and officers of the Guardia Civil). Neguri must not win: if she is brutal (killing and enslaving innocents), then he must oppose her with the same brutality. War hurts everyone, but you cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?
The warrior sees the negotiator as a compromised coward, a weakling who abandons real freedom for a specious pretense (the diluted autonomia within the larger commonwealth that the Spanish government allows). The negotiator sees the warrior as an uncompromising fool, a danger to himself and to everyone else who comes near him (like Blanco, mentioned above, whose "crime" was being in the wrong place at the wrong time: he did nothing to oppress Basques, and his death brought no obvious victory for the separatist movement). But when Onaindia stripped off the warrior's mask and showed him to me in his native habitat, with the ghosts of Neguri looming down over him, threatening his traditional way of life with a faceless and horrible modernity (the end of Spanish hegemony abroad, industrialization of the Basque countryside, and the post-modern desert of globalization in which the wealthy take all and the poor turn to bankrupt governments for economic help rather than retaining the means and skills to serve themselves), I saw that he is not necessarily an inhuman monster. Instead, he looked a lot more like a rather ordinary human being responding to a not entirely irrational fear that his whole way of life is disappearing. When democrats offer him a seat at the common table of the new Spanish order, he fears a trap (a repeat of the rape of Vizcaya). He does not want to move forward to a new society. He wants to go back to the good old days (which have only gotten better since we left them). He does not see where the emerging order created by the Spanish government and the negotiators has any room for him, really. They speak to his head (arguing that the Basque people have freedom, dignity, and self-determination now), but they have not managed to persuade his heart (which cannot help feeling that today's freedom is not what the old freedom was, before the abolition of the fueros and the coming of Neguri).
And so Euskadi remains riven, people go on dying, and visitors like me have to tread carefully.
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