Hatred (27 page)

It is unfashionable these days to implicate religious orthodoxies for their role in cultivating and disseminating hatred. We are a culture of tolerance and diversity, and we strive to protect ourselves from religious bigotry and hatred. But political correctness must contend with historic data. It is not just coincidence that when we examine the environments of persistent hatred such as Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East, religious differences define the opposing populations, even where territory may be the ultimate aim.

Whenever religion is involved—whether for purposes of conversion or conquest—the name and power of God will be invoked in justification of all actions. Religious leaders, since the First Crusade and even before, have motivated the masses with the same promises that the mullahs use in encouraging Al Qaeda. Urban II promised absolution of sins and financial support for the families of crusader heroes. The mullahs promise instant admission to the kingdom of heaven and supply monetary rewards to the families of suicide bombers. The battle cry of the First Crusade, supplied by the pope himself, was “Deus volt”—God wills it, setting historic precedent for the battle cry of the terrorists: “Allah be praised.”

The individual paranoid must oppose his culture in insisting that he has been chosen personally by God, and in claiming that he hears the voice of God. He has to go through the psychic distortion of forming a delusion. No such radical suspension of reality is required of modern terrorists. Their religious leaders, who presume to speak for God, offer their followers an alternative to the delusion formation required of the paranoid.

The arbiters of many orthodox religions, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, have arrogated to themselves the right to interpret the word of God in all areas of life, secular as well as religious. They have been granted this authority by the masses who willingly accept their authority. If the mullah indicates that a woman must be stoned to death for bearing a child out of wedlock, it will be done “in the name of Allah.” The faithful will respond to those who are the interpreters of the word of Allah. They supply the voice of God to the nonpsychotic. This authority is a powerful alternative to delusion formation, which is a device only available to the psychotics among us.

Hatred for the devil has always been one hallmark of love of God. Those obsessed with hatred of evil, and apprised of the identity of the agents of evil, need generate no delusions to rationalize their hatred. The mass population, eager for some justification for their deprivation, is directed to viewing the United States as a prime example of the hand of Satan operating through the imperialist state. In addition, the people see on television the sinful lifestyle of the infidel that is so tempting to their children. Encouraged by the assurances of their religious leaders, they supply their children with an alternative passion. The ticket to the better life is a suicide mission. The child's place in paradise is assured, and their parents will find increased comforts at home supplied by benefactors from Iran and Iraq. They pursue and extinguish the enemy at the behest of their religious leaders and with the reassurance that planting a bomb in a school will be serving their God. No ideological leaders besides the religious ones have this enormous leverage.

Religions, or their ultranationalist equivalents, have the power to choose and identify “enemies.” They do so by defining evil or heretic populations: Jews, Irish Protestants/Catholics, Serbs/ Croats, Muslims/Hindus. Genocide sanctioned by dogma or orthodoxy
and rationalized by political leaders can then be declared a means of purification, a defense of principle—in the service of God or the good—and even an act of survival. Religious leaders have enormous special powers to influence the believer far beyond that afforded secular leaders.

First, religion has “the Word.” The prestige of the Church bureaucracy resides in its self-appointed position as intermediary between God and his subjects. Their authority is both interpretive and directive. Most of us do not hear the voice of God and are not privy to his wants. The power of religious leaders resides in their arrogation of the capacity and right to interpret the divine text.

Second, the Church is an educator. The Church bureaucracy, in its self-perpetuated role as interpreter of the divine text—whether the Koran or the Bible—arrogates a responsibility to inform and instruct the layman. The word of God is what the leaders say it is. They define the appropriate beliefs and the proper code of conduct. As God's instruments, religious leaders are regarded with the kind of fear and awe that inspire obedience. We now have a culturally accepted alternative to paranoid delusion, a method of receiving instructions from God and following his commandments. This power allows religious leaders to locate the source of misery in the populace; define the enemy, the infidel or the anti-Christ; and command action, whether crusade, jihad, or an act of personal martyrdom.

Third, faith supplies power. It demands allegiance and obedience beyond the tests of reason. Faith is demanded in most religious observers. One suspension of reason can facilitate the next. If one believes that Moses literally received the tablets of the law from God on Mount Sinai, then one is prepared to accept the delivery of the golden plates of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York. And one can believe that the
Reverend Jim Jones will lead us out of the modern wilderness.
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We unfairly denigrate the faith of believers in new religions, but the same suspension of logic is required in the traditional religions. The miracles of the Old and New Testaments would seem strange indeed if newly presented in the twenty-first century.

The power of faith is in its ability to counter all the impulses of instinct and the directives of rational thinking. Even the ubiquitous fear of death can be overcome by the promises of faith, whether through fusion with Christ, enshrinement in Valhalla, or admission to the earthly paradise, with its corporal and carnal pleasures, promised by Islam.

Finally, religion supplies passion. Religion (or ultranationalism) does more than define the enemy and rationalize the hatred. It supplies the passion. The kind of passion that allows for torture and cruelty is borrowed from religious ecstasy. Very little besides terror, sexual passion, or religious fervor can support the excesses of group hatred. The passion supplied by religion sustains hatred over a lifetime and across generations. The institution of religion is particularly well endowed with all the ingredients necessary to supply the tinder that ignites group hatred.

Another traditional role of religion that has made it useful to secular authorities is its ability to bring comfort to the masses, and comfort may be used in the service of civil control. Since life for the masses has historically been one of misery and toil, often because of exploitation by the privileged minority, the comfort offered by religion can serve as an emollient to the masses, making misery tolerable. One argument for the ready acceptance by secular powers of an alternative and potentially competitive leadership, the Church, has been the usefulness of religion in stabilizing a feudal and exploitative state. The promise of an afterlife
makes the here and now more bearable. Poverty may be endurable, even preferable, if it is true that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the poor man find justice in heaven.

For years, one of the intended or incidental effects of culturally sanctioned antisemitism in the Catholic and medieval cultures of Europe was the stabilizing effect it offered the state. The Church encouraged the perpetuation of antisemitism, “the longest hatred,”
⁷⁹
for its utilitarian effects. The value of the Jews as scapegoats was in their capacity to divert the masses from the proper sources of their despair, a miserable and impoverished existence. This status quo was easy to maintain when the Church was powerful and unified, the states were weak and diverse, and there was no powerful middle class.

With the Reformation, the creation of the modern state, and the rise of a bourgeoisie, the balance shifted. The power of the universal Church was diminished. Diverse “truths” were revealed. The nation materialized as an alternative source of power, an alternative allegiance, and a new community of identification. After the separation of Church and state, rival loyalties were offered to the masses—Church and state—with diminished powers for each, or variable apportioning of the areas of power between the two, depending on the specific culture.

Out of the masses emerged a strong middle class with the kind of secular life that would be less easy to sacrifice for the admittedly grander, but less certain, future in heaven.
⁸⁰
As life approximated in richness the qualities ascribed to an afterlife, it would
be harder to abandon that which we know—the bird in the hand—for that which was only promised. Still, conditions would arise where a population filled with frustration, resentment, and despair would be ripe and waiting for an explosion into hatred. Max Scheler labeled this emotional state as
ressentiment,
and he described it as a dangerous, pathological, and destructive condition.
Ressentiment
is not exactly translatable to resentment, as it is more powerful than that, a toxic brew of resentment, envy, spite, rage, and revenge: “
Ressentiment
can only arise if these emotions are particularly powerful and yet must be suppressed because they are coupled with the feeling that one is unable to act them out—either because of weakness, physical or mental, or because of fear.”
⁸¹

Scheler described this condition as endemic in the Germany of 1912 in which he was writing. Twenty years or so later, the conditions were only intensified. In the period following the massive defeat of Germany in World War I, a nation emerged that was joined in humiliation and impoverishment. With the coming to power of a paranoid leadership—obsessed with a virulent anti-semitism born out of the leaders' individual psyches—a new Germany emerged. Democracy was replaced with a Fascist dictatorship. The pathological leaders offered a paranoid justification for the feelings of the Germans that relieved them of responsibility and supplied them with a culpable enemy. The qualities of both religion and statehood were combined under the Nazis. And then to supply passion and justification, a religious and mystical mission was offered. A crusade was initiated with the emphasis on protecting not just the people or the state but the purity of the Aryan “race.” The Holocaust became a reality.

Ultranationalist dictatorships share certain characteristics of religious orthodoxy but these qualities are joined with the military
powers of the state. When one combines the two, as is so common now in the Arab world, it becomes apparent why the Islamic state is now viewed as a center for international terrorism.

The work of Al Qaeda, the ideological community, is also supported by its fundamentalist assumptions. It is supported in its efforts by the existence of theocratic dictatorships throughout the Middle East, which erase the traditional balance of power between national and religious interests, limiting the excesses of either. With Al Qaeda the role of religion is central and all-powerful. Religion creates, encourages, rationalizes, and supports hatred—and supplies enemies, the infidel. Al Qaeda is particularly effective in its capacity to wreak havoc because it attaches its religious fanaticism to political struggles, operating as both a political movement and a religious crusade.

Al Qaeda has been described as the Muslim version of the Christian Crusades. The comparison is grossly inexact. The assumption is that because the Crusades represented the particular ideologies of a religion—the Christians—it was an ideological action. It was, in fact, a territorial one. When Pope Urban II gave his clarion call at the Council of Clermont in 1095, his purposes were clear. The object was not conversion of the heathen, but the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. It is generally agreed that the primary mission of the Church was gaining access to the holy places, whereas the promise of power and wealth motivated the secular leaders who actually mobilized the troops and initiated the actions. One of the major positive consequences of the Crusades was the creation of a larger community of interests and contact. The world of the West was enlarged, enriched, and complicated by its exposure to the East.

The modern networks of communication facilitated the formation of Al Qaeda. But what is the articulated purpose of this crusade? What is its Holy Sepulcher? What does Al Qaeda
want?
The easy answer is the security of a Palestinian state. That
certainly is the goal of the Palestinian terrorist. But Al Qaeda is not motivated by the establishment of something. It is the destruction of something that Al Qaeda wants. But what is it? Some would say the destruction of the state of Israel. But the evidence and the chronology of their activities belie that. When they began to mention Israel, it seemed to come only as an afterthought. Destroying Israel appears to be an opportunistic claim, a Johnny-come-lately plan. Their true venom seems to be more directed to Jews in general as representative of the larger host of infidels.

Al Qaeda leaders, by embracing a general antisemitism, have now joined a traditional bigotry. They have found the one-size-fits-all enemy, the Jews. They send tanker trucks to destroy a Jewish synagogue in Tunisia and people with bombs to destroy Jewish cultural institutions in France. Israel appears to be a temporary convenience for Al Qaeda, a rationalization created to influence the liberal communities of Europe that have been offended by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and impatient at the lack of progress in a peace settlement. Israel is most likely a way station for Al Qaeda in its jihad against the hated modern state.

One suspects that the attacks on Jewish (not Israeli) targets in Europe and North Africa represent a temporary and safer alternative to the “Jewish schools and neighborhoods in the United States” that Al Qaeda indicated were to be its prime targets. And what perfect targets! By assaulting these American-Jewish institutions, it would threaten both the security of Jews in the United States and the country itself. That would join the surrogate, the Jews, to the great Satan that really offends it, the United States.