Chris Hedges
Thursday, June 12th, 2008I came across this interview with journalist Chris Hedges, which I thought was pretty interesting. I was really informed on his view of religion and war (the connection, etc.). Though I think some Muslim customs are pretty, well…pretty “distinctive” than what I’m (a Westerner) used to, I am not one who discriminates against the religion. So, in this time of war, the vantage points the majority of Americans have toward the opposing forces are rather skewed, distant, foggy, inaccurate, and racist. So here some of what he said in the interview:
Q: So now you’ve written about what war is. What’s your conclusion?
A: The goal of the book was to portray the disease that war is and how that disease in wartime infects and destroys individuals and societies. I had started writing at Harvard on a Nieman fellowship after I left the war in Kosovo, but it took on a kind of urgency after 9/11. I woke up and realized in New York that we’d all become Serbs, that all of that flag-waving, all of that jingoism, that mass suppression of individual conscience — which I had seen in countries in war around the globe Ð was now part of my own society, part of where I lived. And it frightened me.
I’m not a pacifist. Wars are always tragic, but probably inevitable; I would think they are inevitable. I supported the intervention in Bosnia. I supported the intervention in Kosovo. I feel that we failed as a nation by not intervening in Rwanda. If we’ve learned anything from the Holocaust, it is that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. You have blood on your hands, and we do for Rwanda.
But I also understand what war can do, especially when you fall into the dark intoxication that war brings. That process of dehumanizing the other, that ecstatic euphoria in wartime, that use of patriotism as a form of self-glorification, that worshiping of the capacity to inflict violence — especially in a society that possesses a military as advanced as ours — all of those things I wanted to expose in the book, so that people would at least understand war for the poison that it is.
[…]
Q: I want to ask you about the role of religion and war. It’s often blamed for war. What did you find?
A: In wartime, religious institutions are usually the worst offenders. For instance, in Bosnia the UN could get Serb, Muslim, and Croat commanders together for a civil discussion far more easily than they could get the religious leaders [together] — imams and Serbian Orthodox clerics and Catholic priests.
Religion lends itself to that kind of triumphalism, that notion of the crusade, the purging of evil, the sanitation of dark forces by the forces of light. Certainly within the mosque, the church, you had individuals who stood up, but they very much ran against the institution. Many times these institutions are called upon by the state to sanctify the cause, and they usually are more than willing to do so.
Q: I took it that in your book you were saying that religion was not the underlying cause of the war, but was used by those who were fighting the war to justify what they were doing for other reasons.
A: In the war in the former Yugoslavia, religion was not the cause of the war. First of all, most Yugoslavs had very little religious education. I remember sitting around with a bunch of Muslim troops from the Fifth Corps. Not only was I the only one among the group who spoke Arabic; I soon realized I was the only one who’d ever read the Qur’an. The notion that they were fighting for religious identity was absurd. It was part of the myth of war.
What happened in the former Yugoslavia, and what happens in all fratricides, is what Freud calls the “narcissism of minor difference,” where you seize on absurd differences — you know, dialectic differences. And, of course, religion becomes the way by which you differentiate yourself from the other, and you suddenly say, “Serbs, or Muslims — these are not characteristics that they have; these are vices and we can never deal with these vices until we purge them from our society.” They don’t commit crimes; they have things inherently built into their character. I mean, it’s very much like anti-Semitism. And the only way to get rid of it is to eradicate it, because to be a Jew, to be a Serb, to be a Muslim is to have these qualities that destroy our civilization, and we must, therefore, destroy them.
Once you get into that situation, which the worst kind of [situation that] religion can back up, then you move very swiftly from the language of violence, the language of dehumanization of the other, toward the actual destruction of the other. We turn them into an object linguistically, and then we turn them into an object quite literally — a corpse.
In Bosnia, religion did not cause that war. It was warlords who often came out of the Communist Party and the breakup of Yugoslavia, who overnight became nationalists, who appropriated religion and used religion as a way to prosecute the war and denigrate the other. In every case, I think religion was used. I don’t think religion was a cause.
Religion is used for differentiating warring populations the same way ethnicity is, race is. It’s one of the tools those who want to manufacture a war use — a very effective one. Unfortunately, within the institutional church or the synagogue or the mosque, there are religious leaders who are willing to go along with that enterprise.
The interview was done quite some time ago actually (2003) and could be found here:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week622/hedges.html
Also, I found this page on some Psychology website and about “10 Politically Incorrect Truths about Human Nature.” Rather interesting actually. The “truth” about Muslim suicide bombers was thought provoking.
Most suicide bombers are Muslim
According to the Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, a comprehensive history of this troubling yet topical phenomenon, while suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, when religion is involved, it is always Muslim. Why is this? Why is Islam the only religion that motivates its followers to commit suicide missions?
The surprising answer from the evolutionary psychological perspective is that Muslim suicide bombing may have nothing to do with Islam or the Koran (except for two lines in it). It may have nothing to do with the religion, politics, the culture, the race, the ethnicity, the language, or the region. As with everything else from this perspective, it may have a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.
What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don’t get any wives at all.
So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.
However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.
The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.
It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.
http://psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php/?term=pto-4359.html&fromMod=popular
