Editorials

Pushing Back Against Evil: By BECKY O'MALLEY

Editorial
Friday September 10, 2004

It’s hard to believe that it’s been only three years since Saudi Muslim extremists commandeered commercial aircraft and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. What was before September 11, 2001, a small fire fanned by a few fanatics has become a firestorm which threatens to engulf the world. The historic willingness of human beings to kill and be killed for a religious ideology has been demonstrated again and again since 9/11, most recently in the appalling occurrences in North Ossetia, now part of Russia, where men and (most tragically) women were willing to kill defenseless children who had done nothing to harm them, in support of an abstraction which is essentially meaningless to non-believers.  

The Bush regime has supplied the gasoline for the conflagration. Iraq has been transformed from an admittedly vicious secular dictatorship, a pariah state even for religious fanatics, into a spawning ground for more fanaticism and inter-sect warfare which imminently threatens to spread beyond its borders. And while the U.S. has been preoccupied in Iraq, religious militants of every stripe have been actively recruiting elsewhere, including Chechinya, the Phillipines and Indonesia. Some originally secular nationalist movements whose militants came from an Islamic background, like Chechins and Palestinians, are being captured by religious extremists who are even more dangerous because their beliefs allow recruiting for suicide missions with the promise of an after-life to follow.  

People who are not religious have difficulty understanding how religion turns to fanaticism. Here in Berkeley the resurgent Christian right seems just about as alien to non-believers from a Christian cultural background as Islamic fundamentalism does.  

And it’s not only the monotheistic religions with roots in the desert which have bloodthirsty adherents. Hindus, Native Americans, African animists … if you can name a group, any group, it’s probably had members who have been willing to kill for belief. 

Religion does not have a monopoly on ideological fanatics, of course. Atrocities have been committed on behalf of secular beliefs ever since the Enlightenment at least: by the French Revolution and its progeny, during the Spanish Civil War, under Stalin and many other Communists, by Saddam and the Baathists in Iraq…the list is long and getting longer. Killing for the cause is part of the human gene pool, a curse which other species have been spared. 

Is there anything we can do about it? Dedicated believers have always attempted to restrain the extreme elements in their group, with varying amounts of success. Lysistrata recounts the attempt by Athenian women to stop a war with Sparta. Christian believers were the earliest and most persistent opponents of the war in Vietnam, and the Pope condemned the invasion of Iraq. Both religious and non-religious people from the world Jewish community have spoken out for peace and justice in Israel and Palestine. It is heartening to see the launch of Not in the Name of Islam in the United States, and the voices against extremism in the French Muslim community. As long as humans have lived on the earth, good people have always had to struggle with the killer instinct in their midst.  

Sometimes, as when footage of the tragedy in Russia is shown on television, it’s tempting to believe that this struggle can’t be won. And in truth it is the fate of humans to need constantly to push back the dark side of our inheritance. Many belief systems have stories about this aspect of the human condition. Christian theology calls the persistence of evil among humans Original Sin, and dates it back to the first humans on earth. The ancient Greeks had the myth of Sisyphus, condemned to rolling a rock uphill, else it would roll back and crush him. That’s where we are today as humans, rolling that rock up the hill. As hard as it is to continue to push back against those who want to kill for their cause, we’ve just got to keep doing it, all of us, or we’ll be crushed.