Monday, August 20, 2012

Acts of explicitly religious violence, including wars, skirmishes, disbandment of polities, inquisitions, prosecutions, uprisings, acts of terrorism, and otherwise religiously-justified persecutions

The relation between religion and war has been apparent for a long time, but I want to go a step further and prove the necessary relation between Abrahamic religion and war. Let's start by looking at the big picture. In every continent except Asia, and even then in parts of Asia, Christianity and Islam (with some help from Judaism) account for the religions of the vast, vast majority of inhabitants who claim any religious affiliation. How did it happen? There are a few reasons, but I would postulate that in about 90 percent of cases, religion spread through physical force. Leaders adopted one of these religions because they were forced to by other leaders, or by their own subjects, or because they saw the practical value in convincing people, if not forcing them, to believe that certain things are true in any circumstance, even if these things are never specified. Likewise, subjects adapted a religion because their leader forced them to, or because they themselves overthrew the leader and replaced him with a leader who forced them to, or because missionaries forced them to. In rarer instances, people adapted one of these religions because a missionary harassed them and imposed the religion on them without doing much physical harm; or because they faced pressure from their community or family, or by a local religious establishment, or by the standards of a larger polity (such as the Papacy). In rarer instances, people adopted a religion on their own accord because they thought it would help establish friendship and mutual understanding with trading partners of this religion, or because of sheer curiosity. In much rarer instances, people converted because they felt sorry for a religious dissident in an obscure Roman territory who was tortured and killed because he repeatedly broke the law and was considered a threat to social and political stability.

This list is continually expanding. I decided to begin with conflicts following the apocryphal death of Christ, partly to save myself some work, but also because historical records have become less biased since then. Within the category of "Abrahamic" religions, I am including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Baha'i, Azali, Rastafari, Mandaeism, Sabianism, Mormon (which of course is usually considered a sect of Christianity), and Samaritanism. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether Sikhism is an Abrahamic religion.

  • Persecutions of Christians by Paul, as a Jew who had yet to convert to Christianity, recounted by him as an Apostle in Galatians 1 and Philippians 3;

  • the assault on the Apostle Paul, and his converts, upon his fifth visit to Jerusalem, recounted in Acts 21-28. He was besieged by the entire city, whose inhabitants were identified in Greek as the Ἀσίας Ἰουδαῖοι, literally the "Asian Jews." Too much World of Warcraft: the Asian Jews took Paul to their temple with the intention of torturing him, but he was spared after being interrogated by the Romans, who instead sent him to Italy, still as a prisoner;
  • Jewish rebellions against Roman rule, all of them explicitly motivated by religious concerns. The first began before the Roman destruction of the Holy Temple, and ended with the extirpation of Jewish civilization in their little enclave. The following two Jewish-Roman Wars followed this event;
  • the forced conversion of his subjects by Tiridates III of Armenia, at a time when Christianization was no way of avoiding trouble;

  • Justinian's Wars For Trinity Worship against Persia (then Zoroastrian), and against Vandals, Ostrogoths and Visigoths (all of them predominantly Arian Christian at the time); 
  • a long civil war in the Himyarite Kingdom, in what is now Yemen, between Jews and Christians. In the course of the civil war, the seat of the throne would alternate twice between these two faiths;
  • the First and Second Fitna; 
  • the Arab-Byzantine Wars;
  • the centuries-long spread of Islam across Africa and Asia, converting entire civilizations by means of violence; 
  • the Franks' brutal wars of conquest, lasting from the 6th century until the 9th century, and their similarly brutal imposition of Catholicism on their people; 
  • the Frankish-Umayyad War; 
  • the 640 Jihad against the Coptic Church;
  • the Abbasid overthrow of the Umayyad Caliphate, whose territory had a larger land area than the United States now, by a civil war of a similar proportion; 
  • the Battle of Talas, which culminated in the conversion to Islam by the Turks in the region to Islam and the apocryphal introduction of paper from China to the Abbasids; 
  • the sack of Axum by Jews under the command of Queen Gudit, with help from Islamic allies, beginning in 960. The Axumite Kingdom would then disintegrate, and there is no clear evidence that another functional state was established in this region until 1137. 
  • the Iconoclast Persecutions and the response by iconodules; 
  • the conquest of most of the Umayyad Caliphate, along with the conversion of its government to Shi'a, at the hands of the Fatimids; 
  • the Banu Hilal invasion; 
  • in the course of the Middle Ages, the spread of Judaism gradually halted for many reasons, exogenous and endogenous. This was a radical change in global affairs. During the heyday of Jewish civilization, describe with great bias in the Old Testament, Judaism was expanding aggressively through military and mercantile force. Since then their power would decline along with their economic means, their political clout, their alliances and their sheer numbers. Their situation became much worse when the politics of Western Europe became profoundly disadvantageous to Jews. Their and their numbers would be continually depleted with continual encouragement from the clergy, who kept advocating, if not ordering, persecutions and expulsions, large and small, throughout Western Europe. These atrocities would reach their conclusion in 1555, when the Pope Paul IV issued a decree that Jews should live in isolated communities, preferably walls along the edges to prevent them from leaving these communities or seeing beyond them. The name for these communities is etymologically obscure, but we know if comes from the Italian vernacular of the time: they were called "Ghettos". The first ghetto was built in Rome, but they would proliferate throughout Western Europe and later Eastern Europe, and within a century very few Jews would be seen outside of them. Since the decree, more than two centuries would pass before Jews began walking outside the ghettos in significant numbers, much less settling outside of them. During these centuries the population  of ghettos expanded far too quickly for the expansion of the walls or the acquisition of goods, of any kind and by any means, from outsiders. Over the generations the physical health of Jews would suffer profoundly from lack of food, from diseases and general squalor, and from inbreeding among the small populations of these ghettos.
  • the Episcopal Inquisition, the Papal Inquisition, and the other Medieval Inquisitions
  • the Norman-Byzantine Wars and the Massacre of the Latins; 
  • the Ghurid genocide of Hindus and Buddhists;
  • the establishment of the (Sunni) Ayyubid Caliphate  to replace the disintegrating Fatimid Caliphate, whose strength was sapped primarily by (Sunni) Turks and the (Sunni) Berbers; 
  • the Crusades, both the nine numbered ones and the un-numbered ones (I've tried to avoid overlap between the Crusades and the other conflicts I listed); 
  • the conquest and Islamic makeover of the Byzantine territories; 
  • the near-eradication of Buddhist civilization in Central Asia by the Islamic Khans of the Chagatai Khanate and the Ilkhanate.
  • the "Reconquista" of Islamic regions of Europe under the banner of Christianity; 
  • the Bohemian War between Matthias Corvinus and George of Pedobrad; 
  • the Spanish, Portuguese and Roman Inquisitions
  • a pogrom in Cranganore, a coastal city in India near the southern tip committed by the Mappila, (an Islamic people) against the Jewish community that was rather substantial beforehand, but would be reduced to a fraction of its former size;
  • the Ethiopian–Adal War; 
  • the church-sponsored prosecutions of non-Protestant heretics and other undesirables, particularly witches, who were identified using methods that proved effective time and again for centuries; 
  • The establishment of a ragingly Catholic empire that spanned what is now Mexico, Guatemala, a large fraction of the United States, several Caribbean islands, and the Philippines. This empire is known in English as "New Spain," and at first it was a territory of the Holy Roman Empire. The religious identity of New Spain was established in the course of the 250-year "Mexican Inquisition." In general the viceroys of New Spain were usually interested in incorporating indigenous religious practices and beliefs into a permitted hybrid religion. However, this was only after the conquistadors had made their intentions clear by destroying indigenous temples throughout their many territories, converting thousands of natives by force, violently prohibiting what they perceived to be unauthorized religious practices, and randomly killing and torturing compliant natives in order to instill fear; not to mention disbanding Huguenot settlements. In establishing an all-Catholic empire in place of several civilizations that were virtually unexposed to Catholicism beforehand, it seems likely that many people died. Of course, most of these deaths were the result of European diseases, and therefore not of direct killing. However, I doubt the Catholic clergy in either the New World or the Old World were generally regretful of these deaths. 
  • The conquest and Christianization of Inca strongholds, followed by the establishment of the Viceroyalty of Peru, whose borders would later encompass almost all of South America. As with New Spain, the Viceroyalty of Peru had established Catholicism as its official religion, and the Inca cities would see their own cultural institutions demolished en masse to make way for a disproportionately large number of churches. However, the conversion of the population was more passive, involving no major "inquisition," and instead relying on Jesuits, who were generally peaceful and unaffiliated with the state, and also relying on diseases to reduce natives' numbers to perhaps one-tenth their pre-Columbian size.
  • the Portuguese-Mamluk War; 
  • the German Peasants' War; 
  • the First and Second Battle of Kappel;
  • the Count's Feud; 
  • the Schmaldaldic War;
  • the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and the long series of "French Wars of Religion" which became the defining feature of the 16th century for them; 
  • the Eighty Years' War;
  • the de-facto genocides in Europe and the American colonies of a variety of Protestant groups (among whom some began experiencing extermination efforts before they were "Protestant" groups, but these efforts continued in full force after the Reformation): Polish Brethren, Mennonites, Amish, Vaudois, Hussites, Baptists (mostly in the colonies), Huguenots, Puritans, Quakers, and alas, Presbyterians, who practiced in secret and identified each other by discrete red necklaces, and accordingly with the code name "red neck."
  • conflicts in Ethiopia between followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and loyalists of Emperor Susenyos after his conversion to Catholicism;
  • persecutions of Catholics in Ethiopia, including the expulsion of Jesuits, following the restoration of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as the state religion;
  • the relatively romantic battles between the Knights Hospitaller and the North African pirates; 
  • the Wars of the Three Kingdoms;
  • the acts of religious hostility by English settlers in their American colonies (which I have not mentioned elsewhere). The conflicts I've listed were not large in scale, and they were not within a thousand degrees as serious as those in New Spain, and the main reason might be that the English colonies were superimposed on some sparse tribes rather than a big, firmly-rooted empire. Here are some particular examples of their relatively small-scale violence:
    • Sir Samuel Argall, whose previous achievements included converting the movie star Pocahontas, would move on to uproot the French Jesuit mission Saint-Sauveur on what is now a large island off of Maine, in doing so killing some missionaries, taking the rest captive, and replacing the large cross in the center of the island with a distinctly Protestant one.
    • In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and later the Province of Massachusetts Bay, the governors violently cracked down on Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, general heretics, and witches.
    • The "Mystic Massacre" of Pequots, in Connecticut in 1637, was praised described as follows by Major John Mason, "A principle Actor therein, as then Chief Captain and Commander of the Connecticut forces." In the introduction to Mason's memoir, Rev. Thomas Prince describes his campaign as follows: 
The Judicious Reader knows that the New England History cannot think of these Scripture Phrases or religious Turns unsuitable to his Occasion: for these Colonies were chiefly, if not entirely Settled, by a Religious People, and for those Religious Purposes; It is impossible to write an impartial or true History of them, as the ancient Israelites or later the Vaudois or North-Britons, without observing that Religious Spirit and Intention, which evidently ran thro' and animate their Historical Transactions.
    • In his own words, Mason states:
Thus they were now at their Wits End, who not many Hours before exalted in their great Pride, threatening the utter Ruin and Destruction of all the English, Exulting and Rejoicing with their Songs and Dances [this in itself we should have no problem picturing]: But God was above them, who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven: Thus were the Stout-Hearted spoiled, having slept their last Sleep, and none of their men could find their hands, thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling their Place with dead Bodies!
...burning them in the Fire of his Wrath, and dunging the Ground with their Flesh; it was the Lord's Doing, and it was Marvelous in our eyes! It was He that made this Work wonderful, and therefore ought to be remembered. 
    • In Maryland and Virginia, following the naval battle between Leonard Calvert and William Claiborne, there were a number of conflicts between Catholics and Protestants which would be settled with the Battle of the Severn.
    • In addition to the government, the people were expected to shoulder some of the responsibility. The Stuart kings had a policy of universal conscription, and they wanted the governors of their colonies to learn from their successes. Most of the colonies then organized citizen militias and required all young men to serve. In addition, the citizens who were not currently serving were expected to be on reserve, i.e. they were legally required to own firearms. In North Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, citizens were required to bring guns to church. Arguably, the nature of this policy is not religious, since the intention is purely secular: the defend against natives, French colonists, and slave rebellions. Churches were chosen as the location for this law because of the tactical advantage of having all the townspeople gathered in one place. That is very likely the case. However, among the churches in the US today that hold a bring your gun to church day, the pastors would assume that guns and religion have a more in trinsic significance to each other. Also, it might seem interesting that, in addition among racial minorities and the mentally incompetent, religious minorities were often restricted from owning guns. Not surprisingly, this includes Catholics at certain points in Nova Scotia (a primarily Catholic region of Massachusetts), Maryland and Georgia. In Maryland, which was predominantly Catholic, the Catholics were exempt from service in the militia, at least when the militiamen swore allegiance to King William II. They were also prohibited from owning guns during the French and Indian War. To the Catholics who were barred from owning a gun while everyone else had one, I would imagine they felt beleaguered, especially since I grew up in Los Angeles. I doubt there was a low murder rate in these colonies, especially between religious groups.
    • The small-scale rebellions against the short-lived Dominion of England (1686-89), first the Boston Revolt then Leisler's Rebellion. The former revolt was launched primarily by Puritans who associated the Dominion with Anglicanism and the English Restoration, and suspected intentions to convert its subjects; the latter associated the regime's lieutenant governor of New York, Francis Nicholson, with Catholicism, and also doubted that he would practice freedom of religion. 
  • the Thirty Years' War; 
  • the on-and-off persecutions of Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Jains in Mughal India, the Mughal-Maratha Wars (even though the aggressor was often the Marathas, whose religion was not an Abrahamic one) and the Mughal-Sikh Wars; 
  • the religious conflicts initiated by Catholics Maryland against Protestants in the region, which would be  settled with the Battle of the Severn;
  • the post-Protectorate rebellions in Britain by religious dissenters, particularly Covenanters, and  subsequently The Killing Time and conflicts involving the Cameronians and Jacobites;
  • The Battle of the Boyne;
  • the Great Turkish War, and arguably some Ottoman-Habsburg wars before it; 
  • the battles between the successive Holy Leagues and the Ottomans; 
  • the long struggle waged by the Wahhabi for religious dominance in the Arabian peninsula, followed by their disbandment in the Ottoman-Wahhabi War; 
  • the expulsion of some Mormons, by order of Mormon clergy of the City of Zion in Jackson County, MO, on the condition that they were dissidents;
  • The Mormons, before they could settle in peace, were subject to a couple expulsions before they settled in Utah, and even then they were beset by another war. Among these wars, the first and third were initiated by Mormons. Although the Mormon community was not the first to resort to violence (in the Missouri War) or what seemed like violence (in the Utah War), they did insist on using violence when it would not have necessary if they hadn't insisted on a theocratic government, which of course is Unconstitutional. Tensions with the Mormons community were also escalated by the practice of polygamy by Mormons, at that time very common among them; by suspicion (which has proven to be accurate) that Mormons were converting Native Americans, under the assumption that they were Israelites in need of some updates; and by suspicion, in Missouri, that Mormons were abolitionists.
    • Missouri Mormon War. The Mormon community initiated hostilities in the war itself, although they were evicted for reasons that were, perhaps, less religious than purely political. However, the Mormons insisted on staying because they earnestly believed the City of Zion must be constructed in Jackson County in order to accommodate Jesus in his near-approaching Second Coming, and the official justification for the war was a speech by the Reverend Sidney Rigdor, which seems to have been plagiarized countless times by Gaddafi and others: 
And that mob that comes on us to disturb us, it shall be between us and them a war of extermination; for we will follow them until the last drop of their blood is spilled; or else they will have to exterminate us, for we will carry the seat of war to their own houses and their own families, and one party or the other shall be utterly destroyed. 
And just try counting the number of times the words "God" and "Christ" and "Zion" appear in this speech. The following decade an even more peculiar conflict would unfold after the Mormon exiles established an ersatz City of Zion in Illinois. This city grew to a population of 12,000 and its entire Mormons population would be forced to leave. However, I would not consider this a religious conflict, because the justification for it was the refusal of Mormons to secularize their government.

    •  The Utah Mormon War is hard to blame on anyone besides the Mormons. They had recently suffered from a full-scale expulsion from Illinois, however between then and the Utah War, the Mormon settlers in Utah gave no indication that they wanted to avoid trouble. During the exodus from Illinois, numbers of Mormons grew rapidly, through both voluntary conversion and quasi-voluntary conversion, and "gentiles" (non-Mormons) were concerned that with increasing numbers of Mormons, their impact on the federal Congress was growing, and they were blatantly partial to the borderline-constitutional religious extremists in the House and Senate. Again, while in Utah the Mormons insisted on a theocratic government, this time for the entire Utah Territory (which, after being formally surrendered from Mexico in 1848, was virtually empty of white gentiles). Some signs of mistrust were escapes of gentiles, most notably federal officials, and Mormon abductions of migrants to California, especially during the Gold Rush. In response the federal government resolved to send troops to Utah, although according to federal documents, the purpose of this expedition was to peacefully compel the Utah government to comply with federal demands. However, Utah policy-makers did not respond passively, in fact they made sure to arm their civilians and to form strong alliances with nearby Native American tribes. 

I remember in school my teachers always denounced religious violence. The most elaborate discussion came in my seventh-grade music class, and it was in the context of the song One Tin Soldier, which I would always sing at pan-religious ceremonies in boy scouts. Yes, religious violence is bad. But my teachers were ignoring the fifty-foot anaconda in the room, combined with the 50 thousand bloodthirsty wolves in the room, combined with the raging fire that is consuming the room itself and has already begun consuming our flesh. They were refusing to admit that religion itself is the problem, and violence is an inevitable consequence of it. I don't blame my teachers at all; I blame the fact that my teachers would lose their jobs for telling us the truth on this matter. This problem can only be solved when the Abrahamic religions are finally thrown in the dumpster, by force if necessary, and never allowed to escape. Don't get me wrong, I'm not repeating the mistakes of Stalin and Robespierre. I am doing the polar opposite. In the past, people have tried to secularize their countries by destroying religious culture. By contrast, I think people should not be told to think that a book is correct 100 percent of the time, and I think there's only one way of doing that: people should be encouraged to learn as much as they can about these religions, people with the means and ability should gather as much information as they can, we must maintain as must maintain all this information for future generations, and we must have unbounded, substantive discussions about religion. And, most  importantly, people should be encouraged to READ the Bible, since then they will not be likely to follow it.

Religions try to retain their membership base by implicitly forbidding all four of these activities, especially reading the scriptures, but also have substantive discourse. They typically allow discussions about religion, but they implicitly require these discussions to be vacuous and tautological. And there are several ways of doing so. I have heard that until the 1950s the Catholic Church forbid ownership of the Bible, however I have not found any evidence of this. Submission can be taught, though, not least by branding unconventional thinkers as unconstitutional or anti-intellectual or genocidal. Alright, so it can be unconstitutional, depending on the specific circumstances, to demand that certain religions not be practiced. Personally I hope that over time, the American people will resolve, via Constitutional procedures, to remove the second clause from the sentence: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." But it is Constitutional to prohibit certain religious practices if they are dangerously problematic, and that is certainly the case with the Bible, which has plenty of passages that are anything but Constitutional if followed. Yet we risk our careers by saying so in public.

I have discussed in another blog post how I think our education is feeding into religious censorship in the US. The connection is not difficult to see: let's look at some surveys of American religious knowledge. According to one survey back in 2005, cited in The Economist, there were more Americans who thought the Sermon on the Temple Mount was given by Jerry Falwell than those who thought it was Jesus. I think this, more than anything else, is the problem. More Americans should go to school on Sundays to learn about the Bible - about when and where the different parts of it were written, and by whom; about people's interpretations of the Bible over the centuries; about saints, reformers, the loved and the hated; about the context of all these influential individuals; and about prayers, rituals and other customs. I think Americans are too ignorant about all these matters, except, in general, for the secular Americans, and I guess also some well-educated minorities. I also consider it salutary for people to practice these customs that come from religion, but again, I think people should be taught not to assume that they're sponsored by the supernatural. We all know that any action of ours might land us in Hell, regardless of our intentions, and regardless of the strength of the relation between our action and the demands of religious authorities. Either way we have no way of knowing what God wants from us. What we do know, however, is that this matter should've been dropped five hundred years ago. In this day and age we should be allowed to think.
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Tuesday, August 7, 2012

The role of religion in hate groups

So after the attack by Wade Michael Page on the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, I felt a need to leave a comment in my in my previous blog post about religious violence. I encountered a problem because when I did some research just to verify facts, I would, by shear accident, find plenty of information that was outright shocking. The number of right-wing extremist "militia groups" in the US has QUINTUPLED since 2009, according to Mark Pitcavage, PhD., of the the Anti-Defamation League. There are now 1018 hate groups in the US, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Page not only was a member of one such group, the Hammerskins, but also repeatedly professed involvement in the "Racial Holy War," which has an acronym, RAHOWA, that is well-recognized by major websites. I also became aware that the day before Page's attack, a mosque in Joplin, MO was burned to the ground in an arson attack - the second one his summer on the same mosque. this incident did not make the news because there are simply so many acts of racial/religious violence these  days in the US. There are also plenty in Europe, by whites and non-whites, Christians and Muslims, and the recession has not been an opportunity to put aside their differences. Many people described the Tea Party as "fascist." It certainly is not, and although it's going strong, its membership has declined rapidly since 2010. However, genuine fascists are multiplying, as are other fringe movements. And if these movements are a wildfire, then religious zealotry is an unlimited supply of gasoline to be administered with unlimited supplies of hoses and helicopters.

Before getting started on hate groups per se, or fringe groups per se, I decided to briefly discuss gangs for two reasons: they have a lot in common with hate group, and they are a much bigger problem by a factor of maybe 5,000 to 1. Whereas a hate group will murder someone every one or two years (even Page's murder approved of by the Hammerskins or by the white supremacist bands he had belonged to). By contrast, American gangs kill about 3-5 thousand people every year. And what to they have in common with hate groups? Well, I think most significantly, their numbers are growing. We can see from the website of the National Gang Center that gang membership fell precipitously during the Clinton years, then reached a trench in 2003 and quickly rose again, but remained rather consistent since then. As of 2010, gang membership has slowly been rising, and I would guess it has continued to rise since then, since this is not a good time for youths who dropped out of high school. Also, of course, gangs membership is based of race, and the gangs define themselves based on race, and they usually choose their enemies on the basis of race. Although I would guess that black gangs fight each other, but I think they prefer to fight with Hispanic gangs, or in very the rare case when they can find them and get away with attacking them, to attack a contingent of a white gang. And we hear all the time that blacks and whites in the US discriminate against each other, but to discuss this without discussing racism between blacks and Hispanics is like looking upward and seeing Neil Armstrong the moon, without seeing the moon itself. That being said, these gangs are also like many hate groups because religion seems to have a significant one, although perhaps only an implicit one in  most cases. I discussed this matter in my blog post about religious violence.

Next order of business, I had a dream last night about my involvement in a notorious quasi-hate group. This movement is the "youth movement" of Lyndon LaRouche, an old political troublemaker with his own Political Action Committee (PAC) whose movement began, perhaps, when he began rising through the ranks in the Socialist Workers Party in 1949. I have dreams about this subject every one or two years. Some of these dreams are creepy, and the rest are terrifying. These dreams have two prominent features: one is the way the senior members of the movement latched on and clung to me like leeches, and the other is the menacing facial expressions they use on their novices. I joined this group during my first semester at University of Southern California. I was only a member for about one month, and I only attended three or four meetings (although the word "meeting" is not quite accurate, as I will explain). At the time I was attracted by their claptrap - the booths they set up on campus with very wordy signs, carefully handwritten in intricate calligraphy, and with their cryptic slogans such a "It's the Physical Economy, Stupid!" followed by a long synopsis of this claim that I couldn't try to understand, their posters with images parodying the likes of Richard Cheney or Nancy Pelosi that were tantalizingly disturbing. I can see from their website that they now use email, but at this time (2004) they could only maintain contact with curious students if we gave them our phone number. The more experienced members of the movement knew how to test their limits without being incriminated, so they knew how many times they could call me. I received a call a blonde girl inviting me to a meeting at a YMCA about three miles from campus. The meeting began with long lecture by some fat guy about some political/sociological/scientific/philosophical/psychological concepts; expertly-composed twaddle with the subliminal message that I should stay. He never mentioned me in the discussion, but he clearly made me a subject when he gave a metaphor involving "running to the 711," which triggered an "oh, I get it" from the audience, since I had done so while waiting for the lecture. In the coming weeks I attended what I thought would be meetings, but they would be better described as hanging out with the group during their routines that occupy every waking moment for them: manning recruiting stations, listening to LaRouche's webcasts, discussing his ideology at coffee shops throughout town, singing Mozart, and drinking beer. I rarely heard anything nice from another member, I rarely saw a member smile, and when I did it was usually the head of the Los Angeles chapter, who made a very weird smile and spoke with a very weird voice. I quit after they repeatedly urged me to drop out of school. During the following few weeks they called me incessantly until I convinced them I wasn't coming back. Another thing I noticed about the other members is they were a lot older than me; I was eighteen, and so was a student in my class whom they had for a couple meetings, but everyone else looked at least thirty, except for one South Asian girl who looked about 25. Besides her, the members were about equally split between white, black and Hispanic. And this Indian girl proved to be an exception in another regard: I had a long talk with her, and although she was talking about the influence of Aristotle in Cheney's drug-funded efforts to build a global railroad monopoly, she spoke in a very warm, sincere, receptive manner, and she looked very bright and well put-together. In the case of all other members, everything about them speaks of being in a let's-be-creepy contest. And looking back, their mien implies something else to me, as does the fact that this group occupies all their time, and the fact that the senior members live together. These people are the wretched of the earth, and to them the LaRouche movement is a job. Those who are best suited for the job also get housing from it, while the less senior among them need to work on their creepy skills until they earn their wings. To the very serious members, this job is the best deal available that might come their way, and they probably thought they were doing me a favor, because back then, I showed plenty of non-potential.

I think the LaRouche movement is rather bizarre in ways that most other movements are not really. For one thing, although the movement is often described as "fascist," it isn't intended as a hoi polloi movement, or even as a conservative one. They love recruiting at universities, and their pamphlets, books, signs, etc give the impression of being "intellectual" in a way that revolves around a sort of snobbery, in which young people want to feel they have a rare understanding of things that are far above the heads of most people. Their ideology attacks liberals and conservatives, but it seem to be generally left-leaning, in which case he was left-leaning all along, except more so during the Cold War. The ideology didn't seem to be socially liberal or conservative. The group's chapters are generally located in the most liberal parts of the country, and they tend to hunt for college students, although I heard them criticizing some of the social norms of college students, and I've read that until recently they would question a new member's sexuality as one method (among others) of preventing this person from feeling too good for the group. It was explicitly racist until racism went out of fashion in the 1960s. Since then LaRouche has developed a reputation for being anti-Semitic, although unlike many of these groups, his attacks are not explicit, nor are they implicit; they are meaningless nonsense, so they do not say anything about Jews or any other ethnic group. However, as with the Jabberwocky in Alice in Wonderland, we can easily see from his nonsense that Jews are not being portrayed favorably (except at some points as lip service). Also, as I mentioned earlier, the LaRouche movement is unlike many (perhaps most) other fringe movements, in being secular. And lastly, the movement seems to have a secure future. The founder of the movement is now ninety years old, and his movement will never be as successful as the 1970s, when he purchased a big swath of land in Massachusetts as a training ground for fighting with spears and staffs. However, from their website they seem to be thriving, and it seems to be updated very frequently about non-events. After the tragic loss of LaRouche, I think his successor can keep the group going just as strongly.

To be continued ...
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Sunday, August 5, 2012

The frantic spread of Christianity in its new frontiers

During the year I spent teaching English in a remote Chinese city, I would occasionally hear about the influence of the gigantic church at the edge of town, built very recently on top of what was farmland previously. I taught at a college that was a few blocks away from the church. One time, right outside the college campus, I saw a couple young people distributing flyers with Christian motifs on the front. One time another foreign-born English teacher at the college, a very friendly Hispanic American, told me of an incident where she was walking through town with her student, meanwhile a woman confronted her student and said, in Chinese, "you must buy a bible or you will go to hell."

Let's back track. When I was a naive 18-year-old, I was disappointed to find out that the man chosen to succeed the outgoing Pope in 2005 was a European, and even more strangely, he came from a Protestant-majority country in which religion itself seemed to be headed toward extinction. In Europe generally religion was becoming a thing of the past, and even if combined with the European descendants of Catholics, the Catholics in Europe comprised a very small part of Catholics worldwide. The bulk of global Catholicism was in Latin America, and increasingly also in Africa and Asia. However, there were two things I failed to realize. One that the Papacy would rather not come in contact with a filthy African or Amazonian whose only value is in increasing the number of Catholics in the world. Second, it's Protestant sects that are doing the lion's share of the proselytizing. In particular, it seems the very radical, zealotry-based sects that seem to be sweeping the competition. It says on Wikipedia that the so-called Charismatic movements - namely Pentecostalism, the Charismatic movement and the Neo-Charismatic movement - now number 500 million followers. That's more than the population of every other Protestant sect denomination combined, it's larger than the population of every English-speaking country combined (except for those where people don't really speak it) ... first people thought it would be Hollywood, then they thought it would be McDonalds then Facebook, but it seems Charismatic Christianity is the great American export to the rest of the world, with more influence than possibly any other.


When these radical Christian sects reached non-Protestant countries in very large, rapidly-growing numbers, their arrival created controversy, to say the very, very least. In the Latin American countries where Protestants did not exist in significant numbers throughout most of the country until recently, but where they now represent a large fraction of the population, we can see from the street violence how welcome they are. In Africa, violence between Muslims and the soaring numbers of Christians is manifesting itself in the form of organized warfare, in addition to a constant supply of apolitical violence. In the post-colonial era, Africa has seen more than a dozen wars between Muslims and Christians in which religion was explicitly used as an official justification for the war: the Nigerian Civil War, the First Chadian Civil War, the Second Chadian Civil War along with the Libyan invasion, the First and Second Sudanese Civil Wars (and the “Darfur Genocide”) … in the political conflicts in the Republic of Congo during the 1990s and skirmishes since then, opponents of President Nguesso were significantly abetted by the Ninja militia, a Christian force organized by Frédéric Bintsangou (who went by “Pastor Ntoumi”). In Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army was organized in 1987 with the intention of establishing a state whose founding ideology is the Ten Commandments. Since then the LRA have not succeeded in establishing a state, and instead they have left an estimated 100,000 people killed, 2 million people displaced, 20,000 children kidnapped (most of them girls), and thousands of people with their ears, noses, lips or tongues ripped removed.

Often, the American religious right does not seem remorseful about the problems they are contributing to. In 2011, after the LRA have done their worst for 24 years, President Obama dispatched a contingent of merely 100 troops, and Rush Limbaugh made sure to denounce him for it:

Lord's Resistance Army are Christians.  It means God.  I was only kidding.  Lord's Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan.  And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them.  That's what the lingo means, "to help regional forces remove from the battlefield," meaning capture or kill.
So that's a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda, and -- (interruption) no, I'm not kidding.
And in other regions, the problems resulting from widespread Christian zealotry might become far, far greater. China is estimated to have 67 million Christians, most of them Protestants. Approximately ten million of these Christians are affiliated with a state-sponsored church, of which there is a Protestant one and a Catholic one. The rest of these Christians are practicing their religion illegally. Moreover, the Christian missionaries from abroad that are spreading their religion throughout China are doing so in blatant violation of their visas. What should we expect to result from this? And how should the government respond? In the mid-19th century, the Chinese people lived through the Taiping Rebellion, an attempt to replace the imperial Manchu regime with a theocratic Christian republic. The rebel leader, Hong Xiuquan, was converted to Christianity by an American missionary, then was inspired to action by a series of dreams that he interpreted as omens. He scoured the land looking for recruits, claiming to be the brother of Jesus Christ, and within fifteen years he organized a millions-strong army. The result was a civil war that lasted fourteen years at the expense of 20-30 million lives. Meanwhile, the Dungan, a predominantly Islamic people in China’s Northwest, took advantage of the chaos to launch their own rebellion at the same time, which took an additional 14-16 million lives. We can only imagine what to expect if sentiments were stirred up on the same scale in today's China. Since the Taiping Rebellion China’s population has grown fourfold. Moreover, and their government has become more entrenched than in the mid-19th century, so by toppling the government a modern-day Taiping Rebellion might be a cause of even greater chaos.

To be continued ...
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