STEVEN JONAS, MD, MPH

Mike Pence, Indiana’s Governor, thinks the new law is logical and correct. (Image by DonkeyHotey, via flickr).

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]o the Indiana Legislature passed and the Governor signed a law that, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, as Frank Rich and many others have noted, surely seemed intended to permit persons operating public accommodations and publicly licensed and/or permitted businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ persons, based on their sexual orientation. 

Certainly the list of organizations which sponsored the legislation in Indiana (and have done so in many other states) have not been shy about saying that that’s what it is all about.  Those organizations include the American Family (sic) Association (state and national), “Advance America,”  the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the Heritage Institute, and the Family (sic) Research Council.

Of course, one wonders just how Indiana businesses which want to discriminate against LGBTQ persons would pick out the discriminatees.  Since most LGBTQ persons look just like everyone else, would there be a law in Indiana requiring the known among them to line up to receive, let us say, a Pink Triangle?  Now it is true that that was the insignia the Nazis used to identify homosexuals, starting just after they took power in 1933, two years before they came up with the Yellow Star of David to identify the Jews.  So there might a problem in that.  Perhaps someone in one of the organizations listed above could give it some thought and come up with a better one.

One does have to admit that the wording of the law is a bit dense and can be confusing.  So despite the fact that it was: the Republican Right in the Indiana State legislature that made sure that the law went through with language specifically “protecting” potential discriminators who claimed a “religious exemption” from any government action against them; that the above list of known homophobic organizations had lined up behind passage of the law; and that several of their leaders had physically lined up behind Indiana’s Governor Pence when he signed it; with a straight face the Governor said over-and-over again (at least until the economic pressure began to build) that the law did nothing of the sort, and did not need to be “fixed.”

In principle, Republicans all over the country just love this sort of legislation.  That is why they have passed so many versions of it…”

Anti-gay agitators conveniently forget that many LGBT people are actually religious—and that such reality encompasses all faiths. (Public domain)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he national reaction to the law was very gratifyingly swift and overwhelmingly negative, from organizations like the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) which is headquartered in Indianapolis, to businesses like Yelp and Apple, to associations like the Indiana Chamber of Commerce [!].  After first saying that no changes were needed, by Tuesday, March 31, Gov. Pence was calling for a clarification that apparently would prohibit using the law to discriminate against members of the LGBTQ community.

Hatred of Gay people is inculcated early. (Via flickr)

By the time this column appears such legislation may well have passed, or it may not.  If it does, the political fallout would be severe for Pence (who apparently has been “thinking about” running for President [more than likely Vice-President]) and every Repub. legislator who would vote for the roll-back.  Certainly all the homophobic organizations listed above would be very unhappy with such an outcome as would individual homophobic business owners.  Not only Ted Cruz but that supposed “centrist” Republican Presidential candidate JEB somebody-or-other came out over the past weekend in full support of the law (and subsequently apparently took some version of opposition).  Then all of the other GOP hopefuls, including that so-called “libertarian,” named after some Jewish atheist, who happens to support the very contra-liberty “an embryo is a person” Constitutional amendment.  Presumably they would not be unhappy vis-a-vis Pence, because a potential rival (or petitioner for the Vice-Presidential slot) would have removed himself from consideration.  But any number of Repub. state legislators would be “primaried” right out of the State House because they “groveled to the gays and the media.”

In principle, Republicans all over the country just love this sort of legislation.  That is why they have passed so many versions of it.  Pull-backs occur only when business interests, often Republican-oriented business interests, realize what can happen and happen very quickly.  But that doesn’t stop Repub. politicians, and the homophobic organizations to whom they are so beholden, from going to the next venue (like Arkansas where they were running into the Walmart buzz saw, believe it or not) to try to get it done.  These laws of course patently discriminate against classes of people based upon who they are, by nature.  Outrage is most appropriate.  The actions taken by businesses and organizations against such laws is most appropriate.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut there is an additional very important point here.  This is a matter that goes beyond just discrimination against certain individuals by other individuals.  This is not simply a matter of a person saying “my religious belief is that LGBTQ people are sinful [or whatever] and on that basis I will not serve them,” and it’s OK to let them discriminate in the public square.  Above that, in the realm of government and governance, is the very important matter of putting one set of religious beliefs above another.

There are plenty of LGBTQ people who themselves are religious.  While the homophobic religious types think that homosexuality and gay marriage are sins, obviously the religious homosexual folks don’t.   They attend church or synagogue or mosque on a regular basis.  They are married in places of worship across the nation all the time.  There are numerous gay clergy, who may themselves be married.  But the Indiana civil government has said to the homophobes, your religion is better, is more highly valued, than theirs, and we will use the power of the state to protect and indeed promote your religious belief, as against theirs.

At the same time, every business has one or more permits, licenses, certificates of occupancy, and etc. granted to them under civil law.  They pay taxes, under civil law.  They operate under a whole series of regulations established by civil law.  They receive benefits, like paved streets, sanitary sewage disposal and pure water supply, under civil law.  Thus by definition they fall under the requirements of the equal protection clause of the 14^th Amendment to the United States Constitution.  To permit one person or business to claim exemption from having to abide by the protections of the 14^th Amendment based on their religious belief, as against another’s religious belief, places the discriminator’s religious belief on a higher level, gives it more value, than the religious belief of the person discriminated against.

That’s fine, within the confines of one’s own home, one’s own church, one’s own media sources and outlets.  But it is not fine in the public sector which is controlled by civil, not religious, law.  Religious wars between Catholics and Protestants embroiled Europe for a century and a half from the time Martin Luther may or may not in 1517 have actually nailed his 95 Theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg.  Although there were matters of political economy underlying all such wars, on the surface they were very much “religious” in nature.  They did not indeed end until the religious war to end all religious wars, the Thirty Years War, which began in 1618, in fact ended in 1648 as very much a war of political economy, right on the surface.

What Republican state legislatures are doing now would establish one religion as supreme over all of the others, with the power of the State to determine which is which.  Above and beyond discrimination against one or more targeted groups of individuals, this is a recipe for a Second Civil War, not only about race, but now about religion.  The central issues of the First U.S. Civil War to this day remain unresolved.  Then there is the over-riding issue of U.S. economic disparity and the ever-greater concentration of wealth, income and power, in the hands of an ever smaller number of people.  Are we now to have Republican state-sponsored religious supremacy/determinism added to the mix?   Is this not the recipe for a Second Civil War?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[box] Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 30 books. In addition to being a columnist for BuzzFlash@Truthout he is the Editorial Director of and a Contributing Author to The Political Junkies for Progressive Democracy (http://thepoliticaljunkies.org/), and a Senior Editor, Politics, for The Greanville Post, (https://www.greanvillepost.com/).  Dr. Jonas’ latest book is The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022: A futuristic Novel, Brewster, NY, Trepper & Katz Impact Books, Punto Press Publishing, 2013, http://www.puntopress.com/jonas-the-15-solution-hits-main-distribution/, and available on Amazon. [/box]

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What is $5 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

TED CRUZ: An opportunistic buffoon, nonetheless typical of an American politician, who need exhibit neither intelligence, genuine morality, nor respect for peace or social justice—merely cunning, and a desire to do the bidding of the superrich that owns them. 

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n 1996 I published a book which in its third release (2013) is entitled The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022.  The style is what I call “fictional non-fiction,” for it is a fictional history of the United States from the time of the election of Ronald Regan as President to the year 2022, written in the style of a history book and supposedly published in 2048 on the 25^th anniversary of the restoration of Constitutional Democracy in the United States.  In 2022, with the help of an International Intervention, the Movement for the Restoration of Constitutional Democracy completes the overthrow of the race-based, quadripartite “New American Republics.”  They had been established by the successors to the current Republican Party, first “The Republican-Christian Alliance” and then “The American Christian Nation Party.”

The primary fictional character in the book is a Republican President, first of the United States, then of the New American Republics, named Jefferson Davis Hague.  He is the second son of a truck driver who emblazons the radiator grill of his semi- with an image of of the Confederate battle flag, who named his first son Nathan Bedford Hague, after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.  Summarizing very briefly, Hague, is a relatively young member of the House of Representatives from the first “Gingrich Class” of right-wing Republicans, elected in 1994.  He wins the Presidency the first time around in 2004 (remember, please, that this book was written in 1994-95 and first published, under a slightly different title, in 1996.)

Hague won the Presidency on a platform of “ending welfare, cutting taxes, emasculating ‘government regulation,’ especially of the environment and for consumer protection, criminalizing abortion, banning ‘sodomy’ [gay marriage was hardly an issue when the book was written], and establishing ‘the centrality of God in America’ ’’ (a phrase in the book actually taken from a fund-raising letter circulated by Newt Gingrich in the summer of 1995).  And Hague was able to win the Presidency on a platform like that because his Democratic Party opponent was an old-fashioned Bill Clinton-like, Democratic Leadership Council type, center-right, “let’s-all-work-together-to-find-the-middle-ground,” Democrat. He had no stomach for fighting the kind of no-holds-barred fight that would have been necessary to defeat Hague.  And so, with massive turnout, especially of the Christian Right, Hague won easily.

All of Hague’s positions were drawn from real Republican/Religious Right speeches, legislative proposals, platform planks, and etc. from the 1980s and 90s.  So the writing in the book is not prescient, just observant.  But does this all of it possibly sound familiar now?  Well, it should, because it was all there front-and-center in the Presidential-candidacy announcement speech of Ted Cruz on July 23, 2015.  In fact it was eerily familiar, and in my view has to be taken very seriously.   As a commentator on NPR on March 23 noted, most candidates announce their candidacy on home grounds, often from a favorite place in their states.  Picking another location can be considered very symbolic.  For example, Ronald Reagan announced his 1980 candidacy at Philadelphia, MS, where the three civil rights workers had been murdered in the Freedom Summer of 1964.  And he made it clear that he was not there to memorialize them.

Cruz chose to announce his candidacy at the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, which was during Reagan’s time and still is a hot-bed of Republican-Christian Rightism.  As noted, his platform sounds very much like Hague’s.  But further, he claimed that “Americans’ liberties” are granted by “God,” and that that wording is found in the Constitution.  In fact, neither the word “God” nor the word “Christian” is to be found anywhere in the Constitution.

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]ruz was in fact referencing the Declaration of Independence (which while a great document is not part of the Constitution), misquoting it by claiming that the famous phrase about “inalienable rights” were said to “be endowed” by God.  Actually, this is a mistake, intentional or not, that the Repubs. are making over-and-over again, with increasing frequency. The writers of the Declaration, who could certainly have chosen the word “God,” chose instead the word Creator.  It happens that I, a non-theistic Reasonist, am entirely comfortable with that word, as for me our Creators are the immutable laws of chemistry, physics, and biology.

Cruz’ concept of “God” is at the very center of his thinking.  I do believe that, unlike my character, J.D. Hague, who just used “the preachers” as he called them, to gain power, Cruz really believes this stuff, which makes him even more dangerous.  A right-wing columnist said that talking privately with Ted Cruz was like listening to a set of stump speeches.

Although he is now regarded as a long shot], his shot may not be so long, especially because right at the beginning of his speech he talked about getting a very strong ground game going.  He will not only be able to call upon the Christian Right (and “Evangelicals” is a polite misnomer: there are plenty of non-Republican, non-political evangelicals.)  Of course he will also be able to call upon the Tea Party activists of the type who propelled him to the Senate in Texas.

So Ted Cruz is a real threat.  And if he gets the Repub. nomination he is not going to be defeated by arguing about what the Constitution doesn’t say about “God” and “Christianity.”  Nor is he going to be defeated by talking simply about women’s rights and gay rights, just in the context of those rights, per se, which certainly exist under any reading of the Constitution besides that of Cruz and his ilk, as found in Article VI and the First, Ninth, and 14^th Amendments.  The attack has to go on to Cruz’ own ground, that which he claims as “religious liberty.”  For example, how ironic it was that when Cruz resolved to restore “American liberties” he also vowed that under his Presidency the right of women to determine the outcome of pregnancy and to determine, according to her own religious beliefs (or non-religious beliefs for the Reasonists among us) when a fetus becomes a “baby” whilst still in her womb, let’s say at the time of viability as in Roe v. Wade, would be criminalized.

Indeed, these are issues of religious liberty, for ALL people, not just for those who claim a particular association with “Christ,” as they conceive of him, and the “inerrant word of God,” as set forth in the King James version of the Bible, which happens to be an early 17^th century translation put together by a team of 48 theologians and academicians.

There are plenty of women who choose to have abortions who are religious, just as there are plenty of LGBT people who are.  The height of religious oppression is for a legal system to place one set of religious beliefs above all the others, and then go on to criminalize everyone else’s.  This is where the stand must be taken.  This is where the battle must be won.  There is no “middle ground” on these issues and any candidate who claims otherwise will lose, for themselves and for us too.  This is an issue to which I shall return on a regular basis throughout the upcoming Presidential campaign.  Whether or not the Repub. candidate is Ted Cruz, that party is going to use the false claim of “religious repression” to justify religious repression.  And they must be stopped.  Or the rest of the predictions made in “The 15% Solution” will come true.

Postscript:  Three days after I originally wrote this column an article with the following headline appeared on p. 1 of The New York Times: “Conservatives Are Looking to Unite Behind Alternative to Bush.”  What are the issues they most care about?  Two of the top three are banning same-sex marriage and rolling back abortion rights.  (The third is stopping immigration from Latin America.)  With his speech, which focused like a laser-beam on those three issues, Ted Cruz would seem to have placed himself right at the head of line for the support of the Christian Right.  As I have said elsewhere, “Ted Cruz, meet Jefferson Davis Hague.”  And that ain’t no joke.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
[box] Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 30 books. In addition to being a columnist for BuzzFlash@Truthout he is the Editorial Director of and a Contributing Author to The Political Junkies for Progressive Democracy (http://thepoliticaljunkies.org/), and a Senior Editor, Politics, for The Greanville Post, (https://www.greanvillepost.com/).  Dr. Jonas’ latest book is The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022: A futuristic Novel, Brewster, NY, Trepper & Katz Impact Books, Punto Press Publishing, 2013, http://www.puntopress.com/jonas-the-15-solution-hits-mainlkmz?ncxzxzz-distribution/, and available on Amazon. [/box]

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What is $1 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by Bruce A. Dixon

In the European “wars of religion,” the losers were often hanged. This is Jacques Callot’s represenation in the 1630s. (Wikipedia)

[dropcap]When you want[/dropcap] to understand how the big wide world works you don’t look back at yourself and try to make it rhyme with what you already think you know.

That means you don’t ask smug, Eurocentric, self-congratulatory Bill Maher questions like “Why are they so touchy? How come those backward Muslims separate their religion from politics?” If you actually want to understand why some fraction of Muslims saw gratuitous insult instead of satire when the French magazine Charlie Hebdo depicted the prophet Muhammad doing things you wouldn’t want your own small children to see, or pregnant Muslims as “Boko Haram sex slaves” howling for welfare checks, all you’ve got to do is look at is two bits of history. Philosopher Karen Armstrong, in her latest book Religion and the History of Political Violence, goes a long way to break it down.

The first bit of history Armstrong explains, is that the notion of religion as a set of practices and beliefs about the diety you can perform on Sundays separate from how you put together political and economic life is an exclusively Western concept that nobody on earth before 17th and 18th century Europeans would recognize at all. The Sanskrit, Jewish, Arabic and other old terms for “religion” all mean something that recognizes no separation between politics, economics and morality and moral life.

Bill Maher (Via DonkeyHotey, flickr)

It took more than a century of warfare in the 1600s and 1700s at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives to establish a kind of religion in Europe which could be separated from politics and economics. That way Europeans could have slavery and capitalism. European ruling elites could exterminate tens of millions in history’s greatest genocide colonizing the New World and still call themselves Christians. Non-European Muslims are being allowed only a generation or two and fortunately a lot less bloodshed to make that kind of transition, which brings us to Armstrong’s second bit of relevant history.

She reminds us that the 20th century’s so-called modernizers in the Muslim world mostly didn’t do it with friendly and democratic persuasion. Under the approving eyes of the West, they did it forcibly, with secret police, torture, discriminatory laws, kangaroo courts and especially in Iran sponsored by Britain and the US, with bullets fired into crowds of often nonviolent protestors. In addition to needed reforms like curtailing shariah law, Turkey’s Mufasta Kemal Atatürk, the Pahlevis in Iran and Egypt’s Gamel Adbul Nasser each locked up thousands of religious opponents, and purged them from the civil service and political life.

This ain’t exactly how you train people to engage in a friendly, respectful and civil discussion of religious and political differences. It IS how you make lasting enemies, ever suspicious and vengeful, alert for the next slight or insult. But this is the real and relevant history Americans have trained themselves not to know.

Add to this the wave of armed US and European interventions in Muslim lands, our puppet governments, our occupations, torture campaigns and drone strikes, and factor in that even while cruise missile liberals like Bill Maher and US presidents say we just don’t DO religious war, US military personnel “at the tip of the spear” call their enemies “hajis” and police departments in the US and Europe surveil Muslim communities wholesale and incarcerate Muslims disproportionately.

In this context, unlike jokes exposing the foibles of the powerful, which are real satire, Charlie Hebdo, which is now subsidized by the French government is engaged in something much like war propaganda. And Bill Maher is just another cruise missile liberal, a bully.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web each week at www.blackagendareport.com.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the GA Green Party. Contact him via this site’s contact page or via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

What is $1 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

Murder on Abortion Row: Our 1996 film about the murder of two Massachusetts abortion clinic receptionists by an abortion opponent, and the fierce debate the killings ignited about the intersection of free speech, abortion and religion. Why Watch Now? This week, citing the right to free speech, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the Massachusetts “buffer zone” law passed in the wake of the murders. The law prohibited protests within 35 feet of abortion clinics. The decision marks a victory for abortion opponents, who argued that protesters have a right to approach and try to counsel women who might be seeking an abortion. In the wake of the ruling, we’ve made FRONTLINE’s in-depth examination of the case that helped lead to the buffer zone law available to watch online for the first time. Watch it Here:  http://www.pbs.org/frontline/social-issues/watch-murder-on-abortion-row/

Watch: “Murder on Abortion Row”

The drive for religious practice is deeply rooted in many humans.

Muslim pilgrims crowd Mecca.

By Saral Sarkar
Countercurrents.org

[R]ecently, in two Arab countries – Tunisia and Egypt – the struggle to liberate the country from the tyrannical rule of a despotic regime began under the leadership of the democratically oriented educated youth. But when elections were held to form a legitimate government, it was the Islamists who won in both countries. In Egypt , the Muslim Brotherhood had not joined the revolt in the beginning. Yet it is they and the fundamentalist Islamists called Salafists who overwhelmingly won in the elections to the new Parliament. And in the ensuing election for the post of the President a till then unknown member of the Muslim Brotherhood won. The internationally well-known secular politicians Amr Musa and El Baradei fell by the wayside; they did not even come out second. Reports from Tunisia indicate that a process of Islamisation of the country is well under way. In Egypt it may have already begun under the leadership of the Salafists.

We had witnessed a somewhat similar process in Iran in the wake of the 1979 revolt against the Shah regime. There the left and secular forces had fought side by side with the religiously motivated forces. But then the masses welcomed Ayatollah Khomeini to take over the leadership and establish an Islamic republic. The leftists had to flee the country.

Today, in Syria , the dividing line is not clear. It appeared in the beginning that the masses revolted against a tyrannical regime. Then observers started saying that it is the Sunni majority (60 percent of the population) led by the Muslim Brotherhood that is fighting against the dominance of the Alawites and the Shias. For a few weeks now, it is also being reported that the middle-class Sunnis, particularly Sunni businessmen support the regime of Assad and that it is mainly (however, not only) the poor and the unemployed Sunnis that are doing the fighting against the regime. Another observer reported that the fighters of the Free Syrian Army who pushed into Damascus could dig in in the poor districts of the city. If the latter reports are true, then we can see in the conflict also a class divide. One thing however is clear: the secular and left forces are on the defensive (Assad’s Baath Party was originally a socialist one. Today it is still a secular one).

The passages that follow were written in December 2004, after an Islamist young man in Amsterdam killed the Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh because the latter had insulted Islam and the Muslims in general and because, in particular, in a film he had projected a verse of the Koran on the naked back of a woman. The contents of these passages however are as valid today as they were in 2004.

The power of the religions that makes us so concerned for quite some time now is manifested in three phenomena: religious fundamentalism, political religion (e.g. political Islam) and religiously motivated violence. All big religions – except perhaps Buddhism – have one or all of these expressions of power for quite a long time, more or less. Already in 1947, the power of militant political Islam led to the partition of the Indian subcontinent, the then British India , and the creation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The initially socialist (in Algeria ) or half-socialist (in Egypt ) Arab nationalism has long been edged out by radical Islamism. Today, the Arab struggle against imperialism and Israeli colonialism is being led mainly by militant Islamists. The Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century among the European Christians is being repeated, so to speak, in Northern Ireland . In the USA , the fundamentalist Evangelicals, who want to Christianize the whole world, have taken over power.

What is needed in this situation is not just to be agitated but deep and concerned thinking on these phenomena. For they not only represent a second defeat of socialism, they also mean that the spirit of the Enlightenment is increasingly losing ground.

Search for the Causes

Many among us cannot understand that anybody at all believes in a God and a religion. But let us not make it so easy for ourselves. A deep root of religiosity lies in the human condition itself. We do not know everything. What science tells us about the origin of the universe and of life on earth are after all only the most plausible hypotheses at the moment. Moreover, several fundamental questions remain unanswered: Why did all that originate at all? What is the purpose, the meaning of all that, of life? And what is the purpose of human life? Where do we have our consciousness from, our intelligence, our sense of morality? Are we, the human species, only an accidental product of evolution? If yes, why do members of such a species, only one among several millions, have a sense of morality? Cats, for example, do not bother about other populations of the cat species, about nature or about the future generations. Why do some humans suffer and the others don’t? What is death? Is there anything after death?

Such questions can lead one straight into believing in God(s) and a religion or, in the most favourable case, to harmless spirituality. Especially an oppressed, exploited or somehow disadvantaged person or one who is shattered through cruel strokes of fate needs a source of consolation. If that cannot be found in this world, then it is at least understandable that such a person believes he/she can find it in another sphere, where a God allegedly loves him unconditionally or where he would be happy at long last. As we know, the search of the young Siddhartha (later the Buddha) for insight into the human condition and his passage to religiosity began when he for the first time saw a seriously ill person, then a very frail old man, and then a corpse. After the collapse of the Soviet Union large numbers of formerly atheist and newly impoverished Russians thronged the churches again. Marx had already realized that Religion is “the expression of real distress”, “the sigh of the oppressed creature”.

According to Marx, religion is also “opium”. But he recognised that it is also “protest against real distress”. It is better to say that it can also be that. In fact, in history it has often goaded humans to protest, in many forms including violent ones. In the 16th century, Martin Luther led the revolt against the corrupt Christian (Catholic) religious authorities. Thomas Müntzer, a protestant reformer led a peasant revolt. Some Marxists see him as a precursor in the struggle for a classless society. In the 19th century, in Sudan, Muhammad Ahmed Ibn ‘Abd Allah – a Sufi, who gave himself the title Mahdi – led a mass movement and a revolutionary army in order both to reform Islam and to liberate his country from the oppressive rule of foreigners, namely the Egyptians, and the British.

Both Müntzer and the Mahdi led an armed struggle against a worldly order that they, for various reasons, held to be unbearable. And Luther had been the spiritual leader of the kings who carried out the military revolt against the rule of the Pope. The Mahdi and his followers wanted to lead Islam back to its pristine form, in which the Prophet wanted it to be practised. They were therefore, in today’s jargon, fundamentalists. What these examples say, is that in history often militant religious fundamentalists or only religiously motivated political activists, who were not necessarily fundamentalists, fought in various ways against some real or felt injustice or against some deplorable state of affairs.

The Betrayed Enlightenment, the Betrayed Human Rights, Violated Dignity

Since the Age of Enlightenment and since the various declarations of human rights, at the latest since the world-wide spread of the revolutionary socialist movement after the Second World War, there should not have been any need for any religious drive for such struggles. But the Enlightenment as well as the human rights and socialism were betrayed by the very people who had brought forth these ideals, namely the Euro-Americans. In the name of the white man’s burden and his alleged civilising mission these people waged colonial wars. The peoples of the conquered countries were not only exploited and oppressed but also treated in racist ways. The slave trade went on till 1864. France waged a brutal war until 1962 in order to maintain her colonial rule in Algeria .

Already the armed struggle of the Mahdi was directed not only against the Egyptian rule in Sudan , but also against the British imperialists, who supported the Egyptians. The British colonel Gordon, who went to Sudan for saving the Egyptian rule there, was killed after being taken prisoner. But why did the Mahdi have to be a religious fundamentalist? It is perhaps a law of social history that a people, or at least a part of it, falls back on its own religious-cultural tradition whenever, even without foreign rule, its general condition appears to it to be miserable, whenever it sees itself as living in a materially desolate or morally decadent state, particularly when, in our times, the promises of the modern age prove to be illusory. It then wants to revive the supposedly past golden age of its history, which must not be understood only in the material sense. But also in terms of simple material wants, in the Arab-Muslim countries, it has been the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamist organizations (e.g. the Hamas in Palestine ) that have provided succour to the needy, whereas the state led by a secular Western-educated elite (that may also have included leftists) did not care. That is also a strong reason for the popularity of the Islamist organisations in Muslim countries.

This orientation does not always appear as an additional aspect of the struggle for worldly power. Also in an independent country in which some kind of crisis situation is obtaining for a long time, it can come up with the goal of a peaceful socio-cultural renaissance. Thus in India under British colonial rule, in the 19th century, some Hindu leading personalities started the Aryasamaj andBrahmasamaj movements in order to reform Hindu society on the basis of the ancient Vedic tradition. In 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded, which strove for establishing the Koran and the Hadith as the source of guiding principles for a healthy and modern Islamic society. A similar development can be observed today among Christian fundamentalists, who feel a deep disquiet over the moral degeneration of modern Western societies and therefore want to lead them back to Biblical values. And in India , many Hindus have reacted to the moral degeneration of their society by envisioning the revival of the mythical Ramarajya , the ideal kingdom of God incarnate Rama (the hero of their epic Ramayana ), or, in our days, by reviving what is called Hindutva(hinduness). Of course, many politicians, parties and militant groups instrumentalize these feelings, thoughts, and dreams. But they do exist in society.

For this discussion the recent history of Algeria is the most instructive example. After a successful liberation war, a socialist state was founded in this predominantly Islamic country, which was, to boot, blessed with a large oil and gas wealth. Of course, there were some purely economic causes of the crisis of Algerian society, but the leading, westernised francophone stratum of the ruling FLN was also morally degenerated. Against this background, the underprivileged strata – particularly their youth suffering from mass unemployment, whose absolute number as well as share in the population rapidly increased – could be easily won over by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) for its politics. FIS achieved this in the name of pan Arabism and upholding the religious-cultural identity of the people. The rest of the story – civil war and reciprocal massacres – is well known.

As we know, the Islamic terrorists of today do not generally come from the poor under-classes, but, in their majority, rather from the educated middle and upper classes. If they come to power in any country, they would not abolish the exploitation of the under-classes by the upper classes. Here many western observers, including leftists, make an error in their reasoning. In the case of Islamic terrorists, their motive force is not primarily anger at economic exploitation and their primary goal is not redistribution of the wealth of the world or of their own country. What drives them is their sense of dignity, and hate and revenge as two means of restoring lost dignity. Anyhow, the sense of dignity and honour of the Arab Islamic peoples, actually of all Third World peoples, is suffering since long because of material underdevelopment. Additionally, for decades, it is being violated by Western imperialist countries, to which also Israel belongs. Although a few bombs or Katyusha rockets will not enable them to defeat imperialism, they will at least assuage the thirst for revenge of these humiliated peoples. This is the more important purpose of the violent attacks of militant Islamists against westerners. Only so can one explain the murder of Theo van Gogh.

It is obvious that the motivation for satisfying this kind of needs cannot come from the ideals of Enlightenment and socialism, but it can very well come from fundamentalist interpretations of the great religions (except Buddhism), nationalism or ethnic loyalty. The motivation for the Islamists’ struggle against the West and that of the Chechnians against the Russians is fed by both of these sources.

It is not without reason that one hardly thinks of a Turk when one hears the term “Islamist terrorist”, although there have also been two bomb attacks in Turkey perpetrated by Turkish Islamists. Turkey has never been a colony or semi-colony. On the contrary, it was itself a colonial power. And today it is a member of the OECD and the NATO. Turkish political Islam can therefore take on a mild form. That shows that only the combination of being a Muslim and origin or roots in a (neo)colonially humiliated country makes one particularly susceptible to militant Islamism.

The Function of Identity 

In Algeria , the FIS could successfully utilise the religious-cultural identity “Arab-Islamic”, because the identity preferred by the leftists, namely “worker”, had been of little use to the Algerian under-classes in their struggle against the FLN bigwigs and the upper classes, who claimed to be socialists. It was of little use especially because class differences existed even within the working class. The identity “worker” has also been of no use in the struggle against imperialism, because, seen objectively, Euro-American workers are beneficiaries of the modern imperialist system. So the Islamists became stronger. By using the identity-term “Islamic”, they could also sweep the class problem within their own ranks under the carpet. It is a weakness of the leftists generally, and of the Euro-American leftists in particular, that they refuse to see the objectively existing conflict of interests between the working classes of different nations, ethnic groups and regions, particularly between those of the imperialist countries and those of the Third World countries. They may still shout the slogan “workers of all countries unite!” But they do not care to ask why this unity has not materialised yet.

What Is To Be Done?

What should we do in the face of these phenomena? Everybody knows that the vast majority of the believers in one or the other religion do not take their holy scriptures very seriously. They are realistic, pragmatic people. Live and let live, that is their attitude towards people of other faiths. Although we have to tolerate their being religious, co-operation in political matters is possible. In Algeria , the masses, who were more or less devout Muslims, supported the initially socialist policies of the FLN. Likewise, Christians have their Liberation Theology and political groups calling themselves Christians for Socialism. In practical political work, we can negate the importance of the question of religion; we can reduce it to a private matter. We can take an agnostic position; we can say that we do not and cannot know whether there is any God or Gods. And we can finally put the rhetorical question: even if God exists, why should we rack our brains over the question when we know that He cannot help us?

But we must also differentiate. We must oppose the fundamentalists, who want to impose on society the (often only supposed) dictates of their holy scriptures – the Koran , the Sharia or the Bible – as laws for everyday life. But there are also those who for their struggle against the numerous evils in this world do not find any other source of strength and inspiration than their religion. To them we must offer a different source of inspiration. After the murder of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch journalist Joost Kircz deplored: “The Left cannot offer any alternative to the young people influenced by Islam. …. There are also no comparable heroic struggles against the prevailing conditions, struggles in which the youth could learn a new emancipatory purpose and try it out” (SoZ 12/04). This deficit of ours must be overcome soon, for which a strong revival of the ideals of socialism is necessary.

The German original was written and published in December 2004. This revised English translation was made in July 2012 and published in: www.eco-socialist.blogspot.com

Saral Sarkar was born in 1936 in West Bengal, India. After graduating from the University of Calcutta, he studied German and literature for 5 years in India and Germany. From 1966 to 1981, Sarkar taught German at the Max Mueller Bhavan (Goethe Institute), Hyderabad, India. Sarkar is living in Germany since 1982. He is the author of 5 political books(see list in Wikipedia/German) that have appeared in English, German, Chinese, Japanese and (in internet for free downloading) French and Spanish. Sarkar has also published many articles and essays in several journals in India, USA, Germany, UK, Holland, China, Spain. He also writes regularly in two blogs of his own (see Wikipedia/German).