When weeping for religious martyrs leads to the crucifixion of
innocents

The Independent – United Kingdom
Mar 26, 2005

Robert Fisk

`About suffering,” Auden famously wrote in 1938, “they were never
wrong,/ The Old Masters: how well they understood/ its human
position; how it takes place/ While someone is eating or opening a
window/Or just walking dully along.” Yet the great crucifixion
paintings of Caravaggio or Bellini, or Michelangelo’s Pieta in the
Vatican – though they were not what Auden had in mind – have God on
their side. We may feel the power of suffering in the context of
religion but, outside this spiritual setting, I’m not sure how
compassionate we really are.

The atrocities of yesterday – the Beslan school massacre, the Bali
bombings, the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, the
gassings of Halabja – can still fill us with horror and pity,
although that sensitivity is heavily conditioned by the nature of the
perpetrators. In an age where war has become a policy option rather
than a last resort, where its legitimacy rather than its morality can
be summed up on a sheet of A4 paper, we prefer to concentrate on the
suffering caused by “them” rather than “us”.

Hence the tens of thousands of Iraqis who were killed in the 2003
invasion and subsequent occupation, the hundreds of thousands of
Vietnamese killed in the Vietnam war, the hundreds of Egyptians cut
down by our 1956 invasion of Suez are not part of our burden of
guilt. About 1,700 Palestinian civilians from the Sabra and Chatila
refugee camps – equal to more than half the dead of the World Trade
Center – were massacred in Lebanon.

But how many readers can remember the exact date? September 16-18,
1982. “Our” dates are thus sacrosanct, “theirs” are not; though I
notice how “they” must learn “ours”. How many times are Arabs
pointedly asked for their reaction to 11 September 2001, with the
specific purpose of discovering whether they show the correct degree
of shock and horror? And how many Westerners would even know what
happened in 1982?

It’s also about living memory – and also, I suspect, about
photographic records. The catastrophes of our generation, or of our
parents’ or even our grandparents’ generation – have a poignancy that
earlier bloodbaths do not. Hence we can be moved to tears by the epic
tragedy of the Second World War and its 55 million dead, by the
murder of six million Jews, by our families’ memories of this
conflict – a cousin on my father’s side died on the Burma Road – and
also by the poets of the First World War. Owen and Sassoon created
the ever-living verbal museum of that conflict.

But I can well understand why the Israelis have restructured their
Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem. The last survivors of Hitler’s death
camps will be dead soon. So they must be kept alive in their taped
interviews, along with the records and clothes of those who were
slaughtered by the Nazis. The Armenians still struggle to memorialise
their own 1915 Holocaust of one and a half million at the hands of
the Ottoman Turks – they struggle even to keep the capital H on their
Holocaust – because only a pitiful handful of their survivors are
still alive and the Turks still deny their obvious guilt. There are
photographs of the Armenians being led to the slaughter. But no
documentary film.

And here the compassion begins to wobble. Before the 1914-18 war,
there were massacres enough for the world’s tears; the Balkan war of
1912 was of such carnage that eyewitnesses feared their accounts
would never be believed. The Boer war turned into a moral disgrace
for the British because we herded our enemies’ families into
disease-ridden concentration camps. The Franco-Prussian war of 1871 –
though French suffering was portrayed by Delacroix with stunning
accuracy, and photos survive of the Paris Commune – leaves us cold.
So, despite the record of still photographs, does the American civil
war.

We can still be appalled – we should be appalled – by the million
dead of the Irish famine, although it is painfully significant that,
although photography had been invented by the mid-19th century, not a
single photograph was taken of its victims. We have to rely on the
Illustrated London News sketches to show the grief and horror which
the Irish famine produced.

Yet who cries now for the dead of Waterloo or Malplaquet, of the
first Afghan war, of the Hundred Years’ War – whose rural effects
were still being felt in 1914 – or for the English Civil War, for the
dead of Flodden Field or Naseby or for the world slaughter brought
about by the Great Plague? True, movies can briefly provoke some
feeling in us for these ghosts. Hence the Titanic remains a real
tragedy for us even though it sank in 1912 when the Balkan war was
taking so many more innocent lives. Braveheart can move us. But in
the end, we know that the disembowelling of William Wallace is just
Mel Gibson faking death.

By the time we reach the slaughters of antiquity, we simply don’t
care a damn. Genghis Khan? Tamerlane? The sack of Rome? The
destruction of Carthage? Forget it. Their victims have turned to dust
and we do not care about them. They have no memorial. We even
demonstrate our fascination with long-ago cruelty. Do we not queue
for hours to look at the room in London in which two children were
brutally murdered? The Princes in the Tower?

If, of course, the dead have a spiritual value, then their death must
become real to us. Rome’s most famous crucifixion victim was not
Spartacus – although Kirk Douglas did his best to win the role in
Kubrick’s fine film – but a carpenter from Nazareth. And compassion
remains as fresh among Muslims for the martyrs of early Islam as it
does for the present- day dead of Iraq. Anyone who has watched the
Shia Muslims of Iraq or Lebanon or Iran honouring the killing of
Imams Ali and Hussein – like Jesus, they were betrayed – has watched
real tears running down their faces, tears no less fresh than those
of the Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem this week. You can butcher a
whole city of innocents in the Punic War, but nail the son of Mary to
a cross or murder the son-in-law of the Prophet and you’ll have them
weeping for generations.

What worries me, I suppose, is that so many millions of innocents
have died terrible deaths because their killers have wept over their
religious martyrs. The Crusaders slaughtered the entire population of
Beirut and Jerusalem in 1099 because of their desire to “free” the
Holy Land, and between 1980 and 1988, the followers of the Prophet
killed a million and a half of their own co-religionists after a
Sunni Muslim leader invaded a Shia Muslim country. Most of the Iraqi
soldiers were Shia – and almost all the Iranian soldiers were Shia –
so this was an act of virtual mass suicide by the followers of Ali
and Hussein.

Passion and redemption were probably essential parts of our parents’
religious experience. But I believe it would be wiser and more human
in our 21st century to reflect upon the sins of our little human
gods, those evangelicals who also claim we are fighting for “good”
against “evil”, who can ignore history and the oceans of blood
humanity has shed – and get away with it on a sheet of A4 paper.