Jamaica Observer, Jamaica
July 30 2005
‘Marching as to war.’
Keeble McFarlane
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Keeble McFarlane
Over the course of history, there has been one constant factor in
relations between one set of people and another – strife. Clan has
fought against clan, tribe against tribe, faction has conducted feud
against faction, ethnic group has gone to battle with ethnic group,
nation has bombarded nation. In his collection of stories about the
fictional travels of a man he created, the 18th-century Anglo-Irish
satirist, Jonathan Swift, reduces such conflicts to their most
ridiculous. Lemuel Gulliver, who had been washed ashore after a
shipwreck, finds himself on an island populated by people about the
size of his hand. A neighbouring island was also populated by similar
diminutive people, but the two groups were bitter enemies. The
reason? One set broke their eggs at the little end, the other at the
big end. And never the twain shall meet, except to clash with arms.
The people who fight each other offer their own reasons and
rationalisations. Scholars pick over the bones of each conflict, and
pronounce on the causes and effects.
Library shelves overflow with volumes explaining the fine points
about disputes which resulted in conflicts. Often there are two, or
more, explanations of what happened. A case in point: what Armenians
and their descendants scattered in many countries describe as the
massacre of 1915. Armenia was a small country with a long history of
domination by others. Turkey was in charge a century ago, and when
World War I broke out, the Turkish rulers feared that the Armenians
within its boundary would take the side of Russia and the Allies. So
they forcibly moved more than one and three-quarter million of them
to Syria and Mesopotamia. Some 600,000 died in the process. To this
day the Turks and Armenians disagree over what happened.
Puffed-up pride, inflated ideas about sovereignty and what you can
describe only as plain old testosterone-fuelled machismo is often at
the root of many armed clashes.
Twenty- three years ago, some Argentine ‘salvage workers’ tied up
their ship at an old whaling station called Grytviken on South
Georgia, a frozen, wind-swept island at the southern end of the
Atlantic Ocean. The island is part of the British crown colony of The
Falkland Islands, which the Argentines call the Malvinas. Leopoldo
Galtieri, an army general who headed the military junta running
Argentina, needed something to distract the attention of his
compatriots from the poor state of the economy and the inhumane
actions of his armed forces, which had been “disappearing” thousands
of people who opposed military rule.
Galtieri sent the scrap dealers to kick off a war with Britain. The
British sent a task force to the islands and in 10 weeks decisively
defeated the Argentines, at a cost of nearly 1,000 Argentine and
British servicemen and civilians. As wars go, it was a relatively
straightforward affair. In the end, it led to the downfall of the
military junta and the return to democratic, civilian rule in
Argentina, which declared a cessation of hostilities in 1989, and
most likely, put the entire question to rest for all time.
Not all conflicts are so tidy, as they entail not disputes over
territory nor arguments about aggression by one party or the other.
These arise out of what people believe and how they think other
people should behave. And even the most casual reading of history
reveals that organised religion has to shoulder much of the
responsibility for the billions of souls who have perished for one
cause or other over the ages.
Between the 11th and 14th centuries, Europeans conducted half a dozen
crusades to Palestine. They were unleashed by several popes with the
intention of securing Christian rule of the various Muslim-controlled
holy places in that troubled region. Thus began the enduring friction
between Christianity and Islam. Now we see Islam striking back, not
only in the form of the diabolical suicide bombers, but in the
strident cries of mullahs and imams against the secular west and the
burgeoning of madrassas – Islamic schools – which indoctrinate young
people with a simplified and tunnel-visioned view of their religion
and its place in the world.
It’s not much different in the United States, where a similar,
simple-minded view of the world is taking over. The message goes out
using radio, television and other modern techniques, and reaches far
beyond the boundaries of the US. The Christian fundamentalists also
have their version of the madrassas, but they are not satisfied with
just doing the job themselves. In the past few years, the
neo-conservatives have increased their control of statehouses, the
court system and the federal political structure. Not only is the
Republican Party in power all over the place, the people who run the
party today are not the old-line conservatives who believed in free
enterprise and allowing people to live their lives as they please.
This new lot want the country to be run their way. They want to root
out any mention of Darwin or any discoveries or conclusions he and
other scientists have made about how the natural world works; they
want schools to teach only what they call creationism. They don’t
believe a woman has the right to control her own reproductive system
and don’t even believe children should be educated about sex. They
want the country to return to the dark days of patrician, Puritan
rule. And George Bush is their ayatollah, and Britain has its own
ayatollah, too, in Tony Blair. But so far, that country’s hard-won
liberal tradition endures.
We have seen what the ayatollah in the White House has done to
prevent American money from going to any organisation fighting AIDS
which does not rely only on the narrow-minded message of sexual
abstinence but offers such things as condoms. In this, he is at one
with another narrow-minded but extremely influential and unrealistic
institution, the Vatican. He won re-election last year because his
troops got out the faithful, and it’s now payback time. All the
structures and traditions of the separation of church and state,
liberal democracy and the freedom to think for oneself, built up
slowly and painfully over two and a half centuries, are under attack.
Stay tuned. We are in for some interesting times.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress