(image: psychologytoday.com)
I heard a good radio interview today: Radio NZ’s Kathryn Ryan interviewing Rabbi David Rosen — a conversation which opened with the question whether the long running Israel/Palestine conflict is in any way a religious issue.
In essence certainly not. It’s a territorial conflict … a conflict between two national liberation movements: The Jewish national liberation movement which is known as Zionism and the Palestinian liberation movement.
Rosen points to the 1967 war where the main protagonists were professed atheists, so “obviously weren’t going to war over theology but over territory”… Religion, he says, forms part of national identity but isn’t the driving issue.
The territorial conflict, he said, had been “religion-ized” — reaching dangerous proportions in the last decade. Now, he says, the perception in the Arab and Muslim world is that it is at base a religious conflict and that the holy sites are under siege by ‘malevolent and hostile Jewish intent’.
He’s said this stuff before elsewhere but it’s worth listening to IMO. MP3 audio of the interview is here.
But part of the conversation put me in mind, once again, of my ‘Group A vs Group B’ theory of conflict — the idea of our in-group’s irrational sense of ‘superiority’ over the out-group… that we discussed earlier. Apologies for quoting myself:
It is strangely easy for us as human beings to see ourselves as separate from others … or in an ‘us’ while ‘the others’ consist of a ‘them’ — and, naturally, we regard ‘them’ as inferior to ‘us’ in every measure that matters.
Rosen, talking about the tensions in the Middle East, said:
The problem is not only do you have competition, you have a sense of disparagement of the other, and unwillingness to acknowledge the other and respect the other — and that’s what we’ve got to counteract.
Well said. Disparagement. Unwillingness to acknowledge. And lack of respect.
We do it as nations and we do it on a personal level.
I know I can be a judgemental SOB, and close myself off to other people if they demonstrate, say, dishonesty, malice or gutlessness.
But I certainly don’t hate them and wouldn’t do extreme things…
Or would I? What about if I were faced with sufficient of the ‘right’ provocation?
Is there a button?
I agree totally.
Resources are everything. “Resources” can also include transferable such as actual money.
Religion always gets the short end of the stick (and blame) when it comes to conflict. In our own history, the Reformation (in England), was nothing more of the transfer, by force, of property and other commodities from the Roman Catholic Church to the English Crown. The very idea that it (the Reformation) was simply about a divorce is laughable. Henry VIII would not have lasted as long as he did had he not been surrounded by like minded individuals. The fact that there was also a surge in Protestant sentiment really tells us nothing about the conflict, but if you “follow the money;” as a good detective would, you will surely find that that in it itself was all the persuasion needed to alter the social face of England these last 400 years.
Thanks for the comment, JT. Yes, while I’m not a conspiracy theorist, it makes one wonder about the propaganda effort — the source of the ‘campaign’ (crusade?) to convince the populace that the disenfranchisement and confiscation pogrom is not just an outworking of naked, Viking-like raids to rape & pillage.
The internal representation of the thing intrigues me, as noted. How does one ‘normal’ person make it OK to be that barbaric towards another? Ideology? Theology?
Or, more likely, telling yourself it’s ‘a matter of survival’, (it’s ‘us’ or ‘them’) … Lebensraum ‘living space’ Hitler called it.
I’m following the trial of the Khmer Rouge camp commandant Duch with interest — his acknowledgement of his mass-murder crimes and apology/plea for forgiveness by the victims’ families (a gesture seen as inadequate by the prosecution) is ground-breaking in my limited experience/knowledge of war crimes. Typically the ‘monsters’ on trial just bob and weave, duck and dive.
But that’s the point. Besides the odd sadist, most perpetrators of the religious equivalent of ‘ethnic cleansing’ are ‘normal’ people embroiled in (pushed along by?) larger-than-life events. [This does not excuse their actions.]
David Rosen’s “it was all about territory” is part of the answer — but what makes it OK for “us” to suppress/oppress/persecute “them”? Where do we go in our minds for it to be acceptable?
WHY do we think we are more deserving or superior?
Evolutionary self-centredness?
I did a tour of Dachau Concentration Camp a few years ago. Over the top of the original main entrance there is a huge aerial photograph taken in the 1940’s by Allied bomber aircraft. Dachau and other concentration camps were not bombed and therefore the photograph shows the town of Dachau and the camp as it was during the 1940’s – exactly as it is today – surrounded by homes. What struck me as significant about this photograph is that the employees of the camp, with few exceptions, must have been the people of Dachau – and so, without doubt, everybody in town must have known exactly what was going on; which is significant, I think, because Germans today will tell you that “that the non-military population of Germany were not aware of these “so called” atrocities,” and after spending an afternoon in Dachau I decided that that must be the biggest load of crap anyone has ever tried to make me swallow.
“that that must be the biggest load of crap anyone has ever tried to make me swallow.”
Yes of course it was. People aren’t blind.
Earlier this year I read the 2005 book by Laurence Rees — Auschwitz The Nazis and the Final Solution (book based on the interviews and research for the BBC series. (interesting link, Meet the author video 2 min)
For me, the book blew the ‘ignorant/just following orders’ excuse out of the water. So many years had passed, the time had come for some of the surviving protagonists (camp guards etc) to stop protecting their ‘future prospects’ and finally tell the truth — which was that they supported Hitler’s imperialism and annihilation programmes, they were sympathetic to anti-semitism, (some blamed the Jews for all sorts of ills) and bought into the arrogant sense of German ‘superiority’ (sound familiar?) which justified the horror of what they were doing. As Rees says in the video referenced above, “They did it because they thought they were doing the right thing.”
The fall of the Berlin wall had made previously inaccessible Russian-controlled archives in East Germany available to Rees and his researchers — so the meticulous documentation of the German/Nazi bureaucracy revealed the genesis, the planning, development and execution of the final solution. Chilling, horrible stuff carried out by ‘normal’ people … eager to please, ambitious career-minded family men and women in most cases. Good Germans.
Yes, there were citizens/people caught up in the machine, but as Rees’s interviews showed, there was widespread support for what the Nazis were doing for a long time. To their eternal shame.
We all want to see our past actions in the best light. Pretty tough to do that if you ran a death camp.
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[…] Competition for ‘scarce resources’, as we discussed in Q: Where does conflict come from?, is not an adequate explanation. Likewise religious rivalry is often overstated (see: ‘The overblown role of religion in conflict‘). […]