Apres la guerre: dark thoughts, some whimsy.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Docker, John
• Date: 01 January 2002

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest--forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives. H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Preface to the First Edition, 1950 (1) I

I don't feel very well today; come to think of it, I haven't felt all that well since the first bombs were dropped on Baghdad. And now, after the war: numbness, dispiritedness, melancholy; and a little, maybe more than a little, paranoia. So many across the world tried in so many ways to stop a military conflict happening, because we thought life was sacrosanct and not one life should be lost in a war that was illegal and gratuitous. There was an extraordinary flowering of wit, carnivalesque wit, mocking those with power to enjoin war or join in war, on placards and through puppets at the huge demonstrations and appearing daily on the Internet. Didn't work, didn't stop the war, didn't stop death raining down. Naively, I suppose, I thought Western political leaders, all good Christians like Bush, Blair and Howard, feel that life is sacrosanct. During and since the Iraq War, US forces have refused to say how many people died (unlike their enthusiasm to body-count during the Vietnam War--though, then again, the Americans were ridiculed during that war for their fantastically inflated figures of Vietcong war dead). Clearly, many thousands of Iraqi soldiers died. Journalists have also estimated, from a survey of records from twenty-seven hospitals in Baghdad and its outlying districts, that at least 1700 civilians died and more than 8000 were injured in the battle for the capital; not yet documented civilian deaths could reach up to a thousand. (2)

But Bush, Blair, and Howard couldn't care; such deaths were of no interest to them, they were triumphant after the war; still are. And such deaths appear to be of not the slightest interest to those majority populations, especially in the United States, Britain and Australia, who duly and dutifully supported the war once it began.

II

I think I have worked out, at least to my 'post-secularist' satisfaction, some of the major reasons why the 2003 Iraq war occurred.

I wouldn't say I therefore know the 'origins' of the Iraq war. It is interesting to note in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World, that Arendt was quite dissatisfied with the title that the American publishers insisted on for her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In a 1954 lecture, 'The Nature of Totalitarianism', given at the New School in New York, Arendt wrote:

The elements of totalitarianism form its origins if by origins we do not understand 'causes'. Causality, i.e., the factor of determination of a process of events in which always one event causes and can be explained by another is probably an altogether alien and falsifying category in the realm of the historical and political sciences. Elements by themselves probably never cause anything. They become origins of events if and when they crystallize into fixed and definite forms. Then, and only then, can we trace their history backwards. The event illuminates its own past, but it can never be deduced from it. (3) The elements, I think, that in Arendt's terms crystallized in the Iraq War (and by 'Iraq War' I also mean whatever its consequences and aftermaths will be that contribute to the present crisis of world history) include the following. There was and is a fatal confluence of various forces that are entwinedly religious and secular: popular American Christian Zionism that is extremely influential in electoral politics in the United States (in part inspired by a strand of philosemitism in English history, from the seventeenth century on, that drew on biblical prophecies that suggested that when the dispersed Jews were again ingathered in Palestine, the Messiah would return); the victimology associated with September 11 that authorizes endless retributive violence; the unshakeable deep belief that the land coextensive with the territory known as the United States has been vouchsafed by God as a promised land to a chosen people (whoever else was there first being mere intruders), so that, in terms of international relations, anyone or any government who opposes the United States is at the same time an enemy of God; and a reckless unilateralist Republican US government advised by neo-conservative ideologues who believe the Middle East, and then the world as a whole, can be militarily controlled in the interests of the United States and Israel. Maybe throw in oil as well (as predicted in that superbly prescient 1975 Hollywood film starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway, Three Days of the Condor).

How banally obvious this seems now. Perhaps I've become ill on banality.

III

What is the secret of Christianity's longevity! Why does it still so strongly exist to cause so much mischief and disaster in the world! The theologian Robert Carroll observes, in his notes on the Oxford World's Classics edition of the King James Bible, that in the founding texts of Christianity the figure of Jesus is created as inconsistent, contradictory, perhaps completely incoherent. (4) In the Gospel of Matthew there is more than one created character called Jesus. There is a kindly generous Jesus, uttering famous maxims such as be sure to bless the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers (5: 5-9), love your enemies (5: 44), turn the other cheek (5: 39). He supports compassion towards the hungry and thirsty, the visiting of those in prison, and the taking in of strangers (25: 35-40). Yet there is another Jesus in Matthew, warlike, deploying a violent language of denunciation, accusing and condemning, persecutory and vengeful. When he is being arrested, the kindly Jesus says to his disciples, 'Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword' (26: 52). The warlike Jesus, inveighing against the scribes and chief priests of the Israelites, warns that at the day of judgement those who do not recognize him as the Son of God will be cast into outer darkness, including whole cities: 'Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword' (10: 34-35). This Jesus--God's warrior son on earth--waves the lamentable notion of the 'day of judgement' like a sword seeking blood.

This Jesus is intolerant of ambiguity, doubt, pondering upon uncertainties, the value of not making final decisions, vowing: 'He that is not with me is against me' (12: 30). In the gospel of Matthew it is not only the elders and chief priests and scribes of the Israelites who are now to be treated with the maximum of unkindliness but the Israelite nation as a whole, Jesus pronouncing: 'The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof' (21: 43). Jesus even stages the timing and place of his own death in order to bring great obloquy upon the Israelites, who insist on his being flailed, mocked and crucified even though Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, cannot see that Jesus has done anything wrong. The Israelite nation is henceforth to be discarded in history. Robert Carroll in his wise Wolf in the Sheepfold (1991) suggests that the passages in the New Testament...