by Robert M. Young
Under what circumstances and with what rationale do people kill and maim one another and, in particular, innocent people and children, in the name of a higher cause? This has recently occurred in Oklahoma City, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, former Yugoslavia and, of course, New York and Washington. If we cast our net more widely we can add Rwanda and Iraq, and if we broaden our scope again we can include world wars, civil wars and dictatorships, for example in Uganda, Chile, Argentina and the history of pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition, slavery in the Americas, the genocide of the native Americans.
In Oklahoma City the higher cause was the Militia movement in America, seeking to preserve a special reading of individual rights in the face of the federal government, Jews and the United Nations. In Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and probably in New York and Washington it was Moslem fundamentalism under the sponsorship of Osama Bin Laden, while in the Balkans it was ethnic cleansing. The killing in each of these settings had the keynote of purification, the elimination of enemies who were considered evil. The broader examples I mentioned have that theme, too, whether in tribal terms in Africa, anti-communism in South America, the persecution of Jews as infidel non-Christians, the rooting out of heresy from Catholicism, the mastery of blacks and the conquering of Indians in the name of European and putatively higher civilization. In each case the rights and consideration normally accorded to other humans is denied or is revoked, and it is alleged that they or their ancestors have acted so as to merit the loss of the status of full human being.
Dark-skinned Africans were candidates for enslavement, so goes the rationale, because they were descendants of Ham, the son of Noah. According to the Bible, Ham looked upon his father naked and had failed to cover the old man, though his brothers had done so. Ham's punishment was that his son Chus (or Canaan) and all his descendants would be black and would be banished from his sight. The crime of Ham — as the Hebraic and early Christian commentators understood perfectly well — was not merely disrespect. It was the castration of the father — the violent rejection of paternal authority and the acquisition of the father's sexual choice. The blackening and banishing of Ham's progeny is the retaliatory castration by the higher Father, God. The transgression which is used to rationalise racism was putatively an Oedipal one.
What is black and banished cannot be seen. The long-term consequence of this was, according to Franz Fanon, that in Europe, that is to say, in every civilised and civilising country, the Negro is the symbol of sin. Whatever is forbidden and horrifying in human nature gets designated as black and projected onto a man whose dark skin and oppressed past fit him to receive the symbols. The id becomes the referent of blackness within the personality, and the various trends within the id make themselves realised in the world as the forms of blackness embodied in the fantasies of race (Kovel, 1970, pp. 63-66).
The Bible, other sacred texts and religious traditions more generally are often appealed to for authority for behaving abominably. All of the perpetrators of otherwise heinous and sometimes unimaginable atrocities believed themselves to be acting righteously. During the American Civil War, the Supreme Court dismissed the applications of pacifists with the statement, ‘A country which contemplates war as well as peace as an instrument of national policy must proceed under the assumption that its policies are not inconsistent with the will of God.’ It is, of course, against the tenets of Christianity to take another’s life, as it is against the tenets of Islam, as the President of Lebanon pointed out last Wednesday. However Holy people, Ayatollahs, for example, say to a person who is being asked to blow himself up with dynamite, as Palestinians are currently doing or in a flying bomb as two dozen Arabs did last Tuesday, that they will go straight to heaven. Christian righteousness can be used to rationalize the most appalling behaviour. In Argentina, under the anti-left and officially Christian dictatorship, after highly technical and agonising torture had achieved all it could, prisoners were taken out over the sea in helicopters, their abdomens were cut open, and they were thrown into the sea bleeding to attract sharks. Their children were adopted untraceably by their parents’ torturers, guards and other friends of the ruling group.
Some dynamic features are becoming apparent. The perpetrator is altogether right, sanctioned by God. The victim is altogether wrong, beyond humanity, quite literally dehumanised – monkeys, as the Japanese were called in the Second World War, beasts or brutes as the Germans were, gooks, as the Viet Cong were. The African slaves’ lament was. ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother’? Apparently not, according to the slave trader and slave owner, though, quite paradoxically, the slave man would often be entrusted with the owner’s child, the slave woman would often bear him children, and the slave mammy would often be the confidant of the daughter of the house. This pattern persisted in post-slavery America and was common in Apartheid South Africa, both places of extreme Christian fundamentalist religion. Even so, the ‘place’ of the denigrated person was officially sub- on non-human or, at best, as my mother used to say, ‘They are like children, and it is God’s will that we should take care of them’.
In psychoanalytic terms we have here splitting. Blacks, Third World peasants and enemies are not like us; they are not even rather like us; they are unspeakably awful – dirty, unprincipled, rapacious, thieving, whatever comes to mind. We stereotype them, denigrate them, split them off from the human community and sever the bond of sympathetic imagination which constitutes the fellow-feeling that makes behaving badly unacceptable. Then we can exploit, enslave, rape, harm, kill them. In fact, we have every right to, and it is good in God’s light that we should do so. When the Conquistadores set about slaughtering and otherwise causing the deaths of over 12 million inhabitants of the West Indies in the first forty years after Columbus sailed there, learned Catholic theologians decreed in 1503, that the permission of Queen Isabella should be given for slavery in the New World. A degraded view of the natives was a prerequisite to this trade, as was a promise of salvation. Here is the curious decree she signed: 'Being as they are hardened in their hard habits of idolatry and cannibalism, it was agreed that I should issue this decree... I hereby give licence and permission... to capture them... paying us the share that belongs to us, and to sell them and utilise their services, without incurring any penalty thereby, because if the Christians bring them to these lands and make use of their service, they will be more easily converted and attracted to our Holy Faith' (Carew, 1988, p. 48).
The charges against the Native Americans were caricatures. These people were being degraded. They were stereotyped. They were split off - everything ‘we’ are not. We have the true faith, as claimed so many of the waves of immigrants who went to the New World as that they could be pure, as the Puritans, including my own ancestors, did in 1609. These waves of immigrants were the same people who made and broke treaty after treaty with the native Americans, took their land, and when the Indians defended themselves and their territories, they were called savages. Then they were called ‘redskins’, since it was easier to bring in the bloody skin for the bounty being paid for killing them than to heft a whole corpse. They also were deemed pagans, and the religions they had and the cults they practiced were deemed devilish, as are deemed the positions taken up by third world people whose immiseration leads them to join fundamentalist Muslim sects. It is so striking to read and hear about dreadful terrorists who are accused of attacking the highest values - democracy and freedom and civilization itself - without its being asked how they reached the point of feeling the need to reject all of first world values. We are appalled by female circumcision, fatwas, bombings – all deplorable in themselves – without asking how people got to the point of adopting them.
Fundamentalism
What all the groups I am discussing today have in common is fundamentalism. Karen Armstrong tells us that ‘Fundamentalists have no time for democracy, pluralism, religious toleration, peacekeeping, free speech or the separation of church and state’ (Armstrong, p. ix). Fundamentalisms all follow a certain pattern. ‘They are embattled forms of spirituality, which have emerged as a response to a perceived crisis. They are engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself. Fundamentalists do not regard this battle as a conventional political struggle, but experience it as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past. To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture; yet fundamentalists are not impractical dreamers. They have absorbed the pragmatic rationalism of modernity, and, under the guidance of their charismatic leaders, they refine these “fundamentals” so as to create an ideology that provides the faithful with a plan of action. Eventually they fight back and attempt to resacralize an increasingly sceptical world’ (Armstrong, xi, quoting The Fundamentalist Project; see also below - Appendix). There are, of course, various forms of fundamentalism around, but Karen Armstrong suggests that they have certain common features - common fears, anxieties and desires – and that they share a reaction against scientific and secular culture. This is certainly true of the Protestant fundamentalism with which I am familiar in America and the Muslim fundamentalism implicated in last week’s events.
Thinking about the dynamics of this way of thinking intrapsychically, why do people become fundamentalists? People or peoples or groups somehow come to feel deeply threatened. Poor people, disenfranchised people, displaced people, embattled people, refugees. In a reduced state people cannot bear uncertainty. What people do when they feel under threat is to simplify. To simplify in psychoanalytic terms is to regress, to eliminate the middle ground, to split, dividing the world into safe and threat, good and evil, life and death. To be a fundamentalist is to see the world perpetually in these terms to cling to certainties drawn from sacred texts or the pronouncements of charismatic leaders.
The baby whose needs are not met blames the provider who has not provided or who has removed what one needs and is experienced as abandoning or withholding. One feels attacked, as it were, by lack, hunger, and one wants to retaliate. It is so tempting to defend oneself from feeling so abject by becoming in phantasy the opposite and attain a position of complete self-sufficiency or certainty. Bin Laden’s father died when he was 10; the young Hitler was a failed painter. ‘I am nobody and am sure of nothing’ becomes ‘I am powerful and sure about everything: it is in the book’. If fundamentalists were really sure they would not have to be so intolerant. People who feel threatened in this way see others in very partial terms – as part-objects. They suffer from phantasies of annihilation and defend themselves against these psychotic anxieties with rigid views. They lose the ability to imagine the inner world, the humanity of others. Sympathy, compassion and concern for the object evaporate, and brittle feelings of blaming and destructiveness predominate. They act out. Where acting out is, thought cannot be. It is not seemly that Vice President Cheney said over the weekend that he wants to have the head of Osama Bin Laden on a platter.
Terrorism is the institutional violence of the fundamentalist. It has been used throughout history*. Some will recall the Spartacist slave rebellion in 73-71 BC, which at one time numbered 90,000 It was defeated by the Roman legions led by Crassus, who crucified over 6000 Spartacists and placed them all along both sides of the Appian Way to frighten others from rebellion. Blacks were terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan, Israelis are terrorized by suicide bombers**, as are the Spaniards by Basque bombs.
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