by ARPAN ROY
Human pulsion toward sadism and destruction is as natural as our pulsion toward pleasure, and Gaza has become a museum of the death drive.
It is often said that the bloodiest wars in history were fought in the name of religion. In fact, the opposite is true.
The most inhumane conflicts in history were all secular, modernist, and conducted according to the logic of the rational sciences. While it is true that the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and other holy wars dragged on for centuries in the medieval world, these were always interlaced with “secular” interests like economics and politics of power, and their death tolls (if known) pale in comparison to those of modern warfare.
Forty million people were killed during World War I, over 50 million during World War II, the great atheist Stalin killed millions during his reign as General Secretary of the Soviet Union (even if the standard 20 million number may have been American propaganda), and Pol Pot was responsible for the genocide of two million of his fellow Cambodians (again, the numbers are disputed).
The exact number of casualties in all the wars varies, but when we enter the language of “giving or taking” a few million here and there, we have already entered the realm of humanity reduced to bare life.
Counting souls, not bodies
By comparison, the so-called religious conflicts of recent history were much more benign. The Yugoslav wars, ostensibly rooted in an immortal Catholic/Orthodox rivalry, saw around 140,000 deaths, and Islamic State terror in Iraq and Syria did not top 35,000 casualties (at the highest estimate).
Even the Hindu/Muslim fratricide during Partition “only” resulted in around one million deaths; a “small” number compared to the 20th century’s secular world wars, but perhaps more painful because it was brother against brother, neighbour against neighbour. Its pain can still be felt in a way that the spectacular numbers of the world wars’ military casualties perhaps cannot be.
There are two points to be taken from the discussion so far. One, it is simply not true that religion has been the cause of the most inhumane wars and killings in history. The facts clearly illustrate an inverse situation, to the extent that one might wonder who or what benefits from this often-repeated myth.
Moreover, whereas secular politics driven by Enlightenment ideals or utopian projects like communism have regarded human life as a statistical fact subordinate to a greater imminent good, it is religion that has maintained its fidelity to the idea of a soul, that which uniquely inhabits each and every body. The soul, in its afterlife, designates a place for the individual beyond the collective good, as seen in concepts like martyrdom — a theology for which secular ideologies have no viable alternative.
And, two, the pain caused by violent conflicts cannot be measured in numbers. If this were true, then our capacity to feel pain from the deaths of our loved ones would be trivial compared to the pain felt from knowledge of distant wars. No amount of solidarity in the world can move us to such extremes of empathy.
Secular vs religious
I offer these thoughts now in a time of great suffering in the world — in Palestine — where secular and religious ideologies meet in complicated and often contradictory ways.
There is no mistaking that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a colonial conflict, meaning that it is a secular conflict in which the colonised refuse the terms laid out by the coloniser on basic principles of human dignity and justice. But this basic framework is also imbued with significant religious overtones, and a kaleidoscope of other undertones.
For half a century, leftist internationalists have invested in the Palestinian revolution as a litmus test for a potential world revolution. Similarly, for over a century, Muslims have viewed Palestinian suffering as synonymous with Muslim suffering, and Jewish dominance over Palestine as representative of diminishing Muslim sovereignty.
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