Bringing barbarity back
by digby
Whenever Bill Maher makes does his tiresome commentary in which he rolls his eyes and declares “Yes, Christians used to be violent — but it’s the Muslims doing the violence today and they must be defeated” I always say to myself: “give the Christians a chance and they’ll do it too, and for the same reasons.” Not your regular everyday mainline Christians, obviously, but the fundamentalists, fanatics and other right wingers who would jump on the same bandwagon if that was the one that would carry them to the blood-letting and killing fields. Let’s just say that it doesn’t take a historian to see that all this talk of preserving our “Judeo-Christian” heritage might lead some to think in these terms.
But I had no idea just how explicit this has become.
Right-wing radio and TV talking heads aired long rants about Obama’s “attacks on Christianity”. Jonah Goldberg claimed the Crusades were a justified action against Muslim aggression and the Inquisition was a well-intentioned anti-lynching measure. Ross Douhat spent his morning on Twitter defending conservative Catholicism more generally. Redstate.com’s Erick Erickson declared that Barack Obama was not a Christian in “any meaningful way”. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal argued that since the medieval Christian threat was over a long time ago, we should just focus on combating radical Islam.
Jindal is wrong. While relatively few contemporary Christians are calling for the crusades these days (although crusader iconography is not uncommon in the US military), it’s a mistake to believe in Christian exceptionalism – the idea that Christianity alone has solved its problems – while other religions are still “medieval”. One of history’s lessons is that any ideology, sacred or secular, that divides the world into ‘us versus them’ can and will be used to justify violence.
But when we talk about the past, we’re often really talking about ourselves. In my scholarship, for instance, I look at the ways in which medieval people developed stories about holy war as a response to contemporary problems – which often had little to do with the Crusades.
This kind of tale-telling happens today as well. Matthew Gabriele, a history professor at Virginia Tech, has written about the dangerous nostalgia for the Crusades by right-wing commentators and politicians. In an email, Gabriele told me, “It stems from an understanding of the past as unchanging, one where Christians have always been at war with Muslims and always will be at war with Muslims. It’s an argument that doesn’t care for historical context and one that relies on a false equivalence — either “they” (Muslims) were worse than “us” (Christians) or “they” (Christians of the past) are not “us” (Christians of the present).”
In other words, either the bad stuff done by long-dead Christians has nothing to do with modern Christianity; or maybe the Crusades weren’t so bad for Muslims and Jews after all.
Read on for a short re-cap of the allegedly “defensive” Crusades.
(And if there is a more vacuous right wing “intellectual” than Jonah Goldberg, I’d love to know who it might be. Debra Schussell is less idiotic. You have to read his completely ridiculous column (linked above) to truly appreciate it.)
Guess which Presidential candidate said this?
“The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom. They hate Christendom. They hate Western civilization at the core. That’s the problem.”
That was Santorum, back in the 2012 campaign.
So this desire to whitewash the Christian Crusades and Catholic Inquisition as righteous causes (when they aren’t shrieking that even mentioning the Crusades in the same breath as terrorism is a slap in the face to Christianity) is fairly common on the right. In fact, it’s been building into the mainstream for quite some time. I don’t know why this surprises me, knowing what I know about the right, but it does.
This is unbelievable, however, even for them.
Yet another for the collection. https://t.co/MgTZNCBwQ6 pic.twitter.com/CRjwnIZyYt
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) February 8, 2015
When reminded of this horrific story of Americans burning a young black man alive as he was tied to a tree, a commenter replied that he wasn’t in a cage. Apparently, that makes it completely different.
All my caterwauling about torture being a taboo over the past few years sounds hollow to my ears now. We are always just a moment away from total regression to the kind of barbarity we see from ISIS today. This kind of violence is not really a taboo at all. It’s just been out of fashion. The Taliban brought back medievalism and we followed with Inquisition style torture and now we’re back to summary execution by beheading and immolation. I fully expect to see drawing and quartering come back any day. And I wouldn’t place a bet on who will be the first to do it.
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