Understanding the Middle East: the Enemy of My Enemy May Be My Enemy

We read one day that we have liberated the Iraqis and brought them democracy only to find out the next day that Shiite flagellants are roaming the streets of cities there covered with blood and ecstatically demanding an Islamic State.

We deplore Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel one day and find out the next day that some Israeli fanatics have plans to demolish the Dome of the Rock mosque in preparation for the re-building of the Temple of Solomon.

We listen to skepticism about our war in Iraq from mainline Protestant clerics and papal legates one day only to discover the next day that countless American Evangelicals are relishing the approaching Rapture and End of Days as they plan foreign policy from the Books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation. And the chief Bible Study maven seems to be the man of the house in the White House.

Listening to government officials from Rumsfeld down to Fleischer will not answer our questions about these matters. Nor will cheering the rantings and ravings of the Limbaughs and Hannitys. What we need, believe it or not, is a little old-fashioned scholarship and study.

We need to read the now unread ruminations of Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West), Arnold Toynbee (A Study of History), and perhaps even Friedrich Nietzsche (any of his works will do but you could start with A Genealogy of Morals).

What Spengler, Toynbee, and Nietzsche can teach us is how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, despite superficial differences, were all forged and/or altered by a religious revolution in ancient Iran associated with the name Zoroaster or Zarathustra. The central notions of dualism between Good and Evil, Salvation through an Expected Messiah, and the Final Battle between St. Michael and Satan animate these world religions and their devotees. Pragmatism, reason, and common sense have little place in these primitive Semitic world views. All conflict is interpreted as part of a cosmic struggle between Good and Evil and there is no room for compromise or tolerance.

Our American Evangelicals and Neo-Conservatives have bought into these delusions as much as Islamicists and if left unshackled will lead us all to world conflagration.

A curious French reactionary at the turn of the last century, Charles Maurras, had an interesting perspective on all this. In his view anarchic religious revolution was the contribution of the Jewish and Christian Bible, nourished on the same dualistic fanaticism of the Iranian spirit.

He lacked himself belief in God and Christianity but had a good deal of belief in the institution of the Roman Catholic Church which in his view had performed the necessary service of sanitizing this dangerous religious tradition and re-directing it under the influence of Greco-Roman intellectuality into more conservative paths. He was a Catholic without being a Christian because he valued order over disorder and hierarchy over anarchy.

Maurras had many wrong and prejudiced notions and much to apologize for in his pursuit of a reactionary French political movement, the Action Francaise. But were he with us today he would immediately understand why Anerican Neo-Conservatives and Evangelicals are dangerous fanatics looking for trouble which they neither understand nor appreciate because they have little in the way of learning or historical insight.

Maurras had never read Spengler or Nietzsche, as an anti-German he would not read what he considered Teutonic nonsense, but he shared their fear that Western Civilization little understood its vulnerability from anarchistic, primitive biblical religion.

Every day the news from the Middle East is making these old concerns more relevant and more troublesome.

April 26, 2003