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THE WRONG PATH TO AN UNNECESSARY GOAL
By Jim Kent

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Since roughly forever, people have been killing other people and also usually taking over their land and possessions.  It’s been a long time since anybody said that they did this because they were greedy or vengeful, or even hungry or scared.  Quite a while ago we learned to say instead that there is a noble reason for it: Our deities instructed us to do this. 

 

And if we aren’t very big on deities, we explain that we are impelled by our glorious historical destiny or by the urge to liberate or instruct some benighted others.  This seems to be what has moved such heroes as Stalin, Hitler and Putin.

 

Mostly, though, we have killed people and taken over their land and other property to cheer up our gods, who are apparently unable to entertain themselves quietly at home.

 

The god of the Crusades told Christians that it was vital to expel or slaughter the inhabitants of what they called without apparent irony “the Holy Land,” and then occupy that land because their god needed that particular bleak and barren desert for some reason.  The holy duty of the colonial era Europeans was to sail off to what they regarded as a New World and convert the locals into either Christians or carrion.  If they happened to get rich during this exercise, it proved that they were being favoured for their obedience.

 

But let’s not get all misty-eyed about the folks that were booted out or butchered.  They had been doing the same for centuries or millenia unless they came into completely uninhabited territory and behaved courteously and unselfishly from then on.  Raise your hand if you believe this happened.  That’s what I thought. 

 

And you didn’t have to be white or European or religious or in the New World to participate in this sacrament.   It went on in all of Asia and all of Africa and all of Australia, missing Antarctica only because there were no people to murder, and no land any gods wanted.  

 

Christians undertook this sacred work even though their religion assured them that they were the special favourites of an omnipotent Big Kahuna who would take care of all their needs.  Evidently those assurances were thought unreliable, and now it is time to change verb tenses.

 

There is nothing cultural or racial or societal about the impulse to  overrun other places or oppress other people.  With vanishingly few exceptions every nation, tribe and culture does it when they have a chance and their leaders give them permission.   And there have always been individuals and subgroups who didn’t participate.  It is preposterous to pretend that all Muslims or all Americans or all Jews or even all Red Sox fans are particularly prone to, or particularly exempt from, violent impulses or territorial envy or anything else.  

 

Nobody belongs to a universally or uniquely innocent or to a universally or uniquely guilty category.  Even if the category is convicted murderers, there are people in that category who are not actually murderers; even if the category is elderly Dominican nuns, there are some who are deeply grateful for the ironclad secrecy of the confessional.

 

Jews as a group haven’t had the opportunity for colonialization and conquest in several millenia, but some of them haven’t lost the knack.  What’s going on in Israel and Palestine and Lebanon is not happening because they’re Jews or  because they’re Muslims or because they’re Arabs. It’s because they’re people. 

 

Such gods as there may be shouldn’t need us to cheer them up, certainly not this way.   Gods who demand this should be encouraged to seek other work.   And the rest of us should remember what Heschel said: that in a free society only some may be guilty, but all are responsible—and that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself.  Let’s not try not to let anyone in any of our categories, including ourselves, fall into that trap.  

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