Terrorism, Imperialism, and the Church of Communism
By Daniel Jackson
The young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pockets are filled with nails, ball bearings, and rat poison. The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city. The young man takes his seat beside a middle-aged couple. He will wait for the bus to reach its next stop. The couple at his side appears to be shopping for a new refrigerator. The woman has decided on a model, but her husband worries that it will be too expensive. He indicates another one in a brochure that lies open on her lap. The next stop comes into view. The bus doors swing. The woman observes that the model her husband has selected will not fit in the space underneath their cabinets. New passengers have taken the last remaining seats and begun gathering in the aisle. The bus is now full. The young man smiles. With the press of a button he destroys himself, the couple at his side, and twenty others on the bus. The nails, ball bearings, and rat poison ensure further casualties on the street and in the surrounding cars. All has gone according to plan. The young man’s parents soon learn of his fate. Although saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment. They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory. The neighbors find the event a great cause for celebration and honor the young man’s parents by giving them gifts of food and money. These are the facts. This is all we know for certain about the young man. Is there anything else that we can infer about him on the basis of his behavior? Was he popular in school? Was he rich or was he poor? Was he of low or high intelligence? His actions leave no clue at all. Did he have a college education? Did he have a bright future as a mechanical engineer? His behavior is simply mute on questions of this sort, and hundreds like them. Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy—you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy—to guess the young man’s religion?
With these words, philosopher and student of neuroscience, Sam Harris, launches a barbed, irreverent, and utterly potent attack on Islam and other manifestations of magical, irrational thought. Harris uses this illustration to convey the inexorable correlation between the Islamic death cult and suicide bombing. Undoubtedly, the hypothetical incident has tremendous persuasive power.
Suicide bombing, for most Americans, occupies the same categorical space of the brain as Islamic-fascism, and a consensus has long reigned that these violent incidents are indeed a religious phenomenon. Yet, this assumption has been questioned by many critics of the foreign policy of the United States, who claim that suicide bombings occur largely due to the nation-building and imperialism of the U.S rather than anything intrinsic to Islam. They have a point.
In Congressman Ron Paul’s recent book The Revolution, he draws on research by Robert Pape of the University of Chicago to conclude that the principal motivation behind such malevolent behavior “is not religion but rather a desire ‘to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory the terrorists view as their homeland.” Considering the evidence Paul presents behind this claim- “The largest Islamic fundamentalist countries have not been responsible for any suicide terrorist attacks”- it is probably true.
However, we must be careful not to construct a false dichotomy between the admittance of the fault of Islam and the fault of U.S hegemony abroad; in reality, they both play a necessary role in suicide bombing. Imagine an aggressive bully who verbally assaults and terrorizes a deranged outcast on a daily basis at their office building. Unbeknownst to the bully, his victim harbors an array of militant beliefs and has an obsession with social Darwinism akin to the two boys who perpetrated the shooting at Columbine high school in Colorado. One day, after the victim has become nearly physically sick from the daily torment, he arrives at work bearing a firearm and uses it to brutally murder both the bully and a host of coworkers who were unfortunate enough to be around at the time.
Where can blame be assigned? Does fault rest on the shoulders of the bully or did the reclusive maniac and his deranged ideas cause the tragedy? Both. Analogously, the United States’ interventionist, warmongering foreign policy mixes with a religion that espouses doctrines as disastrous as they are ridiculous to collectively serve as a catalyst for suicide bombing. Sam Harris contrasts Islam and Jainism to show the power belief has over behavior despite outside influence. Jains believe in absolute pacifism, not just towards humans, but to all sentient beings. No matter how the U.S abused the Jainists, no measurable portion of Jains would ever consider such actions. This of course DOES NOT JUSTIFY THE ACTIONS OF THE UNITED STATES ABROAD, WHICH ARE CONTEMPTABLE TO THE HIGHEST DEGREE, but does suggest that the choice of retaliation has much to do with what is innate to the beliefs of an Islamic-fascist.
There remains one fact that still has some persuasive power to imply that there is nothing inherently religious about suicide terrorism: according to the research of Robert Pape, the leading group behind suicide terrorism is not in any way affiliated with Islam, or indeed any traditional religion, but are the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, a Marxist organization. However, this fact comes as a challenge only when misinterpreted. Such a conclusion only strengthens a realization I made long ago from unrelated evidence: MARXISM IS ITSELF A RELIGION. As Christopher Hitchens has remarked, communists were not trying to eradicate local religions so much as to replace them.
Many have noted similarities between communism and traditional religion, but these shared facets reveal more than many realize. Of course, many will be quick to protest that Marxism denies the existence of god and so it cannot qualify as a religion. Yet, Zen Buddhism does not explicitly affirm the existence of a higher power but is still regarded as a religion. Nevertheless, both have quasi-deities: nature in Zen Buddhism and The State in Marxism. Christopher Hitchens writes of the religious nature of communism: “The solemn elevation of infallible leaders who were a source of endless bounty and blessings; the permanent search for heretics and schismatic, the mummification of dead leaders as icons and relics.” Some of the fundamental, defining characteristics of religion are:
- unquestionable dogma (dissent was illegal)
- the providing of both an absolute worldview as well as existential validity (children were indoctrinated as extreme statists)
- prophets who are often represented as being more than human (Lenin was even portrayed in stained glass).
Marxism passes this test with flying colors (perhaps even more than many forms of Buddhism). In Abrahamic religions, the nebulous concept of god provides existential validity, and in the Marxist-cult The State assumes this role: the individual has reason to live only insofar as he serves the collective. As Ayn Rand points out in the Virtue of Selfishness, the “neo-mystics” merely took the notion of god and replaced it with “society.”