Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
February 14/15, 2004
Stan Goff
Beloved Haiti
February 13, 2004
Alan Maass
Kevin
Cooper's Fight to Live
Karyn Strickler
McCarthyism in the Sierra Club
Annie Higgins
On
a Street in America
Adam Federman
Democratic Snipers Target Nader
Mike Whitney
George W. Faces the Nation
Brian Cloughley
Our Imperial Leader Has Spoken
Website of the Day
Lying Action Figure Doll
February 12, 2004
Ray McGovern
George
Tenet's Spin Cycle
Robert Jensen
Bush's
Nuclear Hypocrisy
Saul Landau
Elegy to the Salton Sea
February
11, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Hail, Kerry: Senator Facing-Both-Ways
Steve Perry
Bush
v. Bush?
February
10, 2004
Kurt
Nimmo
Inquisition in Iowa
Ron Jacobs
Politics and the Beatles: Don't
You Know You Can Count Me Out (In)
Elizabeth
Schulte
The Many Faces of John Kerry
Mickey
Z
Meet the Oxmans: "The Rich
Shouldn't Sleep at Night Either"
February
9, 2004
Michael
Donnelly
Will Skull and Bones Really Change
CEOs? Inside John Kerry's Closet
Chris Floyd
Smells Like Team Spirit: the Bush
B-Boys Replay Their Greatest Hits
Bill
Christison
What's Wrong with the CIA?
Dr. Susan
Block
Janet Jackson's Mammary Moment:
Boob Tube Super Bowl
February
7/8, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
Offending Valerie: Dealing with
Jewish Self-Absorption
Jeff Ballinger
No Sweat Shopping
Dave
Lindorff
Spray and Pray in Iraq: a Marine
in Transit
Alexander
Cockburn
McNamara: the Sequel
February
6, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Are the Kurds in the Way?
Joanne
Mariner
Anita Bryant's Legacy
Saul
Landau
Happiness and Botox
Kurt Nimmo
Horror Non-fiction: A How-To Guide
from Perle and Frum
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Real Intelligence Failure:
Our Own
February
5, 2004
Benjamin
Shepard
Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free
Zone
Khury
Petersen-Smith
A Report from Occupied Iraq: "We Don't Want Army USA"
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003
Teresa
Josette
The Exeuctioner's Pslam? Christian Nation? Yeah, Right
David Krieger
Why Dr. King's Message on Vietnam is Relevant to Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
Monkey Business: Of Recess and Evolution in Georgia Schools
Norman
Solomon
The Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Presenting President Edwards!
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
Mark
Gaffney
Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel
Judith
Brown
Palestine and the Media
Frederick
B. Hudson
Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's
Junta?
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating
the Spooks
M.
Junaid Alam
Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract
Fran Shor
Whose Boob Tube?
Kevin
Cooper
This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It
February
3, 2004
Alan
Maass
The
Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"
Nick
Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded
in Iraq
Rahul
Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure
Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?
Laura
Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures
Terry
Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts
Fairness Campaign
Hammond
Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless
Website
of the Day
Waging Peace
February
2, 2004
Gary
Leupp
The Buddhist Nun in Tom Ridge's Jail
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Manners of Their Deaths: Capital Punishment in a Smoke-Free
Environment
Tom
Wright
The Prosecution of Captain Yee
Winslow
Wheeler
Inside the Bush Defense Budget
Lee Ballinger
Janet Jackson's Naked Truth
Leonard
Pitts, Jr
For Blacks, the Game of Justice is
Rigged
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean
Website
of the Day
Resistance:
In the Eye of the American Hegemon
Jan. 31 / Feb 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
January 30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
February 14 / 15, 2004
How Do the Curious
Become Zealots?
Religious
Extremism and Africa
By DANIEL ESTULIN
Any long-standing religion may experience outcroppings
of the fundamentalist impulse, the desire to return to some imagined
pristine social and cultural state by rigid adherence to a set
of beliefs and practices deemed central or fundamental to that
faith.
Religion looms large in African national
politics as it does elsewhere in the world. It is often used
to mobilize people. It can also be used to confuse and divide.
This is what it is like: the rural Africa
of no running water or electricity, no hint of the modern world
of instant communications, computers and mobile phones. In a
scene so quiet, it is impossible to imagine the terror that gripped
this continent for nearly four decades, when millions of people
were butchered in an organized genocide against humanity.
Not long after Uganda made the world's
headlines with the discovery of the mass graves of some 400 religious
zealots, the headless bodies of three babies were found buried
behind a house in western Kenya-apparent victims of some religious
sacrifice.
The pain of a child is my dominant image
of moral horror, even more unbearable than a child's death, and
an emblem of everything that threatens to wreck whatever meaning
and coherence life may seem to have. The child's pain-our awareness
of the child's pain-is where our moral world ends.
To my mind, there are two ethical implications
to this horrible episode. One, relatively facile and slightly
snobbish, is that tyrants and thugs have no taste, that evil
is a form of vulgarity. This may be true in some ultimate spiritual
sense, but I doubt it, and it doesn't look as if it is true in
any world we are likely to inhabit. Evil is if anything more
stylish than good, and to think of it as vulgar is mainly a way
of refusing to contemplate its attractions-and of making its
occasional, fortunate vulgarity seem more important than it is.
The banality of evil is a different matter, but at times we seem
to forget its moral implications.
The other implication is very powerful,
and very difficult to follow out because it takes us beyond words.
It is that evil is literally unspeakable; that all speech about
it incurs and legitimises a conversation that should never have
taken place. If we need to debate these things, if we can debate
these things, we are already morally lost. What must strike these
children is the terrible lateness of our act of rescue and the
drastic demand it makes on our imagination. How much more pain
did we want? How much more could we take? Under the cicumstances,
I might accept to think of God as a name for silence.
I wonder if the extremism says something
about this particular time in Uganda, in Kenya, in Liberia, Ruanda,
Congo, Egypt, Algiers, Angola, in Africa. Is it a symptom of
deep despair from a people grabbing for anything that will give
them hope in troubled times?
How does it all start? When and where
do the curious become zealots? At street corners, standing shoulder-to-shoulder
with others also looking for answers to their problems? Or does
it happen much closer to home?
Stroll through Nairobi, Kenya's capital,
during any lunch hour and you will see throngs of people listening
to unkempt prophets stridently preaching hope, usually complete
with Swahili-English translations. Language, even the most brilliant
language is a kind of shortfall of reason, a leap into graphic
or phonetic chaos, the beginning of a story which loves nonsense
and probably has no end.
People familiar with the dire situation
in Africa are convinced that the extremism is linked to efforts
to retain traditional African beliefs and practices. According
to reports, the Kanungu victims were part of the Movement for
the Restoration of the Ten Commandments. This is no mainstream
church-nor are the several other increasingly popular churches
emerging throughout the region.
What sets them apart is that all mix
Christian teachings with traditional African beliefs. Instead
of condemning popular culture, as they did in the past, many
evangelicals are now feverishly adopting its forms to create
a parallel world of entertainment, a consumer's paradise of their
own. Just ten years ago, it was still a fledgling subculture;
today, it is anything but.
I wonder if the extremism has something
to do with a strange over-respect that Africans seem to have
for authority in general, and for divine authority in particular,
even when common sense rebels. A recent poll showed that an overwhelming
percent of African Christians believe that the events in Revelation
are going to come true; the extraordinary popularity of the apocalyptic
Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments is something
to be taken seriously indeed.
I think that money and power-and thus
politics-are contributing to the sharpened religious identities,
the heightened religious tensions, and thus to the growing religious
extremism.
The followers of the leaders of these
new religious movements, for whom they reveal alternative sources
of identity and hope, often generously open not only their hearts
but their wallets and purses. And it seems that the more extreme
and exclusive the message, the more money and possessions new
converts are willing to part with.
Enter politics. For alternative centers
of power tend to unsettle governments, especially if, like several
in this region, they are insecure about their popularity.
A few days after the Kanungu massacre,
the government warned it would withdraw the licenses of any non-mainstream-also
called "born-agains"- churches involved in suspicious
activities. This was clearly intended to demonstrate a no-nonsense
response and score political points, but may be backfiring.
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, Indian politician
and philosopher warned on November 25, 1949: "Bhakti or
hero-worship in religion may be a road to the salvation of the
soul. But in politics, Bhakti is a sure road to degradation and
to eventual dictatorship."
One must be reminded that Ugandan dictator
Idi Amin likewise banned all religious groupings other than mainstream
Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam.
Meanwhile, mainstream Catholics and Protestants-who
still claim a majority of the country's Christians-argue that
the Kanungu calamity damaged the status of Christianity, and
may even affect its long-term sustainability in the country.
They blame the born-against, whom they label "cultists,"
and approve of government control of their activities.
Whatever comes of the political maneuverings,
the horrible facts of the killings remain. Almost certainly,
others will be discovered. Yet I feel there is more to it than
African psychology and its culture. Happiness and harm, at this
level, are only stories, a matter of guesses and wishes; and
both are easily contradicted by actuality at any given moment.
Doom and harm, by the way, are ways of making things ethically
sound, of making them match our supposedly sensible assessment.
Memory, the disappearance of ordinary
identity into writing, is a dissolution of the self. It is a
wreckage of self, an act of hesitancy which leaves only odds
and ends behind. But Christian hesitancy has deeper grounds than
prudence and more compelling motives than wariness of practical
blunders. Hesitation expresses a consciousness of the mystery
of being and the dignity of every person. It provides a moment
for consulting destiny. After all, existence is not a qualification,
any more than being alive is the same as living. Reality is an
accolade for life, the name of an achievement or an exceptional
piece of luck.
Human difference, the incomplete human
project, will be asserted against the indifference of the real
world where all echoes are the same. What matters is not the
consequence of one´s absence, but the need for consequence;
it is that need that makes us what we are.
Daniel Estulin
is a political commentator living in Madrid, author of four books
on communication skills. He can be reached at: d.estulin@ctconsultoria.com
Weekend
Edition Features for February 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|