It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, March 22, 2024
‘It’s Not Just Misguided—It’s Unconscionable:’ Congress' Spending Bill Could Ban Funding to U.N. Gaza Aid
Yasmeen Serhan Fri, March 22, 2024
Palestinian families take refuge under harsh conditions at a school affiliated with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza City, Gaza on February 6, 2024. Credit - Dawoud Abo Alkas—Anadolu/Getty Images
The fate of the U.N. agency dedicated to Palestinian refugees hangs in the balance as U.S. lawmakers prepare to vote on a batch of spending bills that, if passed, would suspend direct funding to the agency for at least a year.
The U.N. agency, known by its shorthand UNRWA, was first established in 1949 to serve Palestinians displaced from their homes and native villages amid the war that led to Israel’s creation the previous year. In the interim decades, the U.N. body has served as a quasi-state for the stateless, providing schooling, healthcare, and other social services for Palestinian refugees in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza, and across the region. Since Israel began its bombardment of the Strip in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, UNRWA’s role kicked into overdrive, providing not just vital food and medical aid, but emergency shelter for thousands of displaced Palestinians across the Strip.
Providing between $300 million and $400 million annually, Washington was the largest donor to UNRWA—at least until January, when the U.S. and more than a dozen other countries froze their funding amid Israeli allegations that 12 of the agency’s 13,000 employees participated in the Oct. 7 attack. Israel has yet to supply evidence to back its claims, according to the U.N., investigations into which remain ongoing. While several countries—including Canada, Australia, and Sweden—have since resumed funding, the U.S. is the only one that has moved to make its suspension of aid more permanent. The Congressional spending bill stipulates that a ban on U.S. funding for UNRWA will last “until March 25, 2025,” meaning the Biden administration will be unable to reverse the pause until that time.
However, should former President Trump secure victory in November’s presidential election, the decision on whether to reinstate funding would fall to his new administration. The prospects of such an outcome would bode poorly for UNRWA. During Trump’s first term, he cut all U.S. funding to the agency, which his State Department deemed “irredeemably flawed.”
Demonstrators stage a protest during a hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability of House Foreign Affairs Committee on January 30, 2024 in Washington, DC. The subcommittee held a hearing titled “UNRWA Exposed: Examining the Agency’s Mission and Failures.” Alex Wong—Getty Images
President Biden has already pledged to sign the $1.2 trillion spending bill—which includes billions in funding for several federal agencies, including the Departments for Defense, Homeland Security, and Labor—voting on which must take place today in order to avert a government shutdown. Should it pass, it will leave a huge hole in the agency’s operating budget, which amounts to roughly $800 million a year, according to UNRWA Communications Director Juliette Touma. “Such an outcome will make it harder for UNRWA to assist starving Gazans,” she tells TIME, “and potentially further weaken regional stability.”
It also stands to place further scrutiny on the Biden administration, which has faced mounting criticism at home and abroad over its unfettered support for Israel and its lackluster efforts to deliver vital food aid to Palestinians in Gaza. After all, it was only this week that the IPC, the international community’s authority on hunger crises, warned that famine may already be unfolding in Gaza. “Denying funding for UNRWA is tantamount to denying food to starving people and restricting medical supplies to injured civilians,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a leading Democratic lawmaker on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. “To punish over 2 million innocent people in Gaza and UNRWA beneficiaries throughout the region for these actions is not just misguided—it’s unconscionable.”
In the House, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the sole Palestinian American in Congress, told her colleagues on Thursday that passing this bill would mean “contributing to the starvation of Palestinian families.”
What remains to be seen is whether the U.S.’s decision to withhold funding until 2025 prompts other countries to restore, or even increase, their own contributions. On Friday, Finland announced that it will resume its annual funding of 5 million euros ($5.4 million) to UNRWA, a portion of which will be earmarked for strengthening the agency’s risk management. In the U.K., the opposition Labour Party (which polls project will form the next government) has called for the British government to follow the E.U. and others in resuming its payments to UNRWA—which amounted to $21.2 million in 2022— alongside increased emergency funding to Gaza.
But it may not be enough. According to Touma, UNRWA’s budget is based on contributions from member states that provide financial support to the Agency over and above their regular U.N. dues. In 2022, the agency received $1.17 billion in funding by governments. The U.S. was the single biggest donor, contributing more than a quarter of that amount.
In high school biology class, students learn that when egg and sperm cells unite, a zygote is immediately formed. The zygote splits into two cells, and those two cells each split again in a process that keeps repeating itself. A few days later, when the zygote is still less than the size of the period at the end of this sentence, it begins its travel down a fallopian tube to the uterus. At the start of its little journey, the zygote is relabeled a “blastocyst.” It retains that label until implantation in the uterus, where it is again relabeled to become an “embryo.” Eight weeks, and many cell divisions later, the embryo gets relabeled yet again, and is called a “fetus.” If all goes well, after about a nine-month period of fetal growth, a healthy human baby is born and finally receives an individualized moniker like “Jonathan” or “Marianne.”
With in vitro fertilization (IVF) the traditional labeling becomes obscured. Egg and sperm cells are “harvested” and then united outside of the human body. The fertilized egg is lab-nurtured and surgically implanted directly into the uterus. It makes no journey down the fallopian tube, so there is no “blastocyst” stage to label. Perhaps because growth occurs in a Petri dish rather than in a fallopian tube, the “zygote” label is also dropped and the “embryo” tag is commonly applied as soon as egg and sperm cells are united. When it all occurs within the human body, the process is continuous and the stage labels simply offer convenient developmental markers. When the process begins in the lab, it might not be continuous; extra embryos may be formed and cryogenically frozen for back-up or future use. The frozen embryos may be kept in that suspended state for months or even years.
Procreation sentiment can be morally complicated and controversial: When do cells, zygotes, blastocysts, embryos, or fetuses become human beings? The cells are alive from the very beginning, and they are human cells, so does that make a cell or an assemblage of cells a human being? A fertilized human egg certainly has the capacity to grow, develop, and become recognized as a human being, but is it irrefutably a human being when still just one cell, or two cells, or four cells? It’s complicated; it’s a controversial issue over which many people earnestly disagree.
The Alabama Supreme Court tried to “uncomplicate” a complicated issue when it authoritatively ruled that all human embryos are children. To bolster its authority in the matter, chief justice Tom Parker cited God’s word, or at least his interpretation of previously interpreted translations of some pragmatically chosen words commonly attributed to God. He’s a judge, a Christian judge, so many Christians and perhaps even some nonsectarians might assume his interpretation to be correct, or the faithful and learned judge wouldn’t have interpreted it that way. Perhaps the faithful and non-faithful alike should be thankful for the judge’s judicial insight and his willingness to guide us all to the correct meaning of God’s conveyance. Really though, what else could the words mean? When God says (Jeremiah 1:5) “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations,” God is obviously not just citing his omniscience; he is clearly stating that embryos are children – it’s right there between the lines.
So, thanks to the perceptive judge, it was uncomplicated for at least a few days: the court’s ruling made it clear; embryos don’t become human beings, they are human beings from the very first moment of conception (just as God so clearly and unequivocally informs us through his prophet Jeremiah). Pro-Choice advocates were thus put on notice: every abortive procedure, no matter how early, must come to be seen as an act of murder because every human embryo is a human child. Logically, the ruling’s impact could not be limited to just surgically abortive procedures; it must also apply to birth control measures that prevent the implantation of an embryo, and then of course to IVF procedures that produce extra embryos stored (at least temporarily) for future use. Doctors and staff at IVF clinics suddenly found themselves in a dangerous predicament: continuation of normal medical practice might conceivably result in discarded or irreparably damaged embryos, so IVF personnel could henceforth be charged with malpractice and/or murder.
It was a severe, but uncomplicated ruling, and then it got complicated again. Alabama’s Republican Governor and its Republican legislature realized that the consequence of the Supreme Court’s ruling wasn’t confined to just degenerate Pro-Choice advocates; many of their own Republican and Pro-Life voters also utilize birth control measures and favor accessibility to IVF treatments. They surely didn’t want to alienate that part of their constituency. But they also didn’t want to alienate their most righteous Pro-life constituents that would likely be firmly supportive of the court’s “embryos are children” ruling. So, Alabama’s governor and its legislature chose a course of action that would hopefully keep all their constituents in the fold. To that end, Justice Tom Parker’s interpretation of God’s word would not be assailed. Going forward, Alabama would continue to criminalize and prosecute abortive acts, because embryos are children and children must be protected. But in IVF settings, Alabama would assume the “three wise monkeys” position (see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil) and hold that nothing regarding clinical embryonic treatment appeared to be amiss. In blissful concurrence, Governor Kay Ivey signed a bill that will “provide civil and criminal immunity for death or damage to an embryo to any individual or entity when providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization.”
It really is complicated, isn’t it? In one setting, the state will hold that discarding an embryo is murderous and subject to criminal prosecution (with a penalty of up to 99 years in jail), but in another setting, the state will hold that discarding an embryo, while it might be murderous, will not be seen as murderous, and therefore not subject to criminal or civil prosecution.
Alabama’s legislative initiative and the governor’s signature adroitly addressed a court’s ruling that could have held negative political consequences for their Republican Party. Their quick reaction to the court’s decision averted that outcome, but also provided a behind-the-curtain reveal: no one really believes that embryos are actual living children. The Alabama legislative body doesn’t believe it, Governor Kay Ivey doesn’t believe it, and chief justice Tom Parker doesn’t believe it. They all certainly want to appear as if they believe it, and as an abstract argumentative position, they fervently avow that they believe it, but in the real world of physical reality, they don’t actually live like they believe it. They don’t truly believe that embryos are real children, and it’s likely that neither do most of the Pro-Life advocates who avidly say that they do.
If the Alabama legislators actually believed that embryos are real children, would they so nonchalantly have legalized the possible mutilation and murder of children at IVF clinics? If Governor Ivey truly believed that a proposed bill would legalize the culling and killing of real children, would she so eagerly have signed it? If Judge Parker truly believed that real children were being discarded (killed) in IVF clinics, would he then have been able to sit back after announcing his ruling and calmly watch it continue? If ardent Evangelical Pro-Life proponents actually believed that embryos are real children and a gift from God, wouldn’t there be thousands now stepping forward with available wombs to warm and rescue the frozen children held captive in IVF clinics?
“Embryos are children,” offers a definitive stance in Pro-Life/Pro-Choice debate. It’s meant to stifle any consideration that a transformative process might be involved in becoming a human being. Recent events in Alabama show the stance to be a pragmatic linguistic cudgel rather than a truly held actionable belief. “Embryos are children,” is figuratively accepted by those who espouse it, but literally applied to those who don’t. It thus allows for a “three wise monkeys” allowance towards those discarding an embryo in one setting while calling for a 99-year prison sentence for those doing the same thing in another. The allowance is acceptable because the avowal of belief is real, but the belief itself is not.FacebookTwitterReddit
Vern Loomis lives in the Detroit area and occasionally likes to comment on news and events that interest him in whatever capacity available. Besides Dissident Voice, his other musings can be found at Transcend Media Service, ZNetwork, CounterPunch, The Humanist, and The Apathetic Agnostic. Read other articles by Vern.
Rethinking Liberalism and Fascism
by Yanis Iqbal / March 19th, 2024
Liberalism thinks of fascism as the domination of extremist precision, the suppression of some creative vitality. The deliberative character of parliamentary democracy – the inconclusiveness of dialogue – is contrasted with the absolutist closure of fascism. What if we reversed the liberal value judgement regarding fascism? What if fascism consisted not of dogmatic fixity and sharp lines but of the mesh formed by a kind of democratic openness?
Francis Bacon, “Landscape with Pope/Dictator,” 1946
Francis Bacon’s “Landscape with Pope/Dictator” can be of help in such rethinking. The face of the pope/dictator is blurred – it is a smudged brown shape held together by the centrality of the mouth. The mouth is the intermediary of fascist demagogy. Parliamentary liberals foreground the mouth as the democratic source of “voice,” as the harmonious stream of sound that never stops contributing to the richness of the political fabric. Fascism also foregrounds the mouth, but no longer as the source of a creative voice but as the organ of commanding speech, so much so that the mouth comes to define the face itself. Bacon exaggerates the liberal logic of creative vocality by dissolving the stable face of democrats into a disfigured container for the mouth. The shape of the face – this is what allows liberalism to join together the discordant, divisive polyvocality of class struggle into the seamlessness of the parliament. Fascism merely extends the liberal logic by freeing the vitalism of the mouth from the bounds of the face. This shows that the creative openness of liberal democracy functions as a hegemonic project built through the forced integration of social fractals. The reality of class divisions is buried beneath the integrationism of the democratic voice, which demands peaceful dialogue instead of militant struggle. Fascism completes this agenda – any pretense of an actual dialogue among distinct persons is thrown away as the differentness of faces is submerged in the oceanic force of the mouth. Communism, on the other hand, stages the eruption of differences, namely the primary difference of classes. It shatters all images of faux wholeness in the intensity of hostile struggle.
The pope/dictator has hazy hands. In the present-day liberal-capitalist architecture, hands are the nodes unifying citizen-individuals. Oneness courses through the hands. The hand may not be used for throwing Molotov cocktails against the government. It is best preserved within the procedures of electoral legitimacy. Thus, hands merge, dissolving into the general will of the nation. The hazy hands of the fascist reveal the truth of liberal unity: the indisctinctness of hands reduces it to the flowness of the body, the body that is directed towards the metallic protuberance of the mic. The mic functions as a nucleus for the fascist spectacle: it sucks out and concentrates the fluid vitality of the fascist body into the amplified sound that pervades the ears of the audience. The liberal paradigm of individual freedom – the flexibility and openness of the individual – turns into its seeming opposite: the frozenness of the mic. However, there is no opposition here. Liberalism already contains the architecture of imaginary unity found in fascism. The mic of the fascist leader merely foregrounds the regressive foundation of liberal democracy: the bourgeois-democratic suppression of real antagonisms under the pretense of dialogue is bound to lead to the fascist behemoth whose certitude of absolute comprehensiveness unleashes violence against the Other.
Bacon paints flowers beneath the podium where the pope/dictator is speaking. Liberal political theory considers nature as the site of dynamism, as the domain in which force can be observed in its exuberant purity. Nature reflects back to human beings their living potentialities that they are born with. Flowers are a symbol of life’s beauty, the way in which a beneficial order emerges from the free exchange of natural elements. From seeds to flower – this is a journey of beauty that encapsulates the liberal insistence on the value of peaceful coexistence and dialogue. What, then, are flowers doing in a fascist landscape? Bacon’s flowers appear very congruous – their compact groupness resembles hands that are clapping at the dictator’s speech. This, again, brings to the fore the repressed presupposition of liberalism: the beauty of flowers is rooted in the commonality of the soil, the organicist interlinkage of elements with each other. The peaceful poise of the flowers, their growth from the ground of co-existence, positions them in front of the fascist, whose speech they are silently absorbing. When there is too much democratic talk, the end result is silence. The voice of democracy exists within the same frame as the enraptured silence of fascist storm troopers. When the beauty of flowers is all that is visible to the eye, the ugliness of fascism is not far. We have to imagine flowers not in the landscape of peaceful, co-existential synthesis but in the distortedness of their internal assemblage.
Georgia O’Keeffe, “Black Iris,” 1926
“Black Iris” by Georgia O’Keeffe stages this heterodox imaging of the flower. Here, the flower is shown not as part of a scenic landscape but as a magnified collection of different components. The folds and curves of the petals show the manufacturedness of the flower, the labor of undulating intersections that holds it together. When seen closely, the flower reveals itself not as a spontaneous, peaceful synthesis of elements but as the stitch that solders the petals so they don’t fall off. Petals are not just smooth surfaces but specifically shaped materials whose contingent stitch creates crevices, depth, and unevenness. This unevenness is what is needed for a revolutionary politics of class struggle.FacebookTwitterReddit
You’ve read, heard and seen countless stories about supposed Chinese interference in Canada, but how many times has the dominant media mentioned Canadian subversion in other countries?
Don’t believe that Canada does that? Here are a few examples of Canada contributing to leading international stories:
Last Friday former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH) was convicted of drug charges by a jury in New York. Pursued by the Southern District of New York against the wishes of US diplomats, the case documented JOH’s role in a murderous criminal enterprise that began under his predecessor. JOH became president after Ottawa tacitly supported the military’s removal of the social democratic president Manuel Zelaya. Before his 2009 ouster Canadian officials criticized Zelaya and afterwards condemned his attempts to return to the country. Failing to suspend its military training program with Honduras, Canada was also the only major donor to Honduras—the largest recipient of Canadian assistance in Central America—that failed to announce it would sever aid to the military government. Six months later Ottawa endorsed an electoral farce and JOH’s subsequent election marred by substantial human rights violations. JOH then defied the Honduran constitution to run for a second term, which Canada backed.
There’s also a direct line between the 2014 Canadian-backed coup in Ukraine and Russia’s devastating invasion. As Owen Schalk and I detail in Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy, Ottawa played a significant role in destabilizing Victor Yanukovich and pushing the elected president out. Yanukovich’s ouster propelled Moscow’s seizure of Crimea and a civil war in the east, which Russia massively expanded two years ago.
In an episode symbolic of Canadian influence and interference, Peru’s Prime Minister Alberto Otárola Peñaranda cut short his trip to the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada conference in Toronto last week to resign. Implicated in a love affair/corruption scandal, Peñaranda became prime minister after the December 2022 ouster of elected leftist president Pedro Castillo. Ottawa supported the ‘usurper’ government that suspended civil liberties and deployed troops to the streets. Global Affairs and Canada’s ambassador to Peru Louis Marcotte worked hard to shore up support for the replacement government through a series of diplomatic meetings and statements.
Canada’s intervention to undermine Palestinian democracy has also enabled Israel’s mass slaughter and starvation campaign in Gaza. After Hamas won legislative elections in 2006, Canada was the first country to impose sanctions against the Palestinians. Ottawa’s aid cut-off and refusal to recognize a Palestinian unity government was designed to sow division within Palestinian society. It helped spur fighting between Hamas and Fatah. When Hamas took control of Gaza, Israel used that to justify its siege of the 360 square kilometre coastal strip and series of deadly campaigns that left 6,000 Palestinians dead before October 7.
While the media reported the above-mentioned stories, they refuse to discuss Ottawa’s negative role. Instead of holding our governments to account and describing Canadian subversion the media sphere focuses on foreign interference by our designated ‘enemies’ that’s had little demonstratable negative impact. In war and politics this is called distraction.
Starting Thursday in Ottawa I’ll be speaking on Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy in Ottawa, Waterloo, Hamilton and Toronto. The information is here.
After briefly reviewing the theories of the relationship between religion and nationalism, I find the theories of Anthony Smith, George Mosse and Adrian Hutchinson the most compelling. They all agree that religion provides the propagandistic foundation for nationalism. But I also claim that it is a particular kind of religion, monotheism, that is directly connected to nationalism. Animistic tribal societies and Bronze Age agricultural states did not have the same religious paraphernalia as monotheism, and societies like ancient Egypt, Mesopotamian, China and India were never nationalistic.
The second part of my article focuses on how monotheistic beliefs and dramatization have the same parallels in nationalization processes. The categories include the destruction of intermediary institutions, the commitment to expansion and the importance of both origins and future destiny in history as opposed to mythology. In both nationalism and monotheism founders are mythologized. Both nationalism and monotheism use the arts (painting, music and literature) for altering states of consciousness.
Coming Attractions
In this article we will be discussing the social-psychological and psychological techniques by which both monotheism and nationalism promote loyalty. These include means of transmission (writing as opposed to oral), how social time (holidays) is marked throughout the year as well as individual time (rites of passage). We find that marking geography (territory and cityscapes) is crucial to both monotheism and nationalism. Each demands self-sacrifice, either as religious martyrs or soldiers. Each requires a conversion process. Membership is usually lifetime. Each has processes of exclusion and its members are purified through wars. Membership is sustained over time through fear of being exiled.
Next, I show that both nationalism and monotheism support individualism (as opposed to collectivism) for different reasons. I provide six reasons why each supports individualism. Lastly, I provide two qualifications. First, I pose the question of why the monotheistic religion of Islam is not included. After all, Islam began as a world religion hundreds of years before the rise of nation-states. It would seem to have had plenty of time to connect to the emergence of nation-states around the world. Why didn’t it? Secondly, in the 21st century we have a nation-state that is very powerful (India) that is founded on Hinduism, a polytheistic rather than a monotheistic religion. How do I explain that?
Marking Time: Special Occasions
The ability to recognize patterns is one of the adaptive skills that allowed the human species to survive in competition with other species. We live most of our everyday lives as problem solvers. But at the same time we need to be socialized to rise, metaphorically, from the ground level and examine long-term patterns to assess where we have been and where we are going.
In pagan traditions, sacred patterns involve the changing of the seasons. In Catholicism they include Christmas day, Easter, Lent, feast days and saints’ days. At the same time, at the micro level, the rites of passage in the life of an individual are linked to spiritual traditions through the sacraments. In Catholicism, the sacraments include baptism at birth, confirmation during adolescence, marriage in adulthood, and the last rites just before death. Further, a Catholic is expected to attend mass at least once a week and to go to confession. Lastly, monotheists – whether Christian, Jew, or Muslim – make pilgrimages. What does this have to do with socialization into nationalism? Like monotheism, nationalism has its special days, including Independence Day, various presidents’ days, Thanksgiving and Memorial Day. There are pilgrimages to Washington, DC and trips to Mount Rushmore all of which support nationalism.
Marking Places: Geographies of Loyalty
Socialization takes place in physical spaces. Pagan societies built mounds and temples to spirits or deities. In caste agricultural civilizations like Egypt and Mesopotamia, physical buildings of monumental proportions made of impenetrable materials had a psychologically intimidating impact that was not lost on those in power. Likewise, Christians, Jews and Muslim elites build churches, synagogues and mosques, not just to pay homage to their deities, but to propagandize the lower classes into following them since they are God’s representatives on earth. Sacred sites are not limited to places of worship. Streets and buildings are named after saints. In the case of nationalism, we have gargantuan state buildings in Washington, streets named after presidents, and monuments at Bunker Hill, the Statue of Liberty, Plymouth Rock, and Mount Rushmore.
Creating Atmosphere: Literature and Painting
For most “people of the book,” hearing stories from sacred texts like the Bible or the Koran begins at a very young age. This upbringing is strengthened by studying, as with learning the Catholic catechism in grammar school or preparing to read an excerpt from the Old Testament as part of a Jewish bar or bat mitzvah. The most logical parallel to nationalism would be reading or even memorizing the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. However, since this is rarely done, a very important source of nationalistic literature is novels about the American West.
Animistic hunting and gathering societies used cave paintings, amulets and totems) long before monotheists to socialize (Lewis-Williams, 2002) their members. In the case of Catholicism in the 17th century, baroque paintings were epically dramatized to overwhelm the population with monumental scale. Furthermore, music has perhaps been the most compelling of the arts in creating an immediate emotional reaction. Hymns such as “Amazing Grace”help the faithful sing their way into submission.
Nationalist socialization may come about when the population is being exposed to patriotic paintings such as Washington Crossing the Delaware. Music such as the “Star-Spangled Banner”, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”, and “God Bless America” are bound to rouse even the most reluctant patriot.
Social Action: Fulfilling Destiny Through Sacrifice
As we have seen, both monotheism and nationalism must use the past in order to justify the present. However, each must also organize in the present by referring to the future. This is done through the expectation of sacrifice of the participants to life itself.
According to Smith, the painting The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, Jacques-Louis David chose the moment when an anguished Brutus, returning home after the execution of his own sons, hears the cries of his wife and the swooning of his eldest daughter as the bodies of his sons are brought to his house. Having driven out the Tarquin and helping to institute the Republic, Brutus was elected consul in 508 BCE only to discover a monarchial plot fostered by his wife’s family and supported by his two sons. He saw it as his duty to suppress all enemies of the republic, including his own sons.
In 1778 Johann Heinrich Füssli was commissioned by the Zurich council to paint Oath on the Rütli, the cornerstone of Swiss unity and independence. This painting depicts three towering figures who represent the three original forest cantons swearing “an oath of everlasting alliance in the Rütli meadow”. Smith argues that it expresses defiance, struggle, unification, and sacrifice for freedom. In its thrusting defiant male figures embody the ideal of willingness to die for the freedom of the nation.
About a century later, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s painting Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII also conveys the ideal of self-sacrifice as struggle in the service of a higher cause. In 1770 Benjamin West painted The Death of General Wolfe, an epic depiction of the British general who was mortally wounded at the height of victory over the French in Quebec in 1759.
Lastly, Smith points out that during the French Revolution:
On the occasion of Marat’s murder in July 1793, art and ritual proceeded hand in hand. Marat’s friend David was immediately urged by the assembly to paint his portrait. Marat’s assassination shows with great veracity the ‘Friend of the People’ dying in his bathtub, with a Christ-like wound in his right lung…
David also had to supervise the lying in state and funeral of his friend. Marat’s corpse was exhibited on a high dais in the Cordeliers Church, above the bath and the packing case, with a smoking incense burner as the only light. The funeral…which lasted six hours took place to the accompaniment of muffled drum-beat and cannon… Girls in white with branches of cypress surrounded it, and they were followed by the entire Convention, the municipal authorities and the people of Paris. (Smith, 237)
These examples show how the political religion of nationalism draws upon Catholic traditions and uses them for national ends in order to evoke a sense of sacred communion with the glorious dead.
Sacrifice Choreographed in Festivals, Monuments and Song
The Napoleonic Wars were a catalyst for the process of cementing a sense of national identity not just among the French but for those societies under attack. French nationalism was answered by a growing German nationalism, which was at first cultural but soon became politicized with the Prussian defeat at the Battle of Jena in 1806. The War of Liberation of 1813 and the return of aristocratic regimes after Napoleon’s defeat stimulated collective expressions of national sentiment in the form of festivals and monuments.
Smith informs us that in 1832 the Germans held their first mass festival in the same alleged place where the ancient German tribes had held their meetings. There was a procession to the ruins of the castle ruins in which patriotic songs were sung and people wore ancient German dress. The later 19th century saw greater efforts to invite people into the sacred communion of the nation through mass celebrations. This began with the songs of the volunteers for the armies of the French Revolution.
Dancing and Military Drills
Sustaining nationalist and religious loyalties is not just about getting lost in mystical symbols and myths or engaging in altruistic actions. Building political loyalty to a nation or a religion also involves acting collectively in a very structured way. In his very provocative book, Keeping Together in Time, William McNeill argues that building community involves “muscular bonding”: community dancing, communal work, singing, religious rituals and military drills. In community dancing, moving and singing together tends to dissolve group tensions, reminding community members that they have more in common than they have differences. In the area of work, singing and moving together makes otherwise boring work more creative. The great large-scale architectural projects of ancient civilizations could never have been built without workers singing and moving in sync. McNeill points out that the rise of religious dervish orders at the beginning of the 11th century was so powerful in altering states of consciousness that they came close to being declared heretical.
In addition, McNeill argues that militarymuscular bonding, specifically close-order drilling, creates altered states. In his book The Pursuit of Power, McNeill concluded that the victory of European armies over non-European armies was largely due to well-drilled troops who were more efficient in battle. Soldiers moved in unison while performing each of the actions needed to load, aim, and fire their guns. The volleys came faster and misfires were fewer when everyone acted in unison and kept time to shouted commands. The result was more ammunition projected at the enemy in less time.
However, it was not only the superiority of weapons or efficiency in using them that made Europeans victorious. Drilled troops created deep social-psychological altered states. McNeill suggests that many veterans report that group effort in battle was the high point of their lives. Just like the boundary loss of whirling dervishes, the individual merges with the platoon.
By inadvertently tapping the inherent human emotional response to keeping together in time, military drills helped create obedient, reliable, and effective soldiers with a spirit that not only superseded previous identities – ethnicity, region, religion – but also insulated them from outside attachments. Soldiers could be counted on to obey their officers predictably even when fighting hundreds or thousands of miles away from their home base.
McNeill describes witnessing soldiers marching in step as both awe inspiring and terrifying. No twitches, twists, mutterings nor distractions could be seen or heard in the ranks. On the one hand, soldiers were perfectly composed, calm and moving to music. But on the other hand, they were completely poised to destroy human life or be destroyed by it.
For most of human history, the ruling classes understandably had reservations with arming the lower classes for fear they might recognize their class interests. However, the group experience of altered states that resulted from prolonged drills made soldiers loyal and devoted far beyond any class loyalties. In the 17th century, for poverty-stricken peasant recruits and jobless urbanites recruited from the fringes of an increasingly atomized, commercialized society, the military created a new artificial primary community, providing camaraderie that prevailed in good times and bad, where old-fashioned principles of command and subordination gave meaning and direction to life. It became safe to arm even the poorest classes, pay them a regular wage and expect obedience. In a time of domestic conflict, European soldiers were even willing to fire upon their own social class.
Before the drill, in the standing army of kings, obedience was extracted through fear of punishment. But the coming of the drill created a lively spirit between soldiers that was less prevalent than before. Now, instead of standing armies of subjects to a king, the citizens’ army shared the collective emotional identity of the nation. For soldiers who received regular pay, there was a good reason to not break ranks.
It would be an overstatement to say that drilling caused nationalism. The military revolution occurred hundreds of years before the rise of nationalism, which I said came about at the end of the 18th century. But there is no question that military drills helped sustain nationalism once it appeared. Other military formations such as the cavalry couldn’t create such a solidarity among those fighting.
Conversion and Exile
The last part of socialization to nationalism is the unusual time when a person either joins through conversion or departs in an imposed or self-imposed exile. Typical examples of conversion for monotheists are the moment when Moses was on Mount Sinai or when Saint Paul was on the road to Damascus. The Great Awakenings in the United States in 1725 and 1780, though starting out as Protestant religious revivals, had nationalist implications, according to Wilbur Zelinsky (1988). A nationalist counterpart of conversion is the indoctrination immigrants or refugees receive upon becoming U.S. citizens.
Neither monotheists nor nationalists tolerate rejection lightly. For both, membership is expected to be lifetime. For national states, registration at birth and death is compulsory. What becomes of people who decide to leave? In the case of Catholicism, there is excommunication. In all monotheistic religions, there are attacks for such deviations as apostasy, heresy, blasphemy, inquisitions and witch hunts. Nonbelievers are attacked in religious wars as godless atheists. So too, in nationalism, expatriates are feared, ostracized and shunned. They are considered unworthy, traitorous or treasonous. In the case of political opposition, such people become the targets of CIA spying and assassination attempts. As for countries that oppose the nationalist vision, they are subject to state terror, world wars and torture. Please see my summary table at the end of this article.
Monotheism, Nationalism and Individualism
Both monotheism and nationalism support individualism in the following ways:
Each focuses the attention of the individual on a singlesource of loyalty in the objective world: in the case of nationalism it is the nation, and in the case of monotheism it is a single deity.
Each marginalizes and undermines intermediate loyalties between the individual and the single, ultimate source. In the case of monotheism, it is earth spirits, ancestor spirits, totems or gods and goddesses. Similarly, nationalism demands that citizens subordinate regional, class, ethnic and even religious loyalties in favor of the state. The individual must have one and only one loyalty: the state. So with religion, the second commandment of the Bible reads, “I am the Lord Thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me”. This not only applies to religion, but also holds as an expectation that the state demands of its citizens. Both nationalism and monotheism are large-scale emulsifiers that hold together and paper over class or religious conflicts, which monotheists and nationalists tell us will grow and spread otherwise.
Each replaces customs and community traditions with written laws. In the case of nationalism, it is the constitution; in the case of monotheism, it is the sacred text of the Bible or the Koran.
The relationship between the individual and the nation or the religion is presented as a freely chosen association or a covenant. In the case of monotheism, individuals are proclaimed to have free will, with the choice for whether to obey God. In the case of the nation, individuals are free to renounce their citizenship and go elsewhere.
Each binds strangers together as opposed to kin groups, clans or neighborhoods.
Both have extremely violent ideologies. Monotheism has been responsible for more deaths than any other group membership. After the military revolution in the 17th century, nationalistic wars at the end of the 19th century (and, of course, the 20th century) show that the state has been at least as violent.
I hope to have shown that it is a mistake to think of individualism as either anti-social or a withdrawal from social relations. Individualism does mean a weakening of particular kinds of loyalties: kin group, village, regional or estate. But it also means a connection with a de-sensualized community, made possible by the printing press and newspapers.
While the forces of modernization may have weakenedreligious beliefs, the doctrines, myths, rituals, and entire architecture of religion (specifically monotheism) were reorganized and used in the name of a secular political religion: nationalism. Beginning in the 19th century, individualists were expected to renounce loyalty to class, ethnicity, and region – not so they could be “free as a bird,” but also to become bound to a new secular community of strangers serving the state. Citizens may gain political rights, but that is far from the end of the story. The socialization into nationalism has been an enormously successful project of the 19th-century ruling classes. Individualists were mobilized to fight and die in wars to prove their patriotism. The reality is now that stateless individuals are not allowed to exist anywhere in the world.
Please see my table at the end of this article.
Qualifications: What About the Place of Islam in Nationalism?
It might have crossed your mind that I did not include Islam in my monotheistic roots of nationalism comparisons. Certainly, Islam is monotheistic. Furthermore, when we look at Islamic fundamentalism, it would seem that surely there is fanatical nationalism at work. But a closer look shows that Islam has a similar internationalism as the Catholics. Being fanatical about your religion so that you will kill and die for it is not necessarily nationalism. Why did Islam not develop a nationalism the way the Jews and the Christians did: There are at least the following reasons:
Western nationalism was inseparable from the development of industry.While Islam went through a “merchant capital” phase of capitalism, they never initiated an industrialization process that capitalism did in the West. Industrialization is very important in pulverizing intermediate loyalties which is crucial to the emergence of nationalism.
Nationalism in the West was not built by one country at a time. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 created a system of states that became the foundation for nationalism at the end of the 18th century. There was no system of states that existed in West Asia at the time. Predominantly what existed were sprawling tribes, kingdoms or empires, not nation-states.
In the 19th and 20th century, Islam has become a religion of the oppressed. European nation-states were not fighting against imperialism when they arose in England, France, the United States and Holland. Their development was not shackled by fighting defensive wars. West Asian nationalism could not develop autonomously, but as a reaction to being colonized
Qualification: What About the Presence of a Polytheistic Nationalism in India?
It would seem that when we look at the nation-state of India today, it would constitute a clear exception to my argument that only monotheism develops nationalism. Here we have the polytheistic religion of Hinduism as the guiding religion of Modi’s India. How can this be?
The title of my article is the monotheistic roots of nationalism. As we know, the origin of anything (monotheism) does not guarantee destiny (what something becomes in the future). New processes can take place later in time which are independent of their origin. My two previous articles on nationalism only went as far as the beginning of World War I. The events in the 20th century that went beyond the monotheistic roots of nationalism were two World Wars, a depression, fascism and national liberation movements especially after World War II.
In Europe as far back as the Middle Ages there were other political formations long before there were nation-states. There were tribes, city-states, federations, principalities, provinces, kingdoms and empires. With the exception of some empires, all these formations were decentralized. These forms of political organizations continued to exist all over the world even after nation-states emerged. But the effect of political mobilization first in World War I and then World War II, pulverized these earlier formations. The Ottoman and Hapsburg empires did not survive World Wars. Tribes, federations and city-states were too weak to survive two world wars and became hammered into nation-states. It is no accident that at the end of World War I, the new global mediator was the League of Nations not the League of provinces, kingdom or empires. After World War II it was the United Nations that was promoted. After that it is very difficult to have any political standing in world politics without being organized into a nation-state.
In the case of India, revolutionaries had to build up and centralize their states if they were to fight the British. They succeeded. After World War II Indian religions continued to compete – Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism to name three. As India (as many nations in the 20th century) turned politically to the right over the last thirty years it needed a religious justification for its shift. Hinduism, as the oldest Indian religion, was championed. So, in the case of India, Hinduism did not help to form nationalism as Western monotheism helped nationalism. It was a reaction after a political nationalism that had already formed.
Something similar happened in the African liberation movements after World War II. African centralized states had to form in order for those revolutionaries to overthrow the colonizers. This has not been easy for those states as tribal and ethic loyalties in parts of Africa were fierce. Islam proved to be a better unifying force as a world religion than various decentralized pagan magical traditions. In the case of Africa Islam, though itself not a religion that helped nation-states to form prior to the 20th century, became one. Again, we have the case of a religion not being the cause of nationalism but a secondary reaction.
Commonalities Between Monotheism and Nationalism in the Socialization Process From Birth to Death
Monotheism (Judeo-Christian)
Category of Comparison
Nationalism (United States)
Written Scriptures (Bible) interpreted by priests or rabbis
Means of Transmission
Written Constitutions interpreted by courts (judges)
Special occasions throughout the year: Christmas day, Easter, Lent, feast days, saints days
Marking Social time
Special occasions throughout the year: Independence Day, President’s Day, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day
Rites of passage: Baptism, confirmation, marriage, anointing of the sick and last rites
Marking Individual Time
Rites of passage: Cub scouts, boy scouts, girl scouts, draft registration
Sunday school, private religious schools
Educational Training
Public school civics classes on American government and history
Detached from territory: Cosmopolitan (early prophets) Attached to Territory: Promised land, Zionists-Palestine, Christians-Bethlehem
Marking Geography (territory)
Attached to territory: (Promised land) Swiss Alps, U.S. Western frontier
Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, Vatican, streets named after saints, religious statues
Marking geography (urban landmarks)
Federal and state buildings, Streets named after presidents, Monuments: Bunker Hill, Statue of Liberty, Plymouth Rock. Mount Rushmore
Pilgrimages to Mecca, Jerusalem, Bethlehem
Marking Geography (movement)
Pilgrimages to Washington DC
Sacrifice self (religious martyrs)
Sacrifice
Sacrifice of self in patriotic wars (Tomb of Unknown Soldier)
Community dancing rituals
Collective Bodily Orchestration
Military drills
Moses on Mount Sinai, St. Paul on the road to Damascus
Conversion
Great Awakening in America (1725), Second Great Awakening (1780), Naturalization ceremony with immigrants and refugees receiving citizenship rights
To be free every individual must belong to a religion (no pagans or atheists)
Loyalty and Exclusivity
To be free, every individual must belong to a nation (no nationless individuals)
Religious wars
Attitude Towards Nonbelievers
State-to-state wars
Usually lifetime
Length of Membership
State membership usually lifelong (compulsory registration of birth, death)
Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.
