From the title we are at the heart of the subject. Because God, for
believers, their priests, churches and communities is above human law.And for religious radicalisms everything must bend before his
commandments: obedience and blind trust, gendered multiplication of
prohibitions, standardized and controlled religious practices,
reorganization and in-depth control of collective and individual life.
Added to this is a fierce, methodical and exterminating struggle against
the "Others" to be subjugated or destroyed: secularists and atheists
massacred by extremist groups in Bangladesh and India; Yazidis and
Christians by the Islamic State in Iraq, Afghan Shiites massacred by the
Taliban, then by the Islamic State; Christians sentenced to death in
Pakistan, imprisoned in India but also victims of violence by Jewish
extremists in Jerusalem; Muslims marginalized, repressed and killed by
the Indian government...
And, we must not forget the fate systematically reserved for half of the
populations of these countries. Women are the permanent targets of the
masculine and bigoted order (in power or not) and to whom we grant at
best only a status of subordinates, forced into marriage, raped,
exploited and subjected for life. For serious offenses against religious
and patriarchal absolutism torture, rape, assassinations and public
executions are the norm. For sexual minorities it is at best exile or
prison and at worst death.
The subtitle reminds us that to understand these new religious
extremisms in their entirety and unity, we must avoid the Western
magnifying glass effect that reduces (for political and ideological
reasons) religious radicalisms to a single one, the Muslim, while they
are deployed on all continents and in all religions. The murderous and
terrorist action of these politico-religious systems is deployed on all
continents with a marked renewal since the seventies and the fall of the
"socialist bloc": Jewish fascist-religious; soldiers of God of American
evangelicalism; Anglo-Saxon Christian Zionists whose interest in Israel
is based as much on their anti-Semitism as on their messianic delusions
of the end of times; Buddhist powers, ethnic cleansers and massacrers in
Burma and Sri Lanka...
Whether they are in power or in a position of power in dictatorial or
democratic systems (Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, Brazil, Lebanon, United
States, etc.) and producers of imperialist projects (United States,
Israel, Iran, etc.) or in frontal opposition to the established order
(diverse and varied jihadist groups in Africa and Asia); whether they
have a universal vocation (Christians and Muslims) or localized
(Hinduism and Buddhism), all these movements "are drawing a new
geopolitics and underpinning many violent crises.»
Conesa analyzes finely with the help of numerous historical and
political facts the deep unity linking all these violently antagonistic
movements:
Refusal of scientific revolutions especially Darwinian for the three
monotheisms,
Observation of the "failure of Western ideologies" (democracy, fascism,
communism) and their disqualification due to the "double standards"
systematically put in place to the detriment of colonized peoples.
Implementation of "theories of radicalization" in the 19th and 20th
centuries (United States, Muslim world, India...) in the name of the
survival and purification of the community of true believers. They are
based on the need to return to the sacred text(s), reinterpreted in the
most literal way possible, to glorify a past without internal
contradictions, to exalt a martyrology based on a selection of the
sufferings inflicted by groups always outside the community (this is the
role assigned to Western colonialism but among the fascists of the Hindu
BJP the reminder of the countless massacres committed by the Muslim
Mongol conquerors of India),
Fabrication of a collective identity excluding all others, justifying
sanctified and purifying violence,
Establishment of a new religious internationalism mixing diplomacy and
proselytism: Catholic ((John Paul II), Protestant (explosion of
evangelical and Pentecostal sects in Africa and Latin America with their
close links to the military and apprentice dictators (cf Bolsonaro in
Brazil and Ortega in Nicaragua) or Muslim (religious diplomacy Saudi and
Turkish). This new internationalism of obscurantism is also deployed
within political-theocratic groups outside power: Muslim Brotherhood,
various jihadisms, Tabligh... desire to politically and religiously
control their diasporas throughout the world in order to transform them
either into relays of the international policy of the mother country or
into a source of funding for the legitimate parties of the mother
country. This is the case of the BJP and its fascist parent company the
Hindu RSS. All of this is managed via the internet, which makes it
possible to create and maintain at little cost idealized and distant
"imaginary communities". "Sanctifying violence" is at the heart of these
systems. Because, if there is one fable to denounce, it is that of the
religions of Love and Peace. The non-violence of the Dalai Lama is very
recent, he who comes from the worst feudal and religious state of the
Himalayas: incessant wars between monasteries, frenzied exploitation of
peasants by monks, massacres of reformers in the thirties...
The violence of jihadist groups thus strikes 90% of Muslims, because the
Other to be destroyed is "in order, it is the atheist, the unbeliever
but also and above all the practitioners of the same religion who do not
satisfy these self-proclaimed standards..."
Each of these murderous ideologies has its version of the "Great
Replacement" which permanently threatens religious unity, of the people
and of the territory whether it is called Ummah, Christianity, Buddhist
Sangha or Hindu Sang Parivar. Ethnic cleansing is the norm: the BJP and
Hindu governments play the religious card to justify the Hindu
recolonization of Muslim areas in Assam and strip the Muslim refugees of
their nationality from the 1971 conflict that gave birth to Bangladesh.
Burma is not far behind with the refusal of the military supported by
the Buddhist hierarchy to grant birth certificates to Rohingya children
since 1982 (which makes them non-citizens), a prelude to the massacres
of 2017.
Laws against blasphemy: In 2017 "71 countries had a law against
blasphemy... 21.5% in the Middle East and North Africa, 22.5% in Europe,
15.5% in sub-Saharan Africa and 11.2% on the American continent". The
penalties range from the death penalty (Iran, Pakistan, Mauritania), to
forced labor (Russia), to imprisonment (Algeria, Austria, Brazil,
Switzerland, etc.). In Saudi Arabia, atheists and converts are subject
to the death penalty for "terrorism".
In short, a book to read because on the one hand, it forces us to take
into account an essential element of anarchist criticism, that of
religious oppression in its new forms, and on the other hand it
encourages us to conduct a critical reflection on the questions it poses
or touches on to fuel the struggles for emancipation here and elsewhere:
the weight of religion on politics, the determining role or not of
economic factors in the rise of radicalism, the justification of the
frenzied exploitation of humans and nature because it is God who wills
it, the validity of the concept of the religion of the oppressed
conveyed by Anglo-Saxon Trotskyists and post-modernists, etc.
Eugene the Jeep
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4271
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