My Holy War
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Reason has been lost. We're not living now within a rational political context at all; the ways in which arguments are advanced are not by means of reason; they're questions of faith. And if you question that faith you're seen as being effectively an atheist. Running through the whole of the book is an argument, I hope, that rationalism has a place and so does realism, and that we're living under a faith-based administration that's dangerously fundamentalist and religiose in its own right, even as we're fighting an enemy that's fundamentalist and religiose in its own right.
MJ: Right. So realism matters. Reality matters. And knowledge matters. But, as you argue quite vigorously, the US went into Iraq without troubling to learn about the lands we were invading.
JR: Absolutely. It was astonishing to hear Iraq spoken of with almost no comprehension whatsoever of the social, the religious, the ethnic, the tribal divisions. Iraq is a series of cracks, it always has been; the British wanted it that way. They deliberately bound it together as a sort of impossible object, just as Syria was bound together on the same principle by the French, because it made the minority government of the Sunnis, which the British installed, totally dependent on the British, because without British arms the whole thing would have been unenforceable. What the British needed was tame puppet rulers who were dependent on the colonial power for the effective running of the state—the state that never should have been a state.
MJ: So when Wolfowitz, for instance used to talk about respecting "Iraq's territorial integrity"…
JR: Oh yes, I love "territorial integrity." Iraq has about as much territorial integrity as, I don't know, a pair of trousers, a banana, and a bicycle.
MJ: Back to religion. In the title essay, "My Holy War," you write of your adolescent struggles, as an militant atheist, with your clergyman father, and you link that to the "hunger for the battlefield" that seizes young radicalized Muslims. What's the connection?
JR: I come from just about the longest line of Anglican clergymen in history, in England, and mine is the first generation in which there isn't one in the family, and certainly the first in which there aren't believers. I'm the oldest of four sons. I fought the great adolescent battles against my father and his dog collar and his religious beliefs, and I have to say I don't think my position has changed terribly much since I was thirteen, when it occurred to me that God and Santa Claus were pretty much the same person. I just remember that the fury of both me and my father, and in a sense the anger of the jihadis reminds me of the time when I, in my adolescent way, also had the lock on truth and wanted to shoot down the world represented by my father. And I think both in their anti-colonialism and also that terrifying sense of having the lock on holy truth—or in my case unholy truth—there is something one can find in one's own history, one's own life experience, something that's not wholly alien to what drove the 9/11 hijackers and what drove the 7/7 bombers in London.
MJ: You write in that same essay that, from your vantage point as an adolescent in the 1950s in England, "the idea that any religion would have sufficient power left in it to fuel a twenty-first-century war would have struck me as grotesque." And yet, here we are in a new era of "religious ferocity."
JR: Like everybody I knew, I saw that the age of sanity was about to dawn. Nobody would believe in God anymore. And there was this idea that religion was the opiate of the masses, and the more people watched the news on TV, the more education they got, then of course they'd drop their old superstitious beliefs as these sort of village things that they'd outgrown. Well, we couldn’t have been more wrong. And it's very interesting that the assumption, which is often made by sociologists, that with increasing wealth and possessions, that in a capitalist society people will have less and less reason to go to church. Well, America marvelously disproves that theory and sends it packing. I mean, this most materialist country on the face of the globe is also the most superstitious country this side of Iran.
Julian Brookes is the editor of MotherJones.com
