I read something similar about America a few months ago. It may have been a NYT op ed, but I can’t remember. When American liberals say that child separation at the border or Abu Ghraib is not who we really are, they are wrong. America is what America does, for good or bad. If we want to make America a place that does not torture prisoners or separate families, we have to work to make it true. Similarly, if we believe Zionism only means that the Jews get a homeland too, we have to fight the fascist Zionists working to recreate the Armenian genocide, but for Palestinians. Unless and until the fascist Zionists are relegated to the dustbin of history, we have no right to claim that Zionism is really not like that. Today, Zionism is what the Zionists running Israel are doing, and it’s genocide.
Talk about serendipity. I just did a long comment on this elsewhere, and some time ago did the same thing on my own Substack. What you have added, and I like, is the tendency of Christian and Jew alike to say they are the only ones who can define the general term being used. Sorry, language doesn't work like that. I do now tend to say "ultra-right Zionists" to avoid the issue, but it still comes up when a student leaves off the "ultra" while actually meaning it, and gets both attacked and dismissed as antisemitic. Neither Christians nor Jews have the right to say THAT without further evidence, much less arrest the person saying the term they think is theirs alone.
I also tend to use Christianist, in back formation from Islamist, because neither "ist" defines the beliefs of the entire religion. Zionist already as an "ist." Perhaps we should start saying Zionismist?
The notion of a group of people getting to have their own dedicated homeland is always going to be problematic if we consider the logistics and the actual real estate involved: there will always be someone else already living there. The statement "Israel has a right to exist" is treated as anodyne and obvious, when it is anything but. While we're at it, the "right" of any state to exist should probably be regarded with skepticism, but that opens up a whole other topic...
I’m trying to figure out if you mean that what you say about Christian applies to Judaism when religious extremists use religion to oppress the Palestinians? Or Islam? Or Hinduism? (Or even Buddhism, surprisingly if one considers the nationalism in Myanmar tied up with Buddhism as it seems to be?) There’s a nationalist ideology, and then a religion is used in the service of nationalism. These things are bound together.
(One can also consider this with empires—all empires used some religion or other as a tool of domination and conquest.)
But if I understand you correctly, I don’t think anyone can deny that religions which become bound up with nationalism, racism, etc. are oppressive. The religion is clearly used as a tool of oppression. It’s simply a fact.
If it’s true that certain religions are tools of oppression perhaps you are correct the dilemma becomes more what we say about the people who don’t want to denounce their religious identity (or believe they cannot denounce their religious identity, as it is too essential) due to the tainted aspect of their religious identity. This I am not so sure about.
While you don’t find it hard to say the people are tainted if they’re Christian—how do you keep this from being generalized to similar cases of other religions used to oppress? I see some issues if membership in the religion that is used for nationalism and oppression disqualifies the individual from moral worth as a member of that very large historically extended group. Then we run the risk of becoming a bigot against the Muslims, or a supremacist about the greatness of European liberal societies free from superstition, or a paternalist with racist overtones who doesn’t respect the religious identity of those one considers ‘oppressed by the Christian religion,’ generally non-white people for certain kinds of atheists. They must be sheep who should be freed from their chains, not autonomous and rational people.
Maybe that’s just the problem of religious tolerance generally.
I also wonder if this problem of historical burdens doesn’t arise for the persistence of people’s commitment to—or at least non-revulsion—to other ideologies that have been used in perniciously unjust ways. The right claims that communism IS Stalinism. A communist automatically wants to do a genocide, and put people in gulags. That’s what communism is. That’s where Marx leads—the gulag—Tom Cotton would say.
Many people, especially scholars, don’t take that seriously because they believe there’s nothing in Marx that inherently leads to the gulag, or to totalitarianism or even authoritarianism necessarily. They might admit there’s some lacunae in Marx that makes authoritarianism possible when it is turned into an ideology that shapes a polity. But often they don’t think that—they just don’t worry about it too much. They go right on studying Marx, and letting him influence their thinking. Few educated people see studying Marx (or Lenin, etc.), and praising what is useful in it, as equivalent to studying Naziism and praising what is useful in that even if people used communism to commit genocide and atrocities. (Also—more bizarrely—Plato’s Republic—in the case of Pol Pot.)
Are they making the same move as the religious person—saying that they hold to a particular doctrine that rejects the views of those holding a doctrine of the same name, as the doctrine was misinterpreted by those people but their version is not pernicious?
I sincerely don’t know the answer to any of these questions.
My gut feel is that it doesn’t take us very far with every single complex cultural/practical/ideological/identity-forming bundle to determine the evil uses of it are ‘the true essence’ of the bundle of beliefs and practices when there are also benign versions that don’t oppress (or are maybe even used to resist oppression, like Gandhi did with Satyagraha). Does the whole bundle —sometimes spanning the Earth, and having millions or billions of adherents—get tagged with whatever has happened in the name of the ideology?
Or maybe there is no ‘true essence’ to a religion. Religions are extremely malleable, have a vast number of uses, and often some of their incarnations are radically different than other of their incarnations. The fact they are so easily altered while being a set of ideas that gives you a conduit right into people’s heads is probably why they are so useful for empire builders and nationalists.
Though you clearly don’t agree with this, maybe there’s an illusion at the heart of religious belief (and even sometimes political belief) that the individual practitioner is someone partaking in some essential substance that they share with the origin story and all the subsequent people who also partook. But sometimes it’s not even like the ship of Theseus where you’re building the same ship with new materials—sometimes the ships aren’t like each other very much at all. People aren’t keeping all the doctrines and claims of every incarnation of their religion in their mind. It’s not even possible to do that but it’s also irrelevant to practicing a religion. So they lock onto specific aspects of the bundle that are salient to them.
I don't think everyone who identifies with a nationalist religion is culpable. And I think if people say, "you're culpable and must defend x" it's reasonable to say, "no, I am not culpable and this isn't what my religion means to me."
The issue is when someone identifies a source of oppression, and the main response is not solidarity with the person oppressed, but with the identity which you feel you share with th oppressor.
I read something similar about America a few months ago. It may have been a NYT op ed, but I can’t remember. When American liberals say that child separation at the border or Abu Ghraib is not who we really are, they are wrong. America is what America does, for good or bad. If we want to make America a place that does not torture prisoners or separate families, we have to work to make it true. Similarly, if we believe Zionism only means that the Jews get a homeland too, we have to fight the fascist Zionists working to recreate the Armenian genocide, but for Palestinians. Unless and until the fascist Zionists are relegated to the dustbin of history, we have no right to claim that Zionism is really not like that. Today, Zionism is what the Zionists running Israel are doing, and it’s genocide.
Talk about serendipity. I just did a long comment on this elsewhere, and some time ago did the same thing on my own Substack. What you have added, and I like, is the tendency of Christian and Jew alike to say they are the only ones who can define the general term being used. Sorry, language doesn't work like that. I do now tend to say "ultra-right Zionists" to avoid the issue, but it still comes up when a student leaves off the "ultra" while actually meaning it, and gets both attacked and dismissed as antisemitic. Neither Christians nor Jews have the right to say THAT without further evidence, much less arrest the person saying the term they think is theirs alone.
I also tend to use Christianist, in back formation from Islamist, because neither "ist" defines the beliefs of the entire religion. Zionist already as an "ist." Perhaps we should start saying Zionismist?
Agree entirely. Equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is untenable, not just morally but logically as well. The only way to do it is to adhere to a definition of antisemitism that is impossibly vague, which is exactly what proponents of this view tend to do. Wrote more about it here. https://www.readthedetox.com/p/what-antisemitism-is-what-it-is-not?r=fnbr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The notion of a group of people getting to have their own dedicated homeland is always going to be problematic if we consider the logistics and the actual real estate involved: there will always be someone else already living there. The statement "Israel has a right to exist" is treated as anodyne and obvious, when it is anything but. While we're at it, the "right" of any state to exist should probably be regarded with skepticism, but that opens up a whole other topic...
Thank you
So good at following logic arguments all the way to the end. Every one of them. And then comparing.
Not sure anyone else displays that level of integrity and sound logic.
Recommending this one!
I’m trying to figure out if you mean that what you say about Christian applies to Judaism when religious extremists use religion to oppress the Palestinians? Or Islam? Or Hinduism? (Or even Buddhism, surprisingly if one considers the nationalism in Myanmar tied up with Buddhism as it seems to be?) There’s a nationalist ideology, and then a religion is used in the service of nationalism. These things are bound together.
(One can also consider this with empires—all empires used some religion or other as a tool of domination and conquest.)
But if I understand you correctly, I don’t think anyone can deny that religions which become bound up with nationalism, racism, etc. are oppressive. The religion is clearly used as a tool of oppression. It’s simply a fact.
If it’s true that certain religions are tools of oppression perhaps you are correct the dilemma becomes more what we say about the people who don’t want to denounce their religious identity (or believe they cannot denounce their religious identity, as it is too essential) due to the tainted aspect of their religious identity. This I am not so sure about.
While you don’t find it hard to say the people are tainted if they’re Christian—how do you keep this from being generalized to similar cases of other religions used to oppress? I see some issues if membership in the religion that is used for nationalism and oppression disqualifies the individual from moral worth as a member of that very large historically extended group. Then we run the risk of becoming a bigot against the Muslims, or a supremacist about the greatness of European liberal societies free from superstition, or a paternalist with racist overtones who doesn’t respect the religious identity of those one considers ‘oppressed by the Christian religion,’ generally non-white people for certain kinds of atheists. They must be sheep who should be freed from their chains, not autonomous and rational people.
Maybe that’s just the problem of religious tolerance generally.
I also wonder if this problem of historical burdens doesn’t arise for the persistence of people’s commitment to—or at least non-revulsion—to other ideologies that have been used in perniciously unjust ways. The right claims that communism IS Stalinism. A communist automatically wants to do a genocide, and put people in gulags. That’s what communism is. That’s where Marx leads—the gulag—Tom Cotton would say.
Many people, especially scholars, don’t take that seriously because they believe there’s nothing in Marx that inherently leads to the gulag, or to totalitarianism or even authoritarianism necessarily. They might admit there’s some lacunae in Marx that makes authoritarianism possible when it is turned into an ideology that shapes a polity. But often they don’t think that—they just don’t worry about it too much. They go right on studying Marx, and letting him influence their thinking. Few educated people see studying Marx (or Lenin, etc.), and praising what is useful in it, as equivalent to studying Naziism and praising what is useful in that even if people used communism to commit genocide and atrocities. (Also—more bizarrely—Plato’s Republic—in the case of Pol Pot.)
Are they making the same move as the religious person—saying that they hold to a particular doctrine that rejects the views of those holding a doctrine of the same name, as the doctrine was misinterpreted by those people but their version is not pernicious?
I sincerely don’t know the answer to any of these questions.
My gut feel is that it doesn’t take us very far with every single complex cultural/practical/ideological/identity-forming bundle to determine the evil uses of it are ‘the true essence’ of the bundle of beliefs and practices when there are also benign versions that don’t oppress (or are maybe even used to resist oppression, like Gandhi did with Satyagraha). Does the whole bundle —sometimes spanning the Earth, and having millions or billions of adherents—get tagged with whatever has happened in the name of the ideology?
Or maybe there is no ‘true essence’ to a religion. Religions are extremely malleable, have a vast number of uses, and often some of their incarnations are radically different than other of their incarnations. The fact they are so easily altered while being a set of ideas that gives you a conduit right into people’s heads is probably why they are so useful for empire builders and nationalists.
Though you clearly don’t agree with this, maybe there’s an illusion at the heart of religious belief (and even sometimes political belief) that the individual practitioner is someone partaking in some essential substance that they share with the origin story and all the subsequent people who also partook. But sometimes it’s not even like the ship of Theseus where you’re building the same ship with new materials—sometimes the ships aren’t like each other very much at all. People aren’t keeping all the doctrines and claims of every incarnation of their religion in their mind. It’s not even possible to do that but it’s also irrelevant to practicing a religion. So they lock onto specific aspects of the bundle that are salient to them.
I don't think everyone who identifies with a nationalist religion is culpable. And I think if people say, "you're culpable and must defend x" it's reasonable to say, "no, I am not culpable and this isn't what my religion means to me."
The issue is when someone identifies a source of oppression, and the main response is not solidarity with the person oppressed, but with the identity which you feel you share with th oppressor.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks!