The Crusades: Sir Barack and the Knights of the Oval Office

The Siege of Antioch

One commentator on CNN suggested that the Western Powers will get more bang for their buck by unleashing humanitarian aid in lieu of air strikes in Iraq. He also said that the US was the last one who should undertake a military counteroffensive as our bombings are just the kind of images that can be expropriated for propaganda purposes. ISIS is like the hydra that produces more heads every time you try to lop one off. But what do you do when ISIS forces are about to take over the capital of Kurdistan, Erbil, threatening a sect, the Yazidis, with imminent extinction.  Joyce’s Stephan Daedalus famously averred that “history is nightmare from which I am trying to awake” and Vico who Joyce also studied believed in the circularity of history. So have we come full circle. Are we now reliving the era of the Crusades when Knights Templars took off to do battle in the exotic east with the marauding hordes--attempting to safeguard the sacred artifacts and sites of Christendom and in the current instance of Islam and antiquity too (“Isis Is About to Destroy Biblical History in Iraq,” The Daily Beast, 7/7/14) and capture the Holy Grail (aka an oil well or two) along the way. The descriptions of ISIS are so horrific that they in fact fit nicely into the fairytales and legends we associate with the historical battles for the Holy Land during the time of the Crusades. Ah and yes one other thing our current exploits in attempting unseat terrorists sanctioned by nation states or unsanctioned terrorism of the kind represented by ISIS, which have gone on since the time of the first Iraq war early 90’s, are turning out to be like the Crusades: all encompassing endeavors which will take place over eras and even lifetimes.

Little Murders

Are there bad people, or just people with problems that get of hand? The former Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic is now on trial in The Hague, accused of war crimes, but he was once a psychiatrist, a person trained to understand and treat the condition of those suffering from mental illness. Is this a contradiction? For many years following the war, Karadzic lived incognito, sporting long hair and a beard and practicing alternative medicine. His training and the identity he adopted are belied by the fact that he was a murderer and a killer. But surely manifest content is significant; surely some part of him was interested in healing.

Hitler loved dogs. The young Stalin wrote poetry and there were those who thought he might become a priest. What is it that unites these murderers? How do human beings whose behavior shows signs of empathy for others make an about face whereby the brother becomes the other?  Only last week, another crime shocked the nation: the murder of 13 people at Fort Hood, by yet another psychiatrist. What made Major Nidal Malik Hasan open fire? Was he bad or mad?

Little Murders is the title of a play by Jules Feiffer. In a sense, all of us are capable of homicide, and maybe even genocide on a small scale. The beloved wife, friend, business associate, or relative suddenly becomes the enemy, the other, and the vitriol is directly proportionate to the love that once existed. A sense of victimhood can always be counted on to induce revenge. Racial pride was an organizing principle of the Third Reich, allowing for whole new classifications of others. The notion of a shared injury can also become a unifying force that unites a whole population in mass paranoia. Historic feelings of persecution by Christians may have been one of the many causes of the Turkish massacre of its Armenian population. What set the Hutus against the Tutsis, the Janjaweed against the rebels in the Sudan? And what explains the viciousness with which Bosnian Serbs turned against the Muslims with whom they had lived in peace for decades? 

These are no mere squabbles of property lines, money and political power. The depraved indifference to human life that is characteristic of mass murder has the quality of a passion, the kind of passion that once contained the germs of human love. Weren’t the Crusades and the Inquisition about love of God? And yet an academic understanding of the roots of conflict does little to assuage the pain. The guilty still must face trial, even if, as in the case of Karadzic, they refuse to show up.