Religious people tend to get slandered by liberals for being bearers of “atavistic hatreds” that lead to conflicts such as the one in Palestine/Israel. But the root cause of deaths of more than 100 million in the last century can be traced back to a more modern twist on religious dogma that mobilizes passions far more effectively in our times than the old time religion: “Secular Nationalism”. That’s what Noam Chomsky calls the phenomenon in this (MP3) interview in which he describes it as a much deadlier risk than age old religious traditions that are ridiculed by “militant atheists” of the ilk of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, etc. The noted British historian of Greece and the Balkans, Mark Mazower also disputes the impression that “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans is a result of religious enmity. He approvingly quotes the historian Arnold Toynbee’s contemporary opinion (1922) on the source of ethnic strife–which often falls along religious/sectarian divides–in Southeastern Europe:

The introduction of the Western formula [of the principle of nationalism] among these people has resulted in massacre….Such massacres are only the extreme form of a national struggle between mutually indispensable neighbors, instigated by this fatal Western idea.

The founders of Israel were almost to a person secular nationalists. For the first 30 years of its existence it was led by people who believed in “Nationalist Socialism”. These non-practicing Jewish leaders cynically manipulated religious myths for purely instrumental reasons (PDF) without taking millenia old religious texts any more seriously than Alice in Wonderland. A few weeks ago in an online debate, an Israeli wrote the following about the type of person who is the most gung ho “fighter” in his society:

I know that for Americans it’s very hard to understand, but being a liberal and serving in an elite combat unit goes hand in hand here.
If you don’t believe me, just read the news stories, and the bios of the kidnapped soldiers. The front lines are CEOs, lawyers, scientists, mathematicians, accountants and what not. The middle+ class are the people that go to war. The most leftist and liberal leaders were always the best generals–Rabin (Oslo) , Barak (pulled out of Lebanon), and in his last years, Ariel Sharon who pulled out of Gaza. And most importantly, there is not a single religious general, and Israel never had a religious leader.

Incidentally, the term Nationalist Socialism that was coined by the recently bombed Dr. Sternhell bears an uncanny resemblance to the better known National Socialism which resulted in the greatest mass slaughter of human history:

To avoid any misunderstanding or confusion, I have used the term nationalist socialism…But national socialism, which was commonly used at the beginning of the twentieth century, has been contaminated by its association with the Nazis. However, the adjective nationalist, although not traditionally used, in its strict sense describes one of the variants of socialism accurately. There is a nationalist socialism just as there is a democratic or revisionist socialism, often known as social democracy…Nationalist socialism, properly understood, appeared in Europe in the last years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth as an alternative to both Marxism and liberalism…The uniqueness of European nationalist socialism…lay in one essential point: its acceptance of the principle of the nation’s primacy and its subjection of the values of socialism to the service of the nation. In this way socialism lost its universal significance and became an essential tool in the process of building the nation-state. Thus, the universal values of socialism were subordinated to the particularistic values of nationalism. In practice, this was expressed by a total rejection of the concept of class warfare and by the claim of transcending social contradictions for the benefit of the collectivity as a whole. This form of socialism preached the organic unity of the nation and the mobilization of all classes of society for the achievement of national objectives. According to the theory, this process was to be led by natural elites, whose membership was determined not by class, origin, or educational qualifications but by sentiment, dedication, and a readiness to make sacrifices for all. Nationalist socialism quite naturally disliked people with large fortunes, the spoiled aristocracy, and all those to whom money came easily and who could allow themselves to be idle. It lashed out mercilessly at the bourgeoisie whose money moved from one financial center to another and whose checkbook, close to its heart, served as its identity card. In contrast with all these, nationalist socialism presented the working man with both feet firmly planted on the soil of his native country–the farmer, whose horizons are restricted to the piece of land he tills, the bourgeois, who runs his own enterprise, and the industrial worker: the rich and poor who contribute the sweat of their brow, their talents and their money to increasing the collective wealth…Indeeed, nationalist socialism was based on the idea of the nation as a cultural, historical, and biological unit, or figuratively, an extended family. The industrial worker was regarded as an organic part of the whole, and the whole took precedence over the individual. The blood ties and the cultural ties linking members of the nation, their partnership in the total national effort, took precedence over the position of the individual in the production system.

Not that I am part of the movement (I live in Australia), but a friend of mine emailed me a full page ad in the NYT (9/9/08, page A17 I think) placed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. I’m about to check out their website http://www.ffrf.org

Has anyone heard of these guys?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATjlC73htGc#