Posted by finelinebob on September 11, 2006, at 0:04:03
In reply to Re: Fundamentalism » Declan, posted by Squiggles on September 10, 2006, at 21:55:05
> > 50 years ago there wasn't much of it, was there?
>
> Well, i think it has been with us as long
> as the human race has-- for whatever reasons.
> ... - it's either trade
> or colonialism/imperialism.I can't say anything about non-Christian religions, but there certainly have been violently "fundamentalist" times and movements in Christianity -- the Crusades, the Inquisition, wars of Catholics versus Protestants, persecution of certain Protestant faiths by a different, dominant Protestant faith.
In grad school, I was fortunate to have Rafe Ezekiel, author of "A Racist Mind", talk about the research that he did for the book. As a social psychologist, who focused on ethnographic research and field studies, and as a Jew, he wanted to find out why neo-Nazis believed the way that they did which here, in the US, is as much an issue of race as it is of religion. His research centered around three different sources: a neo-Nazi book store in a lower-class, industrial/residential suburb of Detroit; interviews of the leaders of 3 different neo-Nazi groups; and perhaps the most frightening and bizarre case where one of these leaders invited Rafe, under this leader's protection, to attend a two-week rally in a remote camp in Idaho.
Two things really hit home for me. Rafe talked about how the young men drawn to the bookstore earnestly thought that their beliefs weren't just beneficial for themselves, but that everyone else would be better off (even the targets of their hatred) if their way of thinking came to pass. In one breath, they'd express their hatred of Blacks; in the next they'd argue passionately about how racial separatism would be just as beneficial for Blacks as for Whites.
The far more frightening revelation from his research were his profiles of the nation leaders of the three Aryan movements he interviewed. What he found common in these men were (1) their lack of passion, even near indifference, to their personal devotion to the tenets of their organizations and (2) their true passion, which was being able to exert power over others through the manipulation of the message they were selling. Neo-Nazism, for these leaders, was a means to an end, was pure propaganda that stirred the emotions of a large group of people to the point that the leaders could manipulate their "followers" as they would have it.
But to a large degree, the same is true of what each of us might consider "good" movements, organizations, countries, religions. They thrive when a charismatic leader takes (or is given) the "reigns" and the "followers" have a strong, firm, clear message to follow. I'm not trying to make some statement on moral relativism, but on human nature. It appears there are far more "natural followers", even among this species which is supposed to be so intellectually and socially superior to the rest of the animal kingdom, than "natural leaders" or than individuals who seek the middle ground.
By the way, the body count is now at 3004. I wonder if Bush knows, or if he truly cares more about the lives lost than the political capital those losses are "worth".
poster:finelinebob
thread:684102
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20060809/msgs/684900.html