Brainwashing (excerpt)
Chapter 2: God or the Group?
If God be for us, who can be against us?
Romans 8:31
Since 1950, when it was first enunciated, the concept of brainwashing has spent much of its life in the seedy undergrowth of popular culture. Lurking in movies and thrillers, increasingly despised by academia, it has surfaced into public awareness typically as a response to certain extreme traumas, a last resort for commentators trying to explain the apparently inexplicable. Such traumas are not accidental; they are inflicted by a person or persons, usually driven by political or religious motives. In this chapter, I will ask what it is about such motives, and the social and psychological contexts in which they flourish, which makes them so dangerous.
For the West, the worst such recent trauma occurred in the United States of America, erupting on the morning of 11 September 2001 when a jet aeroplane loaded with passengers hit one of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. For the first few minutes the world assumed a dreadful accident, until a second plane crashed into the other tower. A third hit the Pentagon; a fourth was brought down in Pennsylvania when passengers, hearing of the earlier attacks by mobile phone, tried to overpower their hijackers. Both the World Trade Centre towers collapsed and the final death toll ran into thousands. Those who, like me, happened across the story and watched it unfold live on television will not easily forget the trembling disbelief in the reporters' voices as they struggled to grasp what they were seeing. For those involved, and for the American people, 9/11 has left appalling scars.
In the first days after the tragedy, alongside the hunt for bodies and people to blame, some voices described 9/11 as a uniquely evil act. But of course, as others quickly pointed out, it was not. Not only had there been an earlier attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre (linked to Al-Qaeda, the same radical Islamic group which would be blamed for 9/11), but America had previously suffered terrorism on its own soil and from its own citizens. Timothy McVeigh's politically motivated bombing of a government building in Oklahoma on 19 April 1995 killed 168 government employees and civilians and injured over 500. And McVeigh's attack was itself only the latest in a genealogy of terrorism driven by political and/or religious motives, a worldwide genealogy stretching back far beyond 1950. Elements of that dark lineage have triggered renewed discussion of brainwashing ever since the term became available; 9/11 was no exception.
Religion and Politics
What redeems it is the idea only [...] and an unselfish belief in the idea - something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
In the post-Reformation West, religion and politics have tended to become increasingly separate (at least in principle) as enshrined, for example, in the US Constitution and the French policy of separating Church and State. But, as Al-Qaeda shows, this is not the case in many countries. This disparate organization, headed by the wealthy Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, is described as 'radical Islamic', but as well as the goal of spreading its version of Islam it also professes political aims to do with the limiting of Western, particularly US, hegemony. For example, bin Laden's stated aim of removing American troops from Saudi Arabia is a political goal, motivated at least in part by religious reasons since the Americans are regarded as profaning holy soil. Politics and religion are so closely intertwined in this and many other conflicts that it becomes impossible to separate them.
Secular commentators in Britain, used to a form of religion largely defanged, often remark on the peculiar viciousness of religious conflicts. Yet it is a matter of debate as to whether religion is uniquely to blame here. Even distinguishing religious from other motives can be difficult. For example, in Northern Ireland, still frequently cited as an archetypal religious conflict, the two main communities are driven apart by a complex collection of motivating forces which includes concerns about status, human rights, and democratic obligations, as well as more atavistic fears of being oppressed, swamped, or even eliminated.