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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Is bin Laden the Lord of the Rings? |
Current rating: 0 |
by Ira Chernus
(No verified email address) |
28 Dec 2001
Modified: 29 Dec 2001 |
As I was mining deep in the recesses of www.whitehouse.gov, I unearthed this gem:
Reporter: Does [bin Laden] have political goals? The President: He has got evil goals. And it's hard to think in conventional terms about a man so dominated by evil.
Is Osama bin Laden really the Lord of the Rings? |
As I was mining deep in the recesses of www.whitehouse.gov, I unearthed this gem:
Reporter: Does [bin Laden] have political goals? The President: He has got evil goals. And it's hard to think in conventional terms about a man so dominated by evil.
Is Osama bin Laden really the Lord of the Rings?
That question ran through my head for three hours, as I watched a fellowship of brave warriors battle the forces of evil. Was I watching The Lord of the Rings, or network coverage of the war on terrorism?
The villains have no political goals, for only human beings can have political goals. These inhuman forces do evil simply for its own sake. They are the cosmic principle of evil: dark, dark, dark. You dare not think of them in conventional terms, lest you be accused of taking their side.
All that stands between us and this implacable darkness is a small band of ordinary guys doing extraordinary deeds in their unconventional hit-and-run style. Always vastly outnumbered, they never lose a battle and hardly ever a single life. Are they really that good? Or is it just because they embody the cosmic principle of goodness? Their devotion to honor, decency, and each other is exemplary. And they invite us to come back to the theater next Christmas to see them defend the oh-so-white city, where we all hope to live peacefully ever after.
If you have seen the movie and followed the war news, you can no doubt extend the list of parallels.
This is dead serious. How many dead, in Afghanistan alone, the Pentagon will make sure we never know.
The president's job is to hide the fact that bin Laden does have political goals. He wants U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia, an end to bombing and sanctions in Iraq, and no more U.S. support for Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. More broadly, he wants to curb U.S. influence in the Muslim world.
How many American lives are worth losing, to maintain our powerful influence in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world? If that became a matter of public debate, the Bush administration and its war might be in real trouble.
So the administration dehumanizes the enemy, casting bin Laden as the dark prince of evil. Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union "the empire of evil." But at least he admitted that the Soviets had a political vision for which they waged cold war. Bush dares not even go that far. He can only call us to a war against Sauron and the evil forces of Mordor, a war with no end in sight. If we believe in his mythic vision, we can not even begin to think about the political issues involved.
The shocking fact is that most Americans do seem to believe in it. Have we watched too many movies pitting pure shining good against the mindless metaphysical principle of evil? Is there a seamless infotainment web stretching from Lord of the Rings to the nightly news?
Or does the immense success of Lord of the Rings and all its imitators point deeper, to the thousands of years that humans have told stories about absolute good fighting absolute evil? The vast Christian lore of God against Devil is only one corner of this much vaster, world-wide legacy of myth and legend -- the same legacy that bin Laden himself draws on so successfully.
So far, at least, the lure of simplistic myth has worked for the Bush administration like a charm. A mere hint that El Qaeda might have political motives sets off panic alarms among the patriotic citizenry. To raise any political question is to think about the enemy in conventional terms; i.e., to treat them as human beings, not inhuman orcs doing Sauron’s bidding. That thought would open up too many disturbing doors in the public mind. Easier to call it treason, set the mind at rest, and go to the movies.
This is the peace movement’s greatest challenge. As long as the enemy is cast as an inhuman force of cosmic evil, we can not raise public consciousness about alternatives to war. The pro-war forces know that and count on it to keep the war going. We must insist, over and over, in every way we can, as loudly as we can, that the contest is political, not mythic or metaphysical. The victims of this war are dying in the real world, not the Hollywood dream factory.
We can and should condemn the use of violence to gain political ends. We can and should debate the validity of Islamist political principles and goals. Many of us will wholeheartedly oppose them. But first we must help to stop the killing. To do that, we must insist that even the people whose principles and goals we most oppose are human beings, not monsters from Mordor.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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See also:
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1228-06.htm
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Gee... |
by The Mythworker
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
29 Dec 2001
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Thanks for "rapping" with us, Ira. I would never have understood that Bin Laden had political goals and that our government is painting that we are at war with as inhuman, evil monsters.
Lucky for us, you were able to put the situation in terms that we, the brainwashed masses, could understand. Since you laid that LOTR metaphor on us, the fantasy and sci-fi community (not to mention the rest of the unwashed movie goers,) are now behind you 100% percent.
Sarcasm aside, you (though I doubt Mr. Chernus posted this personally,) as a professor of religion, should know the problem *is* mythic. The idealogical contestants in this battle (Bush, Bin Laden) are both coming from religious fundementalist backgrounds that encourage a thought process that dehumanizes the enemy.
What Bush is doing now (as you have pointed out) is no different than what many different sects and denominations of Christianity have done throughout the ages when presented with an obstacle they felt had to be removed by force. This paradigm is also at work in the thought processes of Bin Laden and his unique flavour of Islam.
The answer is not just in awareness that our current enemy of the state is human and has human goals, but in the acknowledgement and reform of the religious extremism that currently holds power in the US.
Progressive Christians and practioners of Islam need to speak out to these appointed figureheads, not in language of the political (which they can easily dismiss,) but in the language of the spiritual (which is harder for them to counter.) If enough of the religious community that Bush claims to draw his values from condemns his cuurent policies and speak loud enough, Bush will be forced to either humanize this conflict or to at least drop the veneer of mythic struggle he has given his recent actions.
To come back to your LOTR metaphor, both Bush and Bin Laden are more like Ring Wraiths, great kings corrupted by the promise of power. Perhaps we need to remind them that the great men their faiths are based on were men of reason and peace, and not the dark forces of Mordor. |
