Mythological Goggles

 

Had a small chuckle today when I encountered an article in an American journal which referred to the ancient Arabs who had established a settlement in Italy as ‘immigrants’. It didn’t say if they arrived in small boats.

The important thing is that in American academic discourse, they can never be referred to as invaders or colonisers. (Made me wonder if Antigua might be usefully rebranded from ‘La Ciudad Colonial’ to ‘La Ciudad Inmigrante’?!)

Anyway, on a mildly separate note, I recently came across this highlighted passage in my copy of God’s War by Christopher Tyerman.

“Crusading reflected a social mentality grounded in war as a central force of protection, arbitration, social discipline, political expression and material gain. The crusades confirmed a communal identity comprising aggression, paranoia, nostalgia, wishful thinking and invented history.”

 

What is perhaps so remarkable about this observation is how true it is of all the combatants in the perpetual holy wars waged in and around the Levant, both then and now. (And the blathering academics and intellectuals in their baggage train.)

 

And there is a monstrous lack of collective self-awareness. Each imagines that it is the other who is beholden to a toxic delusion.

For 1500 years the Levant has been plagued by ideologies which are essentially non-native yet which insist that their ground zero is a certain spot in the city of Jerusalem. This sense of ownership in largely grounded in fabrications, fairy-tales.

 

This has been true of Norman crusaders —  ultimately Scandinavian, and so non-local in the extreme —  or Arabian Muslims or Turks in the past and now Persians. Each brings an obsession which underpins meddling in a region that they have no real business to meddle in. 

It is also true of a certain group of extreme Zionists, originating in the US but also prevalent here in Guatemala, who are not even Jewish, but instead evangelical Christians.

The absolutist perspectives, which for the crusaders were grounded in the spiritual/apocalyptic —  and in fact geographically transferable —  notion of the Holy City on the hill, still prevent anyone who has signed up to these 'visions' from seeing reason today, because these groups have in effect  constructed their communal identities and the sense of how to live their everyday lives around these stark obsessions.

One of the greater absurdities in the western side of this discourse is that the Radical Left appears to have concluded that Zionism is the only form of formalised false consciousness impacting on the conflicts in the Levant during modern times.

This POV represents almost the most outrageous pair of mythological goggles worn by anyone, arguably comparable with those worn by the Islamic fundamentalists: a prescription which pares down reality to a rigidly thematicised, 'anti-colonial' conceptualisation of history.

And as I wrote here the other day, UN institutions like UNRWA have started to operate like the Society of Jesus in the early modern period, a self-serving order which maintains a bizarre, hypocritical, extra-legal operation in the region, which ultimately works against integration and the establishment of stable, peaceful, collaborative societies which operate within the international order as it now stands.