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Walmart Killed My Hometown

            Well, not exactly. Though Walmart transformed what was a thriving downtown into a shell of its former self.

            I was raised in Carlinville, a town of 5000 in Southern Illinois. It is in the transition area between cornfields and coal mines, and is closer both geographically and culturally to Kentucky and Ozark Missouri than to Chicago.

            My home town is a Mid West icon with brick streets and a circular town square with a bandstand in the middle. A stone monument in our church yard marks the site of where Lincoln campaigned against Douglas for his senate seat.  Nearby is an imposing county courthouse, constructed from huge limestone blocks and surmounted with a magnificent dome. When it was built the town hoped that the state would want it for its capital. Alas that honor went to Springfield, some forty miles north, with what seemed to me to be a much less spectacular capital building.

            The town also boasts a thriving college, Blackburn. It was famed for its work-study program that requires students to enroll in work hours, such as mowing the lawn and helping in the kitchen, in addition to academic credits. The money saved by student workers was said to have allowed the college to endure through the depression even when many other similarly sized institutions were faltering.

            My family home was near the college. It was a simple house, one of a hundred or so prefabricated homes purchased from a Sears-Roebuck in 1930 by the Standard Oil Company to house the workers in its nearby coal mine. It is the largest such colony of Sears-Roebuck homes in the country.

            And the town is on old Route 66. What is not to like?

            I grew up playing in the cornfields near the college, then joining the high school band in concerts for ice cream socials in the bandstand of the town square. My father was elected County Superintendent of Schools and his office was in that magnificent court house. It was as if the whole of the town was my back yard.

            My first proper suit was purchased at Surman’s Clothing Store on the Square. We knew the Surmans, they attended our church, and their daughter Jane sang in the choir. Next door to the clothing store was the pharmacy where we got out prescriptions filled from a pharmacist who knew us by name and would call if we forgot to get a refill that we needed.

            We didn’t need many store-bought groceries since we had a fourteen-acre mini-farm with our own chickens and cows and sheep, and one lethargic pig. It also had a huge garden area where we grew corn, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, lettuce, cucumbers, and much more. We seldom bought stuff from a store since my mother would cook and carefully seal glass Bell jars that we stored in the basement. The peas and corn and other vegies would last all winter. For ice cream we would make our own from milk that got from our cows, cranking the churner and adding salt to the ice around the interior ice cream bucket. Then we would add our own strawberries and raspberries to taste.

            We would go to the store for sugar, salt, some other staples, and most exiting for me an occasional candy bar. I liked Mars bars the best.  Fortunately the stores were nearby. There was Lanzerotti’s Superette, just a few blocks from our house, run by an Italian immigrant family who lived upstairs. Their sons, Louis and Richard were among my closest buddies in high school. Whenever I went there for even a candy bar or a soda Mrs. Lanzerotti would engage me in long conversation about everyone in our family as if we were kinfolk. For even more food supplies there was the IGA, though for the life of me I don’t remember what those initials stood for—Independent Grocers’ Association, perhaps? I knew almost all of the workers there, since many of them were the older siblings of my high school class mates.

            I visited the hometown recently for a high school class reunion. There were 100 members of our class and now there are only about 40 of us left. Of those half are in long term care facilities or in other ways not able to travel even a few blocks to the reunion restaurant. There were about twenty of us who were there, and we seemed genuinely happy to see each other. Perhaps we were equally happy just to be alive.

            The town had not changed much in outward appearance. Almost all of the old buildings around the square were still intact, including an old hotel that had not seen a guest in decades. I remember that the Elks club occupied the upper floors, and our Boy Scout troop met there, though today only the lower floors are still occupied by various shops.

            What has changed are the shops themselves. Gone are the clothing store, the pharmacy, the neighborhood grocery stores. Instead the shops are occupied by antique stores and tourist items for the Route 66 trade. There are more restaurants, coffee houses, and taverns than I remembered. The town has survived largely because it is seen as a charming old-fashioned Route 66 tourist stop.

            Where have all the other shops gone? To figure that out you have to venture to the edge of town, actually across the city lines in an area that is immune to city sales and property taxes. There one finds an enormous store the size of a football field surrounded by an asphalt parking lot that would hold hundreds of vehicles.

            Walmart has come to Carlinville. And it has conquered it.

            Walmart was founded in 1962 not far from Carlinville in rural Arkansas by Sam Walton, a clever entrepreneur who seized upon a brilliant marketing strategy. The one thing that small town American misses most, he reasoned, were the megastores of big cities that offered a dazzling array of everything imaginable at ridiculously cheap prices. By clever marketing and control of the supply chains back to factories in China and elsewhere, he could offer “always low prices, always,” as the store liked to boast. And it would transform middle America.

Transform he did, garnering an obscene amount of wealth in the process. Virtually every county seat town in the mid-West soon had a Walmart superstore. Within fifty years Walmart was the largest retailer in the world with over ten thousand stores, over two million employees and annual yearly revenues of over 600 billion dollars (that’s billion with a “b”).

Though Sam Walton is long gone, his heirs still own over half of the company’s shares. The combined wealth of the Walton family is over $340 billion dollars, making them collectively the richest entity in the world, wealthier than Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Sam’s three children each have about a hundred billion dollars in wealth: Jim has $96 billion, Rob has $94 billion, and Alice has $89 billion (making her the richest woman in the world).  

Meanwhile the employees are not faring as well. As of October 2024, the average wage is around $25 an hour, ranging between $14 and $31 an hour. Most “associates,” as the salespeople are known, earn around $26,000 per year. This is a considerable increase from several years ago when the pay was so low many Walmart employees depended on government food stamps to get by.

Though it’s true that the standard of living in Carlinville is not Orange County or Manhattan Island, $26k does not go very far in sustaining a family budget. I talked with one fellow in Carlinville who worked in the stockroom of Walmart and was having to borrow money to feed his family of five. He now has switched to being a welder in East St. Louis, a forty- minute drive away, but well worth it financially.

Most of my former high school classmates are delighted to have Walmart in town. It’s one-stop shopping. They have a clothing department, a pharmacy, a florist section, and a huge grocery supermarket, all with greater variety and much lower prices than the old stores in town formerly had.

All the old stores quietly went out of business, one by one, as Walmart expanded its sales. The last independent grocery store, the IGA, closed a couple of years ago. The Lanzerotti Superette is now a residence, the Surman clothing store now sells antiques, and the town square pharmacy is now a coffee house for the Route 66 tourists.

At least Carlinville looks much like it used to, due to the tourist trade. But Walmart pulls its customers from all of the surrounding towns. Driving through them on the way to the St. Louis airport after my high school reunion, I was dismayed to see the ruins of all the little towns I remember from my youth. They all seem to be in a terminal stage of torpor, additional victims of Walmart’s ravenous reach.

Many of my former classmates have been grumbling about the erosion of the quality of life in the rural mid-West. They often blame the government, immigrants, and the liberal elites on the East and West Coast who sap the country’s strength and weaken the small towns that used to be so prosperous. I quietly encourage my classmates to look not so far away, but at the megastore at the outskirts of our own little village, offering “always low prices, always,” and eviscerating the small shops that used to be at the heart of our town’s commercial life.

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What’s Next for Israel and Iran?

My comments last night on BBC-World. Here’s a summary of what I said:

My sense is that neither Israel or Iran want an all-out war, and the US certainly doesn’t want to get involved as it would have to if Israel was attacked in a major way. Iran’s missile attack on Israel was likely understood by Iran to be more for show than for impact. So the likelihood is that Israel will retaliate in a way that does not provoke worse responses in the future. (Unless Netanyahu wants the conflict to continue in order to embarrass Biden and enhance the chances of Trump winning the November election). But the likelihood is that in a few days this will be over.

Netanyahu’s mission was to degrade the military capacity of Hezbollah, and they have largely achieved that, though this is a short term victory. As with the huge assault on Hamas that has killed tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, it will neutralize the military capacity of Hezbollah and Hamas for many months. But in both cases the animosity it has created will likely strengthen both movements in the future. This has been the pattern in the past when Netanyahu tried to destroy Hamas by killing its founding leader, Sheikh Yassin and the predecessor to Nasrullah as the leader of Hezbollah. Both movements roared back stronger than before. 

So although these attacks buy Netanyahu some relief for a few months — perhaps enough time to get him re-elected– they are not a long-term solution. Far from it.

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Thinking about Religion and Violence

[posted on the Immanent Frame, the online journal of the Social Science Research Council, as an introduction to a special issue on religion and violence}

In the past fifty years, the study of religion and violence has grown exponentially. One reason for this is obvious: the rise of strident religion-related political movements around the world, many of which challenge conventional notions of secularism and the secular nation-state. But another reason has been the scholarly interest in the materiality of culture. Elaine Scarry’s groundbreaking book, The Body in Pain, is emblematic of a growing interest in the way that physical suffering alters perception and challenges our understanding of socially constructed realities. The essays in this Immanent Frame forum display the diversity of topics related to the subject of religion and violence and the rich discussions they evoke.

The focus on the topic of religion and violence has occasioned close scrutiny of what is meant both by religion and by violence. For decades, scholars in the study of religion have recognized that the term is a fairly recently created Western fiction. In 1963, the long-standing director of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religion published The Meaning and End of Religion, a book in which he advocated that scholars abandon the use of the word. “Religion” was a contrivance, Wilfred Cantwell Smith averred, that held no existential meaning and had no ancient roots. He allowed for forms of religiosity that could be described adjectivally, such as religious rituals, religious beliefs, and so on, but there was no intrinsic essence to religion itself.

In the years since Smith’s book, there has been a great deal of discussion of the socio-political contexts in which the concepts of religion and its uneasy partner, secularism, originated. The works of Talal Asad, Charles Taylor, and Rajeev Bhargava are particularly notable in raising the level of these discussions. Twenty years ago, a working group of scholars convened by the Social Science Research Council held a multi-year project examining the notions of religion and secularism. The group, which included Asad, Taylor, Bhargava, and others, published their essays in Rethinking Secularism, a book edited by Craig Calhoun, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and myself, which concluded that the terms were shaped in the West in recent centuries by political and historical contexts in a dialectical tandem.

Still the terms persist in popular discourse. Even Smith capitulated to the use of the word “religion” when he supported the creation of an academic program in Harvard College in the Study of Religion, preferring that phrase to “religious studies,” which Smith thought might be misunderstood as saying that the studies themselves were religious. Other scholars use the term as well, though they usually qualify what they mean by using it.

Late Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah took a different approach. He argued that religion was something, or at least a shared perception, and not just a set of adjectives. In a magisterial book completed shortly before his death, Religion in Human Evolution, Bellah posited that the origin of religion as an element of human culture was in play. Like Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, Bellah thought that the earliest forms of culture were activities, such as dance and ritual. These were embryonic forms of alternative realities that in time became internalized as realms of imagination, alternative realities in the mind. From these acts of cultural creativity spring religion, an alternative reality with persuasive powers of its own. As a sociologist, however, Bellah would never reify the alternative reality of religion or lift it out of its social and cultural context. He regarded it as one of many alternative realities that interact with our daily worlds. This brings Bellah’s position in line with the dominant view of the scholarly community, which is that religion cannot do anything on its own but illumines and interacts with various aspects of human practice and performance.

Hence the English word “religion” can refer to all kinds of things. Smith preferred to speak of religion as composed of tradition and its internalized form, which is faith. Or it can be, as Bellah described it, the perception of an alternative reality. As social phenomena, religion can be the dogmas, sets of beliefs, or ideological positions thought to originate with or be provided by some divine power. It can also mean the organizational institutions that are based on those beliefs and help maintain them, or describe the holders of clerical positions within those organizations. But religion need not be confined to institutions; it can refer to a culture of habits, practices, and shared values as well as to traditions that have been maintained, some of them over many centuries. It can also simply mean the social identity of a particular ethnic group.

The ambiguity around the word “religion” makes the study of religion and violence problematic. Sometimes commentators and authors of popular books aver that “religion causes violence.” No scholar would say such a thing, not only because of the difficulty in defining religion, but because of the causative implication in the phrase, as if religion could do anything on its own.

Scholars who use the phrase “religious violence” do not mean that religion causes violence. When used adjectivally, as in “religious ritual” or “religious art,” the implication is not that there is something called religion that causes rituals or art, but that these cultural forms are colored or characterized by a relationship to a transcendent alternative reality.

Similarly, scholars who speak of “religious violence” simply mean that things or cultural forms associated with religion are in some way related to violence. It is a shorthand for “religion-related violence.” That relationship is precisely what many scholars attempt to understand in their research. Invariably, this leads to a consideration of the social and historical milieu in which violent acts are committed, and of the ways that religious elements of culture are injected into conflict situations. Sometimes religious sanctions are used to shore up the legitimacy of those committing violent acts, sometimes religious images are part of the ideology of a movement, and sometimes religious identity is part of a cultural context.

The religious aspects of the Islamic State are an interesting case in point. Though it has often been referenced as a violent religious movement, “religion” in the sense of beliefs and ideology was limited to the small inner circle of the movement’s leadership. They imbibed apocalyptic images and beliefs from the past and fashioned a contemporary ideology of revenge against perceived foes, including Shi’a Muslims and their Western supporters, that would support their quest for political power. Most of the militants who joined the movement, however, were Sunni Arabs who saw the movement as a form of empowerment for their own ethnic community. They had little interest in the theological complexities of the ISIS ideology. The movement was religious, but in two quite different ways. In neither of these ways can religion be said to have caused the violence that ISIS perpetrated.

The diversity of meanings attached to religion is matched by that evoked by another problematic term: “violence.” The term usually conjures up images of physical violence, bodily harm and potential death. The images that are most striking are those associated with large-scale political violence — wars, genocide, terrorism, and the like. But there are forms of state violence apart from war that are enormously destructive, including pogroms and unjust incarceration. Even in political violence, religion is often a factor. Particular religious communities can be targeted for expulsion or destruction, and religious justifications can prop up the autocracy of the state. In every war, God seems to bless one side or another, and it is invariably the side of those claiming divine sanctions for their actions.

Religious images and ideas also are connected to interpersonal suffering and self-inflicted injury. When monks and nuns immolate themselves to protest injustices against their religious communities, they are described as martyrs. Martyrdom has an honored place in many religious traditions and contradicts the usual religious proscription against suicide. When I referred to certain Islamist activists as suicide bombers, the Hamas leader with whom I was speaking corrected me and assured me that they were “self martyrs.”[1]

There are other forms of violence besides physical violence, and these also often have a religious dimension. Extreme forms of social control and forced behavior can violate the integrity of the other. Mohandas Gandhi considered any kind of coercion a form of violence, and he believed coercion should be rejected as firmly as physical violence. Religious institutions and restrictions are often perpetrators of these less-tangible forms of violence, alas, enforcing coercion with self-righteousness.

Symbols of violence abound in virtually every religious tradition. From the swords of Sikhism and Islam to the execution device that is the cross Christians venerate, such images remind the faithful of violent and brutal death. The crucifixion of Christ, the martyrdom of Guru Arjun, and the killing of Ali ibn Abi Talib are central moments in the histories of Christianity, Sikhism, and Shi’a Islam, respectively. These events are woven into their legends and shape their rituals.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars frequently pointed to sacrifice as a defining element of religion. Almost every early religious tradition has sacrificial offerings, usually of animals, but some cases also evidence human sacrifice. As religious traditions evolved, the sacrificial ritual became more metaphorical. In Christianity, the sacrifice of Christ is represented in the ritual of the eucharist. In the Roman Catholic tradition, the bread and wine offered to the faithful undergoes an act of transubstantiation and becomes the actual body and blood of Christ. Part of the scholarly fascination with the images of sacrifice in religious traditions is that they appear to hold keys to understanding the nature of religion itself. From a Durkheimian perspective, sacrifice is part of the reciprocity between humans and the divine being — life is given in order for life to be received.

Other scholars agree that the seemingly ubiquitous obsession with violence and death in religious traditions, both symbolic and physical, points to basic elements of the religious imagination. Ernest Becker famously described this as the religious “denial of death.” Anthropologist Weston LeBarre, in analyzing the emergence of the Ghost Dance Religion among the Native American plains tribes who were under attack by the US cavalry, thought he had found the source of religion in the ritual response to impending doom. A more sophisticated version of this argument has been made by University of Chicago sociologist Martin Riesebrodt, in The Promise of Salvation.

The essays in this forum explore many of these themes in the relationship between religion and violence, however the terms may be defined. Because of the nuanced nature of the concepts, none of these analyses can be conclusive. But the essays that follow are ample indication of how enlightening the discussion of them can be.

[1] Author’s interview with the political head of Hamas, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on March 1, 1998.

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Anti-Gaza Protests are Different: They’re Personal

When I saw the police clash with protesters and ram a window to end the takeover of Hamilton Hall during the recent Gaza protests, I had an eerie flashback. It stoked memories of my graduate school days at Columbia, where I would frequently pass by that building on my way to classes across Amsterdam Avenue at the School of International and Policy Affairs. The center of the protests, the awesome expanse of grass in front of the Columbia library, was “one of the great urban spaces,” as a colleague of mine called it. A few years later it would be the scene of a huge protest against the war in Vietnam that was at least as large and confrontational as the one this year that focused on Israel’s war on Gaza.

            By the time of the Columbia protests in the 1960s, however, I was a graduate student on a different campus, at Berkeley. I flashbacked to memories of protests that were even larger and more strident. I was convinced that the war was wrong-headed, having spent some months in Vietnam as a journalist and seeing the debacle at close hand. So I joined the protests with enthusiasm. Besides, it was Berkeley in the 60s. Along with pot and free love, it was the thing to do.

            Four of my colleagues in sociology who were also active in the anti-Vietnam war protests many decades ago have posted an open letter comparing the current campus protests with our struggles in the 60s. They point out that student protests have often been the leading edge of public critique and the vanguard of social change. They show the resistance of establish authorities to moral retrospection and change. I agree with this, and compliment my colleagues, all of them Jewish, for their support for the rights of students to protest.

            But there is one big difference between the current anti-war protests and those of the sixties. The protests today are so intimately personal.

            In the 60s, few of us actually knew any Vietnamese. Our cause was not so much for the independence of Vietnam, but against the war itself. Few of those opposed to our protests wanted the American occupation of Vietnam to continue, or hated Vietnamese as people. They just didn’t like to see protests. And they trusted our government. We didn’t.

            The situation today is vastly different. Appearing at the forefront of many of the campus protests are students of Middle East background, many of them Muslim and quite a few with connections to Palestine. Also in the campus melees are a huge number of Jewish students, many with ties to Israel, who have been on both sides of the protest movements.

            One of these Jewish students recently contacted me, trying to add my course on global conflict to her schedule. She wanted to understand better what was going on, she said. Though she had family in Israel her sympathies were with all of those affected by killing and war, including the Palestinians. But she said she was afraid to wear her locket that displayed the Star of David without being chastised on campus as a supporter of Israeli genocide. She was afraid to be identified as being Jewish.

            My Muslim students have voiced a similar fear. By simply supporting the rights of Palestinians and accusing Israel of over-reaching in its militant response to Gaza, they have been accused of being terrorists, and supporters of Hamas.

            Both sides are shouting at each other. The rights of peaceful protest and public debate, and the critique of US involvement with the armaments of war have devolved into personal, tribal animosities.

            My Jewish colleagues who have written the letter of support for the protesters point out that criticism of the policies of the state of Israel is not antisemitism. After all, we do not assume that Shi’a Muslims support Iran, even though it is a self-proclaimed Islamic state. Still, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has encouraged this connection, insisting that Israeli and Jewish identity are intertwined and any critique of his regime is anti-Semitic by nature.

            As a result, my Jewish students are living in a climate of fear, labeled by their mere religious identity as supporters of Israel’s military assault. Even Jewish students who have been involved in the anti-Gaza protests are themselves sometimes targeted by their fellow protesters.

            In a sad way, what is happening on campus has mirrored the current political culture of the United States and much of the rest of the world. Confrontation has degenerated from the level of ideology and policy to the primal contest between tribal communities formed around race and religion.

A disturbing underside to the presidential election slated for later in 2024 is the competition between White Christian autocracy and multicultural democracy. Race and religion are at the heart of the political differences in many of the races leading up to the Fall elections.

            At the level of race and religion, however, these contests cannot be won. They can only be overcome. In the 60s, when the Vietnam War finally ended, the protests dissolved. The war was over. The conflict was forgotten.

            This year, if a permanent cease fire ends the killing in Gaza, and progress is made towards the civil rights of Palestinians, the campus protests will likely also end. But the bitterness that the protests have awakened may linger, possibly for some time to come. Alas the same is true about the wider differences of race and religion in our current political culture.

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My Digital Fast for Lent

I’m giving up using digital devices for Lent. I’m doing this at least one day a week during the forty-day Lenten period, rather than giving up food. A lot of Christians don’t eat sweets for Lent, or choose one day a week to fast during the day. They give up food. For me it’s digital devices.

Food is easy to give up, I thought. What I really can’t do without—and what most of my friends and students can’t survive without more than a few moments—is our smart phone. If not the smart phone, we’re on the computer or watching some other LCD screen.

Giving up digital devices for a day, I thought, that would be a real sacrifice. It also would be an interesting experiment, to see what I have been missing in all the time that I have spent staring at the flickering light on my phone or computer screen.

The Christian observance of Lent falls roughly at the same time as the Muslim month of Ramadan this year. Though the contexts of the two customs are vastly different, in both cases, fasts are traditionally part of the deal.

In Ramadan, Muslims are not supposed to eat anything from sun up to sun down. Then there’s iftar, a lovely meal where families gather together to break the fast of the day. If you’re invited to a Muslim home to take part in one of these occasions, I highly recommend it. Like Seder in the Jewish tradition, Diwali for Hindus, and Christmas for Christians, it’s one of those lovely moments in the cycle of a religious year that reminds you of what is meaningful about the traditions.

In Ramadan and Lent, the purpose of giving up food is basically the same. It is to remind you of the sacrifices made by those who came before you in the tradition, and in the fragility of life. You appreciate more what you have when you do without it.

Lent is not a biblical custom. You don’t find it anywhere in the Christian’s New Testament, for instance.  Early Christians began the pattern of preparing for the Holy Week before Easter by fasting. Often forty days were chosen, as a reminder of Christ’s forty days in the wilderness when he was tempted by Satan and rejected him.

Christ’s forty days of fasting was at the beginning of his Ministry, and the Passion Week before Easter was at the end, but no matter, it seemed to justify a period of days in which to prepare for the Easter events. In 325CE at the Council of Nicaea, when so many other doctrinal issues for Christianity were settled, a 40-day pre-Easter fast was officially recognized as a Church tradition.

At first it did not have a special name. In time, however it came to be called Lent for a rather peculiar reason. Since it occurs during the Springtime when the sunlit days are longer, the term for lengthening, the Old English word lencten, became shortened to Lent.   

But fasting was central to the custom. This brings me back to my own efforts at fasting.

When I was a kid, I remember for a time giving up chocolate. I love chocolate, and for this reason, it seemed to be an appropriate sacrifice.

As I got older, however, I began to question the idea of giving up particular foods as a worthy effort in observing the fast. In fact, it seemed to me that modern people have way too much food anyway and giving up some is simply a smart health decision.

To really take something crucial to sacrifice, I reasoned, you have to look at what compels your time and energy the most. For some people it is sex. For others, and maybe for the same people, it is the digital screen.

I knew I could not last for a full forty days with no recourse to the phone. I questioned even my ability to last more than a few minutes.

But I became determined to try. I decided to take the easiest route, and designate one day in the week, from sun up to sun down, as the day for my digital fast.

That day, logically, was Sunday. Not only is it supposed to be a day of rest, biblically designated for that purpose. But also it is a day of relatively low information demands. In my case, it was a slow day in any event, since I would usually go to church in the mornings, and afterwards pick up the Sunday New York Times which could easily consume the rest of the day, if not much of the rest of the week, with the crossword puzzle alone.

So I chose Sunday as my day of digital fast. I’m now mid-way through Lent, and so far, surprisingly I have mostly kept my vow. Yes, there were a few moments when I was expecting an important call or I needed to check to see if someone had replied to my email. But mostly I kept hands free. I would wait until the last rays of sun dipped behind the mountains to leap towards my computer and my phone to restore communications with the known world.

But what I have gained in relinquishing these absorbing, demanding instruments is considerable. I have discovered the power of printed words on paper, the magic of long walks on the beach or on paths through the woods, and the discoveries of human interaction when you actually talk with someone rather than to read their cryptic text messages that flutter through space like old  telegraphs.

People exist, I found. And so does nature, and knowledge that is not on a screen. I vowed to keep my fast through Lent. But I may keep at it for a while, not just for sacrifice, but for the restoration of the human soul.

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Martyrdom of Saint Alexei

            It might seem sacrilegious to think of Alexei Navalny as a saint, or his likely murder at the hands of Putin to be martyrdom. But hear me out.

            The word “saint” comes from the Latin sanctus, evolving in old French to sacrer, meaning “to make sacred.” The way one became sacred originally was through sacrifice—another word with roots in sanctus—giving up oneself.

            In the new Roman Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles, the elegant travertine walls of the modern structure are draped with woven tapestries depicting the saints. There is quite a procession of them. They begin with the saints of the New Testament, Mathew, Mark and Luke, and then Peter, and then a whole line of medieval saints.

            Towards the end are more recent saintly figures, including Mother Theresa and Pope John Paul. But then the very last tapestries portray some surprising figures. There is a young Afro-American guy in jeans and tennis shoes. Nearby is an Asian girl in a comfortable skirt. There are some kids in shorts.

            All of them saints, even the ones that we didn’t expect. They sanctified themselves with their lives.

            In the early history of sainthood, one of the most certain paths to beatification was martyrdom. The term “martyr” come from the Greek martur, which means “witness.” Those who witness to their faith to the extent that they would rather die than renounce it are the prime exemplars of martyrdom.

            This leads us back to Navalny. There is no question that this definition of martyrdom fits his remarkably brave—some would say foolhardy—stance. The very fact that he would persist in returning to Russia, to the land controlled by the same person, presumably, who had shortly before tried to poison him, is amazing. Few of us would risk such a thing.

            Navalny’s hope was that he would be able to follow the path of his hero, Nelson Mandela, who spent decades rotting in the South African prison on Robben Island before the political winds shifted. When Mandela was finally released, he was hailed as a hero and made the first President of the post-apartheid country.

            That was Navalny’s hope. Though he was fully aware of the likelihood that it would not end like that, that it would end the way it did. Sooner or later, Putin would finish the job.

            Yet he persisted in his witness, even to his martyred death. But was he a saint?

            In Christianity, the exemplar of sainthood is Jesus Christ, who according to Christian belief, gave himself to save the world. That is, his martyrdom was not a selfish act, to valorize himself, but in some way to ennoble everyone.

            It is a singularly odd way to live, this stance of trying to live a life where the virtuousness of the cause rises above one’s personal interests, even one’s own personal security. Martin Luther King Jr. had it. Gandhi had it. And so did Navalny.

            In Saints and Virtues, a book on the comparative study of sainthood that came out of a ten-year Berkeley-Harvard project on Comparative Religion, for which I was co-director, we considered the hallmarks of sainthood. In all traditions where saints abounded, including Sufi Islam and Bhakti Hinduism as well as Christianity, there was something peculiar about those people that we consider saints.

            They were “sublimely wacky,” we concluded. We meant that in a nice way, to describe people who lived unconventional lives for the sake of their understanding of truth. We are not really meant to be like them—they are not exemplars—since they are so unusual. And those around them who for most people are the ones you want to protect, are often abandoned.

            Gandhi was a horrible father, and not a very good husband. ML King had imperfections of his own. And Navalny has left his teenage son and his college-aged daughter on their own, along with their mother, whom he also abandoned in his imprisonment and now in his death. Yet she had taken up his mantle of leadership.

            We cannot all be saints. But thank God there are such beings on the face of the earth. We are all better for having lived in a world touched by them, by those like Saint Alexei.

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Ayodhya and the Rise of the Hindu Right

The blotches of red are flower petals scattered from an Indian Air Force helicopter during Prime Minister Modi’s consecration of the new temple.

Since I was in India shortly after an angry mob descended on an ancient mosque in 1992 in the town of Ayodhya, I thought I should go there and see it for myself. The old relic had been turned into rubble by club-wielding Hindus who believed the site to be the birthplace of the God Ram. So I didn’t expect much, but I thought it would be interesting to get a sense of the setting in which this drama had played out.

I went to the nearby major city, Lucknow, and rented a car with a driver, setting out for Ayodhya. It was a punishing trip. In the summer’s heat my only hope was air conditioning, and I was careful to pay extra for that convenience. As soon as we started out, however, the AC failed. It was too late to turn back. My choice then was one of two insufferable options.

One was to keep the window up, but it soon became much too hot and stuffy. So I would roll down the window to get some air. But then I was blasted with the hot dusty wind. I quickly rolled the window back up, and sat in the stultifying heat until I could take no more. I had to roll the window back down again. But then I immediately had to roll it back up.

It went on like that for what seemed an eternity. Eventually we arrived at Ayodhya. I was delighted just to know that the journey was over.

It was a sleepy little district town, I recall. No decent hotels and only a few restaurants. There were numerous temples, since Ayodhya for centuries had been a pilgrimage center associated with the location of Ram and the great epic, the Ramayana.

There was not much to see at the site of the former Babri Musjid, the old mosque that was stormed by Hindu mob with axes and clubs, battering the ancient walls into rubble. The police had cordoned off the whole area with a kind of no-man’s land around the location. Like me, other curious onlookers were there just to peer at the location.

It was not long before I told the driver to start the trek back to Lucknow. Heat be damned. But at least I had seen the site.

At the time the Ayodhya incident had created a huge public shock. The lawlessness of the mob and the vengeance with which they attacked the humble old mosque was breathtaking. Clearly, many people thought, the government would do something about it.

After all, the ruling Congress Party was dedicated to secularism. It was a term that in the Indian context meant equal treatment of all religious affiliations. The support of India’s fifteen percent Muslim population had been a major factor in the Congress Party’s continuing victories.

The assumption of many at the time was that the miscreants would be found and brought to justice and the old mosque restored. Or failing that, a new mosque would be built on the site.

Neither of these happened, in part for political reasons. The Babri mosque had become something of a cause célèbre on India’s political right. Hindu politics were gaining steam at the time. Support for replacing the Ayodhya mosque with a temple dedicated to Ram was a major plank in the platform of a new political party with religious leanings.

Hindu nationalism had been a feature of Indian politics since the early twentieth century. For over a hundred years it had been in the dark shadows of the secular politics of the Congress nationalist movement that emerged, after Independence, as India’s ruling party. The Congress was the party of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and it seemed like it would reign forever.

In the right wing shadows, however, the politics of Hindu nationalism maintained a looming presence. As early as 1909, Vinayak Damodar Savakar, regarded as the father of Hindu nationalism, engaged in debate with Gandhi in London over the efficacy of violence as a strategy in India’s independence movement.

In 1925 the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (the RSS) was founded as an organization to train young people and spread Hindu culture with the aim of making India a Hindu state. A member of the RSS was implicated in the assassination of Gandhi, and it has been a force in development of post-Independence Hindu parties such as the Jan Sangh. Hindu nationalism had  been a minority movement, however, marginalized by the democratic modernism of the ruling Congress Party.

Ayodhya in 1992 began to change that. The attack on the mosque and the subsequent demand for a new temple to honor Ram was heavily promoted by the new Hindu nationalist party that succeeded the Jan Sangh and was supported by the RSS. It was named the Bharatiya Janata Party, “Indian People’s Party” or simply “the BJP.” It garnered few seats before the 1992 attack, but in 1996 gained the largest number of parliament seats of any other party, though not enough to form a stable government.

By 1998, however, a BJP-led coalition came to power and its leader at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and old Jan Sangh figure, became Prime Minister. In 2004 the Congress Party returned to power. The Congress Party at the time was led by Sonya Gandhi, daughter in law of Indira Gandhi, who declined to accept the post of Prime Minister in favor of a skilled economist, a Sikh, Manmohan Singh.

In 2014 the BJP came roaring back into power with the former Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, as its Prime Minister. Indian national elections are held every five years, and in 2019 Modi and the BJP were resoundingly reelected. They continue to be in office.

Political observers have been trying to explain the remarkable and sudden growth of the BJP in the last decades. There are a number of factors that are distinctive to India related to its urban growth and efforts at economic development.

But the fact cannot be ignored that the rise of an authoritarian religious nationalism in India takes place at the same time when around the world there are new popularist authoritarian movements—many of them buttressed by religious xenophobia. It is an era of Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, Trump in the United States, and Bolsonaro for a time in Brazil.

There is something emerging globally, a mounting distrust in the legitimacy of the secular nation-state, that has afflicted India as well. Like the MAGA Republicans in America, BJP-supporting Indians have embraced their leader with a religious zeal. In both cases, they have attributed to their political hero an almost divine power and an apocalyptic vision of their political reign.

Modi, like Putin and Trump, is not shy about hiding these religious ties.  He has proclaimed Hindu culture to be the dominant culture of the subcontinent, one that should be celebrated. Textbooks in public schools have been rewritten to minimalize the presence of the Moghul Empires and the influence of Muslim culture. Cities with Muslim names, like Allahabad, have been replaced with names that are either neutral or Hindu.

Modi arrived in Ayodhya in priestly garb on January 22, 2024 for the inauguration event of a new temple that had been built on the site of the destroyed mosque. He had endured eleven days of purification rituals to prepare him for taking on the sacral role of consecrating the granite stone image of Ram on the temple’s altar.

The Ayodhya that Modi came to was a vastly different city than the sleepy town I visited some thirty years earlier. The construction of the new temple attracted a number of gleaming new hotels and restaurants, and an impressive new airport was constructed to cater to the new crowds. Visitors would no longer have to endure hours of dusty travel in the summer without air conditioning.

The construction of the new temple had been allowed after an Indian Supreme Court decision in 2019 that settled the issue of what would be done with the site. In an unusual and controversial decision, the Court admitted that the mob’s destruction of the ancient mosque was indeed “an egregious violation” of the law. But nonetheless, it granted control over the site to a trust to be set up by the Government of India in order to have a Hindu temple built on the 2.77 acre location. It simultaneously allocated 5 acres in another “prominent location” to be given to the official Muslim charity foundation of Uttar Pradesh to have a new mosque built there.

By the time that Modi showed up to inaugurate the temple, the rupee equivalent of over 200 million dollars had been raised from non-government donations to create the mammoth artifice. Millions more were allocated from government funds for infrastructure requirements of roads, utilities, and the like.

The building is scheduled to be completed within a year or so, perhaps by early 2025. The incomplete condition of the new construction, however, did not deter Modi from inaugurating it early. It is, after all, right  before the national elections slated later in the Spring. Ignoring the unfinished details, he declared it functionally finished, consecrating the image of Ram that officially made it a sacred temple.

The crowds roared. It was estimated that over 300,000 people had crowded into Ayodhya from all over the country for the grand occasion. At the moment of the consecration, helicopters and airplanes from the Indian Air Force flew low overhead scattering thousands of flower petals on the joyful throng.

The Indian press, much of which was already in the BJP camp, were rapturous over the occasion. India Today, once a respected newsmagazine of India, proclaimed that the installation of the Ram image in the temple was “not just a religious ceremony.” They averred that it was “much more,” stating boldly that “the world is seeing in it the civilizational awakening, the rise of a nation that is finally shaken off the colonial shackles.”

A group of Indian human rights organizations, however, have taken a different position. They issued a statement saying that Modi’s consecration of the temple “set a dangerous precedent.” They accused the Prime Minister of a blatant political stunt in advance of the elections. Moreover, they said that it was a dark indication of “a disregard for the right to exist for religious minorities,” and the further erosion of secularism in public life.

In India, the temple has been consecrated, a monument not just to Lord Ram but also to a Hindu political regime. It signifies, as elsewhere in the world, a religious nationalism on the rise. The garish temple is also regarded for many observers to be a bad omen for democratic nationalism, and a dismal perversion of religion.

 

 

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Three Questions About Hamas

 

We think we know all about Hamas. Our understanding of the movement is is shaped largely by the horrific images of sadistic terrorists ravaging a peaceful rock concert and settlements in Southern Israel when they breached the border and conducted a savage rampage on October 7. Since then this view of Hamas as unspeakable evil has been enhanced by the public pronouncements of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli press.

My own perception is somewhat more nuanced, based on my interviews with Hamas leaders, including the founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, some years ago when I was in Gaza. My information has been buttressed by more recent communications with Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.

What I know about Hamas complicates our picture of it, and raises several basic questions.

  1. Is Hamas is a united organization?

When I talked with leaders of Hamas some years ago I was struck by how disorganized the movement appeared to be, and how fluid were many of the loyalties. I was scheduled to meet with one high-ranking leader of Hamas, but by the time I met with him he had already jumped ship and become a supporter of its rival, the Palestinian Authority. Other leaders acknowledged that there was internal dissention and controversy, especially over some of the Hamas tactics at the time, including the use of suicide bombers.

Though the October 7 attack was extremely well planned, likely years in the making, and involved a complicated organizational support structure, it is also likely that many Hamas officials and supporters were unaware of what was going on. It is well known that Israeli intelligence has spies within the Hamas organization, though in this case they were not well enough placed to know about the secret plans of October 7. Hamas as a political organization includes hundreds of government employees who were probably not only unaware of the attack plans but also likely to have been opposed to them, knowing the reign of terror that this would unleash from Israel’s military defenses.

At the other extreme of the political spectrum were rogue groups of militants who thought that Hamas was too moderate, including members of the Islamic Jihad movement. Many of these non-Hamas militants seized on the opportunity of October 7 to join the attack and carry out their vicious wrath on Israelis unabated. Some of them were little more than sociopaths and street thugs, with no official links to Hamas. The planned attacks of Hamas were savage enough. But these fringe elements likely made a horrible situation even worse. Alas some of these rogue elements also took hostages, making the negotiations with Hamas for their release even more difficult.

If one could roll back to the calendar to the days immediately after October 7, these divisions within Hamas could have been exploited by Israel. It is not impossible to imagine a scenario where Israel could have worked with disaffected Hamas leaders to create an alternative Hamas council to run the Gaza territory. Stoking an internal battle within Hamas might have been as effective in countering the militant Hamas leadership as military engagement, though it would have been a difficult maneuver to achieve. It also would not have had the effect of providing a sense of retaliation to a traumatized public yearning for strong action in response to the October 7 massacre. Still, the military invasion could have been conducted in such a way as to protect and curry favor with the opposition within Hamas’ own ranks.

  1. Do all Palestinians in Gaza support Hamas?

            This brings up another question, regarding the degree of popular support Hamas had among the wider population in Gaza. Though the Israeli military operation treated all of Gaza residents as terrorist supporters, it seems unlikely that was the case.

In my recent conversations with people from Gaza, they claimed that a sizable percentage, perhaps the majority, despised the Hamas organization. It’s difficult to know the exact number, not only because of Hamas intimidation but also because there have been no elections in twelve years. It is true that the movement came to political power in Gaza through free elections in 2006, but it’s likely that this was due to disaffection with the ruling Palestinian Authority at the time as much as it was to an attraction for Hamas.

After years of Hamas’ mismanagement, authoritarian control and economic stagnation, many if not most of the Gaza population has been yearning for an alternative. Though Hamas did not allow opinion polls within Gaza, on the Palestinian West Bank the support for Hamas prior to October 7 was only 12%, though after the Israeli military invasion in Gaza the percentage has raised dramatically.

The prior disaffection with Hamas could have been a useful tool for Israel in its attempts to crush the militant leadership after the October 7 massacre. In my recent book on how religious terrorist movements end, When God Stops Fighting, I report on the inside perspective of three movements, including ISIS, that have been terminated. In each case, old militants in the movements told me that what destroyed the movements was the break-down of support from the general populations they tried to control.

In the Gaza situation, this disaffection could have been harnessed by Israel. It is likely that ordinary citizens of the region were disgusted with the savagery of the October 7 massacre and would have turned against those leaders of Hamas involved in it. Israel might have been able to collaborate with them to help to locate the Hamas bases and fighters. The Awakening movement engineered by US General David Petraeus in Iraq was able to do just that in turning local Sunni Arab leaders against a precursor to ISIS, al Qaeda in Iraq, and essentially defeating its power in the Anbar region of the country.

Though almost all Palestinians despise the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory they would not all have endorsed the cruelty of October 7, and many would likely have turned against the movement, especially if offered the promise of a long-range solution to Palestinian autonomy in the future.

Instead, the massive destruction of Gaza buildings in the weeks since October 7 and the tragic loss of life—overwhelmingly women and children–has likely turned even moderate Hamas-hating Gaza residents into bitter enemies of Israel and grudging supporters of Hamas.

  1. Do all Hamas supporters want to completely destroy Israel?

            One of the most common truths repeated about Hamas supporters is that they are dedicated to the total destruction of Israel and all Israelis. Certainly some are. Moreover the goal of Israel’s eradication is in the Hamas charter, which has never been repealed.

But when I talked with Dr Abdul Aziz Rantisi, one of the founders of Hamas and its political head, he repeatedly told me that he had nothing against Jews as a people or Judaism as a religion. He said that if the situation was reversed, and Palestinians were in charge of the whole Israel-Palestinian region, Jews would be welcome to stay and claim the territory as their homeland as long as they did not control it. Moreover, Rantisi talked about collaboration with Israel in a way that implied a tacit acceptance of the existence of the state of Israel.

Former President Jimmy Carter reported the same thing. He was told by Hamas leaders that they could live with the state of Israel limited to the 1967 borders if they allowed Palestinians to have their own independent state.

But as I said, the charter of Hamas calls for the destruction of Israel, and this clause has never been revoked. Doing so would likely have set off a firestorm of controversy within the Hamas movement, where many members do indeed yearn for the total destruction of Israel. The leadership of the movement would like to avoid that kind of internal turmoil. Hence some have quietly interpreted the strident language of the charter in a way that is more realistic and opportunistic.

When Hamas organized as a political party twelve years ago and ran candidates for offices in Gaza and the West Bank, many members of the movement opposed this move. They thought that recognition of the political structures of Gaza and the West Bank was tacit acceptance of the state of Israel and its limitation of Palestinian control. Nonetheless, the decision at the time was to work within the existing political framework.

The October 7 attack clearly showed, however, that the militant wing of the Hamas movement would not accept the status quo and wanted to literally blow up the walls that kept it imprisoned. Some of them wanted to kill and maim and torture as many Israelis as they could find. Whether the rest of the Hamas movement and the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza supported this tactic is questionable.

Whether these dissenters could have been marshalled in opposition to Hamas and as a base of a more moderate leadership in the territory is unknown.

The reality at present is far different, however. The Israeli military blitzkrieg has created a population more bitterly opposed to the oppression from Israeli than from Hamas. And the future is far from certain.

 

 

 

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I’m back

 

I’m back on my website after more than a month’s hiatus. It’s nothing that I did– I was shocked to see the words “suspended” where my site ordinarily would be, and it’s taken a long process to get it restored.

I won’t bore you with the details –but apparently it had nothing to do with my posts on Hamas (which is what I feared). But rather some malware that infected the site. It’s clean now, you’ll be pleased to know, so no need to wear surgical gloves and a mask when viewing this site.

My thanks to the great guy who originally helped me set up this site, Dustin Anglen, for getting to the bottom of this, even though it interrupted his engagement party in Montana. Thanks also to his friend Alex Marshall who also had a hand in creating the site, and to  Peter Giese who set up the predecessor site and tried to help track down the problem as well. Thanks to these guys I’m back up and running with all the boring content that you’re used to seeing.

There will be more to come! Aloha-

 

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Defeating Hamas

If Israel wants to defeat Hamas, they’re going at it the wrong way. This is the conclusion made by my colleague from the University of Chicago, Robert Pape, in a recent op-ed in the New York Times, with which I largely agree. My agreement with Pape is based on years of following the rise and fall of terrorist movements around the world.

Pape’s point is that a terrorist group should be separated and isolated from the general population in order to be targeted for defeat. Any strategy that includes attacks against the general population—including especially killing them and destroying their homes—simply creates more terrorism in response.

Pape gave several examples from recent history in the Middle East to make his point, including the rise of Hizbollah and Hamas. They emerged as direct responses from a broad Israeli attack on civilian populations that created anger and support for the new extremist movements.

The same happened in Iraq after the US invasion. But there was one bright moment in the counterinsurgency there that is worth recalling, since that offers a strategy that could be employed in the current situation with Hamas in Gaza.

In the early 2000s, the US occupation forces in Iraq were confronted with a new terrorist organization, al Qaeda in Iraq. Led by a Jordan militant, Abu Masab al-Zarqawi, this vicious movement utilized the most brutal of terrorist attacks, including beheading foreigners, to trying to drive away the occupying forces.

Initially the US-led military occupation attacked the resisters to the occupation in the conventional way. In 2004, for example, it launched a wholesale assault on the city of Fallujah, virtually destroying it. In response, however, Al Qaeda in Iraq just grew stronger. Even after locating the leader, Zarqawi, and killing him, the resistance movement expanded.

In 2007, under the leadership of General David Petraeus, the US adopted a new strategy. His idea was for the US military to largely withdraw from the Sunni areas of Western Iraq that were the heart of the resistance. Instead, he empowered the local Sunni leaders there to fight against the al Qaeda in Iraq movement, since it was undercutting their own leadership and creating havoc in the Sunni towns and villages. They hated Zarqawi’s movement, and given the chance and the military support, were eager to fight it.

This strategy, known as “the Awakening,” was largely successful. The movement was virtually destroyed and the region was relatively quiet for several years. After the US withdrew from Iraq in 2011, however, the Shi’i led government in Baghdad abandoned the strategy and the Sunni leaders felt alienated. A new radical movement emerged led by some of the former activists associated with al Qaeda in Iraq. This new movement eventually changed its name to the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq—ISIS—that became an even greater force with which the region had to reckon.

This sequence of events indicates that the strategy of arming and supporting a local resistance to a terrorist movement has to be coupled with a long-term strategy of support for the local population. The local leaders have to be empowered to continue to resist extremist movements in the future.

Could this strategy work with Hamas? The situations are not entirely comparable; Gaza, for instance, is a concentrated mass of urban humanity. Still the majority of residents of Gaza before the October 7 attacks appeared to be hostile to Hamas, or at least noncommittal. There was, and is, the possibility of a Gaza-based insurrection against Hamas that could be supported and that might be far more effective in countering the militants.

The first step in this potential collaboration between anti-Hamas Gaza residents and Israeli forces is to stop targeting them as if they were the enemy. That might open the door to a productive engagement to defeat the militant forces, and it might be a step towards a more enduring peace.

 

 

 

 

Mark Juergensmeyer