Fields of Blood (64 page)

After the Iranian Revolution, one exasperated U.S. official was heard to exclaim: “Whoever took religion seriously?”
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Since the
Enlightenment,
revolutions were understood to occur at a time when the
saeculum
had reached maturity and was strong enough to declare its independence of faith.
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The idea of a popular uprising ushering in a religiously oriented state was almost embarrassing in its upending of accepted wisdom; many Westerners deplored it as atavistic and perverse. But they seemed unable to see that by pursuing their own political and economic agendas that did violence to the Iranian people, Western governments had bred a new species of religion. They had been blind to the particular problems of the postcolonial state and the pitfalls of a modernization imposed from without rather than effected organically from within.
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And in deploring the new theocracy, they failed to appreciate a central irony. The Western ideals of liberty had fired the Iranian imagination and inspired Iranians to demand basic freedoms, but the Western secular ideal had been irredeemably tainted for Iranians by the self-interest and cruelty with which it had been pursued. The
United States declared that it had a God-given mission to spread liberty throughout the world, but this had evidently not included the people of Iran. “We did not expect
Carter to defend the shah, for he is a religious man who has raised the slogan of defending human rights,” an ayatollah explained to an interviewer after the revolution. “How can Carter, the devout Christian, defend the shah?”
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Such perplexity reveals how strange a premodern sensibility must find the idea of religion as a private matter.

The Iranian Revolution had dramatically changed the status quo in the
Persian Gulf. The shah had been one of the key pillars of U.S. policy in the region, permitting the West to access its vast oil reserves at a viable price. In December 1979, the
Soviet Union sought to capitalize on America’s loss of influence in the region by invading Iran’s neighbor
Afghanistan. This
Cold War struggle between the superpowers helped to inspire a global
jihad that would eventually target the United States and its allies. But it would be some time before the West recognized this danger, because during the 1980s and 1990s, it was more concerned with
terrorist atrocities and violence in the
Middle East and the
Indian subcontinent that seemed wholly inspired by “religion.”

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O
n November 18, 1978, nine hundred and thirteen American citizens died of self-administered cyanide poisoning in the agricultural colony of
Jonestown, Guyana.
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It was to date the largest loss of civilian life in a single incident in U.S. history. The deceased men, women, and children were members of the
People’s Temple founded during the 1950s in Indianapolis, Indiana, by the charismatic preacher
James Warren Jones (1938–78). Its commitment to racial and social equality had attracted chiefly poor, working-class white Americans and
African Americans. Members lived a strictly communal life based on what Jones called the “apostolic socialism” of the
Acts of the Apostles. In 1965, after having a vision of a nuclear bomb destroying Chicago, Jones had persuaded his followers to move with him and his family to safety in California. The Temple opened facilities in San Francisco and Los Angeles and gained a reputation for being politically progressive, offering legal services, child care, housing, and drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Membership increased to about one thousand, and in 1976, to escape the systemic violence and injustice that it believed to be inherent in the United States, the Temple moved to Guyana.

Jonestown is often cited by those who claim that religion has been responsible for more death and suffering than any other human activity. Yet even though Jones was an ordained Methodist pastor who often quoted the
gospels and used religion in recruitment, he was a
self-confessed atheist and
communist who often ridiculed conventional
Christianity. Stories about the Temple’s violence had begun to circulate in 1972: defectors spoke of beatings, verbal abuse, and emotional cruelty. Members were viciously castigated for making racist or sexist remarks, complaining about the communal living arrangements, or wasting food. Culprits were subjected to brutal physical punishment and other humiliations in public, and the community was kept in a state of constant terror. Jones filled their minds with graphic descriptions of CIA torture methods,
Nazi concentration camps, and
Ku Klux Klan lynchings. In 1972, while still in California, he announced that the U.S. government was

“I tell you, we’re in danger from a corporate dictatorship,” Jones insisted, “a great fascist state, a great communist state.”
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The ultimate terror began in 1978, when members started to rehearse their mass suicide. On “white nights” they would be roused suddenly from sleep and informed that they were about to be killed by U.S. agents; suicide was said to be the only viable option. They were then given a drink that they believed to be poisoned and waited to die. On November 18, 1978, the community had been visited by U.S. congressman
Leo Ryan, who had come to investigate reports of human rights abuses. After Ryan left, Jones dispatched Temple members to shoot him at the airstrip and then summoned the entire community to the Jonestown pavilion. There medical staff administered potassium cyanide in a batch of the soft drink Flavor-Aid, which parents fed to their children before taking it themselves. Most seem to have died willingly, though the two hundred children were certainly murdered and about a hundred of the elderly may have been injected involuntarily.

They recorded their last messages on audiotape. Jones had taken the concept of “revolutionary suicide” from
Black Panther leader
Huey Newton.
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“I made the decision to commit revolutionary suicide. My decision has been well thought out,” said one Jonestown resident. “And in my death, I hope that it would be used as an instrument to further liberation.” “It’s been my pleasure walking with all of you in this revolutionary struggle,” one woman stated. “No other way I would rather go [than] to give my life for socialism, communism.” People who were convinced that they had no voice in their own society had come to believe that they could be heard only in the shocking spectacle of their dying. Jones was the last to take the poison: “We said—one thousand people who said, we don’t like the way the world is. We didn’t commit suicide. We committed an act of revolutionary suicide, protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”
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The community dynamics of Jonestown were, of course, complex and imponderable. Although religion was clearly not the cause of this tragedy, it has much in common with instances of “revolutionary suicide” that have been articulated in religious terms. The Temple was a protest against the structural violence of American society; it had developed a highly developed history of grievance and suffering that, its members claimed, mainstream society chose to ignore. Jonestown was an assault as well as a protest: Temple members were laying their deaths at the door of the United States, a demonstration that its systemic injustice had made their lives so intolerable that death was preferable. Jones clearly believed, however psychotically, that he was engaged in an asymmetrical struggle with a superpower that held all the cards. All these elements would also surface in the wave of religiously inspired
terrorism that broke out in the 1980s.

One of the many reasons the drama of Jonestown is so disturbing is the germ of nihilism it reveals in modern culture. The Temple was clearly haunted by two of the dark icons of
modernity: the concentration camp and the mushroom cloud.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) had found that human beings were as strongly motivated by a death wish as by a desire for procreation. The French existentialist
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) spoke of a God-shaped hole in human consciousness, a void at the heart of modern culture. By the mid-twentieth century, that psychic void had been filled with a terrible reality. Between 1914 and 1945, seventy million people in Europe and the
Soviet Union had died violent deaths.
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Some of the worst
atrocities had been perpetrated by Germans who lived in one of the most cultivated societies in Europe. The
Holocaust shook the
Enlightenment optimism that education would eliminate barbarism, since it showed that a concentration camp could exist in the same vicinity as a great university. The sheer scale of the Nazi genocide reveals its debt to modernity; no previous society could have implemented such a grandiose scheme of extermination. The
Nazis used many of the tools and achievements of the industrial age—the factory, the railways, and the advanced chemical industry—to deadly effect, relying on modern scientific and rational planning in which everything is subordinated to a single, limited, and defined objective.
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Born of modern scientific racism, the Holocaust was the ultimate step in social engineering and the most extreme demonstration of the inability of the nation to tolerate minorities. It showed what can happen once the sense of the sacredness of every single human being—a conviction at the heart of traditional religions that quasi-religious systems seem unable or disinclined to re-create—is lost.

On August 6, 1945, a 3,600-kilogram atomic bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima, killing approximately 140,000 people instantaneously. Three days later a plutonium-type bomb was dropped on
Nagasaki, killing some 24,000 people.
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For centuries people had dreamed of a final apocalypse wrought by God; now, with weapons of mass destruction, it appeared that human beings no longer needed God to achieve
apocalyptic effects. The nation had become a supreme value, and the international community acknowledged the legitimacy of a nuclear strike to protect it, despite the prospect of total annihilation that such means suggested. There could be no more potent evidence of the death wish Freud had described. But it also, perhaps, suggests a flaw in the purely secular ideal that eliminates “holiness” from its politics—the conviction that some things or people must be “set apart” from our personal interests. The cultivation of that transcendence—be it God, Dao,
Brahman, or
Nirvana—had, at its best, helped people to appreciate human finitude. But if the nation becomes the absolute value (in religious terms, an “idol”), there is no reason why we should not liquidate those who appear to threaten it.

This death wish was, however, not only present in the godless violence of secular
nationalism but is also evident in the religiously articulated violence of the late twentieth century. Westerners were quite rightly horrified by the
Iranian child-
martyrs who died on the battlefields of the
Iraq-Iran War. As soon as war was declared, adolescents from the slums and shantytowns had crowded into the mosques, begging to be sent to
the front. Radicalized by the excitement of the
revolution, they hoped to escape the tedium of their grim lives. And so, as in traditional societies of times past, the potential for
ecstasy and intensity through warfare beckoned. The government issued an edict allowing male children as young as twelve to enlist at the front without their parents’ permission. They became wards of the
imam and were promised a place in paradise. Tens of thousands of adolescents poured into the war zone, wearing the martyrs’ insignia of crimson headbands. Some, trying to clear minefields, ran ahead of the troops and were blown to pieces. Others attacked as suicide bombers, deploying a tactic that has been used in various contexts of asymmetrical warfare since the eleventh century. Scribes were sent to the front to write the martyrs’ wills, many of which took the form of letters to the Imam and spoke of their joy in fighting “alongside friends on the road to Paradise.”
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The child-martyrs restored
Khomeini’s faith in the revolution; like Imam
Husain, he claimed, they were dying to witness to the primacy of the Unseen. But they had also been exploited to serve the interests of the nation.

Religiously articulated militarism has not been restricted to cultures with a premodern religious outlook, though. In the secularized West it has surfaced in response to the terrors of
modernity, particularly those of modern industrialized warfare. During the early 1980s, disaffected American Protestant groups fearing a
Soviet nuclear attack during a particularly tense period of the
Cold War established fortified strongholds in remote areas of the Northwest. These
survivalists, who trained militarily and stockpiled ammunition and other supplies, felt threatened not only by the godless Soviet bloc but by the U.S. government as well. Loosely affiliated as
Christian Identity, these groups had very little in common with orthodox Christian churches.
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Claiming direct descent from the
Twelve Tribes of
Israel (through a preposterous ethnography known as “British Israelism”), they espoused a brand of white supremacy that saw the federal government and its toxic
pluralism as a mortal threat. It is difficult to estimate its numbers, because Identity was and remains merely a network of organizations, but it probably had no more than 100,000 members.
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And not all shared the same concerns: some were strictly secular survivalists who were simply fleeing the threat of nuclear catastrophe.
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Yet there is a religious patina to some of these extremist groups, who use the language of faith to express fears, anxieties, and enthusiasms that are widespread, though not openly expressed, in the mainstream.

The reach of the message can be dramatic. Christian Identity’s brand of ideology would inspire
Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. McVeigh was a self-professed agnostic, however. Like several Identity leaders, he had served in the U.S. Army and had a pathological attraction to violence. During the 1991 Gulf War he had helped massacre a group of trapped Iraqi soldiers and taken photographs of their corpses for his personal collection. He was not officially a member of Christian Identity but read its newsletter, had telephone conversations with its officers, and had visited its compound on the Oklahoma-Arkansas border.
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