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The Rev Dr John Alexie Crane, 2880 Exeter Place, Santa Barbara, CA 93105
Lex1304@aol.comIt was a vicious, brutal attack, the terrorist strike in New York and Washington this morning. Terrorism doesn't get much worse, get any more heartless than this. Innocent people killed or maimed in large numbers. For those of us who lived through the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the resulting feelings are familiar. Shock. Disbelief. Unthinkable. A sense of being violated.
I believe in the value of love and non-violence in human life; but I volunteered to kill our country's enemies during WWII. I was in a crack artillery unit during the war in Europe, and we no doubt killed a great many enemy soldiers. We had been trained to be highly competent at the task. However, neither my fellow troops nor I enjoyed the process. It was a hazardous and exceedingly unpleasant job that had to be done. Why did it have to be done? Because our enemies were not vulnerable to non-violent
opposition, and they were powerfully motivated by their highly effective social conditioning to dominate as much of the world as possible.The Nazis methodically killed millions of Jews, who were easily overpowered by the crushing social and military machine created by Hitler's regime. Which was not restrained by any moral scruples.
Similarly with the enemy who struck our country today. If we cannot persuade them to negotiate, we may have to kill some of them in order to prevent them from wreaking further mayhem. They are powerfully motivated by a bitter hatred that has been a long time brewing. Centuries, in fact.
This morning, soon after I first heard the details of the attack, I found myself reflecting and making a list of the cultural and historical antecedents of the event. Where did all that hate come from and why? Most
immediately is the ongoing conflict between the Arabs and Israelis over the land of Palestine. It's intense. It is a life-threatening cultural illness, triggered by the misconceptions of reality conditioned into people all over the world from ancient times down to the present day.Among these are a few we have begun to transcend, and this allows most of us now to see that, though they defined the world view of our people for centuries, these misconceptions were and are damnably destructive of human life, as well as a blight on our cultural evolution. To take the most obvious of these once dominant misconceptions: everybody knew with certainty for centuries that women were inferior to men, and therefore should be subservient to them. It has taken us 150 years even to begin to transcend
this long standing cultural misconception.Well then, what are the comparable misconceptions that underlie the intense hatred driving today's attacks. There is the widespread anti-semitism that is and long has been pervasive in western culture.
Millions of people in the western world have been convinced that Jews are a scheming and evil people who have managed to penetrate the seats of power all over the world.Another endlessly destructive misconception is seen in the almost universally held conviction that there can be, that there must be only one true, valid world view, and that mine is the one. Social scientists have
named this delusion "ethnocentrism," and it is a curse on the life of our species. This delusion combined in the Christian world with a misconception that propelled it into world dominance during the 19th and 20th centuries. What was this misconception? It was vigorously asserted early in the first book of the Bible where God empowered humanity "to be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over ... every living thing that moves upon the earth."Which is exactly what our forebears did. The power of the west spread throughout the world, swept over all other cultures it encountered. This in turn led to the dominance of the Middle East by Europe and America. Then, after the Nazi holocaust generated some sympathy for the plight of the Jews,
the west encouraged the Jews to establish a colony on land long settled by Arabs. I myself supported this step made possible by the power of the west in Palestine. The Arabs, of course, were opposed, and became increasingly so as the Jewish population expanded with an influx of refugees. Both the Jews
and the Arabs saw themselves as having a legitimate claim to the area. Bitter, violent hatred has ensued.On the Arab side the hatred began a thousand years ago with the Christian Crusades into the Arab world. Their armies were determined to rescue their holy city, Jerusalem, from control by the infidels, the Muslim people. The butchery that followed, while seen as glorious by the west, was, of course, seen differently by Arabs. This is where it began: the hatred driving the attack this morning.
What I am saying here is that this morning we reaped the harvest of centuries of misconceived social conditioning that has separated our species from reality, from truth. The mad terrorist attack is a direct outgrowth of this long simmering, now boiling hatred. We must understand this if we are to respond constructively to the outrage committed by our enemy. If we are not to be as driven by hate as he is, not to be driven to wanton destruction.
Still, if the enemy will not negotiate, it may well be necessary to kill some of them to put a stop to their heartless killing of our people. We should not, however, let ourselves be panicked into abusing or attacking Muslim people now living among us. As we did with Japanese and Germans in the US during WW I & II. There has been more than enough inhumanity. It's time now to break the cycle and recycle of hate. Let's act and act decisively, but not let anger and hate motivate our actions. Let's do it right from now on.
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