A Reason to Believe

a sovereign state in order for the Apocalypse to occur.” But for Sullivan, it’s not just Nasrallah’s particular brand of religious motivation that is suspect, but religion in general. On the subject of the Apocalypse Sullivan writes ” Pat Robertson and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are in complete agreement”, the sole difference being that Robertson is merely ” a corrupt kook” while ” Ahmadinejad has some serious weaponry and a state under his control.” Thus Sullivan sees only a difference in degree and not of essence.

Perhaps, but with the Jihad advancing under a religious banner and all religions doubtful, under what banner should those who oppose it fight? Bernard-Henri Lévy who Sullivan links to, describes the wavering standard of Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz, as he fights the Hezbollah.

And this sign is the Israeli government’s choice of Amir Peretz as defense minister: a former activist for Peace Now, long committed to the cause of sharing the land with the Palestinians, Peretz was head of the trade union Histadrut and was in principle much better prepared to organize strikes than to wage war. “I didn’t sleep a wink all night,” he tells me, very pale, his eyes red, in the little office in Tel Aviv where he welcomes me…. “I haven’t slept because I spent all night waiting for news of a unit of our boys who were caught in an ambush yesterday afternoon in Lebanese territory.” Then a young aide-de-camp who also looks like a union activist holds out to him a field telephone. Without a word, his eyes lowered, his big mustache trembling with ill-contained emotion, Peretz receives the news he has been dreading. He looks up at us and says: “Don’t spread the news right away, please, since the families don’t know yet — but three of them died, and we still haven’t heard about the fourth one. It’s terrible.…”

Peretz picks up a banner of sorts, only to lay it down, all the while bewailing his evil fortune. Opposing Peretz is Ahmadinejad. Matthias Küntzel in describing the Iranian leader’s background for the New Republic begins with this vignette about Ahmadinejad’s favorite Iranian militia: the Basiji.

During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini imported 500,000 small plastic keys from Taiwan. The trinkets were meant to be inspirational. After Iraq invaded in September 1980, it had quickly become clear that Iran’s forces were no match for Saddam Hussein’s professional, well-armed military. To compensate for their disadvantage, Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as young as twelve years old, to the front lines. There, they marched in formation across minefields toward the enemy, clearing a path with their bodies. Before every mission, one of the Taiwanese keys would be hung around each child’s neck. It was supposed to open the gates to paradise for them.

The Basiji who cleared Saddam’s minefields by walking over them had a rather different outlook on warfare from Peretz. And by the looks of it their Lebanese brethren, the Hezbollah are giving him a run for his money.

Teheran’s Jihad is not the first religious war of recent history. Twentieth century totalitarianisms were every bit as millennial and extreme as the Basiji. The first modern European suicide bombers weren’t Islamists but Anarchists. Alexander II of Russia, French President Sadi Carnot, Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Castillo, King Umberto I of Italy, President William McKinley, King Carlos I of Spain, Prime Minister Stolypin of Russia were among the Heads of State murdered by anarchist assassins, each of whom was perfectly willing to die in the attempt. And like today’s al-Qaeda, the Anarchists belonged to no definite organization. Emile Henry after bombing the Café Terminus declared at his trial that “there is no innocent bourgeois”. Hassan Nasrallah would have understood.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair speaking in Los Angeles understood that Islamic terrorism was the successor to the West’s own homegrown religious upheaval: Marxism. Radical Islamists, Blair said, ” were part of a growing movement … an ideology, a world-view” with the ” deep convictions and the determination of the fanatic. It resembles in many ways early revolutionary Communism. It doesn’t always need structures and command centers or even explicit communication. It knows what it thinks.”

And what does the post-Christian, presumably post-Marxist West which it aims to destroy think?

Ann Coulter claimed that “if a Martian landed in America and set out to determine the nation’s official state religion, he would have to conclude it is liberalism, while Christianity and Judaism are prohibited by law.” Liberalism, Coulter argues, is a religion in all but name with its own sacraments (abortion), holy writ (Roe v. Wade), martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal), clergy (public school teachers), churches (government schools,) and creation myth: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Coulter’s comparison is provocative, but fails in one essential respect: unlike “early revolutionary Communism”, liberalism is neither visionary enough nor sufficiently disciplined to qualify as a fighting faith.

Compare Amir Peretz the tormented liberal to a real religious leader: Mahatma Gandhi the Father of India. In 1940 Gandhi advised the British to act thus towards Hitler: “You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions…. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.” To the Jews just emerging from the concentration camps in 1946 Gandhi said: “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” Only a religious pacifist — or a Jihadi — could say that.

That strength of will enabled Gandhi to prise the British from India. And a similar religious dedication, even fanaticism, was mobilized by Western leaders in the fight against the great totalitarianisms: Nazism and Communism, both dark faiths themselves. Churchill in private might agonize over the military necessities of war. Steven Budiansky in his book Airpower recounts how Churchill leapt from his chair after viewing a film of British raids on German cities in 1943. “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” But in public he showed no doubt. He couldn’t afford to.

In The Last Lion, William Manchester describes how Churchill humbugged the British public not only into continuing what seemed to any rational observer in 1940 a hopeless war, but to wage it in the name of things they no longer believed in. The British Empire whose Finest Hour would shine for a thousand years would survive the Reich only by a few short years. And yet the stakes were too high for Churchill to dispense with faith. “This was really necessary because times were so very bad. The method was accepted because everyone realized how near were death and ruin. Not only individual death, which is the universal experience, stood near, but, incomparably more commanding, the life of Britain, her message, and her glory.”

After 1918 The Great War, originally begun for definite political aims, was gradually recast as the “War to End All Wars” for the death of millions of young men in the trenches could no longer be justified simply in terms of recovering things like Alsace-Lorraine. Such a monstrous sacrifice required the religious goal of ending war itself. The alternative was despair. One Great War memorial read: “We’re not making a sacrifice. Jesus, you’ve seen this war. We are the sacrifice.” The mystical attachment of Australians to the memory Gallipoli is precisely because it was senseless. It was necessary to mythically reinterpret Gallipoli as the birth of the Australian nation rather than merely regard it as the death of thousands of Australians for nothing.

During the Second World War, an American family which lost five of its sons to a naval action in a single night had their story dramatized in the film The Fighting Sullivans. Issued in 1944 with many in the audience having sons and fathers overseas, it was almost too difficult to watch. The movie

opens with a simple declaration: “This is a true story.” What follows is the account of five young men named Sullivan. They enjoy a typical all-American small town childhood … go fishing and boating … worship in church … slide down the banister of their house and squabble among themselves and with others. Their hardworking father tries to set for them a good example. Their mother cooks their meals, cleans their clothes and mediates their differences. The years pass too quickly and the Sullivans become young men. They date and go to dances. One of them falls in love and marries. Then terrible news comes, on December 7, 1941. The Japanese have launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. America is at war. “Its always been the five of us,” one of the Sullivans proclaims.

And they were all lost in one night action off Guadalcanal.

What’s astonishing to modern audiences is how the The Fighting Sullivans’ ends, on an unabashedly religious note. “If the scene where the parents learn all five boys have died does not get you, the next scene will: Mr. Sullivan goes off to his job on the railroad and as the train passes the water tower where his boys waved to him as kids, he salutes them. Actually, this film works so well that the final shot, of the Sullivans in uniform striding across the clouds of the afterlife does not seem one whit hokey.” It wouldn’t if you had lost five children. Eleven years later Van Johnson would play a World War 2 soldier returning to his sweetheart (Jane Wyman) for one last kiss on the rainy steps of St. Patrick’s after being killed in action in Miracle in the Rain. (Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore would revisit the same theme in Ghost). In those dark days faith, like freedom was sometimes just another name for nothing left to lose. And yet it was not altogether meaningless: it made the margin between victory and defeat.

But perhaps the West, cushioned by its material wealth, has altogether too much to lose for it to care about faith or freedom any more. Mark Steyn, currently touring Australia on a speaking tour, asks whether the West can rouse itself from ennui just long enough to feel the knife at its throat. And the horrifying thing is that Steyn on the hustings swings his lamp and cheerfully calls out for company in a dark, unanswering cultural night made all the more tenebrous by the bright Antipodean sunshine. What Deity, race or tribe might we still raise against the horde of Basiji?

My own guess is that neither Israel nor the West at large can long resist radical Islam without some sustaining faith of its own, a faith it will not find unless it makes up its mind to look for it. Men will fight on for as long as there is something left to fight for and not otherwise. Despair comes when we are finally convinced that even our hopes are futile. Winston Smith’s final question in 1984’s Room 101 after having despaired of the existence of God was to ask after the possibility of freedom: the existence of the Brotherhood, the only resistance to Big Brother.

(Winston)”Does the Brotherhood exist?”

(O’Brien) “That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No. As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.”

That is the weakness of reason, Winston Smith’s weakness: to stop when there is no reason to continue. And that is the power of faith: to go on without the answers, but to go on.

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