by Ian Hansen, PhD
Pointless War #1: The War on Communism/Socialism/Equality/Human development
Consider the battle against communism. Communism was supposed to be so evil that stopping it required slaughtering millions of people, developing expensive and expansive programs of government torture and mind control, and terroristically overthrowing multiple democratically-elected or otherwise popular governments throughout the world. But Kerala is the most communist state in India. Since 1957 it has regularly elected communists into governance. These were and are free, contested elections by private ballot, with rights to assembly, protest and dissent constitutionally guaranteed. And yet (or therefore, or “as luck would have it”) Kerala is also an Indian standout with regard to education and literacy, high life expectancy, low infant and maternal mortality, and high voter turnout. Other regularly communist-electing states in India also stand out in these regards. In regions outside India, even places like “totalitarian1” undemocratic communist Cuba and “totalitarian genocidal2” China (communist for four decades, and still ruled by The Party) stand out in human development terms: life expectancy, mortality, and literacy. Of course questions of voter turnout are moot in both Cuba and China.
Pointless War #2: The War on Terror/Islam/Religion
And consider also religion, the bugaboo of contemporary War on Terror ideology. The genocidal part of “totalitarian genocidal” China, mentioned above, reflects China’s dictatorial enthusiasm to one-up the US “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) program by murdering and brainwashing Uighur Muslims. Uighurs hail from Xinjiang, a Western Chinese province that is, not coincidentally, just north of Tibet. The US CVE program is rooted in an Islam-impugning junk science that China has only been too happy to capitalize on, as part of their longstanding hostility to religion. The US CVE program reflects the fact that in the post-9/11 political economy and propagandaverse, the US increasingly resembles China. In our 21st century “War on Terror” culture, religion, especially Islam, is supposed to be so evil that we Americans must eviscerate all our own rights and freedoms, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and wantonly destroy cradles of civilization to stop it.
But in Kerala, religion-including-Islam doesn’t look so bad. Kerala is about as religious as the rest of India (that is, very religious)—with approximately half of other Indian states being more religious than Kerala and half being less religious. Kerala is about 52% Hindu, 20% Christian, and 28% Muslim. This means Kerala has one of the largest proportions of Muslims among the Indian states. Nevertheless (or therefore, or as luck would have it), in addition to enjoying the human development benefits listed in the previous paragraph, Kerala is also a standout in women’s equality, and the undisputed leader in India with regard to LGBTQ rights, particularly transgender rights.
And various lines of research, many of them cited in an article I co-authored for Religion, Brain and Behavior (“Religion and Oppression”), suggest that in general religion is okay. Specifically, the core God-worshipping element of religion appears to attenuate oppression and oppression-related prejudices and inclinations to violence. Religion does not, as War-on-Terror ideologists would claim, cause or exacerbate oppression. As for the supposed perils of Muslim religiosity, supplementary analyses for the same article suggest that among Muslim majority countries, the more religious their populations are, the freer they are.
Footnotes
1. The word “totalitarian” evokes a sense of the impossibility of normal life due to a total, and often death-threatening, intrusion of the state into all aspects of life. Cuba and China are more “lapsed totalitarian” in this regard, and their relics of totalitarianism blend into ordinary authoritarianism. Near-constant fear of the state varies greatly individual by individual and group by group, and “normal life”—with humor, friendship, parties, intellectual discussions, social enjoyment, etc—abounds in both countries. The ever-present menace of the state often registers as little more than a faint background hum.
2. The word “genocidal” evokes a sense of organized millions-killing mass murder on the scale of the Holocaust. It can also refer, though, to attempts to exterminate a culture or religion by mostly cultural means like “education”, or sublethal/minimally lethal means like deportation and resettlement. These attempts are often backed up with only a punctuated drip of state murder, rather than a roaring river thereof. China is genocidal in this latter respect, though by no means unique—a “soft” genocidal zeitgeist is sweeping countries of various ideological histories in recent years, including India and the US. The fires of war could turn these relatively soft genocides hard pretty quickly though.