From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat 09 Oct 2004 - 00:51:19 GMT
--- Ray Recchia <rrecchia@frontiernet.net> wrote:
"Last night I attended a very good talk on the
roleof religion in war that had a large evolutionary
component init."
My response:
Ray, there are religious wars, but not all wars have a
religious basis. For instance, what religion was
involved in the Korean war? North Korea invaded South
Korea, the casus belli for that "police action" of the
UN. North Korea (under Kim Il Sung) had an ideology of
Soviet communism. NK had a burning desire for
reunification that was shared by its polar opposite in
Seoul (under the no more palatable Syngman Rhee). The
context leading up to that war was years of colonial
oppression by the Japanese giving way to Soviet and US
spheres of influence after Japan surrendered post
WWII.
Maybe we could generalize about mindsets playing a
role in wars with religious bases being just a subset
of prevalent ideologies.
In Vietnam the Hanoi regime was communist where the
Saigon regime had a significant amount of Catholicism
behind it (at least under Diem). Catholicism was of
course a French import. Ironically France may have
played a slight role in importing Marxism as Ho Chi
Minh spent some time in France as an up and coming
socialist trying to win justice for his embryonic
nation. IIRC he had developed contacts with French
communists while he was there. Bao Dai was a protege
of the French and his successor, Ngo Dinh Diem spent
some time at a seminary in the US, good Catholic boy
that he was.
There was an undercurrent of religious tension in
South Vietnam as I've discussed here recently, but I
can't recall it being central to the wars (Indochina
war between France (with US support) and Vietminh or
the US's subsequent Vietnam war against Hanoi). The
differences between Diem's Catholicism and the
militant Buddhism of some of those living under his
regime came to a boil.
The Indochina war fought by France was more about a
colonial power trying to regain its former status
against a determined nationalist guerilla movement
than anything religious (even if France was Catholic
and a lot of Vietnamese practiced a mixture of
Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism). The US war was
more about a perceived need to stem the tide of
communism in Asia after China had been "lost" to Mao
and the US (with help of British, ROK and other
allies) had just fought a nasty war against North
Korea, China and perhaps the USSR and saw its French
ally against the creeping Red menace fall at Dien Bien
Phu. Hanoi perceived it as a need to get foreigners
out of Vietnam and to destroy the corrupt puppets of
the foreigners. The Vietnam war was not a religious
war. It was an ideological war though.
Religious wars (crusades and jihads) are but a subset
of ideological wars or clashes of mindsets. Do ideas
use people in their proxy wars against each other?
That would be the ultimate in memetic puppetry.
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