Religion, Terror, Nationalism

Those struggling for a revolution must realise that terrorism is the weapon of choice of fascism and of pseudo-religious fundamentalism

- Hune Margulies

THERE is a famous dictum that argues that history is written by the victors. But that is utterly untrue. The vanquished have also written history. The question to resolve is not who writes the history, but who teaches it. If we follow the model that there are always two sides to each issue, we know that each side will put forward a specific context to fit their desired narrative. A false context becomes a pretext for explaining, and sometimes justifying, episodes of history or present-day conflicts. We must therefore understand that there is a right to present a context to a conflict, but there is never a context that can explain or justify atrocities and crimes against humanity. Never will the vanquished resort to crimes against humanity, for those crimes will be the source of their eternal vanquishing. The vanquished will one day triumph, but only if the human likeness of their struggle is held firm in the winds of history.

All nation states that exist today are founded on the perceived inherent rights conferred to shared ancestral commonalities. Those ancestry attributes can be biological, historical or simply political, but what all of them share in common is the manipulative illusion that ancestry determines the present and the future. A blood ethnicity is a biological fact that is as relevant to shared communal experiences as would be body weight or a preference for red wine over Goan feni. We would certainly not think of creating a nation-state on the basis of shared weight and vinophile predilections. We prefer to use blood referents and historical narratives to designate national groupings and assert territorial claims. Sometimes it is a shared religion that prompts us to gather as a nation and separate ourselves from others who do not belong to the beloved faithful.