Opium of the masses? by Gamal Nkrumah (Al-Ahram Weekly 25 Nov. – 1 Dec. 1999)

October 31, 2014

Filed under: Writings

Al-Ahram Weekly 25 Nov. – 1 Dec. 1999 Issue No. 457 Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

By Gamal Nkrumah

Many bloody chapters in the history of the Balkans have already been written. Byzantine political intrigue, followed by four centuries of enslavement and brutalisation under Ottoman Turkish rule, left an indelible mark on the national psyches of the predominantly Orthodox Christian nations of the Balkans, such as Greece, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. The few pockets of Islam that were left after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire — Kosovo, Bosnia and Albania — paid a heavy price in marginalisation and underdevelopment for sticking to their guns, and their religion. The deep wounds left by religious wars are still fresh in this region. And much of the present crisis which afflicts it is a direct result of this chequered history.

It was against this background that United States President Bill Clinton stumbled into the region last week. His trip kicked off with his attending the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit in Istanbul, Turkey. All hell was let loose upon his arrival in Athens. An estimated 10,000 demonstrators rioted, gaily smashing up the business district in and around Syndagma Square in the heart of the Greek capital. The rioting, blamed on communists and anarchists, left 10 banks and some 40 shops and boutiques badly damaged. Sporadic clashes between anti-American demonstrators and Greek police continued well into the night. “Hell in Athens” read the headline the next morning in Greece’s Apogevmatini newspaper.

Outwardly, Clinton was calm and collected, insisting that he was a “Hellenophile”. News leaked that he had urged British Prime Minister Tony Blair to return the so-called Elgin Marbles, a set of ancient statues stolen by the British from the Parthenon and long held captive in the British Museum. These great works of art have long been a bone of contention between successive Greek and British governments.

But few were fooled by Clinton’s show of pique. The White House reduced the president’s Greek stopover, initially scheduled for 13 to 15 November, to a mere 24-hours after Greek’s Socialist Prime Minister Constantine Simitis politely declined an American suggestion that his government ban demonstrations in front of the US embassy and in thoroughfares which Clinton’s party was due to traverse. The Greek government subsequently pointed an accusing finger at the small, but influential Greek Communist Party, together with assorted anarchists, for tarnishing Greece’s international image.

It was not just the American president who came under fire. First Lady Hillary, too, found herself under attack from Margaret Papandreou — the American-born peace campaigner and former wife of the late Greek Socialist premier Andreas Papandreou. “I would have liked to see you in a non-governmental role. I feel you could have been the champion of the downtrodden, the women, the children, the people who are in a state of poverty,” Mrs Papandreou pointedly told Mrs Clinton. The American first lady, who can at times sound just as cynical and sanctimonious as her husband, was planting an olive tree at the time. She retorted unabashedly, “This Greek-American friendship, like this tree, will grow and blossom in the century to come.”

Is it not telling that in what is supposedly still the “American century”, an American head of state should be received in a fellow NATO country — and the original homeland of European democracy, the ideology that America claims to uphold today — not with flowers, but a riot? That his wife should then be publicly told off for meddling in politics and seeking office is merely the icing on the cake.

Nations have long memories. Washington supported the bloody crackdown against student demonstrators in 1973 by the then ruling Greek right-wing military junta, and the Greeks have not forgotten this treachery. Nor is it just the communists and anarchists who are anti-American. Hostility to Washington spans a broad spectrum of Greek society. “All Greeks know that the inability to solve many of our national issues is due in large measure to America,” explained the head of the Greek Orthodox Church, Archbishop Christodoulous.

Which brings me to the topic I wish to tackle, namely the politics of religion. Religious fervour, it seems, remains an impediment to global political stability. Thus, we are told that the real reason for the violent anti-Clinton protests was Washington’s heavy-handedness in Bosnia and Kosovo and the American-led bombing of Yugoslavia — Athens’ traditional Orthodox Christian ally.

Everything these days, from Clinton’s scaled-down Hellenic visit to the probe of airline disasters, seems to be deliberately portrayed by the international media as essentially answerable to nationalistic sentiments infused with a strong dose of religious fervour. Wars across the Eurasian landmass in particular are presented as the outpouring of nationalistic-cum-religious fervour: Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Iran-Iraq, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Indo-Pakistani tensions, Sri Lanka, Southern Philippines, and even the ongoing struggles in East Timor and Aceh.

It is not that I underestimate how much religion enters the minds of individuals, creating people who are incapable of defining themselves in any other context than the parameters set out in Samuel Huntington’s infamous Clash of Civilisations. It is just that I have an instinctive inclination to believe that religion is often used as a blanket indictment on a whole range of socio-economic forces which for some strange reason seem to escape the international media’s attention. Or worse, are simply considered far too complex for otherwise very perceptive journalists in the age of the information revolution to come to grips with.

Thus Indo-Pakistani tensions are reduced to a clash between Hinduism and Islam. The failure of the Iranian Revolution to spread beyond Iran’s borders is explained by the fact that Iran is a Shi’a Muslim theocracy, while most of its neighbours are Sunni Muslims. Russia claims it is battling militants in Chechnya; Protestants are warring against the prospect of a Roman Catholic hegemony in a united Ireland; Russians and Greeks feel sympathy for their embattled co-religionists in Serbia; Greeks and Armenians are traditional enemies of the Turks; the Muslims of Mandanao, in the southern Philippines, are fighting for freedom from Roman Catholic Manila; and Hindu Tamils are pitted against Buddhist Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. The list can be continued to eternity.

It is true that an excessive religiosity claims many lives — the victims of wars, plane crashes, and subway poison gas, for example. It is not just Muslims who suffer from it, or the old and infirm. There is an angry younger generation growing up convinced that things used to be better in a golden age that they have read about only in their Holy Books.

Some young religious zealots seem to be re-inventing the wheel. The youth of Afghanistan’s ethnic Pushtun decided to take their destiny into their own hands when they formed the now ruling Taliban — literally “Students” Movement. In doing so, they incurred the wrath of Washington. We all remember of course that Washington first created this Frankenstein, when it was decided that a religious movement was needed to end Soviet-supported Communist rule in Afghanistan.

So what has become of America’s child? According to the United Nations Drug Control Programme, Afghanistan produced 4,600 metric tons of opium in 1999 — twice as much as in 1998. The ruling Taliban regime, one of the world’s most forbidding theocracies, thus strictly outlaws alcohol, but is doubling its cultivation of opium. We can expect the recently-imposed US-led international sanctions to boost the drug trade yet further, as the country’s hapless population are left with no other alternative way to feed their children than by cultivating poppies as an export crop. Such an irony makes one think Karl Marx actually had a point when he talked about religion being the opium of the masses.

It is perhaps a strange coincidence that even as religious bigotry is identified as the root of all evil, the world’s religious leaders continue to converge on Israel, the only state in which an individual’s religious faith automatically guarantees citizenship, to pray for peace. Their prayers did not seem to work for churches all over the Holy Land closed in protest of the construction of a mosque in Nazareth.

Last Saturday, Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, began a five-day visit to Israel. During his stay, the Buddhist leader participated in the afore-mentioned inter-faith conference for world peace. There, he praised his Israeli hosts as a “hard-working people” and complimented them on their “strong faith”. Everywhere, the mild-mannered, the spiritually thirsty and even otherwise cynical intellectuals, warm to his theme of inner peace and national liberation. But what are such values worth, when they’re merely an afterthought?