The Great Divide

Listening to the radio this morning, I suspect I was not alone in my discomfort at hearing the words of Colonel Gary Brandl of the United States Marine Corps: "The enemy has a face. It is Satan's. He is in Fallujah, and we are going to destroy him." It is not that I have sympathy with the fundamentalist forces, who control the city, but rather that like many Europeans, I see fundamentalism itself as the enemy. We may share with Brandl a desire to see the end of murderous savages like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but the colonel’s brand of Old Testament rhetoric, is as abhorrent to me, as any announcement from the other side.

That fundamentalists line up to fight each other denouncing Satan’s legions, leaves me with an intense unease. Are we entering a new Dark Age? Gary Brandl’s belief that Satan walks the streets of Falluja, is as much at odds with my World view, as any Islamic madman’s is, and I fear for the innocent hundred thousand people in that city, when his crusading troops of macho believers find them in their gun sites.

It was Rationalism that brought us Science, medical advance and the modern world. Fundamentalism gave us the burning of heretics, witches and a miserable self righteousness that stagnated progress for fifteen hundred years. In my lifetime, the Atlantic Ocean has never seemed so wide.