Do you understand that all identities grow on the same tree today? When people say that Communism was a failure they are oblivious to the fact they adhere to the identical utopia with the same origins, whatever that identity may be, the market forces, Zionism, Judaism, Wahhabism or the liberal ethos. Quoting from the review of John Gray’s Black Mass in the Independent:
“Gray’s importance, however, lies in tracing the connections of thought rather than in outlining the detail of politics. Black Mass shows the intellectual linkage between today’s religious rhetoric and movements as diverse as the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins and the Nazis. His deep insight is that the underlying structure of modern politics derives from Christianity, and that the return of overt religious language to politics is merely the renewal of a latent characteristic. There is much here to stir controversy. When British politics subsists within the parameters of secularism, the idea that this secularism is derivative of Christianity is highly provocative. Yet the argument is meticulous and persuasive. Gray shows lucidly how the secular utopian projects of both communism and Nazism were vehicles for religious myths. Both ideologies held that after a great struggle the optimum social organisation would emerge for a chosen people – proletarians for the communists, Aryans for the Nazis.
In this process there was a redemptive quality to the violence, which was an essential part of the process of revolution which accompanied the change. This may seem a long way from Christianity but, as Gray shows, the concepts of an “end time” and of a final struggle leading to harmony are central to early Christian theology. Furthermore, “the very idea of revolution as a transforming event in history is owed to religion”. Thus the ideas of the most brutal atheistic regimes of the 20th century derived their imagery from religious thought. Nor is the influence of religion on political ideals restricted to these extremes. Gray goes much further, arguing that the “evangelism” of democratic liberalism itself derives from Christianity. In this light, the prevalent view amid the pseudo-comfort of the political classes of London and Washington, that the world has settled on democratic values and institutions as its political “end-point”, is merely a reprise of the theology of an end-time that presages harmony. The liberal narrative of progress is itself a proto-Christian story ending in redemption, while the political goal of perfecting human relations is a secular mirror to the religious vision of heaven.”
In a way this is the philosophical explanation of the same phenomenon described by Timothy Snyder in the Bloodlands. I don’t know if you can fully digest the staggering implication or trace them all the way to the Judaic source and even it’s recent eruptions. One can say that all forms of political or religious identities today grow on the same tree and they are by this very definition flawed to the core.
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