In 1967, the Carmelite monk and philosopher Thomas Merton recognized in the Vietnam war, and in the structural injustices that maintained racial and economic segregation in the United States, a parallel to the treatment of Shylock [from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice].
"Instead of preaching an ideology of the Cross for others and advising them to suffer patiently the violence which we sweetly impose, with the aid of armies and police, we might conceivably recognize the right of the less fortunate to use force, and study more seriously the practice of non-violence and humane methods on our own part when, as it happens, we possess the most stupendous arsenal of power the world has ever seen" (Merton 1967: 10).
Without ideological sympathy for the leftist movements of the Third World, Merton was nevertheless able to see the relationship between oppressive structures and revolutionary violence. Importantly, in his attempt to develop a Christian theology dealing cogently with the cycles of oppression and violence, Merton recognized that it was far from always situated in the relatively visible context of direct colonial domination. Instead, he noted:
Violence today is the white-collar violence, the systemically organized bureaucratic and technological destruction of man...It is this polite, massively organized white-collar murder machine that threatens the world with destruction, not the violence of a few desperate teenagers in a slum. But our antiquated theology myopically focused on individual violence along fails to see this. It shudders at the phantasm of muggings on our own doorstep, but blesses and canonizes the antiseptic violence of corporately organized murder because it is respectable, efficient, clean, and above all profitable." (Merton 1967: 6,7)
--Anders Strindberg & Mats Warn,
Islamism: Religion, Radicalization, and Resistance, (Cambridge UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011), p. 52.
No comments:
Post a Comment