Financial Times comenta con respeto un ensayo de Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: Religión and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaida. Se trata de una historia de Europa, desde la perspectiva de las relaciones entre política, religión, cultura e ideas, desde la primera guerra mundial. Con una conclusión poco venial para el proyecto hispano-turco de Alianza de Civilizaciones.

Del comentario de FT me quedo con algo que me parece esencial: para mejor intentar comprender Al Qaida lo primero es leer a Conrad y Dostoievski. Las comparaciones entre fanatismos totalitarios y terrorismos me parecen menos evidentes.

Poco benévola esta sentencia sobre ZP: He is also critical of governments, such as that of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in Spain and the «always disappointing» political left in Germany, that are under the illusion that they can appease militant Islam through an alliance of civilisations.

Financial Times, 4 noviembre 2006

Unholy alliances
By Stephen Fidler, FT defence and security editor

SACRED CAUSES: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda

by Michael Burleigh

HarperPress £25, 557 pages
FT bookshop price: £20

Sacred Causes is a challenging history book with the power to scandalise its readers. It is the story of the past 90 years in Europe viewed through an unusual prism: the intersection of religion with politics, culture and ideas since the first world war.

Michael Burleigh is a trenchant, conservative historian who does not waste or mince words. His sharp judgments, which skewer many modern cultural «icons», bring alive his extensive research. Sacred Causes is a sequel to his acclaimed Earthly Powers, which mapped similar territory from the French Revolution into the early 20th century. It is not popular history – it rambles around its subject rather than reinforces a single overarching theme – but it is no dry academic tome either.

A large part is devoted to the totalitarian states whose ugly forms dominated the century. As Churchill recognised, these regimes sought to create not a substitute for religion but a substitute religion, one without God.

Burleigh understands that totalitarian regimes are founded not only on the will for power of ambitious, amoral men, but also on a popular desire for security. Many religious people who thought their values had been undermined by the decline of the moral order in Weimar Germany initially greeted Hitler’s assumption of power with relief. Hitler consciously imbued his speeches with a quasi- religious tone, his rhetoric becoming on occasions sermon-like: «I cannot divest myself of my faith in the Volk… » Yet in Hitler’s hands, the new religion would be of a muscular, masculine variety evangelised by «a sweaty, militarised and uniformed pastorate, in brown shirts with swastika armbands».

Martyrs were essential elements of this and the other totalitarian religions. The Nazis’ included Horst Wessel, son of a Protestant pastor and a war veteran, who was immortalised, despite being «killed in a squalid brawl over a prostitute».

Burleigh sifts through the record to examine the charge that Pius XII, the unfortunate target of a black propaganda campaign by the Soviet secret police, was an anti-Semite and «Hitler’s Pope». He finds not the slightest evidence of this. «There are many criticisms one might make of the Catholic Church, but responsibility for the Holocaust is not among them,» he says.

Indeed, the Catholic Church, while showing some of the weaknesses of all human institutions, fares better in the face of dictatorship than do many of the Protestant churches. Its transnational character allowed it to confront or at least obstruct tyrants where national Protestant churches failed, or in the worst cases – in Hitler’s Germany and in East Germany, for example – did not even try.

It took its time, but by 1943 the Catholic Church had abandoned its agnosticism towards forms of government in favour of democracy. Driven by its view that communism constituted the gravest threat to European civilisation, the church decided that only democracy fostered self-discipline and moderation, and some guarantees for control of government by the people.

If Burleigh often sympathises with the Catholic Church, he is less kind towards other institutions and individuals. They include the liberal elites who deem the representation in the European parliament of political thugs and gangsters from Sinn Fein and Eta less shocking than the appointment of a Catholic professor, Rocco Buttiglione, as the European Commissioner.

Neither does he have any time for liberation theology, the Latin American effort to fuse Christian theology with Marxist doctrine, a creed «that had resulted in hecatombs of corpses and mass material and spiritual immiseration throughout eastern Europe, Russia and China».

Burleigh often brings to bear a wonderful turn of phrase. Poland, for example, is described as «being crucified between two thieves».

His acerbic voice is not quietened as we approach the present day – on the contrary. His dislike of social developments in Britain since the 1960s is palpable. «Trends that seemed daring at the time hid a squalid reality,» he says, in an era epitomised by John Lennon «imagining his pop group was ‘bigger’ than Jesus and going on to try to improve the world’s collective karma from a bed».

There follows a chapter of singular political incorrectness on Ireland and the Irish, among whom he identifies a deeply unattractive fusion of sentimentality and violence, and a modern speciality in what he calls «impassioned moralising self- assertion». It is startling, he says, to watch British politicians lapping up abuse from Bob Geldof, dismissed as a «mouthy sloven».

The intersection of religion and politics has taken on a new meaning for many people since September 11 2001. Islamist terrorism is only in some respects unprecedented. In others, it represents a cover version of movements that have occurred in modern western societies – along with a gross caricature of what most Muslims believe. To understand it best, he says, turn to Conrad or Dostoevsky.

Not surprisingly, Burleigh is suspicious of multi-culturalism, the British approach to the dealing with significant immigrant minorities in which many flowers would bloom in the nation’s garden. Liberals failed to take adequate notice of the fact that one aggressive minority would seek to create cultural no-go areas where mosques and madrassas would act as «ghettos of the mind», he says.

He is also critical of governments, such as that of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in Spain and the «always disappointing» political left in Germany, that are under the illusion that they can appease militant Islam through an alliance of civilisations.

This is, however, mostly a book about Christianity and its relation to secular power. For those who think that the Christian religion provides only footnotes to the history of the 20th century or ascribe to the notion that its influence has been unerringly malign, this book is an important corrective.