RevWrites - March 15

I was at a concert on Friday last week and the conductor mentioned that last week was the anniversary of the death of Joseph Stalin. He died on 5^th March 1953. I was 4 years old at the time so don’t actually remember it.

But when so many people in the audience burst into spontaneous applause when we were reminded of his death it made me think. I suspect they had escaped from Stalin’s terror or they had relatives who escaped.

It made me think about tyrants and death. I thought about how people often say religion should be banned because it causes war. Is that so?

The Roman Empire was religious. Roman state and Roman religion were intertwined. The Roman state suppressed the Jews because they wouldn’t submit to the Roman gods. Later on the early Christians got caught up in this religious tension and suffered because they were thought to be Jewish. So here’s religions suppressing people.

Often people point to the Crusades as an example of religious tyranny. There is little doubt that these were driven by religion. Again, there was a strong connection between the state and the church. It was the Holy Roman Empire, much later and different to the Roman Empire, that tried to suppress other pagan and Muslim nations. The Crusades lasted nearly 200 years and many people died during the various wars.

One of the features of the Crusades was the struggle for supremacy over Jerusalem. While the state, the Holy Roman Empire, wanted control there is no evidence that Christians within the state, especially Jerusalem, wanted such control.

There is a real sense that religion has been a factor in the serious loss of human life over the years. But that form of religion is often (always?) a religion tightly bound to the state. Little wonder that the Protestants sailing to the Americas wanted separation of church and state! Quite rightly.

But the anniversary of Stalin’s death reminds us of another side of the story. In the 20^th Century, non-religious dictators have been responsible for more deaths than any other comparable time in history. It is estimated that Stalin’s policies resulted in the deaths of nearly 700,000 people in 1937 and 1938 alone. “Between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million people were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. By some estimates up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition.”

Hitler and his Reich resulted in serious loss of human life. “Between 1939 and 1945, the SS, assisted by collaborationist governments and recruits from occupied countries, systematically killed somewhere between 11 and 14 million people, including about six million Jews.”

More recently, Pol Pot ruled Cambodia. “The combined effects of slave labour, malnutrition, poor medical care, and executions resulted in the deaths of an estimated 750,000 to 1.7 million people, approximately 26% of the Cambodian population.”

These three men, and their fellow idealists, were all strongly anti-religion. (Pol Pot’s followers did adopt some aspects of a form of Buddhism to justify their non-standard Communism.)

These three men alone in the last century or so have been responsible for more deaths than there has been in any other comparable period in history. It is very difficult to see that religion played a part in their motivation, except to oppose it. Perhaps religion, especially Christianity, is not the problem. People might be!

Neil