Nonviolence by Mark Kurlansky Read Free Book Online

kill.
    The enemy is evil—in this case despicable. We, on the other hand, said Urban, have God on our side. It was an Augustinian just war. Those who did not support the war should be and would be singled out as immoral for failing to support the cause—just as in every war those who refused to fight have been vilified by the war-makers. Even questioning a war must be attacked as a sign of suspicious weakness. In June 2005, White House adviser Karl Rove accused the Democrats, because they were questioning the war in Iraq, of wanting to “offer therapy and understanding to our attackers.” The fact that no Iraqis had attacked the United States was irrelevant. The point in 2005, as in 1095, was that a failure to hate the enemy, once an enemy had been declared, was unacceptable.
    Urban also claimed that the soldiers would be rescuing a poor oppressed people who desperately needed their help. This tactic generally works best if a case can be made that the people in need of being rescued are people like us. This was why Abraham Lincoln preferred to speak of “saving the Union” to “freeing the slaves,” why Roosevelt wanted to save freedom rather than save the Jews, and why Ronald Reagan in 1983 did not want to rescue the black Grenadians from an evil coup d'état but instead claimed he was rescuing a handful of American medical students. White Christians generally want to rescue white Christians, which was at the heart of Urban II's message.
    Of course not all of these elements are always lies, though they were in this case. The Nazis were actually worse than Allied war propaganda's depiction of them. But history teaches that somewhere behind every war there are always a few lies used as justifications.
    When Urban II finished his speech, those present shouted, “Deus volt!”— It is the will of God. Deus volt! became a battle cry for the Crusaders. The Christian version of a “holy war” had been established, and warfare became Christian. Clergy even asserted that a Christian could obtain divine salvation by going to war against theSaracens. The concept of holy war is one of many ideas that Christians and Muslims borrowed from the Old Testament, which describes numerous wars sanctified by God to deliver God's wrath. In the promotion of the Crusades as a holy war, the Church made frequent references to the Maccabee victory in which the Jews had re-taken Jerusalem, the basis of the Chanukah holiday. This was at a time when Jews had little regard for Chanukah as a holiday, but despite Jewish ambivalence this martial festival was the one moment of the Jewish calendar that excited Christians. Holy war also borrows from the Roman wars in which the enemies were considered “barbarians” regardless of the sophistication of their civilizations.
    The labels Crusade and Crusader did not come into usage until one hundred years and four Crusades after Urban II's rallying cry. By then, the concept of a Christian holy war was well entrenched. The First Crusade was termed a pilgrimage. In this Orwellian lexicon of the Church, in which a “peace movement” promoted warfare, why couldn't a ruthless bloodletting be called a pilgrimage? According to Muslim sources, the Christians killed 70,000 people in the taking of Jerusalem. In time the figure grew to 100,000, many of whom were reportedly slaughtered in the Dome of the Rock Mosque, whose siege by Christian soldiers on a holy mission was described by the crusader Raymond of Aguilers:
Some of our men (and this was more merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious services are ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it