Not in God's Name Read Free

years 2012–14,notes that there has been a marked deterioration in 55 of the world’s 196 countries, due either to authoritarian regimes or to Islamist groups. These are deeply troubled times.
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    Hannah Arendt, writing about the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, famously used the phrase ‘the banality of evil’, suggesting, rightly or wrongly, that many of those who implemented the Final Solution, the planned extermination of Europe’s Jews, were faceless bureaucrats implementing government orders, more out of obedience than hate. There is nothing banal about the evil currently consuming large parts of the world.
    Many of the perpetrators, including suicide bombers and jihadists, come from European homes, have had a university education, and until their radicalisation were regarded by friends and neighbours as friendly, likeable people. Unlike the Nazis, who took fastidious care to hide their crimes from the world, today’s terrorists take equal care to advertise them to the world using professionally produced videos and the latest social media technology. Their lack of conscience in committing what leading Islamic jurists and theologians have deemed forbidden, sinful and contrary to the Qur’an is breathtaking. In Gwoza, Nigeria, one of the survivors of a massacre by the Islamist group Boko Haram described to a reporter how the radicals calmly killed their fellow Muslims one by one. ‘They told us they were doing God’s work even though all the men they shot in front of me were Muslims. They seemed happy.’ 7
    We need a term to describe this deadly phenomenon that can turn ordinary non-psychopathic people into cold-blooded murderers of schoolchildren, aid workers, journalists and people at prayer. It is, to give it a name,
altruistic evil
: evil committed in a sacred cause, in the name of high ideals.
    By this I do not mean the kind of behaviour that people argue over: abortion, for instance, or assisted suicide. Nor do I meanissues like the highly complex question of civilian casualties in asymmetric warfare. I mean evil of the kind that we all recognise as such. Killing the weak, the innocent, the very young and old is evil. Indiscriminate murder by terrorist attack or suicide bombing is evil. Murdering people because of their religion or race or nationality is evil. It was for this reason that, during the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War, the concept of a crime against humanity was born, to give global force to the principle that there are some acts so heinous that they cannot be defended on the grounds that ‘I was only obeying orders’. There are acts so alien to our concept of humanity that they cannot be justified on the grounds that they were the means to a great, noble or holy end.
    There is nothing specifically religious about altruistic evil. Some of the great instances in modern history – Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Mao Zedong’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia – were avowedly secular. Their mass murders were undertaken to avenge past wrongs, correct perceived injustice, restore honour to the nation, or institute a social order that would bring equality and freedom to the world. Only in fiction are the great evils committed by caricatures of malevolence: Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort, Sauron or the Joker. In real history the great evils are committed by people seeking to restore a romanticised golden age, willing to sacrifice their lives and the lives of others in what they regard as a great and even holy cause. In some cases they see themselves as ‘doing God’s work’. They ‘seem happy’.
    That is how dreams of utopia turn into nightmares of hell.
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    Much has been said and written in recent years about the connection between religion and violence. Three answers have emerged. The first: Religion
is
the major source of violence. Therefore if we seek a more peaceful world we should abolish religion. The second: Religion is not a source of violence. People are