Murderous keys to history

The bomb shelter in our village near the DMZ.

Recently (November 14), BBC News on-line ran an article headlined ‘South Korea fears Hamas-style attack from the North’. It began: ‘On Sunday, when South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol hosted US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin at his home for dinner, he urged Mr Austin to be vigilant against any type of North Korean attack, including surprise assaults "resembling Hamas-style tactics".’

We who live near to the DMZ like to joke that people living and working in Seoul are more endangered by North Korea than we are, that we’ll watch the missiles flying high over our heads, aiming at targets in the densely populated metropolis. And anyway, as you can see from the photograph at the start of today’s blog, there’s a handy bomb shelter just one hundred meters from our house.  But this shelter probably wouldn’t be much protection against marauding North Korean soldiers if, for some extraordinary reason, all the many South Korean soldiers garrisoned around here took their time arriving to project us. But in such darkly ‘propitious’ circumstances, would the North Koreans set about wreaking in our village such ghastly vengeance on me, my wife, and all my neighbours – the children, pregnant women, elderly, their pets -  as Hamas did in Israel? This is more than just a macabre thought-experiment, because it helps foreground what is specific about the worldview of Hamas. These North Korean soldiers will certainly have been conditioned to hate South Koreans (and a British citizen whose nation supported the Republic of Korea during the Korean War and has done so ever since),  but will they act with such extreme and calculated savagery as the Hamas militants did in Israel?  Will they record their deeds on social media? Does the ‘alternative’ reality which the North Korean soldiers inhabit also put them beyond the rules of war respected by open societies and inscribed in UN charters?

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Hamas and the North Korean Communist Party are vastly different political organizations, but both are variants of totalizing forms of ideology. Increasingly, however, in Israel/Palestine two rival and implacably hostile totalizing religious ideologies confront each other: Islamic fundamentalism and Zionist settler fundamentalism. These ideologies offer to believers a reality tailored to  achieve the illusion of absolute control of time - the past, present, and future –  and of space - both physical or profane and sacred.  As Hannah Arendt observed in the late 1940s in relation to what she called ‘totalitarianism’, this kind of ideology “differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws, which are supposed to rule nature and man."  

Absolute faith in possessing the ‘key to history’ is what unites the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas and the Zionist settlers with the so-called ‘communist’ system of North Korea. They all share the belief that they have been empowered to see the inescapable future. They believe they possess the secrets of prophecy. Totalism breeds and sustains a mindset founded on the wilful absence of alternatives, on the compulsory, the single-minded, and on autosuggestion, in that the prophesy is apparently self-fulfilling.

Let’s stop for a moment to consider how we - by which I mean those of us lucky to be able to say in public that we are liberal free-thinkers - differ from these fanatics. What do we take for granted when we reflect on the relationship between the past, present, and future?

Unlike members of Hamas, Zionist settlers, or card-carrying members of the North Korean Communist Party, we assume that life is ambiguous and multi-layered. We accept that any potential actions we take respond to meanings that exist on several historical dimensions.  More or less articulately, we think about the short- middle- and long-term. The short-term involves the succession of the before and after that constrain our everyday actions, which means any prognosis we might make about the world is bound situationally. The middle-term turns our attention to trends deriving from the course of events into which enter many factors beyond our control or that of our group or ‘tribe’ as acting subjects.  This means we take into account transpersonal conditions.  On the long-term plane we factor in ‘metahistorical’ duration, that is, certain anthropological constants that resist or elude the historical pressures of change, and so do not respond to immediate political pressures in the present.

The believer caught in the iron grip of a totalizing system does not see the world like this at all. Emboldened by faith in the capacity to prophetically foretell the future, they willingly accept the absence of alternatives and work to conform events to their prior belief-system. This means they reject any view of their situation based on an understanding of short-term succession that constrains everyday actions. They do not see themselves as bound situationally. They also reject middle-term trends. The only transpersonal conditions they believe in are those that conform to the shape of the prophecy.  This prophecy also determines the structure of the long-term plane of anthropological constants; in a religious ideology, human destiny is uniquely tied to the demands of a deity, or in non-religious ideologies, in deity-like humans, such as the Kim dynasty in the DPRK who rule by a kind of supra-human ‘divine right’.

But, of course, there is a fundamental difference between the ideology of Hamas and Zionism on the one side, and the DPRK on the other: the influence of monotheistic religion.   But while the religiously centered worldviews of Hamas and Zionism share these common roots in religious tradition, Hamas is far more radical. Like other Islamic fundamentalist movements, such as ISIS, Hamas believes in violent jihad – Holy War. Followers consider that the teachings of Islam contained in the sacred texts legitimize, indeed glorify, attacks on non-believers, and that the only just future goal is the global establishment of the Islamic caliphate. As such, all means justify the achievement of this single future. In fact, there is no limit to the actions permissible in the present in order to reach this desired end, which also entails the greatest of rewards for those who take up jihad: a believer who dies during jihad is cast as a martyr who goes directly to paradise – Jannah.  The ‘infidels’ they slay, meanwhile, have been rewarded with what God wants for them:  eternal damnation in Hell - Jahannam.

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As many commentators on the left indicate, the state of Israel is in danger of becoming what they call an ‘apartheid’ nation governed by Zionist totalizing ideology. But for the time being, at least, it remains a democracy within which, during the vengeful assault on Gaza, attempts are credibly (and often futilely) made to act according to the rules of war. In his ‘Making Sense’ podcast Sam Harris proposes we try a sobering thought-experiment.  We know that Islamic fundamentalists are willing to use their own people – other Muslims – as human shields.  In some senses, this is precisely what Hamas is doing now in Gaza. What if Israel tried the same tactic?  What if their soldiers rested their gun barrels on the shoulders of Israeli children or set up a command post under a hospital? What would Hamas fighters do? The answer is as obvious as it is terrifying: all the Israelis would be massacred. However dreadfully compromised Israel’s position is today, it’s leadership – even the extremist Zionists - still find using human shields to be beyond the ethical pale.  Hamas and other Islamic fundamentalist movements do not.  

Back in the late 1940s, Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism was limited to political ideologies. In that period, religion really did seem to have lost its influence over politics. But since the end of the Cold War it has become obvious that religion definitely remains a significant and divisive force. This is a fact that commentators on the left seem reluctant to acknowledge. But now we are being forced to recognize the limits of the secular mindset in understanding glabal conflicts. Treating the struggle in Israel/Palestine as primarily about  ‘decolonization’, about an ‘apartheid’ behemoth crushing a defenseless and displaced people,   is to apply an optic that is  dangerously narrowly secular and Western. For example, the slur ‘apartheid’, derives from the racist and secular system imposed for a period by whites on blacks in South Africa.  Historically, that system did not entail religiously motivated racism or establish itself on a global and radically exclusionary vision of society.  Its a critical template that seems viable to a secular culture, but it fails to recognize the significance of the religious dimension to the conflict.  

As Sam Harris emphasizes, it is almost impossible for secular Westerners to grasp just how different this worldview of the jihadist or Islamic fundamentalist is, and how totally the true believer embraces its core tenets. Harris notes that especially we liberals on the left often bend over backwards to try to rationally analyze these people’s beliefs and actions according to the narrow humanist criteria bequeathed to us by Western humanist sociology and anthropology. What we fail to understand is how totally their worldview is at odds with and premised on the total rejection of our own worldview.

This is why calling the brutal assault by Israel on Gaza ‘genocide’ fails to describe that is taking place. ‘Genocide’ is defined as the deliberate killing of large numbers of people of an ethic or national group. Israel isn’t deliberately killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But there is no doubt that its thirst for revenge has made it insensitive to the costs its revenge entails, and blind to the seemingly obvious fact that violence will always be met by more violence.

The situation in Israel/Palestine is so tragically complex that making any kind of  valid prognosis on the basis of the short-term is almost impossible – for example, a political solution is essential but, right now, it looks impossible. The mass protests against Israel taking place worldwide - including in Seoul - are mired in seeing the crisis only in the short-term view. But things look bleak on the mid-term level; so many interpersonal and impersonal agents are involved – not just the Israelis and Palestinians and their intertwined histories.  And if we attempt to rise above the bloody fray and take in the long-term view, what do we see?  Unfortunately, nothing very encouraging. Just the tragic truth that eventually implacable rivals who are trapped in the spiral of revenge lose the will to fight and learn to co-exist in peace.  

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Which brings me back to the chances of us, here near the DMZ, being gruesomely tortured before being killed, Hamas-style, by marauding North Korean soldiers. One thing for certain, the North Korean invaders wouldn’t be sharing their vile actions on WhatsApp and Facebook using our phones, for the simple reason that they won’t know how to use the technology, and anyway, no one back home could answer their calls.  But to end on a less facetious note;  the ideology within which the North Korean soldiers live and breathe may be repellent to the values of the open society, but it does not glorify sadistic violence against  religious non-believers and those of us who have rejected religion entirely. Jihadist violent antipathy to the world makes the so-called Juche ideology of the DPRK seem relatively – I stress ‘relatively’ - anodyne. It is familiar, and not so hard to encompass within our own Western worldview. Jihadism, by contrast, is wholly other. But more than that: it is a self-consciously adopted position premised on the destruction of its own other, which is not just we liberals but anyone who doesn’t share their extreme interpretation of Islam.  Co-existence is therefore not an option. This is why a ceasefire isn’t a viable option.

North Korean soldiers do not believe that when they commit atrocities and then die fighting that  they will  be rewarded for their crimes by going straight to Paradise. That any children they murder, because they are innocent in Allah’s eyes have been fast-tracked to paradise, and that I and everyone else they get their murderous hands on, will roast for ever in Hell.  This, I suppose, is some kind of cold comfort.

NOTES

The BBC article can be read at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67411657

The Hannah Arendt quotation is from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

Sam Harris’ excellent Making Sense podcast on this subject can be heard at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFBm8nQ2aBo

I draw for my discussion of short- mid- and long-term thinking about time and history on Reinhart Koselleck’s  The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts, translated by Todd Samuel Presner and Others (Stanford University Press, 2002) Chapter 8.

Freeing the Mind, North Korea style

A North Korean with her smart phone.

Because I live so near to North Korea –  from my roof I can see its mountains on the other side of the DMZ - it’s difficult for me not to think often about that brutally repressive regime, a preoccupation reinforced by the fact that it is very skillful in keeping itself in the international news (most recently in relation to a failed attempt to launch a satellite).

One thing that especially interests me, and therefore has been the theme of several posts, is the extraordinary level of indoctrination the government of North Korea successfully engages in. The fundamental prerequisite for this success is the isolation of the nation.  This is both geographic and informational. Its closed physical and epistemological boundaries make possible a truly locally global control of the North Korean people’s minds.   

In this post I want to think some more about this mind control in the light of research coming from the neurosciences into the way we now believe the human brain works. This research draws attention to the astonishing - and not a little unsettling - fact  that our brains construct the perception we have of the self and of the world we inhabit. The success of the North Korean regime’s  crazy system of mind control is only possible because of something basic all humans all share.

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What the brain does is figure out the causes of the sensory data in order to get a grip on its environment.  As the  multi-disciplinary researcher Shamil Chandaria, a recent guest on Sam Harris’ wonderful Making Sense podcast, puts it:  ‘most people’s common sense view is that we are looking out at the world from little windows at the front of our heads.  But in fact, we are just receiving electrical signals, and the brain has never seen reality as it actually is.’ In other words, we make inferences about the world.   We learn from all the data coming in, and infer what is going on, then generate internal simulations in the brain.

We simulate a picture of reality.  ‘If I think I am seeing a tree, I then simulate the sensory data  as if it was a tree’, says Chandaria.  The result is that the past shapes our future because the simulation is based on prior experience. We make “top down” predictions about our sensory inputs based on a model of how they were created.

Aa a result, ‘conscious experience is like a tunnel’, writes the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger in his book The Ego Tunnel. The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (2010) :

Modern neuroscience had demonstrated that the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal construct but also an extremely selective way of representing information. This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us. Our sensory organs are limited: They evolved for reasons of survival, not for depicting the enormous wealth and richness of reality in all its unfathomable depth. Therefore, the on-going process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality. 

This ‘ego tunnel’ is a result of the need to adapt to survive in complex environments which required that humans evolved to limit and restrict the range of potential points of view or emotions, thereby restraining the endless possibilities of the senses. In other words, ‘tunnel vision’ is an intrinsic part of ‘normal’ conscious experience.

From the point of view of evolutionary success, we need information about our place within the environment and the likely outcomes of our actions. The principal goal of the brain is therefore to maintain homeostasis  - stable equilibrium within its environment. The most valuable states in terms of optimizing evolutionary adaptive success are therefore states that minimize surprise. It is vital for humans as adaptive agents to reduce the informational ‘surprise’ that is inevitably associated with our complex sensory engagements with the world, and reducing it enables the brain to resist the natural tendency toward  chaotic disorder (entropy).

The level of the surprise we experience, and our ability to limit it through making predictions about our sensations, depends on the robustness of the brain’s internal generative model or simulation of the world. The discrepancy between ‘top-down’ predictions and the actuality and accuracy of ‘bottom-up’ sensations is  called by neurologists ‘prediction error.’  These errors are minimized by converting prior beliefs and expectations, and these include not just what we sample from the world but also how the world is sampled.

The mental states that minimize surprise are those we most expect to frequent, and they are constrained by the form of the generative model we are using. In the field of neuroscience interested in what is know as ‘active inference’ , elements of environmental surprise are known as ‘free energy’. We minimize this energy by changing predictions and/or the predicted sensory inputs so as to resist the chaotic entropic forces suffusing the surprising. We revise inferences in the light of experience, updating ‘priors’ - memories - to reality-aligned ‘posteriors’, optimizing the complexity of our generative model of the world. ‘Free energy’ is thereby converted into ‘bound energy’.

The process through which we simulate past experience and ensure posterior beliefs align with newly sampled data is  called in probability theory ‘Bayesian inference’ (after the theorem of eighteenth century statistician of that name). The ‘Bayesian brain’ is understood as an inference engine that aims to optimize probabilistic representations of what causes any given sensory input. Prediction error in relation to input is minimized by action and perception. Acting on the world reduces errors by selectively sampling sensations that are the least surprising. Perceptions are changed by belief updating, thereby changing  internal states. The results are more reality-consonant predictions. If they are not updated, our predictions will not be consonant with reality. On an individual level, this failure may be caused by some trauma, for example, and can then manifest pathologically.  But reality-dissonance can also happen on a group and societal level.

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In this context, the North Korean system of mind control can be understood as a pathological inferential system that has exploited the profoundly human desire for homeostasis – for minimizing surprise. It aims to massively limit or bind the flow of ‘free energy’. But this means the obviously orchestrated and systematic ‘derangement’ of the North Korea people is only a very extreme case of something that is basic to how all humans make individual and collective sense of the world. As Chandaria notes: ‘You want a simulation that is as close to what you would normally expect before seeing the sensory data’. In the case of North Korea, the simulation is biased towards what the people have been conditioned to expect by  the ‘top-down’ inferences disseminated by the regime’s total control of information.

When considered in this light, the recent Covid-19 pandemic was a ‘gift’ to the regime. It allowed it to greatly increase levels of isolation and restriction, closing off the country more than ever before. There has also been a major increase in crackdowns and punishments on foreign media consumption. For example, the 2020 anti-reactionary thought law has made watching foreign media punishable by 15 years in prison camp. But one can see why it is so vital that the regime keeps such a tight hold on the media. As a major conduit of ‘top-down’ information – ‘free energy’ -  it is a threat to the homeostasis that guarantees the regime’s survival, the feeling of security manipulated by the regime in order to main its grip on power. One could say that it aims to ensure that any ‘bottom-up’ sensory input coming from the environment is conformed to the priors which are tightly controlled by the regime.

The Kim regime will stay in power as long as it maintains this monopoly on information flow.  It is obvious, however, that this degree of global surveillance and control is quite simply impossible in a globalized and networked world. It is inevitable that the wall behind which the flow of ‘free energy’ is held will eventually be breached. And then what?  

NOTES

Thomas Metzinger’s book, The Ego Tunnel is published by Basic Books: https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/0465020690/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3OCZZB2OB1HAG&keywords=The+Ego+Tunnel&qid=1686294457&sprefix=the+ego+tunnel%2Caps%2C242&sr=8-1

Sam Harris’ podcast with Shamil Chandaria is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXs0uQ6M5ow

For more on active Inference, ‘free-energy’ and the Bayesian brain’ see: Karl J. Friston’s essay: https://www.uab.edu/medicine/cinl/images/KFriston_FreeEnergy_BrainTheory.pdf

For applications of ‘free energy’ and the ‘Bayesian brain’ to psychology see: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00592/full

The photo at the top of this post is from the Liberty in North Korea website: https://www.libertyinnorthkorea.org/blog/foreign-media-in-north-korea-how-kpop-is-challenging-the-regime?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=LINK-Blog&gad=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw-IWkBhBTEiwA2exyOy0EHeTr-0GSGeyv5lme5qTpYicJtpGeILjqimauZJg53nMHkW4c1xoCdikQAvD_BwE

The map and the territory

A trench line near my house.

These days, as I take my morning walk with the dog and traverse hills criss-crossed by trench lines and defended with bunkers and gun emplacements, my thoughts inevitably go to similar but much more deadly defenses that now exist in eastern Ukraine. The ones I pass have never seen active service, unless they have been maintained since the Korean War. 

Along with this sobering thought comes into my mind the Latin maxim I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion: Si vis pacem, para bellum – ‘If you want peace, prepare for war.’ I used to think this argument was too cynical, but now I don’t. Living near the DMZ and reading about Ukraine makes being a pacifist  seem much too dangerous. Then again, I can see we need pacifists to temper the bellicosity of human society, just as long as these pacifists recognize that its the people who are preparing to defend their country against belligerent neighbors who are giving them the peaceful luxury of being pacifists.

I’ve also been thinking about lying. One of the obvious differences between a democracy and a totalitarian regime is the power of the lie. In the latter, lying is perennial and efficacious,, while in the former, it is also perennial but will quite quickly be exposed. This is because in a democracy no one can monopolize the flow of information.

I’m thinking about lying because it seems the Russian people are, on the whole, behind or as least agnostic about the ‘Special Military Operation’. This seems remarkable, doesn’t it?  On the other hand, armed with the intellectual rigour provided by my readings in modern thought, and my copious experiences of mendacity in public and private life, I can counter that, actually, those in support of Ukraine are just as much buying into  propaganda – the stuff spun by the United States. As George Orwell wrote: ‘Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’

In other words, it is tempting to demonstrate one’s intellectual robustness and worldliness by claiming there is basically equivalence between the two sides, that ethical relativism means both sides are constructing narratives.

But this is not at all what Orwell means, and to think it is is a terrible mistake. It is true that the ‘map’ is not the ‘territory’, that the language we use is not a reflection of reality but a sign-system we fabricate in order to make sense of the world. But there is a huge difference between recognizing that the map (language) is not the territory (the world) and claiming there is no access to the latter, which is what some influential contemporary thinkers seem to believe. 

There are objective facts, that is, what can be proved true or false, or can be known to have happened. A fact is the result of consensus, of  cooperation with others. Facts are the hard won consequences of moulding language so it points to  what has been  cooperatively ascertained as constitutive of the world.

This is why, as Sam Harris, perhaps the sanest man on the Internet , in his book Lying writes:, “Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.” The act of lying makes it clear that although language does not correlate exactly with what it refers to, that there is a significant bridge between the two, that the map isn’t a complete fabrication but can serve as a workable - that is to say, fulfilling - guide to the world. But that is precisely why lies are necessary.

Harris, again : “People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions—the more consequential the lie.”  

Lying  is official state policy in places like North Korea and China, and, as it now seems obvious, in Russia. These regimes are not interested in cooperation amongst its citizens to create a useable map. Far from it.   Their top-down models of governance require that only a small cadre are involved in making the map, and as a result, what they produce is not factual but blatantly sectarian. You could call a totalitarian regime’s relationship to fact as based on ‘performative truth’, in the sense that any information’s value lies not in being factual but in being useful to the regime.  It is based on the illusion of total control, that the ruling cabal is in charge.

Lying is necessary if a state believes that it can produce a map in which everything  about the territory is knowable, reachable, manageable, and useful. But that’s impossible.  China’s chaotic and dangerous  volte face concerning its  ‘zero-Covid’ policy, in the present context, can be seen as founded on the failure to recognize that uncontrollability is the nature of the ‘territory’, and that therefore, adaptive transformations in relation to these changes while making the ‘map’ are essential. But the Chinese Communist Party’s map to the social control of Covid was laughably at odds with the territory.

A liar believes that they can control the world through their fabrications, manipulating people so they satisfy their own needs and desires. But the desires of those they seek to hoodwink cannot be controlled, and events always run out of control. This is why big lies will always eventually be exposed. Sooner or later, people begin to notice that the diagrammatic  representation of the world they inhabit is misleading, that the wide straight highway they see on the only map they have access to is leading them - or, more likely, has already led them - over a precipice.  

The inevitability of change means a lie has a short shelf life, and once it is exposed, it will quickly undermine the rest of the epistemological edifice within which it has been nested because people will come to suspect more lies everywhere, even where there aren’t any. This is why totalitarian regime  desperately hold onto their big lies. They have to insist that their ‘map is the only map.

Orwell said: ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ Unfortunately, it is also evident that people often want to hear only what brings comfort and a sense of security, and above all, what does not risk puncturing their convictions about themselves. A friend of mine spent the Christmas/New Year period in Thailand, and for a few days she was staying in a hotel next door to a young Russian woman. When my friend broached the Ukraine crisis, the Russian replied that it wasn’t her ‘fault.’

That’s true. But then, no one would want to claim that she, personally, is in any way directly responsible for the brutal invasion. However, we can justifiably argue that her unwillingness to hear what she doesn’t want to hear, to remain within a bubble of self-esteem, should certainly be criticized. Actually, I suspect she probably doesn’t believe Putin’s lies, but rather easily assimilates this recognition because she believes that the ‘West’ is also lying.

It is. But the lies are of a whole different order of magnitude.

 NOTES

Sam Harris, Lying (Four Elephants Press, 2013)

George Orwell, Orwell on Truth (Penguin Books, 2017)

 

 

Slaying Satan near the DMZ

About a week ago, Pope  Francis in an Interview concerning the Ukraine-Russia war said:  “We need to move away from the usual Little Red Riding Hood pattern, in that Little Red Riding Hood was good and the wolf was the bad one. Something global is emerging and the elements are very much entwined.” At first, I was relieved to see the head of the Roman Catholic Church speaking common sense, trying to insert a bit of nuanced reality into the black-and-white narrative. Then I remembered that Pope Francis is head of an institution that is exemplary in peddling one of the most egregious Little Red Riding Hood stories.  After all, it is founded on the assumption of a basic polarity in which the world is divided between God (good) and Satan (bad). 

Reading the Pope’s comments made me think of a sculpture that sits beside a recently built Catholic church not far from where I live, which is located right next to what was once the main highway between Seoul and Pyongyang, but which today is just a minor road. Running parallel to it is a wide dual carriageway that head up towards the DMZ, and, for those with permits, continues onwards to Panmunjom about two  miles away, where not so long ago President Trump met Kim Jung-un.  As you can see from the photograph above, the sculpture, which is actually a plastic cast, is very realistic.

A website called ‘Religious Decor’ says the following in answer to the question why Saint Michael statues are so popular: ‘he is the greatest enemy of Satan and the fallen legions and is specifically named in the Book of Revelation to fight against Satan, descending at the end of the world, and commanding the armies of the Lord in their final struggle.’ Now, in my opinion, a violent (and, it has to be said, homoerotic) representation of a man murdering another man does not seem a very appropriate one for a church  - or indeed any building - especially one located near the DMZ. I am deliberately bracketing out the Catholic iconography, and looking at it for what it actually depicts. 

The statue belongs to a church dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima, which has a small convent attached. It is actually a kind of bunker church, as the space is located  underground. In this picture you can see the steps down to the entrance:

Entrance of Our Lady of Fatima church.

Above ground is an open area where you can do the Stations of the Cross. There are also a shrine to the first apparition, and one to Our Lady.  Here they are:

Fatima, which is in Portugal, is one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations for the faithful. The  first photograph above shows a re-staging of the ‘Angel of Peace’ appearing to  three child-shepherds in spring 1916, and again  in the summer, and a third time in the autumn. The Angel told them that heaven had “designs of mercy” and taught them to offer prayers and sacrifices. In  May 1917 things started hotting up. Our Lady herself appeared to the children, in the end a total of six times, the last in October 1917, by which time a huge crowd had gathered, and weird things were reported to have happened to the sun.  

In passing, I note the association of such apparitions of Our Lady with the rose, my special interest. Witnesses claimed to have seen a shower of rose petals during and after the apparitions.  Annually a group of Catholic faithful in the United States named ‘America Needs Fatima’ makes it a special mission to deliver masses of roses to the site. On his pilgrimage to Fatima in 2017 Pope Francis declared: “Hail Queen. Blessed Virgin of Fatima. I implore to the world the concord between all peoples. I come like prophet and messenger to wash the feet to all, around the same table that unites us. Together with my brothers, for you, I consecrate myself to God, O Virgin of the Rosary of Fatima."

Saint Francis’ word help explain why there is a church dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima near the DMZ: because the “Angel of Peace’ and Our Lady asked the children to pray for peace and for humanity to do penance to help bring it about.  But ‘peace’ can have a strange way of happening. Read this, from ‘The Catholic Thing’ website, discussing the immediate aftermath of the apparitions on events in Portugal and beyond:

Historical changes began almost immediately. Physicist and theologian Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, who traveled to Portugal to undertake a thorough scientific investigation of eyewitness accounts and depositions regarding the “miracle of the sun,” observes in his book, God and the Sun at Fatima:

The day after the miracle of the sun Portugal’s history began to change in the voting booths, though at that time nobody could see the ultimate portent of this.  What, one may ask, if Portugal had fallen the prey of the plans of Lenin who described Lisbon as the most atheistic capital in the world? He would not have watched Lisbon so closely, had he no designs about it. What would have happened to Spain [during the Spanish Civil War], with Portugal already in the Communist camp? And what would have become of France, ruled by a “Popular Front,” if the entire Iberian Peninsula had turned into an outpost of Moscow?

 So, what is this person saying, exactly? That the apparitions at Fatima was God’s way of giving the green light to fascism?  

I assume that within the Little Red Riding Hood world of Catholicism Saint Michael and Fatima converge near the DMZ to signify the destruction of the atheistic  Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  For part-and-parcel of this kind of  stark dualism are polarizations like this in which opposing communism leads one to embrace fascism. But as the Pope says (but surely must find difficult to enact within the institution he leads) “the elements are very much entwined.”

It is  worth noting that the Russian Orthodox Church has sided with Putin, causing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to schism. The war, and the role of the Orthodox Church in condoning it, makes the implications of the following lines from the same website I quoted from above seem, to say the least, distressingly ambivalent:

 Signs [of Fatima’s influence on events]  in post-1989 Russia are many: Orthodox Christians number 60 million, including the president and prime minister. According a 2009 National Geographic article: ‘In 1987 there were only three monasteries in Russia; today there are 478. Then there were just two seminaries; now there are 25. Most striking is the explosion of churches, from about 2,000 in Gorbachev’s time to nearly 13,000 today.

Here, to end this post, is the uncompromising atheist Sam Harris writing  in The End of Faith (2005):

Many have observed that religion, by lending meaning to human life, permits communities (at least those united under a single faith) to cohere. Historically this is true, and on this score religion is to be credited as much for wars of conquest as for feast days and brotherly love. But in its effect upon the modern world – a world already united, at least potentially, by economic, environmental, political, and epidemiological necessity – religious ideology is dangerously retrograde.

So, back to the statue of Saint Michael slaying Satan. I think it is shockingly bad taste and should be removed. How about you?

 References:

Angela Giuffrida, ‘Pope Francis says Ukraine war was “perhaps somehow provoked”,’ The Guardian, Tuesday 14 June 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/14/pope-francis-ukraine-war-provoked-russian-troops

https://www.religiousartdecor.com/who-is-like-god-archangel-saint-michael-statues/

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2013/09/08/fatima-and-world-peace/