• by Martin Rixham

Looking at the world today it would be easy to conclude that mankind is at the beginning of a new chapter in the history of global conflict. This is the conflict of religious ideology. The greatest part of the last century was dominated by conflicts of political ideology, between democracy and autocracy, between socialism and capitalism. But with the fall of the Soviet Union some 20 years ago the last of these great conflicts was won. Now the conflicts in the world clearly have a different source and to many this is religious extremism.

In recent years religion seems to have been implicated in every major conflict; a string of seemingly unprovoked attacks on large cities across Europe and the U.S.A, a war in Afghanistan against a regime bent on imposing extreme religious doctrine, a situation in Iraq that seems to be on the brink of descending into civil war between groups divided along religious lines and an ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine between two groups of different religion. What’s more everyone from governments to the media are happy to encourage this perception, talking about extremists and terrorism and even using these as justification curtailing freedoms. So all in all it seems pretty conclusive that religion is the new source of conflict in the world.

However, I believe this interpretation is very wrong and possibly very dangerous. To take the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as an example; the standard interpretation of this situation goes something like this: There are two groups of people who want to live in the same place and for pretty much insurmountable ideological reasons each people believes it must be theirs and theirs alone. For this reason they just cannot live together peacefully and conflict flares up periodically. The solution? Divide the land up as fairly as possible and then try to convince each side that they should settle for what they’ve got and try to live peacefully. It may not be perfect but it’s the best suggestion going. This is roughly the position held by the U.S. government and probably most of the rest of the world.

But consider for a moment a different interpretation. Now there are still two groups of people, but this time we notice that one of the most pronounced differences between them is that one is rich while the other is rather poor. What’s more, the poverty of the poor group is, to a large extent, due to the rich group. Many lost land and homes which were taken by the rich and even today the poor are kept in poverty due to the actions of the rich. Now we can see that, even if the conflict started due to ideological reason, it is perpetuated mainly be the dissatisfaction of the poor, who consistently come off the worst in the conflict even though the rich claim to be acting in self-defense. In this conflict a two-state solution amounts to little more than segregation, allowing the rich to ignore the problem that they have created and to try to subdue the poor group in a way that is utterly inhumane. The real solution to this problem may be difficult, but this is not it.

The same story can bee seen repeated across the world. Throughout history the greatest powers in the world fought each other for dominance, but now the rich fight the poor and weak and the cause of this conflict is the huge global wealth divide. The reason that religious extremists can gain the support that they do is that they are the only ones who will act against the dominance of the western world, so the modern conflict of rich and poor has been framed in the context of the ancient conflict of Islam and Christianity.

So it seems that there is a new chapter in the history of global conflict, but this is not truly religious conflict, but one based on poverty and inequality, the solution, therefore, will come from the alleviation of these two global problems and not from any attack on religious extremism.

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