Sacred Causes by Michael Burleigh. Published by Harper Perennial $27.99.
KEY POINTS:
On the day I started reading this book the Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto was assassinated and the credit for the crime was immediately claimed by the Islamic extremists of al Qaeda.
That the murder seemed almost inevitable is a reflection of the baleful confluence of politics and religion which we have come to accept as normal, the situation which is the subject of Burleigh's fascinating, if flawed, study.
His theme follows naturally from Earthly Powers, his successful and authoritative study of the "cult of reason" political religion created in the French Revolution and subsequent developments until World War I.
Here he brings the story into contemporary perspective, tracing religion and politics from the European dictators until today.
His accounts of the role of the Protestant and Catholic churches during the rise of fascism and the ascendancy of communism in Eastern Europe are gripping.
His approach is confrontational and the passages on the relationship between Pius XII and the Nazi regime and his study of the role of the church in the triumph of Solidarity in Communist Poland are particularly challenging to some widely accepted positions. His brutal analysis of the Northern Ireland "troubles" is a calculated myth buster. Burleigh is a historian who prefers facts to speculation but he does look at the psychological underpinning of those driven by religion in its noblest manifestations of moral courage and charity and in its worst perversions.
Defending the principles of Western society, Burleigh treats many of its critics with unreserved contempt but has a jaundiced view of today's values.
Burleigh's apparent desire to live up to his reputation as controversial means that the rigour of his analysis is too often demeaned by gratuitous sideswipes. His crack about the Irish "bodgers and shysters" in the British building industry might have strayed in from an old Fawlty Towers script. His clear and destructive account of the 9/11 plotters is not strengthened by describing the hijackers "jabbering prayers in Arabic" and in one sentence film maker Michael Moore is dismissed as "bumptious" compared with the "tough minded" right-wing commentator Richard Littlejohn. It's a bit like reading an upmarket talkback host.
The flow of the book is also hindered by clotted syntax. But this is a book that, although Eurocentric, raises disturbing issues in a clear-sighted way.
As its connection with the Bush Administration brings the "war on terror" into disrepute, it is as well to be reminded the death toll is rising and "Islamic terror atrocities are a fact and not a figment infiltrated into our anxious imaginations by our rulers, a favourite trope of the superficially clever".
* John Gardner is an Auckland reviewer.
