The ISIS Effect:
“Flattened; Everything is Gone”
“Elizabeth, if I think too much about it I just break down. So many shrines I have visited destroyed. So many brethren I have know. battered, beaten or dead. Absolutely devastating.”
That’s a quick note from my friend, Michael LaCivita. Having worked for the Catholic Near East Welfare Association for decades, he knows and loves these places, knows and loves the people who are looking into the face of evil — true evil, the all-too-familiar kind of evil that keeps resurfacing throughout world history. It is the evil that comes forward when some human beings cease to see other human beings, as creatures as equally beloved of God as they are themselves; they see them instead as something less-than-human; sub-creatures meant to be either subjugated or swept from the face of the earth. For them, there is no other, more reasonable and less extreme choice.
We had been discussing the awful news and images out of Mosul and elsewhere, and I had confessed my heartbreak, the difficulty I was having with the reality that our ancient Christian roots — our ancestral places, so to speak, many founded well before the advent of Islam — have been so quickly overtaken, so thoughtlessly and eagerly eaten up by such a conflagration of hate.
That is when I heard his own pain, and worse. Our encounter occurred just as he’d finished communicating with sources on the ground, people who are seeing much more than we’re being told. Michael dared not say much, but he related this from the Syrian Maronite Bishop Sleiman, a sense of things as they are: “Flattened. Everything is just flattened. Destroyed.” People’s spirits are crushed; they have nothing, and are wholly dependent on aid; they are displaced, and in shock, and without the will to engage in the difficult work of surviving.
Orwell said “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” Another way is to simply obliterate their history entirely, give them no connection to their past, no standing reflection of who they are; in this way they become nobodies: people with no past to point to, no footpath to refer back to, so as to gauge a way forward. What a despicable robbery.
“Flattened. Destroyed.” It is unthinkable, and in a post-Christian West — where “tolerance” and “co-existence” are popular concepts of enlightenment, and an expedient political dynamic — this devastation is going almost unmentioned. A bloody, oppressive and culturally catastrophic War on Christians? Not half as interesting, to the West, as Snoop getting high at the White House.
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