Religion, Terror, Nationalism by Dr Hune Margulies
Listen to excerpts from Outlook's All is Well issue by Pragya Vats
#Outlook #Gaza #Palestine #Israel #Palestinians #WestBank #GazaStrip #Occupation #Jerusalem #AlAqsaMosque
#Outlook #Gaza #Palestine #Israel #Palestinians #WestBank #GazaStrip #Occupation #Jerusalem #AlAqsaMosque
Transcript
00:00 I am Pragya and I bring to you excerpts from the current issue of Outlook
00:04 that looks at two cover stories, two narratives of war, one mythical, one real.
00:11 Ramayana and that between Israel and Hamas.
00:15 In the issue titled "In Memory of El Yusuf Peace"
00:19 Outlook delves deeper into the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
00:25 Religion, Terror, Nationalism by Hoon Margulies, the founder and director of Martin Ruber Institute for Radiological Ecology in Goa.
00:35 There is a famous dictum that argues that history is written by the victors, but that is utterly untrue.
00:43 The vanquished have also written history.
00:45 The question to resolve is not who writes the history, but who teaches it.
00:50 If we follow the model that there are always two sides to each issue, we know that each side will put forward a specific context to fit their desired narrative.
01:01 A false context becomes a pretext for explaining and sometimes justifying episodes of history or present day conflicts.
01:10 We must therefore understand that there is a right to present a context to a conflict,
01:15 but there is never a context that can explain or justify atrocities and crimes against humanity.
01:23 Never will the vanquished resort to crimes against humanity, for those crimes will be the source of their eternal vanquishing.
01:31 The vanquished will one day triumph, but only if the human likeness of their struggle is held firm in the winds of history.
01:40 All nation-states that exist today are founded on the perceived inherent rights conferred to shared ancestral commonalities.
01:48 Those ancestry attributes can be biological, historical, or simply political,
01:55 but what all of them share in common is the manipulative illusion that ancestry determines the present and the future.
02:03 A blood ethnicity is a biological fact that is as relevant to shared communal experience as would be body weight or a preference for red wine over Goan penny.
02:15 We would certainly not think of creating a nation-state on the basis of shared weight and binofile.
02:21 We prefer to use blood reference and historical narratives to designate national groupings and assert territorial claims.
02:30 Sometimes it is a shared religion that prompts us to gather as a nation and separate ourselves from others who do not belong to the beloved faithful.
02:40 Can we accept the premise that human groups have an inherent right to a nation-state and a territory under their control because they share the same religion?
02:50 In other words, can religion be the basis upon which to build a nation-state?
02:56 The answer to that question depends on the context of time and space within which it is formulated.
03:02 Are nations more just when the basis to their commonalities is blood ethnicity?
03:08 Is a shared past narrated by those who control its teaching a proper attribute for nationhood?
03:14 We do not seem to have an answer to the question whether the continuum ethnicity-culture territory is a fact of nature or a construction of power and domination.
03:25 domination.