Reply #4: What Erasmus Knew (And We Didn’t)

[Octafish]

Seeing how Corporate McPravda plays dead for Bush and his crimes, here's a bit more on the war profiteering:

What Erasmus Knew (And We Didn’t)

by Jacob Boas
Published on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

It has been reported that in the summer of 2003 Pentagon employees viewed a special screening of The Battle of Algiers, the late Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 classic film of terrorist insurgency and counter insurgency. Presumably the Pentagon’s purpose in showing the film was to help it get a handle on the insurgency in Iraq. (Arguably and however belatedly, the film may have inspired President Bush’s troop “surge.”) Whoever came up with the idea of viewing The Battle of Algiers might have paired it with a reading of On the War against the Turks (1530), a disquisition on the perils of war with Europe’s archenemy by the Dutch humanist and theologian Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1469 - 1536). The year before, the Ottoman armies under Suleiman the Magnificent had stood poised to take Vienna, failing, in the end, thanks to a fortuitous combination of effective defense strategies and unseasonably rainy weather. But despite their seemingly miraculous deliverance, few Europeans believed that they had seen the last of the Turkish host. Anti-Muslim feeling ran deep, and shouts of “‘War on the Turks! War on the Turks!”‘ ran out across Europe.

It was against this backdrop of fear and anxiety that the acclaimed author of The Praise of Folly wrote On the War against the Turks (De Bellum Turco). In it Erasmus, a life-long opponent of war, urged his fellow Christians to think twice before rushing off to war against the Ottoman Turks. “Merely to clamor for war against the Turks,” he wrote, “calling them inhuman monsters, traitors to the Church and a race tainted with all kinds of crime and villainy, is simply to betray the ignorant mob to the enemy.”

Erasmus did not rule out such a war altogether. But if war was to be made - and with the mob howling for Muslim blood, he knew it well might — it was imperative, he stated, “that our intentions be pure and honorable.” Nothing good can come of a war against the Turks, he argued, “if we take up arms without correcting the errors which have provoked God to punish us through their barbaric cruelty.” Among the errors he decried among his Christian contemporaries was a taste for cruelty that was the equal of, if not greater than, that manifested by the enemy. Another was a desire to possess the Turk’s riches and “to rule his subjects,” risking “the danger that we ourselves shall degenerate into Turks rather than bring them into Christ’s fold.”

A further danger of making war on the Turks, Erasmus warned, was that it could serve as a pretext for a “tiny clique” to seize power and use that power to undermine our freedoms, abrogating the rule of law, “removing the authority of parliaments,” and plundering the people, so that by “overthrowing the tyranny of the Turks, … we bring a new and worse tyranny upon ourselves.”

A third danger, according to Erasmus, is that the money it takes to make war winds up in the pockets of the few. There are many “holy sermons” about “crusading expeditions” and “valiant deeds and boundless hopes,” but in the end, remarked the humanist, noting how the collection monies and taxes have disappeared into the pockets of the war profiteers, “the only thing that has triumphed has been money.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/30/1517/

You're welcome, nashville_brook! Thanks for giving a damn, my Friend!