If many Spanish Christians feared atheist communists, they had good reason to do so. The ‘Reds’ murdered thousands of clergy during the Civil War and destroyed many priceless religious artifacts. They made no secret of their desire to violently wipe out religion, nor did Marxists in any other country. So it’s hardly surprising that many Catholics supported Franco, or that he would use Spain’s strong Catholic identity as a rallying point.
(Neither I, nor anyone else, would defend what Franco did generally, but we have a comfortable perspective from 80 years after the fact. We don’t have to choose between Franco and someone who wants us dead.)
Many wars in the past including the crusades were sold as a religious war but often there deeper reasons were the same reasons for most wars. The need for resources (especially food) brought about by overstressed populations or climate change, the desire to subjugate others, the desire for persons to free themselves from outside rulers, or forced into a war by treaty.
Not true. The American Civil War saw its Union belligerent resorting to religious rhetoric to an incredible degree. The religious trappings were foremost in motivating the wide-eyed pietist zealots of the North.
Wilsonianism sees its roots in the same Protestant desire to build God’s Kingdom on Earth. It’s modern proponents see it as their “duty” to bring democracy to the brown people of the world. The Protestant inclination to bring heathens to God by using the mechanism of state is so deeply embedded in the people of the United States that it has survived cultural shifts away from religion, and now bears a secular cloak.
So now the War Party has a “secular” wing and a religious wing represented by Hillary Clinton and George W Bush. Obama doesn’t seem to buy into it but he has outright fanatics like Samantha Power giving him advice.
And Nationalist/Republic movements have always had at least some Protestant representation and leadership:
And there was at least one leader of the Provisional IRA that was born in England, though my memory and google-fu is failing me. I don’t believe he was Protestant though.
As you suggest its difficult to make pat and neat explanations for the conflict in this area of the world, but its certainly never been quite as simple as ‘Protestant VS Catholic’.
John Stephenson/Sean Mac Stiofain, the first Chief of Staff of the Provos after the split from the Official IRA. His father was English, his mother was Irish Protestant. He was Catholic.
It would be pretty neat if people would not only grok this, but then extend this understanding of the Irish conflict to every other war there is, ever was or will be.
Imagine aaaaall the people, sharing all the pettiness, woo-oo oohoohooo…
The English/British overthrew a King in 1688/1689 and invited a foreigner in, because said foreigner was Protestant, not Catholic like the King. They then went and fobade a Catholic from ever being King, or marrying a King which is still in force today.
Across the Channel the repeal of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 led to about 100 years of war between France and its surrounding Protestant neighbours.
In the 1770’s, the establishment of Catholicism in Quebec by the British was one of the Intolerable Acts for the Americans Patriots (a fact which current Americans are rather shy to admit).
So 1648 never ended any wars of religion in Europe. It was in the 19th century that they were replaced by nationalism, which incidentally also had a religious component.
They’re a group of Irish Nationalists who revere a guy named Charles Stewart Parnell, probably the leading figure in the Home Rule movement who was a Protestant.
Yes, just as Al Fatah and the Ba’athists of Iraq and Syria are overwhelmingly Muslim the IRA is overwhelmingly Catholic but classify any of those groups as “Muslim” or “Catholic” is ludicrous.
Also, “Protestants” were hardly their only targets. Anyone who identified as a Unionist or was seen as opposing the Nationalist cause was open game.
Perhaps you are talking about vocabulary with some public school experience, since the term “belligerent” is used to describe a nation or entity at war, not necessarily the aggressor.
Perhaps you are talking about the Civil War from a comic-book version of history in which the pietists of the North were not outright shivering loons who worshiped John Brown as a Christ-like figure.
Read Lincoln’s speeches. He was a master of religious rhetoric. He knew which string to pluck for those nutjobs.
That’s an easy fix. Keep the problems complex and accept the issue of “very long detailed analyses required”, but add lesbian orgies in the background.
Hey, it worked on Game of Thrones.
(heh, I realize that, actually, it did work on GoT. I strongly suspect more people grok the intricacies of the byzantine fantasy politics of Westeros, to a very fine granularity ; than have a correct picture of what ISIS even is, where they are, what they do etc…)
