{"id":5213551,"uuid":"57f09394-6cd4-11ed-a9b4-4201c0a8a0e3","name":"Religious Carnage","description":"From Toxic Grafity 5, May 1980: collage from found images, words in felt pen; litho printed. The cross consists of: the upright a Bren-style light machine gun (can\u2019t identify the exact model), topped by a 1911 pattern Browning 9mm pistol; the cross-piece consists of two FN L1A1 Self-Loading Rifles. All three of these small arms would have been used extensively by Western forces during the post-War era, the SLR was used extensively during The Troubles in Ireland. In the centre, a group of Vietnam era US infantry huddle around what appears to be wounded civilians, above a landscape of Hiroshima, shortly after that city\u2019s devastation in the nuclear attack of 6th August 1945.\n\nLooking at the image now it strikes me that neither the Second World War nor Vietnam were really \u201creligious\u201d wars; the conflicts rather were clashes of rival secular ideologies, with religion as a minor factor, if a factor at all. Even Northern Ireland was only a \u201creligious\u201d conflict if one lazily accepted the labels \u201cCatholic\u201d and \u201cProtestant\u201d at face value, rather than reading them as media ciphers intended to project onto Irish nationalism and republicanism, Ulster loyalism and unionism, a premordialist \u201cancient hatreds\u201d framework, wherein the colonial power, Britain, steps in to keep the peace between \u201cwarring tribes\u201d \u2013 it is an imperialist trope. \n\nYet I think it is a powerful image. It suggests not that these wars (or all wars) are \u201creligious\u201d, or that the Western powers in the Second World War and Vietnam, or the British in Ireland, had an explicitly religious agenda; rather, it suggests that religion has provided a moral framework that seeks to justify previous wars and excuse new wars; that it provides a moral purpose, often retrospectively, to organised mass-killing and the starvation and plague that so often follows war; that religion, particularly Christianity, provides a vocabulary and iconography of service and sacrifice which renders the squalid glorious and the sordid honourable.\n\nIs the use of the cross lazy? Is Christianity a soft target (for various reasons) relative to, say, Islam or Judaism? Maybe. I was aware, of course, of anti-Semitism, and what much later would be called Islamophobia, and Crass\u2019s anti-Christian polemics were still (figuratively and literally) ringing in my ears. But there was also family history, and the fact that I grew up in a household that was both strongly atheistic and hedonistic, with a complex and ambiguous faith ancestry. Christianity was certainly an easy target in the lazy sense, but it was an deserving target. \n\nI think the image today has a new lease of life with the rise in the USA of heavily armed Christian fundamentalist fascism, and the adoption of \u201cChristian heritage\u201d as a dog-whistle summons to neo- and crypto-fascism across Europe, a continent that has brought more death and destruction upon the world than often.","brand":null,"metaTitle":"","metaDescription":"From Toxic Grafity 5, May 1980: collage from found images, words in felt pen; litho printed. The cross consists of: the upright a Bren-style light mac...","metaImage":null,"noIndex":false,"giftWrapCompatible":true,"approvalStatus":"approved","ecoIcons":["organic-icon.png","low-carbon-icon.png","ethical-icon.png"],"isBundle":false,"specifications":"Certified Organic Cotton t-shirt, 155g\/m2. Wash cool, hang dry. GM free. Not tested on animals. Does not contain animal-derived products. Printed with low waste printing tech. 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