Religion, race and hatred

That reasonable and self-effacing thinker, Richard Dawkins, will be back on our TV screens this evening with a programme called "Faith School Menace?". I'm not sure why the question mark is there, because Dawkins doesn't seem in much doubt about it. In fact, I'm wondering whether the programme will be broadcast in black and white, because that's how Dawkins sees most things these days. Consider this quote about Northern Ireland:

“If it wasn’t for religion, and especially religious education going on down the generations, you wouldn’t have a label by which to know who to oppress.”

Nice syntax, Richard! But leaving that aside, anyone who thinks that the conflict in Northern Ireland is basically religious doesn't have much grasp of history. Northern Irish Catholics never fought the Protestants for religious reasons: they fought them because they had been brought over to Ireland specifically to keep the Catholics under control.

Given that the schools in Northern Ireland are still almost entirely run on sectarian lines, I wonder how Prof. Dawkins explains the dramatic decline in sectarian violence over the past decade. The hatred has dissipated because most of the oppression -- the gerrymandering, the job discrimination and so on -- has been done away with. (By the way, looking further back, I also wonder how Prof Dawkins would explain the fact that some of the most important leaders of the Irish independence movement were Protestants).

But let's not confine ourselves to local matters. Earlier this year I paid a brief visit to Estonia, and took a bus tour of Tallinn and its environs. The tour guide, a middle-aged woman, was the most bitter and bigoted person I have ever encountered. Everything bad in Estonia was the fault of the Russians -- even the design of the housing, which seemed to be a particular obsession. She especially resented the fact that the Russians had brought in people from all over the former USSR to take key jobs, something which I saw as a direct parallel to Northern Ireland. "There were Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Kazakhs" she said. Then she almost spat out: "But we knew who they were, because they all spoke Russian". In its own innocent-sounding way, that came across as one of the most racist things I've ever heard.

I commented to a historian I was travelling with that were it not for Mother Russia, Estonians (and perhaps a lot more people besides) might still be living under the yoke of the Nazis. His view was that for many Estonians, obviously including our tour guide, that would be just fine.

Estonia has endured more than its share of history over the centuries, pushed and pulled between Germany, Russia and Poland. I'm sure not all Estonians are as damaged by the past as our guide, but she certainly provided a very clear lesson in how oppression can breed hatred. Whether Richard Dawkins likes it or not, God has very little to do with it, in Ireland or Estonia, or in most other places for that matter.