Simon Heffer
STRIFE WITHOUT END
Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda
By Michael Burleigh (HarperPress 557pp £25)

Michael Burleigh is a man of formidable erudition and remarkable percipience. That he should combine these talents with a loathing of cant, hypocrisy and sentimentality has helped him to fashion an objectivity in his writing that redoubles his already significant standing as an historian. Perhaps best known for his stunning history of the Third Reich, Burleigh last year published Earthly Powers, a chronicle of the interaction of religion and politics from the French Revolution to the Great War. Sacred Causes brings the story up to the present date. Second volumes are often disappointing, but in the scope of his material, the clarity of his thought and the pungency of his conclusions, Burleigh has, if anything, surpassed his earlier achievement.

Interestingly, much of the book is spent giving the lie to the notion that the twentieth century saw the triumph of a secularism that had taken root in the European mind in the nineteenth. Dictators such as Hitler and Stalin mimicked religious tropes and practices when the necessity arose in order to seduce a people and, more to the point, had to accept that the power of Churches could never quite be eradicated. By the advent of the Cold War, the main bastions of independence and resistance left in many Eastern Bloc countries were branches of the Church: and Burleigh recounts how the Church was present at and essential to the re-creation of free societies in countries such as Poland and Germany at the end of the 1980s. Yet the ending is never, of course, entirely happy. The coming down of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain was not the end of history. A new interaction between religion and politics has taken place in the West, only this time the religion at its heart is not Christianity.

Beginning with the aftermath of the Great War, Burleigh describes how Germany was beset by cranks, soi-disant prophets and other fakirs, one of whom was Adolf Hitler. Josef Goebbels raided the repertoire of religion to create a God-like aura for the Führer, and used ritual to entrench it. Nuremberg became a place of worship hosting processions of stormtroopers; the podium became a pulpit; Mein Kampf was the holy text; and Horst Wessel and others became early martyrs. In seeking to woo the German people into his movement, Goebbels used a rhetoric and symbology that they could understand. Hitler never sought to crush the Christian Church: he merely sought to control it. However, when it started to make disobliging noises about his passion for eugenics, or his extermination of the Jews, he made selective raids upon it. In the Protestant and Catholic Churches of Germany during the Third Reich there were countless examples of courage, and of cowardice: that something resembling a coherent Church still survived in 1945 was, Burleigh correctly surmises, an achievement in itself.

Stalin was even more cynical. In the same way that the Nazis regarded the Jews as an implacable enemy, so too, after the Revolution, did the Bolsheviks regard the Orthodox Church. Its congregations were intimidated and dispersed, its property plundered, its clerics persecuted. Some, inevitably, went native, and became ‘useful idiots’ for the Kremlin. For most, survival was against the odds. Yet once Hitler unleashed his own offensive against the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin was there holding out the hand of friendship to the Church. Whatever the pretence might previously have been, the tyrant knew the power the Church still exerted over the minds of the people, and he knew he needed its support to galvanise the faithful in the cause of the Great Patriotic War. Once that war was won, needless to say, it was back to deep freeze for the clerics.

Burleigh’s book is epic in its range. He writes of the conscious creation of clerico-fascist states in Portugal and, later, in Franco’s Spain – though Franco would come to have his own disputes with the Church. He examines the role played by devout Catholics in shoring up Vichy after the Fall of France in 1940. In Mussolini’s Italy, by contrast, the Church seems to have been more sceptical. In Hungary, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches worked strenuously, for the most part, to undermine Hitler’s persecution of the Jews and to maintain some degree of independence. The Orthodox Church in Romania, on the other hand, was actively helping round up Jews and others whom the Nazis deemed undesirables, and Romanians joined in enthusiastically with the Wehrmacht in the ‘crusade’ against Russia. Burleigh is refreshingly unjudgemental about this, as about the manner in which people in the Baltic states regarded the arrival of the Nazis in the summer of 1941 as a liberation from the Soviets: when the choice is between two degrees of monstrosity it can hardly be an easy one to make.

Yet the central section of the book is by far the most compelling: it contains the author’s defence of Pope Pius XII, whom history has vilified for the last sixty or so years as having been unduly lenient towards the Nazis. Burleigh points out that when the Vatican, early in the war, broadcast details of German atrocities in Catholic Poland, the reprisals were severe. True, the Catholic Church in Germany had performed its own act of appeasement in signing up to a concordat with the Nazis in the 1930s, but had it not done so it would have been unable to operate at all. Pius, for his part, supported and encouraged more discreet forms of action against the Nazis. When they overran Italy after the fall of Mussolini in 1943 the Vatican was specifically supportive of refugees and of fleeing Jews, and the Pope’s own summer palace at Castelgandolfo was given over to them. The condemnation by the Vatican and by prelates of racial persecution of Jews around the Reich and the conquered lands was frequent and unequivocal: with some justification, Burleigh dismisses the case against Pius as a Communist fabrication.

The war seems to have put heart into religion in Europe, not least because it had actually survived those years, and with a relatively clean conscience. Such strength made it a formidable opponent in those lands that the Soviets now sought to conquer, and Burleigh writes of the show trials in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary that preceded a dark, forty-year-long night. At the end of his book, however, are two out-of-the-ordinary chapters that show the author’s considerable convictions in their most illuminated form. One is on the nature of the conflict in Northern Ireland since the 1960s, which, while seeming to be a religious war, is, instead, debased as one between two breeds of gangsters. Burleigh is particularly sulphurous about the IRA and the ignorant, bigoted sentimentality that surrounds them and an almost Disneyfied idea of Ireland. This passage deserves quotation in full:

Dingy Irish theme pubs are ubiquitous in Europe, with their fake swirling Celtic tat and Guinness, and giant monitors for football and rugby, Gaelic or otherwise, which only partially drowns out the relentless, mindless gabbling known as ‘craik’. Some evenings these places are given over to interminable fiddle and jiggy music, or to tear-jerking rebel songs, although a truly weird cultural format, consisting of boys and girls hopping up and down with their arms rigid at their sides, has even made it on to the West End stage in London.

It is in the same scorching tone, which lends great entertainment to these writings on profound subjects, that Burleigh ridicules the youths of the post-Christian 1960s, wearing T-shirts adorned by images of the mass-murderers Lenin and Mao, and writes of how ‘the Nazis intended to strip Christmas of its Christian associations, turning it into a general celebration of goodwill and the advent of the New Year, a goal pursued nowadays in Britain mainly by local government’.

Yet in many respects it is Burleigh’s last chapter that is the most sobering, as he brings to an end almost a hundred years of tyrannies and bloodshed. In writing about life after the attacks on America in 2001, he talks of the ease with which others claim to have created a ‘multi-faith’ society not just in Britain but in the West, and to have laid the foundations of something called ‘Eurabia’. Burleigh’s envoi is a salutary one. Although he describes himself as an optimist, he writes that

no measures will appease Europe’s Islamist radicals whose primary loyalties are to the free-floating mercenary army symbolised by Al Qaeda, whose solidarities and values have been forged on battlefields stretching from the Balkans, via the Caucasus to Iraq and Afghanistan. ... The increasingly sharp definition of what is at stake is itself surely part of the solution.

It is not the least outstanding aspect of this brilliant book that it proves, contrary to the beliefs of some, that history has no end.