Syria end Palestine, theatre of conflict between the East and the West for 3,000 years, may yet be the stage for another great religious war, declares Hilaire Belloc, noted English Catholic writer, in his new book, “The Battle Ground,” which has just been published here.
Declaring that Syria and Palestine are essentially one and that the political division of the land “contradicts the nature of things; therefore presumably, it cannot endure,” Belloc states that another reason why Western powers will not be able to maintain themselves on the bridge between Europe and Asia is that “the two masters to whom Syria was artificially given, the French and the English, are hostile rivals–potential enemies.”
The two powers, he declares, “have behind them no strength of religion. Their motive has been and remains in part the old modern exaggeration of nationalism, much more greed–the opportunity for economic advantage, particularly in oil, that dominating modern necessity which frames and underlines half our policy; oil, without which men cannot fly or maintain navies or travel by road.”
He continues; “Western rule, atrophied of religion, has to maintain itself in the face of hostile millions who, on their side, have not lost the religion which made them and by which they live. The French and English officials, the armed forces which obey them (and these are not numerous) stand isolated in the midst of a sea of Island all around.
“That same force which destroyed the Crusades is present in Syria today, and it is as active as ever. It is disarmed, or partly disarmed on the material side; but spiritually it is sufficiently armed. Whether Islam throughout the Eastern world, from the Atlantic to the Ganges, will recover material equality with us of the West we cannot tell; but there is no rational basis for denying the possibility of that resurrection. The Moslems contemporary with Richelieu and Cromwell were better armed than the French or English of their day. It may be questioned now whether Europe will now long maintain that modern supremacy over the Moslems which we have so long taken for granted.
“Moreover, in the face of the Moslems in the Near East, in Syria, the two Western Powers are divided one against the other, and even so the advantages of each are enviously watched by other powers of Europe, who will not admit the lion’s share to fall unchallenged to those who they regard as equals or inferiors.”
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