IN 1899 an international peace conference was held in The Hague to decide the laws of war. One topic discussed was the devastating armaments being used by European armies to subdue their overseas colonies, such as the Armstrong gun and the Shrapnel shell. Sir John Ardagh, a conference delegate, defended this practice. “The savage, like the tiger, is not so impressionable and will go on fighting even when desperately wounded,” he argued. In other words, mass slaughter was more humane. Fifteen years later the same weapons were tearing up the Western Front.
Fields of Blood: Religion and the history of violence is filled with stories like this, stories of such casual horror, and after a while they lose their sting. As Sir John’s defense showed, secular values worked just as well when trying to justify these horrors. That said, religion, too, has been one of the most popular excuses — something the book’s author, Karen Armstrong, admits from the outset. What she disputes is the idea that religion is inherently violent, or that religious belief makes conflict inevitable. Instead, Fields of Blood looks at the many ways these fundamentals of human experience have been bound together for the last five millennia.
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