Perhaps the most damning comparison between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and what South Africa used to do to non-whites is the one made by onetime ANC guerilla (and, prior to that, Zionist guerilla) Arthur Goldreich who doesn’t hesitate to use words like “bantustanism” when describing present-day occupied Palestine (long article; Goldreich’s words are about 1/3 of the way through it).
It’s been said (and rightly so) that “terrorism” is today’s “communism,” in that hysteria about it is fanned by those who which to curtail civil liberties much like McCarthyism used anti-communist hysteria to demonize any left-of-center views.
It’s hardly a new development. Two hundred years ago, the bête noire of choice was Jacobinism, the ideology that had led to the Reign of Terror in France. Just google the phrase “anti-Jacobin hysteria” and see how many hits come up (mostly for articles one has to pay to see, alas).
In all cases, some very real recent or contemporary evils were (and are) used to justify other evils by ruling classes that end up posing more of a threat to the ruled than the original evil supposedly being safeguarded against.
One of the victims of the hysteria was Spain, which in 1812 attempted to enact what was for the time a very liberal constitution. One of the organizations that jumped on the hysteria bandwagon was none other than the Catholic Church, despite the fact that the constitution was hardly anti-Catholic; it even enshrined the Church as the sole legitimate religion of the country. But it did away with absolute monarchy and instituted partial suffrage, which was enough to start the forces of reaction hyperventilating about a grave and imminent threat of a new Reign of Terror.
It worked out quite well for the enemies of progress; the attempt at reform was quashed.
That is, until it sparked a backlash. All subsequent attempts at liberalization in Spain (and there were many) until Juan Carlos’ reforms in 1975 ended up having strong anti-clerical elements to them. Which of course was then used in the reactions to all those failed attempts as evidence of how evil the reformers were.
Which brings us back to plain old communism, or at least the Spanish Revolution of 1936 in which actual communists (as well as anarchists, socialists, and liberals) played roles. By then, repeated iterations of the process in the previous paragraph had pretty much thoroughly poisoned sentiments on both sides.
In short, the anti-clerical bent of the Spanish Revolution didn’t mysteriously come out of nowhere for no good reason save the intrinsic depravity of the revolutionaries. And the Left wasn’t the only side to engage in religious persecution, either. The Falangists were plenty brutal in their repression of Protestants and Jews (whom the revolutionaries typically left alone to worship in freedom).
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