Crusades

"I watched that Terry Jones documentary about the crusades ages ago and it was quite funny. You’ve got old Pope Urban in the 11th century who got up and said: ‘We’ve got to go do it.’ And the spread of Christianity – it was all about business, power. And all of a sudden the crusaders were getting absolution. There was a crusade in the south of France and the Pope said: ‘Just kill them all. God will sort it out in Heaven.’ And you’ve got the Knights Templar who invented the first cheques and who were there when the Magna Carta was signed saying: ‘We are the king-makers.’ They thought they were stopping the spread of the evil Islam… One thing that struck me was when Bush was making his early speech on the War on Terror and he referred to it as a crusade. I really don’t believe that was a mistake. He was playing to the neo-con, Baptist lobby. It was exactly what they wanted to hear: a crusade! His speech writers are smart people – they wouldn’t have been ignorant of the implications. And if it were ad lib then he got it exactly right. It lit the touchpaper. In Islam they know more about our history than we do. Bin Laden will refer to things in antiquity and we don’t know what he’s on about. But the extremists do. Read the Terry Jones book and you can just see that nothing changes. During the Crusades that was definitely part of the whole thing. They had these young men and they were guaranteed a place in heaven and all the booty they could grab. The Pope got them out there and they even hit and destroyed Constantinople which was a Christian city but by that point, no one gave a shit. Now we are a liberal society and people find it very uncomfortable that there is a part of the population that wants to go to war, that wants to fight. I give talks to the military and I was speaking to some boys just back from Afghanistan – they take pride in fighting, they like what they do. No it isn’t. I think if you look at our army, we’re remarkably resilient. In the US 15 per cent of serving soldiers get post-traumatic stress disorder and in the UK it’s four per cent. There are variations, of course – infantry soldiers, for example, experience higher rates than the rest of the services because they are more exposed to the bang bang. For the people who do suffer PTSD it generally begins to impact 10-13 years after serving and then it becomes more of a social problem than a military problem. It is a very real issue but not everyone’s running around traumatised. I was with 2 Rifles in Basra and some of them were signing up to stay on another six months after their tour ended because they were saving up for a new Ford Focus."