http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0729-11.htm
See also: http://www.monbiot.com
Published on Tuesday, July 29, 2003 by the Guardian/UK
America is a Religion
US Leaders Now See Themselves as Priests of a
Divine Mission to Rid the World of Its Demons
There is no more dangerous notion than that of America
the Divine.
by George Monbiot
The death of Uday and Qusay," the commander of the
ground forces
in Iraq told reporters on Wednesday, "is definitely going
to be
a turning point for the resistance." (1) Well, it was a turning
point, but unfortunately not of the kind he envisaged. On the
day he made his announcement, Iraqi insurgents killed one
US soldier and wounded six others. On the following day,
they killed another three; over the weekend they assassinated
five and injured seven. Yesterday they slaughtered one more
and wounded three. This has been the worst week for
US soldiers in Iraq since George Bush declared that
the war there was over.
Few people believe that the resistance in that country
is being coordinated by Saddam Hussein and his noxious
family, or that it will come to an end when those people
are killed. But the few appear to include the military and
civilian command of the United States armed forces.
For the hundredth time since the US invaded Iraq,
the predictions made by those with access to intelligence
have proved less reliable than the predictions made
by those without. And, for the hundredth time,
the inaccuracy of the official forecasts has been
blamed on "intelligence failures".
The explanation is wearing a little thin. Are we really
expected to believe that the members of the US security
services are the only people who cannot see that many
Iraqis wish to rid themselves of the US army as fervently
as they wished to rid themselves of Saddam Hussein?
What is lacking in the Pentagon and the White House
is not intelligence (or not, at any rate, of the kind
we are considering here), but receptivity. Theirs is
not a failure of information, but a failure of ideology.
To understand why this failure persists, we must first
grasp a reality which has seldom been discussed in print.
The United States is no longer just a nation.
It is now a religion. Its soldiers have entered Iraq
to liberate its people not only from their dictator,
their oil and their sovereignty, but also from their
darkness. As George Bush told his troops on the day
he announced victory, "wherever you go, you carry
a message of hope - a message that is ancient and
ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah,
"To the captives, 'come out,' and to those in
darkness, 'be free.'" (2)
So American soldiers are no longer merely terrestrial
combatants; they have become missionaries. They are no
longer simply killing enemies; they are casting out demons.
The people who reconstructed the faces of Uday and
Qusay Hussein carelessly forgot to restore the pair
of little horns on each brow, but the understanding
that these were opponents from a different realm was
transmitted nonetheless. Like all those who send
missionaries abroad, the high priests of America
cannot conceive that the infidels might resist
through their own free will; if they refuse to convert,
it is the work of the devil, in his current guise as
the former dictator of Iraq.
As Clifford Longley shows in his fascinating book
Chosen People, published last year, the founding
fathers of the USA, though they sometimes professed
otherwise, sensed that they were guided by a divine
purpose. (3) Thomas Jefferson argued that the Great Seal
of the United States should depict the Israelites,
"led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night".
(4)
George Washington claimed, in his inaugural address,
that every step towards independence was "distinguished
by some token of providential agency". (5) Longley argues
that the formation of the American identity was part
of a process of "supersession". The Catholic Church
claimed that it had supplanted the Jews as the elect,
as the Jews had been repudiated by God. The English
Protestants accused the Catholics of breaking faith,
and claimed that THEY had become the beloved of God.
The American revolutionaries believed that the English,
in turn, had broken their covenant: the Americans
had now become the chosen people, with a divine duty
to deliver the world to God's dominion. Six weeks ago,
as if to show that this belief persists, George Bush
recalled a remark of Woodrow Wilson's. "America,"
he quoted, "has a spiritual energy in her which
no other nation can contribute to the liberation
of mankind." (6)
Gradually this notion of election has been conflated
with another, still more dangerous idea. It is not
just that the Americans are God's chosen people;
America itself is now perceived as a divine project.
In his farewell presidential address, Ronald Reagan
spoke of his country as a "shining city on a hill",
a reference to the Sermon on the Mount. (7) But what
Jesus was describing was not a temporal Jerusalem,
but the kingdom of heaven. Not only, in Reagan's
account, was God's kingdom to be found in the United
States of America, but the kingdom of hell could
also now be located on earth: the "evil empire"
of the Soviet Union, against which His holy warriors
were pitched.
Since the attacks on New York, this notion of America
the divine has been extended and refined. In December
2001, Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of that city, delivered
his last mayoral speech in St Paul's Chapel, close
to the site of the shattered twin towers. "All that
matters," he claimed, "is that you embrace America
and understand its ideals and what it's all about.
Abraham Lincoln used to say that the test of your
Americanism was ... how much you believed in America.
Because we're like a religion really. A secular
religion." (8) The chapel in which he spoke had
been consecrated not just by God, but by the fact
that George Washington had once prayed there.
It was, he said, now "sacred ground to people
who feel what America is all about". (9) The United
States of America no longer needs to call upon God;
it is God, and those who go abroad to spread the
light do so in the name of a celestial domain.
The flag has become as sacred as the Bible;
the name of the nation as holy as the name of God.
The presidency is turning into a priesthood.
So those who question George Bush's foreign policy
are no longer merely critics; they are blasphemers,
or "anti-Americans". Those foreign states which seek
to change this policy are wasting their time: you can
negotiate with politicians; you cannot negotiate with
priests. The US has a divine mission, as Bush suggested
in January, "to defend ... the hopes of all mankind",
(10)
and woe betide those who hope for something other than
the American way of life.
The dangers of national divinity scarcely require
explanation. Japan went to war in the 1930s convinced,
like George Bush, that it possessed a heaven-sent mission
to "liberate" Asia and extend the realm of its divine
imperium. It would, the fascist theoretician Kita Ikki
predicted, "light the darkness of the entire world".
(11)
Those who seek to drag heaven down to earth are destined
only to engineer a hell.
George Monbiot's books Poisoned Arrows and No Man's Land
are republished this week by Green Books.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, Commander, Coalition Ground Forces,
23rd July 2003. Briefing on the Confirmation of the Deaths of
Uday and Qusay Hussein
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jul2003/g030723-D-6570C.html
2. President George W Bush, 1st May 2003. Address to troops
on the USS Abraham Lincoln
3. Clifford Longley, 2002. Chosen People: the big idea that
shapes England and America. Hodder and Stoughton, London.
4. Thomas Jefferson, cited in Longley, ibid.
5. George Washington, cited in Longley, ibid.
6. President George W Bush, 21st May 2003. Remarks to the
United States Coast Guard Academy, New London, Connecticut.
7. Ronald Reagan, cited in Longley, ibid.
8. Rudy Giuliani, cited in Longley, ibid.
9. ibid
10. President George W. Bush, 28th January 2003. State of the
Union Address. The US Capitol.
11. Kita Ikki, cited in Piers Brendon, 2000.
The Dark Valley: a panorama of the 1930s. Pimlico, London.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
###
