America Is A Religion
U.S. leaders now see themselves as priests of a divine mission to rid
the world of its demons
George Monbiot
Tuesday July 29, 2003
The Guardian
"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." 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 U.S. security services are the only
people who cannot see that many Iraqis wish to rid themselves of the
U.S. 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".'"
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. 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". George Washington claimed, in his inaugural address,
that every step towards independence was "distinguished by some token of
providential agency". Longley argues that the formation of the American
identity was part of a process of "supersession". The Roman 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."
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. 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." 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". 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", 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". 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 |
