[R-G] Fw: MONBIOT: AMERICA IS A RELIGION

[Tim Murphy]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1007741,00.html

AMERICA IS A RELIGION

US leaders now see themselves as priests of a divine mission to rid the
world of its demons

The Guardian (London)  

July 29


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." 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".'"

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.

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