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America
Is a Religion
There
is No More Dangerous Notion
Than that of America the Divine
by
George Monbiot
July
29, 2003
"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 is Honorary Professor at the
Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of
Environmental Science at the University of East London. He writes a weekly
column for the Guardian newspaper of London. His recently released book, The
Age of Consent (Flamingo Press), puts forth proposals for global democratic governance. His articles and
contact info can be found at his website: 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.