America
Is A Religion
By George Monbiot
Guardian, UK
30 July, 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." 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.
· George
Monbiot's books Poisoned Arrows and No Man's Land are republished this
week by Green Books.
www.monbiot.com