The Divine Fright of Kings

STOP. If you're just breezing through here and not hitting links, I'd rather you read this from Jim Henley than anything I've written on this page. I mean it. Don't finish this 'til you've read it.

You will hear in response, "That's how you have to deal with these people." But if holding women and children hostage is how we must deal with them, then we should not be dealing with them at all. We should be minding our own damn business and steering clear of the whole debacle. Of course, it's a little late to realize that now. When a government decides that the ends justify the means, that the agreed-upon rules of civilized nations can simply be ignored, that war crimes can be shrugged off, then all of its people have come to a very dangerous crossroads. And "he did it first" is not a defense.

Bush's inadvertent use of the word "crusade" during the build-up to the Afghanistan war no longer seems so inadvertent. It took zealotry to get us into this situation. Many people get very nervous about Bush's evangelical beliefs not just informing but invading his foreign policies. But in this Guardian article, George Monbiot is on to something: the bigger peril is that the real fundamentalist religion driving the Bush administration is not so much Christianity, but Americanism.

[W]e 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.

[...]

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.

Particularly when they also happen to spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined and have the new King James as their leader.

"...his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: 'If you want your family released, turn yourself in.' "