-----Original Message-----
From: Data Center
Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 7:16 AM
To: 'Michael Baier'
Subject: RE: OT: Religion or America is a religion


Rubbish!  The deaths of ooday and koosay may very well signal the beginning
of the end of the resistance, and the upsurge in attacks could just be the
death pangs of the Baath Party.  $30 mil went to the man who dropped a dime
on those two, and it's just a matter of time until somebody decides to opt
for the $25 mil for Saddam's head.

Reagan was right when he referred to the Soviet Union as the evil empire,
and in retrospect I think it's clear that his approach worked.  I think
we're also beginning to see the positive results of Bush's foreign policy.
Arafat is on his way out.  Kaddafi wants to be our friend.  Iran and Syria
are starting to cooperate.  Saddam is no longer in power and his sons are no
longer a threat to the Iraqi people or the US.  The Taliban is no longer in
power in Afghanistan where they can harbor those who attack US targets.  Bin
Laden is in hiding (if he's still alive) and his sidekick Shaikh Mohammed is
in custody and singing like a canary.  38 of the top 55 most wanted in Iraq
are either dead or captured, as well as half of the top Al Queda leaders.

Yes, some extremists might equate criticism of Bush with blasphemy, just as
other extremists compare Bush with Hitler.  But most understand that freedom
of speech and the right to disagree is a big part of what we're fighting
for.  Those who find a moral equivalency with Saddam's insanity and
aggression and Bush's war on terror are beyond hope in my opinion.  Sure,
there are religious themes employed here, just as were used in the
Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement.  Sometimes
right and wrong are so obvioius that the allegories are unavoidable.

-Rod Saunders


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Baier [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 8:36 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [HP3000-L] OT: Religion or America is a religion


Interesting article/comment in the UK Guardian.

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

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 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.

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *