Leaders Use Patriotism to Justify Today's 'Holy Wars'
By RICHARD E. CROSS Our country is torn apart by controversy when it comes to the subject of war. Americans are at odds over the meaning of "patriotism" and "supporting our troops." In our own local paper there has been an ongoing and heated exchange on the subject.
Amid these arguments, however, we can observe a dangerous and distorted concept of "patriotism" that has become a new kind of "religion" for some. The state has become an object of worship, and the age-old mantra of "holy war" has once again been involved to mislead and deceive the citizens of our homeland.
Hermann Goering, Hitler's second in command, said it cynically but acutely:
"The people can always be brought to do the bidding of their leaders. That is easy. All you have to is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the fatherland to danger."The present Bush administration uses this same tactic. Sadly, many Americans have succumbed to this strategy of deception. This vision of patriotism is really a kind of idolatry. It is a perversion of religion, one that substitutes the state ("my country right or wrong") as an object of worship. It is a false messianic mentality that preaches: "They're the bad guys; we're the good guys and we have a divine mission: to bring the blessings of 'democracy' and 'liberation' to all the peoples of the world."
The religious right makes a similar claim: "We are God's chosen people with a mandate from on high." This is part of their agenda to turn America into a theocracy. Christopher Hedges rightly describes these neo-crusaders as "fascists" in his book "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." As Sinclair Lewis warned, "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." We have a president who also seems to take his marching orders directly from God.
This is also what historian Arthur Schlesinger once called "America's unconscious religion." Like the perversions of religion in other times, this unconscious American religion, as Robert Blair Kaiser describes it, has enjoyed "an entire support system for that idolatry, one that made itself felt in our world as strongly as any primitive religion did on the society that surrounded it. This religion had its own doctrines and scriptures and apologetics, its rites and sacred idols, its high-priests and hierarchs . . . It has even had its own inquisition and heresy trials."
President Bush gave himself away when he referred to the war in Iraq as a "crusade." His advisers jumped on it right away to hush him up, and we have not heard the word since. Too late: The cat was out of the bag. This would be Mr. Bush's "holy war," and the appeal to religion would rule the day. Just as the Crusaders in the past cried "Deus vult" - "God wills it" - while they slaughtered their fellow Christians in the siege of Constantinople as well as hordes of Muslims and Jews, so, too, today the same ethos is in play.
In its best sense, jihad is the inner spiritual struggle against personal vice and ignorance in the defense of Islam. Just as radical Islamists have distorted the concept of jihad, so too there are those in the West who distort the values of patriotism and love of country with their own kind of perverted jihad. Kaiser notes how the present holy war has set America back a century fiscally, squandered our moral credibility in the eyes of the world, and driven several million Iraqis flee to Jordan and Syria to escape from their so-called "liberated" homeland.
The "liberation" of Iraq, of course, will allow some Americans and their corporations to get fat off this holy war. But in order to render this fat, far more Americans will have to die. The Pentagon does not do body counts of Iraqi civilians. But their children and grandchildren can count, and will remember.
The bottom line is that there is no such thing as a holy war. But there are fanatic "holy warriors" and misguided "patriots" in every camp. I often wonder if those leaders we label "enemy" are all that different from our own leaders in Washington in their contempt for human life and their pursuit of a holy "cause." The methods and technologies of human destruction may differ from camp to camp. But the end result of holy war is always the same: death.
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