AMERICANISM AS RELIGION

When I consider how the US public so faithfully believed the Bush administration's badly constructed lies about Iraq's WMDs and connections to al-Qaeda, I think of our country's nationalism as a kind of religion. However, this sense of America-as-religion goes much deeper than the bloodthirsty fervor unleashed for the Iraq war when you carefully decode all the political rhetoric. British writer, George Monbiot, examines this notion (courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe):

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.

For more, click here.

Also, here is some appropriate REAL ART for your perusal:

The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Pieter Bruegel, 1562.

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