God loves America
Oh my name it ain’t nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I was taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side
Bob Dylan
The British journalist Robert Fisk, in his epic “The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East,” describes an interview he conducted in 1993, in Abu Dhabi, with a man named John Hurst, who was a vice president of the American arms dealer, Lockheed Martin. Hurst was representing his company at an international munitions exhibition—tanks, missiles, body armor, that sort of thing—where military officials from around the world were buying weaponry from arms sellers around the world. Hurst, who had earlier worked on developing the Pershing II nuclear ballistic missile, was now selling Lockheed’s Hellfire ground-to-air missile to “friendly” countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—yes, the same UAE that recently partied with Trump at the White House.
Fisk had seen, as he writes in his book, “thousands” of dead, torn and mutilated bodies during his years covering the Middle Eastern wars (and he was to see lots more in the years that followed). Appalled, he asked Hurst, respectfully, about “the morality, or immorality, of his work.” After all, Hurst’s descriptions of the Hellfire’s “percentages and development costs and deals” essentially “stripped (it) of politics and death.”
Hurst was thoughtful, Fisk writes. “I’ve had great debates (about that),” he replied. “On a religious basis, too.” He went on to explain his point of view. “I’m a very strong Christian. I’m Episcopalian. You can look through your entire New Testament and you won’t find anything on defending yourself by zapping the other guy. But the Old Testament, that was something different. There’s plenty there that says God wants us to defend ourselves against those that will strike us down. In the New Testament, it says the Lord wants us to preach his Gospel—and we can’t very well do that if we’re dead. That’s not an aggressive posture…the guy that wants to hurt me has to think twice…the Lord wants us to defend ourselves and arm ourselves so that we can spread his Word.”
Yes, an eye for an eye, in the name of Jesus. And there you have it: the basis for American defense [i.e. killing people] policy in the 1990s, according to Lockheed Martin, was so that America could spread Christianity throughout the world, especially in the Muslim Middle East.
Do you need me to point out the insanity of Hurst’s statement? At the very moment he was making it, Osama bin Laden was living not far away, in Sudan, planning his expansion of Al Qaeda into a terror organization. That same year would come the first bombing of the World Trade Center, as well as the ambush of U.S. soldiers in Somalia (“Black Hawk Down”), both attacks planned by bin Laden. And eight years later, of course, came World Trade Center attack #2.
And how was bin Laden justifying his attacks? “God willing, our raids on you will continue as long as your support to the Israelis will continue.” And here is what he said a few weeks after Sept. 11: “There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots. Its greatest buildings were destroyed, thank God for that.” Can the Hursts of this world not see the irony? Hurst—echoed by U.S. Presidents—insists God is on America’s side and America is thus justified in using weapons of mass destruction against its enemies. Bin Laden insists God is on the side of the Muslims, who thus are justified in using their own forms of weapons of mass destruction to use against us. And so it goes, round and round, an insane, out-of-control merry-go-round of death, spiraling out of control.
What I’m writing here has little or nothing to do with America’s national interests. Perhaps we do sometimes have to fight “just” wars. We were right to defend ourselves after Sept. 11, and after Pearl Harbor as well. I’m not a rigid pacifist. But can we please move away from this silliness about “God”? People have differing understandings of God. No one’s view of God is better, truer or realer than anyone else’s. That should be obvious to any rational person. As soon as someone insists his “God” is the one, true God, and the other person’s “God” is a fake, we should move away from that person and not listen to him anymore, because he’s suffering from a mental condition. Yes, that includes, especially at this current time, idiots like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr., who happily no longer is around to plague us because his “God” failed to warn him that having polyamorous sexual affairs would get him in trouble. And this also includes, more than anyone else, the imposter Donald Trump, a lifelong agnostic who, having discovered what useful idiots evangelicals are, never fails to hoist up Bibles (upside down) and claim they’re his favorite book.
It’s people like this—the militant preachers, the sociopathic politicians—who keep getting us into trouble. This election is about a lot of things, but to my mind one of the biggest is that it represents a chance to begin to isolate these warmongering religious frauds. If we can’t get rid of them entirely—and I guess we can’t—we can at least make them irrelevant.
“never fails to hoist up Bibles (upside down) and claim they’re his favorite book.” And I thought he would have said “The Art of the Deal.” Actually, it’s not hard for something to be the favorite book of someone who doesn’t read books.