America is a Religion - UK Guardian worrying article

[Pert_UK]

George Monbiot in The Guardian:

"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...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...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 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. "

Full article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1007741,00.html

[Jack Rabbit]

1. You beat me to posting it

Monbiot has it spot on:

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.

This is what happens when one attempts to decuce facts from ideology and acts without testing his hypotesis. There is a name for such a person: Fool.

[OneBlueSky]

2. "Our Bush, Who art in Crawford" . . .

"Callow and insane."

[T_i_B]

3. Not a religion but an ideology

I suppose that is the best way of putting it. With a written constitution that provides such clear principles America has had a tendency to lean towards being an ideological state. And ideologues can be has dogmatic & fanatical as the worst relious nut. It never fails to amuse me how rigididly many marxists & libertarians for intance cling to their political ideology. For many political ideologues political dogma indeed replaces religous faith.

Of course with right wing ideologues now making up the vast majority of the US establishment the trappings of the ideological state are increasingly in place with all the negative points that entails.

[Merlin]

4. USA is a religion with an ideology

No question America has become a religion. We have our "Hallowed Halls". The oval office is "sacred". We have our sainted figures(Raygun), our martyrs (war dead), our prophets (founding fathers), our high priests (SC). We take up crusades in the name of spreading belief in her catechism. We have a shared faith in the triumph of the USA ubber alles.

We have become quite ill, I'm afraid. This is a terrific article.

[T_i_B]

5. Religious imagery maybe...

...but such spin would not hold such a status without ideology.

Ideology seems to have become all within the US junta and common sense seems to have been discarded, which is not good for anyone.