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The Faith that Supports U.S. Violence: Comparative Reflections on the Arrogance of Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Herbert P. Bix
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In the second year of the U.S. occupation of Iraq many people in the U.S. still cling to a political tradition that confuses actually existing American society “with the ideal society that would fulfill human destiny.”1 They tend to think of the United States not as the polyarchy and global empire that it is, but as the incarnation of “freedom and democracy,” or at least the closest approximation to the democratic ideal that exists. Whatever their assessment of current U.S. foreign policy, they regard their country as the Promised Land, the embodiment of Western virtue, the deliverer of freedom to oppressed peoples.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 2 , Issue 9 , September 2004 , e7
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2004

References

Notes

1. Raymond Aron, “History and Politics,” in Politics and history: Selected Essays by Ramond Aron, Transl. by Miriam B. Conant (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 239.

2. Lawyers working for the chief agencies of the executive branch recently expressed this as the notion of a president's “inherent constitutional authority,” as commander-in-chief, to set aside the laws of war, order torture, and do anything else he wants in waging war.

3. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968, 1980), p. 34.

4. Ronald A. Wells, “Religion in American National Life: What Went Wrong,” The Mennnonite Quarterly Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (1991), p. 124.

5. Clifford Longley, “The Religious Roots of American Imperialism,” Global Dialogue, Vol. 5, Nos. 1-2 (Winter-Spring 2003) p. 41.

6. For the term “conquering Chosen People,” see Francis Jennings, The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), p. 285.

7. Tuveson, Redeemer Nation; also see Bush's speech at Ellis Island on the first anniversary of 9/11 attacks, as reported in New York Times (Sept. 12, 2002).

8. Clifford Longley, Chosen People: The Big Idea That Shapes England and America (London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 2003), p. 281.

9. Longley, “The Religious Roots of American Imperialism,” Global Dialogue, Vol. 5, Nos. 1-2 (Winter/Spring 2003), p. 41.

10. Bush's words, as quoted by Longley (Ibid., p. 41), were: “Much time has passed since Jefferson arrived for his inauguration. The years and changes accumulate. But the themes of this day he would know: our nation's grand story of courage and its simple dream of dignity. We are not this story's author, who fills time and eternity with purpose. Yet his purpose is achieved in our duty, and our duty is fulfilled in service to one another… This work continues. This story goes on. And an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm. God bless you all, and God bless America.”

11. Available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/prints/200206.

12. Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2004, as noted by Eric Umansky, “Reagan Reverberates,” Slate, posted same day.

13. Lisa Ashkenaz Croke, “American Lawyer Finds New Evidence of Recent Torture in Iraq,” The New Standard (Aug. 30, 2004). Available at http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=showitem&itemid=911.

14. Duncan Campbell and Suzanne Goldenberg, “They said this is America … if a soldier orders you to take off your clothes, you must obey,” The Guardian (June 23, 2004).

15. Matthew Gutman, “Analysis: Will Rolling Heads Crush Rebellion, or Iraq Itself?” Jerusalem Post online edition, April 11, 2004.

16. Josh White, “Methods Used on 2 at Guantanamo,” Washington Post (June 4, 2004), p. A16.

17. The political yonaoshi (setting the world right) tradition also contained millenarian beliefs but had died out at the end of the 19th century. The Nichiren sect of Buddhism as well as Zen, which encouraged action based on intuition, mainly influenced Japanese military officers during the 1920s and ‘30s. In 1931 Staff Officer Ishiwara Kanji, a devotee of the Nichiren sect, masterminded Japan's conquest of Manchuria, which abruptly ended Tokyo's cooperation with the great powers. Ishiwara also envisaged a permanent era of universal peace following a world war in which Japan would emerge victorious over the U.S. On Buddhism and war see, Brian Daizen Victoria, “When God(s) and Buddhas Go to War,” in Mark Selden & Alvin Y. So, eds., War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, Pub., Inc., 2004), pp. 91-118.

18. Robert Jewett and John S. Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: the Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004).

19. Robert Jay Lifton, Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York: Thunder's Mountain Press/Nation Books, 2003), p. 5.

20. Jonathan A. Bush, “The ‘Supreme Crime’ and Its Origins: The Lost Legislative History of the Crime of Aggressive War,” Columbia Law Review, 102/2324 (Dec. 2002).

21. Timothy Brook, “The Tokyo Judgment and the Rape of Nanking,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 60, No. 3 (August 2001), p. 682.

22. H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), p. 109.

23. Philip Nobile, ed., Judgment at the Smithsonian (New York: Marlowe & Co., 1995), from “Smithsonian Script,” p. 14.

24. Winston P. Nagan, “Nuclear Arsenals, International Lawyers, and the Challenge of the Millennium,” Yale Journal of International Law, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1999), p. 487.

25. The term comes from American science fiction of the period before and during World War I. Truman, then “a young Missouri farmer and businessman,” avidly devoured such literature. See Franklin, War Stars, p. 53.

26. First to become actively involved was the anti-Semitic Pius XII. Truman next tried unsuccessfully to mobilize Protestant leaders of the World Council of Churches in a “religious anti-communist front” against the Soviet Union. He failed because he completely ignored the historic schism in Christianity between the Catholic Church and the Protestant denominations. See Dianne Kirby, “Harry S. Truman's International Religious Anti-Communist Front, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the 1948 Inaugural Assembly of the World Council of Churches,” Contemporary British History, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 37-41.

27. Kirby, p. 35.

28. Richard J. Walton, Cold War and Counter-Revolution: The Foreign Policy of John F. Kennedy (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 9.

29. “Six military coups overthrew popular regimes during the Kennedy years,” notes Noam Chomsky, “ten more later; in several cases, Kennedy Administration policies contributed materially to the outcome.” See his Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1993), p. 146.

30. Alfred W. McCoy, “The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research,” in Counterpunch, Weekend Edition (May 29/31, 2004), available at http://www.counterpunch.org/mccoy05292004.html; Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), pp. 26-28.

31. Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot.

32. Longley, Chosen People, p. 255.

33. Longley, Chosen People, p. 254.

34. Timothy L. H. McCormack, “Their Atrocities and Our Misdemeanors: The Reticence of States to Try Their ‘Own Nationals’ for International Crimes,” in Mark Lattimer and Philippe Sands, eds, Justice for Crimes Against Humanity (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2003), p. 136.

35. Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counter-terrorism, 1940-1990 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), pp. 318-328.

36. See Martti Koskenniemi on the generalization of Monroeism in his, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), p. 415.

37. Edward R. Schaffer, “The Myth of American Exceptionalism and Global Peace,” in Jurgen Kleist & Bruce A. Butterfield, eds., Mythology: From Ancient to Post-Modern (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1992), p. 91.

38. Niels Thorsen, “American Religion and the Idea of Unprecedented Violence,” American Studies in Scandinavia, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1986), p. 61.

39. On Kennedy. see Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot, p. 2 and the documentation that he presents throughout the study.

40. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), pp. 155-6.

41. Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity (London: Verso, 2003), p. 74.

42. John R. Bolton, “Is There Really ‘Law’ in International Affairs?” Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems, 10/1 (Spring 2000).

43. Michael Lind, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 110; Paul Krugman, “Machine at Work,” New York Times (July 13, 2004).

44. Charles Reagan Wilson, “The Southern Religious Culture: Distinctiveness and Social Change,” Amerikastudien, Vol. 38, No. 2 (1993), pp. 360-367.

45. On the rise of the new right in the West see Richard White, ‘It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own’: A History of the American West (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1991), pp. 601-611; Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review, Vol. 99, No. 2 (April 1994), pp. 417-418.

46. Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), p. 5.

47. Black and Black, pp. 398-399.

48. Reuters, Security Watch, Jan. 13, 2004, citing the disclosure of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

49. Lifton, Superpower Syndrome, p. 3.

50. Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 24.

51. Cited in Allison Ehlert, “Iraq: At the Apex of Evil,” Berkeley Journal of International Law 21/731 (2003), p. 8 of 43.

52. David Rose, “Bush and Blair Made Secret Pact for Iraq War,” The Observer/Guardian Unlimited (April 4, 2004); Raymond Whitaker, “Blair Told US Was Targeting Saddam ‘Just Days After 9/11,” Independent/UK (April 4, 2004).

53. Longley, Chosen People, p. 279.

54. In his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush used the phrase “wonder-working power,” “an allusion to an evangelical Christian song.” See Chris Mooney, “W.'s Christian nation; how Bush promotes religion and erodes the separation of church and state,” The American Prospect, v. 14 (June 2003), p. 34 (4).

55. As reported by the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, at the Aqaba Summit in early June 2003, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas alleged that Bush said: “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.” Posted at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=310788

56. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Bush Allies Till Fertile Soil, Among Baptists, for Votes,” New York Times (June 18, 2004).

57. Mary Leonard, “Bush presses funding for faith groups,” The Boston Globe (Nov. 30, 2003), available at www.boston.com

58. Jim Lobe, private communication; also see “What a Tangled Web the Neocons Weave,” Dec. 23, 2003, available at http://antiwar.com. Lobe's many excellent articles on the neo-cons and Bushite policy may be read on Alternet and Inter Press Service.