The Sickness of America, the Sickness of Humanity by Wayne Northey

This was sent to me over the Internet:

All-Time Best Quote

In a recent interview,
General Norman Schwarzkopf was asked if he thought there was room for
forgiveness toward the people who have harbored and abetted the terrorists who
perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on America.

His answer was classic
Schwarzkopf.

The General said, “I
believe that forgiving them is God’s function. OUR job is to arrange the
meeting.”

The good General apparently never read the
Lord’s Prayer: “This, then, is how you
should pray: “‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come,
your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have
forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from
the evil one.’    For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father
will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father
will not forgive your sins.”[1]
(Matt 6:9-15)

My second-year French professor in 1968
digressed delightfully in his classes. His favourite theme that fall was not
Proust, Pascal, or Prudhomme. It was the prospective fascist state under
Richard Nixon, should he be elected. He was, and the rest, as they say, is
history, repeated history at that…

Time magazine privileges history’s unfolding as function of great players, not great events. Two instances were 1990’s front-page photos, one
captioned, “The Face of a Hero,” the other, “The Face of Evil.” General Norman
Schwarzkopf was the former, Timothy McVeigh the latter.

My French prof taught that perspective is
everything. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 innocents, and was executed. Yet he is
martyr and hero amongst white supremacists and similar ilk crackpots. General
Schwarzkopf, celebrated American hero, was contrarily hated in Iraq in the
first Gulf War, responsible in fact for the death of as many as 100,000
combatants and civilians, most infamously on “the highway to hell,” when
thousands of retreating Iraqi troops, mostly teenagers, were relentlessly
slaughtered “like a turkey shoot.”

When it comes to
violence resort, one person’s hero is ineluctably another’s killer. The most
startling and least acknowledged ethical insight of humanity is, end and means are one. Resort
to violence, reap violence; in violent response to resort to violence, reap more
violence. There is no nonviolent outcome in use of violence.

The above is borne out in the research of
arguably the greatest contemporary theorist on violence: René Girard. From
Charles Bellinger’s discussion in The
Genealogy of Violence, Girard’s theory begins with the experience in all
cultures known to history of existential lack or ontological sickness, which
lack leads to endless societal cycles of imitation or mimesis of others, which
invariably elicits violence. Society consequently seizes upon a victim and
kills him/her to meet its own psychological needs. Humanity historically
prevented itself from descending into a chaos of self-destruction by choosing a
scapegoat whose death would create a new sense of social unanimity and
cohesion. This may be routine sacrifice of victims in ancient Incan and Mayan
“civilizations” to secure blessings from the gods; mob lynching of Blacks to
protect “righteous” white folk; immolation of Jews in Nazi Holocaust to excuse
collective German guilt; prosecution of a minority of “criminals” through
imprisonment and the death penalty to let the “law-abiding” off the hook;
Allied saturation bombing of two million civilians in Germany and Japan to “make
the world safe for democracy.” There is fundamental moral and psychological
falsity to, endless recycling of, all scapegoating violence.

Girard applies a hermeneutic of suspicion
to foundational social phenomena, claims Bellinger. The ubiquitous scapegoat
mechanism is one side of the great either/or of human existence: either our
civilization (and any other) will continue sacrificing victims

to meet the psychological needs arising out
of universal “ontological sickness,” or humans will learn to follow the way of
love of neighbour and enemy at its most broadly political and social
application. “Civilized” society invariably acts throughout history the exact
opposite to the way of nonviolence, which summation is “love your
neighbour/enemy as yourself” – as being yourself.
We are, according to African ubuntu tradition,
human only through others.

For Girard, the spiritual immaturity of
modern Western civilization creates an inability to recognize and love its
“victims” (which all civilizations known to history invariably generate) as
neighbours. At the heart of violence is mimetic desire that results from a failure of individuality. The person who
has become an individual (truly human) is a person responsive to the charge:
“You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Such receptiveness opens up the
way to a new kind of society, quite simply a community of love and respect for
all people, including for those who perpetrate and harbour those who
perpetrate, terrorism, without exception.

There are increasingly open comparisons
between President Bush in his “War Against Terror” and various fascist leaders
such as Hitler and Mussolini. But the cancer goes far deeper. “The Face of Fascism”
in fact is “Everyone” who ultimately endorses sacrifice of “others” for
self-preservation (though it invariably be whitewashed as “democracy” and
“freedom” in the West).

Here are the chilling words of CIA
operative “Anonymous” concerning potential civilian casualties in an interview
about his 2004 book, Imperial Hubris:
“That’s the way war
is. I’ve never really understood the idea that any American government, any
American elected official is responsible for protecting civilians who are not
Americans.”

What he’s also never remotely
understood is Gospel. The tragedy is, most American church leadership, certainly
most Evangelical church leadership, from Billy Graham to whomever, would/do say
the same. That is the nub of America’s
idolatry; of America’s sickness unto death. Billy Graham is right now (end
of June, 2005) leading his (likely) last Crusade in New York much to
nation-wide acclaim, since his has ever been the Gospel of “American Empire Über Alles.” Next year, a full-size
bronze statue of Billy Graham preaching in front of a cross will be unveiled at
the 2006 Southern Baptist annual meeting in Greensboro, N.C. Not surprisingly,
George Bush, the most executing state Governor ever, and fast approaching the
most killing President, attributes his “conversion” to Mr. Graham. All that is
needed to complete such pure American civil religion idolatry is for Graham’s
statue to be installed on Capitol Hill and captioned, “Anti-Christ.”

Historian Bishop Stephen Neill once tellingly designated America
as the mission field where “religion is up, morality down.” Meanwhile,
ironically, Evangelicals throughout the 20th century and into the 21st,
like the Pharisees trumpet from the housetops their sick version of a deadly
self-serving individualistic morality. Neill’s is possibly the most succinct
description ever of the pure spirit of pharisaism.

Evangelical church historian Douglas
Frank in Less Than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twentieth
Century (Eerdmans, 1986) wrote: “We are the Pharisees
of our time, if anyone is (p. 229).” In the Epilogue of a sweeping
historical and sociological analysis of Evangelicalism in the late 19th,
early 20th centuries, he added: “Whether in auspicious or declining
times, as we have seen, we display a tenacious commitment to self-deceit. It is
true that we are those who like to think that we heed Jeremiah’s words,
‘Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord.’ Our history, however, gives
evidence rather of Jeremiah’s wisdom in adding these words: ‘The heart is
deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?’
(Jer. 17:7,9). In our very protests of trust in the Lord, we find occasion for
our deepest self-deceits (p. 278).”

This deceit/conceit leads
to scapegoating violence at its most religious and pragmatic. It is Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s “final
solution” to fighting the Muslims: “What we can do is
bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans.” This
is Hitler with the Jews and six millions liquidated; six millions more
non-desirables wiped out. This is also the all-time most decorated American war
hero General Curtis LeMay, more celebrated even than Schwarzkopf, who boastedthat “wescorched and boiled and baked
to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 [1945] than went up
in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” (He was, for the record, wrong: only 100,000 civilians died that night,
while 120,000 were slaughtered instantaneously by the two bombs.) He also
admitted that had America lost that war, he and many other American leaders would
have been executed as war criminals. Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara acknowledged the same in Errol Morris’ 2004 documentary, The Fog of War.

The “clash of civilizations” (Samuel
Huntington) is in truth the “clash of barbarisms” (Gilbert Achcar), as René
Girard’s life work so compellingly presents. Jared Diamond in The Third Chimpanzee, wrote – and
substantiated his conclusion with long lists of evidence – that the only consistent
signature of our species is genocide. This is certainly the case with all
Empires, Pax Americana included. Psychologist
John Brand, who directed me to that insight, says humans are “reptilian” or
“raptorial” at our very core. Jeremiah as already seen said the same: “The heart is deceitful above all things and
beyond cure. Who can understand it? (Jer 17:9)” Jeremiah wrote in the
context of war against Babylon. Babylon is modern Iraq…

The “face of fascism” turns out to be my face and your face, unless we turn
our faces individually and collectively towards the neighbour and enemy in
relentlessly creative new embrace. The Gospel (not its current American Empire
version, 100 million American Evangelicals and other religious notwithstanding)
addresses this: “For whoever wants to
save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the
gospel will save it (Mark 8:35). There is
evangelism without the Gospel, and it is ubiquitous; and, says Jeremiah, it is also iniquitous. Dominant American
evangelism, following Luther, calls the individual to find a gracious God
without reference to neighbour or enemy. Theologian Walter Wink has taught us: The
Gospel calls us without exception to find
God in neighbour and enemy, or not find God at all!

The “how” perhaps begins with the “why.” My
second-year French prof always claimed it
is the only way of becoming human.