US Idolatry and False Messianism, Part I

Lady Macbeth's Nightmarish Hands

Every so often you have to spare a pitying thought for the Western liberal elite. Reality has a frustrating habit of not turning out as it was meant to be. We had such a moment when we recently came across a piece by Simon Jenkins, published in the Sydney Morning Herald. It had been originally printed in the Guardian, an intellectual bastion of the left wing in the UK. Jenkins is a regular columnist for the Guardian.

Under the Sydney Morning Herald's headline, the piece was entitled, "Afghans resist liberal do-gooders' intentions" and it represents a cry of frustration that the US has turned out to be such a hopeless world messiah. Firstly, he sends up some of the richer ironies and the blatant hypocrisies on display in Afghanistan.

The abuse and now the expectation heaped on this presidential election [of Karzai in Afghanistan] are absurd. It is as if Kandahar were a precinct of Boston or a ward of south London. In a country awash with guns, drug lords, suicide bombers, aid theft and massive corruption, that a few ballot boxes might have been stuffed and returning officers suborned hardly qualifies as indictable crime. The fact Karzai has been able to win any sort of legitimacy is amazing, with the Taliban controlling half the provincial districts and NATO incompetence reducing turnout in the south to somewhere near 5 per cent.


The rigging has frozen a decision on reinforcements by Washington's national security council, plunging troops at the front into greater danger. And why? The US would have better deployed its dominance in Kabul by demanding a coalition government rather than another costly election. If America is content for Karzai to squander money on clinging to power, bribing Taliban and fuelling a narco-economy, why is it so fastidious about election rigging?

He argues that the US is searching desperately for a reason to have soldiers dying in Afhanistan.

Since glory resolutely refuses to show her face, American voters must be given a proxy. It is that they are rescuing the Afghans from their worse selves by ''being given democracy''.


If Osama bin Laden cannot be found, if the Taliban cannot be eliminated, if troops cannot be withdrawn, if victory cannot be declared, then Western leaders must find a reason for soldiers to die.


The excuse that we are preventing another 9/11 is ludicrously thin. That event, whose plotting and training were in Europe and America, will cause the US to spend what Congress puts at a staggering $US1.3 trillion in wars and related security by 2019. And still no one has arrested bin Laden.

Jenkins ends by railing against the hubris and stupidity of the US and the UK governments.

The West is not under any threat that remotely justifies this wreckage. Instead, weak politicians have seized on any passing threat to boost their standing at home by fighting small wars abroad and making them big. That Obama should dash his store of popularity against the mud walls of Kabul is astonishing; no less so that Brown, not a stupid man, should insult his voters by declaring that ''the safety of the streets'' requires soldiers to die in their hundreds in Helmand.


Western leaders seem unable to resist the seduction of military power. They think that, because they could defeat communism and fly to the moon, they can get any poverty-stricken, tin-pot country to do what the West decides is best for it.


They grasp at nation-building, that make-work scheme of internationalism against which any people, however pathetic, are bound to fight. All is hubris. The arrogance of empire has now mutated into the arrogance of liberalism.

The sad reality is that there is blood on the hands, and many on the left are now desperately trying to rub those vile spots out. And it is one of their own who is perpetuating the travesty. What Jenkins fails to reflect is that liberalism, if it has been anything at all, has always and ever been arrogant. The so-called progressive, left-wing, state intruding, redistributing, soft-despotic liberal has always been awash with pedantic, paternalistic, condescending, we-know-best hubris.

This, in turn, has made the United States of America the most bellicose and aggressive nation in the last hundred years. It has fought more wars, for more years, in more parts of the globe than any other nation. The war in Afghanistan now represents the longest military conflict in which the US has ever been involved. If you look at the last fifty years of US history, it could be written as the Fifty Years War, since there has hardly been a year when that country has not been at war with someone, or some country, somewhere.

Why? How has this come to be? To explain the bellicosity of the United States over the past one hundred years we need to go back to the turning of the last century, in the early nineteen hundreds. Here we can trace the source of the evil that has cascaded down upon the globe ever since. It is sobering, although salutary, to realise that the cause was (and has been) a Christian heresy. It all began, this bloodthirstiness, with a perversion of the Christian faith which happened to capture the US in the early decades of the twentieth century and which has poisoned it ever since.

Until that particular poison is identified and cured, until that specific heresy is exposed and rejected, until the idolatry is discovered and smashed we will inevitably see more of the same. The Fifty Years War will elongate into a Hundred Years War. More and more liberals will walk the dank, damp castle halls at night staring in horror at the blood on their hands. But it will not stop them yawing restlessly between manic aggressive and stentorian demands to punish wickedness in the world followed by long periods of remorse and guilt as the bloodguiltiness mounts and the glory of righteousness proves ephemeral.

In the next few posts on this topic, we will endeavour to expose this particular curse at it source. We will go back to the early Twentieth Century, to Woodrow Wilson, and his ilk. For it is Wilson more than any other US President who set the tone for the hundred years that have followed. If fact one might say, "We are all Wilsonians now." Wilson was a professing Christian; his progressive idealism, he believed, was nothing other than a full orbed consistent Christian faith. But his beliefs were idolatrous and thus anti-Christian. And, like all idolatries, once they hold peoples in thrall, they have led to the perpetual shedding of blood.