Universal Arrogance

The Iranians may be deluded-certainly the regime's pronouncements on the Holocaust are a clear indication of collective madness-but in one thing they are surely right: America, the 'city on the hill', represents not the universal nation, but universal arrogance. It is the arrogance of the missionary who believes that he and only he is virtuous, whilst the rest of the world is damned

"The Puritans first conjured up the notion of America as a redeemer nation with a sacred mission, popularised the jeremiad - a sermon of complaint against backsliding and declension - which would become in time 'a kind of American anthem', and set precedents for the harsh treatment of demonic otherness. The Puritans confronted their own axis of evil - Quakers, Indians, antinomians, witches - and established an American pattern of waging external war as 'an idealistic moral crusade against a satanic foe' and of purging domestic society of heretics and 'scary, hidden subversives' when these threatened the community's divine vocation"

I was struck by a Brookings Institute report today that claims that America's failure in Iraq is down to her ignorance of history. This, to me, is truer than it first appears. For to live in a bubble, a virtual reality, where other people are mere dots or dreams, where war is a spectacle presented by CNN, and even the attack on the Twin Towers elicited the response : "I thought it was film," will invariably lead to such a 'disconnect'. It is , as Gibbon saw so clearly, a recipe for disaster, staggering folly, both at a personal and monumental level....
[society and the Holy..]

We have to destroy the city before we can save it.

These were the famous words from Vietnam but are equally applicable here. Is it any wonder, then, that the favourite song of the Marines has the lines, 'Burn motherf**er, burn'? Not quite the Wagner from the films!