The American Holy War

Promoting the war in Iran as an American holy war, is as outrageous as it seems. Claiming this to be a battle of righteousness against the forces of evil, the MAGA savior Donald Trump with Pete Hegseth as his disciple of lethality, are at the forefront. They are embarking on this 21st century Crusade with the full support of Trump’s pastor, Paula White-Cain. Trump’s Easter message to the MAGA faithful was filled with death and destruction rhetoric and a sarcastic closing of, “Praise be to Allah.”

Trump took the admonition of pastor White-Cain to heart when she told him that, “God is using you to defeat evil.” It was this message that perhaps prompted his meme post depicting him as Jesus. Pete Hegseth, not to be outdone, delivered a Bible sermon at the Pentagon where he invoked Ezekiel 25:17 and prayed for those beset by “the tyranny of evil men.” He then vowed to “strike down…with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother.”

That Hegseth quote was not written by a biblical scholar for the King James Version of the Bible, but by Quentin Tarantino for the movie Pulp Fiction. For that movie, Tarantino adopted a biblical manner and created a stylized amalgamation of biblical sounding jargon as a dramatic monologue for the character played by Samuel L. Jackson. Tarantino lifted most of that speech directly from the opening of the 1973 Sonny Chiba Kung Fu film, The Bodyguard. So, not really the Bible at work here, and not a prayerful invocation from Pete Hegseth, the Righteous, but a quote actually from Chiba, the Bodyguard via Quentin Tarantino, the Director.

Our religious daily-double of Trump and Hegseth, is perhaps closer to a creation from a darker entity than it is from any true motivations inspired by the teachings of Christianity. In the Editor’s Letter by Susan Caskie, Executive editor for The Week, she quotes from Hegseth’s Pentagon prayer in the name of Jesus that U.S. soldiers might use “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” He went on to request in his “prayer” that: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.”

Ms. Caskie then brought up a 1905, Mark Twain short story, “The War Prayer.” In that tale, a stranger comes to a church where a congregation is praying for their boys as they head off to battle. That stranger warns them not to involve God in what they are about to do. He reminds them that they are asking the Almighty to “help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste to their homes with a hurricane of fire.” Put that way, it is a tough sell to make war sound holy.

[The graphic accompanying this post has the actual last page of the Mark Twain short story. It's legibility may vary by screen size.]