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General News    H3'ed 12/8/15

Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Six Mistakes on the Road to Permanent War

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In fact, the presidential candidates of this moment all demand annihilation and nothing less. In Donald Trump's words, "bomb the sh*t out of 'em." In Hillary Clinton's more demure formulation, "crush ISIS... break the group's momentum and then its back." Even Bernie Sanders agrees: "Our priority must be... to destroy the brutal and barbaric ISIS regime."

The dream of a war of annihilation against evil has a long, long history in white America. It began in 1636 when Puritans in New England wiped out the Pequot tribe, promising that such a lesson would prevent further attacks by other tribes. In fact, it created a spiral of violence and counter-violence, and a war-against-evil template that the country still follows nearly four centuries later in its "war on terror." The current conflict in Iraq and Syria seems only to be locking us into that template and its guaranteed cycle of violence ever more firmly.

Why do we as a nation keep on playing into the same dismal scenario and committing the same mistakes? Why this seemingly irresistible urge to fight yet another war against evil?

I worry that the answer to such questions may lie in what I've called an American myth of national insecurity. It tells us that we will always be at war with evildoers bent on destroying us; that this war (whichever the latest one may be) is the mission and the meaning of our nation; and that the only way to feel like a real American is to enlist permanently in permanent war.

In other words, even as we stoke the Islamic State, we stoke ourselves as well. The longer we fight, the more deeply we are seized by fear. The more we fear, the more fiercely we are determined to fight. Perhaps the point is not to win the war but to remain trapped in this vicious circle, which feels perversely comforting because it offers a sense of unified national identity as nothing else can in our otherwise deeply divided nation.

National myths are, however, invented by human beings, and we are always capable of changing our minds. Who knows? Maybe someday the Islamic State will figure out that brutal killing and other acts of horror in the name of the caliphate are not such a good idea after all. And maybe the United States will figure out that depending on an eternal, self-defeating war against evil for our national identity is a huge mistake after all. Maybe.

Ira Chernus, a TomDispatch regular, is professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of the online "MythicAmerica: Essays." He blogs at MythicAmerica.us.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2015 Ira Chernus

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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