CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

God, War, and the Media

Perhaps theologian Walter Wink can help us understand Pete Hegseth, America’s self-declared “secretary of war” and spokesman, for God’s sake . . . for God. At a recent prayer service at the Department of Defense, for instance, Hegseth, after calling the Iranians “barbaric savages” who deserve no mercy, called on the citizens of his country to pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

Love thy neighbor, folks! Earlier he had boasted that the American bombing campaign had “unleashedtwice the firepower in its first five days as the initial ‘shock and awe’ bombing phase of the Iraq War in 2003.” You might recall, of course, that this campaign included the devastation of a school in Minab, which killed – murdered – around 170 people, including over 100 children. God bless America.

Wink, in his book The Powers That Be, discusses what he calls “the myth of redemptive violence” – the belief that violence saves us. Indeed, “It doesn’t seem to be mythic in the least,” he writes. “Violence simply appears to be in the nature of things. It’s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. If a god is what you turn to when all else fails, violence certainly functions as a god.”

And when we use it, that’s God with an uppercase G. Just ask........

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