War and Propaganda
The Ten Commandments: Interpreted for Republican Christians
Abstract
© 2003 Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Thursday, 10 April 2003, Friday, 2 October 2009
Foreign Policy as Holy War
The Religious Right captured the Bush administration. The administration’s moral ideology is that of evangelical Christianity. The speeches of Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Wolfowitz are heavy in self righteous moral harumphing, and US foreign policy is again a battle between “good and evil” empires. Communism has been replaced by Islam. Moslems see the War on Terror as a Christian holy war against Islam, and the Bush administration’s evangelicals also see it as a Holy Crusade against Islam.
For the first time the US attacked a smaller country unprovoked even by a staged incident, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident that excused the bombing of Vietnam. Once, Americans would not resort to force without a pretext, but Bush follows a well trodden Christian path to the east. The pious tone of Bush’s speeches permits the invoking of divine intervention for murder and robbery, as it did in the twelfth century. That is Christian progress. Bush’s excuse for the invasion was Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. The real motive is oil, for Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves in the world.
So, which commandments do Bush, Rumsfeld and the rest of the Republican Fundamentalist Holy Family actually keep?
- Thou shalt have none other gods before me.
- Thou shalt not make thee any graven image.
- Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain.
- Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
- Honour thy father and thy mother.
- Thou shalt not kill.
- Thou shalt not commit adultery.
- Thou shalt not steal.
- Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
- Thou shalt not covet any thing that is thy neighbour’s.
Ye shall walk in all the ways which the LORD your God hath commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess.Deuteronomy 5
An Interpretion for Republican Christians
- These hypocritical men and women worship money. Their God is Mammon! Their God has said so…
“No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon”. Matthew 6:24 - The idols of these people are dollar bills, the US Stars and Stripes and the Judaeo-Christian bible, in that order.
- They take the name of God in vain as a matter of routine by ignoring his commandments while pretending to be devout believers, whether Jews or Christians.
- The Sabbath is holy to the Great God, the dollar!
- They do not honour fathers and mothers at all because they kill them if they are foreign, and, with no sign of compunction, send their sons and daughters into danger of being killed if they are Americans.
- They are concerned that others should not kill them, but use bombs, chemicals and missiles to kill as many other people as they can get away with, as long as not many US citizens are among them.
- They are undoubtedly all faithful to their wives because they made such a fuss about Bill Clinton not being.
- They invade foreign countries to steal resources that are not their own.
- They lie incessantly and unrepentently in their propaganda to fool people into believing they are what they are not.
- They covet anything of value that anyone else in the world has.
There is scarcely a commandment of God that these people actually obey. Can any Christian explain how these people get away with pretending to be one? Or are all Christians the same?
