Ray McGovern: Hijacking "Him" for Empire

[Martin Eden]

Ray McGovern is the spokesman for the group of ex-CIA agents known as the Veteren Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, who have raised the alarm over the cooked intelligence used to sell the Iraq war.

Here he has some keen observations on the message in Dick Cheney's Christmas card:


Put It On Your Shield…or on your Christmas card, as did Vice President Dick and Lynne Cheney:

“And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”

This, of course, is not the first hijacking of “Him” for the needs of empire. In 312 before the great battle at the Milvian Bridge at Rome, Hijacker the Great, also known as Constantine, saw a cross in the sky with the words “In Hoc Signo Vinces” (“In This Sign You Will Conquer”). Constantine had a cross inscribed on his soldiers’ armor. The new “Christians” won the battle and lost Jesus’ message of nonviolence.
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Had Jesus allowed himself to be co-opted by the empire and its Quislings, had he chosen to divorce his nonviolent but challenging vision from the politics of the day, he could have died peacefully in his bed—as did the leaders of the institutional church in Nazi Germany.

And we can too. All that is required is a mind-trick to convince ourselves that Jesus did not really mean to say what he said, that he did not really mean to do what he did in exposing the evil of empire. Help is at hand. It is easy to find a pastor preaching a domesticated Jesus—an ahistorical Jesus far more interested in “piety” than justice. I find myself wondering how the Cheneys’ pastor reacted to their Christmas card.
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Ray McGovern ([email protected]) is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry inspired by the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. His first career of 27 years as a CIA analyst taught him something of empire.

Read more:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1229-02.htm