The religious American unconscious caught in the trap of torture

Editors Note: Manuel de Diéguez is a French Philospher. Most of his writings are in French, but this piece has been translated into English for our benefit. He has a web site of his works at Manuel de Diéguez and can be contacted by email at dieguez@dieguez-philosophe.com.

I am honored to have permission to post this work on Uncommon Thought, and offer my thanks to Marilyse Devoyault for the translation. I feel that this piece in particular offers important insights into the current merged neo-conservative / apocalyptic Christian political environment in the U.S. It also adds to our understanding of the context and meaning of the torture of "detainees" that has recently come to light

An anthropology able to analyse the politics and the history of our species, to the light of a scrutiny of its theological brain, will be an anthropology that will observe the move of imperial democracy in a new Andersen's tale where a naked king of the great Danish presents himself armed to the teeth. The anthropological psychoanalysis, therefore existential, drives to the discovery of an unconscious of grace trapped in advance by its fall in torture.

To lighten the eyes of political Europe, we need to precise how "Simiohuman" history tries to trace a demarcation line between reality and mythology, politics and Utopia.

1 - The sleeping political spirit of Europe

Three major experiences marked the XXth century: Mussolinian Fascism, Hitlerian Nazism and Soviet Marxism. All three preceded the seraphic forms which the American imperialism was going to take, with its "idealities"' horns of plenty, with the Messianic conditioning of opinion in the name of the myth of a redemptive freedom, with the simplification of a field of vision conceptualized by promising abstractions, with the promotion of a " Good " and an " Evil " mythified on the model of Manichean orthodoxies of salvation and damnation. But these age-old matrix of the black and white of the Sacred found their most simplistic theological pace in the mythical edenism from which American imperialism has made its religious ornament.

Just when a psychobiological knowledge on the three monotheisms' draw of swords is taking its first steps in anthropology, the European political reason remains trivial after a millennium of a simple administrative practice of the States. How the art of governing wouldn't seam rebel to the development of an anthropology of the American imperialism that would clarify the relations between religious American unconscious and the hyper-industrialization of modern democracies, and to the development of an anthropology that would highlight the theological bases of empire's political unconscious? There must be a second reading of the history of the brain of civilizations, there must be a reflexion nourished by an in-depth knowledge of the evolution of our osseous cranium, there must be a psychoanalysis of the bio-oneiric life of a species whose unconscious mental leaves to worlds divided between their Eden and their hell.

The historians of XXIst century will mention that in 2004, a great part of the European leading class was so late in the radiographic knowledge of our species' two-phase brain that It was extremely refrained from understanding how United States had become a schizoid empire, thus messianically expanding through the five continent, and refrained from understanding that the irrepressible ambitions of this nation dichotomized by its "salvation" theology had to be observed to the light of the laws which govern the growth and which order the failure of the empires self-mythified by their religious seraphism. But moreover, it was becoming urgent to become aware of the fate that governs the modern wars for the control of the new energy resources in this time, the supply oil had become the key of the domination of the world. To capture the black gold reserves, the empire needed a strategy of abduction, which was in great contrast with the myth of the American empire's religious predestination. The planet's brain had become the hostage of a theopolitic of the soteriological democracy annunciations.

In truth, Nazism and Marxism had already presented resolutely redemptive and bloody forms of politics. But the first ideologies connecting to an oneiric future of politics, therefore to a dream of salvation on the whole earth, had only delayed the armed landing of the evangelist American dream, which had remained artificially under pressure and whose victory of 1945 was going to release the eschatologic surge. Why the European elites of the beginning of the third millennium still entirely ignored the religious nature of the "liberators" empires and their vocation to seize the world? It is that they did not have at all the keys of a critical anthropology which would have enabled them to decipher the biblical bases of political America. The problem was with the leading classes of the time lacking of historical knowledge. For a long time the most informed men of CLIO had tried to arm their memory with the elementary reference marks provided by chronology.

One remains confused by reading, in 1986, under Jean Favier's pen, member of the Institute and general director of France Archives, an explanatory text illustrating the scholar lack of information of " cultivated general public " to who was addressed the remarkable Chronique de l'humanité published by Larousse:

"The American victory in the war against Spain in 1898 made out of the United States, regional power, a world wide imperialist power which appropriated a vast insular area in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The old Spanish possessions - Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines - were placed under American protectorate. Central America, "back-yard of the USA" and Far East became the usual theatres of the American imperialist politics. Maritime power on the Atlantic and the Pacific, the USA could guarantee their possessions only by two distinct fleets. A colossal policy of getting maritime equipment, started by President Theodore Roosevelt, made it possible for the United States to become in 1907 the second naval power of the world, behind United Kingdom, whereas it occupied only the fifth row three years earlier. In the centre of the strategic conditions of the American imperialism, the Panama Canal, link between the two oceans, only means to efficiently guarantee the colonial empire, President Roosevelt proclaimed the United States right to intervene directly in the interior affairs of the Central America countries to guarantee their safety, when the American political or economic interests required it." (p.937)

This overview of the situation courageously appeared "commited" at the time. How was it possible that scolarised France had not learned these facts during primary school?

2 - Europe of an Andersen's tale

More than one century had passed since the war of 1898. A sixty years long reign on Europe of the allegiance occupied by American garrisons found sovereign, therefore set up in enclaves of a foreign State's territory on our European ground, is a reign that only begins to have us see that since 1945, the planet's history is that of the expansion of an American empire whose fall of the Berlin Wall did not stop the move and of which September 11, 2001 only accelerated the pace. This phenomenon is similar only to the immense backwardness and delay that the Hellenic world and its pedagogues had showed to discover the rise of Rome and to explain it to the school boys. But who could have imagined that a blindness considered to be extraordinary by the historians of ancient world would happen again millenniums later, and this only because no one was teaching to rising generation that politics is the language of history? How come the American presence all around Mediterranean sea appeared granted and accepted, and that Europe was asking for a modest share of this imperium?

When the United States announced that they were going to settle in Baghdad the most gigantic of their embassies and that it would count three thousand people; when everyone was seeing the American empire building in Iraq military bases intended to accomodate a hundred and twenty thousand men with residence; when Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of defense, expected that there would

" not be any change in our military deployment between June 30 and July 1st, unless that we will be over there on the invitation of an Iraqi sovereign government, which will ask us to remain until the killers, as those who did the atrocities of Falloujah, are put out of state of harm " ( Le Monde diplomatique, May 2004),

how come the whole world was transported in a reversed tale of Andersen, in which the king wasn't naked in the middle of his "chamberlains chamarrés", but armed to the teeth? How come the aureola of democracies which was floating over the king's head emitted such powerful rays that the king's heart was metamorphosed in a church of the humans right to the eyes of the whole universe?

Such an apostolic mystery could only be explained under the light of an anthropology of holiness to the height, if possible, of the spectrography of Andersen. In these distant times, Noam Chomsky was evoking " the autism of the empire ". But the descent in the depths of an autism crowned by the divine grace was requiring not only searches in the kingdom of the mystical unconscious of our species, but a psychoanalysis of the theology that was exceeding the means of investigation that were those of psychobiological genius of the great Danish.

To try to understand Andersen's tale, a comparative lighting of Marxist edenism and that of America will make it possible to go down in the first anthropological mysteries of modern empires and to exert us to progress a little in the speleology of the oneiric life of simiohuman history. Then a genealogy of the politico-religious unconscious of the monotheisms will make us witness the conclusion of an alliance of sacred orthodoxies with democratic totalitarianism.

3 - Compared psychophysiology of the Soviet ex-empire and the American empire

One remembers how the expansion of the Soviet empire rested on the rise of the world wide proletariat to the rank of redeemer of mankind. The modern messianism was singing an hymn to the planetary victory of justice over the injustice of capitalism. The promise of salvation on earth had profited from the guarantee of a foreteller and of an infallible intercessor of the working class deliverance on an international scale. The new vehicle for the Writings of Freedom was called the " historical process ". This mean of transport of the happy and blessed towards a tangible paradise was introducing a new type of scission of the simiohuman brain between the religious dream and reality.

The panoply of the cerebral dichotomies already indexed in the nomenclatures of schizoid theologies of the time was arming from now on with dialectical thoughts and a genealogy of " concrete truth " on all inhabited ground. When the armies of the " Warsaw Pact " were seizing a nation - Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary - they were installing there governments won over to the new Vatican and supposed to express the will of the sovereign people: this is why these countries were called people's democracies, in opposition to middle-class democracies. Marxism had carried the 1789 liberation principles to their soteriological achievement in Russia, where they had found their Episcopal see. The Western States legitimated these wars known as " liberating". They were considered as based on a mystic of bliss from here bellow which Christianity had relegated in the beyond after only a century of setbacks on earth. Nobody was easily fooled by the disguises in international law of a tyranny validated by a semi-religious finalism.

In front of this eschatology in conformity with sacrilizing mentalities of orthodoxe Russia, the American empire had been able to consolidate its democratic soteriology and had been able to extend according to the to despotism which had capitalist Europe shaking. But following the collapse of the Marxist edenism, the United States naturally took care not to withdraw their troops from the Old Continent - on the contrary, they reinforced the guardianship supervision which they were exerting since 1945 by the means of NATO and they perennialized in times of peace the mission that this military organization had achieved at the hours of the cold war. Controlled Europe was agreeing to it. Under these conditions, it is decisive to reach the anthropological analysis, therefore biopsychic of the parareligious weapons which will make it possible to the American empire to relay the Marxist dream; because theologies of the two empires were meeting in a common paradisiacal dream and a dream rooted in the origins of Judaism and Christianity because messianisms all are founded on the myth of an escape out of the prison world described as " temporal ", the prison world of " Egypt of the rites " whose Exodus episode had concretized the original symbolic system under Moïse's commandment. The examination of the differences in method and of the parallelisms that we can notice in the two empires of the Eden will make it possible to specify the schizoid structure of the oneiric brain that these two messianisms are sharing.

4 - Two edenisms

The evangelism and angelism belonging to the democratic type of Edenic universal dream suffer from two handicaps whose impact was discovered by Marxism only with lateness. The first handicap results from how " humans right " and "freedom " are ideal by definition, therefore abstract by nature, which generates a sacred veneration capable of protecting them from the examination of the degree of application to real history of their seraphic universality. For this reason, they appear of a more theological use, therefore more oneiric than Marxist edenism, which was dreaming of putting a very large proletariat in immediate and direct possession of its rights and its powers on earth. But these prerogatives of salvation were remaining attached to the needs and the wishes of labour status, therefore related to an ignorance and an inculture which left in advance the proletariat in the incapacity of never exerting efficiently indeed, and of its own authority, the responsibilities of a leading class. Also the proletarian elites went through the party's school charged of teaching them the catechesis of a new ecclesiocracy.

This pedagogy was so well copied on those of the seminars, that collective dignities and prestige the labour class claimed for itself were fatally leading labour class, like all churches, to devaluating the individual capacities to the profit of a powerful collective ego. A cerebral dichotomy of this kind necessarily led to the destruction of talent and genius, therefore to the ruin of the bases of civilization. On the other hand, this final catastrophe was profiling in the term of more than half a century. Meanwhile, Marxist edenism could use as wiched the support of "croisés" (crusaders) of masses' salvation, crusaders whose compact and blind regiments were receiving the parareligious support of legions of apostolic intellectuals coming from the middle-class. The American empire, on the other hand, was based on a more verbal edenism, therefore looking more vaporous, but founded on a complete individualism, therefore on the intense valorization of particular merits. A messianism based on what is qualitative constitutes a political handicap and advantages of what war on Iraq was going to show the difficult division.

The Marxists masses did not have the eyes to observe the Soviet empire in action. Neather them saw the Kremlin putting hands on the resources of the nations it occupied, neither the faithful ones of the XVIth century saw the Church piling a treasure of war by the sale, at own desks, of entry bonds to the paradise. On the other hand, the edenism of the American empire presented until cynicism and to everybody's eye the spectacle of its industrial and commercial ambitions, because by rehabilitating the spirit of lucre in the posterity of Calvinism, the good capitalist conscience insulted a worship of poverty bound not only to Christianity since the origins, but also with Buddhism. Moreover, the source of asceticism is in the Stoicians' philosophy.

While the proletarian dream was nourishing from ignorance and the simplicity of spirit of the candidates to a future Eden, the American edenism could only be openly propagated by the joint force of weapons and industry. The military victory was accumulating ruins and piling up dead bodies at only purpose of filling the order books of the big American companies. As to the nations appealed to grow rich at the sides of the warrior of businesses and appealed to profit from gigantic and profitable market from the rebuilding at high price of the losers' pulverized dwellings, their avid complicity was also associating them to the hard verdict to what the religious edenisms are necessarily tributary here below: success on the ground. The cerebral dichotomies whose apparatus of the Sacred is that of political Utopia are subjected to expected verdicts of the court of victory and defeat of weapons.

The Marxist edenism had used a crusade of the poor and had encountered a universalization of stupidity, the American edenism was helding up the standard of the lucre cloathed in political euphoria. But the anthropological difference between the two dream and salvation empires is even more instructive if one compares the systems of repressions which they generated.

5 - Compared analysis of the concentration systems
The Stalinist goulags were supposed to purify the world of its capitalist profit plague. They were working on the lustral model of conversion and redemption of the sinner. The labour camps were at the same time punitive and purifiers. The new catechism was managed with roughness. It was leading the sinner to an Eden at the same time far away and about to land from one moment to another. When the fanaticism of proletarian salvation had seized the Marxist myth, it had accumulated the pieces of corpses of Pol Pot. In front of such titanic setbacks, democratic holiness believed to have won their case all the more that the recalcitrance of Karl Marx's victims to conquer freedom, equality and fraternity to the price of the extinction of capitalist profit appeared inveterate. How come that under conditions looking that favourable, the invasion of the American democratic edenism caused a revulsion more immediate and more violent than that which had taken away the tyranny of a Soviet leading class as infidels to its own orthodoxy as the Roman clergy toward the Gospels?

Initially, the prophets of the New World could not believe their eyes concerning how the stubborn impiety of the Iraqi people made Iraqis take arms against the New World's holy idealities. And yet, the new religion of redemption and of salvation was self confident, devilishly jaunty, full of sufficiency and forfantery. Wasn't its natural lightness the legitimated product of its innate innocence? But it was too much convinced of the inferiority of the different people remained on earth and located at a so great distance from the paradise of the new chosen ones. The mocking and laughing pace of that new religion's promises were not forgiven.

And then, one badly could understand an holiness which allowed amused women to be photographed at the sides of the defeated left naked like worms and attached by the neck to a leash for dogs. These trainers angels and specialized angels in the exercise of virtues of democracy were illustrating another weakness of American edenism. I already emphasized that, from its side, the expansion of Marxist empire had progressed on the kreeping model and without resorting to massive and prolonged carnages, because it had been ensured by armies of workers elated by a mystic of deliverance. The capitalist yoke had been broken, was it said, by the inaugural Revolution of 1917, then by the bloody weapons of Utopia and the lawsuits in heresy.

On the otherhand, Washington's edenism was dressing up as wild beasts in a circus of Good. By holding up the streamers of democracy's idealities on the scale of the whole earth, the White House was inaugurating the seraphic era of despotism. As a result, the American military conquests needed to get a planetary holly cloathing, which could be only if other angelic nations were also coming to occupy, by use of weapons, the conquered territories to the benefit of the empire of Good. The show of this gigantic conversion of force into virtue had gone as far as caricature. One had seen microscopic States sending about fifty soldiers, so much it was important to conquer in catastrophe the symbol of justice and right which their physical presence would be supposed to embody. The universality of the ethics engraved on the blazon of apostolic democracies was turning over against its apostles. Chrism (Saint chrème) of which one had coated bombs and guns was flaking off. Marxism, on the other hand, was feeling sufficiently legitimated by the Gospels of saint Marx not to have to call the armies of capitalist sin and stain in reinforcement of freedom and the sovereignty of the people.

Also the revelation through televisual image diffused on the five continents, of the maltreatment and tortures by American army at Guantanamo, then in Iraq, had ruined in only one blow and definitively the theology of the American Eden, while the Marxist Eden had been able to flourish before the advent of a civilization left to the ubiquity of its own theatre. The empire's evangelism was telling, from now on, the adventures of universal conscience to the way of a comic strip with multiple episodes.

Initially, Washington had tried to keep the sinners in an unhappy, but accidental adventure: it was only a question of "brebis galeuses" - the English language calls them "black sheep" -, as was saying the White House, whose exemplary and fast punishment was going to be enough to purify the Eden, at a moment stained by an extraordinary contest of circumstances. But soon a tight report of more than fifty pages of a General engaged on the ground had confirmed that it was indeed of an institutionalization of torture systematically and expressly authorized by the highest authorities of the army and by the American State. How come the myth of freedom on which the New World's democracy was resting since Abraham Lincoln, had produced a concentration system that some had succeeded in hiding during a few months, but that appeared to everyone as natural as the Russian goulags?

For scientific anthropology, the capital range of this discovery results from how the sacred origin of torture was so spectacularly confirmed that it became impossible not to connect it to the Manicheist origin of all the monotheists religions, something that I did not stop emphasizing since September 11, 2001 on this site. Now, how to look further into our analyses of the cerebral dichotomy mankind suffers from at the present stage of its evolution?

6 - The Christian concentration camp

The first theological model of Gulag of Nazi concentration camps, and of the torture rooms imagined by the democratic empire isn't anything else than the hell of Christians and Moslems, of which one knows that the eternal atrocities are thoroughly described by Dante and that they appear among the pearls of the Sacred to arrange among the treasures of world literature. In front of such anthropological obviousnesses, for how long will the traditional social sciences be able to take advantage of the status of a science based on a voluntary blindness which was believed exclusively reserved to theological thought? Isn't it time to analyze how a proper "scientific " blindness can meet the alliance of a common "angelism" with " experimental knowledge ", with politics, and with the Sacred?

How to proclaim rational a knowledge of the escaped prisoners of animal world that would remain timourously silent over the pathetic articulation between oneiric worlds and real worlds, an articulation of which our brain seems stamped from birth? The time has come to give a look at holy synergies between dreamed cruelties of the Sacred and the cruelties put into practice by political schemer, or we will have to give up any anthropology whose rationality would be to the scale of this spectacle. One calls "scientific" an objectivity able to clarify the subjectivity of illusory problems whose blindness manages to adorne.

Then it appears that the "angelism" of human conscience is at the base of all theologies which claim to be of the divine election of the " right persons ", and it appears that if the Nazi, Marxist and American concentration camps share a theology of torture precisely founded on the proclamation of the innocence of the torturers, then this model of devotion answers point by point to the theatre production of Christian paradise and hell. Therefore the chosen ones on earth are proclaimed the champions of piety and justice. Their seraphism is so innate that they do not have a look for the damned they watch slowly cooking in their underground oven. As the sovereign of the universe of these savages isn't other than the wild creator of the world, who raised the devil to the rank of guardian and general administrator of his gigantic Gulag, scientific anthropology led to the psychobiological spectrography of the three single gods. As a result, the scientific study of simiohuman theology enters the field of historical and political documentation on cerebral and moral evolution of mankind; and the history of psychophysiology of idols becomes the key to a real scientific anthropological knowledge of human.

Because as long as a religion is believed true, and as long as it is therefore sincerely practised by tens of million of faithful ones, there, hell plays a central part, coming from the only fact that the strategy of punishement is the heart of politics, so it is the capacity of sky and of leading classes to join in order to discipline mankind. The brutality of tortures thus is the thermometer of the gravity of danger to be fought: the infinite cruelty of " God " is declared proportional to the need of which its " holy justice " is supposed to be forced to fight the plague of sin. The Messianic wars of democracies being considered to express the will and the concerns of their sky of values, the compared observation of the means of tortures of Nazism, Marxism and the American empire appears to be the privileged instrument of the anthropological weighing of the simiohuman political brain.

Naturally, when the political weakening of religions makes them seraphic, their irresponsibility turns them unsuitable to the anthropological weighing of the species. This is why the Christian theology of tortures is heuristic only from the first century to the twentieth; but the Roman theology of hell has not changed a iota, so that the documentation of anthropological science is not helped of anything by the apparent irenicism of catechesis since Vatican II.

7 - A psychoanalysis of american torture

A science of mankind based on critical observation of the brain of the civilizations of liberation and salvation requires a compared psychoanalysis of the three monotheists theologies and of their history, as well as the examination of their ideological tracings and transfers. Thus the schizoid brain of Marxist type rested on the execration of the empire of evil that was embodied to its eyes by capitalism of XIXth and of XXth centuries. On its side, the religious brain of American type gives birth to a theological empire being collateral and rooted in immemorial time : the Evil and the Good refer to the myth of innocence of the First Couple. Also GW Bush declared that nothing appeared more enigmatic to him than the hostility of the external world towards the United States; and he claimed to the face of the world: " Us who are so good!"

American torture appears so well connected to the biblical innocence of the inhabitants of Eden, that it presents itself under the features of the most common piety. A sacrilege anthropology by definition, because scientific, is thus held to explain the genealogy of the duplicated life of the brain of humanity since this strange species escaped from the animal world. I can only propose some political and historical tracks of a research on the universality of simiohuman's unconscious which controls this existential bipolarity.

One knows that in Occident the torturer was condemned to hide with all his family just as a pest, because of the theological bancality of the divino-human justice, which condemned murder, but legitimated death penalty and infernal tortures. As for America, it tries to escape from this dichotomy of its religious unconscious by making cherubinic its politicy of purification of the universe. One will notice, in this spirit, that American soldiers guilty of tortures in Iraq are seraphes and that they kindly accept to be photographed at the sides of their victims, undoubtedly in order to enrich their album of patriotic memories. Democratic senator Mr. Patrick Leahy, former president of the commission of judiciary affairs, sees there the proof that they are covered by the line authority. But this authority covers them because of the religious unconscious that controls American politics. Without an anthropological knowledge of this unconscious, historical science is blind, so much the characteristic of the white teeth Eden is precisely to metamorphose the humiliations inflicted to the prisoners in expressions of faith in the empire of the Good, which involves the need for promoting bliss on earth. The purification of the world by torture belongs to piety.

8 - A recall to history

To understand it, it is necessary for us to return one moment to the imperial explosion of 1898 evoked above by Jean Favier. At this date, the Secretary of State Elihu Root wrote that the American soldier is

" different from other soldiers of all the other States of the world since the world started. He is the vanguard of freedom and justice, of law and order, peace and happiness. "

The perfect achievement of the wills of God on earth had made it possible to America to spread its kindness and its blessings in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, in Mexico and among the indigenous populations of the Pacific. The " national nobility of soul" had left the limbs to land in real history. The American democratic messianism is a reproduction or a dubbing of the myth of incarnation - it comes down from the sky of divine justice.

The nation expressly designated by the divinity to achieve its projects in this world conforms to the prophesied mission as soon as the XVIIth century by calvinists, who were already seeing America as the " redeemer of nations ". For this reason, it is predestined to build a " city of paradise " that all nations will have to imitate. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson added:

"I believe that God put in us a prophetic vision of freedom (...) I nourished the hope that we were selected, and that in an eminent way, in order to show to the other people of the world how they must walk on the path of freedom."

The defeat of Nazis and the fall of Communism were going to confirm the national conviction which will express Francis Fukuyama in The End of History (La fin de l'histoire): after eight thousand years of social development, humanity discovered that democratic and liberal capitalism finally carried out the final synthesis that universal History was waiting for impatiently between " moral goals and fundamental national interests " of America. Also Duncan Hunter, member of the Chamber of the representatives can write:

" America is the strength of good. Our troops changed the world and build a future for the Iraqi people. "

As for Tom Delay, the leader of the majority in the Chamber, he does not fear to add:

" The operation Iraqi Freedom, whatever the cracks it showed, is an absolute good. "

9 - Return to the anthropological psychoanalysis of the Sacred

Which is the degree of religious culpability of the tortured ones that will rise from this mental universe? Paradoxically, these damned ones will be given a floating theological status, because the redemptive good conscience from which the torturers take profit, and that makes the torturers safe from the contamination by the evil which abounds in the outside world, (this redemptive good conscience) reduces the weight of the damnation pronounced by angels' justice, a damnation that weighs heavily on the shoulders of the heretics, but without crushing them completely. It is known that Calvin is a theological son of Saint Augustin and that the bishop of Hippone is the first theorist of the fate of the sin of which are excruciated for all eternity miserables that the unsoundable mystery of the creator's arbitrary did not predestine to salvation.

But the author of the Confessions is also the theologist of grace: the infinite freedom and power of the creator can save in extremis the worst infidels. This is why American torture is held in suspension somewhere between eternal flames and Eden thus, so to speak, in the " average area of the air ", according to Descartes: one will not burst the eyes of the prisoners, one will not tear off their nails, but they will be starved, dehydrated, sodomized, they will be left to gibes, exposed nacked to the threat of aggressive dogs, because principal torture, to the eyes of a theology of predestination to salvation or to damnation is the torture of moral humiliation in front of God.

The tortured ones are guilty in advance because the creator collectively judged them to be from their birth strangers to the blessings the kingdom of Good could bring to them and of which they are condemned to refuse the benefits. But from this theology of "self-innocenting", also results that Americans are sincerely astounded to find themselves rejected and hated by the rest of the world. Quite simply, they cannot get over that they find themselves the victims of a so great injustice, when they " are so good ", them who bring to a lower civilization the religious treasures of democracy and its Gospel of Freedom. Not one moment these idolatrous of their sky doubt of the legitimacy of the war that led them straight in these oil-bearing places, since God is their guide and that He took them by the hand to have them discover the country of Canaan. It is thus without batting an eyelid that the idolatrous of the absolute condemn the resistant ones to their occupation and that they qualify them " terrorists " and "killers" obstinately rebellious to the deliverance which the sky of democracy brings to them totally free of charge.

Also we saw all the American political community, John Kerry ahead, declaring itself "outraged" by the decapitation of an American industrialist as retaliation to tortures undergone in the American prisons by tens of thousands of Iraqis. The empire's good conscience was so well reinforced that the future White House candidate could affirm:

" Now, there is no doubt that we must continue ".

However, this last adventure is understandable too only in the light of a radiography of the theological unconscious of the nation: to the "self-innocenting" of the elected officials is opposed the absolute evil, that of ancient scriptures, which obeyed to the law of retaliation. Calvinist sweetening of the principle "eye for eye, tooth for tooth " is seen as the world advent of holiness on earth; but angelized repression leads to refined and proliferating forms of cruelty - and initially to interminable methods of torture, therefore adapted in advance to the incurable character of the sin to fight! The unanimity and the instantaneity of the American political community's reaction in front of a murder committed at the school of "old law ", well shows the psychological knot of imperial theology: the main thing is to legitimate in front of God the war of conquest and the occupation. Naturally Kerry isn't dupe : he knows that the theological mask is used to sanctify the final Americanization of the Mediterranean region. But the need to reinforce the religious cover of the Empire's expansion around the Mare Nostrum is not less a revolution ; more over, what will become political Europe if it condemns the empire for ethical reasons without seeing the essential, which is not theological: it is a question of being opposed to territorial expansion of an empire, and it is for this purpose that an anthropology able to decipher unconscious theologies is an essential intellectual weapon.

10 - America and theology of anguish

As seen, the existential psychoanalysis of theologies is a key of history and of politics. But at the same moment, the American messianism is corroded from the inside by the cruel obviousness that the ruin of Marxist heresy and of its deadly immorality neither sanctified the globalization of trade, nor legitimated the gigantic profits of the great international companies. How will be endorsed thickest armour of political innocence? How will one remain happy and hopping in the universe of a blinded Eden of "Good"? How will one attend the spectacle of a civilization which is horrified by the hell of a capitalist profit whose brutality replaces the Stalinian hell? The theological drama of America, inaugurated with the rout of Vietnam, lands in the third millennium.

Then the other face of Calvin's theology appears, that of doubt and anguish: the believer is never sure to be chosen. Which final proof does he have of it? Nothing else than the abundance of tangible properties the divinity kindly accepts to generously give him. This is why, at the beginning, Genevois calvinists are at the same time ascetics and rich bankers. The American defeat in Iraq will be a terrifying theological traumatism, because it will be the public proof of the disavowal of the nation of the chosen ones by the divinity. Naturally, all this will be happening in the non-explored depths, therefore carcinogenic of the religious unconscious of the nation. But how to explain that Saint Augustin's God made thirty two nations accomplices of a torturer? We wish a lot of pleasure to the future theologists of the American God. Modern anthropology only raises the true question, the only question having a scientific status : why the escaped ones of zoology use their advance of 1,5% on chimpanzee's psychogenetic capital to go up in the holly sky in so many ways?

Does a humanity torn between its animal impulses and the failure of its jumps towards pseudo angelica worlds testify of an incurable brutality? To learn it, isn't the rational knowledge the new pedagogue of hope? An anthropology based on the psychophysiologic observation of theologies and attentive to the diversity of their schizoid representations of the world appeals as well to the spectrography of religious beliefs according to times and places as to the weighing of the bipolar mental structure which orders them all.

May 14, 2004
Translated by Marilyse Devoyault ,06/21/2004

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