About That "Prayer for Victory"

 In the notorious Signal thread that senior Trump administration officials accidentally shared with a journalist in March, J.D. Vance at one point reassures everyone—with his usual pious cant: "I will say a prayer for victory." Shortly thereafter, Mike Waltz declares that a U.S. airstrike just demolished a building, which has "collapsed." The officials on the chat all cheer. J.D. Vance—fresh from his prayer—responds to the news of the destroyed building with one word: "Excellent." 

I wondered at the time how many people were in that building when it collapsed. And who were they? Do we have any evidence they were all Houthi fighters? Was this a civilian structure? Did any of these officials even care how many noncombatants they had just slaughtered?  

According to reporting from the New York Times this past week, we may have a partial answer to those questions. Of course, we may never know exactly which building Waltz was referring to in the thread. But it does appear that a U.S. strike at some point was responsible for destroying a migrant detention center in Yemen. 68 innocent people were reportedly killed in the strike—people displaced by violence from their homeland, who were just seeking safety and a means to survive. 

But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. This is the same population of people—displaced refugees—that the Trump administration is also trying to disappear to secret prisons in El Salvador, Libya, and elsewhere. So why would we expect them to be solicitous of their lives when they are raining down indiscriminate death on the cities of Yemen? 

So that's who our U.S. bombs were killing, when our officials were cheering on that Signal thread. That's what J.D. Vance was praying for, with his sanctimonious "Prayer for Victory." 

To which Robert Burns once penned the only possible response: 

Ye hypocrites! are these your pranks?
To murder men and give God thanks!
Desist, for shame!--proceed no further;
God won't accept your thanks for Murther!

I was reminded of Burns's epigram because Hugh MacDiarmid quotes it in The Battle Continues—his book-length poetic rejoinder to Roy Campbell's pro-Franco epic on the Spanish Civil War, The Flowering Rifle. It is fitting that MacDiarmid would quote Burns here—one great anti-war Scottish bard to another. And both being personal poet-heroes of mine (Burns was probably the first poet I ever read who had a social conscience), I couldn't ask for a better combination.

Nor is the epigram from Burns the only place in which MacDiarmid's book seems to have a message for the Trump era. His condemnation of the hypocritical flatterers—like Campbell—who showered praise on fascist dictators—could well have been penned with J.D. Vance in mind. Or Marco Rubio. Or Pam Bondi. Or any of the other Trump administration officials who have sold their integrity to serve Trump's authoritarian ambitions: 

...A ruthless few
Claiming as their rights the wrongs they do,
Ready to advance themselves
And secure high posts and powers for which
No intrinsic merits qualify them
At no matter how great a cost
In the sacrifice of all human values
—A few whose only distinction
Is cowardice, cruelty, and greed[.]

Yes, that's them. Vance; Rubio; Bondi. What MacDiarmid here captures so well is the self-righteousness of this type of hypocrite. That's what never ceases to amaze me about these people. It's not just the fact that they sell their souls for power; that much is familiar from human history. It's the way in which they seem to feel entitled to their hypocrisy. 

Vance in particular always wears this wounded, baffled look—even while he is twisting a knife in some innocent person's back. Even while he is serving the administration's grotesque ambitions to seize Greenland from its native inhabitants in an unprovoked act of aggression; or even while he is defending the administration's illegal renditions of asylum-seekers to secret torture-prisons in El Salvador. 

He does all these horrifying things, and then he looks around with this hurt, affronted look—like he can't even understand why someone might object to these things. He is shocked and outraged that anyone could so much as utter a yelp of protest while he grinds his boot in their faces. 

"Claiming as their rights the wrongs they do"—that's the Trump goons all over. 

"Desist, for shame," indeed—as Burns said. 

Let us have no more "prayers for victory" or any other sanctimony from J.D. Vance until he actually grows enough of a Christian conscience to stop celebrating the bombing of innocents or disappearing asylum-seekers to secret prisons or flattering Trump's imperial ambitions. To Vance, we say, with Burns: proceed no further; / God won't accept your thanks for Murther!