Insolent Praise

 Recently, global human rights watchdogs completed a review of the U.S. air strike in April that killed more than 60 African asylum-seekers at a detention camp in Yemen, in the early months of this administration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they concluded that, yes, the strike was indeed a war crime—an unjustifiable attack on a civilian target that served no discernible military objective. 

This was the same strike, let us recall, that senior administration officials were discussing over that notorious Signal chat that they accidentally leaked to a journalist. The chat shows Vance, Hegseth, and others crowing over the results of the strikes—even as we now know they were snuffing out the lives of more than 60 innocent civilians. 

But it always seemed to me that the most appalling touch—in that Signal thread—is the way Vance and Hegseth repeatedly take the Lord's name in vain, as they celebrate these murders. "Godspeed to our warriors," Hegseth writes in the thread. "I will say a prayer for victory," adds Vance. Even as the corpses of more than 60 noncombatant refugees were smoldering in flames on their orders. 

"Hallelujah! It works! We blew the shit out of them. [...] Praise the Lord for all good things," as Harold Pinter wrote in "American Football" (his poem protesting against the First Gulf War)—satirizing the blasphemous mixture of schoolboy sadism and posturing, self-congratulatory religiosity that so often marks the worst kind of "hawkish" American rhetoric. 

Wilfred Scawen Blunt likewise describes the habits of Anglo-Saxon imperialism in words that could well apply to the second Trump administration: 

[T]he last scene is played in death's red charnel house.

[...] The Earth with fire is rent,

And the poor souls misused are wiped from the world's face

In one huge imprecation from the Saxon race,

In one huge burst of prayer and insolent praise to Thee,

Lord God, for Thy high help and proved complicity. [...]

60 African asylum-seekers were indeed wiped from the world's face on that day in April. U.S. planes blew them to the next world, while they were trapped in a burning prison camp from which they could not escape. And they perished to the sounds of insolent, self-congratulatory orisons from our "professedly Christian" Secretary of Defense and Vice President. 

"Godspeed to our warriors," Hegseth said—as their corpses were still burning. 

"I will say a prayer for victory," said Vance. 

Ye hypocrites! as Robert Burns once wrote, 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.