For God and Phallus?

 It goes without saying that there is no rational, legal, moral, or humanitarian justification for Trump's murderous war of aggression in Iran—which has so far taken the lives of four American service members and hundreds of Iranian civilians—many of them apparently elementary-age schoolchildren. 

If you search for a logical answer to the question: why are we are war with Iran?, you will find none. But if you search for explanations at the level of the nether-reaches of psychology—you will suddenly find a surfeit. From the standpoint of the libido and the Id, Trump's war suddenly seems over-determined. 

What is this war about? It's about distracting from Epstein, perhaps. The old "wag the dog" scenario. But it's also about making Trump feel better. His ego took a bruising from the Supreme Court decision striking down his tariffs. And so, he needs to blow something up and murder some children in order to feel powerful again. 

Then there are his henchmen: Pete Hegseth, e.g., who has made no secret of his own obvious need for phallic compensation. These are men desperate to feel large and potent through displays of masculine aggression, violence, and psychosexual sadism. 

Those U.S.-made rockets thudding into Iran right now, then, really do double work as what their phallic shape implies. As Harold Pinter aptly wrote of the Bush administration's military aggression in 2003: "There's no escape. / The big pricks are out... Watch your back." I'm omitting a line that this family-friendly blog will not reprint. 

Hegseth, of course, also couples his insecurity-driven macho posturing with an overt commitment to the ideology of Christian nationalism. It's an odd fit, of course. Jesus was not notably a fan of war and retaliation and murder; nor are his ethical teachings much consistent with a program of masculine aggression and phallic compensation. 

But powder-puff Pete has found the solution to the conundrum in the wars of aggression of the medieval Church. This is a man, after all, who has a Crusader slogan ("Deus vult") tattooed on his body. 

If we are wondering "why are we at war with Iran," then—this too may be part of our answer. We must recall that Hegseth really is a true believer in the Crusade against the Infidel. The Trump administration started bombing Iran during the holy month of Ramadan, after all. Hegseth may truly just have been looking for any excuse to kill Muslims. 

In case we need a reminder about the character of those Crusaders that Hegseth loves so much—and wishes to emulate—let us call to mind a passage from the liberal Catholic historian Lord Acton (who never tired, to his credit, of pointing out the faults in his own confession—Lytton Strachey records in one essay how Acton was far more insistent than his Protestant colleagues about disparaging the sins of the Borgia popes) that describes what these men actually got up to on their journeys: 

When the first warlike pilgrims started for Palestine at the end of the eleventh century, it occurred to some of them that without toiling so far they could find enemies of Christ, as bad as the Saracens, close at hand. So they fell upon the Jews in the north of France, [...]  and murdered them as they passed. [...] And when it became known, in the same region, that there were heretics, the same cause produced the same effects[.]

Of course, it wasn't only the medieval Christians who subverted the ethic of Christ by using His Gospel—perversely—as a pretext for war-mongering. The fascists of the Spanish Civil War likewise went into battle "with black friars spattering blessings," as Neruda put it. Cyril Connolly likewise writes of the "cannon-blessing bishops of the Spanish war." 

And of course, the British Empire did not hesitate to claim that God was on their side in their "civilizing mission," or that the "white man's burden" was in part the burden of inflicting the Gospel upon the unwilling by force of arms. (Though Shaw observes in his "Adventures of the Black Girl" that English missionaries continued their work of making converts in Africa long after the average educated Briton had stopped believing in the Bible themselves.) 

As Wilfrid Scawen Blunt put it in "Satan Absolved"—his blistering and righteous polemic against Anglo-Saxon imperialism: 

Nay Lord, ’tis not a lie, the thing I tell Thee thus.

Their bishops in their Churches lead, incredulous,

The public thanks profane. They sanctify the sword—

(As Robert Burns would say: "God does not want your thanks for Murther.") 

To such spurious invocations of Christ—whose one most conspicuous ethical teaching was to turn the other cheek and refuse to repay evil for evil—Thomas Hardy had the most apt response: 

... "I would know

By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law

Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,

Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?

And what of logic or of truth appears

In tacking 'Anno Domini' to the years?

Near twenty-hundred livened thus have hied,

But tarries yet the Cause for which He died."