{"id":207709,"date":"2020-01-25T00:59:35","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T19:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=207709"},"modified":"2020-02-01T11:46:52","modified_gmt":"2020-02-01T06:16:52","slug":"karma-in-american-actions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/karma-in-american-actions\/","title":{"rendered":"Karma In American Actions\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Patrick Mendis<\/a> –<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dr Patrick Mendis<\/p><\/div>\n

Karma in American Actions <\/b>–\u00a0Or, Has \u201cthe Mandate of Heaven\u201d Been Bestowed Upon the Trump White House?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

After his assassination order to kill<\/a> the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, both domestic and international hostilities against President Donald Trump began to multiply. Since then Trump backed down on his threats but ridiculed<\/a> the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei to \u201cMake Iran Great Again.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Within days of the president\u2019s military order from the Mar-a-Lago Club<\/a> in Florida, Pastor Paula White, his\u00a0 <\/span>favorite televangelist and a newest White House aide, organized<\/a> a rally of evangelical Christians at the King Jesus International Ministry in Miami. There, the president singled out the two Democrat congresswomen \u2013 Somali-American Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib of Michigan \u2013 and denounced that they \u201chate\u201d Jewish people and then claimed<\/a> God is \u201con our side.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Invoking God is \u201con our side\u201d is heretical and diametrically opposed to the traditional Christian faith; the true believers always want to be \u201con God\u2019s side.\u201d For the die-hard evangelical Christian base<\/a> of supporters and financiers, Trump is the champion of their religious faith. And, their political agenda is cleverly shrouded in the Prosperity Gospel of health and wealth creation. For them, the genuine practice of the Christian teachings of Jesus Christ rests somewhere else.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Mandate of Heaven over Providence?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

When President Trump decided<\/a> to abandon the America\u2019s Kurdish allies fighting to defeat ISIS in Syria, Reverend Pat Robertson \u2013 the 90-year old patriarch among the influential televangelists and the founder of Christian Broadcasting Network \u2013 criticized<\/a> Trump and decried<\/a> that \u201cthe president of the United States is in danger of losing the Mandate of Heaven if he permits this to happen.\u201d Using the phase \u201cMandate of Heaven<\/a>\u201d by a Christian is extraordinary but seemingly purpose-driven in the prevailing political environment.<\/p>\n

The Mandate of Heaven or Tianming<\/i> is an ancient Chinese political and religious doctrine. It justifies the rule of the emperor according to the natural order of the moral universe and the supreme will of the celestial power. If an emperor was unfit to govern, calamities ensued, and the mandate was withdrawn with the appropriate justice of reward and revenge. Reverend Robertson\u2019s subtle use of the Chinese phrase was to send a coded message, which other American leaders often referred to as \u201cProvidence\u201d or \u201cNature\u2019s God\u201d as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When a powerful editorial in the flagship evangelical magazine Christianity Today<\/i><\/a> described President Trump as \u201cimmoral\u201d and called for his removal from office, the most domineering Republican group of evangelical leaders and conservative commentators rallied around the impeached president. Apparently for Reverend Robertson, Trump is acting more like a Chinese emperor or a dictator than a leader of the free world.<\/p>\n

The other White evangelical Christian group would fear losing the president\u2019s already shrinking electoral base to advance their own pro-Israel Middle East policy agenda that had temporarily been hidden away during President Barack Obama\u2019s administration.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Born Again Christians<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

This neoconservative policy toward the Middle East has its own rebirths. Within weeks of the 9\/11 attacks, for example, General Wesley Clark, the former Supreme Allied\u00a0Commander of NATO, was informed that then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had a plan in the George W. Bush administration. It described<\/a> in a memo how \u201cwe\u2019re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off Iran\u201d after of course invading Afghanistan.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then Secretary of State General Colin Powell \u2013 who was cynically used to provide justification for invading Iraq by the Bush White House \u2013 advocated the traditional Party\u2019s platform of diversity and tolerance at the Republican National Convention in 1996. By the time he supported President Obama and defended<\/a> him as neither a \u201cMuslim\u201d nor a \u201cforeign-born\u201d in 2010, the Trump Republicans had long abandoned Powell and labeled him a RINO (\u201cRepublican In Name Only\u201d). These resurrected forces and dynamics have subtly propelled the emergence of Trump\u2019s Republican base with nativist evangelicals.<\/p>\n

Exporting the Culture War<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Having assembled a cohesive white national security team of obsequious Christian men, President Trump\u2019s acts would constitute the most consequential of his presidency to remake America. Emphasizing the national security risks, the Washington Post<\/i><\/a> analysis highlights that Secretary of State Pompeo, for example, has tried \u201ca maximalist position on Iran\u201d and as the CIA director, Pompeo \u201cquickly set up an Iran Mission Center\u201d at the agency. The Post<\/i> then provides<\/a> the reason that these acts made him \u201cpopular among two critical pro-Israel constituencies in Republican politics: conservative Jewish donors and Christian evangelicals.\u201d This is essentially an attempt to export the American \u201cculture war\u201d to other countries with their Christian zealotry.<\/p>\n

The very essence of the founding doctrine of the United States is to prevent the current perils of advocating religious, personal, and partisan agendas that would undermine the functioning of government in American democracy \u2013 not as the governance of absolute monarchy in a Christendom. The sobering lessons of yet another hubris of power come from the Bush administration of neoconservatives (one of whom included President Trump\u2019s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton<\/a>).<\/p>\n

In his book Decision Points<\/i> in 2010, President Bush wrote<\/a> \u201cI had reached one of the defining decision points in my presidency: We would fight the war on terror on the offense, and the first battlefront would be Afghanistan.\u201d In a new age of global war on terror, targeting the safe havens of terrorists in Afghanistan was a \u201cwar of necessity;\u201d Iraq was a \u201cwar of choice\u201d as Dr. Richard Haass coined<\/a> the phrases. The latter phrase was a war against the moral universe rather than a \u201cspecial calling<\/a>\u201d from God for President Bush<\/a>, a born again Christian.<\/p>\n

The Return of Providence<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Knowing the unseen forces of unjust wars and unfair congressional decisions is beyond normal human capacity but inevitably the higher power does always bend toward justice. It is the immutable law of Nature\u2019s God or Providence as the mysterious mechanics of this impartial magistrate will bring about fairness for all.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was precisely the point recognized by Otto von Bismarck when he cautioned<\/a> Wilhelm I in 1875 that \u201cI would . . . never advise Your Majesty to declare war forthwith, simply because it appeared that our opponent would begin hostilities in the near future. One can never anticipate the ways of Divine Providence securely enough for that.\u201d<\/p>\n

As in the Chinese doctrine of Mandate of Heaven, God is all about justice that comes with an intrinsic karmic mechanism of rewards and punishments for the individual ruler and collectively for particular group or geography. It is with that understanding by which the Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence and the need of government to be \u201cthe great moral purposes of society. . . founded in the laws of nature and of Nature\u2019s God,\u201d said<\/a> Secretary of State (and later President) John Quincy Adams in 1821.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The omniscience of God here has always been the omnipotent arbitrator of justice in American public life. The unfolding impeachment saga of President Trump and his \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d role in the world has yet to be revealed in the moral universe of Nature\u2019s God.<\/p>\n

*Dr. <\/i>Patrick Mendis<\/i><\/a> is a Taiwan fellow of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China and a distinguished visiting professor of global affairs at the National Chengchi University in Taipei. Previously, he served as a distinguished visiting professor of Sino-American relations at the Yenching Academy of Peking University and a commissioner of the US National Commission for UNESCO at the US Department of State. The views expressed in this article are his own; they do not represent the institutions of his past or present affiliations.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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