In the Bible the Israelites are
forbidden from worshiping Moloch, a local god who is associated with fire and
child sacrifice. Today the name Moloch has become synonymous with unrequited savagery, conjuring up images of unsated bloodlust and the inexplicable
cruelty. The idea of child sacrifice – one of the few practices that Moloch
worship is remembered by – appears not only unconscionable but simply incomprehensible.
It arouses a strong visceral reaction: its practitioners seem to have
transgressed the very bounds of humanity, becoming something less than human in
the process.
Unable to understand, no less relate to
such people, they are cast outside of the cognitive boundaries within which we
attempt to make sense of the world. Instead they become an inscrutable other, embodying all that we –
those who are civilized – are not. They are projections, symbols of everything
we do not understand, or, more accurately, everything that we refuse to believe.
And as all that we revile is resurrected in their image, we leave out all that
is essential and good for ourselves. It is as if we are standing atop a great precipice,
adorning white robes, while watching the begrimed heathens cast their children
into the flames below, the laughing maw of Moloch.
________
Though it is easy to reduce such people
to brutish caricatures, we do so at their own peril. For contrary to popular
interpretations, the followers of Moloch were not unusually cruel, unusually
depraved, or even unusual. Upon deeper examination, one finds that they were human-beings who were not all that
different from anyone else. Yes, child sacrifice is an inherently cruel act. But it is just as common today as it was back then – if not far more pervasive
and even more senseless.
Followers of Moloch, like so many
practitioners of child sacrifice, likely believed that these sacrifices were
necessary for propitiating Moloch and, consequently, saving their society from
the wrath of this temperamental deity. In other words, child sacrifice was not
carried out because these people were simply inclined towards violence, but rather,
out of a sense of social responsibility. How else, after all, were they to
guard against the very real specters of blight, disease and natural disaster?
With this civic burden weighing heavily upon their hearts, mothers gave up
their children as protection against these disorders and other related
calamities for the collective good. So was child sacrifice an act of bloodlust or self-denial, cruelty
or sacrifice, bestiality or despair?
The answer to each of these questions
is not “either-or,” but rather, “yes.” Bizarre as it may sound, there are
elements of truth to all of these charges. Certainly these sacrifices were
cruel – as any act of unnecessary violence is cruel – but within the logic of
sacrifice that grounded these rituals were probably purer motives than a fascination with suffering. As the
parent gave up their child they were undoubtedly tormented by conflicted
feelings: a parent’s natural love for their child and a sense of one’s civic duty. For as
other biblical stories make clear, whether in the lives of Abraham and Isaac or
Mary and Jesus, to give up one’s child is the ultimate sacrifice.
________
Today parents are asked to make a
similar sacrifice to ensure the protection of society. For over one decade,
parents have been asked to cast their children into the flames of war, an
inherently destructive enterprise that always leaves a scar. Just as
mothers and fathers of biblical Palestine gave up their children to appease
Moloch, now parents are being asked to place them on the altar of liberty in
order to appease the gods of war. It is their patriotic duty – indeed, the
paramount act of national “sacrifice”. No, they do not know how casting them
into a war machine that every day grows bigger, more debauched with dollars,
and more appetitive, will make the nation secure. But they are told to have
faith. Remember, as Bush II assured the public, that this is a just “crusade”.
Through divination violence and murder,
the two essential ingredients of war, will somehow – miraculously – establish
lasting peace and harmony. If violence fails then the conjurers may call for
small changes, always in quantity but never in kind. If “shock and awe”
does not do the trick then the high priests will add more of the same to the bubbling
cauldron: cruise missiles in place of tanks, drones in place of planes, and dazzling
white phosphorous for the pièce de résistance.
All of the nation’s trust is placed in
the hands of these diviners, masters of the dark arts who are selected by fate
through an obscure ritual called the Electoral College. Within their great
white temples they contemplate the mysteries of the universe and devise new plans
by which to ensure that society’s delicate ecology is kept in balance. With alchemy
they control the spirits that cause inflation; with talk of “shared sacrifice”
they prostate themselves before the specter of national debt. Dividends, assets
and financial-based wealth must not be taxed – and anyone who suggests
otherwise must be stoned – for they are the lifeblood, indeed, the very sinews,
of the sacred “movers” whose guidance the nation requires.
But the priests always feel the weight of their sublime task. To lighten the load, part of their work is delegated to
series of dark orders – the NSA, CIA and FBI – whose ubiquitous eyes and ears
make up the foundation of their power. Through their mastery of the dark arts
all speech is instantly received and recorded in their secret annals. And to
legitimate this power a national mythos is weaved together, as by Penelope’s
loom, drawing deeply from the best of America’s – only slightly soiled – heritage.
Hence on the airwaves one hears siren songs about “American exceptionalism,”
while the history textbooks, i.e., the national bibles, eulogize the
magnanimity of America in war. Yes, during WWII we firebombed virtually every major city in
Japan and dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese, but this was resolutely a “good
war,” one in which we defeated “fascism abroad.” As for fascism at home, such as the lynching of blacks
and Jews in the same period, not a word is mentioned.
________
In short, America is a very religious society; child sacrifice
is no stranger here. A soldier may not be able to drink because of their
developing – growing – mind, but they sure are old enough to die. As Kurt
Vonnegut reminded the world in Slaughterhouse-Five,
every war is a “Children’s Crusade”.
But one should not be indiscriminate in
their judgments, since there are real differences between giving one’s child to
Moloch and sending another to battle in Baghdad. When Moloch worshipers engaged
in child sacrifice they were attempting to address problems that were as real
as they were familiar: crop blight, pestilence and disease. To be sure, blood
sacrifice did not address the root cause of these problems, but that is because
their causes were unknown. Lacking knowledge of modern germ theory or
meteorology, they logically came to believe that some greater being was at work
– a wrathful god.
By contrast, the problems that
Americans are attempting to solve through child sacrifice are largely
non-existent or of their own making. They are artificial problems; imagined problems. In order to sustain an overgrown military-industrial complex, threats are not only
imagined but manufactured. The threat of fascism transmogrifies into the threat
of communism, before turning into the latest fashionable fear: terrorism. And
if the problems are imagined, then their imagined solutions are even more
morbid: a Big Brother-style intelligence apparatus; perpetual drone warfare; a
dungeon with the pet-name GTMO; and casting military “personnel” – human-beings – into the fiery maw of Mars, the god of war. But this is
what makes America “exceptional”; for it is precisely America’s ability to act
upon these unfounded fears with impunity that makes America
different.
________
It was previously noted that the choice of parents who commit child sacrifice generally embodies a complex
set of motives, both good and evil. A present-day example will put this in more distinct terms. During the Vietnam War, some parents argued that “quitting” the
war was sacrilegious since it meant that their deceased children’s sacrifices were made “in vain”. This argument was consciously inflated by
Richard Nixon, who used it as a strategy to perpetuate the war so that his own
reputation would not be blemished by the “fall” of Vietnam – to its own people –
on his watch. Similar arguments have been made during the most recent
of America’s forays, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan, for the purpose of continuing these exercises in violent futility.
Of all the confused logic used to
justify child sacrifice, this may be the worst. First, this line of thought is abhorrent
because it is premised on the assumption that the dead are more important than
the living. Put another way, the dead supposedly deserve more consideration
than the needs of those who are alive – even their lives. The real needs and
humanity of existing beings is thus sacrificed to appease the imagined spirits
of deceased, i.e., nonexistent and imagined, beings.
Moreover, the legacy of the dead is
spat upon since their memory and identity is used to construct a
modern-day Moloch, implicitly making the deceased out to be wrathful gods whose
bloodlust can only be assuaged through the loss of more life. Each loss
augments the power of this false idol, as the memory and identity of the newly
deceased is assimilated into the identity of the corporate Moloch. And the
logic is circular: the deity’s appetite grows in proportion to the increasing number
of dead, becoming even more greedy and capricious. When the futility of war is
finally understood, the deity clamors all the more for war; for as deaths
increase its demand for the war’s perpetuation logically increases proportionally.
________
Is this why sacrifices to the biblical
Moloch continued? Did the parents of the dead, after the twilight of their
faith passed, become bitter and spiteful? Did they have second thoughts that
required the validation of their sacrifice, or, perhaps, felt the perverse compulsion
to drag others into the same sin by continuing the ritual? It is
a well-known fact that criminal groups often feel a compulsive need to initiate
others into their way of life; their crimes. Doing so temporarily validates their
lifestyle, diffusing guilt and reinforcing a sense of solidarity that makes
living possible within a miasma of despair.
Whatever the case, our “civilized”
society has chosen to prolong the war ritual. And many parents encourage it.
There remains one important distinction, however, between the sacrifices made
to Moloch and those made on America’s altar of liberty. Today not only do
parents choose to send their children to their deaths, but they damn other
human-beings to an unnatural death too – people whom their idol is arraigned against. Americans will likely mourn their lost children (and
rightly so) for a long time. However, it is hardly likely that they will also be
shedding tears for the murdered Iraqis and Afghans who died senselessly –
murdered by their own sons and daughters.
Is this what war is? A never-ending
cycle of murder: parents sacrificing children, children murdering innocent
people, parents demanding vengeance – through the blood of Americans and others
– all to satisfy the bloodlust of a Moloch that they imagine in order to hold onto a part of their dead child?
________
A
low murmur wends its way through the temple of the high priests, where a small
fire illumes their silhouettes against the wall. As the fire’s tongues lick the
darkness, the priests' shadows dance across the polished granite, growing bigger and
bigger. On the opposite bank of the river, a group of men collect wood for the
fire. Their work is slow and rhythmic, the saws moving back and forth like a
pendulum swung out of place. Another tree falls and the men begin to cut it
into smaller pieces, each moving with measured effort. They have
done this before.
Will the fire eventually consume the shadows?
Will it someday expose things as they really are? Or will one day, in a moment
of special recklessness, the fire grow out of control and consume it all? Will
we even have a chance to know?
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