The Secret Destiny of the United States

In the year 1845, as the US was about to annex Texas and the territory of Oregon, an America writer, John O’Sullivan, coined the phrase Manifest Destiny to describe a belief that the US was divinely ordained to expand its territory, institutions, and values across North America. It was the belief in Manifest Destiny that propelled Caucasian settlers westward across the North American continent, ethnically cleansing the land of its native population and depriving Mexico of over 525 000 square miles of land.

The idea of a nation with a divine calling to expand it borders, gods and values in not unique to America. The ancient Egyptians, Akkadians, Persians, Romans, Greeks, Chinese, and Japanese had rulers who believed that they were divinely appointed to expand their rule and their religion to other regions. In Europe, kings ruled by what they called the divine right of kings. Since the king got his legitimacy straight from the gods, rebellion against the king was construed to be rebellion against the gods as well.

The Israelites under Moses, Joshua, and the Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right axis, embraced a very extreme divine mandate from their deity Yahweh. According to the book of Exodus, Moses went up mount Sinai, met with Yahweh -who no man is supposed to come face to face with- and received a mandate to initiate an apocalypse in the land of Canaan. After coming down from his high encounter, Moses proceeded to lay plans for the first iteration of Epic Fury on the Canaanites.

Moses may have drawn up the plans for the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Canaan, but it was his general Joshua who put the plans into operation. Beginning with the city of Jericho, Joshua unleashed the Israeli war machine on the Canaanites with a precision that would have made Adolf Hitler and his Aryan sycophants proud. The city of Jericho was declared to be under a divine ban which meant total slaughter of everything living inclusive of livestock.

Think about that for a moment. Every man, woman, young, and old were killed. Senior citizens were killed along with pregnant women, toddlers, invalids, the blind, the dumb, and the deft. The only bright spot in this orgy of violence was the sparing of the collaborator and prostitute Rahab who supposedly helped the Mossad agents sent by Joshua into Jericho to gather intelligence. As a favor to Rahab, her family also seemed to have been spared in the bloodbath.

I can imagine how grateful Rahab and her family must have felt after seeing all their friends and loved ones being put to the sword. We can only speculate on the grave sins committed by the livestock in Jericho that warranted their own special holocaust as well. These scenes of unsurpassed carnage would be repeated in city after city until the servants of Yahweh were in control of most of the land of the Canaanites. Many of the nations surrounding Canaan were also attacked and subdued by the Israelites whose deity Yahweh was not above giving grand and deadly assists to his chosen people.

The Moses /Joshua model of divine mandate followed by horrendous ethnic cleansing and genocide, was the guiding ethic behind the settler colonial project that Christopher (Mass Murderer) Columbus launched in the world that was new to the Europeans. The American colonists ran with this same model, giving the First Citizens of America a taste of the original Israelite bloodlust. Apartheid in South Africa and in the modern state of Israel is just the most recent iteration of the, ‘God has given us this land and your hides as well’ philosophy.

The founding fathers of the American nation did their best to downplay the religious component of their enterprise by erecting a wall of separation between church and state. The expansion of the US landmass was couched in political and economic terminologies. The religious undertone was, however, always close to the surface of American consciousness. The idea of the US being that shining city on a hill has always been a motivating factor for both secular and religious segments in the American government.

The MAGA movement that has surged to prominence in the US, signals a right-turn in the direction of the hard-core divine right of America and its favorite ally Israel to rule the entire world. Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump could not be more crystal clear about their intentions to dominate not only their sphere of influence but the entire world as well. Eretz Israel is really a thing in Israeli foreign policy and Prime Minister Netanyahu is currently attempting to reshape the map of the Middle East in accordance with the Greater Israel project.

President Trump is on a high from his spectacular kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and his wife from their bed in Venezuela. Lindsay Graham is convinced that the commencement of his war in Iran paves the way for the collapse of the regime in Cuba. Graham and many Christian nationalists in America believe that Cuba and all the other hold-outs in the Americas and the rest of the world will fall like bowling pins before the awesome, unstoppable might of the God approved and God led army and government of the US.

Seventh-day Adventists have long predicted that America would repudiate every republican and Protestant principle that propelled that nation into the positions of peerless global hegemon. Adventist prophetess Ellen G. White, writing in her classic work Great Controversy, predicted that in America, the wall of separation between church of state would crumble, and that America would become a religio-political state that resembled the authoritarian and oppressive states in Europe under the tyranny of the papacy during the Dark Ages.

This to me is the most accurate reading of current geopolitical events especially as they relate to Christian nationalism in America, the shift to the right in global politics, the loss of confidence in politicians and political institutions, the return of religious functionaries to the corridors of political power, the détente between Catholics and Protestants, and the growing stature of the Roman Catholic institution in the comity of nations.

Now that President Trump has embraced his role as a messianic figure and now that his wars are being reframed as catalysts to usher in the battle of Armageddon and the return of the Christ, it is left to be seen how far his religious handlers can push him in setting off their countdown to Armageddon. An American or Israeli ground incursion into Iran which leads to a missile being fired from Iran that hits the El Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem could open a Pandora’s box that nobody including President Trump or Prime Minister Netanyahu will be able to close. The world today seems to be precariously perched on a precipice that may very well prove to be a portal into something far more deadly than Dante’s Inferno.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of The Catholic Church, Mystery Babylon and the End of the World: Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Chaos.