It’s Easter Morning. The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for peace in the Middle East. No doubt Pope Leo will do too. (See later!) Donald Trump will not listen. But the main headline today is the rescue of an American pilot shot down in Iran. What might have been the other big news story is the first sighting by the Artemis astronauts of the other side of the moon. My sense – our collective sense – of wonder is tempered by the sense that we’re in a space race with China, more serious than the old Russian one, that space could be militarised, that Musk wants to get us to Mars.

Violence where it isn’t explicit is an undercurrent. Trump is part of a long tradition, where violence is visited on civilians. It is as if Netanyahu’s disregard for life in Gaza and the Lebanon and the West Bank has opened a door in Trump’s mind. He will bomb Iran, in his words, ‘back to the Stone Age’.

It is a little realised truth that when the USA has gone beyond its own continental borders and attacked another much older civilisation it has always come off worse. Vietnam looked to be a forever warning. It wasn’t. The Second Iraq War took on a country which occupies the territory, Mesopotamia, of arguably the oldest civilisation on earth. Moving into tribal Afghanistan, America in the end proved no match for old loyalties. And now Iran. Iran – ancient Persia – is one of the world’s great civilisations, of a depth and indeed humanity (in its broadest sense) which the USA has never achieved. The current government of Iran is, in the long history of Persia, an abomination.

I’ll quote here from an article by Pankaj Mishra. ‘Indeed, if Persian nationalism has maintained a profound sense of historical continuity transcending many different political regimes it is because of its roots in the achievements of an expansive and long-lasting Persia civilisation. The poetry of Rumi and Hafez [and others] assumed a canonical authority across Asia. Rulers everywhere, whether Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist, adopted Persian ideologies of statecraft that privileged the notion of justice and connecting economy, morality and politics’.*

It’s worth remembering here that for almost fifteen hundred years since the rise of Islam Christianity remained a tolerated, albeit subordinated, faith under the rule of multiple Islamic states.

Bombing ‘back to the Stone Age’ has an irony all its own when asserted by Trump. It should hardly go without saying that Obama and the Europeans’ approach to containing the nuclear aspirations of a brutal regime in Iran was the better approach. Contain the regime, allow the country to function, and wait on a time when some measure of individual freedom can be restored.

There is a long and terrible tradition of violence against civilians in war. Cities stormed could be obliterated, as was Carthage, citizens murdered, raped, enslaved. There is by contrast a nobility in defence, as we saw in the two World Wars. But even then… think of the destruction of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945. Also of Tokyo in the firestorm of April 1945, when clusters of bombs ‘blew open two thousand feet above the ground, scattering six-pound canisters of napalm’. The raid ‘destroyed 15.8 square miles of Tokyo, including 267,171 homes, shops and businesses, and killed 105,000 people, more than twice the number of deaths in Hamburg the two years earlier’. Curtis LeMay, the man behind the Japanese raids, won later notoriety ‘ for remarking that the USA should bomb North Vietnam ‘back to the Stone Age’.*

This is the language and level of malevolence practised by Donald Trump. The Stone Age should be Iran’s destination too. It is a convenience of war to elide an enemy’s military and its people. It would behove Trump and Netanyahu and Pete Hegseth to imagine themselves under the bombs their air forces rain down on Gaza and Iran and the Lebanon. As we ordinary folk can. Imagine themselves working with the doctors and nurses who tend the dying and wounded. The Geneva Convention of 1949, ratified by all members of the United Nations, outlaws the ‘wilful killing of persons not involved in conflict, as well as ‘wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health’, and ‘extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity’. 

We’ve had Pete Hegseth leading prayers at the White House. He is a proponent of a new-wave ‘Christian nationalism’, which by some extraordinary sleight of hand weaponises Christ. He argues for ‘overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy’. Iranians are religious fanatics? All Iranians? Can that be any greater a fanaticism than his own? I won’t labour this further now, but whatever we had in World War Two, or in Vietnam, or in the Gulf or Afghanistan, was an attempt to establish, or restore, and embed the ‘old’ rules-based order. Where nations traded and cooperated and we in the West hoped that in time that commercial contact would bring all of us closer together. Now we have the main proponent of that world order taken over by men of violence.

Just how many of us in the UK have registered this agenda, how many who understand when we are enjoined to join the fight just what that fight, that battle, might be? A holy war propagated and proselytised by … let’s leave as ‘men of violence’.

Christian nationalism is the USA has evolved out of more traditional right-wing policies. Just how that has evolved out of small-state and family values American conservatism is a subject for another time. At what point did it become specifically illiberal?

I will sign off with words from Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican this Easter Sunday morning. ‘On this day of celebration, let us abandon every desire for conflict, domination, and power…’ He has a battle on his hands against those, amongst them a good few American Catholics (and Protestants), who see their faith as an ‘onward march of Christian soldiers’.  

* Quotations from two articles in New York Review of Books, dated 9th April, by Pankaj Mishra (‘A Bitter Education’) and Joshua Hammer (‘A Man-Made Disaster’)