The Triumphal Arch

Editor:

Donald Trump has proposed a 250-foot “Triumphal Arch” to be built in Washington, D.C., commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026. The proposed structure is of neoclassical design, featuring a 60-foot golden statue, winged figures, and eagles, and would be taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Blazoned across to top would be inscribed the words “In God We Trust.”

However, there’s a problem with the motto “In God We Trust.” Whose God are we talking about? Would we want “In Allah We Trust” on the arch? How about “In Krishna We Trust” on the arch? Krishna’s life was a precursor to the life of Jesus.

And what does “In God We Trust” actually mean? To believers it means God is on our side and will guide us, the elect, in the proper path to follow. But can the Bible God be trusted? When you read the Hebrew Scriptures (aka, The Old Testament) it depicts a God that abets and participates in many genocides on a massive scale. The Noachian Flood killed millions of men, women, children, babies and almost all animal and plant life. What sins could the children, babies, animals and plants have committed only to be horrendously drowned? Thousands of the women would have been pregnant and their fetuses destroyed.

The Bible states that all things were created by God (Colossians 1:16-17), therefore God created all the world’s diseases including malaria that killed around fifty billion people historically, or about half of all the people that have ever lived. God also created the mosquito, the most dangerous animal in the world because it is the vector for so many dangerous diseases.

A typical family consists of parents and children. Parents love their children and seek to raise them to be upright and moral members of society. The children have unspoken trust in their parents for love, affection, help when sick, and protection in sometimes dangerous situations.

Considering the immoral actions outlined above, we can question whether this God provides any love, affection, help when sick, and protection. There’s only unproven anecdotal statements by religious believers.

The founding fathers knew from history the dangers of mixing religion with government, so instead of the inscription “In God We Trust” inscribed on the arch it would be better to inscribe “E Pluribus Unum” (Out of Many One), which is more descriptive of our actual immigrant-filled and pluralist country.

David M. Keranen

Bakersfield, CA

America’s selective memory on Iran

Editor:

U.S. officials and much of the media emphasize the Islamic Republic’s brutal repression of its own citizens, including the killing of large numbers of protesters, while rarely acknowledging Washington’s role in enabling similar abuses in Iran’s past.

Twenty-five years of horrific human rights abuses under the Shah of Iran, a close U.S. ally installed in a 1953 CIA-backed coup, have largely escaped scrutiny. The Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, was created with help from the CIA and Israel’s Mossad.

Human rights organization Amnesty International’s 1974/75 Annual Report asserts: “The Shah of Iran retains his benevolent image despite the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief.”

Time magazine’s August 15, 1976 cover story, “Torture as Policy: The Network of Evil”, documented the widespread use of torture by governments in order to suppress dissent. The article noted that the worst violators may have been Chile and Iran, where torture had become institutionalized by their police forces. Chile’s brutal military dictator General Augusto Pinochet was another U.S. ally whom the CIA helped bring into power in 1973. The Time article further reported that Iran’s torture techniques included electric shock, rape, beatings, and helmets designed to amplify victims’ screams.

In his 1982 book, The Real Terror Network, Edward S. Herman writes: “In each country, a web of myths evolves that allows the loyal citizenry to feel good about their nation, that depicts its people as generous, progressive and decent to a fault in its international behavior.” This tendency to sanitize history isn’t confined to the Cold War era.

The Trump administration’s efforts to recast national history, pressuring museums and parks over slavery, Native American dispossession and other “disparaging” material is another example of trying to control the story a nation tells about itself.

Brenda Hafera, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, leads the organization’s review of historical sites. In a March 2026 PBS NewsHour segment on divisions over U.S. history ahead of America’s 250th anniversary, she stated:

“I think any truthful commemoration of the American story will be celebratory, because that’s accurate, because this is a good country that has contributed a lot and has moved towards human freedom.”

Yet U.S. support for the Shah helped sustain a regime that denied political freedom to Iranians.

Adam Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, ends with a chapter titled “The Great Forgetting.” Hochschild writes:

“And yet the world we live in–its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence–is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.”

Hochschild’s warning is fitting. What nations choose to forget affects how power is exercised in the present. For the world’s dispossessed, there are memories no empire can erase.

Terry Hansen

Grafton, WI