With God On Our Side

WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE

Another major song that concerns itself with the relationship between the youthful movement and the older Establishment is “With God on Our Side,” which deals specifically with America’s view of its past. Among the various authorities the new counterculture attacked was history as taught in the high schools. History is written by the victors, so the maxim runs, but in the twentieth century the cultural theory movement managed to undermine the authority of the history books; history, like the literary canon, was a construct of the western white male, obsessed with battles and politics. History was recognised as narrative, in other words as storytelling, determined by politics and beliefs, never free of bias; thus a truly objective history could not be written. Instead, there was a recognition that history has always been in the service of nationalist, political, propagandist causes. Dylan’s “With God on Our Side” is perhaps the most eloquent of the broadsides fired in the ‘60s against the manipulation of history and the use of the past to justify atrocities in the present. 

The song is all the more effective because Dylan feigns the speech of a naïve patriot in order to attack the exploitation of history and patriotic fervour in the service of selfish ends. While still at school, we are instilled with a sense of national pride, making us recognise our country’s grand climb towards progress. America had always liked to think it had God on its side, that its heroes and founders acted according to some kind of divine scheme, but Dylan rejects this notion. From the opening “Oh my name it is nothing / My age it means less”, Dylan is emphatically refusing to recognise his place in a grand tradition of patriots (a privilege that the propagandist would ascribe to all Americans by simple birthright). He disavows nationalism, saying “The country I come from / Is called the Midwest,” and goes on to attack the nationalist drive of the education system, and the narrow patriotism of his social upbringing, by saying “I’s taught and brought up there / The laws to abide / And that land that I live in / Has God on its side”. Dylan is undermining the notion of moral teaching leading to a blind respect for all forms of authority, which thus extends to an unthinking and uncritical patriotic service, especially during wartime. With such a history of shame dressed up as victory, can the young really be expected to obey the laws and respect the Establishment, he prompts?

The American history books, clogged full of heroes, tell the story of a land that was tamed and a barbarian people subdued. In the movies Dylan’s generation grew up with, the films of John Ford and Howard Hawks, you were meant to root for the cavalry. But here Dylan conveys with skilful economy the genocide of the Native Americans, calling to mind countless depictions of Army bravado in American cinema, but changing the tenor (“the cavalries charged / The Indians fell / The cavalries charged / The Indians died”). Then, sardonically, he offers: “Oh the country was young / With God on its side”. The country had, of course, already been the home of Native American tribes for thousands of years. It is a bitterly ironic statement, and directs us to the fact that, for many years, the history of the Native Americans was relegated to the darkness of a kind of barbarian pre-history.

The heroes from the Spanish American War and the American Civil War are memorised by the narrator as having “guns in their hands / And God on their side,” an obvious image of duplicity, were it not for the fact that in traditional education this has never appeared a contradiction. The pilgrim fathers worked hand in hand with the Spanish conquistadors to subdue the primitive tribes of South America, religion itself being a tool in conquering the new world. But the context here is war - the timeless belief is that there is such a thing as a just war, exemplified in the twentieth century as the war against Nazi Germany. Since God favours the victors, he must have favoured the conquerors of the Native Americans too. The idea of learning by rote the names of the heroes also expresses the uncritical methods of learning about the past, the insistence on learning and accepting without question the received wisdom of our elders.

The Great War, the so-called “war to end all wars”, is also presented as a moral war; though few history books do so now, Dylan is aware of the contemporary propaganda that presented it so. With feigned naivety, he admits that he never “got” the reason for fighting - neither did most of the soldiers who were sent to their deaths by their generals in the mass slaughter of the trenches. Motives for fighting are not really necessary and often clouded, enemies are chosen out of convenience. The masses who lay dying in no man’s land certainly believed they were fighting a just war, a war to protect their country. Coming to the Second World War, the controversial comment about the Germans, who “murdered six million,” is perhaps understandably bitter coming from the descendent of European Jews, but its main function is to point to the hypocrisy of foreign policies. Put simply, we choose our allies for selfish nationalist reasons, as we do our enemies. No moral imperative guides us in our appetite for war, and such choices are made from political expediency rather than moral convictions; because of this an enemy may soon become an ally and vice versa, as exemplified again and again in the case of Russia, Japan or even Germany itself during the twentieth century.

Finally we return, with the reference to the Russians, to the backdrop of anti-communist propaganda, which spread like a disease through the American mid-century. The ordinary citizen’s basic prejudices are manipulated, he is taught to “hate them and fear them.” Strengthening the conviction that enemies and allies are chosen independently of just causes, Dylan says of the Russians, “If another war starts / It’s them we must fight”. The Cold War also instilled the fear of “weapons of chemical dust”; the pro-nuclear argument (“If fire them we’re forced to / Then fire them we must”) of course absurd in the face of the consequences Dylan so bluntly describes: “One push of the button / And a shot the world wide”. “And you never ask questions,” Dylan asserts. Luckily the young were beginning to do just that. The song’s “argument,” finally, is given weight by an allusion to the betrayal of Christ by Judas Iscariot. Dylan wants us to think about whether God plans everything. The paradox is that Jesus was betrayed by a “‘kiss”‘, symbol of love and brotherhood. Therefore, we have to consider whether evil acts are justified by their end results, and whether it all balances out in the long run. The final statement is powerful: “If God’s on our side / He’ll stop the next war”.