Life & Mortality Quote by Eldridge Cleaver

A line like this lands because it sounds like a funeral rite and a threat at the same time: whatever comforts and moral authorities a society claims to worship, Cleaver suggests they have already been buried. What’s left standing is war, not as an emergency but as a functioning deity - the one institution that still commands real sacrifice, real budgets, real obedience.

Cleaver’s intent is accusation. In the late-1960s U.S. he’s writing into a country selling itself as democratic and righteous while prosecuting Vietnam abroad and militarizing the policing of Black communities at home. The subtext is that “peace,” “justice,” “freedom,” even “God,” have become civic branding - slogans used to launder violence. War, by contrast, doesn’t need to lie. It keeps its rituals in public: uniforms, flags, televised body counts, the steady conversion of young bodies into policy.

The phrasing borrows the shock of Nietzsche’s “God is dead” but redirects it from philosophy to power. Cleaver isn’t arguing that people stopped believing; he’s arguing that belief has been reorganized. The state’s most reliable sacred object is coercion, and everything else is secondary theology. Read this way, “the god of war” isn’t only foreign policy; it’s a whole domestic order where conflict is treated as natural, necessary, even cleansing - and where the people most targeted are told to call it protection.

It works because it refuses consolation. If war is the last god, then appeals to conscience are weak currency; the real question becomes who benefits from worship and who pays the offering.