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Fascism watch

"All effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand." Adolf Hitler

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The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism by Chris Hedges

Tags: religion, fascism on 2008-05-04 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

in list: Politics and Beyond

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Christian fundamentalists now
hold a majority of seats in 36 percent of all Republican Party
state committees, or 18 of 50 states, along with large minorities
in 81 percent of the rest of the states. Forty-five Senators and
186 members of the House of Representatives earned between an
80 to100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential
Christian Right advocacy groups - The Christian Coalition, Eagle
Forum, and Family Resource Council.
Bush may turn out to be a transition figure,
our version of Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck used "values"
to energize his base at the end of the 19 th century and launched
"Kulturkampt", the word from which we get "culture
wars," against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck 's attacks split
the country, made the discrediting of whole segments of the society
an acceptable part of the civil discourse and paved the way for
the more virulent racism of the Nazis. This, I suspect, will be
George Bush's contribution to our democracy.
The Reconstructionist movement, founded
in 1973
an ideology that advocated
violence to create the Christian state
1,600 page three-volume work, Institutes of Biblical
Law
The world
was to be subdued and ruled by a Christian United States.
Promise Keepers
These leaders believe that God has selected them
to battle the forces of evil, embodied in "secular humanism,"
to create a Christian nation.
One of the most enlightening books that
exposes the ultimate goals of movement is America's Providential
History
The book denounces
income tax as "idolatry," property tax as "theft"
and calls for an abolish of inheritance taxes in the chapter entitled
Christian Economics. The loss of such tax revenues will bring
about the withering away of the federal government and the empowerment
of the authoritarian church
Dominionists have to operate, for now,
in the contaminated environment of the secular, liberal state.
They have learned, therefore, to speak in code. The code they
use is the key to understanding the dichotomy of the movement,
one that has a public and a private face. In this they are no
different from the vanguard, as described by Lenin, or the Islamic
terrorists who shave off their beards, adopt western dress and
watch pay-for-view pornographic movies in their hotel rooms the
night before hijacking a plane for a suicide attack.
The Christian Right finds its ideological
justification in a narrow segment of the Gospel, in particular
the letters of the Apostle Paul, especially the story of Paul's
conversion on the road to Damascus in the Book of Acts. It draws
heavily from the book of Revelations and the Gospel of John. These
books share an apocalyptic theology. The Book of Revelations is
the only time in the Gospels where Jesus sanctions violence, offering
up a vision of Christ as the head of a great and murderous army
of heavenly avengers.
These books rarely speak about Christ's
message of love, forgiveness and compassion. They focus on the
doom and destruction that will befall unbelievers and the urgent
need for personal salvation. The world is divided between good
and evil, between those who act as agents of God and those who
act as agents of Satan. The Jesus of the other three Gospels,
the Jesus who turned the other cheek and embraced his enemies,
an idea that was radical and startling in the ancient Roman world,
is purged in the narrative selected by the Christian Right.
The cult of masculinity pervades the ideology.
This image of Christ as warrior is appealing
to many within the movement. The loss of manufacturing jobs, lack
of affordable health care, negligible opportunities for education
and poor job security has left many millions of Americans locked
out. This ideology is attractive because it offers them the hope
of power and revenge. It sanctifies their rage. It stokes the
paranoia about the outside world maintained through bizarre conspiracy
theories, many on display in Pat Robertson's book The New World
Order .
Only by reintegrating the working
class into society through job creation, access to good education
and health care can the Christian Right be effectively blunted.
"Any teaching of peace prior to [Christ's]
return is heresy."
the 9 th chapter of the Book of Revelations where four angels
"which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released
to slay the third part of men." The march towards global
war, even nuclear war, is not to be feared but welcomed as the
harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies
is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms millions of non-believers
to a horrible and painful death.
The movement seeks the imprint of law
and science. It must discredit the rational disciplines that are
the pillars of the Enlightenment to abolish the liberal polity
of the Enlightenment. This corruption of science and law is vital
in promoting the doctrine.
Facts become interchangeable with opinions. An understanding of
reality is not to be based on the elaborate gathering of facts
and evidence. The ideology alone is true.
"What convinces masses are not facts,"
Hannah Arendt wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism, "and
not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system
which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated
in importance because of the common belief in the "masses"
inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important because
it convinces them of consistency in time."
watch closely what the
Christian Right did to homosexuals. He has seen how the Nazis
had used "values" to launch state repression of opponents.
The attacks on homosexuals handed to the foot soldiers
of the Christian Right an easy target. It gave them a taste of
victory. It made them feel empowered.
All debates with the Christian Right are
useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue.
It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not
mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday
School. These naive attempts to reach out to a movement bent on
our destruction, to prove to them that we too have "values,"
would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. They hate
us. They hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution.
Our opinions do not count.
The spark that could set it ablaze may
be lying in the hands of an Islamic terrorist cell, in the hands
of the ideological twins of the Christian Right. Another catastrophic
terrorist attack could be our Reichstag fire, the excuse used
to begin the accelerated dismantling of our open society. The
ideology of the Christian Right is not one of love and compassion,
the central theme of Christ's message, but of violence and hatred.
It has a strong appeal to many in our society, but it is also
aided by our complacency.