Pope, Chris Hedges blast Christian Fascists
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: Pope, Chris Hedges blast Christian Fascists
Date: Jun 7, 2010 12:11 PM
ARTICLES BELOW
======================================
Well, we're not too afraid of Christian
Fascists because they're dumb. They're
*like* cops (without the uniform, brotherhood,
order, or guns).
To Wit(less): Sarah Palin.
This week Palin had to check with Bill
Kristol as to what her talking points were
to be re the Gulf Oil Leak. She blamed the
"liberals," of course for objecting to drilling
in the US (for imaginary US oil, one supposes).
Palin knows not about what she speaks:
http://www.iasps.org/caspian/russiairan.htm
The Israelis ^^^ who came up with the
current Israeli/Bushie Realm-Securing plans
think we Americans are dumb, too. They said so:
"the US for all its power is weakminded."
Those Christian Fascist dopes will never get
their act together. They have no ideological
cohesion; they are not a threat.
The real threat is about what the banksters
will do to prevent the collapse of the Euro.
Are they - the banksters - ready to start the
war against Iran... and go into their own little
underground bunkers and bases??
[You know, which is where the Trovan is:
http://www.actionlyme.org/TROVAN.htm
(for ^^ the dirty bombs).]
Beyond the practical, here, which I just
mentioned, what's fascinating is: What would be
a sound ideology, were these Christian Fascists
to pick one?
They reject all would-be leaders, because,
after all, it's "ALL ABOUT..." each one of
them, as individuals. This is the *nature* of
the rejection against the only true Vicar of
Christ. This is where *we* were 230 years
ago. This is where Europe was at the dawn
of the "Enlightenment," LOL.
Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
===============================================
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=129324§ionid=351020202
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/07-4
=============================================
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/07-4
Published on Monday, June 7, 2010 by TruthDig.com
The Christian Fascists Are Growing Stronger
by Chris Hedges
Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious
movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the
intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They are
creating a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and shutting out
all those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and
closer to traditional fascism, seeks to force a recalcitrant world to
submit before an imperial America. It champions the eradication of
social deviants, beginning with homosexuals, and moving on to
immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims and those they
dismiss as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace
their perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Those who
defy the mass movement are condemned as posing a threat to the health
and hygiene of the country and the family. All will be purged.
The followers of deviant faiths, from Judaism to Islam, must be
converted or repressed. The deviant media, the deviant public schools,
the deviant entertainment industry, the deviant secular humanist
government and judiciary and the deviant churches will be reformed or
closed. There will be a relentless promotion of Christian “values,”
already under way on Christian radio and television and in Christian
schools, as information and facts are replaced with overt forms of
indoctrination. The march toward this terrifying dystopia has begun.
It is taking place on the streets of Arizona, on cable news channels,
at tea party rallies, in the Texas public schools, among militia
members and within a Republican Party that is being hijacked by this
lunatic fringe.
Elizabeth Dilling, who wrote “The Red Network” and was a Nazi
sympathizer, is touted as required reading by trash-talk television
hosts like Glenn Beck. Thomas Jefferson, who favored separation of
church and state, is ignored in Christian schools and soon will be
ignored in Texas public school textbooks. The Christian right hails
the “significant contributions” of the Confederacy. Sen. Joseph
McCarthy, who led the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, has
been rehabilitated, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is defined as
part of the worldwide battle against Islamic terror. Legislation like
the new Jim Crow laws of Arizona is being considered by 17 other
states.
The rise of this Christian fascism, a rise we ignore at our peril, is
being fueled by an ineffectual and bankrupt liberal class that has
proved to be unable to roll back surging unemployment, protect us from
speculators on Wall Street, or save our dispossessed working class
from foreclosures, bankruptcies and misery. The liberal class has
proved useless in combating the largest environmental disaster in our
history, ending costly and futile imperial wars or stopping the
corporate plundering of the nation. And the gutlessness of the liberal
class has left it, and the values it represents, reviled and hated.
The Democrats have refused to repeal the gross violations of
international and domestic law codified by the Bush administration.
This means that Christian fascists who achieve power will have the
“legal” tools to spy on, arrest, deny habeas corpus to, and torture or
assassinate American citizens—as does the Obama administration.
Those who remain in a reality-based world often dismiss these
malcontents as buffoons and simpletons. They do not take seriously
those, like Beck, who pander to the primitive yearnings for vengeance,
new glory and moral renewal. Critics of the movement continue to
employ the tools of reason, research and fact to challenge the
absurdities propagated by creationists who think they will float naked
into the heavens when Jesus returns to Earth. The magical thinking,
the flagrant distortion in interpreting the Bible, the contradictions
that abound within the movement’s belief system and the laughable
pseudoscience, however, are impervious to reason. We cannot convince
those in the movement to wake up. It is we who are asleep.
Those who embrace this movement see life as an epic battle against
forces of evil and Satanism. The world is black and white. They need
to feel, even if they are not, that they are victims surrounded by
dark and sinister groups bent on their destruction. They need to
believe they know the will of God and can fulfill it, especially
through violence. They need to sanctify their rage, a rage that lies
at the core of the ideology. They seek total cultural and political
domination. They are using the space within the open society to
destroy it. These movements work within the confining rules of the
secular state because they have no choice. The intolerance they
promote is muted in the public assurances of their slickest operators.
Given enough power, and they are working hard to get it, any such
cooperation will vanish. The demand for total control and for a
Christian nation and the refusal to permit any dissent are on display
within their inner sanctums. These pastors have established within
their churches tiny, despotic fiefdoms, and they seek to replicate
these little tyrannies on a larger scale.
Many of the tens of millions within the Christian right live on the
edge of poverty. The Bible, interpreted for them by pastors whose
connection with God means they cannot be questioned, is their handbook
for daily life. The rigidity and simplicity of their belief are potent
weapons in the fight against their own demons and the struggle to keep
their lives on track. The reality-based world, one where Satan,
miracles, destiny, angels and magic did not exist, battered them like
driftwood. It took their jobs and destroyed their future. It rotted
their communities. It flooded their lives with alcohol, drugs,
physical violence, deprivation and despair. And then they discovered
that God has a plan for them. God will save them. God intervenes in
their lives to promote and protect them. The emotional distance they
have traveled from the real world to the world of Christian fantasy is
immense. And the rational, secular forces, those that speak in the
language of fact and evidence, are hated and ultimately feared, for
they seek to pull believers back into “the culture of death” that
nearly destroyed them.
There are wild contradictions within this belief system. Personal
independence is celebrated alongside an abject subservience to leaders
who claim to speak for God. The movement says it defends the sanctity
of life and advocates the death penalty, militarism, war and righteous
genocide. It speaks of love and promotes fear of damnation and hate.
There is a terrifying cognitive dissonance in every word they utter.
The movement is, for many, an emotional life raft. It is all that
holds them together. But the ideology, while it regiments and orders
lives, is merciless. Those who deviate from the ideology, including
“backsliders” who leave these church organizations, are branded as
heretics and subjected to little inquisitions, which are the natural
outgrowth of messianic movements. If the Christian right seizes the
legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, these
little inquisitions will become big inquisitions.
The cult of masculinity pervades the movement. Feminism and
homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male
physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus, for the Christian right,
is a muscular man of action, casting out demons, battling the
Antichrist, attacking hypocrites and castigating the corrupt. This
cult of masculinity, with its glorification of violence, is deeply
appealing to those who feel disempowered and humiliated. It vents the
rage that drove many people into the arms of the movement. It
encourages them to lash back at those who, they are told, seek to
destroy them. The paranoia about the outside world is stoked through
bizarre conspiracy theories, many championed in books such as Pat
Robertson’s “The New World Order,” a xenophobic rant that includes
attacks on liberals and democratic institutions.
The obsession with violence pervades the popular novels by Tim LaHaye
and Jerry B. Jenkins. In their apocalyptic novel, “Glorious
Appearing,” based on LaHaye’s interpretation of biblical prophecies
about the Second Coming, Christ returns and eviscerates the flesh of
millions of nonbelievers with the sound of his voice. There are long
descriptions of horror and blood, of how “the very words of the Lord
had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins
and skin.” Eyes disintegrate. Tongues melt. Flesh dissolves. The Left
Behind series, of which this novel is a part, contains the best-
selling adult novels in the country.
Violence must be used to cleanse the world. These Christian fascists
are called to a perpetual state of war. “Any teaching of peace prior
to [Christ’s] return is heresy…” says televangelist James Robinson.
Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, instability in Israel and even
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are seen as glorious signposts. The
war in Iraq is predicted, believers insist, in the ninth 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 is inevitable and irreversible and requires everyone to be
ready to fight, kill and perhaps die. 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
hundreds of millions of apostates to a horrible and gruesome death.
The Christian right, while embracing a form of primitivism, seeks the
imprint of law and science to legitimate its absurd mythologies. Its
members seek this imprint because, despite their protestations to the
contrary, they are a distinctly modern, totalitarian movement. They
seek to co-opt the pillars of the Enlightenment in order to abolish
the Enlightenment. Creationism, or “intelligent design,” like eugenics
for the Nazis or “Soviet” science for Stalin, must be introduced into
the mainstream as a valid scientific discipline—hence the rewriting of
textbooks. The Christian right defends itself in the legal and
scientific jargon of modernity. Facts and opinions, once they are used
“scientifically” to support the irrational, become interchangeable.
Reality is no longer based on the gathering of facts and evidence. It
is based on ideology. Facts are altered. Lies become true. Hannah
Arendt called it “nihilistic relativism,” although a better phrase
might be collective insanity.
The Christian right has, for this reason, its own creationist
“scientists” who use the language of science to promote anti-science.
It has fought successfully to have creationist books sold in national
park bookstores at the Grand Canyon and taught in public schools in
states such as Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. Creationism shapes the
worldview of hundreds of thousands of students in Christian schools
and colleges. This pseudoscience claims to have proved that all animal
species, or at least their progenitors, fit on Noah’s ark. It
challenges research in AIDS and pregnancy prevention. It corrupts and
discredits the disciplines of biology, astronomy, geology,
paleontology and physics.
Once creationists can argue on the same platform as geologists,
asserting that the Grand Canyon was not created 6 billion years ago
but 6,000 years ago by the great flood that lifted up Noah’s ark, we
have lost. The acceptance of mythology as a legitimate alternative to
reality is a body blow to the rational, secular state. The destruction
of rational and empirically based belief systems is fundamental to the
creation of all totalitarian ideologies. Certitude, for those who
could not cope with the uncertainty of life, is one of the most
powerful appeals of the movement. Dispassionate intellectual inquiry,
with its constant readjustments and demand for evidence, threatens
certitude. For this reason incertitude must be abolished.
“What convinces masses are not facts,” 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.”
Augustine defined the grace of love as Volo ut sis—I want you to be.
There is, he wrote, an affirmation of the mystery of the other in
relationships based on love, an affirmation of unexplained and
unfathomable differences. Relationships based on love recognize that
others have a right to be. These relationships accept the sacredness
of difference. This acceptance means that no one individual or belief
system captures or espouses an absolute truth. All struggle, in their
own way, some outside of religious systems and some within them, to
interpret mystery and transcendence.
The sacredness of the other is anathema for the Christian right, which
cannot acknowledge the legitimacy of other ways of being and
believing. If other belief systems, including atheism, have moral
validity, the infallibility of the movement’s doctrine, which
constitutes its chief appeal, is shattered. There can be no
alternative ways to think or to be. All alternatives must be crushed.
Ideological, theological and political debates are useless with the
Christian right. It does not respond to a dialogue. It is impervious
to rational thought and discussion. The naive attempts to placate a
movement bent on our destruction, to prove to it that we too have
“values,” only strengthens its legitimacy and weakness our own. If we
do not have a right to be, if our very existence is not legitimate in
the eyes of God, there can be no dialogue. At this point it is a fight
for survival.
Those gathered into the arms of this Christian fascist movement are
desperately struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile
environment. We failed them; we owe them more: This is their response.
The financial dislocations, the struggles with domestic and sexual
abuse, the battle against addictions, the poverty and the despair that
many in the movement endure are tragic, painful and real. They have a
right to their rage and alienation. But they are also being used and
manipulated by forces that seek to dismantle what is left of our
democracy and abolish the pluralism that was once the hallmark of our
society.
The spark that could set this conflagration ablaze could be lying in
the hands of a small Islamic terrorist cell. It could be in the hands
of greedy Wall Street speculators who gamble with taxpayer money in
the elaborate global system of casino capitalism. The next
catastrophic attack, or the next economic meltdown, could be our
Reichstag fire. It could be the excuse used by these totalitarian
forces, this Christian fascism, to extinguish what remains of our open
society.
Let us not stand meekly at the open gates of the city waiting
passively for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching
toward Bethlehem. Let us shake off our complacency and cynicism. Let
us openly defy the liberal establishment, which will not save us, to
demand and fight for economic reparations for our working class. Let
us reincorporate these dispossessed into our economy. Let us give them
a reality-based hope for the future. Time is running out. If we do not
act, American fascists, clutching Christian crosses, waving American
flags and orchestrating mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance,
will use this rage to snuff us out.
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges
graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades
a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of
many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What
Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The
Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
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Vatican blasts Israeli occupation
Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:12:19 GMT
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Pope Benedict XVI ended his visit to Cyprus on Sunday calling for an
end to bloodshed in the Middle East.
The Vatican has lashed out at the Israeli occupation of Palestinian
territories while blaming Christian fundamentalists for using
scriptures to justify the occupation.
In a working paper prepared for a summit of Middle East bishops in
Rome in October and unveiled during the first-ever papal visit to
Cyprus by Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic hierarchy also blamed
"political Islam" for bloodshed and "plight of Christians" in the
region.
"The Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is creating
difficulties in everyday life, inhibiting freedom of movement, the
economy and religious life," with access to holy sites dependent on
military permission, said the paper quoted by wire reports.
Moreover, according to the Vatican document, "certain Christian
fundamentalist theologies used sacred scripture to justify Israel's
occupation of Palestine, making the position of Christian Arabs an
even more sensitive issue.”
The pope has also urged the globe to end the bloodshed in the Middle
East, claiming that the world has neglected the "plight of Christians"
in the region.
Wrapping up his visit to Cyprus on Sunday, the pontiff appealed for an
"urgent and concerted international effort to resolve the ongoing
tensions in the Middle East, especially in the Holy Land, before such
conflicts lead to greater bloodshed," the Associated Press reported.
The Vatican paper alleged that the rise of "political Islam" in Arab,
Turkish and Iranian societies and its extremist currents are "clearly
a threat to everyone, Christians and Muslims alike."
The Catholic Church, struggling to climb out of a wide-spread scandal
over sexual abuse charges against its priests in many countries, has
not mentioned any specific cases of an organized or state-sponsored
harassment of Christians in the region.
The Vatican document has not explained, however, the growing practice
of anti-Muslim discrimination across Europe and rising efforts to
legalize such practice.
The Pope visit came barely a week after a Gaza-bound aid convoy
carrying 10,000 tons of relief supplies for the people of the besieged
enclave was heavily assaulted by Israeli forces in international
waters, sparking world-wide protests.
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci