I am motivated to edit and repost this diary for several reasons.
The first reason is something that I’ve thought about Ann Coulter ever since I became aware of her rhetoric, some of which is outlined in Coulter on Today: Nuking Iran warms Conservatives hearts.
Normalizing fascism
is the political, business and media agenda of America in our times. While even the most serious and deeply thoughtful voices on the actual left cannot get a single minute of national television time, the airwaves remain chock full of the COUlters, Malkins, Savages etc. There can only be one reason, a deliberate and coordinated effort to normalize, to “mainstream” fascist opinions and attitudes. Such obvious and deliberate imbalances can only serve that purpose, thus that purpose must be deliberate.
The second reason is this.
In terms of what I (Troutfishing) have discovered within the United States Pentagon recently, researching for MRFF, I am fully convinced that religious war IS one of the intended goals of the Bush Administration and its fundamentalist allies in the US military.
In addition, Troutfishing’s newest diary, Found: The Fundamentalist Handbook For Subverting US Military
This story will further underline the extent to which fundamentalist Christian right “para church” ministries with apocalyptic theological views have penetrated the United States military in a pattern, we’ll shortly be demonstrating, that goes from the Pentagon on down to the base level, in which evangelical organizations, under the Campus Crusade for Christ, teach Biblical literalism and “Rapture” theology, and they have been invited onto the US military’s basic training facilities to run “religious education” programs and evangelize recruits.
Which brings me to my last reasons, which are that it’s rather convenient for those that want war with Iran to only point out how the President of Iran denies the Holocaust, when liberals are and have been demonized in attempts to normalize fascism in my opinion, and when those that want war with Iran are the most general ones who most deny the genocide of American Indians.
Are my opinions too extreme? Wait to read to the end, and don’t take it from me. Take it from Dr. James Luther Adams, a man who “was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as The Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” Read on.
To start, let’s once again put Apocalyptic Christianity into a historical perspective, because as Troutfishing so well states, ” I am fully convinced religious war IS one of the intended goals of the Bush Administration and its fundamentalist allies in the US military.”
From the moment of its birth Christianity had envisioned the end of the world. Saints and theologians differed on many details about the end, but few disagreements were as intense as those concerned with the nature and timing of the events involved. There were those who believed that as the end drew near conditions on earth would grow progressively dire, evil would increase, love would diminish, the final tribulations would be unleashed-and then suddenly the Son of Man would appear: he would overcome Satan, judge mankind, and bring an end to history. Others had what is generally thought to be a more optimistic view: before reaching the final grand conclusion, they claimed, there would be a long reign of peace, justice, abundance, and bliss; the Jews would be converted, while the heathens would be either converted or annihilated; and, in certain versions of the prophecy, this Messianic Age of Gold would be ushered in by a Last World Emperor-a human saviour-who would prepare the way for the final cataclysmic but glorious struggle between Good and Evil, whereupon history would end with the triumphant Second Coming.
Trail Of Tears: Moving Beyond The Myth Of America
The Apocalyptic Christians are looking forward to the possible coming strike on Iran…
I said it once and I am saying it again, Send Hagee To Hell: Don’t Let Bush Bomb Iran!
Hagee and his blind flock want human beings to be eliminated, because they are convinced they are being motivated by Satan. Think about it.
John Hagee:
Christian Zionists lobby for US attack on IranAnd the liberal agenda is they are pro-abortion. They’re pro-homosexual. They’re pro-gay marriage – they want men to marry men and women to marry women – and their difference with me is not really what I’m doing with Israel. Their hostility to me is poisoned by their liberalism.
They take a liberal position that poisons their view of what we could be doing for Israel.
Are there more generalized demonizations of liberals within the genre of fundamentalist Christianity?
I believe Satan is behind all liberal movements.
Liberal Democrat’s Satanic OverlordThese liberals, from Nancy Pelosi’s home, consider morality and religion dangerous. They openly protest and fight against efforts to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and suicide.
-snip-
Who but Satan could run a city and a political party that fights against morality, and specifically considers efforts to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and suicide “fascist” and dangerous?
Ship of fools: Johann Hari sets sail with America’s swashbuckling neocons
“A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralize the country,” she says. “Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get.”
She squints at the sun and smiles. “Then things’ll change.”
‘The Surge Won’t Work, But Concentration Camps Might Do The Trick’
Make no mistake: those means were cruel. I have stated previously that I endorse cruel things in war â?” to eschew them is folly. The British achieved victory over the Boers by taking their women and children away to concentration camps, by laying waste to the countryside, and by dotting the veld with small garrisons in blockhouses at regular intervals.
Read these two excerpts and draw your own conclusions, remembering thatNazi War Criminals came to the U.S. after WWII.Temporarily, substitute the word “Liberal” for the word “Jew” in an effort to draw correlations from past to present. To accentuate, I mean temporarily. These are amongst the most evil words ever spoken. They are from the time of the Jewish Holocaust. Mussolini’s “Doctrine of Fascism” is included afterwards. If the rhetoric of now weren’t so comparable to the rhetoric of then and even glorifying it, then I wouldn’t think it would be appropriate. It is appropriate to today on American soil in a comparison of the rhetoric only.
There are instances, such as the Rwandan Genocide, in which it is completely comparable. I can’t accentuate enough the spirit of respect and appropriate context in which it must be compared.
Continuing, Hagee states indirectly that it is not “Jews” (who are “The apple of God’s eye,” he said) who are “poisoned,” it is “liberals” who are “poisoned.” Hagee and those like him are against the ideas of liberalism, and have demonized people with liberal philosophies. The Jewish people overall, he and his blind flock believes, need to be “saved” now, but will be redeemed later. Brace yourself as you read “The Decent Jew” by the Nazi Hanns Oberlindober from the year 1937and the “Doctrine of Fascism” by Mussolini himself from the year 1932 (bold and underline mine).
The Rise of Christian Nationalism. Michelle Goldberg. p. 73
“The Decent Jew.” By the Nazi Hanns Oberlindober. 1937.
To the following source:
The “Decent” Jew A Letter to an Englishman, 1937
Despite the sensitivity of the democrats to the world’s moaning and groaning, the warmongering incitement of the so-called world press and the agonized howls of those of your nature and religion, the National Socialist people’s and state leadership has only done its simple duty to the German people, namely to investigate and determine the results and consequences that the “good Germans” and “decent Jews” have left behind for the German people, and to ensure that there will never again be a time of unlimited or concealed Jewish domination.
I say Jewish domination intentionally, for there is no more dreadful tyranny than when world Jews enslave their host people through their willing, bribed, and obedient democratic lackeys.
If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.
There’s a fire to put out.
(Bold mine)
The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism
Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”
The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global, Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.
– snip –
He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of religion, rise to dismantle the open society.
He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil nor the cold reality of how the world worked…
President Bush, without so much as issuing a press statement, on May 9 signed a directive that granted near dictatorial powers to the office of the president in the event of a national emergency declared by the president.
The “National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive,” with the dual designation of NSPD-51, as a National Security Presidential Directive, and HSPD-20, as a Homeland Security Presidential Directive, establishes under the office of president a new National Continuity Coordinator.
That job, as the document describes, is to make plans for “National Essential Functions” of all federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal governments, as well as private sector organizations to continue functioning under the president’s directives in the event of a national emergency.
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is going to be a tough act to follow.
clean up the part of your front page post that is above the fold?
I realize that after budhy’s fp post it is silly for me to start carping now.
but you might wanna…uh. go back here for a sec, and bring with you whatever tools are appropriate for recalibration of t3h snark meter! 🙂
rofl
I find myself in tormented agreement with your alarm, and always appreciate your scholarship.
There is this one thing that drives me nuts about the entire debate: the violent reframing of the meaning of Christianity. I can hardly type or speak the name Coulter without sickened reaction because I am floored at how corrupt the message of the Gospel has become 1) through “gentilization” ever since the fall of Jerusalem, 2) emphatically since it became a state religion, and 3) morphed utterly toxic since the confluence of the advent of a media-drenched, dumbed down electorate too dazed by fear and debt to question the toxic specter of Coulter.
The one teaching of Jesus that is in blinding contrast with post-Reagan “churchianity” (very pivotal time when the church was deliberately invaded by rightwing power brokers) is the idea that murder is just as real as a thought as it is in a deed. In other words, the entire stupid abortion debacle reduces every one of so-called adherents to Jesus to hypocrisy, for just hating Coulter-style by Jesus’ teaching is every bit as much murder as any overt deed:
Or remember the Jimmy Carter moment when he confessed to “committing adultery in his heart?” This is the core of that thinking, but no one goes there much anymore.
I’m a walkaway as they call them, more like ran out of formal church environment wide-eyed like someone fresh out of a housefire. The rhetoric freaked me out back in 1993. It was soft then.
This too is the core perversion yanked on by the state church. The words for earth and world are entirely different in Greek, but like a lot of other utterly ignorant things issuing from the mainstream media goo, people refuse scholarship.
I have spent a lot of time researching what people believed in ancient Israel about the time of Jesus, when the Jewish people were very messianically inclined. Above all they expected deliverance from the “world” or “kosmos” (not earth – “ge” is earth) in the form of the destruction of the government of Rome, which many believed was the reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar’s Neo-Babylon. The idea was to overthrow “the order of things” (e.g. “world”) not destroy the planet.
AERRRRGH I know, it seems we’re far beyond the pale of apologetics or corrective scholarship. I personally am almost categorically disinterested in much written long after the fall of Jerusalem, because I believe the Gentiles NEVER got it right. This multiple entendre “born again” (mark my words as a believer in reincarnation) is going to, in the end, amount to the greatest misprision ever on the face of the earth. I’m going to sign off at this point because I don’t want to hijack, maybe I’ll do my own study on StreetProphets or something, but I’m still mad after being told in the state church that my mother’s belief, hence mine, in reincarnation, was satanic. They will regret eating their words but the Coulterists do have it coming.
One reason I persist in “apologetics” is that there will be fatal blowback for abuse of these ancient Hebrew teachings against the Jewish people once this Hagee nightmare goes wherever it does. For that matter orthodox Jews have always believed in reincarnation, still do, and no one is going to put that away from them. They will defend their writings to the end, and I am in sore dread for how Hagee et al are going to hurt these people with their perversions of this text. For this reason alone I would plead for clarity.
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I had forgotten about the “Camps”! Makes one pause for more than a few moments.
Great poem too.
Thanks for posting this most excellent analysis of the “Fascist Takeover of the US”.