[Promoted from the diaries by Steven D, with minor edits.]
It is hard not to make the connection, to look away from the militarism that increasingly smothers our culture and the ascendancy of far-right wing religious movements who advocate harsh judgement and an unforgiving assertion of Old Testament punishment. Slowly, more and more people, even those on the right, are starting to see this trend too, people like Kevin Phillips:
“Conservative true believers will scoff: the United States is sue generis, they say, a unique and chosen nation,” writes Phillips. “What did or did not happen to Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Britain is irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that He was apparently not added a further debilitating note to the later stages of each national decline.”
Under George W. Bush, this messianic view of our nation was coupled with belligerence and bald-face, arrogant assertions of raw, naked military muscle.
There had been hopes in some quarters that there would be a “peace dividend” when the Cold War finally ended. Unfortunately, the Republican Party, slightly more entwined with the defense industries than the Democrats (though not by much), were increasingly making common cause with the far right religious movements in Evangelicalism and Catholicism, feeding off of anti-communist rhetoric and stoking the fires of civil culture war. Chalmers Johnson, in an interview with Tom Engelhardt:
The Soviet Union imploded. I thought: What an incredible vindication for the United States. Now it’s over, and the time has come for a real victory dividend, a genuine peace dividend. The question was: Would the U.S. behave as it had in the past when big wars came to an end? We disarmed so rapidly after World War II. Granted, in 1947 we started to rearm very rapidly, but by then our military was farcical. In 1989, what startled me almost more than the Wall coming down was this: As the entire justification for the Military-Industrial Complex, for the Pentagon apparatus, for the fleets around the world, for all our bases came to an end, the United States instantly – pure knee-jerk reaction – began to seek an alternative enemy. Our leaders simply could not contemplate dismantling the apparatus of the Cold War.
That was, I thought, shocking. I was no less shocked that the American public seemed indifferent. And what things they did do were disastrous. George Bush, the father, was President. He instantaneously declared that he was no longer interested in Afghanistan. It’s over. What a huge cost we’ve paid for that, for creating the largest clandestine operation we ever had and then just walking away, so that any Afghan we recruited in the 1980s in the fight against the Soviet Union instantaneously came to see us as the enemy – and started paying us back. The biggest blowback of the lot was, of course, 9/11, but there were plenty of them before then.
And now it’s all connected. Our new enemy just happen to be adherents of a religion that Christianity fought in the past. It was just a slip of the tongue that President Bush described our Global War on Terror as a “crusade”. The General put in charge of pursuing Osama bin Laden just happened to be a evangelical wingnut.
This culture, our political leaders, our church leaders, our media … there can be little or no talk of diplomacy, of second chances, of real communication or admissions of error. Anyone who suggests such things is accused of a lack of patriotism, a lack of faith (increasingly flipsides of the same bloody coin), of many things up to and including treason. There is less and less talk of taking care of our poor, of spending our money wisely … especially since there will be no future after the Second Coming, and since the US is doing God’s work:
Dobbs: Former Republican Party strategist Kevin Phillips joins us here tonight. His new book is called “American Theocracy.” It is a provocative indictment of the administration’s foreign and economic policy, and examines, among other things, how the religious right is driving this administration’s policy. Kevin, it is going good to have you with us.
Phillips: Ah. 1969 is when it was published. It started before the election. But what’s happened to the Republican coalition in the last 10 years especially is it’s been moved more and more towards religious yardsticks. People who go to church. People who favor religion defining government. People who have just a whole set of concerns that go beyond economics.
One of the reasons I think we have kind of screwed up economic politician in some ways is that a lot of Americans have stopped worrying about the economy because they’re waiting for the second coming.
Dobbs: And you mean this quite literally?
Phillips: I mean it quite literally.
Chris Hedges, author of WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING, said in an interview on PBS’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly:
I had a great ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, James Luther Adams. When I was a student, he was in his seventies. He told us that when we were his age, we’d all be fighting the Christian fascists, which we thought was rather silly then, but probably not so silly now.
Fundamentalism lends itself completely to war, because it has a dichotomy between “us” and “them.” There is a notion that the only way to salvation is through whatever religion we happen to be, and in the fervor of that kind of fundamentalism, we refuse to acknowledge that salvation is possible through any other route. In a time of national distress, people always look for those who promise what appear to be black-and-white answers, or clear-cut solutions to the confusion around them.
One of the most important things to remember about war is that it entails a loss of control. Suddenly, you can’t control your environment. You search for those forces that you think can help you regain control, and fundamentalists promise the direct and divine intervention of God — whatever god that happens to be — on behalf of his chosen people — whatever chosen people that happens to be.
This is a culture war, and reason and decency are losing. There is no Prince of Peace, but only a warrior God, bloody on the Cross.
xposted from Liberal Street Fighter
