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Edited on Sat May-29-04 10:18 PM by arendt
Its a long weekend, so maybe people will have time to wade through this admittedly over-long essay. My point is that, in spite of the GOP running the government, we are really in a guerilla war. Conventional tactics cannot decapitate and kill the hydra-headed beast that is the corporate/CHINO/spook army. Voting out Bush is not enough. We have to keep to expose them at all levels of government, media, and business. Otherwise we will never root them out.
On this Memorial Day, I think of all the Americans who died to preserve our Constitution and way of life, and I am ashamed at how our generation has rolled over for these un-American fanatics. I will not feel safe, even if we defeat Bush in November, until we have a grass-roots movement to preserve democracy from the kind of guerilla war that has been waged on it.
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CHINO Tribesmen, Ex-spook Handlers, and the Guerilla War on Democracy by arendt
...."Every time a church tried to act through the propaganda devices accepted by an ....epoch, the truth and authenticity of Christianity were debased...In such moments ....(when acting through propaganda), Christianity ceases to be an overwhelming ....power and spiritual adventure and becomes institutionalized in all its expressions ....and compromised in all its actions. It serves everybody as an ideology with the ....greatest of ease, and tends to be a hoax...Thus reduced to nothing more than an ....ideology, Christianity will be treated as such by the propagandist...this ideology ....will no longer be Christianity. It will be just another doctrine."
....- Jacques Ellul "Propaganda"
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...."(One may choose to) emphasize the tribal aspects of Christianity...This is the ....orientation of American fundamentalism and its kindred beliefs abroad. Fundamentalism ....rests not on the acknowledged Christian virtues of charity, forgiveness, and understanding, ....but on war - on an imaginary epic conflict between the self-styled 'forces of God' and those ....of His adversary. Reality is reduced to a simple matter of 'us' and 'them'.
...."By dint of this process, Christianity is in effect drained of its universal applicability. It ....becomes, instead, merely a ratification of something much more parochial. Christianity is ....in effect made synonymous with the values of Middle America; God is perceived as .... a patron of, say, Peoria, Illinois, and such places come to be seen as blueprints, ....so to speak, for Paradise."
....M. Baigent, R. Leigh, and H. Lincoln, "The Messianic Legacy"
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The 20th century barely survived its two psuedo-religions: Nazi-ism and Communism. Four years into the 21st century, Washington, D.C. is looking like 1975 Saigon, as fundamentalist guerillas, supported by the tank battalions of Big Oil, close in on the hapless defenders of the U.S. Constitution.
Those defenders expected their opponents to play by the standard rules of politics, i.e., to, in the old American tradition, "play fair". But the fundamentalists had learned that they could not compete with open government and conventional argumentation. They were completely outgunned. So, they fell back on the classic tactic of the underdog: guerilla warfare.
It is hardly a uniquely American tactic. Separatists and anti-colonial movements have used guerilla tactics for centuries. Anti-Royalists in France formed an armed guerilla resistance called the Fronde, which was more Catholic than the King. This movement often linked up with ultra-Catholic nobles like the Guise family. Such movements often outlive their founding political purpose, and survive as religious tribes within a nation. The Fronde festered in the provinces for over a century, participating in risings against both Louis XIV and Napoleon.
It may be that the current American Fronde can be traced back to the racial tribalism of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan ran a paramilitary organization that flouted government authority when it wasn't being surreptitiously run by elected officials. It used secrecy and brutality to intimidate its white opponents, and justified its lynchings with the Bible. The Klan did not limit itself to hating blacks and Jews. It hated intellectuals, and was heavily involved in the anti-Darwin agitation surrounding the Scopes Trial. As recently as two years ago, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was out-ed as catering to the Sons of the Confederacy - yet another unrepentant, revisionist defender of Confederate slavery.
Given this French and American history, and given the success of the Viet Cong in a thirty year guerilla war, you have to wonder just how blind the 1980s liberals were. They had seen the overt, conventional right wing disintegrate in the 1970s, as Nixon took the GOP and the CIA down with him; and they naively thought they were in total control - the same thing the Shah of Iran thought. Like the Shah, the liberals did not see the covert, guerilla movement coming. Admittedly, it was a sudden thing on a historical scale - driven by the Roe v. Wade decision, the school prayer decision, the 1970s stagflation, budget deficits, trade deficits, and oil shocks.
But, what my survey of the American Fronde has shown is that what was sudden was not the anti-government, fundamentalist sentiment. Rather, what was sudden was the massive funding and media-savvy organization to focus it.
Much as North Viet Nam, China, and Russia provided military supplies and safe bases to the Viet Cong. The big money of reactionary conservatives, like the Coors brothers, provided the fundamentalists with an untouchable supply depot; and the liberals' respect for religious freedom gave them an untouchable sanctuary. Like the Viet Minh attacking Dien Bien Phu, the fundamentalists began their campaign by laying siege to the foolishly forward base of the "liberal media" and the political think tanks. With reactionary money, they manufactured their own think tanks, and they bought their own media. In ten short years, between 1980 and 1990, they pulverized the liberal media and began a drive to media concentration and dominance that is today equivalent to a privatized fundamentalist Propaganda Ministry.
The initial guerilla cadres of this movement came, not from religious fanatics, but from the disgraced covert ops wing of the military-industrial complex. Cynical opportunists, like Chuck "I'd run over my grandmother" Colson, founded Christian ministries. Drug-running spooks like Ted Shackley shilled among the Fundamentalists for money for the Afghan guerillas. Out-of-work intelligence people, such as Oliver North, set up their money-laundering, drug-funded apparatus inside their own country. Like some American Frei Korps, they became street agitators. They played the classic "liberals stabbed us in the back" gambit about our defeat in Viet Nam and spouted the "spendthrift liberal" canard about an economy wrecked by massive inflation induced by war deficits and oil-shocks.
These fundamentalist guerillas attacked the supply lines of conventional politics. They have screamed for tax cuts night and day, boom or bust, surplus or deficit. They have constantly sniped at the educational system that supplied critical thinking, training in democratic principles, and the historical facts needed to apply the thinking to the problems of the day. They won a huge victory over democracy when the Fairness Doctrine was repealed, and the floodgates opened to pure propaganda.
That moment marked the kind of change that occurred when the North Vietnamese started fielding entire infantry divisions in a South Viet Nam softened up by guerilla actions and nests of spies and nationalist patriots. The moment the Fairness Doctrine went down, up rose Rush Limbaugh and his ilk. It is true that they were lavishly funded by the newly reactionary owners of the media, but they honestly did attract the fundamentalist true believer. The cadres had created a sea to swim in.
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But this extended analogy gives too much credit to the anti-democracy forces at large in America. The North Vietnamese were principled people. Ho Chi Minh was a great nationalist leader who adopted Communism pragmatically, as a means to obtaining arms and support. His troops were rarely accused of atrocities because they were genuine patriots who could not afford to alienate their countrymen. The North Viet- namese moral never cracked under a decade of strategic bombing by the world's most powerful air force.
The leaders of the guerilla movement in America, on the other hand, are often the same CIA people who "handled" the Meo hill tribesmen. Those tribesmen from the boondocks were recruited by the CIA to be a counter-insurgency against the Communists. The CIA supplied guns to these primitives, inserted Green Berets to train them, and turned them loose on their traditional enemies, the Vietnamese. The Meo had no idea what the war was about. They weren't committed ideologues, just simple-minded hired guns easily manipulated into a ferocious battle that had nothing to do with them. Which brings us to America's intellectually primitive tribes of Christian fundamentalists.
Actually, as the opening quotes point out, these people have slapped the name of Jesus onto a patriarchal tribalism that dates from time immemorial. Men in charge; violence the measure of power; and "otherness" in any form met with brutal suppression. There is nothing Christian at all about their Old Testament ferocity and intolerance. Hence, the increasing tendency to label these people "CHristians In Name Only" or CHINOs.
At least 20% of America is hard-core CHINO fundamentalist. That number grows to about 45% if you include Evangelical Christians and hard-right Catholics and Mormons. It is a well-known fact of counter-insurgency warfare that you can sustain a guerilla movement with the passive support of as little as 10% of the population in the absence of government counter-represssion. And since "liberals" would never repress anyone, as it is against their core principle of tolerance, the liberals have, for the last decade, found themselves totally on the defensive against people who absolutely refuse to play fair, people who snipe and sabotage - sometimes literally, as in the case of abortion doctors and clinics.
Today's situation in America resembles not only Saigon in 1975, but also China in 1948. The liberals are trapped in the coastal cities. The liberals cannot walk on the ground in the rural communities. The liberals are perceived as elitist parasites. Now, all of that made sense when you were talking about the corrupt Chiang Kai Shek - whose wife became a darling of the American right wing - in an impoverished country. But liberals genuinely tried, by their own lights, to help America. They passed laws to increase civil rights, the social safety net, and educational and job opportunity. When they were taken to task for budget deficits, they listened and changed their ways. Even the triangulating Bill Clinton provided the first economic benefits the lower classes in America had seen in twenty five years.
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The hatred against liberalism, then, is disproportionate to its so-called crimes; and, the remedies offered by the corporate/spook cadre of the CHINO movement, while they may provide spiritual benefits to fundamentalists, take away economic benefits.
As has been increasingly noticed in the bland acceptance of the Bush administration's and the corporate media's complete detachment from reality, we are not dealing with rational political and economic matters any longer. We are dealing with irrational religious hatred that has been focussed into a weapon by shady characters formerly and/or currently found in our intelligence and military apparatus. (It is both surreal and ironic that it is Sun Myung Moon - KCIA asset, cult leader, America basher, and convicted fraudster, but still the only genuine religious fanatic among the founders of this movement - had to rescue the bloodthirsty CHINO, Jerry Fallwell, from bankruptcy.)
The educated, middle-class remnant of civic-minded, democracy-respecting Americans has been maneuvered into a religious killing zone. A kill zone where anyone who says he is for peace is somehow simultaneously not supporting our troops and not being a "muscular Christian, doing his duty in the Crusade against Islam". A zone where Homeland Security throws Quaker peace workers off airplanes. A zone where anyone who even states the facts about the disastrous results our policies have produced in the Middle East is reviled as "comforting the enemy and undermining our troops", while the incompetent running the show is treated by the CHINO fire-breathers as, literally, the second coming of Christ. A zone where, contrary even to the CHINOs' favorite misogynist Paul, the pie-in-the-sky end of "democracy for the Middle East" justifies the criminal means of torture, indiscriminant bombing, collective punishment, and the radioactive pollution of an entire country. A zone where Supreme Court justices blandly lie about America being founded as a "Christian nation" and are in a position to make that lie into reality.
While rational people are hemmed in, lunacy is given free rein. The White House is handing out an unprecedented number of summer internships to students from a two-year-old religious "college" founded in Washington D.C. A half dozen CHINO Congressmen live collectively with CHINO seminarians in training. And, a recent article disclosed that a high percentage of the "administrators" in Iraq were wet-behind-the- ears kids who posted their suitably conservative resumes on the Heritage Foundation web site. This isn't democracy; this isn't "the best and the brightest". It is tribalism. It is a backlash against "soft" feminine values like peace, compromise, and tolerance.
That, my friends, is what we are up against: patriarchs out to re-enslave uppity women, uppity niggers, godless geeks and nerds, perverted queers, and dirty foreigners. There are two groups of patriarch wannabees: the super rich, and the barely-getting-by. (As Springsteen sang: "Poor men want to be rich men, and rich men want to be kings.") Its no surprise that neither group is middle class.
The elitists, gathered around Bush, want to regain their stranglehold over government policy and to use that stranglehold to force the rest of the population down into subservience. The Joe Six-packs, the Ralph Cramdens of America, they know they are losers; but the Bushies have offered them the standard deal for jailers: if Joe and Ralph toe the line, they can beat their wives and abuse their kids and drink their paychecks at the corner bar because they are "pater familias". Neither group has any use for democracy, except as an excuse when it works in their favor.
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Liberals have been fighting a conventional war against the CHINOs, but such a strategy is doomed to fail. We need to undertake the classic response to guerilla action: the drying up of their bases of support; the identification and neutralization of their organizers. Unless the middle class goes out on the streets, goes one on one with the sorry-ass Ralph Kramdens of America, and unless they get their act together politically and kick Bush out of the White House or at least the GOP out of Congressional majorities, we are looking at a Tokugawa Shogunate in America for the rest of our lives and beyond: cold-blooded killers and cynics milking the peasants and dictating the minutest details of daily life in accordance with their version of religion and tradition.
However, unless we just want to descend to their level of "us and them" violence, we must engage these extremely limited people in some kind of intellectual discourse. Unfortunately, all these people know is their version of the Bible. (You may be surprised about their version if you've never heard of the Scofield Reference Bible.) So we are forced to engage them in theological argument, and because they instantly denounce any non-fundamentalist Christian as a demon or agent of Satan or somesuch, we must engage them in Biblical argument.
Therefore, I challenge the theological arrogance of the CHINOs and the total cynicism of affixing the name of Jesus to a program of mayhem and bigotry.
My God tells me that planet earth is like the parable of the talents. God has given each generation of humans the set of resources created by the previous generation, and he has asked them to be good curators of that gift. If a generation leaves the world a better place for its children, my god says that that generation has done well in his eyes. Because, as anyone who believes in a god knows, you truly cannot take it with you.
Around 1980, the leaders of the U.S. inherited a world with about five billion people. There were no major hot wars threatening civlization, and the Cold War was entering its final stages, unbeknownst to many at the time. Countries in South America and Africa were beginning to experience positive growth. Life expectancy was increasing, education was increasing, smallpox was being wiped out, the food supply was being increased. In short, the world inherited by those in power in 1980 was a getting better.
Cut to today. The population has grown by a billion and it has become much more economically segregated. Poverty levels, illiteracy levels, and disease levels are all up sharply. In spite of their being less of a military threat, we are spending more money than ever on defense. We have the largest prison population on the planet. In some states, we spend more on prisons than on higher education. Pollution is up dramatically, especially in poorer locales, which have become dumping grounds. The world offers less opportunity to our children, and George W. Bush is in the process of handing them half a trillion (with a T) dollars of debt a year. The world has gotten nastier every year the GOP have held office since 1980.
Here are some biblical questions for the CHINOs:
Who says God isn't going to judge us by how we invested our wealth to improve the lot of the six billion less fortunate people on the planet? And I don't mean, we created some shitty sweatshops for child labor so that the "miracle of the marketplace" will improve their illiterate lives.
Why has making money become the religion of America and making peace (without making a desert and calling it peace) become the work of Satan? Why do CHINOs think Al Gore is evil, but have no problem with Ken Lay going scott-free after robbing his employees and his investors of billions of dollars?
Who says God isn't going to judge us on how we treated our Good Samaritans, of whatever faith? With hundreds of religions anathematizing each other and murdering each other over theological minutiae, who says God does not honor goodness without creed?
Who says God wants us to tithe 10% to a church but cut government taxes for peaceful purposes to nothing? Whatever happened to "render unto Caesar"?
And, finally, how dare you try to encourage Armageddon? Religiously, it is conjuring and witchcraft to try to force God to begin your so-called end of days on your schedule. Rationally, it is a rush to planetary and racial suicide. Why are you so-called peace-loving CHINOs so fixated on war?
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I'd love to hear in their responses some sign of awareness from the CHINOS about the moral swamp into which they have dragged us all. But I expect to hearnothing but the same poisonous scapegoating and denial of reality that has gotten us to our present disastrous state.
The American version of the Khmer Rouge is upon us, and all that stands between us and a continent-wide killing field is one trumped-up terrorist attack/martial law declaration.I pray for my country and the small minority of its citizens who are still exercising their free will.
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