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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWho Would God Vote For? (How the radical right used left wing tactics to transform politics)
Another excellent post from Adam Curtis (The Power of Nightmares). I love Curtis' blog posts for the BBC because he thinks like a documentarian. The result is that his posts have a strong narrative, liberally sprinkled with clips of BBC archival footage. They wind up reading like mini-documentaries.
But in the 1970s everything changed. For that was the moment when religion was deliberately brought into politics in both countries with the aim of using it as a revolutionary force. And those who did this - Khomeini in Iran, and right-wing activists in America - were inspired by the revolutionary theories and organisations of the left and their ambition to transform society in a radical way.
I want to tell the forgotten story of how this happened - and how in the 1980s both the Americans and the Iranian idealists came together in a very odd way - with disastrous consequences.
...
One of the leaders of the New Right was a man called Paul Weyrich, and in the wake of the student revolts of 1968 he infiltrated the meetings of left-wing grassroots organisations. He was astonished by the amount of planning and tactics that he saw and he realised that the conservative movement in America was completely unaware of all this. The right, he said, were still trapped by the belief that people would simply vote for them because they were right.
So the New Right set out to organise a new grassroots movement that could counter the left's success. They had all sorts of discussions and during one of them Weyrich pointed out that there were millions of Americans who were socially and culturally very conservative but who never voted. They were the religious fundamentalists and the evangelicals - a vast segment of the population who believed that they should never get involved in politics.
Full post: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/03/who_would_god_vote_for.html
longship
(40,416 posts)Even if you're aware of this it is a worthwhile read, well written and sourced.
salvorhardin
(9,995 posts)Even if you're well read about 20th C. history, he delves into these dusty little corners where no one else goes. For instance, this post from January where he looks at how Ted Arison and Knut Kloster created the modern cruise industry. Kloster in particular was a fascinating man who thought cruising could unite the first and third worlds.
So his cruise ships were going to remedy that.
Kloster hated the idea that his liners were just going to take white middle class Americans on cheap holidays in other peoples' hell and misery. He supported the left-wing politicians in Jamaica who said "Tourism is Whorism".
Full post: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/01/were_all_in_the_same_boat_-_ar.html
mysuzuki2
(3,521 posts)salvorhardin
(9,995 posts)Tis the same here in Indiana too.