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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.
----
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"
----
...."(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"
------------
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.
----
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.
----
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.
----
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?
----
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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