The War and the high-risk narcotic of national unity

Iconic photo from the First World War of a wounded soldier deprived of the use of part of his face. His fatherland was no doubt proud of him. Maybe strangers greeted him on the street saying, "Thank you for your service".

At the Web site for The War as of 09/29/07, producers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick write of their series:

Over the course of seven episodes, we spend a great deal of time in battle - on the ground, in the air and at sea, in Europe and the Pacific - examining in countless ways and from many perspectives what one of our witnesses, Paul Fussell, described as "the real war."

"The rest of it," he told us, "is just the show-biz war. The real war involves getting down there and killing people. And being killed yourself or just barely escaping it. And it gives you attitudes about life and death that are unobtainable anywhere else."

Throughout the series, one theme has stayed constant, one idea has continually emerged as we have gotten to know the brave men and women whose stories it has been our privilege to tell: in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives. (my emphasis)

That quote gives a good glimpse of what makes the series itself confusing and also at why war maintains a continuing attraction for our us fallible humans.

What does this business about the "real" war versus the "show-biz" war mean? Are they saying to us that all those chats and segments about life on the "home front" are worthless fluff? Seriously, that short excerpt from Paul Fussell doesn't make much sense to me on its own. Is he saying that only military events, literally only battles, are "real" war? If he is, I find that hard to interpret any other way than as his own personal preference for military history. The armaments production isn't part of the "real" war? Domestic politics aren't part of the "real" war?

The sentiment that "in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives" is a good statement of the gushy core of the mythology of the Second World War in its most kitschy incarnation.

There's no doubt that war produces a feeling of excitement and solidarity, at least for some moment of time. I often quote the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, comment that all wars are popular for the first 30 days.

But permanent war mobilization is also poison for democratic government. Every war of any size seems to inevitably bring government abuses of the public's freedom, even with the best-intentioned governments. (Just to be clear, a government run by Dick Cheney cannot be counted as a "well-intentioned" one.)

That feeling of national solidarity and patriotism feels good, no question about it. But war also has its price, above all in what was commonly called "the butcher's bill" in the First World War, i.e., the costs in dead and wounded. The promised miracles of air powers for nearly a century now have provided a useful basis for "boys with toys" fantasies about making war antiseptic - for Our Side that is - by killing lots of the Bad People while not killing many of Us. And I'm confident that if Cheney and Bush give the final word for attacking Iran, we'll hear about some new technological twist combined with new experience that will make this war a cakewalk, like the Iraq War was supposed to be.

But that pleasant, exciting feel of solidarity always comes with a price. As I mentioned in an earlier post, national unity isn't all it's cracked up to be. Contrary to the interviewee on The War who said that there was a feeling of unity he didn't think we would ever have again, it's very likely that the national feeling of unity after the 9/11 attacks exceeded even that following Pearl Harbor.

But what good has that feeling done us? Al Qa'ida is still out there plotting and killing. We jumped into a war in Afghanistan that possibly could have been some kind of success and in any case was unavoidable in the circumstances, but which has long since become one more useless little colonial war. We got the Iraq War, the most cynical foreign war that the country ever undertook that I can recall. (Some of the smaller wars, like the Indian Wars and various-and-sundry interventions in Latin America could be contenders.) We got torture as an official policy. We got Dick Cheney's theory of the all-powerful Unilateral Executive put into practice to a disgraceful extent. We got the final transformation of the Republican Party into an authoritarian political movement. We got the USA PATRIOT Act and unlimited NSA surveillance. And as sure as Richard Nixon was a crook, some substantial portion of that surveillance went to domestic partisan political espionage, as we'll someday find out. (The latter is speculation on my part, but speculation with a high confidence level.)

The next time we have a major terrorist attack in the United States, we should all pray for less national unity of that kind.

What Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Culture of Contentment (1992) is still very true, and sadly will likely be true long after the Iraq War is no longer a living memory for anyone:

Almost any military venture receives strong popular approval in the short run; the citizenry rallies to the flag and to the forces engaged in combat. The strategy and technology of the new war evoke admiration and applause. This reaction is related not to economics or politics but more deeply to anthropology. As in ancient times, when the drums sound in the distant forest, there is an assured tribal response. It is the rallying beat of the drums, not the virtue of the cause, that is the vital mobilizing force.

But this does not last. It did not as regards the minor adventures in Grenada and Panama, nor as regards the war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The effect of more widespread wars has been almost uniformly adverse.

World War I, although it evoked the most powerful of patriotic responses at the time, has passed into history largely as a mindless and pointless slaughter. The party victoriously in power at the time, the Democrats, was rewarded in 1920 with a stern defeat at the polls. World War II, made inescapable by Japanese and German initiation or declaration of war, has survived with better reputation. However, the Korean and Vietnam wars, both greatly celebrated in their early months, ended with eventual rejection of the wars themselves and of the administrations responsible. In the longer run, it cannot be doubted, serious war deeply disturbs the political economy of contentment. (my emphasis)

And now that it's being used as the all-purpose justification for every war any US President deems desirable, we might wish that the Second World War had maintained a less favorable reputation. But not if Ken Burns and the "Greatest Generation" industry have their way!

At the risk of stepping on one of my favorite quotations about war, I would add to Galbraith's comment that American public opinion did stay remarkably strong in support of the goals of the Second World War. Maybe someone will do a real TV documentary someday that spares us the sentimental violin music and actually tries to analyze why that was so. Two thoughts on that: the cause was necessary and justified in a way that was obvious to most people; Franklin Roosevelt had a better fell for the politics of war than did his successors (predecessors, too, for that matter, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln).

Is Galbraith's view of war too cold and unromantic? Good. Any tiny thing I can do to help de-romanticize war, I'm glad to be able to do.

In his 1921 book Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego), Sigmund Freud describes with approval several aspects of the work of the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon, particularly his book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), on the psychological mechanisms at work in unified groups:

In order to make a correct judgement upon the morals of groups, one must take into consideration the fact that when individuals come together in a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification. But under the influence of suggestion groups are also capable of high achievements in the shape of abnegation, unselfishness, and devotion to an ideal. While with isolated individuals personal interest is almost the only motive force, with groups it is very rarely prominent. It is possible to speak of an individual having his moral standards raised by a group .... Whereas the intellectual capacity of a group is always far below that of an individual, its ethical conduct may rise as high above his as it may sink deep below it.

... In groups the most contradictory ideas can exist side by side and tolerate each other, without any conflict arising from the logical contradiction between them. But this is also the case in the unconscious mental life of individuals, of children and of neurotics, as psycho-analysis has long pointed out. ...

And, finally, groups have never thirsted after truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as by what is true. They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the two ... (my emphasis; Standard English edition translation)

That is a good statement of the dynamic by which wars can produce both great achievements of self-sacrifice and personal accomplishment, as well as the greatest and most sickening cruelties. That dynamic operates no matter how worthy the cause in some kind of objective, ethical, moral, religious, political sense. If the best causes need conscious restraint, which is where the rules and laws of warfare have come from over the centuries.

When those boundaries are thrown overboard, as the current administration has with the torture policy and the invasion of Iraq when no imminent threat had occurred, and then reinforced that freedom from constraints by producing only half-baked prosecutions of the most serious legal offenses committed by Americans, for many individuals this no doubt took the lid off "all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, [and which] are stirred up to find free gratification" in group psychology.

And, no, trolls that's not "criticizing the troops", though some certainly deserve to be criticized. It's a recognition that those troops are human beings subject to human dynamics, not the toy-soldier heroes so many Republicans like to pretend that they are.

So in that sense, what Burns and Novick write is certainly true in wartime and other cases where powerful group dynamics come into play, that "in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives". But unless we fully recognize the dark side of that kind extraordinariness, we make the positive side into a pretty lie.

Chris Hedges gives a vivid description of his own experience of war fever in the context of his work as a war correspondent in places like El Salvador and Bosnia in his book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002):

When we ingest the anodyne of war we feel what those we strive to destroy feel, including the Islamic fundamentalists who are painted as alien, barbaric, and uncivilized. It is the same narcotic. I partook of it for many years. And like every recovering addict there is a part of me that remains nostalgic for war's simplicity and high, even as I cope with the scars it has left behind, mourn the deaths of those I worked with, and struggle with the bestiality I would have been better off not witnessing. There is a part of me - maybe it is a part of many of us - that decided at certain moments that I would rather die like this than go back to the routine of life. The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant certain oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst of war - and very stupid once the war ended.

A Hallmark-card-style slogan like "in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives", standing alone, is about like saying that war gives its participants special opportunities for travel.

Tags: chris hedges, freud, john kenneth galbraith, ken burns, the war documentary

Chris Hedges on the Untergang option in Iraq

"Untergang option" (collapse option) is my own phrase, not his. It's a possibility that's been hanging out there for a while, though the politicians on either side of the war debate don't want to touch it. It only a possibility, and not the likeliest one. But, however probably, here's Chris Hedges' description from Beyond Disaster Truthdig.com 08/06/07.

The war in Iraq is about to get worse—much worse. The Democrats’ decision to let the war run its course, while they frantically wash their hands of responsibility, means that it will sputter and stagger forward until the mission collapses. This will be sudden. The security of the Green Zone, our imperial city, will be increasingly breached. Command and control will disintegrate. And we will back out of Iraq humiliated and defeated. But this will not be the end of the conflict. It will, in fact, signal a phase of the war far deadlier and more dangerous to American interests.

Hedges seems to be a Green Party fan or something similar, so he's inclined to give the Democratic Party as much blame as the authoritarian Republicans for the Iraq War. And I don't think that is realistic or fair.

But however blame is allocated domestically - and you can be sure the Republicans will try to lay 100%+ of the blame on the Democrats - there could be an Untergang Option outcome such as Hedges describes.

Hedges also makes a good point on the ever-popular excuse that the problem was mismanagement. He makes it clear that he's aware of the mismanagement aspect. But he's points out:

There are probably about 10,000 Arabists in the United States — people who have lived for prolonged periods in the Middle East and speak Arabic. At the inception of the war you could not have rounded up more than about a dozen who thought this was a good idea. And I include all the Arabists in the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence community. Anyone who had spent significant time in Iraq knew this would not work. The war was not doomed because Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz did not do sufficient planning for the occupation. The war was doomed, period. It never had a chance. And even a cursory knowledge of Iraqi history and politics made this apparent. (my emphasis)

But can't anybody keep straight the difference between preemptive war and preventive war? Even Hedges, who should know better, writes: "There are still many in the U.S. who cling to the doctrine of pre-emptive war, a doctrine that the post-World War II Nuremberg laws define as a criminal 'war of aggression.'"

Uh, no. This is a real and important distinction. A preventive war is a criminal war of aggression under international law. That's a war waged to forestall some claimed future threat that is not imminent.

A preemptive war is one waged to prevent a military threat that is imminent. Preemptive war is not a war of aggression in the meaning of international law.

It's bad enough that the Cheney-Bush administration just makes up its own definitions for legal terms to avoid responsibility for violating the law, e.g., the definition that anything the administration orders done is not "torture". Can't war critics at least get the difference down between preemptive and preventive wars? They are not the same thing. And it's a difference that matters.

Tags: chris hedges, iraq war

Chris Hedges on American Christian dominionism

This past Friday March 30, I heard author Chris Hedges speak at the 1st Congregational Church in Berkeley, sponsored by an area bookstore (2-store chain), Cody's. His topic was his new book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America (2006).

His prepared presentation was largely derived from the first chapter of his book. Several excerpts/adaptations from the book and related material are available online and I provide links at the end of this post. In his talk, he particilarly described his own religious background and outlook as the son of a liberal-minded Presbyterian minister. Hedges himself holds a degree from Harvard Divinity School, although he never went into the ministry himself. He emphasized, for instance, that faith and doubt were not opposites, as the fundamentalists assume, but rather both are part of a religious outlook that acknowledges the mystery of God but doesn't presume to know with certainly exactly what God's will is for every aspect of human existence.

As the book's title might lead one to guess, he sees the Christian Right as an alarming and dangerous movement, and his book is in part a jeremiad warning people in America to pay attention to the dark side of that movement.

Most of the book, though, consists of detailed reports on the people he met and events he covered during his research for the book. As he said several times during his talk, the stories of many of these people will "break your heart". My guess is that the book will be a favorite sources for other researches on Christian fundamentalism mainly because of the extensive case-study-type material he provides, including long quotations from his subjects.

However, the case study material is not able to carry the weight of the analytical superstructure he perches on top of it. That doesn't mean in itself that the analysis is wrong. On the contrary, I think his view of the theocratic, anti-democracy goals of leaders like James Dobson and Tony Perkins is basically sound, though I would prefer to describe it as "authoritarian" rather than "fascist", for various reasons I won't belabor here.

But some readers will no doubt feel like they're having to make a "leap of faith" to go from the information in the case studies to the broader arguments on the politics and sociology of the movement. For example, as he describes in the Alternet piece linked below, he views the economic dislocations of recent decades that have left large areas of many American cities looking like something from the developing world and the resulting disruptions of community and family life as creating a market for the fundamentalist religious message and institutions. He also talks about how the sameness and dullness of so many cities and "exurbs" generate a sense of emptiness and hoplessness. From the Alternet article:

The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker's paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.

I appreciate the vividness of the concept of "soulless exurb", and it appeals to my inner Amish idealist (or inner hippie or something). But his account is to a large extent impressionistic and anecdotal. Yes, many inner cities have been devastated by economic shifts. But the political strength of the Christian Right comes primarily from smaller towns and the smaller cities, urban megachurches notwithstanding. It not the Chicagos or Seattles or Atlantas that are electing the candidates who back the political and theocratic goals of the Christian dominionists.

And when you drive from one town to the next and see what looks like the same Wal-Mart and MacDonald's and Applebee's in every one of them, it's boring and detracts from the distinctive charm of individual places. But does it drive you to adopt a super-strict version of Christianity vote for Republicans who support torture?

His point about the "soulless exurb" has more to do with the lack of community, diconnectedness and lack of personal support that weighs heavily on many people. Still, I'm not convinced that "despair" is especially useful to explain either the religious or political behavior of the Christian fundis. People being attracted to the structure and support networks provided by many churches is understandable. But what percentage of active fundamentalist churchgoers really fit a picture of despair? Are church deacons and political activists at the church and city levels predominantly people who's personally lives have been shattered by some unusual personal tragedies? And what would we legitimately consider "despair" in this context? Homelessness? A nasty divorce? A personal banruptcy? Disappointment at being passed over for a promotion to senior vice president at your company?

In one sense, it's not fair to criticize Hedges for not doing a full-blown sociological study when that's not what he set out to do. And the reporting his does do on his topic provides us informative material, as the links below will show. It's just that I think a more average profile of someone who supports Christian Right theocratic ideas and votes that way would look less like a single mother who was orphaned as a child and beaten by her two husbands than like a white man or woman from a small town or city who came from a religious background, prefers "traditional" sex roles in the family where the wife defers to her husband, and is particularly committed for whatever reason to a conventional conception of sex in general. I doubt that their level of "desperation" in any objective sense is greater than the average, probably less so.

Hedges doesn't deal extensively with the racial attitudes of Christian fundis. But his research does show some strong continuities between far-right ideas and groups like the John Birch Society and some of the more inflammatory ideas of Christian Right advocates. And he also calls attention to the network of private schools and the Christian homeschooling movement, which owe a great deal to Southern whites trying to create a white alternative to the public schools when racial integration was finally implemented throughout the South.

For an intentionally comic example highlighting how lilly-white so much of the Christian theocratic conservative movement is, see this post by Mark Dever, White Presumptive Together for the Gospel blog 03/24/07, as he awkwardly explains he viewpoint as an "other than African American", i.e., a white guy.

Hedges also talked a bit about his own political perpsective, which at least clarified for me why his arguments about the Christian Right come off sometimes as fatalistic. He seems to be a Green in his political outlook, or at least a Ralph Nader fan. (See his column, Pariah or Prophet? Truthdig.com 02/26/07). So he was particularly emphatic in saying that the Democrats were totally inadequate in their willingness to fight the Christian Right.

He also emphasized that to counter the appeal of the Christian Right, what was needed was a politics that challenged the "corporate state", the extreme domination of the government by the wealthy. And I'm for that as a general concept, too. But I'm not sure it will diminish the particular political appeal of the Christian Right. It seems to me that to do that means reducing the general level of fear, a critical part of which is providing better economic opportunities.

But here's where the demographic assumptions become important. I'm not convinced that people who experience the worst results from outsourcing and de-industrialization are actually the people who are bolstering the Christian Right as a political force. This excerpt from his article on Nader lined above shows his argument about how economic globalization is driving recruits to the Christian Right, and also shows how his gloom-and-doom about that movement fits into his third-party political pitch:

I spent the last two years reporting and writing “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” The rise of the Christian right - the most dangerous mass movement in American history - can be traced directly to the corporate rape of America. This movement, which calls for the eradication of real and imagined enemies, all branded as “satanic,” at home and abroad, is an expression of rage. This rage rises out of the deep distortions and dislocations that have beset tens of millions of Americans shunted aside in the new global marketplace. The massive flight of manufacturing and professional jobs overseas, the ruthless slashing of state and federal assistance and the rise of an unchecked American oligarchy have plunged many Americans into deep economic and personal despair. They have turned, because of this despair, to “Christian” demagogues who promise magic, miracles, angels, the gospel of prosperity and a fantastic Christian utopia. And the Republicans and the Democrats are equally culpable for this assault.

There are only two solutions left. We must organize to fight the corporate state, to redirect our national wealth and resources to fund a massive antipoverty campaign and curb the cycle of perpetual war that enriches the military-industrial complex and by extension the two political parties that dominate Washington, or we must accept an inevitable Christo-fascism backed by these corporations. Don’t expect glib Democratic politicians such as John Edwards, Sen. Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama to address these issues. They are, as Nader understands, hostage to corporate money.

Hedges' research on and insight to the Christian dominionist movement are valuable. But I'm not ready to accept that the only alternatives are a victorious Naderite third party or an impending theocracy. Here's another area where there are varying degrees of despair. And I don't see that matters are that desperate at this point.

America’s Holy Warriors Truthdig.com 12/31/06

The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair Alternet.org 01/19/07

Christianists on the March Truthdig.com 01/28/07

When They Came for the Homosexuals... Truthdig.com 03/11/07

A World Where Lies Are True Truthdig.com 03/26/07

The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism Theocracy Watch 11/15/04

The holy blitz rolls on by Michelle Goldberg (interview with Chris Hedges) Salon 01/08/07

Tags: american fascists, authoritarianism, chris hedges, christian dominionism, christian fundamentalism, christian right

What would a Christian Right America look like?

Okay, so my last post was a bit light on the political content. Well, maybe in a kind of Wilhelm Reich sense it was political.

But here's an article that focuses more on the political aspects of the Christian Right.

One benefit of a group blog is that we have been able to combine our respective research staffs into a large research division. :) Marigolds2 alerted me to this article that one of our experienced researchers came across: The Crusaders by Bob Moser Rolling Stone 04/07/05.

It's a report about a February conference called "Reclaiming America for Christ." But they weren't focused on handing out pamphlets on street corners about how you will go to Hell if you don't get saved. Moser notes that they were meeting at a time in which the political clout of the Christian Right was at an unprecedented level nationwide.

But despite their unprecedented power, fundamentalists still see themselves as a persecuted minority, waging a holy war against the godless forces of secularism. To rouse themselves, they kick off the festivities with "Soldiers of the Cross, Arise," the bloodthirstiest tune in all of Christendom...

On the bloodthirstiest tune front, apparently Moser hasn't experienced "There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood." Which is actually one of my favorite hymns, thanks to Kate Campbell's rock version (!?) on her Wandering Strange album. But Moser shares some of the lyrics of "Soldiers of the Cross, Arise":

Seize your armor, gird it on
Now the battle will be won
Soon, your enemies all slain
Crowns of glory you shall gain.

Yeesh. This was a conference of Christian Dominionists. If you haven't encountered the concept, Moser's article gives an introductory glance. In this passage, he refers to James Kennedy, who I quoted in my previous post about how sex before marriage is "an uprising [sic] against God."

The godfather of the Dominionists is D. James Kennedy, the most influential evangelical you've never heard of. A former Arthur Murray dance instructor, he launched his Florida ministry in 1959, when most evangelicals still followed Billy Graham's gospel of nonpartisan soul-saving. Kennedy built Coral Ridge Ministries into a $37-million-a-year empire, with a TV-and-radio audience of 3 million, by preaching that it was time to save America - not soul by soul but election by election. After helping found the Moral Majority in 1979, Kennedy became a five-star general in the Christian army. Bush sought his blessing before running for president - and continues to consult top Dominionists on matters of federal policy.

"Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost," Kennedy says. "As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors - in short, over every aspect and institution of human society." (my emphasis)

At least he didn't include the blogosphere in his list!

Moser makes a distinction between Billy Graham's brand of evangelical Christianity and the Christian Right/Dominionist version. It's an important distinction, although Graham has not always been so "nonpartisan."

As the fight over the Supreme Court takes place over the next three and a half years, this is an image worth remembering:

Activist judges, of course, are precisely what the Dominionists want. Their model is Roy Moore, the former Alabama chief justice who installed a 5,300-pound granite memorial to the Ten Commandments, complete with an open Bible carved in its top, in the state judicial building. At Reclaiming America, Roy's Rock sits out front, fresh off a tour of twenty-one states, perched on the flag-festooned flatbed of a diesel truck, a potent symbol of the "faith-based" justice the Dominionists are bent on imposing. Activists at the conference pose for photographs beside the rock and have circulated a petition urging President Bush to appoint Moore - who once penned an opinion calling for the state to execute "practicing homosexuals" - to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And the following is notable, since it involves the spokesman on social policy of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States:

It helps that Dominionists have a direct line to the White House: The Rev. Richard Land, top lobbyist for the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, enjoys a weekly conference call with top Bush advisers including Karl Rove. "We've got the Holy Spirit's wind at our backs!" Land declares in an arm-waving, red-faced speech. He takes particular aim at the threat posed by John Lennon, denouncing "Imagine" as a "secular anthem" that envisions a future of "clone plantations, child sacrifice, legalized polygamy and hard-core porn."

I think the Rev. Land may be confusing Karl Rove with the Holy Spirit.

David Neiwert is one of the best contemporary writers on radical-right movements in America. And he has written quite a bit in his Orcinus blog about Christian Dominionist thinking and activity. In this post, The undertow of totalism Orcinus blog 05/11/05, he quotes author and former war correspondent (and serious student of religion) Chris Hedges on the Christian Right (my emphasis):

If you look at the ideology that pervades this movement, and the term we use for it is dominionism, it comes from Genesis, where the sort of founders of this movement, Rousas Rushdoony and others, talk about how God gave man - this is a very patriarchal movement - dominion over the land. And dominionists believe that they have been tasked by God to create the Christian society through violence, I would add. Violence, the aesthetic of violence is a very powerful component within this movement. The ideology, when you parse it down and look what it's made up of, is essentially an ideology of exclusion and of hatred. It is a totalitarian ideology. It is not religious in any way. These people quote ... selectively and with gross distortions from the Gospels. You cannot read the four Gospels and walk away and tell me that Jesus was not a pacifist. I'm not a pacifist, but Jesus clearly was. They draw from the Book of Revelations the only time in the Bible, and that's a very questionable book, as Biblical scholars have pointed out for centuries, the only time when you can argue that Jesus endorsed violence and the apocalyptic visions of Paul. And they do this to create an avenging Christ.

At some point here, I hope to talk more about alternatives ways of understanding the Book of Revelations. Which is one of my favorite books of the Bible. (Maybe I shouldn't be naming my favorites like this.) For one thing, it's a great story! It's also a Christian "power vision" that does not have to be understood in terms of warfare in the physical world, as the Christian Right insists on doing.

Speaking of the Christian Right/dominionist vision of the kind of America they want (see Rev. Kennedy's quotation above), Hedges says with particular reference to the "Justice Sunday" hatefest of earlier this year (my emphasis):

And this is an America where people like you and me have no place. And you don't have to take my word for it, turn on Christian broadcasting, listen to Christian radio. Listen to what they say about people like us. It's not a matter that we have an opinion they disagree with. It's not a matter of them de-legitimizing us, which they are. It's a matter of them demonizing us, of talking us - describing us as militant secular humanists, moral relativists, both of which terms I would not use to describe myself, as a kind of counter-militant ideology that is anti-Christian and that [is] essentially propelled by Satan that they must destroy. Listen to their own language. You know, when in "Justice Sunday," listen - you know, I urge everyone to go back and look closely at what James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, said. He talked about Roe v. Wade causing the biggest holocaust in the 20th century. There is a frightening kind of revisionism and a kind of moral equation of a magnitude that, you know, having lived through disintegrating states in Yugoslavia and other places, essentially divides - destroys the center, divides the American public, and creates a very dangerous and frightening culture war. And that's what these people are about.

The Hodges quotations are taken from a 05/05/05 "Democracy Now!" program, The Christian Right and the Rising Power of the Evangelical Political Movement.

Tags: chris hedges, christian dominionism, christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, dave neiwert, james kennedy, richard land, roy moore