http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=7763King George, Prince Abdullah, Global Warming, and the Torture of Thomas Jefferson
by Paul Street May 01, 2005
“The period of history which is commonly called ‘modern,’” wrote Bertrand Russell in 1945, “has a mental outlook which differs from that of the medieval period in many ways. Of these, two are most important: the diminishing authority of the Church, and the increasing authority of science.” “The culture of modern times,” Russell added, “is more lay than clerical,” so that “states increasingly replace
the Church as the …authority that controls culture.” These “modern” states, partly under the influence of science, tended, Russell felt, toward democracy, which first became “an important force” in “the modern sense” with the American and French Revolutions (1).
Last Monday, nearly 230 years after the modern democratic American Revolution challenged the Divine Right of Kings and “made the rights of man known to all of Europe” (Condorcet), a curious meeting took place in the vacation home of the President of the United States. News of this summit in Crawford, Texas sent Kant, Voltaire, Condorcet, Thomas Jefferson and other leading thinkers of the Ages of Reason and (bourgeois) Revolution spinning in their coffins a little faster than usual.
In one chair sat George W. Bush, the “messianic militarist” (Ralph Nader’s description) United States (U.S.) president who once invoked “Christ” as his favorite political philosopher (“because he changed my heart”) and who announced his imperialist war(s) on terror and the Arab world as “a crusade” (2). A friend of school prayer and the death penalty and a religiously based opponent of abortion rights, gay rights, civil rights, evolutionary science, and stem-cell research, Bush is probably the nation’s most theocratic president to date. He finds critical electoral support among the highly mobilized group of Americans – equaling perhaps a third of the first “modern” nation’s citizenry – who call themselves Fundamentalist Christians and who therefore tend to believe literally in such biblical prophecies as Armageddon, and the Second Coming. These beliefs, taken from the book of Revelation, “imply acceptance,” as David Harvey notes, “of the horrors of war (particularly in the Middle East) as a prelude to the achievement of God’s will on earth”(3).
Bush is probably the most authoritarian U.S. president since at least the turn of the 20th century. He has exhibited extreme disdain for democratic institutions and values in numerous ways, including chronic deception of the American public (most dramatically in regard to the reasons for, and achievements of, his Iraq occupation and nature of his “middle-class” tax cuts), denial of citizen access to public White House records, and a determination to enact regressive, corporate plutocratic domestic policies opposed by most Americans.
Sitting in the other chair at Crawford was Crown Prince Abdullah, neo-medieval monarch of the most reactionary and doctrinaire nation on earth....
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