Hedges: Huckabee, The Evangelican Revolution (leading to Christian Fascism)

[Wiley50]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/24/5984/

The rise of Mike Huckabee as a presidential candidate represents a seismic shift in the tactics, ideology and direction of the radical Christian right. Huckabee may stumble and falter in later primaries, but his right-wing Christian populism is here to stay. Huckabee represents a new and potent force in American politics, and the neocons and corporate elite, who once viewed the yahoos of the Christian right as the useful idiots, are now confronted with the fact that they themselves are the ones who have been taken for a ride. Members of the Christian right, recruited into the Republican Party and manipulated to vote against their own interests around the issues of abortion and family values, are in rebellion. They are taking the party into new, uncharted territory. And they presage, especially with looming economic turmoil, the rise of a mass movement that could demolish what is left of American democracy and set the stage for a Christian fascism.

snip

The Christian right is the most potent and dangerous mass movement in American history. It has been controlled and led, until now, by those who submit to the demands of the corporate state. But the grass roots are tired of being taken for rubes. They are tired of candidates, like Bush or Bill Clinton, who roll out the same clichés about working men and women every four years and then spend their terms enriching their corporate backers. The majority of American citizens have spent the last two decades watching their government services and benefits vanish. They have seen their jobs go overseas and are watching as their communities crumble and their houses are foreclosed. It is their kids who are in Iraq and Afghanistan. The old guard in the Christian right, the Pat Robertsons, who used their pulpits to deliver the votes of naive followers to the corporatists, is a spent force. Huckabee’s Christian populism represents the maturation of the movement. It signals the rise of a truly radical, even revolutionary force in American politics, of which Huckabee may be one of the tamer and less frightening examples.

snip

Huckabee has close ties with the Christian Reconstructionist or Dominionist branch of the Christian right. The Dominionist movement, which seeks to cloak itself in the mantle of the Christian faith and American patriotism, is small in numbers but influential. It departs from traditional evangelicalism. It seeks to redefine traditional democratic and Christian terms and concepts to fit an ideology that calls on the radical church to take political power. It shares many prominent features with classical fascist movements, at least as such movements are defined by the scholar Robert O. Paxton, who sees fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cultures of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Dominionism, born out of Christian Reconstructionism, seeks to politicize faith. It has, like all fascist movements, a belief in magic along with leadership adoration and a strident call for moral and physical supremacy of a master race, in this case American Christians. It also has, like fascist movements, an ill-defined and shifting set of beliefs, some of which contradict each other. Paxton argues that the best way to understand authentic fascist movements, which he says exist in all societies, including democracies, is to focus not on what they say but on how they act, for, as he writes, some of the ideas that underlie fascist movements “remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language” and “many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions.”

Dominionism teaches that American Christians have been mandated by God to make America a Christian state. A decades-long refusal by most American fundamentalists to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian “dominion” over the nation and, eventually, over the Earth itself. Dominionism preaches that Jesus has called on Christians to actively build the kingdom of God on Earth. America becomes, in this militant Biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan. Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the Ten Commandments form the basis of our legal system, in which creationism and “Christian values” form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all. Labor unions, civil rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the work force to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship.

snip

Huckabee has publicly backed off from this extreme position, but he remains deeply hostile to gays. He has used wit and humor to deflect reporters from his radical views about marriage, abortion, damnation, biblical law, creationism and the holy war he believes we are fighting with Islam. But his stances represent a huge step, should they ever become policy, toward a theocratic state and the death of our open society. In the end, however, I do not blame Huckabee or the tens of millions of hapless Christians-40 percent of the Republican electorate-who hear his words and rejoice. I blame the corporate state, those who thought they could disempower and abuse the working class, rape the country, build a rapacious oligarchy and never pay a political price.

[The Stranger]

1. Clearly, the minister candidate is a devious a devious little devil.

Make no mistake about it: there are brass knuckles inside the velvet glove.

[sandyd921]

2. These are scary people

But as they say, "know thy enemy". Thanks for posting the article.

[seemslikeadream]

3. Democracy Now: American Fascists

:hug:


6,000 complaints from soldiers who claim to have been persecuted by Christian evangelicals

http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2007/11/anti-crusader-mikey-weinstein.html

The Anti-Crusader


Weinstein is the middle rung in three generations of soldiers. A former Air Force JAG and White House attorney for Ronald Reagan, he has adopted a shock-and-awe approach to battling efforts by the military to impress Christianity upon American soldiers. "We have the Christian Taliban and the Christian Al Qaeda inside our military," says Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, "and they really have WMD, unlike Saddam."

An amateur pugilist with shoulders like a butcher block and a head like a cannonball, he several times challenged evangelical minister Ted Haggard to a boxing match. (Haggard declined.) His adversaries call him, to his great delight, "The Field General of the Godless Armies of Satan," though his friends prefer nicknames like "Ticktock" and "Motor Mouth." During one of his trademark rapid-fire, profanity-laced diatribes, he proclaimed," Our job here is to kick ass, take names, and leave sucking chest wounds on the people who are trying to engage the machinery of the state to push their biblical worldview." To allies who suggest that perhaps Weinstein should appoint someone more diplomatic to lead the foundation, he offers, "First they will have to prove to me that what we are engaged in is a polite exchange of views" with right-wing Christians," instead of a bloody battle that only ends with the last person standing."

Weinstein is certain that fundamentalists will stop at nothing to transform the United States military into an army of God. He notes that Officers Christian Fellowship, with chapters in every major U.S. military installation in the world, envisions—and here he quotes its mission statement—a "spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit." The group has helped boost fundamentalist Christianity among the armed forces from a negligible presence 20 years ago to a faith currently held by 30 percent of U.S. soldiers, according to Weinstein. He adds that many of those soldiers—hardcore end-timers and Dominionists—desperately want America to invade Iran, thereby triggering the biblical prophecy of the Rapture.

This summer he uncovered plans by the Pentagon to ship "freedom packages" to soldiers in Iraq that were to contain Bibles, proselytizing material in English and Arabic, and Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a video game inspired by post-Rapture novels in which "soldiers for Christ" hunt enemies who look suspiciously like U.N. peacekeepers. Partly due to Weinstein's efforts, the packages were never sent. "It's not just the Holocaust or the inquisition or the pogroms or the nine—count 'em: nine—crusades," Weinstein cautions. "It's everything that's happened since then. Whenever a virulent form of any faith has engaged the machinery of the state, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, we have ended up with tidal waves of blood."

And so Weinstein is laying sand bags. He has fielded more than 6,000 complaints from soldiers who claim to have been persecuted by Christian evangelicals; 95 percent of the complaints come from mainstream Christians. Tipsters helped him catch uniformed military officers publicly endorsing an evangelical group and ferret out an anti-Semitic Bible study guide on an army base website. In September, he shunted many of the complaints into a massive lawsuit against the Department of Defense. His lead plaintiff, U.S. Army Specialist Jeremy Hall, alleges that a major at Iraq's Speicher base threatened to block his reenlistment in the Army in retaliation for organizing a meeting of atheists.



Democracy Now: American Fascists


Democracy Now: American Fascists Pt. 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHABaK7LXYU




Democracy Now: American Fascists Pt. 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75KQCNSEh0M



Chris Hedges's new book examines how Christian dominionists are seeking absolute power and a Christian state. According to Hedges, the movement bears a strong resemblance to the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s. Hedges is the former New York Times Middle East bureau chief and author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."




http://ianmasters.org/ian_masters_021807_80.mp3 (direct link to mp3)

http://www.ianmasters.org/archives.html (site link - scroll down to Feb. 18)

Chris Hedges on the religious right in the United States. Mr. Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran war correspondent, who now writes about religion and politics. He is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and is the author of the just published "American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America." In this book, Hedges, who grew up in rural parishes in upstate New York where his father was a Presbyterian pastor, attacks the Christian fundamentalist movement from the point of view of a believer, as someone steeped in the Bible and Christian tradition. He points to the hundreds of members of Congress with high approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups as one of many signs that the movement is burrowing deep inside the American government, in order to subvert it. The movement's call to dismantle the wall between church and state and the intolerance it preaches against all who do not conform to its warped vision of a Christian America are pumped into tens of millions of American homes through Christian television and radio stations, as well as reinforced through the curriculum in Christian schools. He shows that the movement's yearning for apocalyptic violence and its assault on dispassionate, intellectual inquiry are laying the foundation for an unrecognizable fundmentalist America. His thesis: we face an imminent threat. Chris Hedges earlier books are highly acclaimed. He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know about War and another religiously themed book, Losing Moses on the Freeway.. He has worked for various publications including the Christian Science Monitor and the Dallas Morning News. He was part of the New York Times team that shared the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for global terrorism coverage. Hedges has written extensively about his experiences on the front lines of war. He has reported about his experiences in Sarajevo, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, the Middle East and other places around the world. He is lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. He received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. (In a 2003 Commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Ill., Hedges raised the intense ire of audience members when he spoke out against the war in Iraq. Many regard Hedges as a "philosopher of the experience of war." According to Hedges, the experience of being in a war zone, where there is very little distinction between life and death, fills a person with a sense of "meaning" and brings him to a "high" that cannot be experienced so strongly any other way, producing a kind of addiction.)



http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2509817#2510810

[AndyTiedye]

4. Huckabee is Our Worst Nightmare

Kicked and recommended.

[0007]

5. Right on! I'm happy to see that there are some young folks

that see the truth for what it is........

[Liberal In Texas]

6. Chris Hedges is an important journalist.

I hope that someday he'll be more recognized.

K and R

!

[Liberal In Texas]

7. I'm just kicking for Hedges...

[Wiley50]

8. I'll help n/t