Somewhere the Reverend Dr. Jerry Falwell of Lynchburg, Virginia and Mullah Dadullah of the Taliban, Kandahar and Northern Waziristan are smiling.
God help us all.
On the front page, above the fold of the May 14th edition of the New York Times, there is a shocking photo. The body of Mullah Dadullah, about whom we know very little except that he was supposed to have been the top operational commander for the Taliban, is wrapped in a hot pink blanket (and we're talking about Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blond hot pink) and laid out on a cot in front of a line of press photographers.
It's a clever piece of photojournalism, especially the way the Times photographer frames his fellow press photographers against the corpse as a statement on voyeurism, but it's also psyops against radical Muslims. While Dadullah may have been a fearsome Islamic warlord in life, in death, with one foot hanging over the side, both hands tucked under the covers, and a single fleshy shoulder on display, he looks more like a fat computer geek who fell asleep masturbating on a Friday night, probably in his parents' basement. Needless to say, the United States government never released a photo of Tim McVeigh's corpse with a pink diaper on his head and the New York Times never photographed it. White Christian men, even terrorists, don't get this kind of treatment.
For this small favor we can be thankful because, only two days later, another radical cleric died. As much as I disliked the Reverend Dr. Jerry Falwell of Lynchburg Virginia, I had no real urge to see him laid out naked on a slab of concrete with an apple in his mouth and his fat belly turned up to face the God he slandered so relentlessly over the course of his 73 years.
And yet the contrast is striking. Even though the great majority of Americans outside of the religious right loathed the Revered Falwell, he was treated with respect, even reverence by the mainstream corporate American media. The worst thing they seemed to be able to say about him was that he was "controversial". It took the BBC to remind us that Falwell had originally been a segregationist who would refer to the Civil Rights Movement as the "civil wrongs movement" and that he also supported South African apartheid in the 1980s.
While Representative Ron Paul of Texas was universally slammed in the corporate media and by the thuggish Rudy Giuliani for attempting to open up a real debate about the causes of 9/11, Falwell paid no such price for openly mocking the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Most of us remember what he said.
"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen."
The Republican candidates for President, of course, had memory problems. John McCain, still backpedaling away from his criticism of the religious right back in 2000 said that "Dr. Falwell was a man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his life to serving his faith and country." Mitt Romney, a Mormon, and, thus, to Falwell, not a real Christian, remarked that "he will be greatly missed, but the legacy of his important work will continue through his many ministries where he put his faith into action." Even the left liberal Al Sharpton considered Falwell his "friend". "I am deeply saddened by the passing of Reverend Jerry Falwell," he said. "Though he and I debated much and disagreed often, we shared a very cordial and warm friendship."
Falwell vs. Mullah Dadullah, Bush vs. Bin Laden, the worst type of Anglo Saxon Calvinism vs. the very worst type of Wahhabist Islam, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vs. the Likud Party, Jihad vs. a crusading McWorld, how did the world get polarized along these lines, divided up between religious fundamentalists in a way that's caused unimaginable suffering to people not only in the Middle East but also in the West?
Wahhabist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity both have deep roots in their respective societies, and, interestingly enough, both have their origins in the 18th century as violent reactions to the Enlightenment. Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab was born in 1703 and died in 1792 and the "Great Awakening" in the United States reached its first crest in the 1730s and 1740s.
Yet by 1960 religious fundamentalism seemed very dead. China and The Soviet Union, the two largest countries in the world, were both run by officially atheist governments. The world's major religious movements, Gandhi in India, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and Vatican II Catholicism were tolerant and humanistic, all three well within the tradition of the Enlightenment. The United States and Western Europe, the world's wealthiest and most powerful alliance, were run by liberals and social democrats, almost always secular. Even when they professed some form of allegiance to a traditional church, it was almost always more a form of social conformism than any rejection of the Enlightenment. The Arab world was dominated, not by religious fundamentalists, but by secular Pan Arabists who openly sought an alliance with the Soviet Union. In the United States, the climate was best summed up by Lionel Trilling in his book The Liberal Imagination (where he declared conservatism dead) and by John F. Kennedy in his magisterial address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association where he argued that the United States government's position towards religion should be one of absolute neutrality.
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President -- should he be Catholic -- how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him.
The empire almost came apart.
While the New Deal and the Marshall plan, the concessions made by the American ruling class at home in the form of laws friendly to secular institutions like unions, social security, the GI Bill, and in Europe in the form of US supported cold war social democracy had saved capitalism during the horrific double crisis of the Great Depression and the Second World War, by the 1960s, it was starting to become clear that the people had too much freedom, too much wealth, too much security. Not only was the US army ground up into hamburger in Vietnam, not only were blacks in the United States looking past desegregation and starting to link up with the decolonization struggles in the third world (Indeed the Pan Africanism of Kwame Nkrumah found a potent echo in Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.), and not only was a very radical form of democracy breaking out all over the rich west, the Soviet Union and China were on the rise all over the world. By 1968, the only question that seemed to remain was what secular expression of working class rebellion would finally overthrow capitalism. Would it be Mao and the Cultural Revolution? Would it be Black Nationalism? Would it be the new left, radical democracy, and the anti-war movement? Or would it be good old-fashioned Stalinism? The ruling class was in trouble and they knew it. What they needed was a way to brainwash the working class not only in the poor south and in the Third World but also in the rich west. They needed an ideology of obedience and conformism, one that would kill critical thought, demonize sex, and put women back in their place.
What they needed was God. Reenter stage left, Allah and Jesus.
The United States government, of course, had always supported the most reactionary and feudal tendencies in the third world. In 1954, they engineered a coup against the secular democratic president of Iran. In 1953, they overthrew the secular democratic president of Guatemala, a covert operation that would lead to devastating results for the Guatemalan people in the form of the brutal Falwell/Robertson backed evangelical Christian dictator Rios Montt. But by the 1970s, it had been hammered into a coherent strategy of backing religious fundamentalists abroad while aligning the Republican Party with religious fundamentalists at home. John Paul II, the American client in the Vatican, would crush Liberation Theology in Latin America in favor of a far more repressive, far more conservative form of Roman Catholicism, one that emphasized the control of sexuality over concern for the poor, mind control over Christian compassion. At home, the answer would be evangelical Protestant Christianity and in the Middle East and on the southern border of the Soviet Union it would be a violently radical form of Wahhabist Islam.
What a mad form of reaction. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Kennedy administration was talking about beating the Russians into space. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Reagan and Carter administrations were talking up people at home who wanted to teach the Bible in high school biology classes and abroad people who wanted to cover women with veils and hack off their clitorises.
Indeed, it's startling to look at the rise of Jerry Falwell's career and notice how closely it parallels the rise of American supported fundamentalist Islam in the Middle East. In 1973, the Supreme Court legalized abortion and in 1973, a coalition of Soviet backed secular Arab states almost knocked out America's brutal, quasi-theocratic client in the Middle East. In 1979, the Carter administration started funding the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and in 1979, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a socially reactionary organization of evangelical Christians, fanatically loyal to Israel and fanatically opposed to reproductive rights for women at home. Evangelical Christians and Wahhabists, up until this point relatively apolitical, had entered the world arena.
While Falwell's moral majority attacked secular education in the United States, agitating for prayer in public schools, building up fundamentalist Christian colleges and universities and pressing for school vouchers to fund their own private high schools and grammar schools, the Saudis and the Pakistani intelligence services were funding the madrassas that would train the future leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. In early 1981, the religious right found an enthusiastic backer in the largely secular, but politically sympathetic Ronald Reagan, who had, of course, been elected president because of the backlash against Jimmy Carter for failing to adequately respond to the taking of the American hostages by the fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran, a crisis Reagan's campaign probably conspired with the Iranians to keep going until he took office. Later in 1981, the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt assassinated Anwar Sadat, and in 1982, the Israelis under the right-wing Likud Party invaded Lebanon with the enthusiastic support of Falwell himself.
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On one chilling occasion in Jerusalem, Halsell saw hundreds of Falwell's people shouting Hallelujahs and Amens as Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens depicted Israel's brutal 1982 aggression in Lebanon-in which 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed-in terms of smiting "enemies" and "Communists." The killing in Lebanon was applauded as a possible precursor of the hoped-for Armageddon.
In 1989, the Soviet Union, the only genuine restraint on American foreign police collapsed. A year later, the United States mounted its first direct military intervention in the Middle East.
If the names in America, Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, Hagee, Perkins, Graham are all familiar, the names in the Middle East are just as familiar. While the Christian right grew in power and influence in the United States, culminating in their ferocious attacks on President Clinton, an evangelical Christian himself but one who largely pursued a secular agenda at home and abroad, Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar were confident, even jubilant from what they saw as their own victory over the godless Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Looking back at the run up to 9/11 is to realize just how openly in plain sight it was all hidden. As Ken Starr and the Christian right mounted their attacks on Bill Clinton, Al Qaeda started to turn its guns on the west. In 1993, they pulled off the first bombing of the World Trade Center. In 1994, the Republicans took over Congress with an explicitly right wing, even theocratic mandate. While the Christian right in America was fuming about Clinton's blowjob, Bin Laden in his cave in Afghanistan was fuming about the American military presence in Saudi Arabia. While the Madeline Albright and the UN maintained their genocidal campaign of sanctions against the Iraqi people and the admittedly brutal but also secular regime of Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden slowly and carefully mounted ever more deadly, ever more sophisticated terrorist attacks on western interests in the Middle East.
And in 2001, the American ruling class had its wildest dreams come true. As fanatical Muslim fundamentalists danced for joy at the sight of the World Trade Center in flames, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney just laughed. Now every form of repression would be legitimate, every restriction on civil liberties granted, every form of popular dissent crushed. The fanatics on both sides had, at long last, got what they wanted, war, a clash of civilizations, an apocalyptic showdown between Jesus and Allah.
Somewhere the Reverend Dr. Jerry Falwell of Lynchburg, Virginia and Mullah Dadullah of the Taliban, Kandahar and Northern Waziristan are smiling.
God help us all.