We must attend to growing social and economic inequities in order to stop the most dangerous mass movement in American history -- or face a future of fascism under the guise of Christian values.
..wrote Chris Hedges nearly ten years ago | February 7th year 2007
Last year after running across a speech by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse I posted this diary that included his speech from the floor of the senate (video):
Later that year, again approaching republican fanaticism/fascism with this:
Both those attempts at getting to the heart of it don’t begin to cover what’s happening — the link or alliance between the Christian Right’s dominionist theology, fascism and corporatism — with the clarity and power that Chris Hedges does, so here is his beginning paragraph or two with a few excerpts included
The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy
Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age -- he was then close to 80 -- we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."
The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.
He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.
Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him.
— emphasis added
Promising utopia:
The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system...
Scapegoating as a diversion from the real threat:
...offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true -- the very essence of the totalitarian state.
It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement.
And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens.
The oppressors that buttress the plutocracy:
We now live in a nation where the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, where we have legalized torture and can lock up citizens without trial.
What Adams saw coming:
Adams saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the guise of religion to dismantle the open society
Compliant universities and media:
These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort.
Infiltration of government:
...the power-brokers in the Christian right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House before the last elections earned approval ratings of 80 to 100 percent from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups -- the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council
There is much more covered in the article which is an alarmingly accurate portrayal of what is happening today and absolutely an eye-opening must read — imo — even if one doesn’t agree to every part of it
That was Chris Hedges from 2007. This is more recent work:
by Chris Hedges | June 7, 2010
What Chris Hedges began warning of near ten years ago, and Dr. James Luther Adams witnessed over 80 years in the past, is now becoming part of the present. This is one of the reasons, whether an individual republican politician subscribes to this Christofascism or not, that “reaching across the aisle” to reach compromise with the goal of altering this disastrous course just ain’t going to cut it.
The republican party is too far gone; a solely owned subsidiary of the corporate financed fundamentalist Right, with the establishment power brokers financing the Dems not far enough behind the GOP in that regard.
We still have a choice though — imo — thanks for stopping by ♫♪♫