Hal Lindsey's 1970 book "The Late Great Planet Earth" ("LGPE") was the first modern paperback end-of-the-world Bible prophecy book, and the predecessor of the Left Behind novels and Rapture cultural phenomenon. But the story laid out in LGPE was also a strategy that was adapted to create the core support for George Bush and the Iraq war. This diary covers a lot of ground, from the Bronze Age, to the Trilateral Commission, to 2008, so you may want to get a snack.
Using the books of Daniel and Revelations as guides, Lindsey predicts the end of the world as taking place 40 years after the founding of Israel in 1948. Reliable sources tell us that the world did not actually end in 1988 as Lindsey predicted.....
But folks predicting the Apocalypse have been resetting the Doomsday clock for the last 2000 years, just like the episode of the Simpsons in which Homer predicts the end of the world. So when I picked up a copy the Hal Lindsey's sequel "The 1980's: Countdown to Armageddon" I expected nothing more than grins and giggles. However, what I found was a political strategy that was later adapted by the lovable scamps of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) to start the Iraq war.
The gist of LGPE is that the rise of Israel, the Soviet Union, the European Union, and China is predicted by the Bible, based on the Lindsey's interpretation of the books of Daniel, Isaiah, and Revelations. Although Thomas Jefferson described Revelations as the "meaningless ravings of a madman," LGPE patches together a coherent story line for the Apocalypse by cherry picking passages from various books of the Bible. The Bible takes the religious stories of the Early Bronze Age (creation, flood, messiah, end of the world) and compresses them into a much more recent period described in the Old Testament. These stories were rewritten over and over again, but the authors never imagined these stories would be put in a single book, because they had no books, only tablets and scrolls. But when the Bible sandwiched these versions all together, the repeated stories became a cycle of increasingly detailed prophecies rather than plagiarism. Lindsey takes passages from these similar stories to illustrate the familiar Millenialist storyline that would be expanded in the Left Behind novels.
So where is the United States in all this? Even after cherry picking both the Old and New Testaments, Lindsey admits that it is hard to justify the view that the United States has an important role in the End Times:
"This isn't an easy question to answer because there are no specific or even indirect references to America in Bible prophecy."
Revelations doesn't mention America, but there are mentions of other "kingdoms" in Europe and Asia, although this is pretty sketchy considering that the Roman Empire had already built highways all the way to Scotland, and Alexander the Great had marched to central India. Likewise the Bible is silent about a whole lot of information that would have been helpful, like other continents, physics, germ theory, electricity, medicine, or even the astronomy that was so well known to other civilizations. Which is a shame, because if the Moses had told us that e=mc2, it would have been a more convincing miracle than parting the Red Sea.
Lindsey's main point was that the Soviet Union had overwhelming superiority in all types of conventional and nuclear weapons, including a long list of imaginary Star Wars weapons, but damnable Jimmy Carter was selling us out to the Communists with his arms controls treaties. Today, we know who was cooking up these stories of Russian space-based lasers and other miracle weapons back in the 70s: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who had packed the CIA with cronies that sold us bogus intelligence that the USSR had superior weapons of mass destruction. The CIA also told us that the USSR was rich enough to build as many weapons as they wanted. LGPE said that we needed to match the USSR's fictional spending levels.
Of course the benefit of this argument was that the "right people" made a lot of money by investing in the defense industry. And in hindsight, we see that Cold War was immensely profitable to a cartel of politicians, media, and industrial interests. The leaders of the Soviet Union enjoyed similar benefits, until their military spending drove them to collapse.
Because the founding of Israel is a key event in the return of Jesus, LGPE states that it is the duty of the Evangelical community to support Israel. Lindsay concludes that America needs weapons, lots of weapons, lots of nuclear weapons, and that Americans should sacrifice their standard of living in order to buy more nuclear weapons. He does not develop the full Dominionist theology that the US must take over the world to trigger the arrival of God, but he explains that since Russia could cut out oil lanes (like Iran today) we need those nukes to protect our oil supply, which the US military would need to protect Israel. So Lindsey finally explains that we need vast stockpiles of nukes to secure our oil supply, and although he does not state this explicitly, we can see that protecting the financial interests of the oil companies is God's will.
Besides communism, Lindsey's other big threat is the New Deal. Everything in the Bible about charity is ignored in favor of a line in Matthew about not helping people that won't work, although this was in the middle of a chapter explaining that ministers should pay their own way, which Lindsey omits. Again, Lindsey does not make the connection explicitly, but every cent spent on poverty relief is money that is not available for more nukes.
Lindsey also spends a lot of time talking about the sinister Trilateral Commission ("TriCom"), a group that played much the same role as the PNAC for the Bush administration. The TriCom was a group of academics, politicians, media people, and industrialists that attempted to sort out policy questions. With the end of Vietnam and start of the oil crisis, Carter and TriCom members attempted to cut the defense budget by signing the SALT2 missile treaty and cancelling the B1 bomber and neutron bomb. Clearly, this was going to upset the apple cart, so Carter was pilloried by the press and replaced by Ronald Reagan, who opened the floodgates to increased defense spending. The TriCom was not a conspiracy, as Lindsey alleged, but Lindsey lays out the justification for replacing it with a cartel of commercial interests that would benefit from defense spending. After two terms of Reagan, his backers were involved in a variety of real conspiracies that included death squads in Central America, drug smuggling, and the Iran-Contra scandal.
PNAC has played a similar role to the old Trilateral Commission, and many PNAC members went on to have cabinet level posts in the Bush administration. Like the TriCom, PNAC is often incorrectly thought of as a criminal conspiracy. But 9/11 allowed the neocons to attempt to implement all of PNAC's goals in a space of 6 months rather than 20 years, with disastrous results. In this way, PNAC was the precursor of a cartel of powerful commercial interests promoting defense spending, increased executive power, and reduced civil liberties. Like the Cold War, this led to vastly increased levels of defense spending, and great prosperity for everyone invested in the defense industry.
Where LGPE told the evangelical community to damn the Trilateral Commission, PNAC members have molded Administration policy to accommodate the views and goals of the Millenialist community. So we see the junction of media, industry, and politicians, but with the addition of the evangelical community as direct supporters of the war effort and record spending on defense. In this way, the administration has strip mined the American economy while fulfilling the policy goals laid out 35 years ago in a pulp paperback.
In making this point, I am not exactly making a bold subversive statement, because we are already looking at this strategy receding in the rear view mirror. Over the last 18 months, several factors have developed that that would cause PNAC members to move away from the model of Middle East Crusades and ruinous defense spending proposed by Lindsey.
* First, too much defense spending has essentially killed the golden goose, because future tax revenues will have to go to servicing debt rather than actual spending. The US is in danger of following the Soviet Union into economic collapse.
* Second, the public is disenchanted with the idea of perpetual warfare, whether for Christ or big oil. The Cold War of the 80s was featured seductive spies, fancy gadgets, military slam dunks like Grenada, but little actual death. And when the US got its fingers burnt in Lebanon, Reagan did not hesitate to "cut and run." In contrast, the Crusades of the New American Century are brutal affairs too much like Korea or Vietnam.
* Third, the public is more concerned with health care, energy security, and even the environment in the form of global warming
* Fourth the media are experiencing decreased ratings and increased levels of disgust from the general public fro both conservatives and liberals.
* Fifth, corruption, secrecy, and deficits have risen to a level that investors must ask whether US companies can be trusted to not use their political connections to defraud investors as Enron did.
And so we see that the energy industry, defense industry, and media are all under increasing market pressure. A broad range of the public believes these industries are absorbing too much of the consumers' income, fostering dangerous national policies, providing products that consumers does not want, and lack sustainable business models.
And as the GOP's political capital has been whittled down to the evangelical base, evangelicals have demanded more and more political power. But Evangelical political support comes with the Millenialist demands for more war and more internal divisions of US society, none of which are good for business in the long run. For a while it seemed like the media's evangelical themed content has peaked, and even Fox has been running more cheesecake and less "values based" programming (war on Christmas). The GOP is betting their remaining political capital on the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and it will be interesting to see if the MSM will play along. And where will the PNAC crowd be during all this? Are the evangelicals after a gay marriage ban AND more war? Most likely they are all over the map on other issues, so there should be a lively power struggle.
Although corporate interests are anxious to back away from the new Cold War strategy, they still expect to make easy money somewhere. Major conservative economic powers have been hostile to the New Deal and programs such as social security and medicare because these programs do not simply vomit profits the same way as defense contracts. Where more defense money allows gold plated weapons and cost overruns, more money for health care would be used for cancer screening and eyeglasses for poor children.
Even though health care is a huge industry, it does not provide the defense industry's path to sudden personal wealth. When a political crony contributes $10,000 to a Representative's campaign, the contributor can expect a multimillion dollar defense contract to be awarded to the company which he starts in his basement. That company might bill out security guards for $700 a day, or fail to deliver anything but still get compensated for its cost overrun. But in the health care industry, the great demand is for systems that will reduce cost overruns and common problems like triple billing for the same $5 cotton ball, or reduce the clerical errors that kill tens of thousands of patients per year. Conservatives have tried to make the health care industry more attractive by malpractice "reform," so that it would be OK for companies to kill thousands of patients per year, but that has not proven popular.
The support of the evangelical community has not been enough to transform of the LGPE economic model of the Cold War into new Middle East Crusades. The Baby Boomers want health care more than warfare. And so we are witnessing the Conservative Marchback where PNAC members renounce the neocon agenda and have as gone as far as endorsing the Democratic Party in 2008. This represents corporate America renouncing the strategy of endless war, and by leaning towards the Democrats they are looking for greener pastures in fields such as health care.
One factor in turning away from the Wartime Economy will be to turn the evangelical community away from the wartime agenda and political power and towards a more traditional role for churches. Certainly, the federal government could exert great influence using the IRS and FBI to curtail Dominionist plots to subvert the US government and Constitution. Also, these churches are driven by the media, and the media can steer church policy. So will Fox run with the gay marriage ban or not?
To set the stage for the shift for these economic changes, the people behind these industries will select the Democratic and Republican candidates. The Republican nominee is still up in the air, so it has not yet been decided whether the Democrat is supposed to win or lose. In 2004, clearly the media had gotten the message that Kerry was supposed to lose, so they were free to be mean spirited and lazy. But at the same time, if Bush had died in a plane crash, Kerry was still a Skull and Bones alumni who knew many of the same people.
In 2008, the situation may be different. The economic powers will be looking for an acceptable Democratic candidate which the media can ram them down the throat of the electorate the same way Bush was. Lieberman has worked very hard to be a Democratic candidate who could also be seen as loyal to core Republican values and power brokers, although he has alienated many of the voters in his district who see him as a DINO. Hillary has tested the waters of "centrism" as a pro-war Democrat, but repeated tabloid-style stories about her marriage may be a signal from higher powers that they will not back her, probably because of the hysterical hatred that so many conservatives have for her.
Progressives are already mobilized to shift the country away from the GOP. It is also moving to undercut the congressional campaigns of faux "centrists" like Lieberman before he can announce a run for the White House and get the national media push that comes with corporate approval. But long term, there is still the chance that progressives will be stuck with a DINO in 2009, and that will be the opportunity for the progressive community to start taking over the democratic party from the inside, the same way that conservatives took over the GOP. The key difference is that progressives would be for the Constitution where the GOP was against it. This would be the most certain path to lasting change, because a Democratic president would not turn the FBI and CIA loose on their own party. Considering that a strategy as nutty as LGPE served as a game plan to take over the GOP, this isn't brain surgery.