UPDATE: for more deeply researched speculation on the beliefs of George W. Bush, see this post, by dogemperor. While my interpretations are not synonymous with dogemperor's, few I'm aware of research the religious right, as a subject, in closer detail. Is George W. Bush an Assemblies Of God "Manchurian candidate" ? (my characterization, not dogemperor's) I reserve judgement on that but dogemperor's intensely researched post suggests, at the very least, that Americans should be far more concerned about the beliefs of the current American president than they appear to be. I've been pursuing a parallel track to dogemperor's research, on Bush's religious beliefs, and we've both come similar conclusions, quite independently ; that George W. Bush does hold religious belief and that his form of belief is dramatically more extreme than has been previously recognized. And, that this should be a cause of concern to the American public.
So....
"Gog" and "Magog" ?
That's the claim...
"In 2003, University of Lausanne theology professor Thomas Römer received a telephone call from the Elysée. Jacques Chirac's advisers wanted to know more about Gog and Magog ... two mysterious names pronounced by George W. Bush while he was attempting to convince France to enter the war in Iraq at his side."
The buildup of hostile Bush Administration rhetoric directed towards Iran and the increasingly bellicose US posture feels eerily familiar, and so the question arises - if the George W. Bush ordered an attack on Iran, would there be any plan behind that ? What would be the intended outcome ?
(from the Wikpedia writeup on Gog And Magog)
Gog and Magog are mentioned in the New Testament a Book of Revelation, which draws on the depiction of them in the older prophetic works. They appear in verses 20:7-8:
- And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.
- And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. (KJV)
Here, Gog and Magog are identified as the nations in the four corners of the earth, and their attack is represented as an eschatological crisis after the Millennium, to be vanquished by divine intervention. The language of Gog and Magog's destruction is very similar to that of their mention in Ezekiel.
After spending 5 months researching, for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the promotion - at all levels of the United States military - of the sort of crusading, militarized Christianity discussed in the documentary Constantine's Sword, based on a recent book by James Carroll, I have come to the conclusion that the intended outcome is, quote simply, catastrophy or, in religious terms, apocalypse.
Over the last year, I've ferreted out evidence of the spread of apocalyptic Christian theology in the US Pentagon and even found evidence the Pentagon has been directly promoting, among US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, apocalyptic theology and also the idea of a necessary religious war with Islam.
Fundamentalist Christianity often advocates widespread war in the Mideast, but it's less often recognized that the Neoconservative vision for the Middle East is, in practical terms, all but indistinguishable from apocalyptic dispensationalist Christian views. [note: I've modified my origin statement in this paragraph - I apologize for suggesting that all fundamentalist Christianity is dispensationalist. That's not true]
It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that people who believe in the coming (or even the necessary) Apocalypse are impractical or unhinged. But, my impression has actually been quite the opposite - I've noticed that many people who hold Dispensationalist theological views are often more pragmatic than non-dispensationalists.
Yes, there are those Christians who try to cast demons out of engine blocks or worry about how their blenders might be possessed by demons.
But at the level at which I'm talking, the neoconservatives and their apocalyptic dispensationalist Christian allies have been utterly and ruthlessly pragmatic, I've come to feel, about inciting maximal mayhem in the Middle East.
***
The quote that led this post came from a story that derives from a disturbing incident mentioned in a French academic review published September 2007 by the University of Lausanne. Thomas Römer wrote, of his take on the possible meaning of George W. Bush's strange comments to Chirac, "This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins,".
What's notable here is that Bush's comments were, in a political context, utterly dysfunctional and not, it would seem, intended for any direct PR purposes. In fact, had Bush emitted such statement in public to the American press, so that the American public became convinced that Bush wanted to invade Iraq to trigger the Apocalypse, it is quite possible the invasion of Iraq would not have happened at all.
image, right: David Domke is author of "God Willing? - Political Fundamentalism In The White House, The "War On Terror", and The Echoing Press"
George W. Bush has an extraordinary record of invoking God in his public speech that has no contemporary equivalent. That actually has been statistically proven by David Domke and Kevin Coe, who wrote in Counterpunch February 2, 2005:
Since the night of September 11, 2001, when George W. Bush quoted Psalm 23 and declared the day's events to be the opening salvo of a cosmic struggle of good vs. evil, administration officials and supporters have claimed that this president's mixture of religion and politics is nothing new in the presidency. Just last month in speaking to journalists, Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson offered this viewpoint.
That simply is not so. We have the data to prove it.
What makes Bush distinct from other modern American presidents is not that he believes in or refers to a supreme power in his public communications. What sets Bush apart is how much he talks about God and what he says when he does so....
Bush also talks about God differently than most other modern presidents. Presidents since Roosevelt have commonly spoken as petitioners of God, seeking blessing, favor, and guidance. This president positions himself as a prophet, issuing declarations of divine desires for the nation and world. Among modern presidents, only Reagan has spoken in a similar manner - and he did so far less frequently than has Bush.
Domke, writing October 11, 2004 for the revealer, expands on that last point:
White House officials and allies consistently have made the case that Bush’s faith and language are no different from past presidents....
That simply is not so. Bush’s fusion of faith and politics is anything but conventional for the presidency.
The key difference is this: Presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have spoken as petitioners of God, seeking blessing and guidance; this president positions himself as a prophet, issuing declarations of divine desires for the nation and world. Most fundamentally, Bush’s language suggests that he speaks not only of God and to God, but also for God.
***
Does George W. Bush really hold religious beliefs ? And could those really be of the apocalyptic sort ? Even were George W. Bush willing to submit to a brain scan that might show high levels of activity in parts of his brain that have been associated with religious belief, we would not know for sure. But as the Greek Skeptics demonstrated thousands of years ago, we can know nothing for sure. Still, we assess possibilities and probabilities all the time and most reading this possess various types of insurance, on houses, cars, our health, our lives even, to help financially mitigate the consequences of various sort of accidents from the minor to the catastrophic.
I can't prove George W. Bush holds apocalyptic religious views, but there's a strong case that he does.
Well, you might say, so what ?
Isn't Bush simply a puppet ?
No, I'd submit, but it really doesn't matter - the implication of neoconservative visions for the Middle East, as outlined the foundational PNAC document Rebuilding America's Defenses amount to a sort of "secular apocalpyse"; it is hard to imagine the signers of that document thought that the destabilizing impact of demolishing the governments of Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea... (and several other nations) would not lead to widespread war if not World War, especially considering the possibility that such an ambitious program of regime destruction could destabilize Pakistan, a regime with lots of nuclear weapons.
What's the "apocalypse" anyway ? Well, it's catastrophic war with staggering loss of human life. But in any case, neoconservative pronouncements sound apocalyptic too:
"If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now. - Richard Perle, to journalist John Pilger
"One can only hope that we turn the region [the Middle East] into a cauldron [of war], and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today." - Michael Ledeen
"God willing, Judgment Day is coming to the Middle East." - Michael Ledeen
***
It's been my experience over the last six or so months of studying the influence of the Christian right in the US military that there's a major push on - sometimes it seems more like a race even - to both expand the influence of Christian right and apocalyptic ideology within the military and also, on the part of individual churches associated with the movement, to foment an attack on Iran and dramatically expanded war throughout the Middle East.
There are differing theological motivations for this - classic apocalyptic dispensationalists want to (though they will almost always strenuously deny this) activity trigger the end times, the Rapture, the Apocalypse, and so on.
Another theological school that has arisen more recently in American Christianity holds that Christians (certain ones, the right sort of Christians) must conquer the Earth and rid the world of evil (evil humans included).
The push for war gets expressed in various ways at various levels. At the local level, individual churches send care packages, often with religious material include, in organized troop-support programs, and many organize public patriot events on holidays, with "support the troops" patriot themes that really amount to support for continued war, more war even.
At the national level, there's CUFI, "Christians United For Israel", a new Christian Zionist lobby that says it supports Israel at all costs but, in practice, doesn't tend to so when
Israeli politicians make any moves towards peace. CUFI works closely with the far-right AIPAC, thus tending to amplify AIPAC's power on most issues.
The general calculus seems to be that even though the latest wave of Christian right political activity is ebbing somewhat as national politicians in the movement get voted out for being too extreme or chased out by sex and corruption scandals, [ see Frederick Clarkson's writing, 1, 2 for a deeper perspective on that - the religious right allegedly "died" in the late 1980's too : not. ] none of that actually matters as long as the movement can push things over the top into dramatically expanded war in the Middle East.
If that happens, all bets and predictions - on the alleged "death" of the Christian right as a movement - are in my opinion off, because the national and world political calculus will shift. Jesus Christ may not reappear on a white horse, sword in hand, but if the Bush Administration is able to achieve the requisite level of American public backing for an attack on Iran and orders that attack, the US would then be, for all practical purposes, at war with the Islamic World. The dynamic of polarization would be very hard to stop.
So, the Christian right is not dead yet - indeed, both in world terms and within the US military, the movement is still spreading. And, a new - possibly global - religious war would be just the trick to reverse the sagging fortune of the movement's American wing.
***
So, what can you do about this ?
Well, I have some suggestions based on what I'm doing. I do not do electoral politics, however, and that's another, completely valid and necessary, field of battle. That's what this, and many other worthy websites, do.
My strategic goals, evolving over the past year, have concerned attacking the underlying ideology that's powering the religious right.
Any motion in the three areas I describe below will help lessen the ability of the Bush Administration to wage war on Iran.
There are several major ideological poles I've been attacking this year:
CHRISTIAN ZIONISM: Christian Zionism is profoundly anti-Semitic, and so any deals the Israeli right makes with the movement will prove, in the end idiotic and disastrous for Israel - especially given the proliferation, in the US military, of apocalyptic ideologies that, in the classic dispensationalist mold, envision a future, immanent conflict that will kill the majority of Jews living in Israel today.
Christian Zionism needs to be outed for what it is - structurally anti-Semitic in the most vicious possible way.
Here's my last piece on the subject, and Talk To Action as an enormous archive of writings under the topic "Jews and the Christian Right". A recent post I did, CUFI Leader Fantasizes, Ululates For Destruction Of Islam's 3rd Holiest Site illustrates CUFI's political extremity. Here's a rather scathing, pointed story I wrote, directly addressing CUFI's anti-Semitic underpinnings. CUFI's leader, John Hagee, has expounded a New World Order/Illuminati conspiracy theory that sounds suspiciously derivative of the "Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion". Max Blumenthal has a superb short video, from the 2007 summer CUFI conference in Washington, DC, entitled Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour that's a must-see, in which Blumenthal confronts John Hagee for blaming the Holocaust on Jews themselves. Please pass these indictments, of CUFI's deep anti-Semitic nature, far and wide: especially to Jewish Americans and Israelis.
FAKE HISTORY: The falsification of American history drives the central political complaint narrative of the Christian right, that American, sometime in the last several decades (some say 1947, others say '62 or '63) "walked away from God" and, as a consequence the nation began to fall apart, in moral terms and also in terms of a decline in national vigor, expressed in, among other things, the outcome of the Vietnam War. Falsified American history has its hooks in the Democratic Party too.
[fighting fake history ]
Chris Rodda, author of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version Of American History, is my partner in fighting fake history. She's the historian, I'm just promoting the issue. You can help fight fake history by recommending Chris' book reviews, of fake history books, on Amazon.com [ note: please only recommend Chris' reviews, if you like them of course. If you recommend other reviews (there's a "was this review helpful?" button at end of reviews) then Chris' post won't advance in relative prominence. ] Review of "America's Providential History", a very popular work of "pseudo history" among Christian homeschoolers, by Stephen K. McDowell and Mark A. Beliles. Also, review of "Original Intent", by arch history falsificationist David Barton.
But, fake history is just that - FAKE. Demonstrably so - outing fake history would help undercut one of the principle ideological supports of the Christian right.
MILITARY INFLUENCE: Unless the spread of the influence of the Christian right in the US military is not countered, nothing else will matter. The Ten Commandments, or prayer, in schools ? Fake science ? Home schooling ? The "culture wars" generally ?
None of that will matter if we lose the military. That fight is the dedicated mission of MRFF. If we lose the military, we will in short order lose our democracy. MRFF needs all the help it can get.