One of the most heartbreaking experiences I have ever had was watching the January 6th, 2021 “stop the steal” attack on Congress:
Watching the sacred halls of Congress desecrated with Confederate and Nazi racist hate banners, it’s brave defenders murdered, beaten mercilessly inside Congress, with racist hate slurs, our most sacred Congressional business obstructed, nearly prevented by mere seconds. Congress literally defiled by hatred, racist terrorism, shed blood. The most highly classified state secrets stolen out of Congress itself. Our most sacred core values mocked and vilified: It was overwhelming.
it is incomprehensible. It is heart rendering:
Congress is the beating heart of what makes the US us, we the people: it is where we the people meet to exercise our right to rule for ourselves our fate as a people.
SCOTUS 1819, McCulloch v Maryland, ruled explicitly that the USA is the union of the people, governed by the people, solely for the sake of the people.
In 1860-1865, 400 thousand US military died to preserve that union for the people, we the people, ending the shame of slavery. Many more yet uncounted thousands of US patriots living within the Confederacy died in an active union underground now forgotten in our histories, but remembered there in those southern communities.
Again, in 1942-1945, 400 thousand US military died to fight to save our union of we the people against the same Confederate race sovereignty threat, now labeled Nazism, Fascism, Divine Imperialism, taken up by the Axis powers.
We the People won it and we ended it at home with desegregation, civil rights, voting rights and a national holiday for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, jr, martyr to the union of We the People.
The constitution makes Congress that place where we the people united go to decide who we are. To decide our own fate. Elections are the sine qua non of union.
To me, the whole “stop the steal” assault looked like a zombie virus movie in real time, just like you see in all the zombie virus movies. Literally a horror film, Night of the Living Dead shot live.
I was in grief.
It was incomprehensible, a terrible violation of reason, leaving me, a 100% disabled USA vet, triggered by PTSD, unable to think. Overwhelmed.
But then, on April 9th, after his death, I read about the Prince Phillip Movement in Vanuatu, and it reminded me that, essentially, we know full well how societies get changed, go through irrational upheaval, sometimes for the better, oftentimes not. I realized what I was seeing, and realized I have the intellectual, scientific, rational analytical tools to understand these inexplicable, terrifying people with ties, nooses, nazi banners and violent hatred of everything the USA has ever stood for, fought for, died for.
I was able to untrigger and understand the actual danger we face. How cults function.
Let me explain —
My intention is NOT to denigrate, demean, belittle, ridecule, or make little of the people of Vanuatu in any way. I did not do the fieldwork nor do I know the details of the Prince Phillip Movement. It certainly is not an existential threat to anyone as I can see. No cult in and of itself is any kind of threat. A cult is a social movement and social movements as often as not provide much needed cultural renewal. Social movements are self organizing, and arise spontaneously, and are part of the story of how societies all function. Everyone’s social peculiars are a mystery to others who live different lives.
Cargo cults, a subclass of social movements that occured post WWII in the Pacific, are very interesting, in part because they give such insights into how societry itself functions, and are well studied. We know a great deal about how they work. The Prince Philip Movement in Vanuatu is a cargo cult. I reference this movement because it is well known and widely reported because of its association with Prince Phillip.
The people on the island of Tanna, in Vanuatu, believe that Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Consort of Queen Elizabeth, actually is originally from Tanna, an ancestor of theirs, and they believe that their traditional ancestor, as prophesized, went to England to marry Queen Elizabeth in order to bring back English wealth and prosperity to Tanna. They believe their ancestor married the queen of England to save the culture and faith of the people of Tanna, knowing she is, under the UK constitution, the titular chief of UK christianity [remember King Henry the Eighth].
The Prince Philip Movement is one of hundreds of cults in the Western Pacific called cargo cults that had sprung up all across the Melanesian islands of the Western Pacific during WWII. Briefly, to the Prince Philip Movement, Prince Phillip himself actually is their avatar being, an ancestor of theirs, a kind of messiah, prophesized by their traditional culture, up to and including bringing back a white queen to protect the people for runaway Christianity.
In the late 1930s through the 1940s, Melanesian societies all over the Western Pacific suddenly, without warning would throw away everything, tear down everything, reject everything they believed and practiced, abandon their fields, and wait for their ancestors to bring them their rightful wealth and goods of the US and Europe in convoys of cargo airplanes, hence the name cargo cult.
All over the Western Pacific, someone would have a vision of the ancestors giving instructions on how to make an airport runway with lights for all the cargo planes, and warehouses to store the cargo.
Everything everybody owned including sacred artifacts of worship all were destroyed, fields and work abandoned, and people stopped eveything and waited for cargo, Some marched. Some built “headquaters.” Some performed marching band hymns. Each seperate cult had its seperate individuality … but all more or less having abandoned everything, they’d left themselves with no food — no nothing. Many without even having had any contact yet with US military, only just seeing convoys of aircraft flying overhead. The Prince Phillip Movement is just one of these many cargo cults.
According to the people living on Tanna, in Vanuatu, Prince Phillip is their traditional ancestor, who left Tanna specifically to marry Queen Elizabeth and bring her to the island.
So:
In 1974,Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited the New Hebrides, before it became Vanuatu, where the Prince handed over a white pig to a member of the Tanna community”...”"The spirit of kastom tried to protect people from Christianity … [thespirit] told the people, 'I need to go to the source of the threatening'," https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-13/prince-philip-mourned-by-a-vanuatutribe/13183044#:~:text=In%201974%2C%20Queen%20Elizabeth%20and,in%20the%20capital%2C%20Port%20Vila [accessed08/15.2021 1200 GMT+3]
...The Prince Philip Movement, a sect followed by the Yaohnanen tribe on the southern island of Tanna in Vanuatu, believed [Prince Phillip] to be the pale-skinned son of an ancient [ancestral] mountain spirit." https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/apr/10/prince-philip-south-sea-island-god-duke-of-edinburgh [accessed 08/15/2021 0700 GMT+3]
Chief Lalu, from West Tanna, said: “Prince Philip was a man who connected Tanna to London. Our fathers and our grandfathers told us this.” ...“Prince Philip’s family is Tanna’s family,” he said. Willie Lop ...chief on the island ... is equally unequivocal: “I want to tell the world that Prince Philip came from Tanna. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/14/his-spirit-lives-on-vanuatus-tanna-island-mourns-prince-philip-as-its-own [accessed 08/15/2021 0700 GMT+3]
It was reading about about Tanna and the Prince Philip Movement that reminded me of cargo cults, millenium movements and the whole anthropological analysis of social movements over the last century. My own research on social movements through the 60s and 70s gave me the analytical tools I needed to comprehend, to understand the cruelty, the irrationality, the insanity, and the rabid determination of our own cargo cult, #MAGA45, despite all human consequences.
It reminded me of the irrationality of cargo cults behavior, their disavowence of personal consequence and their personal individual alliegence to the cult, whether it was a cargo cult, or the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, or the Rape of Nanking in the name of the divine emperor, or the genocide rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia: the power of attachment to and identity with the group over all else.
The recognition of the cultic nature of cargo gave me a rational analytical structureof the irrational, based on almost a century of science and study that helped me understand. PTSD receded
As an anthropologist, I had done research on several social movements, the US commune movement of the 50s-70s, Hassidism, Hippie Pentecostalism …
Most social movements are a good thing, creating new ways of facing new problems, like the ecology movement of the 20th Century, suffragettes, abolitionism, bus boycotts, grape boycotts, Pentecostalism, union solidarity, but we know there are those cults which were a great deal less ideal. Helter Skelter, Jonestown, KKK, mafia, race sovereignty, Dominionism.
As a cult, the Prince Phillip Movement gave me a clear insight into what #MAGA is, and its infectious zombie virus.
During the 1940s, Melanesian cultures all across the Pacific spontaneously destroyed everything they had, threw out all their sacred spiritual paraphernalia, and waited for cargo and their deliverance by their ***ancestors*** flying in “cargo,” i.e. all the western technology of the US. With no conceivable rational basis for any such a belief. Why?
.
The analysis here is based on the years of research done by Luther Gerlach and Virginia Hine, who basically wrote the book on social movements. Some ideas are also plagiarized from Anthony FC Wallace’s researches on the Johnstown Flood and on the Seneca Nation Long House religion.
Above all else a cult / a millenium movement is a total commitment to and personal identification with, total bonding with each other in the movement, not an organized hierachal institution under some leader’s control, no budget department, but a spontaneous self organizing network of deeply realized interpersonal bonding.
The more irrational and counterfactual the ideology, the more firmly and unquestionably it is held: questioning the rationale is a betrayal of the bonds of the network of cult followers. Those bonds are forged by living the cult together, cult action. Mutual experience.
Cults and millenium movements, at least at first, originate in a narrow band of ethnographic and demographic boundaries. Cults recruit from immediate family, close friends, fellow workers, your parish, school or grange, your coffee clatch and soccer mom group, your friends at the rifle range or shooting hoops.
A cult at first is clearly identifiable by its ethnic and demographic. As a network of interpersonal bonds. it is highly factional, schismatic, splitting and rejoining again and again, a horizontal, extended social network of interpersonal bonds, no hierachy. Anyone familiar with the 60s anti-war, civil rights, social justice movements knows what this means.
Cultic movements can and do evolve and many become an institutional part of the country's culture. In the 1890s the KKK became institutionalized. In the 60s, in the USA, the cooperative-commune movement at first had its roots in the long American tradition of socialist christian movements but the communes developed their own 20th century cultures. Many became agricultural, back to nature communities, while a whole new system of urban community developed, based on service industries, food cooperatives, group families, coop restaurants, coop book stores, film coops, artist coops, and zen, christian, vedanta, kibbutz oriented communities. Few survived the Reagan-Thatcher era, but quite a few became permanent fictures in their local cultures. There are well over 3000 intentional communities now alive and well today, mostly founded in the 60s and institutions like Greystone Bakery in Yonkers that do important work in their larger community.
The Foundation for intentional Community, www.ic.org , keeps a directory of established functioning intentional communities. The article, Communes still thrive decades after the '60s, but economy is a bummer, man by Katie Gilbert [america.aljazeera.com/...] says
“Modern utopias -- or intentional communities, as their proponents prefer -- still have to deal with dystopian finances...A look inside an intentional community in the midst of the economic slowdown is a look at what it’s like to live set apart from our society’s dearest economic values — acquisition and individual ownership, debt, consumption as fuel for the growth imperative — but still remain under their influence.”
The fragmented factional split up bifurcating intentional cooperative-commune movment of the 60s grew out of a long history of cultic movements in US history and it has has evolved into its own subculture, permanently fixed in the society of the US, allied with the ecology, permaculture and various religion based cooperative commune movements.
#MAGA, also, for now, is at least a very specific movement with a specific ethnic and demographic, people who, it must be said, are doing quite well compared to other americans, yet they carry grievances so grievous they justify assaulting Congress to overthrow the US American union itself. They reject the most essential core value of the union of the people in the name of the most anti-american patriotism since the assault on Fort Sumner that began the USA Civil War.
The #MAGA cult has roots first of all in the 50 year war on science by the carbon industry investing its billions in anti-science conspiracy theory vilifying and demonizing climate science, ecology, geology, basic physics. The anti-science hate cults of industry find their natural allies among the so called ‘evangelical’ anti-science tradition, denying basic biology, geology, psychology, anthropology.
Not to get too far off topic, literally, nowhere in scripture is there even one sentence about a 6,000 year old earth, not a single word anywhere about abortion, and the passage in Genesis 2:7 pretty explicitly describes natural evolution. Nowhere in scripture is "homosexuality" discussed, the word being coined in German in the late 19th Century. So-called references are about idolatry and landed property rights. Yet “the bible” they believe, quite baselessly, requires them to hate science and not teach it to their kids. The educated secular and religious right have nurtured denial of science as the essential conerstone of their intellectual life and economy.
Race and race sovereignty is arguably the most egregious assault on rationality in all of human history, erected as it is solely to turn workers into commodity. It gives rise to the post WWII growing tradition of anti-science hatred and counterfactualism in society. These are the roots of #MAGA, far better explained by others, starting all the way back in 1619. The 1890s KKK changed our culture all through the 20th century, and since the banner of the KKK was taken up by RR-Thatcher and the neoliberals, it’s become the poison killing us all. #MAGA and the various cults of anti-science are rooted firmly in the concept of race sovereignty. The #MAGA zombie movie is rooted in that ethnic and that demographic.
Cults/ Millenium Movements, at least, at first, begin in a well defined ethnic and demographic group, recruiting along social networks, family, friends, work associates, parishes, sports clubs.
They are networks of intense personal social attachments primarily, and the more bizarre the ideas they hold in common, the more firmly it’s held to: because movements are personal social attachments, not intellectually organized. Movements are based on shared action, shared experience, shared bonding that unites people together socially at a deep personal individual level.
Movements of culture change are factional, splintered, schismatic. Not hierarchical but strongly held horizontal social bonded networks, splitting and rejoining and splitting, endless bifurcation. As said before, anyone familiar with the 60s antiwar movement and civil rights/social justice movements knows what that factionalism means. Lastly, movements require some kind of palpable perceived enemy to struggle against. #MAGA vs Good Ole Joe. #MAGA vs Joe and Beau Biden.
MAGA has deep roots in the upper class rejection of social responsibility and denial of science movements of the 1980s and 1990s – the total rejection of the concept of and denial of social responsibility promoted by Thatcher, RR, Bush, Gingrich, Cheney, leading now to this overwhelming need to feel one belongs, to be recognized, to be validated. Without social responsibility, the privileged elite and entitled have no real means to validate their entitlement and have developed feelings of vulernerability. Individuals with collections of billion dollar yachts claiming to feeling besieged and the whole concept of white replacement genocide fears that plague the USA entitled classes.
What makes it dangerously toxic, like something from a B zombie horror film, as we saw on January 6th, 2021, and since, with violent attacks on medical personel, mask users, vaccination clinics and perceived liberals, is their deeply emotional bonding to and identification with what we now recognize as the #MAGA cult. All appeals to rationality and all aspects of rational regulation are reinterpreted as an attack on each person in the bonded group they have identified with. Reason, rationality are out the window. Hence, the enemy, Joe and Hunter Biden are the enemy that “stole the election.” Nevermind the sheer abject absurdity of that.
Prince Philip’s gesture in the 70s of a ceremonious gift of a white pig to the leaders of the Prince Philip Movement was taken as proof of the entire movement’s existence. No ifs no ands no buts no maybes remain. Prince Philip is their ancestor from Tanna and Elizabeth is their white queen.
By the same token, in the name of the gods of QAnon, #45 will be #47 before August is out.
There are many details of analysis I have skipped over. Especially details of the relationship of #MAGA to a half a century of antiscience hate cults created by the carbon industry and its coalition with pentecostal anti-science hate cults. Both of which are allied now to the new GoPQ cult. The huge rise in covid19 deaths among the unvaccinated some of whom chose to die rather than betray their anti-science cult hatred, are considered validations of the movement. Dying of Covid 19 without a vaccination validates the movement. No bail for conspirators arrested because of clear flight risk are validations of the movement. Dying while trying to kill a Capitol police officer validates the movement. Ties of the movement to politics, to funds, to officials in US government are details much better covered by others.
For me, at nearly 80, a 100% disabled USA veteran, ex-pat 35 years, there is virtually nothing I can do except share this personal understanding of the pandemic of insanity understanding we face in the hope others can use its insights in developing strategies effective against the zombie virus.
The fear I have of the #MAGA zombie virus infecting all of us has receded. It no longer triggers my PTSD into incomprehension. There still is little one disabled octogenarian can do about its outcome except shout as loud as I can that the climate catastrophe, the 6th mass extinction, covid19 are real and can be solved by good science and good social responsibility and rational regulation to save life. To save human existence. Can you imagine however, if we as a nation had not enabled the KKK. How many Tulsa Oklahoma genocides, how many Rosewood Florida genocides, how many Battles of Blair Mountain would never have occured. Even WWII might have never had to have been fought.
Literally, you cannot make this up: the latest twist in the #MAGA zombie virus cult saga is the Mississippi poison control center warning people not to take ivermectin against Covid 19, a cow parasite medicine that can kill humans.
quote ABC News,
Mississippi's poison control center has seen an increase in calls of people taking ivermectin, including versions of the deworming drug intended for livestock, to treat or prevent COVID-19, according to state health officials.
The Mississippi Health Department took to social media Friday to issue a warning about the phenomenon...”
abcnews.go.com/…[accessed 08/21/2021 1200 GMT+3]
Science, though has given us the structural, analytical tools needed to understand the existential threat of a dangerous cult where people take poison and deny straight science.
At the very least, this helps me understand what otherwise is incomprehensible, and set priorities, for myself at the very least. The Gerlach-Hine model of social movements can help set set up and organize a rational response to what has become an existential threat to our society.
The Gerlach-Hine model of cults over the last half century has been the anthropological framework that by far best presents the 5 core features of social movements, cults, revolutions, giving a rational, reliable, validated set of analylitical tools to identify what we most need to know about this zombie virus horror movie show and how best to take the steps necessary to defend against it.
It took nealy a century to overcome the damage done by the KKK starting in the 1890s. Had we not empowered enabled promoted the KKK and films like Birth of a Nation, we would be a better nation. Let us learn and return to the promises of Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburgh Address and Second Inaugural Speech and take up again Chief Justice of the Supreme Court’s, John Marshall’s words in McCulloch v Maryland — the US is not a union of states. Rather, it is a union of the people governed by the people, for the sake solely of the people, we the people.
[Let me know if you see anyegregious typos, or other egregious errors that sliped through. Thank you.]