The logical part of the mind with its executive functions is the wrong part of the brain to use to understand what to do about what the fascists are doing. They are feel — thinking with hate, fear, and all related cognitive distortions from misinformation and bigotry.
The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism
Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”
The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at 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. 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.
– snip –
He 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, under the guise of religion, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil nor the cold reality of how the world worked…
They want liberals in all their social and political positions gone. They do not merely want our jobs and our money — they want us gone. If the United States wasn’t so steeped in genocide denial, it could see this.
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_8_i4RoC-c4C&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&sig=PzXXLM0CyHIihEXH2rAS7cmyOIg&dq=Half+breed+-+the+remarkable+story+of+george+bent-+caught+between+the+worlds#PRA1-PA95,M1
And so, when the Chiefs gathered to decide what the people should do, Black Kettle took his usual place among them. Everyone agreed Sand Creek must be avenged. But there were questions. Why had the soldiers attacked with such viciousness? Why had they killed and mutilated women and children?
It seemed that the conflict with the whites had somehow changed. No longer was it just a war over land and buffalo. Now, the soldiers were destroying everything Cheyenne - the land, the buffalo, and the people themselves. Why? George thought he knew. He had lived among the whites and had fought in their war. He knew their greed for land and possessions - Their appetite for these things was boundless. But they also obeyed rules of warfare peculiar to them. They waged war on men, and only on recognized fields of battle. In the great life-and-death struggle between North and South even then raging in the East, prisoners were routinely paroled and released or held in guarded camps, where they were fed and cared for. And the whites never warred on women and children who were protected by law and by an unshakable code of honor -
Still Black Kettle counseled peace. A war with the whites, he said, could not be won. The newcomers were too numerous, their weapons too strong. Besides, they had the ability to fight in winter when Cheyenne horses were weak and food was scarce... For Black Kettle, Cheyenne survival depended on peace. War could only bring more Sand Creeks, more deaths, more sorrow - One by one the council Chiefs smoked the red stone war pipe, each recognizing the importance of his decision. When the pipe reached Black Kettle, he passed it on, refusing to smoke. But the others took it up, indicating they would fight.
So, it didn’t matter what the American Indians did, fight or not fight. The US Army and everyone else was actively hunting them. In addition, the rich were using them “to be a buffer.”
by monopolizing the good land on the eastern seaboard, they forced landless whites to move westward to the frontier, there to encounter the Indians and to be a buffer for the seaboard rich against Indian troubles. Zinn. People’s History of the United States, pg. 56
The lesson the Democratic Party hasn’t learned, is the fascists see us as their enemy. That, should be the bedrock for all decisions going forward. They should all be warriors — fighting to the metaphorical death.
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.
Tecumseh
