Patriotism

I'm back from a desperate couple of days in bed, if not quite back in the saddle then at least plodding down the proverbial path leading Dobbin by the reins.


It was back in May when I published my shortest post ever.

Three Things I Never Want To Hear Again

Protecting the American people.
Supporting the troops.
Patriotism.

End.

Shabby words uttered by shabby Pols for shabby political ends, even though I write this six years to the day of that tragic event in New York I cannot help but reflect to what degree that first short sentence has been misused and abused and employed to further the transparent agenda of the worst administration in American history.


The second phrase is but just more shabby rhetoric used by equally shabby Politicos. The troops are expendable cannon fodder, always have been always will be, history attests to that.
It would be well to remember exactly the role of any soldier, having taken the King's shilling and picked up a gun, his job then is to use that gun when called upon to kill people and sometimes be killed in the process.
And never should it be forgotten that coalition forces are an invading army in an illegal war and as such are an illegal force occupying a foreign country.

And lastly we come to patriotism, what a dangerous and delusional word if ever there was.

Never was a patriot yet, but was a fool.

– John Dryden

A patriot is a fool in ev’ry age.

– Alexander Pope.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Samuel Johnson

In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.

– Ambrose Bierce

Patriotism is as fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone, and irrational as a headless hen.

– Ambrose Bierce

That pernicious sentiment, “Our country, right or wrong.”

– James Russell Lowell

“My country right or wrong” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother drunk or sober.”

– G. K. Chesterton

Patriotism which has the quality of intoxication is a danger not only to its native land but to the world, and “My country never wrong” is an even more dangerous maxim than “My country, right or wrong.”

– Bertrand Russell

Patrioism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

– George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

– George Bernard Shaw

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

– George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

– George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

– Denis Diderot

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

– George Santayana

The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations.

– H.G. Wells

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism” is its cult. . . . Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.

– Erich Fromm

One of the great attractions of patriotism–it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat, Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

– Aldous Huxley

Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and “patriotism” . . . Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.

– Gordon Allport

It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag.

– Elbert Hubband

Patriotism varies, from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy.

– William Inge

Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

– Arthur Schopenhauer

Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions.

– Arthur Schopenhauer

Patriotism corrupts history.

– Goethe

Into the cultural and technological system of the modern world, the patriotic spirit fits like dust in the eyes and sand in the bearings. Its net contribution to the outcome is obscuration, distrust, and retardation at every point where it touches the fortunes of modern mankind.

– Thorstein Veblen

The standardization of mass-production carries with it a tendency to standardize a mass-mind, producing a willing conformity, not merely to common ways of living, but to common ways of thinking and common valuations. The worst defect of patriotism is its tendency to foster and impose this common mind, and so to stifle the innumerable germs of liberty.

– J.A. Hobson

Unfortunately I failed to take note of the compiler of this list, so who ever you may be, a tip of the tit for. Tomorrow patriotism and religion.

On Patriotism - Fred Reed

Although I have featured this fellow previously, just the once I think, so I could be forgiven for not recognising the name. But having just read the article in question, and a spot on article it is, prompted me to have a wander around his web page. Fred Reed is quite a prolific author and blog writer on subjects.... well, his site is under the handle Fred on Everything, need I say more?

Out of the nearly five hundred short essays on offer, I have just read three of those, American History 101 and Wikileaks both being eminently readable, as I have no doubt are the vast majority of other articles that are on offer.

Fred Reed bio. and all Fred On Everything columns here.

''Patriotism'' is another one of my little pets, so much so it has its own tag here. I have employed this talking point previously, but it's always a good exercise for a first timer; Google image patriotism, and see what you get for a result.

On Patriotism
Examining the Firmware of War
Fred Reed
May 23, 2011

Patriotism is everywhere thought to be a virtue rather than a mental disorder. I don’t get it.

If I told the Rotarians or an American Legion hall that “John is a patriot,” all would approve greatly of John. If I told them that patriotism was nothing more than the loyalty to each other of dogs in a pack, they would lynch me. Patriotism, they believe, is a Good Thing.

Of course the Japanese pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor were patriots, as were the German soldiers who murdered millions in the Second World War. The men who brought down the towers in New York were patriots, though of a religious sort. Do we admire their patriotism?

Of course not. When we say “John is a patriot,” we mean “John is a reliable member of our dog pack,” nothing more. The pack instinct seems more ancient, and certainly stronger, than morality or any form of human decency. Thus, once the pack—citizenry, I meant to say—have been properly roused to a pitch of patriotism, they will, under cover of the most diaphanous pretexts, rape Nanking, bomb Hiroshima, kill the Jews or, if they are Jews, Palestinians. We are animals of the pack. We don’t admire patriotism. We admire loyalty to ourselves.

The pack dominates humanity. Observe that the behavior of urban gangs—the Vice Lords, Mara Salvatrucha, Los Locos Intocables, Crips, Bloods—precisely mirrors that of more formally recognized gangs, which are called “countries.” Gangs, like countries, are intensely territorial with recognized borders fiercely defended. The soldiers of gangs, like those of countries, have uniforms, usually clothing of particular colors, and they “throw signs”—make the patterns of fingers indicating their gang—and wear their hats sideways in different directions to indicate to whom their patriotism is plighted. They have generals, councils of war, and ranks paralleling the colonels and majors of national packs. They fight each other endlessly, as do countries, for territory, for control of markets, or because someone insulted someone. It makes no sense—it would be more reasonable for example to divide the market for drugs instead of killing each other—but they do it because of the pack instinct.

Packery dominates society. Across the country high schools form basketball packs and do battle on the court, while cheerleaders jump and twirl, preferably in short skirts (here we have the other major instinct) to maintain patriotic fervor in the onlookers. Cities with NFL franchises hire bulky felons from around the country to bump forcefully into the parallel felons of other cities, arousing warlike sentiments among their respective fellow dogs.

Fans. Fans.


Such is their footballian enthusiasm that they will sometimes burn their own cities in delight at victory or disturbance at loss. Without the pack instinct, football would hardly matter to them at all.

It’s everywhere. The Olympics, the World Cup, racial groups, political parties—Crips and Bloods, all.

Part of patriotism is nationalism, the political expression of having given up to the pack all independence of thought.
Patriotism is of course incompatible with morality. This is more explicit in the soldier, a patriot who agrees to kill anyone he is told to kill by the various alpha-dogs—President, Fuehrer, emperor, Duce, generals.

Is this not literally true? An adolescent enlists, never having heard of Ruritania, which is perhaps on the other side of the earth. A year later, having learned to manage the Gatlings on a helicopter gunship, he is told that Ruritania is A Grave Threat. Never having seen a Ruritanian, being unable to spell the place, not knowing where it is (you would be amazed how many veterans of Viet Nam do not know where it is) he is soon killing Ruritanians. He will shortly hate them intensely as vermin, scuttling cockroaches, rice-propelled paddy maggots, gooks, or sand niggers.

The military calls the pack instinct “unit cohesion,” and fosters it to the point that soldiers often have more loyalty to the military than to the national pack. Thus it is easy to get them to fire on their own citizens. It has not happened in the United States since perhaps Kent State, but in the past the soldiery were often used to kill striking workers. All you have to do is to get the troops to think of the murderees as another group.

If you talk to patriots, particularly to the military variety, they will usually be outraged at having their morality questioned. Here we encounter moral compartmentation, very much a characteristic of the pack. If you have several dogs, as we do, you will note that they are friendly and affectionate with the family and tussle playfully among themselves—but bark furiously at strangers and, unless they are very domesticated, will attack unknown dogs cooperatively and kill them.

Similarly the colonel next door will be honest, won’t kick your cat or steal your silverware. Sshould some natural disaster occur, work strenuously to save lives, at the risk of his own if need be. Yet he will consciencelessly cluster-bomb downtown Baghdad, and pride himself on having done so. A different pack, you see. It is all right to attack strange dogs.

The pack instinct, age old, limbic, atavistic, gonadal, precludes any sympathy for the suffereings of outsiders. If Dog pack A attacks intruding dog pack B to defend its territory, its members can’t afford to think, “Gosh, I’m really hurting this guy. Maybe I should stop.” You don’t defend territory by sharing it. Thus if you tell a patriot that his bombs are burning alive thousands of children, or that the embargo on Iraq killed half a million kids by dysentery because they couldn’t get chlorine to sterilize water, he won’t care. He can’t.

The same instinct governs thought about atrocities committed in wartime. In every war, every army (correctly) accuses the other side of committing atrocities. Atrocities are what armies do. Such is the elevating power of morality that soldiers feel constrained to lie about them. But patriots just don’t care. Psychologists speak of demonization and affecting numbing and such, but it’s really just that the tortured, raped, butchered and burned are members of the other pack.

I need a drink. On Patriotism

Pissing On The Taliban

Update: UK taxi driver chunkymark has a word or two to say. Philosophy from a black cab. (Only it's not a black cab.)




I thought I would get this one in before the next round of faux moral outrage starts up, if it ain't already, over the video showing US troops pissing on the corpses of Taliban some men with a wheelbarrow.

"If verified as authentic, the video shows behavior that is totally unbecoming of American military personnel'' abc news - video

Don't people talk fucking shite?

A quick hit of Bill Hicks and then a few words from the inimitable Fred Reed.

If I had to choose one image out of all the images in all the world, that described America, this is the one.

On Patriotism
Examining the Firmware of War
Fred Reed
May 23, 2011

Patriotism is everywhere thought to be a virtue rather than a mental disorder. I don’t get it.

If I told the Rotarians or an American Legion hall that “John is a patriot,” all would approve greatly of John. If I told them that patriotism was nothing more than the loyalty to each other of dogs in a pack, they would lynch me. Patriotism, they believe, is a Good Thing.

Of course the Japanese pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor were patriots, as were the German soldiers who murdered millions in the Second World War. The men who brought down the towers in New York were patriots, though of a religious sort. Do we admire their patriotism?

Of course not. When we say “John is a patriot,” we mean “John is a reliable member of our dog pack,” nothing more. The pack instinct seems more ancient, and certainly stronger, than morality or any form of human decency. Thus, once the pack—citizenry, I meant to say—have been properly roused to a pitch of patriotism, they will, under cover of the most diaphanous pretexts, rape Nanking, bomb Hiroshima, kill the Jews or, if they are Jews, Palestinians. We are animals of the pack. We don’t admire patriotism. We admire loyalty to ourselves.

The pack dominates humanity. Observe that the behavior of urban gangs—the Vice Lords, Mara Salvatrucha, Los Locos Intocables, Crips, Bloods—precisely mirrors that of more formally recognized gangs, which are called “countries.” Gangs, like countries, are intensely territorial with recognized borders fiercely defended. The soldiers of gangs, like those of countries, have uniforms, usually clothing of particular colors, and they “throw signs”—make the patterns of fingers indicating their gang—and wear their hats sideways in different directions to indicate to whom their patriotism is plighted. They have generals, councils of war, and ranks paralleling the colonels and majors of national packs. They fight each other endlessly, as do countries, for territory, for control of markets, or because someone insulted someone. It makes no sense—it would be more reasonable for example to divide the market for drugs instead of killing each other—but they do it because of the pack instinct.

Packery dominates society. Across the country high schools form basketball packs and do battle on the court, while cheerleaders jump and twirl, preferably in short skirts (here we have the other major instinct) to maintain patriotic fervor in the onlookers. Cities with NFL franchises hire bulky felons from around the country to bump forcefully into the parallel felons of other cities, arousing warlike sentiments among their respective fellow dogs.

Fans. Fans.

Such is their footballian enthusiasm that they will sometimes burn their own cities in delight at victory or disturbance at loss. Without the pack instinct, football would hardly matter to them at all.

It’s everywhere. The Olympics, the World Cup, racial groups, political parties—Crips and Bloods, all.

Part of patriotism is nationalism, the political expression of having given up to the pack all independence of thought.
Patriotism is of course incompatible with morality. This is more explicit in the soldier, a patriot who agrees to kill anyone he is told to kill by the various alpha-dogs—President, Fuehrer, emperor, Duce, generals.

Is this not literally true? An adolescent enlists, never having heard of Ruritania, which is perhaps on the other side of the earth. A year later, having learned to manage the Gatlings on a helicopter gunship, he is told that Ruritania is A Grave Threat. Never having seen a Ruritanian, being unable to spell the place, not knowing where it is (you would be amazed how many veterans of Viet Nam do not know where it is) he is soon killing Ruritanians. He will shortly hate them intensely as vermin, scuttling cockroaches, rice-propelled paddy maggots, gooks, or sand niggers.

The military calls the pack instinct “unit cohesion,” and fosters it to the point that soldiers often have more loyalty to the military than to the national pack. Thus it is easy to get them to fire on their own citizens. It has not happened in the United States since perhaps Kent State, but in the past the soldiery were often used to kill striking workers. All you have to do is to get the troops to think of the murderees as another group.

If you talk to patriots, particularly to the military variety, they will usually be outraged at having their morality questioned. Here we encounter moral compartmentation, very much a characteristic of the pack. If you have several dogs, as we do, you will note that they are friendly and affectionate with the family and tussle playfully among themselves—but bark furiously at strangers and, unless they are very domesticated, will attack unknown dogs cooperatively and kill them.

Similarly the colonel next door will be honest, won’t kick your cat or steal your silverware. Sshould some natural disaster occur, work strenuously to save lives, at the risk of his own if need be. Yet he will consciencelessly cluster-bomb downtown Baghdad, and pride himself on having done so. A different pack, you see. It is all right to attack strange dogs.

The pack instinct, age old, limbic, atavistic, gonadal, precludes any sympathy for the suffereings of outsiders. If Dog pack A attacks intruding dog pack B to defend its territory, its members can’t afford to think, “Gosh, I’m really hurting this guy. Maybe I should stop.” You don’t defend territory by sharing it. Thus if you tell a patriot that his bombs are burning alive thousands of children, or that the embargo on Iraq killed half a million kids by dysentery because they couldn’t get chlorine to sterilize water, he won’t care. He can’t.

The same instinct governs thought about atrocities committed in wartime. In every war, every army (correctly) accuses the other side of committing atrocities. Atrocities are what armies do. Such is the elevating power of morality that soldiers feel constrained to lie about them. But patriots just don’t care. Psychologists speak of demonization and affecting numbing and such, but it’s really just that the tortured, raped, butchered and burned are members of the other pack.

I need a drink. On Patriotism

h/t Maren

The American Syndrome

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The last in the patriotism series.

The American Syndrome:

If you have a weak candidate and a weak platform, wrap yourself up in the American flag and talk about the Constitution.

– Matt Quay

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be “American” before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries? It is really too easy a disguise for our shortcomings to dress them up as a form of patriotism.

– Edith Wharton

The 100 percent American is 99 percent an idiot.

– George Bernard Shaw

Treason is in the air around us everywhere. It goes by the name of patriotism.

– Thomas Corwin

Three relatively positive assessments of patriotism:

A patriot is somebody who protects his country from his government. Or better yet: who has the guts to protect his country from its government.

– Piotyr Dirk

Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.

– George Washington

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

– Thomas Jefferson

Brian Haw: A Tribute

It was not with a certain amount of sadness that I noticed the recent passing of peace activist and thorn in the side of the government, Brian Haw. Obituary from Wedgwood here, and another Guardian piece here. Or try your own search; Brian Haw+Gestapo brings a result or two if you're interested.

Recently raised in conversation, was the subject of patriotism. I can think of no better tribute to Brian Haw, than to republish this piece I wrote back in 2007.

Put Away The Flags

Thankfully we don't do much of it any more, wave the flag of empire that is.
Do I say thankfully, because I'm not nationalistic? probably, or do I say this because of what the Union Flag represents? definitely.

You see when you are a realist and you cut away the nationalistic fervour and all the bullshit that surrounds these bits of cloth and take a good look at what they have been built on and truly represent, well they're not something a fellow can take a great deal of pride in, and the last thing that any realist wants to be seen waving is this symbol of empire and repression.

I hardly need to give you chapter and verse on British hegemony and our glorious colonial past, suffice to say the Empire is unregrettably no more.


But as is all too apparent and undeniable, Americans have taken the flag culture to it's extreme, and as the two are inextricably intertwined, have also taken the concept of patriotism, wrapped it in the same flag, stuck it on a pedestal and viewed it as something noble.

The horrific history, and the resulting deaths of millions brought on by American nationalist super-patriotism is indeed well enough documented, but I fear not near well enough read, or, just as likely read and ignored or read and denied.
One only has to remember quite recently the thunder of beating war drums and the waving of flags as America set fort on yet another invasion of a foreign land.


Yet another example of this wonderful thing called patriotism is how it has become a cheap and shoddy tool in the political arsenal.
Seemingly the moment anybody, pol or otherwise starts to talk a bit of sense, out comes the cannon and the patriotism shell is fired across the bows of anybody who might have the audacity to suggest that America isn't the land of freedom and democracy but a rogue nation drenched in the blood of millions of innocents that this shining beacon of light, this Christian Nation, has murdered.


What does it say of a country when it's blood soaked nationalistic symbol is so revered as this, (link now dead) and this is not the exception other examples abound throughout the country.

So let us move on to how this super nationalism is viewed by a realist.

I cannot get out of my mind the recent news photos of ordinary Americans sitting on chairs, guns on laps, standing unofficial guard on the Arizona border, to make sure no Mexicans cross over into the United States. There was something horrifying in the realization.........

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy. That self-deception started early...........more

Filed under the Patriotism tag.

Patriotism and War

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Patriotism and War:

At the bottom of all patriotism is war: that is why I am no patriot.

– Jules Renard

No other factor in history, not even religion, has produced so many wars as has the clash of national egotisms sanctified by the name of patriotism.

– Preserved Smith

Naturally the common people don’t want war . . . Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders . . . All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism.

– Hermann Goering.

That worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor . . . This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism–how passionately I hate them!

– Albert Einstein

Tomorrow the American Syndrome.

"Don't Teach Children Patriotism" Damn Right

.
Yes let's leave off the sugar coating and tell it like it is. Patriotism what a fools concept.
Patriotism is something I have featured previously.

God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.

– Luis Buñuel

Patriotism should be avoided in school lessons because British history is “morally ambiguous”, a leading educational body recommends.

History and citizenship lessons should stick to the bare facts rather than encouraging loyalty to Britain when covering subjects such as the Second World War or the British Empire, the Institute of Education researchers said. Teachers should not instill pride in what they consider great moments of British history, as more shameful episodes could be downplayed or excluded.

The slave trade, imperialism and 20th century wars should be taught as controversial issues while students are deciding how they feel about their country, the report says.

Three quarters of teachers felt obliged to tell students about the danger of patriotism. The survey suggested neither pupils nor teachers wanted patriotism endorsed by schools.more

Patriotism and Religion

.
.

Patriotism and Religion:

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.

– Guy de Maupassant

God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.

– Luis Buñuel

To be patriotic, hate all nations but you own; to be religious, all sects but your own; to be moral, all pretenses but your own.

– Lionel Strachey

When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at strangers, it is patriotism!

– David Starr Jordan

Tomorrow Patriotism and War

Put Away The Flags

Thankfully we don't do much of it any more, wave the flag of empire that is.
Do I say thankfully because I'm not nationalistic? probably, or do I say this because of what the Union Flag represents? definitely.

You see when you are a realist and you cut away the nationalistic fervour and all the bullshit that surrounds these bits of cloth and take a good look at what they have been built on and truly represent, well they're not something a fellow can take a great deal of pride in, and the last thing that any realist wants to be seen waving is this symbol of empire and repression.

I hardly need to give you chapter and verse on British hegemony and our glorious colonial past, suffice to say the Empire is unregrettably no more.

But as is all too apparent and undeniable, Americans have taken the flag culture to it's extreme, and as the two are inextricably intertwined, have also taken the concept of patriotism, wrapped it in the same flag, stuck it on a pedestal and viewed it as something noble.

The horrific history and the resulting deaths of millions brought on by American nationalist super-patriotism is indeed well enough documented, but I fear not near well enough read, or just as likely read and ignored or read and denied.
One only has to remember quite recently the thunder of beating war drums and the waving of flags as America set fort on yet another invasion of a foreign land.

Yet another example of this wonderful thing called patriotism is how it has become a cheap and shoddy tool in the political arsenal.
Seemingly the moment anybody, pol or otherwise starts to talk a bit of sense, out comes the cannon and the patriotism shell is fired across the bows of anybody who might have the audacity to suggest that America isn't the land of freedom and democracy but a rogue nation drenched in the blood of millions of innocents, that this shining beacon of light, this Christian Nation, has murdered.

What does it say of a country when it's blood soaked nationalistic symbol is so revered as this, and this is not the exception other examples abound throughout the country.

So let us move on to how this super nationalism is viewed by a realist.

I cannot get out of my mind the recent news photos of ordinary Americans sitting on chairs, guns on laps, standing unofficial guard on the Arizona border, to make sure no Mexicans cross over into the United States. There was something horrifying in the realization.........

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy. That self-deception started early...........more

Please Don't Mention The War

When a blog author, me, had this to say previously:

When All Else Fails Roll Out Adolf Hitler - Rick Santorum

I've lost count as to how many times I have iterated the header in commenting on this blog. When you are talking bullshit and you have nothing to support your argument, roll out Adolf.

It then leaves little doubt as to why I have picked up on this article posted in the BBC's News Magazine.

Making some excellent points on all manner things, both historical and contemporary, there is little I would disagree with, other than, yes there is always an other than or a but in most everything one reads. And so there should be, critical thought differentiates us as individuals rather than one of the flock, plebeian or religious, the choice matters not.

The author writes:

When I read well-intentioned people talking about the impossibility of assimilating Muslims in my adopted country of France, for instance, I become frightened when I see that they are usually entirely unaware that they are repeating - often idea for idea and sometimes word for word - the themes of the anti-Semitic polemics that set off the Dreyfus affair a century ago.

Yes quite. Don't we already know that Muslims just want to be left alone so they can subjugate their women in peace? The odd Jihad apart that is. When you find Utopia Mister Gopnik, please do let me know.

But that said, the rest of it quite readable.

A Point of View: Don’t mention the war?
by Adam Gopnik
29 June 2012

It's time to stop invoking Hitler and the Nazis in arguments about everything from censorship to birth control - but we should never stop heeding the lessons of World War II, says Adam Gopnik.

Whoops! sorry, wrong photo, here's the one.

It's time to stop invoking Hitler and the Nazis in arguments about everything from censorship to birth control - but we should never stop heeding the lessons of World War II, says Adam Gopnik.

Over the past few weeks, I have been talking about bees, and the Beatles, and babies (at least ones who are babies no longer), and also about books and bad reviews. I am as deep in the Bs as the crew that went hunting for the Snark in Lewis Carroll.

I hope you will forgive me if I turn this week to something, if not more serious, then more obviously sombre, and that is the question of what the memory of World War II ought to mean to people now.

It recedes, its soldiers die, its battles become the occasion for camp fantasy, or Quentin Tarantino movies - the same thing.

Recently, the Economist published a long book review asking just that; what WWII ought to mean to people now?

We know already what it means to publishers and television networks. The publishers love new books about the war's battles, and the cable shows can never get enough Nazis. A German friend once complained to me that educated Westerners often know far more about the German government during those five years of war than they do about all German governments in the 60 years of subsequent peace.

But then, as The Economist wrote: "the sheer magnitude of the human tragedy of [WWII] puts it in a class of its own, and its relative closeness to the present day makes claims on the collective memory that more remote horrors cannot."

Does it, should it, make such claims? Of course, there is a band of American neo-conservatives who insist on seeing every new year as another 1938, with whomever is the monster of the week cast as a Hitler figure.

On the other extreme, there are those who insist that there is, in a sense, nothing to learn from what happened then, because it was so uniquely, horribly evil. There is even a principle, frequently repeated during internet squabbles, and half-jokingly called Godwin's Law (after Mike Godwin, an expert in internet law of the unjoking kind, who first invoked it). It states simply that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler gets greater. The stupider the argument becomes, the more likely someone is to use the "reductio ad Hitlerium".

Therefore Godwin's law implies - and this is the law-like bit - one should try never to compare anything or anyone current to Nazis, Nazism - or for that matter, to mention 1938, Munich, appeasement or any of the rest of the arsenal of exhausted exemplars. It's a bit like Basil Fawlty's old rule when the German guests come to the hotel: "Whatever you do, don't mention the war!"

And, to an extent, this caution is sane and sound.

The people on the right who invoke "liberal fascism" should be bundled off - with those on the left, who morph Thatcher's or Blair's picture into Himmler's - shut up in a library, and made to read some history.

But I'm always haunted by the simple words of the historian Richard Evans towards the end of his good book, The Third Reich at War, where he said that we should always remember that what happened was not some act of Satan - though Satanic acts took place - but the result of the unleashed power of long latent traditions of militarism, nationalism and the hatred of difference. It was the force of three ever-living things, braided together like hissing, poisonous snakes around a healthy tree.

The danger is that each of these things is not necessarily evil on first appearance, and each seeks a new name in new times.

"There are obvious topics in which the [Nazi] comparison recurs. In discussions about guns and the Second Amendment, for example, gun-control advocates are periodically reminded that Hitler banned personal weapons.

"And birth-control debates are frequently marked by pro-lifers' insistence that abortionists are engaging in mass murder, worse than that of Nazi death camps. And in any newsgroup in which censorship is discussed, someone inevitably raises the spectre of Nazi book-burning.

"I developed Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

The old distinction between patriotism and nationalism, made many times by many people, has never been more vital to our mental health than it is now - as vital for the health of the country as the distinction between sexual fantasy and pornography is for the health of a marriage. Patriotism, like fantasy, is a kind of sauce, a pleasing irrationalism that is part of what makes us human - and saucy. Nationalism, like pornography, is a kind of narcissistic addiction that devours our humanity.

Patriotism is a love of a place and of the people in a place. As GK Chesterton understood, it becomes more intense the smaller the unit gets, so that it was possible for him to feel more patriotism for Notting Hill than for Britain.

Nationalism is the opposite belief; that your place is better than everyone else's and that people who don't feel this way about it are somehow victimising you.

Recently in America, "exceptionalism" has become the new name for this illness. All nations are exceptional, but some are more exceptional than others, and America is the most exceptional of all. This sounds like a mordant joke, but it is actually what many people in the US believe, and want everyone else to believe, and routinely arraign President Obama for not believing in enough. (As it happens, for good or ill, he does.)

To believe this, it is necessary first of all to be exceptional in never having lived in any other place that thinks itself exceptional.

"History is full of wars that were bloodier than the Second World War. As a proportion of the population, more people were killed during the An Lushan rebellion in 8th Century China, for example, or by the Thirty Years War in 17th Century central Europe.

"But the sheer magnitude of the human tragedy of WWII puts it in a class of its own, and its relative closeness to the present day makes claims on the collective memory that more remote horrors cannot."

Any American lucky enough to grow up in Canada, as I did, which believes itself rightly to be exceptional among the world's nations in its ability to cover an entire continent in common values without the governments ever having once resorted to internal violence. Or else to have lived, as I also have been lucky enough to do, for many years in France, which believes itself to be exceptional among the countries of the world because… well, I haven't time to enumerate all those reasons, though they were nicely summed up in Noel Coward's remark, just after the death of General De Gaulle. Asked what De Gaulle might say to God, Coward said that that depended entirely on how good God's French was.

Exceptionalism, it seems, is the least exceptional thing on earth.

Just as nationalism is the opposite of patriotism, not its extension, so militarism is an emotion opposed to the universal urge to honour soldiers for their courage. Militarism is the belief that the military's mission is moral, or moralistic. That the army can be used to restore the honour of the nation, or to improve our morals, and that a failure to use it to right every imagined affront is a failure of nerve, rather than a counsel of good sense.

After 9/11, in the US we suffered from a plague of militarism of this kind, again mostly from sagging middle-aged writers who wanted to send someone else's kids to war so that the middle-aged men could feel more manly in the face of a national insult. Militarism is not the soldiers' faith that war can be conducted honourably, but the polemicist's belief that war confers honour.

Hatred of difference - notice I carefully did not say racial hatred, or religious hatred. Hitler hated Jews because of their religion, and because of their race, but he hated them above all because of their otherness.

When I read well-intentioned people talking about the impossibility of assimilating Muslims in my adopted country of France, for instance, I become frightened when I see that they are usually entirely unaware that they are repeating - often idea for idea and sometimes word for word - the themes of the anti-Semitic polemics that set off the Dreyfus affair a century ago. For those writers, too, believed not that Jews were eternally evil, but that Judaism was just too different, too foreign to France, and tied to violence against the nation and its heritage.

And indeed there were Jewish anarchists in Europe, as there are Muslim extremists now. But there was never a Jewish problem in France, any more than there is a Muslim problem now.

This is a question in which after a half-millennium of religious warfare, the results are really all in. If we accept the Enlightenment values of tolerance, coexistence and mutual pursuit of material happiness, things in the long run work out. If we don't, they won't.

So, from now, when we evoke Godwin's Law, as we ought to, I would like to propose Gopnik's Amendment to it. We should never believe that people who differ from us about how we ought to spend public money want to commit genocide or end democracy, and we should stop ourselves from saying so, even in the pixelled heat of internet argument.

But when we see the three serpents of militarism, nationalism and hatred of difference we should never be afraid to call them out, loudly, by name, and remind ourselves and other people, even more loudly still, of exactly what they have made happen in the past.

We should never, in this sense, be afraid to mention the war. We should say, listen: you've heard all this before - but let me tell you again just what happened in the garden the last time someone let the snakes out. It is exactly the kind of lesson that history is supposed to be there to teach us. BBC

Dennis Potter The Last Interview

Updated below.

It was afterall a rather light hearted program, never for a moment had I expected to find within, content that moved me the way it did. But that part of the program, Frost on Interviews, (UK only) that featured Melvyn Bragg talking about, and talking with, Dennis Potter (The Last Interview 1994) I found profound, inspirational, and quite moving.

It's at this point that I would normally say a few more words on the subject, but I can't, and for no other reason that I am posting the full interview sight unseen. Unusual I know, but I'm pretty sure it's a decision that will be without regret, watching for the first time, as you yourself may, here on this blog.

Though I can't give you an introduction, I an taking the liberty of employing one already writ, courtesy of Brian Edwards Media.

The Finest Television Interview Ever Recorded: Melvyn Bragg talks to Dennis Potter
Brian Edwards
February 7th, 2011

On 15 March 1994 Melvyn Bragg interviewed the playwright and television dramatist Dennis Potter. The interview was broadcast on the BBC’s Channel Four on April 5. Potter died of cancer two months later on June 7.

Potter smokes throughout the interview, holding the cigarette and lighter between the bunched fingers of his clawed right hand. Like his hero Philip E Marlowe, the mystery writer in perhaps his most celebrated work, The Singing Detective, the playwright had suffered for much of his life from debilitating and painful psoriatic arthropathy, a skin and joint disease which, in its chronic stages, formed lesions and sores over his entire body, partially crippling his hands and feet. He was eventually obliged to write with the pen tied to his wrist.

Beside his chair in the television studio he has a flask of morphine, which he drinks from at intervals during the conversation to control the pain.

All of this would make the interview remarkable enough. But it is the quality of what is said, of Bragg’s questions and Potters responses, which allows me to call this ‘the finest television interview ever recorded’. Much of a media commentator’s time is given over to criticism in the negative rather than the neutral sense of the word. I thought it appropriate to redress the balance a little by inviting you to watch this small screen gem. The YouTube version is in seven parts, each just under 10 minutes long.

If you’re unfamiliar with Potter’s work, Wikipedia or YouTube are both good places to start.

Enjoy! Brian Edwards

By the by, enjoy the three minute "parting shot" from Potter, I think you may find it quite amusing. Certainly topical.

Update:

What can I say; other than perhaps to parrot the words: ‘the finest television interview ever recorded’? But by concentrating on the 'interview' does that do disservice to the man? Most surely, for if nothing else, you bathe in Potter's remarkable essence throughout this fascinating, sixty some odd minutes.

Of all that past, and there was much, during this fleeting hour, I never felt more connected with a man as when he described his type of patriotism, for as you might know I don't do patriotism, but Potter described his love for this England, not for its flags and all the razzmatazz that people normally associate with, as Samuel Johnson put it: Patriotism, the last refuge of scoundrels, but a quiet almost unspoken love for this country ours, this England.

But no few words would be complete, particularly in light of what is transpiring at this very moment that I write, is Potter's scathing condemnation of Rupert Murdoch, and in other places during the interview other than the aforementioned 'parting shot.' Which is by the way, part of the main body of the interview, not the parting shot as the words imply.

File under: unmissable.

Update: Bollocks, video private. There are some miserable fucking cunts about, let me see if I can find a new upload.

Sorry folks, everywhere I've searched it comes up as private, I can't even find any files to download in order that I might up it myself. What a bummer.  

















Tip of the hat to HerefordMSV for the uploads.

Fred Reed: Love of Country

It's not for nothing that Fred Reed has his own tag on this here blog, not when he keeps coming up with little gems like this it ain't.

Y'all enjoy now.

Love of Country

Seldom Requited
July 23, 2012

I’m trying to understand love of country. It’s hard hoeing. Maybe some things just ain’t understandable. Or maybe it’s ‘cause I’m from West Virginia and don’t have shoes, ‘cause they ain’t any that fits people with twelve toes. How are you supposed to love a country where you can't get shoes?

I’m not even sure there’s any such thing as a country. Mostly my country seems to be a bunch of brigands in Washington who send you tax forms to get money so they can kill people in some place that never did anything to you and you probably don’t know where is. When did I ask them to do that?

It looks to me like a country is just a temporary mood ginned up to get everybody hooting and hollering behind the grenade industry with other people’s money. People just naturally like to get together in packs and kill each other, or beat each other full of concussions like in football, or have gangs and zip guns and ball bats and smack hell out of each other. A country’s just a teenage gang with older teenagers and better zip guns, I reckon. All you got to do is get them riled up about something that probably don’t exist. You send the dumb ones to get killed and the smart ones cash the checks at home. That’s what a country is.

Think about it. Isn’t it true? When the gummint wants to go kill folks we mostly never heard of, in Halfghanistan or Eye Rack this week anyway, it acts like the country is one solid thing, a big happy family, and has to think the same things. If the gummint hates Halfghans, or wants their oil or something, we all got to hate them because we ought to love our country. It makes as much sense as lug nuts on a birthday cake.

I can’t see how there’s anything special about a country. It’s just a big herd full of little herds that hate each other and want to swindle each other and pick everybody’s pockets and burgle their houses if they can’t actually steal them. I mean, the blacks hate the whites and beat them lopsided so they can take pictures, and half the whites hate blacks but don’t dare say so, and want to run Mieesicans out of the country, and the Messicans hate the blacks and the whites that want to run them back to Messico, and everybody hates Moslems, whatever one of those is. Maybe that’s a country. It looks more like a bar fight waiting to happen.

What’s funny is how people talk about how they love their country, but don’t act like it. I mean, there ain’t nothing more patriotic than a businessman who thinks he can make money at it. The newspaper in Charlestown says the gummint spends a trillion dollars on wars every year, either fighting them or getting ready or looking for new ones. I don’t know how much a trillion is. I do know it never sees the inside of a soldier’s pockets.

No. All they get is stumps and blinded and dead. The businessmen don’t want them to win, because then the gummint wouldn’t buy as many helicopters to get shot down and then buy more. But businessmen don’t want the troops to lose either, for exactly the same reason. Nobody in his right mind stops a going concern.

We got two kinds of businessman, and they both love their country the way a bank robber loves a bank. One kind wants to bring the whole country of Messico to America so they can pay them twelve cents an hour under the table and get rich. The other wants to send all America’s factories to China where they can pay twelve cents an hour and get rich. Both kinds drip patriotism like oil from a 1964 Harley. If anyone loved me like businessmen love their country, I’d go into hiding.

Then we’ve got the military that loves its country something crazy. In West Virginia I noticed that ticks love cows. (Why did I think of that, I wonder?) In Washington you’ve got whole packs of colonels strutting around like barnyard roosters, but with less brains, and saying that hippies and reporters need to support the Pentagon’s troops in killing Halfghans. It’s so they can show how much they love their country.

See, colonels think they are the country, and nobody but them gets to decide what the country wants. But what if I think I’m the country as much as some useless tax-sucking colonel with colored gewgaws stuck on his coat jacket like a stamp collection? And what if I don’t want to bomb anybody that I don’t know, just to make money for bomb factories?

I didn’t know that Lockheed-Martin was a country. I do now.

I got my doubts about some other patriots too. Suppose you went up north to Wall Street and asked those Yankee tape worms if they loved their country. Reckon they’d say yes? Of course they would. Why, they love their country like a hog loves cornbread. Of course, the hog don’t care whose cornbread.

Thing is, the tapeworms, along with the other part of the gummint that stays in Washington, just busted the economy and left half of us with no house. If that ain’t patriotism, I don’t know what might be. And they didn’t even say they was sorry, probably because they were too busy hiding the money in off-shore accounts. Somehow, patriotism usually seems to have dollar signs attached.

A famous fraud said, “Ask not what your country can do for you,” but that’s just what everybody does ask. Best I can tell, lots of folk love the United States till their gums bleed, but don’t want to do anything for it except run it broke. Congress takes bribes the way a Las Vegas slot machine eats quarters. Big Pharma swindles the public like a riverboat gambler with three decks of aces in his pockets. The Pentagon ain’t nothing but Section Eight housing with five walls, so’s you can tell whoever built it wasn’t paying attention.

I guess with lots of practice I might learn to love hookworm, or leprosy, or even rap music like they have on the radio out of Wheeling—though that may be stretching it. But I can’t go lower. I got my limits. Fred On Everything

Have You Ever...

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Google imaged "patriotism"



Patriotism has it's own label on this blog.
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Beware of Right Wing Hate Group Attacks Coming in America

The underlying theme in the main post is as much about what this one liner says as it says about anything else.

A Willingness to Destroy America in Order to "Save" it

And these Fundies Patriots are more than willing to see that happen, if it should realise their goal of a single party of Christian Fundamentalists ruling America for ever and a day. Forever that is, or until the Rapture, whichever comes first.

Some might wonder why I have such a hard-on for what goes on in America? It's quite simple really, it being down to just one word. One word, the substance of which, coats ninety nine percent of everything that is America, quite simply, hypocrisy.




Something from a previous post that says it all.

.....and ain't impressed with all the jingoistic patriotic shite that every other Congress Critter revels in. Or better said, hides behind, because there isn't a patriot between the whole disingenuous bunch of 'em, not one. There isn't one of them that puts country first, it's party or self first and the country go to hell in a hand-basket, which of course it is.




Intolerant Right Wing hate groups (Christian fundamentalist) armed with bomb, bullets and Bibles, are being primed by intolerant Right Wing hate group leaders to commit acts of violent sedition patriotism against US Government.

You might notice the header; coming IN, not coming to, because let's face it, per capita, America must have more fundamentalist nutjobs than any other country on the planet.

But as I reported previously, these plebeians for patriotism, these jihadists for Jesus, are far from a disorganised bunch of loons, they are a well organised, well armed and many are being trained as cold blooded killers.

- - -

Update July 26, 2007

Mike Lee: I Want America’s "House to Come Down" Unless Congress Votes to Rewrite Constitution

In an interview on MSNBC’s Hardball Monday evening, tenther Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) admitted that he is using the threat of a catastrophic default to extort the nation into rewriting the Constitution to force a permanent era of conservative governance:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: How many days do you think we have, on the outside, to get this debt ceiling through before we have a problem? How many days?

LEE: I don’t know, maybe ten days.

MATTHEWS: Okay, in ten days you want to change the United States Constitution by two-thirds vote in both houses? That’s what you’re demanding.

LEE: Yes. If possible we can’t change the Constitution just in Congress but we can submit it to the states. Let the states fight it out.

MATTHEWS: And you think you’re being reasonable by saying you want a two-thirds vote in the House, which is Republican, and in the Senate which is Democrat. You want the Democratic Senate, by a two-thirds vote, to pass a constitutional amendment or you want the house to come down?

LEE: Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying and I’ve been saying this for six months. more and video.

- - -

THE .50 CALIBER Bushmaster bolt action rifle is a serious weapon. The model that Pvt. 1st Class Lee Pray is saving up for has a 2,500-yard range and comes with a Mark IV scope and an easy-load magazine. When the 25-year-old drove me to a mall in Watertown, New York, near the Fort Drum Army base, he brought me to see it in its glass case—he visits it periodically, like a kid coveting something at the toy store. It'll take plenty of military paychecks to cover the $5,600 price tag, but he considers the Bushmaster essential in his preparations to take on the US government when it declares martial law.

His belief that that day is imminent has led Pray to a group called Oath Keepers, one of the fastest-growing "patriot" organizations on the right. Founded last April by Yale-educated lawyer and ex-Ron Paul aide Stewart Rhodes, the group has established itself as a hub in the sprawling anti-Obama movement that includes Tea Partiers, Birthers, and 912ers. Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Pat Buchanan have all sung its praises, and in December, a grassroots summit it helped organize drew such prominent guests as representatives Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun, both Georgia Republicans.

There are scores of patriot groups, but what makes Oath Keepers unique is that its core membership consists of men and women in uniform, including soldiers, police, and veterans..... Oath Keepers and the Age of Treason Recommended.

But far from being a lone league of loonies, there are others out there, Soldiers in the Army of God, or the American Resistance Movement to name but two. Videos of both organisations can be found at the bottom of the page in this very relevant previous post: "..after the slaying of Tiller the Killer" Re-up

Links to three more related previous posts and then on to the article proper.

Michele Bachmann and The Rise of Neo Nazi Candidates

Pro-Lifers for Mass Murder

Warmongering vs. the Sanctity of Life


I think I would be doing the fellow a disservice if I described this as a rant, albeit a well structured one, so let me call it, a passionate piece of writing.

Why We Should Worry About Right-Wing Terror Attacks Like Norway's in the US
24 July 2011
by Frank Schaeffer

The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a 32-year-old man, whom they identified as a Christian fundamentalist with right-wing connections, over the bombing of a government center and a shooting attack on a nearby island that together left at least 91 people dead.

In my new book "Sex, Mom and God" I predicted just such an action. I predicted that right wing Christians will unleash terror here in America too. I predict that they will copy Islamic extremists, and may eventually even make common cause with them.

There is a growing movement in America that equates godliness with hatred of our government in fact hatred of our country as fallen and evil because we allow women choice, gays to marry, have a social safety net, and allow immigration from other cultures and non-white races.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the killer wrote:

"Today's Protestant church is a joke," he wrote in an online post in 2009. "Priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres. I am a supporter of an indirect collective conversion of the Protestant church back to the Catholic."

It seems Anders Behring Breivik longed for a "pure" and ultra conservative religion. He was a man of religious conviction, no liberals with their jeans need apply! Liberals beware.

Norway is just a first taste of what will happen here on a larger scale.

A History of Violent Action

There is a history to the far right, religious right extremism on the rise today, extremism so extreme that in its congressional manifestation it is risking the good faith and credit of the US in the debt calling fiasco. The Tea Party activists also want purity of doctrine.

My family was part of the far right/violent right's rise in the 1970s and 80s when we helped create the "pro-life" movement come into existence that in the end spawned the killers of abortion providers. These killers were literally doing what we'd called for.

The terror unleashed on Norway - and the terror now unleashed by the Tea Party through Congress as it holds our economy hostage to extremist "economic" theories that want to destroy our ability to function -- is the sort of white, Christian; far right terror America can expect more of.

The "Christian Brotherhood"

Call this the ultimate "Tea Party" type "answer" to secularism, modernity, and above all our hated government. Call this the Christian Brotherhood. From far right congress people, to far right gun-toting terror in Norway and here at home, our own Western version of the Taliban is on the rise.

Foreigners, visitors from another planet and Americans living in a bubble of reasonable or educated people might not know this but the reality is that the debt ceiling confrontation is by, for and the result of America's evangelical Christian control of the Republican Party.

It is the ultimate expression of an alternate reality, one that has the mistrust of the US government as its bedrock "faith," second only to faith in Jesus.

To understand why an irrational self-defeating action like destroying the credit of the USA might seem like the right thing to do you have to understand two things: that the Republican Party is now the party of religious fanatics and that these fanatics -- people like Michele Bachmann -- don't want to work within our system, they want to bring it down along the lines of so-called Christian "Reconstruction." (See my book for a full account of what this is.)

In the scorched-earth era of the "health care reform debates" of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren't the evil government. The right even decided that it was "normal" for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies -- even for military operations ("contractors"), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.

Private "Facts"

The Religious Right/Far Right et al. favored private "facts," too.

They claimed that global warming wasn't real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!

"Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!"

"Amtrak must make a profit!"

There is an indirect but deadly connection between the "intellectual" fig-leaf providers/leaders like my late father and periodic upheavals like the loony American Right's sometimes-violent reaction to the election of Barack Obama, killings in Norway and what the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party is about to do to us in forcing a default on our loans, and thus destroying the US economy in a way bin Laden could only have dreamed of doing.

No, your average member of some moronic gun toting Michigan militia is not reading books by my late father Francis Schaeffer where he called for the overthrow of the government because of Roe v Wade and the legalization of abortion. Nor have they heard of people like Robert George. And the killer in Norway may or may not have read my father's books.

But Michele Bachmann is reading my father's books. And she was trained in far right Reconstructionist theory at the Oral Roberts law school by one of Dad's followers.

Bachmann says she got into politics because of reading my father's work. And she is one of his extremist followers.

Non-Evangelicals with far right agendas like Robert George (I'll introduce him to you in a moment) have cashed in on the Evangelicals' like Bachmann's willingness to lend their numbers and influence to one "moral" anti-American crusade after another, or rather I should say, to one political crusade after another masquerading as moral crusades.

"Respectable" Far Right "Intellectuals"

For instance, conservative Roman Catholic Princeton University Professor of Jurisprudence Robert George is an antiabortion, anti-Obama, anti-gay-rights, and anti-stem-cell-research "profamily" activist, and he has found ways to effectively carry on the far right Reconstructionist agenda while denying any formal connection to it and taking the intellectual high road.

Take George's brainchild: the "Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience."

This was published in 2009 as an anti-Obama manifesto, and many far right Evangelical leaders signed on.

The "Manhattan Declaration" reads:

"We will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act . . . nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God's."

In case you've never heard of George, he's been a one-man "brain trust" for the Religious Right, Glenn Beck, and the Far Right of the Republican Party as well as for the ultraconservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church. Here's how the New York Times introduced him to its readers:

"[Robert George] has parlayed a 13th-century Catholic philosophy [the natural law theory] into real political influence. Glenn Beck, the Fox News talker and a big George fan, likes to introduce him as "one of the biggest brains in America," or, on one broadcast, "Superman of the Earth." Karl Rove told me he considers George a rising star on the right and a leading voice in persuading President George W. Bush to restrict embryonic stem-cell research. . . . Newt Gingrich called him "an important and growing influence" on the conservative movement, especially on matters like abortion and marriage. "If there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy," the conservative Catholic journal Crisis concluded a few years ago, "its leaders probably meet in George's kitchen.""

Government is the Enemy

It's a question of legitimacy and illegitimacy.

What the Religious Right, including the Religious Right's Roman Catholic and Protestant enablers, did was contribute to a climate in which the very legitimacy of our government--is questioned as part of religious faith itself.

The "Manhattan Declaration" called laws with which its signers disagreed "edicts," thereby conjuring up images of dictators handing down oppressive rules, rather than legitimately elected democratic bodies passing legislation. In other words, when the Right lost in the democratic process, "other means" to undermine the law were encouraged. This is the language of revolution, not democracy.

The Far Right intellectual enablers began by questioning abortion rights, gay rights, school prayer rulings, and so forth. What they ended up doing was to help foster a climate in which--in the eyes of a dangerous and growing (mostly white lower class undereducated gun-toting) minority--the very legitimacy of the U.S. government was called into question, sometimes in paranoid generalities, but often with ridiculous specificity: for instance, in the persistent lie that President Obama was not a citizen or was a Muslim or that the Federal Reserve and/or United Nations were somehow involved in a plot to "take away our freedoms" or that sensible gun control equaled "tyranny."

Terror for Christ

It was in the context of delegitimizing our government that actions by domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh became thinkable. In 1993 McVeigh told a reporter, "The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control."

Change a word or two and his words could have been lifted from my father's 1981 book A Christian Manifesto, or for that matter a few decades later, from statements by the so-called Tea Party or those by Michele Bachmann, or Robert George or his follower Glenn Beck.

In my father's book he called for the overthrow of the US government unless non-violent ways were found to overturn Roe v Wade. He compared America to Nazi Germany.

Note the ominous rhetorical shadow Dad's book cast over a benighted and divided American future, a future that produced the climate of hate that eventually spawned the murder of abortion providers such as Dr. George Tiller in Wichita in 2009 and the threat of destroying America's credit in an effort to literally defund the USA.

Here's a bit from Manifesto on how the government was "taking away" our country and turning it over to Liberals, codenamed by Dad as "this total humanistic way of thinking":

"The law, and especially the courts, is the vehicle to force this total humanistic way of thinking upon the entire population..."

And this:

"Simply put, the Declaration of Independence states that the people, if they find that their basic rights are being systematically attacked by the state, have a duty to try and change that government, and if they cannot do so, to abolish it."

Then this:

"There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate. . . . A true Christian in Hitler's Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion. . . . It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's law it abrogates its authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation."

In other words, Dad's followers were told that (1) force is a legitimate weapon to use against an evil government; (2) America was like Hitler's Germany--because of legal abortion and of the forcing of "Humanism" on the population--and thus intrinsically evil; and (3) whatever would have been the "appropriate response" to stop Hitler was now appropriate to do here in America to stop our government, which Dad had just branded a "counterfeit state."

Extremism is Next to Godliness

To understand the extremism coming from the right, the fact that there are members of Congress who seem to be genuinely mentally unhinged leading the charge on the debt ceiling, you need to understand that this hatred of all things government has theological roots that have nothing to do with facts.

Theology is -- by nature -- not about reason but about faith. If God's will is to be served then so be it if America is plunged into chaos! This debt ceiling fiasco is just another chapter in the "culture" wars.

The extreme language of Evangelical/"pro-life" rebellion has now been repackaged in the debt ceiling showdown. It is the language of religion pitted against facts.

And the anti-government charge is being led by people who are either true believers, thus unable to reason, or people catering to the true believers so that they can remain in the good books of the Tea Party, which is nothing more than the Evangelical far right repackaged and renamed.

Some people took the next step. The night of December 14, 2008, Bruce Turnidge was in handcuffs and sitting next to an FBI agent in Turnidge's farmhouse in Oregon. He was ranting about the "need" for militias and cursing the election of an African American president. Hours earlier, his son, Joshua, had been arrested for allegedly causing a fatal bomb explosion.

"Bruce started talking about the Second Amendment and citizens' rights to carry firearms," said George Chamberlin, the FBI agent. "Bruce talked at length that the government should fear the people and that the people should not fear the government."

In February 2010, a little more than a year after Obama's inauguration, Joseph Stack, a fifty-three-year-old software engineer, piloted a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, and killed one man and injured several others.

Before killing himself, Stack posted an online suicide note railing against the federal government and expressing grievances similar to those Dad had enumerated.

A Facebook group celebrating Stack had thousands of members sign on almost instantly after he was "martyred for our freedoms," as one contributor called it. The site featured the Gadsden flag (the flag with the logo "Don't Tread On Me") and these words: "Finally an American man took a stand against our tyrannical government that no longer follows the constitution and turned its back on its founding fathers and the beliefs this country was founded on."

In March 2010 the so-called Hutaree Militia, a right-wing, biblically inspired fundamentalist group, was alleged to have hatched a plot to kill police officers. Members of this outfit had planned attacks on police officers as a way of acting out their hatred for the government as well as a way to launch the civil chaos "predicted" in so-called End Times biblical prophecies. The day the plotters were arrested, I checked their online homepage. Here's what I found as their mission statement (misspellings in the original post, which has since been taken down, as has the site):

"As Christians we all are a part of the Souls of the Body of Christ, the one true church of Christ. . . . This is the belief of the Hutaree soldier, as should the belief of all followers in Christ be."

The Black Man in the White House Drives the Right to Insanity

Following the election of our first black president, the "politics" of the Evangelical, Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Mormon Far Right was not the politics of a loyal opposition, but rather the instigation of revolution, which was first and best expressed by Rush Limbaugh when even before President Obama took office he said, "I hope Obama fails."

To the old-fashioned conservative mantra "Big government doesn't work," the newly radicalized Evangelicals (and their Roman Catholic and Mormon cobelligerents) added "The U.S. government is evil!"

And the very same community--Protestant American Evangelicals--who had once been the bedrock supporters of public education, and voted for such moderate and reasonable men as President Dwight Eisenhower, became the enemies of not only the public schools but also of anything in the (nonmilitary) public sphere "run by the government."

As they opened new institutions (proudly outside the mainstream), the Jesus Victims doing this "reclaiming" cast themselves in the role of persecuted exiles.

What they never admitted was that they were self-banished from mainstream institutions, not only because the Evangelicals' political views on social issues conflicted with most people's views, but also because Evangelicals (and other conservative religionists) found themselves holding the short end of the intellectual stick.

And yet having "dropped out" (to use a 1960s phrase), the Evangelicals nevertheless kept on demanding that regarding "moral" and "family" matters the society they'd renounced nonetheless had to conform to their beliefs.

Christian Jihad

Another Far Right Roman Catholic ideologue (and also an academic) even wrote a book calling on Christians, Jews, and Muslims to join together in a jihad against the secular West. In Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War a former friend of mine, Peter Kreeft (a professor of philosophy at Boston College), called for "ecumenical jihad."

I met with Kreeft several times in my home in the 1980s and early 1990s while he was developing his "jihadist" ideas.

Kreeft's was not a plea for blowing people up, and his book was published pre-9/11.

His book was based on the fact that many believers in Roman Catholicism, Evangelical Protestantism, and Islam (at least in their fundamentalist forms) rejected the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Homosexuality is out, sex education is evil, and so on. Kreeft called on all believers to unite to overthrow "secularism" in the same anti-secular spirit that Robert George channeled a few years later when trying to undermine the Obama administration through his brainchild, the "Manhattan Declaration."

Kreeft called for an "alliance" of fundamentalist Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims to prosecute a culture war against what he viewed as the Western cultural elite. Ecumenical Jihad was dedicated to Richard John Neuhaus, the late Roman Catholic convert priest, and to Charles Colson (who later teamed up with George to author the "Manhattan Declaration").

The groups Kreeft, Colson, and Neuhaus had in mind to "bring together" in an ecumenical jihad were alienated Evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Roman Catholics, to which Kreeft added Muslims (not that any actually signed on to his program as far as I know). These groups did not share each other's theology, but they had a deeper link: anger at the "victimhood" imposed on them by modernity.

Kreeft and Neuhaus were calling abortion murder. Thus, the logic of their argument was that of my father's, too: The U.S. government was enabling murder and was thus disparaged as a "regime," even a "counterfeit state," that needed to be overthrown.

A Willingness to Destroy America in Order to "Save" it

George and Colson and the others who wrote and then signed the "Manhattan Declaration" (like Kreeft before them) also called for fundamentalists to unite if need be for civil disobedience to stop the U.S. government from passing laws that did not comply with their religious "values" and/or to undermine those laws if they were enacted.

So if the U.S. government legalized gay marriage and thus "compelled" all Americans (including church groups) to recognize gay men and women's civil rights, the government need no longer be obeyed when those laws affected religious people who disagreed with them. The "Manhattan Declaration" called believers to "not comply." And just as Neuhaus dismissed the U.S. government as a "regime"--and my father did the same when saying the government was a "counterfeit state"--George and his co - signers also used dismissive and demeaning language about the U.S. government.

In a country awash in weapons and wallowing in the rhetoric of rebellion against an "evil" government, sporadic outbursts of murder tinged with political overtones seem as inevitable as they seem horribly "normal."

It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to foresee a day when a "secessionist" group and/or members of some "militia"--let alone one lone individual--will use their U.S. passports, white skins, and solid- citizen standing as a cover for importing a weapon of mass destruction to "liberate" the rest of us from our federal government's "tyranny" and/or to "punish" some city like New York, known as the U.S. "abortion capital" or San Francisco as the place that "those gays have taken over." And the possibility of an assassination in the same vein is a never-ending threat.

What we fear most from Islamist terrorists will be unleashed here as it was in Norway.

Terror is on the way on the way from our very own Christian and/or Libertarian "Tea Party" type activists inspired by right wing "Christian" intellectuals and political leaders like Bachmann who - after the killing starts -- will then disown them and express horror at their actions, actions that are in fact the logical extension of the anti-government rhetoric spewing from Congress and the religious right. truthout

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His new book is Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway.