wolfgang von skeptik
12-18-2007, 02:30 PM
Anyone who knows even a little about U.S. political history understands that from the 1920s onward, when the Republican Party allied itself with the Ku Klux Klan, the "Grand Old Party" has been the core vessel of U.S. fascism. Since then, though these activities have been mostly hidden by a mass media smokescreen, the GOP has enthusiastically anointed, embraced and saluted Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Somoza, Pinochet and many other such perpetrators of genocide and other equally hideous crimes against humanity. With help from Democratic collaborators, the Republicans have also repeatedly turned the U.S. into a haven for the henchmen of such torture-tyrants, for example welcoming Nazi war criminals into the U.S. Government with open arms. Now -- with the Soviet Union dead and fascism marching unstoppably toward its final triumph in the thousand-year reich of the Global (Sweatshop) Economy -- the Republicans and their Democratic collaborators have dropped all pretense of being anything but what they are: hence the Bush Regime's unabashed imposition of torture-tyranny, its nullification of the Constitution and its defiance of international law; hence too the Clintons' open support of Bush's despotism -- a despotism which was first proposed nearly seven years earlier (at the Clintons' urging) by none other than Attorney General Janet Reno.
Knowing these things -- often terrified to numb paralysis by the dread reality they represent (a reality that surely includes mind-shrieking glimpses of our own ever-more-probable fates) -- we tend to think of our oppopnents as monolithic. They are the Ruling Class; they have turned the Abrahamic doctrine of divine right and the autocracy of "god's chosen" into the Nazi ideology of rule by an omnipotent ubermenschen: the concept of der Führerprinzip and its exact U.S. counterpart, the unitary executive and its Decider. The face they present to us -- implacably hateful and ruthlessly vindictive -- seems as merciless as a hungry tyrannosaur and as unyielding as its steel-hard teeth.
But what if there were cavities in those fangs? What if the tyrannosaur were being eaten from within by (ironically self-inflicted) cancer?
Here in service to the principle that we should know our enemy even better than we know ourselves is an astonishingly revealing essay from the hard-right on-line press, posted on a website that (just to place this material in its original context) unabashedly describes outsourcing, downsizing and the methodical ruination of millions of U.S. workers as an ultimate Ayn Randian triumph: positive proof capitalism is succeeding as never before -- that is, reducing the upstart Working Class back to the slave-pens in which we belong. The essay's disclosures should be thought-provoking at the very least:
[...]
I wrote this piece not in order to vent my anger, but to get to the bottom of it, to discover its source. On my journey I realized that I may have stumbled upon some truths that need badly to be aired at this point in the campaign for the Republican nomination, because it is becoming more and more obvious to me that a lot of otherwise quite intelligent Republicans need a bit of multicultural sensitivity training, not in order to understand a foreign culture, but an alien domestic one—namely, the culture of Christian fundamentalism. This need has become imperative, because the Republican establishment is in danger of throwing away the loyalty of the people from whom Mike Huckabee, and myself, come. That is why some effort must be made to understand what it is to be a Baptist by those who can't even imagine being such a thing.
[...]
Much of this attack takes the odious form of snobbery. It is true that the Southern Baptist church has seldom been the home of the elite, social or intellectual. On the contrary, it began as the religion of the poor and the uneducated, those who farmed their own land and made things with their own hands. The Southern Baptist religion was never the opium of the people—it was more like their methamphetamine, revving them up, stirring them to revival, exhorting them to missionary work. In the nineteenth century, there were many rural Baptist congregations where the preacher was not even paid, on the grounds that a paid preacher might start giving himself airs. The preacher man was simply the man who stood up and preached from the heart. If the congregation liked what they heard, he could stick around; if not, he was gone. Nobody told the Southern Baptists what they could and couldn't think—not even each other, which is why they kept dividing off into new congregations so frequently. You still can't tell them what to think, which is perhaps why the intellectual elite distrusts them—they stubbornly refuse to take the word of those who are so clearly their cerebral superiors.
Today there is high drama in the Republican Party. A Baptist preacher, running for the Presidency on a shoe-string budget, has gained a momentum that no one in the Republican establishment anticipated, and that no one knows quite what to do about. If the Republican establishment cannot stop him, it will face a difficult future. It will be forced either into opposition to its own nominee, or worst, its own President; or it will have to follow the lead of a man who simply isn't "one of us." And, indeed, a candidate who appears to have figured out how to win votes without requiring other people's money is an obvious affront to any establishment—a fact that may explain the fury of the Anybody But Huckabee tsunami that may well pose a much greater danger to the Republican establishment than it poses to the intended object of their fury, and here's why.
More and more, the attack on Huckabee has become a not very subtle attack on his Christian fundamentalism. This would pose no problem if the Republicans could dispense with the vote of Christian fundamentalists, but it cannot hope to win the indispensable states in the South without them. This is simple arithmetic. Now all would be well if the Christian fundamentalists were the clueless morons that they are alleged to be by those cultured despisers, but they are not. At the very minimum they have the same intelligence of sheep who, if fleeced once too often, will begin to think that they are merely being used, and not looked after. The Left has long charged the Republican establishment with cynically manipulating Christian social conservatives in order to further the agenda of the vested interests, duping the hicks with promises of cultural conservatism in order to get them to swallow tax breaks to the greedy rich. If the Republican establishment is really interested in self-immolation, they need only give Christian conservatives a good reason to suspect them of such crass manipulation of their deeply held convictions by those who look down on them with contempt and derision.
In short, handle Huckabee with care. Oppose him, if you wish, but do so in a way that preserves both his dignity and those of the people for whom he speaks so eloquently. Otherwise sooner or later they will find another home, and it will not be in the Republican Party. (Line-breaks as in original.)
The full text of this provocative essay -- its author is Lee Harris -- is here:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121707C
To which -- for the sake of those not familiar with the Southern Baptist Church and its politics -- I add the following footnotes:
(1)-While all mainstream protestant denominations in the South have been at one time or another associated with the Ku Klux Klan, it was probably the Southern Baptists who began the practice of euphemistically describing the combination death-squad/morals-police units -- "Klaverns" in Klan-speak -- as "the Saturday Night Men's Bible-Study Class," hence acknowledging forever not only the connection between Abrahamic dogma and racism but the theocratic nature of the South.
(2)-The Baptist belief that it is an act of desecration to put any book atop the Bible (noted in the text of the essay) is shared by other totalitarian ideologies toward their own select volumes. The Nazis regarded it as criminally disloyal to place any other book atop Mein Kampf; covering a copy of the Qur'an with anything -- book, magazine, whatever -- is similarly regarded in Muslim countries, some of which punish it by death.
That said, the incipient class-struggle revealed by "Handle Huckabee with Care" is yet another reflection of how our discussion of class here mirrors a growing awareness throughout the United States that class warfare (and only class warfare) adequately explains what is being done to us and why.
It also begs the question: given such awareness even on the Far Right, how can it be mobilized into a genuine force for change? And what can we ourselves do to help?
(Though I must admit I would truly rather be dead than live in socialism under Christian theocracy, which would be every bit as sadistically intolerant as its Islamic counterpart, public executions by torture included.)
Knowing these things -- often terrified to numb paralysis by the dread reality they represent (a reality that surely includes mind-shrieking glimpses of our own ever-more-probable fates) -- we tend to think of our oppopnents as monolithic. They are the Ruling Class; they have turned the Abrahamic doctrine of divine right and the autocracy of "god's chosen" into the Nazi ideology of rule by an omnipotent ubermenschen: the concept of der Führerprinzip and its exact U.S. counterpart, the unitary executive and its Decider. The face they present to us -- implacably hateful and ruthlessly vindictive -- seems as merciless as a hungry tyrannosaur and as unyielding as its steel-hard teeth.
But what if there were cavities in those fangs? What if the tyrannosaur were being eaten from within by (ironically self-inflicted) cancer?
Here in service to the principle that we should know our enemy even better than we know ourselves is an astonishingly revealing essay from the hard-right on-line press, posted on a website that (just to place this material in its original context) unabashedly describes outsourcing, downsizing and the methodical ruination of millions of U.S. workers as an ultimate Ayn Randian triumph: positive proof capitalism is succeeding as never before -- that is, reducing the upstart Working Class back to the slave-pens in which we belong. The essay's disclosures should be thought-provoking at the very least:
[...]
I wrote this piece not in order to vent my anger, but to get to the bottom of it, to discover its source. On my journey I realized that I may have stumbled upon some truths that need badly to be aired at this point in the campaign for the Republican nomination, because it is becoming more and more obvious to me that a lot of otherwise quite intelligent Republicans need a bit of multicultural sensitivity training, not in order to understand a foreign culture, but an alien domestic one—namely, the culture of Christian fundamentalism. This need has become imperative, because the Republican establishment is in danger of throwing away the loyalty of the people from whom Mike Huckabee, and myself, come. That is why some effort must be made to understand what it is to be a Baptist by those who can't even imagine being such a thing.
[...]
Much of this attack takes the odious form of snobbery. It is true that the Southern Baptist church has seldom been the home of the elite, social or intellectual. On the contrary, it began as the religion of the poor and the uneducated, those who farmed their own land and made things with their own hands. The Southern Baptist religion was never the opium of the people—it was more like their methamphetamine, revving them up, stirring them to revival, exhorting them to missionary work. In the nineteenth century, there were many rural Baptist congregations where the preacher was not even paid, on the grounds that a paid preacher might start giving himself airs. The preacher man was simply the man who stood up and preached from the heart. If the congregation liked what they heard, he could stick around; if not, he was gone. Nobody told the Southern Baptists what they could and couldn't think—not even each other, which is why they kept dividing off into new congregations so frequently. You still can't tell them what to think, which is perhaps why the intellectual elite distrusts them—they stubbornly refuse to take the word of those who are so clearly their cerebral superiors.
Today there is high drama in the Republican Party. A Baptist preacher, running for the Presidency on a shoe-string budget, has gained a momentum that no one in the Republican establishment anticipated, and that no one knows quite what to do about. If the Republican establishment cannot stop him, it will face a difficult future. It will be forced either into opposition to its own nominee, or worst, its own President; or it will have to follow the lead of a man who simply isn't "one of us." And, indeed, a candidate who appears to have figured out how to win votes without requiring other people's money is an obvious affront to any establishment—a fact that may explain the fury of the Anybody But Huckabee tsunami that may well pose a much greater danger to the Republican establishment than it poses to the intended object of their fury, and here's why.
More and more, the attack on Huckabee has become a not very subtle attack on his Christian fundamentalism. This would pose no problem if the Republicans could dispense with the vote of Christian fundamentalists, but it cannot hope to win the indispensable states in the South without them. This is simple arithmetic. Now all would be well if the Christian fundamentalists were the clueless morons that they are alleged to be by those cultured despisers, but they are not. At the very minimum they have the same intelligence of sheep who, if fleeced once too often, will begin to think that they are merely being used, and not looked after. The Left has long charged the Republican establishment with cynically manipulating Christian social conservatives in order to further the agenda of the vested interests, duping the hicks with promises of cultural conservatism in order to get them to swallow tax breaks to the greedy rich. If the Republican establishment is really interested in self-immolation, they need only give Christian conservatives a good reason to suspect them of such crass manipulation of their deeply held convictions by those who look down on them with contempt and derision.
In short, handle Huckabee with care. Oppose him, if you wish, but do so in a way that preserves both his dignity and those of the people for whom he speaks so eloquently. Otherwise sooner or later they will find another home, and it will not be in the Republican Party. (Line-breaks as in original.)
The full text of this provocative essay -- its author is Lee Harris -- is here:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121707C
To which -- for the sake of those not familiar with the Southern Baptist Church and its politics -- I add the following footnotes:
(1)-While all mainstream protestant denominations in the South have been at one time or another associated with the Ku Klux Klan, it was probably the Southern Baptists who began the practice of euphemistically describing the combination death-squad/morals-police units -- "Klaverns" in Klan-speak -- as "the Saturday Night Men's Bible-Study Class," hence acknowledging forever not only the connection between Abrahamic dogma and racism but the theocratic nature of the South.
(2)-The Baptist belief that it is an act of desecration to put any book atop the Bible (noted in the text of the essay) is shared by other totalitarian ideologies toward their own select volumes. The Nazis regarded it as criminally disloyal to place any other book atop Mein Kampf; covering a copy of the Qur'an with anything -- book, magazine, whatever -- is similarly regarded in Muslim countries, some of which punish it by death.
That said, the incipient class-struggle revealed by "Handle Huckabee with Care" is yet another reflection of how our discussion of class here mirrors a growing awareness throughout the United States that class warfare (and only class warfare) adequately explains what is being done to us and why.
It also begs the question: given such awareness even on the Far Right, how can it be mobilized into a genuine force for change? And what can we ourselves do to help?
(Though I must admit I would truly rather be dead than live in socialism under Christian theocracy, which would be every bit as sadistically intolerant as its Islamic counterpart, public executions by torture included.)