LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dkmnow)

Democracy Now! is a daily staple for me, and today's program was especially good. Amy Goodman interviewed Max Blumenthal, and (naturally) discussed "Christian Zionism" at length:

"Christians United for Israel: New Christian Zionism Lobby Hopes to Rival AIPAC

"We take a look at a new recently established group called Christians United for Israel - an evangelical organization that believes supporting expansionist policies of the Israeli government is: "a biblical imperative." We speak with investigative journalist Max Blumenthal who reports they lobbied the Bush administration to adopt a confrontational posture toward Iran, refuse aid to the Palestinians and give Israel a free hand in its attack on Lebanon..."

And the segment that follows does not address Dominionism explicitly, but is of obvious relevance, with it's discussion of the "authoritarian personality" and its dangers:

Fmr. White House Counsel John Dean on Conservatives Without Conscience

"We speak with former Nixon White House counsel John Dean about his new book, Conservatives Without Conscience. In it, he warns that many of today's Republican and conservative leaders are: 'conservatives without conscience who are capable of plunging this nation into disasters the likes of which we have never known.'"

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Audio streams of Democracy Now! are available on demand from their website, and the daily programs are also repeated every four hours on Radio For Peace International -- for those many of us whose local stations do not carry it. If you have DirecTV, a Pacifica station in your neighborhood, etc., you can listen/watch DN! broadcasts live.

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The research on authoritarianism that figures so centrally in Dean's book has been ignored and actively marginalized by authorities in the "social sciences." We owe a debt of gratitude to Altemeyer, and others who have persisted in their research, despite continual rejection and censure from the status quo. Some of the best work on human development, such as "Self-Determination Theory" of Edward Deci, et al, has likewise been muted by establishment and academic bias in the service of authoritarian "tradition." It's not hard to see why -- such work is a direct threat to the authoritarian mentality.

This social phenomenon -- which figures profoundly in the machinations of the "Religious Right" as well as its "Neoconservative" twin -- has also been explored extensively from the "psychoanalytical" point of view. For a quick (if imprecise) sketch of how authoritarian "values," and their attendant sanctimony and insidious brutality, are passed from one generation to the next, I reccommend reading the 1984 Afterword to the Second Edition (scroll down past bibliography) of Alice Miller's For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. In the book, Miller also examined the pedagogic forces that made Adolf Hitler into the man he was, and made an entire nation into his willing accomplices. A condensed version, of sorts, can be found in the article Adolf Hitler: How Could a Monster Succeed in Blinding a Nation?

These ideas are also discussed in Chris Hoffman's The Question of Evil. Despite such authors often being very accomplished in psychology, it should come as no surprise that their work is also scoffed at in academia and the professions, both conventional and "traditional" alike. It would seem that the fundamental truths about our frailties and limitations as human beings are simply an intolerable threat to those who, out of deeply instilled fear, crave posession of, and alliance with, absolute power over the lives of the masses. And for such, no known system provides such total "safety" as the fusion of commercial, religious, and governmental power -- a.k.a. "fascism."

Yes, it is happening here.