LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dkmnow)

Don't miss this one, folks. Best interview I've heard in a long time. They discuss Hedges' new book a bit, but within the context of Dominionism and fascism, they manage to touch on virtually every major issue that we are currently facing.

Both audio and video versions are available on demand. This interview begins after the headlines, about ten minutes into the program.

Democracy Now!, Monday, February 19th, 2007

Chris Hedges on “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America”

The blurb:

A new book by Chris Hedges called “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America” investigates the highly organized and well-funded "dominionist movement." The book investigates their agenda, examines the movement's origins and motivations and uncovers its ideological underpinnings. “American Fascists” argues that dominionism seeks absolute power in a Christian state. According to Hedges, the movement bears a strong resemblance to the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s.

Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for many years where he won a Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" and "Losing Moses on the Freeway." Chris has a master's degree in theology from Harvard University and is the son of a Presbyterian minister. He is currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute - and he is here with me now in the studio.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Those of you with Air America to listen to have probably heard about "State of Belief". It's an excellent radio show. For those of you without access to Air America, I've found the online website, complete with archives.

State of Belief

The January 21 show features another interview with Chris Hedges, who talks about "American Fascists".

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY jehovahsfitness)

Imagine a secretive religious group with ties to dictators and weapons manufacturers whose ranks include many US senators. Sound like a bad conspiracy theory? I wish. The group is called the Fellowship. You probably know them from their fruits, most notably the National Prayer Breakfast. What I want to know is why I hadn't heard of these guys sooner. Seriously, they've been in the press since 2002 and they've just now come to my attention. I don't want to jump to conclusions, but I wouldn't be surprised that their desire to remain an "invisible" groups has something to do with it.

http://www.toobeautiful.org/lat_020927.html
http://www.harpers.org/JesusPlusNothing.html?pg=1
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=The_Fellowship
http://www.alternet.org/story/16167/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellowship_Foundation

Edit: Looks like Sunfell posted about it over a year ago, but I think a reminder is not uncalled for.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kiji_kat)

And now, time for a game of "Name That White Supremacist."

Quote: "Europe is right now in the midst of racial suicide because of the declining birth rate."

Now, who said it? Click the link for the answer.

And also, I'd like to take the opportunity to apologize to any and all Europeans who read this journal. Trust me, that twat does not speak for me, nor does he speak for a majority of the people in this country.

(x-posted to my own journal)

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

It's been a very rich day for articles! I just found another one, via Mark Crispin Miller's blog that is a sermon from a Seattle area pastor, Reverend Rich Lang. Here's an excerpt:

Within the Church there is an irreconcilable divergence emerging (1 John 2:18-19). At its extremes we see the birth of Patriot Pastors in Ohio even as liberal churches become targets for IRS investigations. We see Justice Sundays and the growth of theocratic nationalism even as more are jailed because of their faith-based resistance to the further production of war. From the pulpits of the nation the Sermon on the Mount, Christian identification with the poor, the declaration to love our enemies are! all replaced with strategies of church growth or manipulations to infiltrate political parties.

Congregations insist that clergy dare not speak its name. Congregations insist that clergy stay embedded in their role as chaplain and golf partner. They insist that clergy provide comfort and offer therapeutic guidance. And clergy, with paycheck in hand, and a desire for career advancement in heart, oblige their congregations with false words of “peace, peace” (Jeremiah 8).

But when does it get said? When do we clergy preach I Samuel 8, Isaiah 6, Jeremiah 8, Ezekiel 33, 1 John 2, Revelation 18? When do we prepare our people for the next act of terrorism and the next seizure of power? When do we clergy declare that allegiance to a military security state committed to permanent war is idolatry? When do we cease our support for the regime that sends troops out to oppress, dominate and die while it chants the empty slogan "support our troops?”

When, in other words, will clergy name the disease that is our present reality? When do we speak of it from the pulpit? What are we waiting for? What other signs do we need? Are we waiting for the inevitable arrests of dissidents? Are we waiting for the next invasion, and then the next? Are we waiting for further heresy trials, further church harassment, further cultural friction? Are we waiting until the waters of the coming economic flood finally bubble up under our own chins? When do we dare blow the trumpet and warn our people? When do we dare cast aside the comforts of popularity, prosperity, and privilege so that we finally speak its name? And having spoken it from the pulpit, from the Bible study, from out of each pastoral visit we make, having spoken the Word then perhaps we can lead our people in doing that which only the Church can do: casting out the demon while repenting for the sin of this republic now turned empire. Just like Jesus encountering the man in the tombs, we must begin this exorcism by naming its name: some might call it militarism but I think it is better understood as fascism (Mark 5).

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY navytron89)

I recently read an article from guerillanews and am passing it along as well. As a few thoughts which I asked myself while reading about fascism and how it compares to dominionism.

Are Fascism and Dominionism really the same animal, just one has a religious justification/backing to its madness?

Additionally I also am posting from the Council for Secularism and an article about how Hitler was not an Atheist as many Religious Reich members tell their flock of sheeple.

The statement; " That America will see Fascism, yet it will be called anti-facism". Well, I've seen the fascism and its many forms including Dominionism and other religious cults that are out there.  

( Fascism... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY lihan161051)

America, Fascism, & God, by someone I know personally, Rev. Davidson Loehr.

Good collection of sermons that cut right to the heart of what we're exploring here. Davidson minces few words when analyzing the dominionist menace, and on top of everything else, he's fun to read ..

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This WSW article talks about the 'whitewash of systematic bigotry' perpetrated at the USAF Academy. An excerpt:

If leaders at the US Air Force Academy—which trains young men and women to serve as officers in a branch of the US military—promote and tolerate religious discrimination against non-Christians, and openly espouse evangelical views in the course of official academy functions, this is clearly a violation of these Constitutional protections against the “establishment” of religion.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY bennu_)

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed
to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.


Does any of this sound familiar?

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY ellid)

The Nazi/Dominionist comparisons are justified. Proof:

http://www.365gay.com/newscon05/06/061305pride.htm

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Here's another look at the NYC conference from a conservative point of view. It's interesting how the different sides spin these things... I've taken the rare liberty of including my own remarks in [brackets] in the body of the article- being there and actually listening to what went on is definitely an advantage.

Conference shows deep divide of liberals, religious right

By RICHARD N. OSTLING, The Associated Press
Published: Saturday, May. 7, 2005

NEW YORK – A video screen showed President Bush boarding a plane for Washington. His purpose: to get to the White House and sign Congress’ bill asking federal courts to review the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube.

Joan Bokaer of TheocracyWatch.org offered her take on the action. “There’s something strange about the folks running our country,” she quipped. The audience of 500 people responded with some appreciative chuckles.

Bokaer, from a social action center affiliated with Cornell University, was speaking at a conference last weekend that denounced conservative Republicans on matters like mercy-killing, abortion, gay marriage, research using human embryos, broadcast indecency, Israel, Iraq, faith-based charity funding, judicial nominations and church-state relations. The book table sold assorted Bush-bashing titles. [I saw one or two, but the majority of books were about the Religious Right, the 'culture wars' and other subjects.- ed]

But the gathering wasn’t a Democratic Party caucus.

It was an academic conference at the City University of New York on “the real agenda of the religious far right” – and it offered a fresh example of just how venomous America’s conservative-liberal religious split has become and how entangled faith is with politics.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

The American Conservative, a flagship magazine of the far right, isn't the place that you would expect to find the following article. But its very presence is a sharp warning that even the most conservative people in the US are aware that the Dominionist-driven rot is spreading.

Hunger for Dictatorship

An excerpt:

Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New Deal, McCarthyism, “the Sixties” (1964-1973), the NEP, the purge trials—all have their dates. Weimar, whose cultural excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score polemical points, but we never do.

Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.

***

Stern points to the religious (and more explicitly Protestant) component in the rise of Nazism—but I don’t think the proto-fascist mood is strongest among the so-called Christian Right. The critical letters this magazine receives from self-identified evangelical Christians are almost always civil in tone; those from Christian Zionists may quote Scripture about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in ways that are maddeningly nonrational and indisputably pre-Enlightenment—but these are not the letters foaming with a hatred for those with the presumption to oppose George W. Bush’s wars for freedom and democracy. The genuinely devout are perhaps less inclined to see the United States as “God marching on earth.”

Secondly, it is necessary to distinguish between a sudden proliferation of fascist tendencies and an imminent danger. There may be, among some neocons and some more populist right-wingers, unmistakable antidemocratic tendencies. But America hasn’t yet experienced organized street violence against dissenters or a state that is willing—in an unambiguous fashion—to jail its critics. The administration certainly has its far Right ideologues—the Washington Post’s recent profile of Alberto Gonzales, whose memos are literally written for him by Cheney aide David Addington, provides striking evidence. But the Bush administration still seems more embarrassed than proud of its most authoritarian aspects. Gonzales takes some pains to present himself as an opponent of torture; hypocrisy in this realm is perhaps preferable to open contempt for international law and the Bill of Rights.

And yet the very fact that the f-word can be seriously raised in an American context is evidence enough that we have moved into a new period. The invasion of Iraq has put the possibility of the end to American democracy on the table and has empowered groups on the Right that would acquiesce to and in some cases welcome the suppression of core American freedoms. That would be the titanic irony of course, the mother of them all—that a war initiated under the pretense of spreading democracy would lead to its destruction in one of its very birthplaces. But as historians know, history is full of ironies.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kalibex)

Does calling the fascist trend in general "Christian fascist" send the wrong message to those Christians who reject it and find it irreconcilable with what they consider Christianity?

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY alostrael)

From Cursor:

(Go read this article, seriously!)

"$350 for One Jew, $700 for a Couple":

Counterintuitive as it may seem to some, a large majority of Zionists in the world are not Jewish, and most of the Zionists do not live in Israel. They are fundamentalist evangelical Christians of the apocalyptic persuasion -- Christian Zionists -- in the United States, who, as Mark Ames puts it, "hope to bundle every hairy Jewish ass up, air-freight them to the West Bank and East Jerusalem (once those areas have been cleansed of Muslims), and use the Jews as bait to bring upon the Rapture, as kindling in the Apocalypse, the final battle that will bring Jesus back to Earth. None of this can happen until every last Jew is penned into the occupied territories -- and the Jews won't get there unless the far-right runs Israel and America" ("Save a Jew, Save Yourself!" New York Press 17.41, October 12, 2004).

Not only dominionist, but nationalist/fascist, and semi-racist.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kalibex)

'The fascism of Nazi Germany belongs to a world so horrendous it often seems to defy the possibility of repetition or analogy. But Dr. Stern, 78, the author of books like "The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology" and university professor emeritus at Columbia University, has devoted a lifetime to analyzing how the Nazi barbarity became possible. He stops short of calling the Christian right fascist but his decision to draw parallels, especially in the uses of propaganda, was controversial.

'"When I saw the speech my eyes lit up," said John R. MacArthur, whose book "Second Front" examines wartime propaganda. "The comparison between the propagandistic manipulation and uses of Christianity, then and now, is hidden in plain sight. No one will talk about it. No one wants to look at it."'

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/nyregion/06profile.html?oref=login

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Karl Schwarz, who is a conservative Christian Republican, and damn proud of it, is the author of a very interesting website that talks about a lot of things- particularly the direction that our country is currently headed under the current administration. Today, however, he took aim at what he calls the "Christian Dominionistas", who are destroying the US to serve their faith.

Here are some excerpts:

I have decided that our American lexicon needs a new word - Dominionistas, noun, plural, definition - groups whose religious beliefs obstruct critical thinking on matters of fairness, equity, Christ-like qualities, confusion between goodness and sin; cultists; persons of Neocon beliefs, fascists, persons of narrow mindedness.

The commentary today is yet another open letter to Christian Dominionistas who need to step away from the Kool-aid and have a long talk with God and Jesus Christ about what Christianity is, and more importantly - what Christianity is not. They might as well call themselves Zionist Christians, for some erroneously do and do not "get it" when myself or anyone else explains to them that Zionist Christians is in fact an oxymoron, or two words that have no business being used together. Sort of like "jumbo shrimp", or "military intelligence", or "Bush Compassionate Conservatism" being just three operative examples of what to look for when seeking an example of an oxymoron.( Read more... )