Christian Fascism: Gary Leupp

[teryang]

http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp01132005.html

Everybody's Talkin' About Christian Fascism
By GARY LEUPP

<A top Bush aide actually told the New York Times' Ron Suskind that administration officials disparagingly dismiss what they call "the reality-based community"---specifically, people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality" as irrelevant. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he declared. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality---judiciously, as you will---we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors. . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

In other words, truth is for wimps; forget about it. We are the champions, the powerful, we make it up as we go along and if you want a piece of it, embrace the delusion. We will punish the French for rationally rejecting the attack on Iraq, and for that matter for inflicting the Enlightenment (with its emphasis on unmanly, unheroic rational empiricism) a few centuries back. We will punish the CIA for obnoxiously promoting reality-based intelligence over the requested, required disinformation before the Iraq attack...<snip>

<The question in my mind is this: Given that this fascist tide is so related to a post 9-11 foreign policy so shaped by non-Christians, can we indeed call the movement "Christian fascist"? If one does so, one acknowledges the obvious: that Bush's social base is largely a Christian fundamentalist one, committed to what it perversely terms a "family values" agenda. But Christian fundamentalists, who have been agitating for years for prayer in the schools, textbook censorship, public display of the 10 Commandments, etc., haven't from the grass roots been demanding U.S. military action to achieve regime change in the Middle East. The movement to achieve that central aspect of the fascist program comes from the elite, with the neocons in and out of government playing key roles. Their plans for the Middle East do happen to dovetail with the fundamentalists' "End Times" hopes and expectations for that region, such that even the collapse of the original justifications for the Iraq War doesn't daunt the latter in their support for what they see as God's plan. The neocons in power, in concert with their fundamentalist colleagues (Bush and Cheney among them) have played the Christian fascists at the grass roots like a harp.>

Excellent essay. Excerpts can't do it justice.

[saltpoint]

1. Yes -- "Christian Fascism" works for me.

That's how it is with the Bush evangelical bunch, too.

Certainly authoritarian, and bordering on fascist.

They want a Christian jihad. They want prayers in school. They want 10 Commandments statues in courthouses. They want control over your genitalia. They want to determine what you read, which films you see, and what art you see.

That level of control, that authoritarianism, is dangerously close to fascism.

Bush himself may be too vacuous to see it, but Dick and Karl and the others have keys to the control panel and they're busy showing the Christo-Nazis just which buttons to push.

[tavalon]

2. Sadly

I feel this essay is too meandering, not tight enough and some of the references are more oblique than I would care to see. This is too bad because the primary thesis is one I wholeheartedly agree with.