Now that we all have seen the kind of political "orthodoxy" that Pelosi (Pete Stark should apologize) and Reid (screw your hold, Chris Dodd) are enforcing, I am no longer troubled by the reception my essays on ecstatic authoritarianism receive at DU. I have always been comfortable opposing orthodoxy, from my particular heretical tradition: science.
------------------
My last essay, "Why the Nazis are relevant",
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2083442&mesg_id=2083442laid out the pseudo-religious motivations beyond the Nazi rhetoric and actions. It was met with no outright name-calling, which is progress in the current atmosphere on DU. In that essay, I pointed out that, however deliberately crippled the fundamentalist fanatic "useful idiots" are, their corporate masters have once again overlooked their infiltration into the military. In this essay, I will take that point to a conclusion.
But, be warned. This is a very long essay with a lot of nuance. That is because I have set myself three very difficult points to make:
1) I want to re-iterate that heresy comes in many flavors (of which Nazism is but one) but that it is useful to pay attention to recurring tactics and events. This is where I will lose any DUers who "don't do nuance".
2) I want to show that the CNP-Dominionist agenda, up-armored by the "inverted Marxism" of the neocons, is the latest outbreak of anti-Enlightenment heresy to break out in the last hundred years. That is, I want to place "Christians with Guns" in Morris Berman's typology of heresy. Hint: it lands in the same bin as Naziism
3) I want to point out, via "The Shock Doctrine", that the more dangerous infiltration of armed thugs is in the private mercenary companies - particularly the CNP-connected Blackwater.
If I could accomplish my tasks in three separate essays I would; but then the connections wouldn't be clear, and the impact would be weaker.
1. A typology of heresyMorris Berman argues that the denial/mortification/fear of the human body is at the root of religion and politics in Western civilization. He sees history as a cycle of: people connecting with the body by meditative practice, having a new religious insight, overthrowing the ossified orthodox religious position, and rapidly outlawing the body practices that brought it to power - thereby becoming a new dead orthodoxy that can be successfully challenged by the next outbreak of heresy.
His book is concerned with cataloging how the constant factor in this equation (the human body and the effect of meditative practice upon it) interacts with sociologically variable factors (historical, economic, ideological, ethnic) to produce different outcomes. Think of Berman's typology as a limited version of the sci-fi trope of "the anthropomorphic universe", where the conditions at the time of a Big Bang determine the basic constants of the universe created by that particular bang.
"...the German sociologist Max Weber was one of the first to argue (that) heresy has been a major force in the history of Western civilization. I believe this is so firstly because our biological legacy, and the events of our infancy, generate a definite energy field; and secondly because this energy field has been deployed in various ways. In particular, a typology of heretical formation can be mapped out, such that we come to see that one of four models is always running our psychological life, even down to the present day. Cultural upheavals in the West have the heresy/orthodoxy conflict at their very core.
...many of these cultural manifestations cannot be shoved into the same category. I have used the label "gnosticism" in an umbrella-like fashion, and strictly speaking, this is inaccurate. Gnosticism, Catharism, magic, Fascism, alchemy and witchcraft, heresies of all sorts - these are not equivalent and may not really add up to an alternative tradition...How to escape from this terminological confusion, then? The answer is that, despite what a more discriminating analysis might want, there may be no escape, and this is due to the somatic nature of the phenomena involved...The things I have (correctly and incorrectly) labeled "gnosticism" are somatic phenomena - lived experience. They resist the neat categorization that a student of ideology, let us say, might "reasonably" insist upon.
- Morris Berman, "Coming to Our Senses - Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West"
I hope by expanding on what heresy means to me (i.e., how I view Naziism as just one recent example of the cycle of heretical outbreak) I hope to convince some people that it really is OK to make carefully-stated comparisons between America today and Germany 70-80 years ago. And, given that Berman himself says this cannot be neatly categorized, I am not going to get into hair-splitting over exact historical parallels. I'm with Tolstoy (you never step into the same river twice) and Berman (the type of heresy depends on the context).
The reason why the Nazi experience is relevant is, to quote Berman:
"A number of historians...have argued that as a doctrine, Nazism...(gave) particular emphasis to the irrational side of human life. It was, in other words, an ideological rebellion against the dominant (liberal, democratic, rationalist) culture, and the influence of this peculiar brand of racist romanticism can be traced from writers in the late 19th century right down to Hitler. While this thesis has much to commend it, it tends to overvalue the importance of intellectuals and ideas for a phenomenon that was violent, pervasive, and grass-roots. Ideas, in and of themselves, are not capable of unleashing energy. To do that, something else must be present. This missing factor is that of pyschological salvation, directly experienced."
The point is that today's fundamentalist Christians are, identically, in rebellion against rationalism and liberalism. The fundamentalist Christians are, identically a "violent, pervasive, grass-roots movement". The fact that their particular symbology differs from Nazi symbology is not a reason to give up on the analogy; it is simply a place where Berman's typology of heresy needs to be applied.
2. The re-tooled version of corporate ChristianityThe "permanent private government" in America (the names of their front groups change, but the families and corporations at the top don't) was never rooted out after WW2, in spite of their blatant support for the German war machine before the war. Only a small number of high-profile war criminals were prosecuted; and, with the rise of the Communist Menace, even some of those were rehabilitated and pressed into Cold War service. For example, Operation Paperclip brought the ex-Nazi spymaster Reinhard Gehlen and his assets (spy networks behind the Iron Curtain) into the U.S. spying community. So, these guys have had plenty of time in a warm, safe place to figure out how they blew it, and how they are going to get it right the next time - i.e., right here, right now.
It became apparent after the Viet Nam/rogue CIA revelations of the late 1970s that working inside of governmental organizations would be met with the greatest suspicion and scrutiny; so the CIA field ops folks simply went private. The CIA proprietary companies had long since become self-funding, after being started up with the generous funding available in the Cold War. (The private air force that ran arms to and drugs from the Nicaraguan contras was a CIA proprietary.) So, we started to see free-lance operations. (A good, but hard to read, compendium of this stuff can be found in "Hot Money and the Politics of Debt" by a Canadian professor, name of Naylor.)
At this same moment in history, the social reactionaries were reeling from the huge social changes that occurred in the wake of the 1960s: feminism, civil rights, gay rights, etc. They were desperate to get misogynistic, homophobic, "man on top, get it over with quick" Christianity back in control of the society. (cf. Berman on fear of the body.) The CIA free-lancers (like the infamous Ted Shackleton) found these partners, and trained them up into a pretty nasty bunch of thugs. In the process, some weird mutations of Christianity (i.e., heresies) ensued.
"The influence of 20th century American Marxism on the rigid dogmatism of the American conservative elite cannot be exaggerated. From its beginings, the conservatism of Joe McCarthy, William F. Buckley, Jr., Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz was not just anti-communist or non-communist, but counter-communist. The key figures on the intellectual right, from Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham to Irving Kristol, were mostly ex-communists who thought that old-fashioned Burkean traditionalism was too feeble and genteel to withstand the assault of the cunning and well-organized communist conspiracy.
The conservative movement these ex-radicals created was therefore one that adopted the characteristic institutions and strategies of communism while purveying an anti-communist (not merely a noncommunist) message. The conservative "movement" took the place of the Communist Party. The Popular Front strategy of allying the communist vanguard with American liberals was replicated in the "no enemies to the right" policy of allying conservative intellectuals and activists with the religious right and the paramilitary right. The myth of the struggle of the heroic proletariat against the evil bourgeouisie became the structurally identical myth of the struggle of "entrepreneurs" or (more broadly) "producers" or (more broadly still) "middle Americans" against a sinister new class of bureaucrats and intellectuals. Even the historical version of dialectical materialism was taken over from communism, although "the end of history" was redefined from the worldwide triumph of socialism to the worldwide triumph of "democratic capitalism".
American conservatism, then, is a counter-communism that replicates, down to rather precise details of organization and theory, the communism that it opposes."
- Michael Lind, "Up from Conservatism"
Mr. Lind calls this counter-communism
"inverted Marxism". Many of the people he identifies in the conservative movement are today necons. This canonization of the businessman is one thread in the new "muscular Christian" heresy that is happily stealing everything that isn't nailed down from a government that has deliberately gone to out to a very, very long lunch under Bush.
You really have to hand it to these guys. They have managed to turn "God Vs. Mammon" into "God is Mammon" without missing a beat. And, conveniently, most of the rich, anointed-by-God honchos just happen to be reactionary white guys. So, what they did to New Orleans isn't racism; its just free market forces at work. Overt racism doesn't play in Peoria anymore, but whining about "welfare queens" still does - in spite of the fact that, today, the corporations are the biggest queens by far.
3. Applying rendition to democracyJust as Christianity stewed and bubbled for three hundred years in the cauldron of the Roman Empire before congealing into one of the most reactionary social systems ever seen, Corporate Christianity has been brewing in the corporate backlabs for thirty or so years. The corporate chemists have been tinkering to get just the right mix of additives in their product. Anti-government? Check. Pro-military, anti-Geneva Convention? Check. Extra-territorial? Check.
But, there are two ingredients that the corporatists shouldn't be playing with. Dominionist Christian and Creationist Christian. Yet, these are precisely the ingredients that are front and center in the "road trip" that disaster capitalism has taken all around the world. (And will soon be in play right here in the good ole US of A.)
Founded in 1996, (Blackwater) has used the steady stream of contracts during the Bush years to build up a private army of 20,000 mercenary soldiers on call and a massive military base in North Carolina...Blackwater...is closely aligned with the anti-aborion movement and other right-wing causes. It donates almost exclusively to the Republican Party, rather than hedging its bets like most big corporations...Is it beyond the realm of the imagination to conceive of a day when political parties will hire these companies to spy on their rivals during an election campaign - or to engage in covert operations too shady even for the CIA?
Wherever the disaster capitalism complex has landed, it has produced a proliferation of armed groupings outside the state. That is hardly a surprise: when countries are rebuilt by people who don't believe in governments, the states they build are invariably weak, creating a market for alternative security forces, whether Hezbollah, Blackwater, the Mahdi Army, or the gang down the street in New Orleans.
When the contractor infrastructure built up during the Bush years is looked at as a whole, what is seen is a fully articulated state-within-a-state that is as muscular and capable as the actual state is frail and feeble. This corporate shadow state has been built almost exclusively with public resources (90% of Blackwater's revenues come from state contracts)...Yet the vast infrastructure is all privately owned and controlled. The citizens who funded it have absolutely no claim to this parallel economy or its resources.
- Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine"
The theocratic power grab is not some conspiracy theory. Cheney just met
in secret with the shadowy CNP; and it was not big deal to the corporate media. Blackwater is CNP to its eyeballs. Cheney's Haliburton has built the concentration camps that will be used when martial law is declared. You have Blackwater setting up more and more armed camps inside the U.S., getting contracts to do intelligence and riot control.
Do the corporations think they are going to blow this rapidly-escalating police state away without a huge fight? Or do they just plan to take their loot to China and let America rot? Either way, you and I are as screwed as the typical resident of Baghdad, Beirut, or Grozny.
How do you think you take over the world's largest military in the world's oldest democracy? You do it by transporting democracy to some militarized hell hole where you do with it what you will. Call it "rendition" for political systems.
In the military hell-hole that the American taxpayer has paid to create over the last sixty years, there is a $50 Billion black budget. Then there is a huge reliance on "private security contractors". In fact, we have more contractors in Iraq than we have soldiers. Iraq is simply the furnace in which the new privatized, corporatized army is being purified for use against American democracy.
Let's do a few comparisons:
A. Blackwater is an ideological pure organization, directly wired into the highest levels of the reactionary party that is privatizing government out of existence - just as the SS was an ideologically pure parallel army reporting directly to Hitler.
B. Blackwater is a private army, better equipped and better paid than the regular military - just like the SS.
C. Blackwater will hire any thug from any country, as long as he swears loyalty to Blackwater - just like the SS who made up separate SS divisions for fascists from occupied countries.
D. The regular army has tried to maintain its honor and its intactness in the face of hideous tactics and demands from an insane civilian leadership - just as the professional German army did throughout the war in the face of Hitler's suicidal demands for "no retreat".
4. ConclusionSo, I ask the rhetorical question: Is it heresy yet?
Of course it is. The only question left to resolve is who is in charge when the pretense of democracy is finally dropped - the theocrats at the CNP or the international corporatists.
We are in the final stage of a coup that has been planned and executed over a period of almost thirty years. Naomi Klein documents that where Blackwater appears, democracy dies, and corporatism and private armies prevail. In some ways, this is the world the Catholic Church liked: a lot of tiny, feuding principalities (think Holy Roman Empire) with one over-arching ideological leader and doctrine. The nation state was bad news for theocracy; so the theocrats are dissolving it. If it weren't so horrific, it would be brilliant.
You don't need to call it Naziism to know it is horrible beyond your worst nightmare. But, calling it Nazi-like is no mistake.
arendt
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
