| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fredric L. Rice" |
| Date: |
15 Jun 2005 03:19:23 AM |
| Object: |
Faith-Based Fascism |
Christ Inc.
Faith-Based Fascism
by Leilla Matsui and Stella La Chance
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 10, 2005
When a triumphal George W. Bush declared his intention to cash in on his
“political capital” in the days after the election, he was merely
reaffirming his commitment to hand over the reins of power to a higher
authority than even ***** Cheney. The religious right, with its enormous
political stake in the “End Times” outcome of America's latest Imperial
misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, have seized upon Bush's continued
pledge to transform the “Homeland” into a locked down religious theme park
with the organizational zeal they had previously reserved for bilking
gullible parishioners out of their social security checks.
Like Halliburton, Christ Inc. has become the latest recipient of taxpayer
largesse, having won the contract to keep the media out of the news
business, and to ensure that power speaks to truth, as opposed to the other
way around. Purging the “news” of news is just the latest attempt by
religious Brownshirts to stamp their poisonous insignia on every major
institution that they don't control lock, stock and barrel.
In recent months the escalating violence in Iraq and mounting evidence of
US-run torture chambers has been dutifully ignored by the Christian News
Network, a.k.a. “The Missing White Girl Network” who never miss an
opportunity, these days, to provide their theo-con masters with a platform
to discredit the administration's naysayers and whistleblowers. Instead,
news consumers get trumped up coverage of sensational celebrity trials,
“heartwarming” tales of rescue and survival (always thanks to Jesus) and
“special reports” revolving around the heroic law enforcement figures as
they “secure our borders,” track down “terrorists”, and sniff out the
latest
Caucasian corpse du jour. The message has become implicitly clear:
resistance is useless against an increasingly paranoid and authoritarian
state apparatus that has its finger on the trigger, ready to blow away even
unruly toddlers.
The endless parade of Christian pundits and security analysts on CNN these
days is more than an attempt by the beleaguered cable giant to do one
better
than rival news corps in “outfoxing” the competition. Not content with
FOX's
spectacular success as the profit-driven propaganda arm of the US
government, the religious right has set out to erase the distinction
between
the pulpit and the news desk across the media spectrum (never a wide one in
the first place) -- a feat they have managed to pull off with the
cooperation of the nervous corporate elites.
Just as the American definition of the term “liberal” to mean “far left” is
laughingly at odds with its intended targets, i.e. House Democrats,
Hollywood celebrities, and anyone who reads the news on air outside of FOX
or any of its affiliates, the word “mainstream” is perhaps as much a
misnomer when describing America's radically reconfigured media at the
hands
of bat wielding swastikas like Bill Frist and “Doctor” James Dobson.
The New York Times’ recent pledge to “improve” its coverage of topics
relating to rural and Heartland American “values” is just another example
of
dunce-capped elites publicly denouncing themselves in a desperate, last
ditch attempt to make nice-nice with the revolutionary zealots ransacking
their offices. Similarly, the sacrificial offering of petty plagiarist
Jayson Blair wasn't enough to please the “sore winners” of the right, who
won't settle for anything less than unfettered control of the medium right
down to the wire. Dan Rather's roasting of chickenhawk George Bush's
National Guard service merely stoked the theo-con appetite for complete
destruction at the personal and political level, and gave them what
amounted
to a green light to flatten, by any means necessary, every pocket of
potential resistance in their path.
Obviously, the suppression of media-based dissent entails the purging if
not
complete destruction of PBS, and along with it, any remaining standard of
integrity remaining in the television and radio broadcast industry. After
being forced into resignation by a Bush administration ally who chairs the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the indomitable Bill Moyers remarked:
We're seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age-old ambition of power
and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that
make princes and priests uncomfortable...One reason I'm in hot water is
because my colleagues and I at NOW didn't play by the conventional rules of
Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and
Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend
they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the
news,
they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.
Moyers was immediately declared “insane” by drug-addled propagandist Rush
Limbaugh to his millions of self-described “dittohead” fans. There is no
reason to believe that the last remaining example of independent
investigative reporting on free television -- PBS’ Frontline -- will
survive
the remainder of Bushtail's term.
With every revelation of corruption and ineptitude at the leadership level,
the lavishly funded, state-of-the-art neo-con spin machine goes into warp
drive to ensure that anti-war voices are filtered through the rightwing of
the Democratic Party, or more recently, stamped out altogether. As a
result,
the so-called “opposition” has adopted the neo-con rallying cry of “staying
the course,” as if prolonging and escalating the war would somehow end it
sooner rather than later, a strategy recently tested in Vietnam. Talk about
a “victory strategy” for the masterminds behind the new and improved
“Orwellian” media.
You would think that the Times’ support for the invasion of Iraq with
fabricated “evidence” of Saddam Hussein's imaginary weapons program would
have forced the regime to come up with more creative ways to impugn its
potential critics than branding them “biased”. Then again, nothing
mobilizes
the disgruntled many to the cause of defending the wealthy few against the
threat of taxes and secularism better than the lame “liberal media” canard.
Or to paraphrase Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of propaganda, “The
bigger and steamier your three-coiled whopper is, the likelier it will be
swallowed wholesale by the common scum on the ground.”
Fascists have always relied on the willingness of so-called moderates on
either side of the political aisle to make alliances with them against
their
common enemies of the Left. Hillary Clinton's recent decision to team up
with her former tormentor, Newt Gingrich, on healthcare is another example
of the Faustian bargains centrist elites are willing to make with thuggish
extremists, hoping to score political points for appearing conciliatory.
Similarly, John Kerry's doomed campaign strategy of offering voters a
watered down version of White House theology by mildly condemning gay
rights
and abortion, didn't take into account that the anti-gay, misogynistic,
market-worshipping Zionists of the religious right only put forth a pretend
ideology based on “values” and “economics”. Upon closer inspection, this
so-called agenda reveals only emptiness at its core, bereft of any ideas
beyond a promise to use force when necessary against those who refuse to
“get with the pogrom.”
The success of the Christian Right in dismantling all existing institutions
and re-shaping them to their exact specifications depends on the ability of
its leaders to provoke an exalted state of outraged-tinged euphoria within
its rank and file members -- the “Hannitized” hordes who feel a raw
emotional need to feel part of an enterprise engaged in exercising supreme
power over a despised enemy. This can only be achieved by the full
cooperation of the media, who fear their own irrelevance in a highly
volatile political atmosphere even more than those who create these
conditions in the first place.
After Hitler was elected German Chancellor in 1933, the novelist Thomas
Mann
noted in his diary that he was witnessing a revolution “without underlying
ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against
freedom, truth and justice.”
Today's Hannitized hordes are every bit as eager as Hitler's little helpers
to sell out their own political and economic interests for the privilege of
basking in the reflected glory of those who talk loudest while carrying the
biggest stick. Like all factory farmed meat machines, they yield to the
voices that carry the most authority. If anything, they don't seem overly
alarmed by the absence of “news” in the media, particularly in regard to
Iraq, perhaps reassured by inanities like the Jacko trial or Pope-o-Rama.
Their “mobilizing passions” are not stirred by any fully articulated
philosophy beyond a heightened suspicion that their entitlements are being
encroached upon by some demonized minority -- a point that Democrats and
their cohorts in the corporate media have yet to grasp as they seek ways to
accommodate them by purging their own institutional bases of “offending”
doctrine. So far, they have only succeeded in emboldening the cross-bearing
Brownshirts to violently upgrade their methods of rooting out dissent.
The “logic” of destroying a village in order to “save” it can be applied to
the media at the executive and ownership level. Better to help engineer the
takeover of your organization by bible wielding Brownshirts than to risk
making enemies with these coup plotters, drunk on their recent successes in
subverting every other major institution across the political and cultural
landscape. Having looted and pillaged America's crumbling fourth estate,
the
information highway robbers may have pulled off their biggest heist yet.
Leilla Matsui is a freelance writer living in Tokyo, Japan. Contact her at:
catcat@s3.ocv.ne.jp. Stella La Chance is a disgruntled housewife living in
suburban Ohio, who takes an amateurish interest in immature child
psychology. She attends night school.
---
http://www.ElmerFudd.US/ http://www.notserver.com/
Scientology crooks: http://sf.irk.ru/www/ot3/otiii-gif.html
http://PerkinsTragedy.org http://www.rightard.org/
End Republican race hatred: http://www.thedarkwind.org/
.
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| User: "Hendrix Fan" |
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| Title: Re: Faith-Based Fascism |
15 Jun 2005 05:07:17 PM |
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Fredric L. Rice wrote:
Christ Inc.
Faith-Based Fascism
by Leilla Matsui and Stella La Chance
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 10, 2005
Faith-Based Fascism is a redundant term. Fascism is a government that
acts on behalf of some special corporations, nationalists, and
fundamentalist faiths at the same exact time. Fascism in itself is just
a process while the outcome of that process are nazis and neo-cons. The
neo-cons aren't imposing fascism onto us, they are the product of a
fascist system that always results in very similar outcomes.
Hendrix Fan
a.a atheist #1692
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