Inside U.S.A.: Heart of Darkness: The Bush cult and American madness
Posted on Friday, October 22 @ 23:00:20 VET
Topic: Bushwacked
BushwackedBy Chris Floyd
Note: This is an expanded version of Chris Floyd's regular Friday
column in The Moscow Times
Now we come at last to the heart of darkness. Now we know, from their
own words, that the Bush Regime is a cult - a cult whose god is Power,
whose adherents believe that they alone control reality, that indeed
they create the world anew with each act of their iron will. And the
goal of this will - undergirded by the cult's supreme virtues of war,
fury and blind faith - is likewise openly declared: "Empire."
You think this is an exaggeration? A typical bout of "liberal
paranoia"? Then heed the words of the White House itself: a "senior
adviser" to the president, who, as the New York Times reports,
explained the cult to author Ron Suskind in the heady pre-war days of
2002.
First, the top Bush insider mocked the journalist and all those "in
what we call the reality-based community," i.e., people who "believe
that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality." Suskind's attempt to defend the principles of reason and
enlightenment cut no ice with the Bush-man. "That's not the way the
world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality," he said. "And while you're studying that
reality, 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."
Anyone with any knowledge of 20th century history will know that this
same megalomaniacal outburst could have been made by a "senior
adviser" to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or Mao. Indeed, as scholar Juan
Cole points out, the dogma of the Bush Cult is identical with the
"reality-creating" declaration of Mao's Little Red Book: "It is
possible to accomplish any task whatsoever." For Bush, as for Mao in
the all-devouring Great Leap Forward, "discernible reality" has no
meaning: political, cultural, economic, scientific truth - even the
fundamental processes of nature, even human nature itself - must give
way to the faith-statements of ideology, ruthlessly applied by
unbending zealots.
Thus the reality-twisting assertions of Bush's ideologues: The
conquered will welcome their killers. The poor will be happy to slave
for the rich. The earth can sustain any amount of damage without
lasting harm. The loss of rights is essential to liberty. War without
end is the only way to peace. Corruption and cronyism lead to
universal prosperity. Dissent is evil; dissenters are "with the
terrorists." But God is with the Leader; whatever he does is
righteous, even if in the eyes of unbelievers - the "reality-based
community" - his acts are criminal: aggressive war that kills
thousands of innocent people, widespread torture, secret
assassinations, imprisonment without charges or trial, electoral
subversion.
Indeed, the doctrine "Gott mit Uns" is the linchpin of the Bush Cult.
Tens of millions of Americans have now embraced the Cult's fusion of
Bush's leadership with Divine Will. As a Bush volunteer in Missouri
told Suskind: "I just believe God controls everything, and God uses
the president to keep evil down...God gave us this president to be the
man to protect the nation at this time." God appointed Bush; thus
Bush's acts are Godly. It's a circular, self-confirming mindset that
can't be penetrated by reason or facts, can't be shaken by crimes and
scandals. That's why Bush's core support - comprising almost half of
the electorate - stays rock-solid, despite the manifest failures of
his administration. It's based on blind faith, on poisonous fantasy:
simple, flattering ("We're uniquely good, we're God's special
nation!"), comforting, complete - so unlike the harsh, bewildering,
splintered shards of real life.
This closed mindset is constantly reinforced by the ubiquitous
rightwing media - evoking the threat of demonic enemies on every side,
relentlessly manufacturing righteous outrage with distortion and
deceit - and by Bush's appearances (epiphanies?) at his
carefully-screened rallies, where even the slightest hint of demurral
from his Godly greatness is ruthlessly expunged. For example, three
schoolteachers were ejected from a Bush rally under threat of arrest
last week: not for protesting - they hadn't said a word - but merely
for wearing t-shirts that read, "Protect Our Civil Liberties." Thus
the faithful "create the new reality" of undivided loyalty to the
Leader. And it's clear that the very idea of "civil liberties" is now
a dangerous blasphemy in the divinvely-sanctioned Empire.
The dogma of Bush's godliness is no mere rhetorical flourish; it's
being forged with blood and iron. Consider General Jerry Boykin, who,
in uniform, toured churches across America, declaring openly that
"George W. Bush was not elected by the majority of the American
people; he was appointed by God" to lead his "Christian nation"
against Satan and the "idol-worshippers" of Islam, as Salon.com
reports. Bush then made Boykin the Pentagon's chief of military
intelligence - the point man for wringing information out of Islamic
captives in the "war on terror." The result - confirmed even by the
Pentagon's own anemic investigations - was a military intelligence
system gone berserk, systematically torturing and occasionally
murdering prisoners who, as the Red Cross notes, were overwhelmingly
innocent of any crime. Bush signed orders removing these prisoners
from the protection of U.S. and international law; Boykin's boys then
visited divine wrath upon the heathens. But these atrocities cannot be
crimes, because Bush and Boykin are, in the general's own phraseology,
"Kingdom warriors" in the "army of God."
This isn't "politics as usual" - not even an extreme version of it,
not McCarthyism revisited, Reaganism times two, or Nixon in a Stetson
hat. There's never been anything like it in American life before: a
messianic cult backed by vast corporate power, a massive cadre of
religious zealots, a highly disciplined party, an overwhelming media
machine and the mammoth force of history's most powerful government -
all led by men who "create new realities" out of lies, blood, theft
and torment.
Their "empire" - their Death-Cult, their power-mania - is an old
madness come again, an old heresy in new form, another outbreak of the
fever, the deep soul-sickness that devoured so many nations in the
last century. Now it's come to America. After decades of sliding
toward the abyss - blithely, blindly, drunk with corruption, letting
democracy and justice wither on the vine - now we are here at last, in
the heart of darkness.
Chris Floyd is a columnist for The Moscow Times and a regular
contributor to CounterPunch. His new book, Empire Burlesque: The
Secret History of the Bush Regime, is available at
www.globaleyefloyd.com. He can be contacted at cfloyd72@hotmail.com.
http://www.trinicenter.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=813
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