| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Heywood Jablomi" |
| Date: |
18 Mar 2006 01:33:58 PM |
| Object: |
Jihad, American style |
It's called the 'Evangelical Christian Right' co-opted Republican
Party http://tinyurl.com/fbp32
-------------------------------------------
March 19, 2006
'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillips
Clear and Present Dangers
Review by ALAN BRINKLEY
Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the
Republican Party, began work on what became a remarkable book. In
writing "The Emerging Republican Majority" (published in 1969), he
asked a very big question about American politics: How would the
demographic and economic changes of postwar America shape the
long-term future of the two major parties? His answer, startling at
the time but now largely unquestioned, is that the movement of people
and resources from the old Northern industrial states into the South
and the West (an area he enduringly labeled the "Sun Belt") would
produce a new and more conservative Republican majority that would
dominate American politics for decades. Phillips viewed the changes he
predicted with optimism. A stronger Republican Party, he believed,
would restore stability and order to a society experiencing
disorienting and at times violent change. Shortly before publishing
his book, he joined the Nixon administration to help advance the
changes he had foreseen.
Phillips has remained a prolific and important political commentator
in the decades since, but he long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the
Republican coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th)
looks broadly and historically at the political world the conservative
coalition has painstakingly constructed over the last several decades.
No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability
and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological
extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and
dangerous shortsightedness. (His final chapter is entitled "The Erring
Republican Majority.") In an era of best-selling jeremiads on both
sides of the political divide, "American Theocracy" may be the most
alarming analysis of where we are and where we may be going to have
appeared in many years. It is not without polemic, but unlike many of
the more glib and strident political commentaries of recent years, it
is extensively researched and for the most part frighteningly
persuasive.
Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the
dangerous policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much
time examining the ideas and behavior of the president and his
advisers. Instead, he identifies three broad and related trends — none
of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes,
exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten
the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil
in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and
domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical
Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the
astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the
government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating.
If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three
linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to
look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and
desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.
The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported
extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front
of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of
many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but
to Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops
around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that
were the key to effective oil production. Phillips fully supports an
explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration dismisses as
conspiracy theory — that its principal purpose was to secure vast oil
reserves that would enable the United States to control production and
to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large
oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst said a couple of years ago.
"You can't ask for better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of mass
destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were,
Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the
invasion.
And while this argument may be somewhat too simplistic to explain the
complicated mix of motives behind the war, it is hard to dismiss
Phillips's larger argument: that the pursuit of oil has for at least
30 years been one of the defining elements of American policy in the
world; and that the Bush administration — unusually dominated by
oilmen — has taken what the president deplored recently as the
nation's addiction to oil to new and terrifying levels. The United
States has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism," Phillips writes,
"the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation into a
global oil-protection force," and which "puts up a democratic facade,
emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to
secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs."
Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second
great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical
Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics.
The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret
to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings
together an enormous range of information from scholars and
journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling
picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.
He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a
scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so
large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American
Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not
speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues,
are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is
a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of
"Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like"
reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and
state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government
shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants,
perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the
supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of
Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.
Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of
politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars
have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in
Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the
rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush
administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and
encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to
premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and
other members of his administration may actually believe these things
themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a
tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this
disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.
THE third great impending crisis that Phillips identifies is also,
perhaps, the best known — the astonishing rise of debt as the
precarious underpinning of the American economy. He is not, of course,
the only observer who has noted the dangers of indebtedness. The New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, frequently writes
about the looming catastrophe. So do many more-conservative
economists, who point especially to future debt — particularly the
enormous obligation, which Phillips estimates at between $30 trillion
and $40 trillion, that Social Security and health care demands will
create in the coming decades. The most familiar debt is that of the
United States government, fueled by soaring federal budget deficits
that have continued (with a brief pause in the late 1990's) for more
than two decades. But the national debt — currently over $8 trillion —
is only the tip of the iceberg. There has also been an explosion of
corporate debt, state and local bonded debt, international debt
through huge trade imbalances, and consumer debt (mostly in the form
of credit-card balances and aggressively marketed home-mortgage
packages). Taken together, this present and future debt may exceed $70
trillion.
The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although
exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the
work of many people over many decades — among them Alan Greenspan,
who, he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising
debt to avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It
is most of all a product of the "financialization" of the American
economy — the turn away from manufacturing and toward an economy based
on moving and managing money, a trend encouraged, Phillips argues
persuasively, by the preoccupation with oil and (somewhat less
persuasively) with evangelical belief in the imminent rapture, which
makes planning for the future unnecessary.
There is little in "American Theocracy" that is wholly original to
Phillips, as he frankly admits by his frequent reference to the work
of other writers and scholars. What makes this book powerful in spite
of the familiarity of many of its arguments is his rare gift for
looking broadly and structurally at social and political change. By
describing a series of major transformations, by demonstrating the
relationships among them and by discussing them with passionate
restraint, Phillips has created a harrowing picture of national danger
that no American reader will welcome, but that none should ignore.
Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and the provost
at Columbia University.
.
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| User: "Sid" |
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| Title: Re: Jihad, American style |
18 Mar 2006 03:33:26 PM |
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"Heywood Jablomi" <m.m.peter@microphallus.org> wrote in message
news:esno12h21omdvmva5nba1d80f4jtralv44@4ax.com...
It's called the 'Evangelical Christian Right' co-opted Republican
Party http://tinyurl.com/fbp32
-------------------------------------------
<... >
The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although
exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the
work of many people over many decades - among them Alan Greenspan,
who, he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising
debt to avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It
is most of all a product of the "financialization" of the American
economy - the turn away from manufacturing and toward an economy based
on moving and managing money, a trend encouraged, Phillips argues
persuasively, by the preoccupation with oil and (somewhat less
persuasively) with evangelical belief in the imminent rapture, which
makes planning for the future unnecessary.
Deja vu:
In the year 1000 AD, some Christian "prophets" in Europe,
declared the imminent return of Jesus. As a result, fields
were not plowed, nor crops planted, as such activity was
thought unnessary in light of the coming end-of-the-world.
As a result, Jesus did a no-show, and tens of thousands
of people starved to death!
Fast forward to the late 1800's and James Miller, (the
Millerites) who once again started to teach this end-of-the-
world doctrine. In short, Jesus did another no-show, and
the Millerites were discredited.
End of story? Hardly! The Millerite movement simply
morphed into the Seventh-Day-Adventist Church. Off-
shooting from the SDA came the Sheperd's Rod Davidians
at Mt. Carmel, TX which eventually split into the Branch
Davidians-- the David Koresh cult-- and we all know the
tragic end to that story.
All of this pales in comparison to the potential tragedy that
could result from the current beliefs espoused by the
Evangelical Born-again's (un)Christian Coalition-- of which
Southern Baptist Convention is a major player-- who believe
they must turn America into a Born-again nation in order for
Jesus to return-- the same old story, but with a new and
very dangerous twist.
Of note: I have it on good authority that the Southern Baptist
Convention is now in the process of mass producing (by a
Phoenix, Az design house, Sieb) a highly politicized brochure
derogatory to Democrats, liberals and the ACLU.
All under the guise of religion (and its tax-free status) thus
highly Illegal!
~S
"Rapture: I can hardly imagine 144 thousand people, sucked
into outer space, each exploding into a billion bits as their
blood begins to boil..."
- Sid See
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| User: "Heywood Jablomi" |
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| Title: Re: Jihad, American style |
19 Mar 2006 11:51:52 AM |
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On Sat, 18 Mar 2006 14:33:26 -0700, "Sid" <sid.see@willcox.net> wrote:
All of this pales in comparison to the potential tragedy that
could result from the current beliefs espoused by the
Evangelical Born-again's (un)Christian Coalition-- of which
Southern Baptist Convention is a major player-- who believe
they must turn America into a Born-again nation in order for
Jesus to return-- the same old story, but with a new and
very dangerous twist.
The same old story that's been going on forever now. A group uses its
deluded belief system to try to exploit a government system so their
power hungry people in charge can get control over everybody else in
the wider society. Gee, where have we seen this before...how about
Osama & the Islamic Jihadis, The Nazis back in the 30s, Stalin, Lenin
& the Soviets back at the turn of last century, etc, etc ad
infinitum...going back to when man first started fighting for fruit &
antelope meat after he climbed off the trees away from the chimps in
some primeval jungle way back when.
Of note: I have it on good authority that the Southern Baptist
Convention is now in the process of mass producing (by a
Phoenix, Az design house, Sieb) a highly politicized brochure
derogatory to Democrats, liberals and the ACLU.
All under the guise of religion (and its tax-free status) thus
highly Illegal!
Totally illegal, or used to be anyway. The way the Repubs are going
these days, if they run in to a law they break that causes them to get
in to some sort of trouble, they just change the law & legalize what
was illegal before. Nice, being able to do that huh? "Gee officer,
you're pulling me over because I was doing 75 on the freeway & the
speed limit is 65? Let me just change that maximum speed limit law up
to 85 & that speeding ticket will disappear." Must be a nice world
these guys live in, making it all legal _after_ they commit the crime
so they don't end up having to do the time :-p
.
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| User: "Sid" |
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| Title: Re: Jihad, American style |
20 Mar 2006 12:32:33 PM |
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"Heywood Jablomi" <m.m.peter@microphallus.org> wrote in message
news:ck4r12hgrmrmtgrleon7kjshn3043shdaq@4ax.com...
On Sat, 18 Mar 2006 14:33:26 -0700, "Sid" <sid.see@willcox.net> wrote:
All of this pales in comparison to the potential tragedy that
could result from the current beliefs espoused by the
Evangelical Born-again's (un)Christian Coalition-- of which
Southern Baptist Convention is a major player-- who believe
they must turn America into a Born-again nation in order for
Jesus to return-- the same old story, but with a new and
very dangerous twist.
The same old story that's been going on forever now. A group uses its
deluded belief system to try to exploit a government system so their
power hungry people in charge can get control over everybody else in
the wider society. Gee, where have we seen this before...how about
Osama & the Islamic Jihadis, The Nazis back in the 30s, Stalin, Lenin
& the Soviets back at the turn of last century, etc, etc ad
infinitum...
Indeed!
going back to when man first started fighting for fruit &
antelope meat after he climbed off the trees away from the chimps in
some primeval jungle way back when.
Looking at the fully bipedal fossil "Lucy", the 5 million year
old proto-human, suggests that many millions of years of
evolution towards bipedalism had already occured-- thus
questioning (in my mind) the classical theory that early Man,
climing out of the trees to become omnivores, learned to
walk upright in the tall grasses of the African savanna...
Then, of course, there's the Aqua-Ape conjecture-- Lucy,
after all, was discovered on the edge of an ancient lake
bed... :)
Of note: I have it on good authority that the Southern Baptist
Convention is now in the process of mass producing (by a
Phoenix, Az design house, Sieb) a highly politicized brochure
derogatory to Democrats, liberals and the ACLU.
All under the guise of religion (and its tax-free status) thus
highly Illegal!
Totally illegal, or used to be anyway. The way the Repubs are going
these days, if they run in to a law they break that causes them to get
in to some sort of trouble, they just change the law & legalize what
was illegal before. Nice, being able to do that huh? "Gee officer,
you're pulling me over because I was doing 75 on the freeway & the
speed limit is 65? Let me just change that maximum speed limit law up
to 85 & that speeding ticket will disappear." Must be a nice world
these guys live in, making it all legal _after_ they commit the crime
so they don't end up having to do the time :-p
Or, applying the loopy logic rule: to simply declare
going 75 in a 65 zone is not breaking the law, citing
an ancillary "prudent speed" clause as proof...
~S
.
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