Open Left - projection

Projection Marches On!

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Ah, for the good old days when angry white supremacist guys attacked our black President and Latina Supreme Court nominee as racists. That the week before last. This last week its fascist thugs hurling accusations of fascism.

I'm nostalgic for the good old days simply because the new ones have brought us to the brink of mass violence. There have already been some blows, and a hyping of threats (from TPM):

Based on the news that health care events are edging into violence, an anti-health care reform protester in New Mexico named Scott Oskay is calling on his hundreds of online followers to bring firearms to town halls, and to 'badly hurt' SEIU and ACORN counter protesters.

Popularized in part by conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, the hashtag symbol he's using, #iamthemob, has gone viral on twitter, appearing several times a minute according to a recent search.
Anti-reform activists have scheduled a protest outside SEIU Missouri offices tomorrow, and officials there are taking these threats seriously.

On the other hand, there's an upside to this sharply increased threat level, which is two-fold: First, it has the potential to lead to lead to a sharp rejection of what the movement conservatives are up to. Second, it's a whole lot easier to document the projection involved. That's because the dynamic of wealthy special interests supporting street thuggery against "the left" is exactly how both Mussolini and Hitler came to power.

David Neiwert, from Crooks And Liars:

No one has a problem with right-wingers marching in protest of the health-care plans. That's certainly their right. And no one minds that they choose to participate in these forums. But town halls were never designed to be vehicles for protest. They have always been about enabling real democratic discourse in a civil setting.
When someone's entire purpose in coming out to a town-hall forum is to chant and shout and protest and disrupt, they aren't just expressing their opinions -- they are actively shutting down democracy.
And that, folks, is a classically fascist thing to do.

The corporate role in orchestrating this thuggery is not just an allegation, or an observation. It's been confirmed by the perpetrators themselves, as Greg Sargent reports:

Anti-Reform Group Takes Credit For Helping Gin Up Town Hall Rallies
Conservatives for Patients' Rights, the operation that's running a national campaign against a public health care option, is now publicly taking credit for helping gin up the sometimes-rowdy outbursts targeting House Dems at town hall meetings around the country, raising questions about their spontaneity.
CPR is the group headed by controversial former hospitals exec Rick Scott that's spending millions on ads attacking reform in all sorts of lurid ways, a campaign that's being handled by the same P.R. mavens behind the Swift Boat Vets.
In response to my questions, a spokesman for the group confirmed that it has undertaken a concerted effort to get people out to the town hall meetings to protest reform. The spokesperson, Brian Burgess, confirmed that CPR is emailing out "town hall alert" flyers, and schedules of town hall meetings, to its mailing list.
These efforts - combined with CPR's effort to enlist Tea Party-ers, as reported yesterday by TPM - provide a glimpse into the ways anti-reform groups are trying to create a sense of public momentum in their favor.
CPR spokesman Burgess confirmed that the group had set up a list serv designed to reach out to "third party groups" involved in the health care fight, including the Tea Party activists. And in a statement emailed to me, Scott, who was ousted as a health-care exec amid a 1990s fraud probe, took credit for the town hall showings.
"We have invested a lot of time, energy and resources into educating Americans over the past several months about the dangers of government-run health care and I think we're seeing some of the fruits of that campaign," Scott said, though he claimed outrage was spontaneous.
Similarly, America's Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, the insurance industry group, has stationed employees in 30 states to track local town hall events.

And, in a scathing article posted just yesterday, Frank Schaeffer, an apostate co-founder of the religious right, writes:

The Republican Old Guard are in the fix an atheist would be in if Jesus showed up and raised his mother from the dead: Their world view has just been shattered. Obama's election has driven them over the edge. Consider Former Congressman Dick Armey. Several far right foundations and the multitrillion dollar health-insurance industry have teamed up with him to organize the far right foot soldiers of the Republican Party to intimidate people speaking on behalf of health-care reform. They are using my old shock troops -- given many of these folks were first energized by the Evangelical pro-life movement that my late father and I started in the 1970s. What we did to clinics they are now doing to congressmen and others speaking out for health care reform.
Having failed at the ballot box, having watched their Fox News-organized "tea parties" fizzle the intimidation tactics which the Republicans have embraced are being used in a well-financed, top-down orchestrated fake grass roots campaign by corporate interests to try and protect the profits of the insurance business. Armey's FreedomWorks is organizing against health care reform. Armey's lobbying firm represents pharmaceutical companies including Bristol-Myers Squibb. Armey's lobbying firm also represents the trade group for the life insurance industry. FreedomWorks is supporting the status quo at all costs. ....
I used to know Dick Armey quite well....Armey was once a decent guy, whatever his political views. How could he stoop so low as to be organizing what amounts to America's Brown Shirts today?
I think I know what happened to him, Gingrich and the rest: They can't compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can't reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don't run the country any more -- and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the "other" into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court... for them this is the Apocalypse.
The last presidential election (to paraphrase Bart Simpson) "broke their brains." What else could explain their embrace of intimidation -- rather than discourse -- over the health care debate and such unsavory moments of madness as the Republicans accusing Obama and Judge Sonia Sotomayor of racism, knowing full well that they'd just destroyed their chances with the Hispanic community forever?
The "Scorched Earth Policy"
Dick Army and company have been driven mad by their reversal, not just of political fortunes but of seeing that they've wasted their lives. They now know they were wrong: about the country, the free market, war for fun and profit, and what the American people really want. They made their best case and were rejected by the American people -- and by history. Bush was their man and he turned out to be a fool. So now all the the Republican gurus have left is what the defeated Germans of World War Two had: a scorched earth policy. If they can't win then everyone must go down. Obama must fail! The country must fail!
....
There is no daylight between the Republican Party, the health-care insurance industry, far right leaders like Dick Armey, the legion of insurance lobbyists, and now, a small army of thugs. All we're missing is actual uniforms, otherwise we now have a full blown American version of the Nazi Brown Shirts.
No, I don't believe that these people are about to take over the country. No, the sky is not falling. But the Republican Party is. It is now profoundly anti-American....
Conclusion: the Fascist Formula
Here's the emerging American version of the fascist's formula: combine millions of dollars of lobbyists' money with embittered troublemakers who have a small army of not terribly bright white angry people (collected over decades through pro-life mass mailing networks) at their beck and call, ever ready to believe any myth or lie circulated by the semi literate and completely and routinely misinformed right wing -- Evangelical religious underground. Then put his little mob together with the insurance companies' big bucks. That's how it works -- American Brown Shirts at the ready....

As Schaeffer's article makes eminently clear, there are multiple parallels between what's behind the town hall thuggery and the classical manifestations of fascism/Nazism. But to make the point about projection blindingly clear, consider these final two points:

(1) Nazism was fundamentally founded on projection: It aimed to take over the world, and did so based on the claim that this is what the Jews had already done. It practiced mass-extermination, based on fantasies about what Jews had done and were planning to do that had absolutely no basis in fact.

(2) When the new brownshirts today--and those who egg them on--claim that the rest of us are fascists, what they are doing is practicing the "big lie", which is, of course, pure Hitler.

What Is To Be Done?

America is in a very perilous place right now. The parallels to Germany and Nazism are bone-chillingly real. American conservatism has crashed and burned, just as German conservatism had done by the end of WWI. The question now is if we will see another two decades of rightwing rage tearing our country apart, and threatening the safety, perhaps even the survival of the rest of the world.

While there are many different things that can and should be done to counter what is happening--I am a great believer in pluralism, and a diversity of forms of activism--I believe that one of the most crucial, and most powerful things that can be done is to call on official leaders of the Republican Party to renounce the violence and the anti-democratic tactics that are being empoloyed to shut down debate at town halls across the country.

This is the bottom line: Stiffling debate is anti-democratic. It is un-American. Are Republican officeholders going to defend mass un-American activity? Or are they going to denounce it? Are they pro-American? Or anti-American?

It's really just that simple.

And they should be willing to take a stand. For America. Or against it.

The choice is theirs. But it's up to us to put it to them, and demand an answer.

Impersonations-1

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:06:58 GMT

In the comment section of my earlier diary, Alan Keyes In "Return To Ridiculousville", commentator ~~Gary~~ Gray quoted Steve Gilliard:

I don't want there to be any misunderstanding. Black people hate what Alan Keyes stands for.
I'm sure that some people like the guy, there are some useless fools who call themselves Republican. who do, but to most black people in America, he is simply a traitor. He betrays the community, the culture, everything good about being black.
...
Now, I know being black isn't easy, and some people, unfortunately, are driven crazy. I mean did Keyes try to lighten his skin? Bathe in milk? Why did he have to try so hard to adapt the way of his masters.
It isn't even that he's a conservative. There are lot of people who are black and conservative, at least socially. But Keyes crossed over and decided to take stands which would hurt black people, to prove he wasn't like us. He wanted to be a special negro, one white people would like, would let run something.
But of course, they would no more do that than let him marry their daughters.
...
People need to understand that black conservatives are our shame, our embarassment. People driven mad to assimiliate at ANY cost, their soul, their dignity, common sense.
Look at the respect people like Tom Joyner, Tavis Smiley and even Oprah gets. They don't debase themselves for the approval of white people. They have character and dignity. Look at the gollum which is Alan Keyes and you see something entirely different, sadder, but different.

Unsurprisingly, what Steve said here (of which the above is only the briefest excerpt) gets to the very heart of the matter.
When Alan Keyes says of Barack Obama:

"The man is an abomination.... That is a man with such a seared conscience, I can't even understand why anyone in their right mind would consider him worthy of political support....

Isn't he obviously actually speaking of himself in his relationship to both the black and the white community, precisely as Gilliard lays it out for us? Isn't this as plain as the nose on your face? And, as Steve says, this is not any sort of mystery to black people. It is universally understood in the black community, not just about Keyes, but about his whole type.

In his post, Gilliard quotes a famous passage from Malcolm X's speech "Message To The Grass Roots", where he talks about the house Negro and the field Negro:

To understand this, you have to go back to what [the] young brother here referred to as the house Negro and the field Negro -- back during slavery. There was two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes - they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good 'cause they ate his food -- what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master's house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master said, "We got a good house here," the house Negro would say, "Yeah, we got a good house here." Whenever the master said "we," he said "we." That's how you can tell a house Negro.
If the master's house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, "What's the matter, boss, we sick?" We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, "Let's run away, let's escape, let's separate," the house Negro would look at you and say, "Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?" That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a "house nigger." And that's what we call him today, because we've still got some house niggers running around here....

America is a nation of self-invention. Of impersonation, if you will. We act is if we are someone else--someone we wish to become. And that is precisely what happens, though of course, there's always a twist.

This is one of the things that makes American conservatism so fundamentally absurd. Most conservatives everywhere cling to an imaginary past. Hesiod's Works and Days recalls a golden age, followed by a silver age, and bronze age, none of which ever existed. It's an utterly typical conservative text.

And yet, most societies did have a more or less organic origin. They developed gradually over time, and continuity characterized them more fundamentally than radical change. Not so America. Not so at all. We were born in a desire for mass reinvention--the very epitome of the "New World"--and Americans have been reinventing themselves ever since.

This is but one reason why America is fundamentally a liberal nation. The essence of liberalism is individual autonomy secured by the state. What greater autonomy is there than to fully reinvent oneself? To impersonate who one would be, and become that impersonation?

In this sense, as in so many others, blacks are the quintessential Americans. Not only have blacks repeated reinvented themselves, they have customarily done so in at least two ways at once--once for what white society demands of them, and once for themselves. Alan Keyes is a broken man, like all house negroes before him, because he only reinvents himself for his white masters. There is no reinvention for himself.

Typically, blacks have re-invented themselves to fit white stereotypes that insist they are not fully autonomous. They are, at best, the sidekick in the buddy movie. They must re-invent themselves to pretend to lack the power of re-invention. They must impersonate creatures incapable of impersonation.

Keyes senses something important about Obama--though not unique. Obama's biographical writing, the core of his political identity is precisely this: a claim to the archetypal white American myth, a myth of self-discovery, and self-making. He is, in fact, impersonating Abe Lincoln and Horatio Alger. This is, of course, nothing new. This was Clarence Thomas's celebrated "Pinpoint strategy," his way of getting himself confirmed to the Supreme Court by marginalizing all other concerns with his claim to the American myth of self-making.

But up 'til now conservatives have done a remarkable job of denying liberals access to this myth. Joycelyn Elders, for example, was perfect example of such self-invention, but she was not allowed to use the myth to defend herself politically.

In sharp contrast, Thomas was actually a far, far cry from what this myth propounds. He had all manner of assistance in his self-making quest. He was carried all the way to the Ivy League. He was given numerous assists, And it infuriated him. Because the reality is that no one is self-made with the assistance of others. Most folks simply take this as a given. But it clashes sharply with the conservative mythos. Most conservatives are happy hypocrites, so it all works out. But black conservatives often seem to miss this subtlety, and perhaps that's just one more thing that tends to drive them just a little more nuts than their white brethren.

And yet, he was still able to claim this myth, even though he seemed positively allergic to it for anyone who bothered to watch him carefully.

So this was Obama's great achievement--unlike Joycelyn Elders, or many others before him, he was able to pull a Clarence Thomas, without becoming Clarence Thomas. He was able to impersonate Horatio Alger and Abraham Lincoln for his white audience without becoming totally consumed by that act of impersonation. And Alan Keyes quite rightly saw this as a very, very dangerous development, even though he was far, far, far too unaware to understand just why.

Bill Moyers Shines Light On Hate Radio--But Deep Shadows Remain

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 20:50:05 GMT

Last night, the first segment on Bill Moyers Journal dealt with rightwing hate radio, using the late July shootings at the Knoxville Unitarian Church as the entry point. It was an unusually raw and unvarnished look at what hate radio does--examining specific examples: Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh--and yet, there were some significant critical avenues that were left unexplored. Still, the media has been so neglectful of this for so long, it was heartening to see this virulent cultivation of mass hatred finally get a spotlight thrown on it. Rick Karr was the correspondent reporting the story. He began reporting like this:

RICK KARR: On a steamy Sunday morning in July a man armed with a twelve-gauge shotgun burst into this church in Knoxville, Tennessee and opened fire. Seconds later, one person lay dead, another mortally wounded, and six injured.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: The man who walked into this sanctuary on July 27th was armed with a gun but he was also armed with hatred, he was armed with bitterness, he was armed with resentments, he was armed with indiscriminate anger. He was armed in body and spirit.
RICK KARR: Members of the congregation wrestled a fifty-eight-year-old, unemployed truck driver named Jim David Adkisson to the floor and held him until police came. At first it seemed like just another inexplicable outburst of violence until a police news conference the next day.
POLICE CHIEF STERLING OWEN: It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement.

The Unitarian Universalist Pastor Responds

The report continues:

RICK KARR: Why did Adkisson hate "the liberal movement"? Police said that he told them "that all liberals should be killed ... because they were ... ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and ... ruined every institution in America...." Police said that Adkisson had targeted the Unitarian Universalist Church "because of its liberal teachings." The church advocates social justice and tolerance, and it openly welcomes gay, lesbian, and transgendered members. According to police, Adkisson said that, "Because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would target those that had voted them in to office."In the weeks following the tragedy, the congregation and its pastor, Reverend Chris Buice struggled with what they were learning about Adkisson.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: Some have suggested that his spiritual attitudes, his hatred of liberals and gays, was reinforced by the right wing media figures. And it is beyond dispute that there are a plethora of books which have labeled liberals as evil, unpatriotic, godless and treasonous.
RICK KARR: During that recent sermon Buice told his congregation, some of who had risked their own lives to stop the shooting, that he has been reading some of those books.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: One of the books has the title "Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism". If that author was here in this room right now I would introduce him to some good liberals who acted decisively on that Sunday, acted quickly and courageously to stop the terror that came into our church building. I would introduce him to some good liberals who know how to fight terror with more than just their mouths.

At that point, members of the congregation rose up and gave a standing ovation. This is what we need to see much more of in America today--liberals standing up and applauding their own for standing up to the hatred and violence mobilized against them.

Of course, it goes without saying that a liberal pastor would want to understand the source of the evil that entered his church and took the lives of his congregents. After all, that is what makes us liberals and leftists--we want to know the truth, however dark that truth may be. But for far too long we have not fought back against purveyors of evil and untruth nearly as hard and consistently we need to.

Michael Savage Talks Like Hitler

The report continues by taking a look at Michael Savage, author of one of the books police found in the shooter's apartment:

RICK KARR: Buice says even with the outpouring of sympathy from around Knoxville and across the country, Adkisson's lethal anger has left him angry and full of questions.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE:People were killed in my sanctuary of my church which should be the holy place, a safe place. People were injured. A man came in here totally dehumanized us. Members of our church were not human to him. Where did he get that? Where did he get that sense that we were not human?
RICK KARR: Buice admits that no one knows for sure and says that Adkisson alone, is responsible for the shootings. But he keeps thinking about some books that police found in Adkisson's apartment, books by popular right-wing talk-radio personalities who berate and denigrate liberals. One of the books police found in Adkisson's apartment was Michael Savage's "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder". In it, Savage calls liberals "the enemy within our country;" "an enemy more dangerous than Hitler"; "traitors" who are "dangerous to your survival" and who "should be placed in a straightjacket". Like Adkisson, Savage accuses liberals of "[tying] the hands of our military".
Savage isn't just a bestselling author: he also hosts a syndicated radio show.
ANNOUNCER:"And now American's most exciting radio talk show...THE SAVAGE NATION...THE MICHAEL SAVAGE SHOW."
RICK KARR: Savage reaches more than eight and a quarter million listeners a week. And when it comes to demonizing liberals, he's the same on the air as he is in print.
MICHAEL SAVAGE:"Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus, and it weakens the defense cells of a nation. What are the defense cells of a nation? Well, the church. They've attacked particularly the Catholic Church for 30 straight years. The police, attacked for the last 50 straight years by the ACLU viruses. And the military, attacked for the last 50 years by the Barbara Boxer viruses on our planet."

Here is where we can see two important points that deserve intense scrutiny which Karr and Moyers did not follow up. The first is that Savage uses the same extreme dehumanizing language that Hitler used, portraying his enemies as germs. The only difference is that Savage updates it a bit, substituting "virus" instead. When dehumanization becomes this extreme, it passes on to a qualitatively different realm--that of eliminationism. After all, what else does one do with a disease? One wipes it out. This is the inexorable logic of such talk, and there are countless examples of it from rightwing media figures over the past two decades.

The second important point is that Savage, who uses Hitlerian language, projects his own Hitlerian proclivities onto liberals, calling them "an enemy more dangerous than Hitler." Projection is a virtually all-pervasive feature of rightwing political discourse. Sometimes it is in the forefront, sometimes in the background, but it is virtually always there somehow. People are rightwingers because they cannot find effective means to cope with the problems they face, and so they create or latch onto elaborate narratives that shift the darkness within onto others. Of course it doesn't work, and so the darkness only grows, and with it grows the hatred of the others who are blamed.

The report went on to briefly show Savage's attacks on gays, immigrants and children with autism as well. Then it turned to other hate radio examples.

Other Examples: Glenn Beck, Michael Reagan, Neal Boortz

RICK KARR: Michael Savage isn't the only right-wing talk-radio host who launches blistering, even violent, verbal attacks on people and groups he doesn't like. Glenn Beck, for instance, fantasized about murdering a liberal filmmaker.
GLENN BECK:"I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out of him. Is this wrong?"
RICK KARR: Michael Reagan, son of the former president, suggested that people who claim that "nine-eleven was an inside job," a U.S. government conspiracy, deserve to die.
MICHAEL REAGAN: "Take them out and shoot them. They are traitors to this country, and shoot them. But anybody who would do that doesn't deserve to live. You shoot them. You call them traitors, that's what they are, and you shoot them dead. I'll pay for the bullet."
RICK KARR: Neal Boortz went after victims of Hurricane Katrina.
NEAL BOORTZ:"That wasn't the cries of the downtrodden. That's the cries of the useless, the worthless. New Orleans was a welfare city, a city of parasites, a city of people who could not, and had no desire to fend for themselves. You have a hurricane descending on them and they sit on their fat asses and wait for somebody else to come rescue them."
RICK KARR: Muslims are some of Boortz's favorite targets.
NEAL BOORTZ:"It's Ramadan and Muslims in your workplace might be offended if they see you eating at your desk. Why? I guess it's because Muslims don't eat during the day during Ramadan. They fast during the day and eat at night. Sorta like cockroaches."

Boortz is using Hitlerean language as well. Bugs and germs. Bugs and germs. Wipe them all out. The Nazis, too, spoke of cockroaches.

With Beck and Reagan, the eliminationist fantasy is right out there, front and center. The desire to kill liberals could not be more clear. But this is not simply an expression of desire, it is clearly an incitement. These are wealthy, successful public figures telling anyone who will listen, "Look, this is an acceptable thing to think about, acceptable to talk about to an audience of millions. There's nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with it at all."

Talk Radio And Genocide

While Hitler remains the classic example, you don't have to look back as far as Hitler to see how dangerous such language can be, as the program went on to note:

RICK KARR: Reverend Chris Buice says he's heard that kind of language before.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: If you look at the history of like situations like in Rwanda in 1994, the talk radio was a big part of leading to the conditions that created a genocide. The Hutu radio disc jockeys would call the Tutsi cockroaches. There's the sense that these aren't human beings. You know, they're not human beings with children or grandchildren. These are cockroaches. And when you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorist. That's hate language. You don't negotiate with evil people. You don't live in community with people you consider to be traitors.
RICK KARR: Millions of Americans tune in to right-wing talk radio every day. Rory O'Connor is a media critic and a liberal himself who's written a book on shock-talkers. He says not all of these broadcasters use violent language. But they do all share a predilection for outrage and, he says, they're all practically addicted to constantly cranking up that outrage.
RORY O'CONNOR: Here's the real problem. When you shock somebody, if you come back the next time and you apply the same stimulus, it's not shocking any longer. It's already happened. So you have to ratchet it up a little bit. So how do you cut through? How do you really shock? I think that in order to continue to outrage, you have to constantly be jacking up the pressure. And ultimately, there's gonna be some deranged person out there in that audience who's gonna say, "You know what? That's a good idea. Let me act on that."

Indeed, one could argue that the violence carried out by Jim David Adkisson was a foreseeable consequence of the overt eliminationist talk of the most extreme hate radio jocks. As such, they could be held liable for manslaughter, for acting with a depraved indifference to human life. That's not the course of action I would advise. But I do think it's important to note that there is a credible violation of criminal law involved here, which only sereves to strengthen that argument that sensible government regulation--of the sort we used to have--is fully warranted.

Two Further Wrinkles

RICK KARR: Right-wing talk radio hosts usually reserve their ad hominem attacks for liberal figures. Jim Quinn has his own name for the National Organization for Women.
JIM QUINN: "The National Organization for Whores, they're whores for liberal politics in general, and they were whores for Bill Clinton in particular."
RICK KARR: Glenn Beck tried to connect former Vice President Al Gore's efforts against global warming with Nazism.
GLENN BECK: "What was the first thing they did to get people to exterminate the Jews? Now, I'm not saying that anybody's going to, you know, Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however[...]you got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler's plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore's enemy, the U.N.'s enemy: global warming."

Two comments. First, about Quinn: Demeaning women is second nature to rightwingers. They've been doing it since the dawn of time. Whoever is not completely obedient to male authority is automatically "a whore" or a lesbian, or both. It may be hard to believe that an entire political movement is based on deep feelings of personal inadequacy, but when it comes right down to it, that's simply the way it is.

Second, about Beck: This is a truly remarkable passage. Not only does Beck project his own Hitlerean mindset onto Gore, he equates demonization and the recognition of large-scale problems.

Think about it. Hitler taking the Jews as a problem required expulsion at the least, and ultimately extermination. Al Gore, the UN and the world's climate scientists taking global warming as a problem requires shifting to new mix of carbon-neutral energy sources. No bloodshed. No one rounded up in the middle of night. Just windmills, photovoltaic cells, double insulation, more mass transit, and the like. How are these two in any way similar?

Simple: They aren't. This is just the reductio ad absurdum of the rightwing attempt to eliminate opposing viewpoints as well as opposing people. You can't even talk about a major problem, because then you're acting just like Hitler!

An Inconclusive Conclusion

The end of this powerful report was provided by Bill Moyers himself, in a curiously subdued conclusion:

BILL MOYERS:We may never know what finally triggered the killer's rage, unless he chooses at his trial or later to tell us. But not for a moment do I think any of the talk show hosts mentioned by the police would have wished it to happen.

Excuse me! After all your report has just exposed, you think these guys are what? Just joking around? Hell-o-oh! Roll the tape again, Bill. The part about Rwanda:

REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: If you look at the history of like situations like in Rwanda in 1994, the talk radio was a big part of leading to the conditions that created a genocide. The Hutu radio disc jockeys would call the Tutsi cockroaches. There's the sense that these aren't human beings. You know, they're not human beings with children or grandchildren. These are cockroaches. And when you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorist. That's hate language. You don't negotiate with evil people. You don't live in community with people you consider to be traitors.

That's what Moyers himself has just aired, and here in his conclusion he's telling us, essentially, that he doesn't believe his own warning! This is simply incredible.

His conclusion continues:

We asked several radio hosts to come on this broadcast and talk about the story; they either declined or didn't return our calls.

Gosh, the bullies are cowards! Who knew?

The issue of course is not their right to say anything they want on the air. The First Amendment guarantees their free speech as it does mine. Government shouldn't be the arbiter of what the Bill of Rights leaves to one's own sense of fair play.

Um, excuse me Bill, but why the hell not? Not in terms of what purely private people do, of course. But we're talking about people using the public airwaves to spew eliminationist rhetoric, which history shows can lead to actual genocide. The news hook for your story was a vivid, bloody example of what this looks like on a microcosmic scale.

We used to have a clear public policy against allowing this sort of thing. The airwaves were to be used in the public interest--this was built into the foundation of our telecommunications law. In fact, it's still there, in principle. On top of that, for decades we had the Fairness Doctrine, which required that views on matters of public controversy be balanced--a common-sense requirement if the public airwaves are to further the ideals of self-governance in a democratic republic.

What's more, we used to have ownership limits and at least the formal apparatus for reviewing whether stations really did serve the public interest. All that is gone now, and so it is very easy for broadcasters and/or syndicators to do darned near whatever they like. This is why even "market forces" have ceased to be an effective check. Even in the liberal Bay Area, rightwing talk radio radio took over the airwaves, despite a potential audience that was diametrically opposed.

On a national level, Jim Hightower was on a strong upward trajectory, with over a million regular listeners, when Disney bought ABC, and quickly kicked him off the air. These are not market-driven business decisions, any more than MSNBC's firing of Phil Donohue when he was their top-rated program before the Iraq War.

These are the result of a long-term rightwing Gramscian "culture war"--a struggle to control the cultural institutions that define our shared reality for us. That culture war intersects with corporate strategies involving much larger sums of money, currying favor with rightwing politicians in order to secure yet more anti-competitive advantages worth billions of dollars over the long term.

There is nothing "free market" or "free speech" about any of this. And it's time for good liberals like Bill Moyers to wake up and smell the coffee. Ths funny thing is that Moyers knows all this. He even talks like this himself sometimes. But he all too often wimps out like this at the end.

And speaking of the end, this is how he concluded this segment:

Watching that report, however, I was reminded of a story from folk lore about the tribal elder telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself. He said, "My son it is between two wolves. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, generosity, truth, compassion and faith." The boy took this in for a few minutes and then asked, "Which wolf won?" His grandfather answered, "The one I feed." So, too, America's public life. The wolf that wins is the wolf we feed. Media provides the fodder.

Although invidual choice still matters, it matters more when forged into collective aciton. And ultimately, the way we decide which wolf is fed is through public policy. Do we empower monopolies of hate? Or do we empower a true democratic dialogue?

We're So Lame

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 13:37:34 GMT

Here's a list of people involved in politics, most of them prominent bloggers, some with other political accomplishments as writers and activists spanning decades, one (Jennifer Nix) a publisher responsible for helping bring two important voices to printed prominence--George Lakoff and Glenn Greenwald. So what do the following people have in common?

Chris Bowers
Mike Lux
Matt Stoller
Jennifer Nix
Pam Spaulding

Frederick Clarkson
Howie Klein
George Lakoff
Brian Leubitz

Vincent Bugliosi
Duncan Black
Amanda Marcotte
Rick Perlstein

Answer: They're all lame.

Or at least that's what a number of commentators insisted this week, as their vociferous complaints dominated the discussion in the diary, "100,000 Strong Against Evan Bayh for VP" Off To Good Start--You Can Help".

A few samples:

"If Obama wants to win, he's not going to take a facebook page seriously"
"Obama is trying to win an election. You on the other hand are just trying to show off how cool you are."
"Giving people the impression that activism comes at the click of a mouse is totally deserving of mockery."
"Joining a facebook page is no effort. And it deserves no respect."

In response, Mark Matson observed :

Time Well Spent
Funny how it is such a waste of time to join a Facebook group, which took me roughly 30 seconds this morning, but apparently well worth the time to write paragraph after paragraph criticizing people for joining the group.
It reminds me of someone watching someone else playing a video game and then, after an hour or so, criticizing the video game player of wasting his time. Perhaps, sure, but not compared to the guy who didn't even play.

This could just be just another trivial example of the endless foibles of humanity. But I think there's something a bit more significant in the mix as well.
After a few fruitless go-rounds of arguing at cross-purposes, I reached the conclusion that rational argument was going nowhere. Whenever this happens, one thing I consider is shifting focus from the reasons given to the motives. Given the ludicrous contradiction Mark pointed out, why are they doing this?

Of course it's unfair to simply ignore people's arguments and skip directly to questioning motives. In fact, doing so invariably constitutes some form of fallacious reasoning, and I was immediately accused of this. It's called "ad hominem"--against the man. But like virtually all the fallacies, this one derives its power from the fact that it's based on a valid principle that's misapplied.

All other things being equal, the source of arguments is a good heuristic indicator of how seriously they should be taken, and people do have a strong tendency to consistent fall into patterns of making certain kinds of arguments, with characteristic strengths and/or weaknesses. People who persistent argue in bad faith are an extreme example, and we are well justified in distrusting or even disregarding everything they say as simply a waste of our time and energy.

We err, however, when we turn this valid heuristic principle into an assumed fact with which to dismiss an argument as false without even looking at it. This is how a valid heuristic principle becomes a fallacious form of argument. (Note: it is still valid to dismiss an argument as not worth our time, for example. We don't have to refute every false claim in Corsi's book, or even read someone else's refutation. This is a valid heuristic for determining what's worth our time and serious attention and what is not.)

There are a number of related fallacies here. The genetic fallacy simply rejects an argument because of where it comes from, the appeal to authority and appeal to tradition accept it for the same reason, the ad hominem rejects an argument and attacks or criticized the one making it, etc.

I go into this background detail as a way of indicating that I don't take it lightly when I set aside the arguments people are making to shift attention to motive. Even the worst of motives can still lead to valid arguments, so caution is always called for.

But here we had a case of sustained ridicule out of all proportion for what was being proposed. No one was arguing that this was the most effective form of activism ever invented. It was simply, as Mark pointed out, something that need take no more than thirty seconds, and more worth doing something than nothing. That was all we were arguing. The venom we encountered--though mild by internet standards--was simply out of all proportion to the proposed action.

Some of it, of course, derived from reflexive defense of Obama whatever he chose to do--a form of authoritarian submission that's no doubt depressing to see, particularly on the left, but hardly new or surprising. And some, slightly different, derived from a form of authoritarian aggression--attacking those who dare question anything Obama might do.

While both these motives are disturbing, to say the least, I view them primarily as correlates of rightwing authoritarianism (RWA), which is well-documented to exist across the political spectrum, even though it tends to be more common on the right, a tendency that grows increasingly stronger as people beceom more political involved. There is relatively little one can do about such attitudes in the short run, aside from not giving much power or authority to those who have them.

However, there are two alternative forms of explanation that deserve our attention. First is the fact that environmental factors can readily overpower individual attitudinal ones. Put simply, in a threatening environment, even those who are not particularly authoritarian in their basic attitudes may adopt authoritarian positions for a time. Thus, some of the authoritarian submission we see may well not derive from a basic authoritarian orientation. It may simply reflect an understandable fear that we could be facing another 4 years of wildly reckless Republican governance.

The second explanation is more a more complicated one, not necessarily wholly separate. This one focuses on more narrowly on the form of action itself, and the vehement accusations of futility. It is not so much--or even at all--about the content of the activism, and can be expressed by someone who despises Evan Bayh. This is what I honed in one myself, when I wrote:

As Someone Who's Walked Precincts, Done GOTV and Gone To Jail
among other forms of activism over the past 40+ years, I'm well aware that this is not a big deal.
But neither is picking up the phone and calling your congressmember. That doesn't mean it has no effect, muich less that it's worthy of mockery. Especially when done by thousands and thousands of people.
It sounds to me like you have serious self-esteem issues. If you really knew how important what you're doing is, and you felt secure in it, you wouldn't feel any need to denigrate others you don't even know.
Or, maybe you just had a bad day.
Hopefully the latter.

Self-esteem was foremost in my mind at the time, given the intensity of the put-downs being voiced. Such contempt for others one does not even know--others like Vincent Bugliosi, George Lakoff, Mike Lux and Dunacn Black, whose long-term seriousness of purpose ought to be recognized by all--drew my attention to issues of self-esteem.

But there was something else, broader going on as well, as I pointed out in a later comment:

I think that a lot of people are feeling ineffectual, because, in fact, it's objectively true that individuals are less effectual than they were earlier on. There are less people out there who are persuadable, it's harder to reach them, and at the same time, the campaign is perceptibly responding more to people that don't support it than it is to its base. This has to take a psychological toll, particularly if one denies what is going on. Being conscious is invariably better, as it allows for coping mechanisms. Lashing out at others as "ineffectual" is clearly indicative of projection, and not being on top of the toll it is taking.

I think this is a very real, very deep problem that tens upon thousands of activists are facing. And the two-fold root of this problem is quite simple. One is structural and unavoidable: in any election cycle, early persuasion is always easier, and early activism is always more visibly rewarded for the same sorts of mundane activities that the vast majority of us are engaged in.

But the second factor is particular to this campaign. Put simply, Obama's great appeal, the reason he is the nominee, is because he is different, because he represents change, because he promises to break the mold and offer new possibilities. However, ever since he clinched the nomination, his campaign has increasingly been about the exact opposite of all this. It's not just about "moving to the center," but about moving toward "tried and true" conventional positions.

As Matt noted in his diary, "Democratic National Security is For the Boys",

Here's who is representing the face of the party on national security.
Former President Clinton
Gov. Bill Richardson, New Mexico
Sen. Evan Bayh, Indiana
Sen. Joe Biden, Delaware
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, West Virginia
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada
Sen. Ken Salazar, Colorado
House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn, South Carolina
Rep. Patrick Murphy, Pennsylvania
Iraq war veteran Tammy Duckworth
VP Pick
So unless the VP is a woman, the 'Security America's Future' evening features four Senators who voted for the war in Iraq, one ex-President who supported the war in Iraq, one Congressman who voted against the war in Iraq, one Governor who opposed the war in Iraq, one Congressman who served in Iraq and voted for war funding, and one veteran who served in Iraq, ran a divisive primary and got crushed in a general election. There are no grassroots antiwar progressives on there and there is ONLY one woman.
What exactly did Evan Bayh do to deserve to represent himself as a leader on national security? And Joe Biden? And Ken Salazar? And Rockefeller? Really? All of these people got the big decision wrong, but they are tied together by a willingness to preen around as serious boys who like guns.
Moreoever, the one woman on stage that night, Tammy Duckworth, though she represents a laudable and important commitment to veterans, also represents an explicit repudiation of grassroots antiwar progressives.

This lineup--indeed, the very fact that we even have a whole night devoted to "national security" rather then "restoring America's economy" or "clean energy for our children's future" or (God forbid!) "restoring the Constitution"--is an almost total repudiation of the very foundation of Obama's career on the national stage, and all those ordinary American citizen-activists who enabled his rise. Yes, he had consultants, and fundraisers and all the rest, too, but what set him apart was that vast sea of citizen-activists whose hopes are being directly contradicted by the campaign Obama is now running.

What am I suggesting in place of the above line-up, you might ask? Well, aside from a totally different focus, as noted above (Or how about a night of "Republicans for Obama", if one must "show strength"? They could easily be much more progressive than the lineup presented above), why not feature someone like Andrew Bacevich, the conservative veteran who held forth so powerfully for the entire program on Bill Moyers Journal last night?

I'm not asking for Ron Kovic, because Bacevich looks the part and has the background of a Republican elder, and would say almost the exactly same thing, at bottom, as Kovic would say.

Heck, at this point, Sun Tzu would say the same thing as Kovic would say.

There is simply no denying that the Obama campaign has fundamentally abandoned the basic premise of its original rationale for being. Whether the governance that follows will continue this trajectory, or turn back towards its origins, we cannot say. But the sense of individual impotence in the face of such a turnabout is something that simply cannot be denied. Denying it simply means that you will lash out at others, projecting your own sense of powerless onto them.

The way forward can only lie with acknowledging that sense of impotence, and then resolving to do something about it. There should be no doubt that however compromised the Obama campaign is, the alternative is infinitely worse. So the question is not about whether one should continue to support the campaign. Rather, it is about how to organize against the tendencies that have to dominate it of late. And this is a question that will be with us for the duration of an Obama presidency--and even afterwards.

It's best to start owning our own sense of powerlessness. That is the only path that leads, eventually, back to our own true power.

Shadow Elites And Religion UPDATE

Paul Rosenberg — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:54:26 GMT

My series, "Shadow Elites And Religion" was interrupted after its first two installments (Part 1, Part 2), mostly because I'd built up such a head of steam that I wanted to do a lot more digging for the third installment, focused on John McCain and his ties to two Word of Faith ministers--John Hagee and Rod Parsley. All sorts of other stuff intruded, and, well, the hiatus continues.

But meanwhile, Sarah Posner, Word of Faith expert extraordinaire, has posted an excellent piece over at Huffington Post--"McCain's Pastor Problem", while Gary Kamiya chimes in at Salon with "Psycho Christians and the media", and there's even signs of catchup with my second installment, "Shadow Elites And Religion--Part 2: Sun Myung Moon", as noted in a frontpage post at DKos, "Moonshadows ", by DarkSyde, which focuses on recent attention to the connections between Moon and Bush Sr.--connections that I didn't delve into in my post, because I wanted to focus on the deep structural connections, but that are quite considerable in themselves.

Darkside highlights this piece at the Houston Chronicle, and John Gorenfeld's book, Bad Moon Rising.

I'll be writing more this weekend, but one thing worth highlighting now is the thinness of the McCain defense--"He's not my pastor, so it's not my fault."
Well, turn this around--since he's not your pastor, then why all the investment in associating with him in the first place, and the reluctance to condemn him in the second?

Kamiya writes:

even if Hagee and Parsley had been McCain's pastors, it's hard to imagine that the media would have attacked him as relentlessly as it has attacked Obama over Wright and Farrakhan.
The media's double standard is all about deference to perceived mainstream norms, and tiptoeing around the Christian right. Despite their cartoonish views, the media treats Hagee and Parsley as quasi-mainstream figures, which makes McCain's relationship with them non-newsworthy. The dirty little secret of mainstream American journalism is that it operates within invisible constraints that conform to some imagined Middle American consensus. The issue isn't that journalists share Hagee and Parsley's views so much as that they know that they are widely held, which makes them reluctant to acknowledge how truly outrageous they are.

This is all quite true. It's also true that qustioning these charlatans would involve acts of actual journalism, and as Chief Wiggums famously said (regarding his chances of having an actual friend), "What are the chances of that?"

Posner, too, takes on the "he's not my pastor" trope:

When Hagee and Parsley were revealed to have spewed bigotry from their pulpits, many people wondered if McCain had a "pastor problem" like Obama's supposed problem with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The rejoinder from the McCain camp was that he was not responsible for every sentence uttered by people who endorse his candidacy. But his pastor problem is not just his own, it's his party's too. And it's not about candidates bearing responsibility for odious sermons. It's about bearing responsibility for propping up religious demagoguery in order to win elections.

"He's not my pastor" is a narrative trope. As the TVTropes Wiki explains:

"Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations."

A large part of the work that the right has done over the past four decades has involved consciously pushing its tropes. This is a major part of cultural hegemony and the Gramscian "culture war"/"war of position" is all about. In such a context, something sounding "reasonable" is much more important than anything else. If it "sounds reasonable" it will be far less likely to be questioned, even if it has little or nothing to do with the underlying facts.

After all, who's going to look at the facts if reasonable explanation tells them there's no need to even look? Only those with a bad attitude, that's who!

That means us.

Shadow Elites And Religion--Part 2: Sun Myung Moon

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 11 May 2008 18:01:38 GMT

Part 1 here.

In 1995, Jerry Falwell was on the brink of financial ruin, $73 million in debt, when he was saved by the Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon. The transaction was hidden from sight, as Moon and Falwell used a pair of Virginia businessmen as cut-outs.

Moon has been a major player on the right since at least 1982, when he established the Washington Times, which he has subsidized to the tune of $3 billion over the years, according to investigative journalist Robert Parry, who was the leading journalist uncovering the Iran/Contra affair in the 1980s, and who has an extensive series on Moon at his website, Consortiumnews.com.

Until the emergence of Fox News in the late 1990s, the Washington Timeswas unquestionably the leading national news/propaganda organ of the right, and thus none of the movement higher-ups questioned him or his organization. (Even today, it remains a vital hub of the rightwing noise machine.) But Moon's theology and practices were so clearly heretical that appearances required significantly soft-peddling his enduring role and influence. It's impossible to fully grasp the hypocrisy and projection involved in rightwing politics without a consideration of the role of Sun Myung Moon.

For example, Moon claims to be the Second Coming--but he also claims to be better than Jesus, saying that Jesus failed in his mission, because he didn't procreat. Moon, in contrast, has been married three times, had various affairs, and numerous children. He has never disclosed where his money comes from, but Parry cites substantial evidence that much of it comes from underworld figures in Asia and Latin America. He served 18 months for filing false tax returns and conspiracy in the early 1980s.

It's very clear that his organization functions as an authoritarian cult, and Moon is deeply hostile to the United States. He also has clearly visible ties to Bush Sr. So, naturally--based on the principle I'm writing about here-- the money he funnelled to Falwell helped Falwell to project all these negatives onto a shadow liberal elite. And so he did, devoting enormous amounts of attention to peddling The Clinton Chronicles, a pseudo-documentary film that attempted to paint President Clinton as the mastermind of a vast criminal enterprise.

Falwell not only peddled the film on his TV program, he appeared in it, and later admitted he had no idea if any of it was true. Apparently, the commandment against bearing false witness didn't make it into Falwell's Bible.

This is the flip side of the manufactured hate-fest directed at Jeremiah Wright. Figures like Moon and Falwell break every Commandment in the Book, but are regarded as revered pillars of the conservative establishment. The more they sin, the more they have to savagely attack someone else. On the flip, we'll look at just a few of the things Sun Mung Moon has done that no liberal could possibly get away with.
The Second Coming

The Wikipedia article on Moon begins thus:

Sun Myung Moon (born January 6, 1920) is the leader of the Unification Church, which he officially founded on May 1, 1954 in Seoul, South Korea. Moon is also the founder and leader of the global Unification Movement which owns, operates or subsidizes many organizations involved in political, cultural, mass-media, and other activities. One of the best known is the Washington Times newspaper, founded in 1982.[1]
Moon has said he is the Second Coming of Christ, the "Savior", "returning Lord", and "True Parent". He teaches that all people should become perfected like Jesus and like himself, and that as such he "appears in the world as the substantial body of God Himself." He is well-known for holding Blessing ceremonies, which are often called "mass weddings". [2][3]
Moon has been among the most controversial modern religious leaders. He and his followers have been widely criticized, both for their religious beliefs and for their social and political activism. [4]

Robert Parry elaborates a bit on those religious beliefs ("Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right"):

Moon asserts that Satan corrupted mankind by sexually seducing Eve in the Garden of Eden and that only through sexual purification can mankind be saved. In line with that doctrine, Moon says Jesus failed in his mission to save mankind because he did not procreate.

Moon sees himself as a second messiah who will not make the same mistake. He has engaged in sex with a variety of women over the decades. The total number of his offspring is a point of debate inside the Unification Church.

A former young leader in the church, John Stacey, goes even further, Parry wrote in another installment of his series on Moon:

Moon's criticism of Jesus also unsettled Stacey. "In the church, it's very anti-Jesus," Stacey said. "Jesus failed miserably. He died a lonely death. Reverend Moon is the hero that comes and saves pathetic Jesus. Reverend Moon is better than God. ... That's why I left the Moonies. Because it started to feel like idolatry. He's promoting idolatry."

Think of how much the right hates George Soros. Most of the money Soros gives away does not go to anything partisan, but say that it did. And then say that Soros claimed to be the Second Coming of Christ. Say he claimed to be better than Jesus. Do you think maybe people would, I duno, maybe talk about it? But how often do you ever hear anyone complain about Moon? Interesting, no? Well, that's the power of projection at work.

Please note, I'm not arguing that there's a direct link here. It's not that rightwingers look at Moon, freak out, go looking for some liberal to blame instead, and fix on George Soros. Rather, there is a deeply ingrained set of orientations, primarily associated with rightwing authoritarianism (RWA), which predisposes people to trust those they perceive as established authorities, and to demonize those seen as social outgroups. Shadow elites are manufactured out of this raw material. Their sinister, unseen machinations are what makes the social outgroups so dangerous.

For those not familiar with it, RWA is defined thus:

Right-wing authoritarianism is defined as the co-existence of three attitudinal clusters in a person:
1. Authoritarian submission -- a high degree of submission to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
2. Authoritarian aggression -- a general aggressiveness, directed against various persons, that is perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities.
3. Conventionalism -- a high degree of adherence to the social conventions that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities. (Source: Altemeyer, 1996, Chapter 1)

And it's been empirically found to have the following correlations:

1: Faulty reasoning -- RWAs are more likely to:
* Make many incorrect inferences from evidence.
* Hold contradictory ideas that result from a cognitive attribute known as compartmentalized thinking.
* Uncritically accept that many problems are 'our most serious problem.'
* Uncritically accept insufficient evidence that supports their beliefs.
* Uncritically trust people who tell them what they want to hear.
* Use many double standards in their thinking and judgments.
2: Hostility Toward Outgroups -- RWAs are more likely to:
* Weaken constitutional guarantees of liberty such as a Bill of Rights.
* Severely punish 'common' criminals in a role-playing situation.
* Admit they obtain personal pleasure from punishing such people.
* Be prejudiced and hostile against racial, ethnic, nationalistic, sexual, and linguistic minorities.
* Volunteer to help the government persecute almost anyone.
* Be mean-spirited toward those who have made mistakes and suffered.
3: Perverse Character Attributes -- RWAs are more likely to:
* Be dogmatic.
* Be zealots.
* Be hypocrites.
* Be absolutists
* Be bullies when they have power over others.
* Help cause and inflame intergroup conflict.
* Seek dominance over others by being competitive and destructive in situations requiring cooperation.
4: Blindness To One's Own Failings And To The Failings Of Authority Figures Whom They Respect-- RWAs are more likely to:
* Believe they have no personal failings.
* Avoid learning about their personal failings.
* Be highly self-righteous.
* Use religion to erase guilt over their acts and to maintain their self-righteousness.

That does happen in some cases, I'm sure. can't prove any direct link, it's completely compatible with the way projection works that Soros is subject to all manner of unfair, hyperbolic attacks in part because of the corruption, degeneracy and almost limitless moral arrogance of similarly situated funders on the right--including, but not limited to Moon. Of course, it doesn't hurt that he's Jewish. That's all good for getting the hatemongers blood boiling. But there's millions of Jews in the world, and not that many people who claim to be the Second Coming.

The Many Loves of Sun Yung Moon

Wikipedia again:

Marriages and children
In November 1943 Moon married Sun Kil Choi. Their son, Sung Jin Moon, was born in 1946. They divorced in 1953 soon after Moon's release from prison in North Korea. Choi and Sung Jin Moon are now both members of the Unification Church. Choi has remarried. [6]
Technically, Moon was still married to his first wife when he began a relationship with his second (common law) wife Myung Hee Kim, who gave birth to a son named Hee Jin Moon (who was killed in a train accident). The church does not regard this as infidelity, but rather part of God's "providential" plan.[7]
Moon married his third wife, Hak Ja Han,[8] on April 11, 1960, soon after she turned 17 years old, in a ceremony called the "Holy Marriage." Han, called "Mother" or "True Mother" by followers, and her husband together are referred to as the "True Parents" by members of the Unification Church.
Hak Ja Han gave birth to 14 children; her second daughter died in infancy. The family is known in the church as the "True Family" and the children as the "True Children." Shortly after their marriage they presided over a Blessing Ceremony for 36 couples, the first of many such ceremonies.
Nansook Hong, ex-wife of Hyo Jin Moon, Sun Myung Moon's eldest son, said in her 1998 book In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family, that both Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han told her about Moon's extramarital affairs (which she said he called "providential affairs"), including one which resulted in the birth of a boy raised by a church leader, named by Sun Myung Moon's daughter Un Jin Moon on the news show 60 Minutes.[9]

Robert Parry elaborates a bit on those religious beliefs ("Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right"):

Moon asserts that Satan corrupted mankind by sexually seducing Eve in the Garden of Eden and that only through sexual purification can mankind be saved. In line with that doctrine, Moon says Jesus failed in his mission to save mankind because he did not procreate.

Parry adds more to this, however. Continuing the passage quoted in the previous section:

Moon says Jesus failed in his mission to save mankind because he did not procreate.
Moon sees himself as a second messiah who will not make the same mistake. He has engaged in sex with a variety of women over the decades. The total number of his offspring is a point of debate inside the Unification Church.

Anti-American

In "Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Hooking George Bush", Robert Parry wrote:

Moon's jingle of deep-pocket cash also has caused conservatives to turn a deaf ear toward Moon's recent anti-American diatribes. With growing virulence, Moon has denounced the United States and its democratic principles, often referring to America as "Satanic." But these statements have gone virtually unreported, even though the texts of his sermons are carried on the Internet and their timing has coincided with Bush's warm endorsements of Moon.
"America has become the kingdom of individualism, and its people are individualists," Moon preached in Tarrytown, N.Y., on March 5, 1995. "You must realize that America has become the kingdom of Satan."
In similar remarks to followers on Aug. 4, 1996, Moon vowed that the church's eventual dominance over the United States would be followed by the liquidation of American individualism. "Americans who continue to maintain their privacy and extreme individualism are foolish people," Moon declared. "The world will reject Americans who continue to be so foolish. Once you have this great power of love, which is big enough to swallow entire America, there may be some individuals who complain inside your stomach. However, they will be digested."
During the same sermon, Moon decried assertive American women. "American women have the tendency to consider that women are in the subject position," he said. "However, woman's shape is like that of a receptacle. The concave shape is a receiving shape. Whereas, the convex shape symbolizes giving. ... Since man contains the seed of life, he should plant it in the deepest place.
"Does woman contain the seed of life? ["No."] Absolutely not. Then if you desire to receive the seed of life, you have to become an absolute object. In order to qualify as an absolute object, you need to demonstrate absolute faith, love and obedience to your subject. Absolute obedience means that you have to negate yourself 100 percent."

Parry goes on to report on a former disciple who was shaken by a Moon diatribe against America, in which Moon said, "America is so Satanic that even hamburgers should be considered evil, because they come from America'."

The disciple was shocked: "Hamburgers! My father was a butcher, so that bothered me. ... I started feeling that I was betraying my country."

So, the House GOP voting against motherhood last week. The pieces are falling into place...

Drug Crazy

Remember what I said above about George Soros and Sun Myung Moon? Well, it was sort of set-up:

On August 30, 2004, Kevin Drum wrote:

"I'M SAYING WE DON'T KNOW"....Josh Marshall links today to the latest smear from House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Lloyd Grove reports:
"You know, I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't know where -- if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from," Hastert mused. An astonished Chris Wallace asked: "Excuse me?" The Speaker went on: "Well, that's what he's been for a number years -- George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he's got a lot of ancillary interests out there." Wallace: "You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?" Hastert: "I'm saying I don't know where groups - could be people who support this type of thing. I'm saying we don't know."
And I think maybe George Bush got tossed out of the National Guard because he crashed a plane while he was high on coke and then spent the next five months in Alabama in a rehab center. I mean, we just don't know, do we?
For the record, I'd like to note that Hastert is not an overweight filmmaker or an anonymous blogger. He's the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third highest ranking Republican official in the country. This is what the leadership of the Republican party has become.

Well, you know we'd never hear the end of it if Nancy Pelosi were to act like that. But I bet you also know where I'm going next. Yup! That little old drug-dealing cult leader:

Mysterious Republican Money
By Robert Parry
September 7, 2004
If House Speaker Dennis Hastert were really concerned about drug profits being laundered into the U.S. political process, he would not be sliming billionaire financier George Soros with that suspicion. Hastert would be looking at a principal conservative funder: South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon.
While Hastert was unable to cite a shred of evidence that the liberal Soros is funneling illicit money, there is a substantial body of evidence that Moon has long commanded a criminal enterprise with close ties to Asian and South American drug lords. The evidence includes first-hand accounts of money laundering disclosed by Moon confidantes and even family members. Besides those more recent accounts, Moon was convicted of tax fraud based on evidence developed in the late 1970s about his money-laundering activities.
Since serving his tax-evasion sentence in the early 1980s, however, Moon appears to have bought himself protection by spreading hundreds of millions of dollars around conservative causes and through generous speaking fee payments to Republican leaders, including former President George H.W. Bush.
Moon himself has boasted that he spent $1 billion on the right-wing Washington Times in its first decade alone. The newspaper, which started in 1982, continues to lose Moon an estimated $50 million a year but remains a valuable propaganda organ for the Republican Party.
How Moon has managed to cover the vast losses of his media empire and pay for lavish conservative conferences has been one of the most enduring mysteries of Washington, but curiously one of the least investigated - at least since the Reagan-Bush era.

Parry goes on to describe how Moon is connected with the Korean CIA, rightwing Japanese WWII war criminals Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who "grew rich from their association with the yakuza, an organized crime syndicate that profited off drug smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and Korea," and an assortment of different rightwing regimes in Latin America during the 1980s, including the notorious Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia. This also, inevitable, involved connections to the Nicaraguan Contras cocaine dealing.

If George Soros were to get anywhere near even a fraction of this, we'd never hear the end of it. But Moon? I'll bet that at least half the people reading this have never even heard anything about Moon's involvement in drugs and underworld finance. That's precisely how the projection process works in the fantasy construction of shadow elites.

But there's more, you see. Parry also describes how a much younger Senator John Kerry, still fired by moral passion at the time, launched an investigation into contra drug trafficking, and thus earned the ire of Moon's Washington Times:

Kerry's Probe
When Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts conducted a Senate probe and uncovered additional evidence of contra drug trafficking, The Washington Times denounced him, too. The newspaper first published articles depicting Kerry's probe as a wasteful political witch hunt. "Kerry's anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain," announced the headline of one Times article.
But when Kerry exposed more contra wrongdoing, The Washington Times shifted tactics. In 1987 in front-page articles, it began accusing Kerry's staff of obstructing justice because their investigation was supposedly interfering with Reagan-Bush administration efforts to get at the truth. "Kerry staffers damaged FBI probe," said one Times article that opened with the assertion: "Congressional investigators for Sen. John Kerry severely damaged a federal drug investigation last summer by interfering with a witness while pursuing allegations of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance, federal law enforcement officials said."
Despite the attacks from The Washington Times and pressure from the Reagan-Bush administration to back off, Kerry's contra-drug investigation eventually concluded that a number of contra units - both in Costa Rica and Honduras - were implicated in the cocaine trade.
"It is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers," Kerry's investigation stated in a report issued April 13, 1989. "In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter."

This is only the tip of the iceberg, however, as Parry goes on to note:

The available evidence now shows that there was much more to the contra drug issue than either the Reagan-Bush administration or Moon's organization wanted the American people to know in the 1980s. The evidence - assembled over the years by inspectors general at the CIA, the Justice Department and other federal agencies - indicates that Bolivia's Cocaine Coup government was only the first in a line of drug enterprises that tried to squeeze under the protective umbrella of Ronald Reagan's favorite covert operation, the contra war.
Other cocaine smugglers soon followed, cozying up to the contras and sharing some of the profits as a way to minimize investigative interest by the Reagan-Bush law enforcement agencies. The contra-connected smugglers included the Medellin cartel, the Panamanian government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military, the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and the Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans with their connections to Mafia operations throughout the United States.

The official story at the time was that "we" were fighting the "communists" in Central America. But as Parry shows, the reality was "something completely different," as the Pythons would say. In fact, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas were not aligned with the Soviet Union. The Nicaraguan Communist Party was part of the opposition, and the Sandinistas only turned to the Soviets for aid after the US had twisted the arms of all the European governments that the Sandinistas had approached first. The official story recognizes none of these basic facts. And of course it regards any talk of drugs as a "conspiracy theory," even though it's been confirmed by the CIA's own inspector general.

That's just how vital a role projection plays in the maintenance of the power of conservative elites.

And right in the middle of it all, a virulently anti-American Korean cult leader who claims to be better than Jesus.

And they want to get us all in a tizzy over Jeremiah Wright?

Shadow Elites And Religion--Part 1

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 10 May 2008 22:01:57 GMT

In my diary Fox's Faux Populism vs A Shadow Elite--pt. 1, I argued:

It's relatively easy for an elite to create a "shadow" elite, meaning something akin "shadow" in the Jungian sense of the unacknowledged dark side of the self. The mass of people resent the elite for things the elite cannot admit or accept about itself--above all, the arbitrariness and injustice of its position in the world--and so it projects its shadow onto another group.

In that diary, I talked about the conservatives' creation of the truest form of shadow elite-the non-existent "Bavarian Illuminati" who had been disbanded a decade prior to the French Revolution they were accused of master-minding. In this diary set, I want to talk about shadow elites and religion-a topic which necessarily evokes a much earlier point in time, peg some further observation look much farther back in time, to the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine (306-337), the first Christian Roman Emperor.

The changes that took place in Christianity as a result gave rise to or intensified contradictions that are with us still, as a pacifistic religion of the downtrodden and peripheral was transformed into an imperial religion. Although tremendous intellect was devoted over the ages to attempting to perfect this transformation, it was, at bottom, an impossible task. This partly explains the distinctive nature of America's Black Church, since its practitioners are in the same position as the early Christians and their Hebrew forbearers-a fact which Black Christians seemed to have grasped almost immediately, though it seems to have entirely escaped the understanding of their slavemasters.

White Christians, OTOH, are all too vulnerable to sliding into Crusade mode, as this new release from Brave New Films-highlighting John McCain's excessive praise for holy war enthusiast Rod Parsley--reminds us:

[More on Parsley below the fold]

In the heat of a presidential campaign, it is perhaps understandable that Reverend Jeremiah Wright should be castigated for causing trouble for Barack Obama, yet, whatever one thinks of his actions, he does have a point: He is acting out a traditional Christian role, and he is correct when he claims to be articulating Biblical principles. He seems a cantankerous outsider, and so he is. So were all the Hebrew prophets, so was John the Baptist, and so, too, was Jesus, as were his followers for generations, up until the time of Constantine.

In contrast, the Christian elite, from at least Constantine onward, has struggled with the contradictions of its own existence, and often, in doing so, has resorted to projecting its own contradictions, its own hypocrisy, its own confusion onto others, including, of course, its shadow elites, and rival religious traditions.

In this diary set, I want to focus on a four main contradictions underlying imperialist Christianity, as a cultural mainstream, and the religious right as it has specifically articulated itself since the 1970s....
Four Main Contradictions

The first contradiction is simply that of being imperalist Christianity-as I said above, "a pacifistic religion of the downtrodden and peripheral ... transformed into an imperial religion." The second contradiction is the religious right's tortured roots in Southern segregationism, recast as moral superiority, based on issues that are almost entirely cultural, not Biblical-abortion, school prayer, homosexuality, etc.

The third contradiction is the broader conservative movement's long-time dependence on a profoundly anti-Christian figure, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who financed what was the central news/propaganda organ of the conservative movement-The Washington Times-for well over a decade, until its importance was finally matched by the Fox News Channel. Moon's claim to his own divinity is so clearly heretical that it's mindboggling he should have played such a central role in the building of the contemporary "conservative" movement. It's precisely this sort of crazy-making contradiction which only makes conservatives all the more fanatical in projecting their own shadows, and attacking the perceived transgressions of others.

The fourth contradiction is the similarly heretical Pentecostal offshoot known as "Word of Faith," a sort of New Age prosperity cult that turns its back on all the social justice teachings of the Bible. Both Rod Parsley and John Hagee are "Word of Faith" huslters with an Armageddon fixation, who show no compunction whatever over draining the bank accounts of their less affluent followers.

Whatever one's religion-or lack of same-it should be obvious that each of these configurations is hardly the pure Christian Gospel it claims to be. They are each of them riddled with their own contradictions-contradictions in which demons gestate over time, until out of those contradictions, unguarded, unfaced, anacknowledge, full grown demons come.

The five minute hate directed at Jeremiah Wright derives at least some of it instensity from the simple fact that so many of those who condemned Wright and demanded others do the same are themelves driven by those demons that they still have yet to face.

"Just War Theory"-Or Just War?

Originally, Christianity was understood as a pacifistic religion, and was most popular among the Empire's underclass. But as it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it necessarily underwent a change, giving rise to the origins of just war theory. Indeed, Wikipedia notes:

In 316, Constantine acted as a judge in a North African dispute concerning the heresy of Donatism. After making a decision against the Donatists, Constantine led an army of Christians against Christians. After 300 years of pacifism, this was the first intra-Christian persecution. More significantly, in 325 he summoned the Council of Nicaea, effectively the first Ecumenical Council (unless the Council of Jerusalem is so classified), to deal mostly with the heresy of Arianism. Constantine also enforced the prohibition of the First Council of Nicaea against celebrating Easter on the day before the Jewish Passover (14 Nisan) (see Quartodecimanism and Easter controversy).[151]

What we see here is not just the speed with which Christianity is adapted to a war-fighting stance, but also how readily it is adapted to suppressing one form of Christianity by another. Wikipedia also notes:

From the beginning, Christianity was regarded as completely pacifistic, due to a strict interpretation of the Bible as well as constant persecution by the Roman Empire. However, when Christianity became the official religion of the empire "all of Christianity began to embrace just war theory, as an attempt to be realistic about evil and harm-doing", a critical transition for the church.[142] Another consequence of Christianity being the state religion was that clergy members were given preferred status and exempted from military service and forced labor. There was a growing divide between clergy and laity as conversions were often more about socioeconomic status rather than faith. Converts were baptized in order to abuse Christianity for political influence, a problem unheard of before Constantine, when converts to Christianity willingly risked their life for their faith. [143]

None of this is should be surprising. This is precisely what one expects from a union of church and state-the two reinfore one another, and lose certain defining attributes which they would have if standing alone. Of course, the Roman Empire had previously had another state religion, so its defining attributes were already religiously inflected. But Christianity was profoundly transformed. What three hundred years of persecution could not accomplish, a few short years of power managed quite handily. It moved from the right hand of God to the left:

Matthew 25:31 "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 "Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'
37 "Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'
40 "The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'
41 "Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'
44 "They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'
45 "He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'
46 "Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."

From the Crusades to the colonization of the New World to the spread of imperialism throughout Asia and Africa, Christianity would prove itself a potent driving force, spurring on the imperial lust for wealth, power and control over the lives of others-all a far, far cry from its origins and its original orientation as a religion of the dispossessed. Naturally, imperialist Christianity was always eager to see the demons in others, it had so many of them itself.

Parsley's Place: A Foretaste

Rod Parsley is a very important figure in the religious right, and I will have much more to say about him in a future instalment. He was a major player in helping Bush to win Ohio in 2004. But first, I need to lay the proper groundwork, which will take some time. For now, however, what's worth noting is how well his religious extremism fits into the larger mainstream of imperial Christianity. Over the past hundred years or so, historical forces have worked to greatly mitigate the ferocity of Christian imperialism. For four hundred years, Christian imperialism had grown increasingly dominant on the world stage, until it reached a breaking point, as the Christian powers fell on one another in World Wars I and II.

At the same time, many different missionaries to the Third World went native in one way or another. The more perceptive and open-minded of them often noticed that the people they were evangelizing were a good deal more "Christian" than the powers at their backs. To a significant extent, as Walter Russell Mead argues in Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World, both multi-culturalism and the Wilsonian multi-lateral tradition have their roots in America's very high level of overseas evangelization. Non-white Christian voices-from the black South to black South Africa-added to a mix that was also softened by the emergence of a more humane secular outlook. Consequently, there was a clear trajectory of mainstream Christianity to move away from its earlier, longstanding blind embrace of imperial power. This distancing was even evident in the Pope's condemnation of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Parsley is not shocking to many, I assume, because there is a long, long history of imperial Christianity whose attitudes are echoed in his own. But it's important to realize that Christianity as a whole has learned some lessons over the last 100 years or so, and Parsley represents a very deliberate forgetting of those lessons, a willful embrace of the darkest aspects of our collective imperialist madness.

Fast Forward To Our Times: The Segregation/Christian Conservtive Connection

Imperialist Christianity was one of the great bulwarks of slavery, even as the Black Church and Quakerism were amongst its greatest foes. In his book Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840, Larry E. Tise reveals the overwhelmingly dominant role that the Bible played as a source of Proslavery arguments in the generation leading up to the Civil War, as slavery finally became the object of sustained attack. Of course, religion played a powerful role in mobilizing opposition to slavery as well, and the same clashing views persisted down to the Civil Rights era, when mainline Protestents joined the Black Church and progressive Jews to form a powerful religiously-inspired coalition to eradicate segregation from our land. In the South, White Curches played a powerful role in legitimizing the existing segregationist order, some by directly justifying and defending it, others by insisting on the need to "go slow"-which everyone knew really meant "don't go."

The obstructionist role toward civil rights that white churches played in the South is not well known, but that doesn't mean it wasn't important-particularly given how influential religion has always been in Southern culture. When Jerry Fallwel died last year, there was nary a word in most places about his anti-civil rights past. At The Nation magazine, Max Blumenthal sought to set the record straight with an article, "Agent of Intolerance" that included some notable highlights-not only Falwell's segregationist roots, but the initial tolerance of abortion by Southern Baptists-in stark contrast to the Catholic hierarchy at that time.

[F] or Falwell, the "questions of the day" did not always relate to abortion and homosexuality--nor did they begin there. Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell's life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race--not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues--that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.
As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher's own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled "Segregation or Integration: Which?"
"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made," Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. "The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."
Falwell's jeremiad continued: "The true Negro does not want integration.... He realizes his potential is far better among his own race." Falwell went on to announce that integration "will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city," he warned, "a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife."

What's significant here-among other things-is how little of anything had changed in 100 years. This can be seen on at least three major points: (1) God was still the justification for keeping blacks separate, and for keeping them down. God was the original segregationist. Segregtionist society creates a segregationist God in its image, and then feels duty-bound to abide by his commands.

(2) We are assured that blacks themselves do not want their own freedom. The logic imputed was absurd on its face-"He realizes his potential is far better among his own race"-since a black man with a college degree was still the social inferior of a white grade school dropout. That simple fact might escape Falwell's intellectual grasp, but few indeed were the blacks who were quite that stupid.

In fact, what's happening here is that the White elite projects its unchanging image of the social order into the minds of the black underclass. They cannot possibly conceive of a different social order. They must surely accept that whites will always, uniformly, be better than blacks. There is no possibility of bettering themselves individually, and it's inconceivable to the White elites that the downtrodden blacks should think of themselves as a people, and act in terms of their common destiny. Therefore, because he accepts all the unspoken assumptions his imaginative creator White creator projects into him, the "true Negro" wants precisely what his imaginative creator wants him to want-things exactly as they are.

Of course this "logic" is preposterous, but it is also utterly necessary for the conservative project. For if people themselves want political reforms-if the French people themselves revolt against monarchic misrule, if the slaves want to be free, and 100 years later the segregted black masses want the same-then one cannot blame their challenge to the established order on a hidden shadow elite of troublemakers, whose only real agenda is to take the rightful place of the estabished conservative elite. Instead, one must confront their actual demands, and their actual arguments head-on, and this is one thing that conservative elites simply cannot do. It revolts them to even think of talking to a black person-or a common French peasant-as any sort of equal whatsoever. And if they somehow could stand the insult, their arguments would be blown away like so many dead leaves in the wind, since they are all based on rootless assumptions, conjured out of thin air.

(3) Miscegenation is proffered as the ultimate segregationist argument, as if nothing more need be said. But, of course, it was the Southern slaveowners who began the practice, under the threat of the lash. It only became abhorrent when it passed beyond the control of lecherous powerful men. Like any other trespass in the eyes of conservative elites, notwithstanding what they said, the problem was not the act itself, but who was doing it, and who was being served.

I spend so long reflecting on Falwell's brief remarks because they provide such direct continuity, not just with the slaveowning/slavery-justifying past, but also with the authoritarian sexual morality to come. Just as God blessed slavery and segregation, he will bless the war on abortion, and gays and lesbians as well. The fact that others moved by their own understandings of God come to opposite conclusions-that is simply unthinkable, just as it was unthinkable for the slaveowners of the 1830s. Likewise, just as the "true Negro" knows that segregation is for him, so, too, the "true Woman" will come to know that male dominance and anti-feminism are for her, and the "true Gay" will know that the only "true Gay" is an ex-gay, which is why they have to exist--even if they don't. Lastly, the "self-evident" evils of abortion, homosexuality, and secular humanism in general will come to be denounced-or forgiven, denied or ignored as the case may be-in an a totally relativistic manner, just as miscegenation was denounced, forgiven, denied or ignored from the earliest days of slavery right up to Falwell's day.

Blumenthal continues:

As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs."
In a 1964 sermon, "Ministers and Marchers," Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations," Falwell declared, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."
Falwell concluded, "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners."

Priceless!

Then, for a time, Falwell appeared to follow his own advice. He retreated from massive resistance and founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy, an institution described by the Lynchburg News in 1966 as "a private school for white students." It was one among many so-called "seg academies" created in the South to avoid integrated public schools.
For Falwell and his brethren, private Christian schools were the last redoubt. Rather than continue a hopeless struggle against the inevitable, through their schools they could circumvent the integration entirely. Five years later, Falwell christened Liberty University, a college that today funnels a steady stream of dedicated young cadres into Republican Congressional offices and conservative think tanks. (Tony Perkins is among Falwell's Christian soldiers.)

Yes, folks, "Liberty University," so named because it was free of blacks!

Now we get to the good stuff:

In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right's genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court's ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.

Indeed, there was long a belief that life started with the first breath, just as God breathed the first breath-and his soul--into Adam. As Blumenthal goes on to explain, the Catholic right's concerns about abortion failed to interest White Southern Protestants for years to come:

While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until 1971.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it's easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."

Because, of course, a Christian school could not be integrated.

Blumenthal continues:

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His pleas initially fell on deaf ears.
"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

Yep! "So-called" segregation!

Blumenthal:

In 1979, at Weyrich's behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell's organization hoisted the banner of the "pro-family" movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government's attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right's culture war would likely never have come into being. "The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something."

Of course, millions of those who were mobilized by Falwell and his cronies sincerely believed that abortion was the issue, and that it was against God's word-despite the fact that such words could not be found in the Bible. There were words against homosexuality, however, along with words against shrimp and polyester blends. (The war on Red Lobster and Sears will begin any day now, I promise!) What really mattered was that provincial elites and would-be elites, like Falwell, had a chance to reclaim the moral high ground they had once inhabited, when just to have black skin marked one as morally inferior.

The Civil Rights Movement had turned the moral universe upside down, and by God, Falwell and his cronies were going to set it right again, with themselves on top, and their enemies accused of all the shameful things they could imagine-both recycled charges stretching all the way back to slave-time, and their own experience of humiliation when all the world looked at their racism and found it morally repugnant. Indeed, this was the whole point of the Moral Majority, and the other similar groups: they were out to emulate the success of the Civil Rights Movement, copying everything about it that had washed away their precious moral authority. They wanted payback, and they wanted it bad.

And, you know what? That's exactly what they've given us, for lo these many years.

But to get it done, first they had to do a deal with the anti-Christ, Sun Myung Moon.

To be continued in Part 2.

The Congressional MoveOn Madness: Shaking Off The Demons

Paul Rosenberg — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 15:10:58 GMT

The recent behavior of Congress approaches the level of clinical insanity. This is not snark. It's reality-based observation. And such observation is vitally necessary in order to not sucked into the insanity ourselves. I want to explain precisely what I mean, and I want to present some reference points, so we may appreciate how deep and long-standing this insanity is.

Otherwise, quite frankly, the French Revolution option starts to look mighty good. And we all know how badly that turned out. Just because we are ruled by an imbecilic, out-of-touch, gang of narcissistic twits does not mean we should kill them all. Actions have consequences. They may not know it, but damn sure better. And so it behooves us to find a place of sanity from which to observe, analyze, and start to correct this sea of madness that threatens to engulf us.

And make no mistake, it is a sea of madness. One that we have all been swimming in from at least 1995, when the GOP took over Congress. If we think it started with 9/11, we are deluding ourselves, and one consequence of that delusion is that we expect Beltway Democrats to recover their sanity mush faster than they are actually capable of. Of course, it's eminently reasonable to expect to be governed by people who are sane. But we have not been a reasonable nation for a very long time now.
Clearing The Decks

First, let's get clear on the basic fact of the madness. What did MoveOn say? Did MoveOn criticize the military? (Gasp!) No, in fact, MoveOn did not. Did MoveOn attack the military? No, in fact, MoveOn did the precise opposite: It defended the military by pointedly asking if the troops were being sold out for a political purpose. And the people who mounted this attack on MoveOn were precisely those who have been selling out the military since day one.

This is projection, folks, pure and simple. Pot. Kettle. Black. It's been the dominant form of political discourse since the GOP took over Congress in 1994.

Consider. Here is the military's own summary of its "lessons learned" from the Vietnam War. It came to be known as "The Powell Doctrine," because it was prominently articulated by Colin Powell around the time of the First Gulf War. But in fact it did not come from Powell personally. If was a consensus judgment, and for the military as an institution, it made a lot of sense. Here it is:

The questions posed by the Powell Doctrine, which should be answered affirmatively before military action, are:
1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?
2. Do we have a clear attainable objective?
3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
7. Is the action supported by the American people?
8. Do we have genuine broad international support?

By now, the fiasco of Iraq is so well-known that simply to pose these questions is to indict the Bush Administration. Every single question can unambiguously be answered in the negative. And this is not simply something that we can say with the wisdom of hindsight. This was obvious as events were unfolding.

So, here's the simple construction:

(1) The military developed the "Powell Doctrine" as its set of lessons learned from Vietnam, to protect itself in the future, and thus to protect its ability to defend America.

(2) Bush carelessly discarded the "Powell Doctrine", thus severely damaging the military and its ability to defend America.

(3) Bush hates the troops. He treats them with utter contempt. General staff that chooses to do his bidding aligns itself with Bush, and against the troops entrusted to their care.

(4) Criticizing officers who betray the troops is defending the troops against their betrayal.

Taking the Measure of Insanity

Without even thinking about it, most of us have our political clocks set to the time-scale of 9/11. This is where we go terribly wrong. If our collective political insanity really had started then, then it would be perfectly normal to expect that madness to be wearing off. The election of a Democratic Congress nearly a year ago should have signaled a sharp turning point.

But this assumption is wrong. And it's not just that the Democrats actually controlled the Senate when they voted to authorize war with Iraq in 2002. It's wrong because we had already experienced more than half a decade of madness before 9/11. Indeed, we have every reason to believe that that period of madness was why 9/11 happened in the first place.

If you think that a President getting a blow-job is the greatest crisis in the history of American government, then it pretty much goes without saying that you're missing the big picture. And that big picture includes people plotting to destroy the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the White House and/or Congress.

To gain some perspective on that madness, I want to quote from a document--a collection of email posts, actually--from the pre-blog era. These are from Phil Agre, whose essay, "What Is Conservatism and What is Wrong With It?" also figured prominently in post-2004 election discussions at MyDD, and was the first subject of the first Book Club discussion there.

Like that essay, the posts collected in this document--Notes On The New Jargon came from Agre's email list, the Red Rock Eater Newsletter, which had around 5,000 subscribers as I recall--a pretty considerable audience for the time. Some were written during the 2000 Florida election contest, some earlier in 2000, and a couple in 1998 and 1999. The document as a whole runs over 30,000 words, and is well worth reading in its entirety. But here are just a few choice excerpts, worth reading both for their invaluable insight, and for the reminder of just how long things have been going on like this:

12/9/00
The Florida Supreme Court's order to finally count the votes in the presidential election should not have been a surprise. Republicans in Florida insist on counting illegal ballots and not counting legal ballots, and accuse the Democrats of stealing the election for insisting otherwise. Florida Republicans stole the 1998 Miami mayor's race using illegal absentee ballots, and now they insist that illegal absentee ballots be counted in the 2000 race, and excoriate the Democrats for circulating a memo that summarizes Florida absentee ballot laws. It's incredible.
Meanwhile the Republicans accuse the Democrats of trying to change the rules after the election simply for going to court to make the election boards follow the Florida election law, even as the Republican Florida legislature attempts to change the rules after their election with their utterly illegal attempt to replace the citizens' votes with their own.
We see here the central principle of the new jargon: whatever you're doing, falsely accuse your opponents of doing it. Now the far-rightwing of the US Supreme Court has engaged in the most extreme case of judicial activism in American history, staying action by the Florida Supreme Court under the very clear authority granted to the Florida courts by the Florida legislature, shutting down the contest procedure that Florida law provides and thus effectively throwing the election to its preferred conservative choice. In response to all of this,the sidewalk of the federal building in Los Angeles is filled with right-wing protesters whose signs use words like "fascism" and "evil"-- to describe what the Florida court did.

This is what actually happened to bring George Bush to power. It was so bad that, for instance, Agre was one of the few public commentators to actually note at the time something that has been totally flushed down the memory hole--there never even was a full Florida recount in the first place. A significant chunk of counties did not recount their ballots as required by law, but simply re-ran the tabulation software. This could readily be seen at the time, since they were the counties that had identical vote totals for the original count and the recount--something that virtually never happens with more than a few thousand votes.

Did this make a difference in the outcome? We'll never know. But it is fully indicative of how utterly lawless the process was, left to itself, and how utterly incompetent the media was in reporting on it. These are the filters through which all the known outrageous need to be viewed.

Agre continues:

America is now Upside-Down-Backwards Land; it is filled with people who are capable of doing anything, because whatever they do, no matter how crazy or extreme, they hallucinate that it is really being done to them. How do they get themselves into that state? Let me give you an example. Looking at the map of which American states voted for which presidential candidate, conservative pundit Mike Barnicle remarked on MSNBC that the southern and middle states, which voted for Bush, represented "family values", and that the northeastern and west-coast states, which voted for Gore, represented "entitlement".
In a normal country this sort of thing would be denounced as ugly and divisive stereotyping. Instead, Gore supporter Paul Begala responded in a polite way by arguing that the situation is more complicated, and that every state has both good and bad aspects. To illustrate this, and clearly in that context, he pointed out that the states that Barnicle praised where also the states where James Byrd was lynched, Matthew Shepard was crucified, a federal office building was blown up, and so on. He continued by repeating that each of those states also has good attributes, and repeated that the picture is complicated. He concluded by calling Barnicle a "gifted commentator".
Then Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall St. Journal, took out of context the bit about the Bush states being places where people got lynched and crucified and so on, and presented it as if Begala were claiming that those events defined the states they happened in. She mentioned nothing of Barnicle's comments, or of the message about things being complicated. Noonan's out-of-context quote was then repeated over and over by the conservative media echo chamber, Michael Kelly in the Washington Post for example.
The quote bounced all over the Internet, and was mailed tome by several different people. In each case, starting with Noonan, the argument was the same: this is the viciousness of Democrats to which we must respond in kind. Can you see the projection? Republican columnist issues vicious stereotype of Democratic states. Nobody expresses outrage. Democrat responds that the picture is complicated and that stereotypes do not apply. Republicans quote Democrat out of context, accusing him of issuing vicious stereotype of Republican states, using said accusation to justify further vicious behavior of their own. That's how it works.

That's the ways it's done: hysterical rightwing propaganda is normalized, and not even liberal, but a purely factual centrist observation is demonized as vicious and hateful.

(Of course, Begala could have said something much more damning and appropriate to the specifics of Barnicle's claims: It is the the northeastern and west-coast states, which voted for Gore, which supposed "represented 'entitlement'", that are by in large net donors to the federal government, and the Bush red states that live off of federal money. Likewise, the southern and middle states, which voted for Bush and supposedly "represented 'family values'", are the ones with the highest divorce rates.

But, of course, Begala would never say such a thing. After all, he's one of the ones they let onto tv.)

Here's one final quote from that first email in the document:

Here's another example. The Republicans have incessantly used the word "selective" to suggest that there is something wrong with the Florida law that allows a party to an election to ask for recounts in particular counties. This law is not remotely unusual, and Republicans have asked for recounts under similar laws in many jurisdictions.
Now, however, they claim to discern a 14th amendment equal-protection problem, an idea that the courts have basically laughed at. Like so many words of the new jargon, the word "selective" is nicely ambiguous: it has one meaning that is true but trivial, and another meaning that is menacing but false.
The true-but-trivial meaning is simply that the recounts are to be held in some jurisdictions and not others; a more suitable word might perhaps be "selected". But "selective" carries a negative connotation that the selection has been made in an arbitrary, unfair, or biased way, and this is the second, menacing, false meaning -- false because, as everyone on a sane planet would clearly recognize, the Republicans had a perfectly equal right to ask for recounts of their own, and simply declined to do so.

This starts to get into the sort of linguistic analysis that Agre excels at, unravelling how two different frameworks interact with one another to obfuscate and confuse.

Another thing Agre does is illuminate how projection works in larger context. This is from the next emai in the document:

(1) The words "partisan" and "bias". In the time that I have been writing about the current elections, I have received perhaps 100 messages telling me nothing except that I am either "partisan" or "biased". These words are outstanding examples of the perversity of the current jargon. The first entered into circulation when some Americans called people like Newt Gingrich "partisan" for doing things like training political candidates to describe their opponents with words like decay, sick, pathetic, stagnation, corrupt, and traitors (LA Times 12/19/94).
The jargon-speakers did something characteristic with this: they accused their opponents of identifying as "partisan" any views other than their own. Notice how this works: it inflates the word, deletes all mention of the justification for using it, and projects both of these moves onto Them.
Next, they started using the word "partisan" in the inflated, dishonest way that they had ascribed to their opponents. Again very characteristically, this gave them the cover they needed to go around irrationally abusing people: it let them think "they're really the ones who are doing this to us".
This is one reason why the speakers of the new jargon so cherish the slights that they sometimes experience: they now have new cover to employ in abusing people. What is more, the word "partisan", like the word "bias", now means nothing except "you have a different opinion than mine", except that having a different opinion is now ipso facto wrong -- not just mistaken but improper.
Faced with the discomfort of differing views, you can now release the tension by flinging these empty words, thereby assaulting people while feeling inwardly that you are standing up for morality. And if they have a problem with that, then of course you can ask surprised and accuse them of abusing you.

These quotes, although somewhat long, only scratch the surface of this collected work on jargon. The point of my presenting it, again, is two-fold: first, to introduce folks to some powerful insights, and second to remind us all of just how long things have been this crazy. Because we live in America, rather than Versailles, it's a lot easier for us to see through all this BS. But if you're living right in the middle of it, and if you have done so for years, then this sort of insanity becomes "normal" and normal thought comes to seem insane.

Speaking of insanity, here's one final excerpt before I sign off:

9/3/00
American culture is going insane. I'm not sure that I mean this in a clinical way, but I do mean it. In "The Divided Self", R. D. Laing described the experience of going insane, and I think that his model applies well. Insanity, he says, starts with "ontological insecurity", which is a doubt about whether one's own self exists. People who suffer from ontological insecurity are unhappy, and they may even be crazy, but they are not insane. Insanity starts when the individual decides that his or her own personality is evil, and that they are obligated to destroy it.
American culture has always been prone to ontological insecurity, ever since Europe exported all of its religious fanatics to us. Not all religious people are crazy; indeed, true religion is the cure for craziness. Rather, Europe was raked for centuries by horrific wars and epidemics, and the cultural upshot of these experiences in a deeply religious and badly educated society was religious fanaticism.
In the American context, religious fanaticism rapidly turned into a politics of conspiracy theories, and that politics has returned periodically to the surface ever since. Conspiracy theories are precisely but a kind of political psychosis driven by ontological insecurity: a doubt that the institutions of the country even exist.
This takes extreme forms with wackos, mostly on the right but on the left as well, who believe that the United States Constitution was officially repealed in the 1930s, or any number of other wild scenarios. But ontological insecurity was also a dominant theme of 1990s mass culture, for example in the X-Files -- to be sure a great show, but very much a product of the encapsulated psychosis of American conspiratism.
But it wasn't just craziness that came to the surface in the 1990s, but insanity as well: the delusional belief that one has an obligation to destroy one's own personality. And this insanity was found equally on the left and right. The self-destruction of the country's cultural personality is easy to find: look for either anger or humor that gets its bite by stigmatizing and then punching through some boundary of morality or conscience.
On the left, the highest product of American cultural insanity is "South Park", whose humor consisted precisely of -- as the patter goes -- "breaking taboos". Why is it funny to see little kids cussing their faces off? Because it's a blow for freedom against the uptight ayatollahs of the religious right who don't like it.
On the right, the highest product of American cultural insanity is Rush Limbaugh. His humor works the same way: those politically correct jerks on the left are oppressing us, so we have to stand up for freedom by, for example, instructing a black caller to get the bone out of his nose. In a normal world this would be racist garbage, but in the insane world of Limbaugh it's a courageous act of standing up to the intimidation of liberal thought control. The very fact that "they" don't like it *obligates* us to do it.
This sense of continually, purposefully punching through the barriers of conscience is exactly the process of making oneself insane. It becomes a habit of mind, and as one's conscience is slowly cut away one becomes less and less capable of rational thought.

I would disagree with Agre that "South Park" is on the left, although they definitely appeal to some folks on the left. But the rest of this seems amazingly spot on to me. Who has ever pegged Rush better than this?--his whole purpose is making his audience insane... and proud of it!

All the above strongly suggests that what we are up against is not just "crazy" in some vernacular sense. It is actually crazy in a clinical sense. Books like "Bush on the Couch" are not just sly digs, they are survival manuals. And not nearly enough of our representatives in Versailles are surviving.

I do not have a 10-point plan for dealing with this. But I think we need to start a very serious dialogue about how we go about deprogramming an entire village, a subculture that rules America and dominates the world.

The problem clearly is not just Bush, not just the Administration, not just the Republicans, or even the Conservative noise machine and its "mainstream" echo chamber. The problem has deeply infected the Democrats as well. And we need to be thinking about basic mental first aid on a mass basis.