MSNBC'S LAWRENCE O'DONNELL and the many
others who condemn Vice Presidential Debate Moderator Martha Raddatz
for daring ask the candidates how their religious beliefs shape
their views on abortion are clearly loathe to acknowledge the
depth to which the United States has already been thrust into
zero-tolerance Christian theocracy.
That such acknowledgement has become
one of the paramount taboos of U.S. politics makes the critics'
objections – whether spawned by pathological denial or deliberate
deception – all the more indefensible. Three unimpeachably credible
books on the subject, their revealing subtitles shown here in
parentheses, have documented in terrifying detail this unprecedented
threat to U.S. liberty. Chris Hedges' American Fascists (The
Christian Right and the War on America) and Kevin Phillips'
American Theocracy (The Peril and Politics of Radical
Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century) were
released in 2006, while Jeff Sharlet's The Family (The
Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power) appeared
in 2008, each the product of a major publisher. A 2005 Rasmussen
poll
had already revealed 63 percent of the U.S. population believes the
Bible is literally true – the core litmus test for whether one is a
fundamentalist and thus presumably favorable to overthrowing
constitutional governance and replacing it with biblical law, the
Christian version of Sharia. And no one can deny the Republican
Party has become the scimitar with which Christian fanatics are
hacking away women's rights, their success measured by the fact women
in 87 percent of the nation's counties now lack access to
abortion.
In this ever-more-reactionary
context, the answers to Raddatz's question undoubtedly produced the
most revealing moment of the entire presidential campaign, its
relevance reaching far beyond the debate between Vice-President Joe
Biden and Vice-Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan.
The
candidates' views on women's rights – Obama/Biden generally
supportive, Romney/Ryan fanatically opposed – have thereby emerged
as the one defining issue in an
election that, beneath its rhetorical histrionics, is otherwise
scarcely more than a clash over the tactics and strategies of how
capitalism is to complete its (inevitable) transition to fascism. The
Democrats reflexively conceal their tyrannical agenda behind lip service to once-genuinely progressive values; the Republicans make
no secret of their bigoted intent to abolish the rights of women and
minorities and their genocidal plan to immediately destroy all
remaining socioeconomic safety nets, thereby revealing themselves to
be the modern-day equivalent of the Nazis. And like the Nazi Ruling
Class, the Republican One Percent regards Christianity as a primary
mechanism of social control. Meanwhile – their cooperation deftly
concealed by corporate-controlled mass media – both parties
quietly collaborate to end forever the American experiment in
constitutional democracy: note the near-unanimous Congressional votes
to abolish constitutional rights and grant the president the
unlimited powers of a fΓΌhrer
or a tsar.
Thus
Biden's performance against Ryan – no question it was superb –
does not diminish my deeper, more cynical suspicion President Barack Obama
has been ordered to lose the election. With terminal climate change
accelerating beyond all projections, the One Percent is racing to
protect itself by converting the United States into the de
facto Fourth Reich:
absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total
subjugation and genocidal poverty (including mass poisoning by
genetically modified foods) for all the rest of us, the entire system
increasingly sustained by Ayn Rand indoctrination, Christian
prosperity gospel and the Big Business variant of rule by divine
right.
Though
it is a bit of an aside, I cannot but wonder how long it will take
the Ruling Class to expunge Rand's atheism from her (numbingly
tedious) writing as it is elevated into the U.S. equivalent of Mein
Kampf.
In
any case Obama's behavior in the next two debates will demonstrate
whether his abysmal showing in the first bout was accidental or
deliberate. If the latter, and if Romney therefore wins, those of us
who are elderly, disabled and/or chronically impoverished – I am
all three – have nothing to look forward to save the various forms
of misery and death inflicted by deliberate abandonment. And those of
us who are critics of capitalism will no doubt end our lives in
prison or concentration camp.
Hence,
given our only electoral choice is between the more gradual
boiled-frog fascism of the Democrats and the blitzkrieg JesuNazism of
the Republicans, I'm obviously voting for Obama/Biden.
*****
Elsewhere: Reflections on
Capitalism, Theocracy and the Imbecility of Hope
When
Reader Supported News
ran a detailed
indictment of Wall
Street thievery (“...the
same austerity philosophy that has been forced on Greece and Spain -
and the same that is prompting President Obama and Mitt Romney to
urge scaling back Social Security and Medicare”), I responded
accordingly. As the negative numbers show – at least once going as
high as -9 – many RSN
readers were infuriated by my condemnation of the
anti-intellectuality that renders the U.S. Left powerless in the face
of capitalist savagery, a classic example of the proudly ignorant
closed-mindedness that too often characterizes today's USians
regardless of their ideology.
As I have said more times than I can
count, such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited
profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty
for all the rest of us.
The questions – the only
questions really – are (1) how to fight back and (2) whether the
U.S. population has enough residual courage to mount an effective
resistance.
Unfortunately, answering the first
question requires the very intellectual processes the self-proclaimed
Left despises and rejects: note for example the hateful
anti-intellectuality characteristic of the Occupy Movement.
As to the second question, the
answer is self-evident. Just as the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
collapsed in the wake of the Kent State Massacre, so has Occupy –
denied ideological solidarity by its frenzied anti-intellectuality –
collapsed in the face of police brutality.
Thus – unless we are saved at the
last minute by some miraculous awakening – have we doomed ourselves
to inescapable slavery.
***
A former Arkansas Department of Human
Services lawyer, an avowed Christian theocrat running as a Republican
for a seat in the state's Legislature, is urging the death penalty
for rebellious children, calling it “a tremendous incentive for
children to give proper respect to their parents.”
Alas, far too many of those who
commented on this terrifying report obviously dismiss its
significance as a harbinger of horrors to come:
We jeer this
JesuNazi at our own peril.
He is the
quintessence of Republicanism, the ultimate, Ruling-Class-financed
purpose of which is imposing zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on
the United States.
Charlie Fuqua
makes no secret of this intent because he lives in the South, which
is already a de facto
theocracy.
Yes, murdering
children for disobedience is in fact part of the Biblical Law the
corporate-funded theocrats intend to impose. So is stripping women of
all rights (including the right to vote). Likewise the public burning
of unbelievers.
But surely, you
say, the people who run corporations can't be that savage.
Guess again:
consider Bhopal, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon. Remember Karen
Silkwood.
Never forget
the core truth of capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum
virtue.
Then recognize
that under theocracy, CEO's rule by divine right. Work orders are
holy writ. As in the Parable of the Talents, the person who has least
is punished with the most harshness.
Unless we
awaken, such is the future that awaits us.
***
Meanwhile, in a detailed report on the
surveillance devices by which the nation's school children are
increasingly monitored, we learn the technology to enforce
zero-tolerance theocracy is already being installed.
Which leaves me profoundly grateful I was born 72 years ago and lived the first decades of my
life in a United States that truly was – at least for most
Caucasians – a “sweet land of liberty.” But that realm no
longer exists, nor – thanks to (self-inflicted) terminal climate
change – will our species ever again know anything so wondrously
comfortable and comforting:
When I view the future imposed on us
by Ruling Class technology – a slave world overseen by
zero-tolerance electronics – I am glad I am old. Surely I will be
dead before consciousness becomes naught but horror.
LB/13
October 2012
-30-
