Weekend Update 14/4/18: Trump Appointees' JesuNazi Yearning for Apocalypse Makes Present Confrontation with Russia Infinitely More Terrifying Than Cuban Missile Crisis

TOO MANY OF US have remained comfortably oblivious to the fact all the most fanatical U.S. Christians are ominously applauding the Trump/Pence Regime as "the most evangelical cabinet in history," a belligerently Bible-thumping boastfulness frighteningly confirmed by Tom Waddell of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. 

The Mainstream Media propaganda machine -- ever faithful to the Capitalist mandate to conceal "the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power" -- routinely suppresses any reports that reveal the breathtaking speed and vast dimensions of the regime's conversion of our Big-Lie "democracy" to zero-tolerance Christian theocracy. 

Likewise suppressed are analyses that declare theocracy prophetically implicit in the 1954 addition to the Pledge of Allegiance, which redefines the flag as emblematic not of "one nation" of allegedly free peoples but of one nation tyrannized to submission "under God." 

We are also plagued by an obliviousness that is due to the allegedly "progressive" equivalent of the prideful, self-inflicted ignorance that defines the USian national mentality. In this instance it's the stubborn refusal of some secular-minded folks to recognize the U.S. remains more far more opiated by Christianity -- and therefore far more shackled to all its bigotry and hatefulness -- than any other industrial nation.  

Beyond that, even many of us who recognize the multiple horrors of the Trump/Pence Regime's white Christian agenda nevertheless choose to avoid looking closely at its unprecedented ecocidal, genocidal (and therefore ultimately apocalyptic) implications. 
Though in this instance I suspect our denial is a last-ditch mechanism of self-protectiveness, one of the very few ways left us to try to preserve whatever aspects of sanity we might manage to retain in this the darkest and most hopeless of all eras in our species' 200,000-year history.

Quoth Waddell:  

"Most of Trump’s Cabinet nominees...believe that God created the Earth 6,000 years ago, that men and dinosaurs co-existed, that everything is part of God’s plan and that Armageddon is just around the corner. Collectively they oppose civil rights, LGBT rights, a woman’s right to choose, and public education, while they deny climate change, all based on their Christian beliefs." 

Armageddon is of course the final battle of the apocalypse. Christian doctrine states that Armageddon is to be welcomed as the prelude to the second coming of Jesus. When that doctrine becomes a core tenet of the Empire's foreign policy -- as it probably is already and undoubtedly will be after the Senate's all-but-certain  approval of Mike Pompeo as secretary of state -- our species and planetary Motherland will be in jeopardy as never before.
  
Waddell again:

"Pompeo shows he doesn’t understand that the secretary of state’s job is to promote and maintain world peace when he claims that politics is a 'never-ending struggle until the rapture.'"

 

Thus the difference between the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the U.S.-Russian confrontation today.  

During the former I was a married 22-year-old just returned stateside, joyfully reunited with my first wife after nearly two years of soldiering in Korea and newly transferred to the reserves after three years' Regular Army duty. If war broke out, I knew my wife and I would either be killed in the initial nuclear exchange or I'd called back to active duty and -- given the horrors of war -- I'd probably never see her again. But President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had each known those horrors -- Khrushchev's experience included the epic battle of Stalingrad -- and both were men of reason. Otherwise there'd have been no U.S.-Soviet rapprochement and humanity would not have survived. 

But today most of the people in the White House know war only in its sanitized Hollywood version. Moreover they are apocalyptic Christian fundamentalists whose we-have-to-destroy-the-planet-to-save-it fanaticism can neither be appeased nor ameliorated no matter the unquestionable depth of Russian President Vladimir Putin's patience and rationality.

That's why the the sheer terror I feel today is many magnitudes greater than the apprehensiveness I experienced for a few days in October 1962. Today's terror is relentless. It has no discernible end.  It is the spectral companion who peers over my shoulder in my every conscious moment, and it is the omnipresent source of  nightmares too horrifically chaotic to describe.  Its origin is my firsthand experience of the bottomlessly self-righteous lynch-mob malevolence of the white Christian mentality; I lived most of my boyhood in the South, where it rules unchecked and from which its venom has metastasized to conquer the entire nation and now attempt conquest of the entire planet. 

 

I am not afraid for myself or my generational peers; at age 78 my life is effectively over, and the increasing pains of rapidly declining health tell me I will soon be at that threshold beyond which death is welcome. But I am wrenchingly fearful for the young adults and children I know personally and for the millions of other humans like them who might yet live long, fulfilling and useful lives.  I am equally fearful for our Mother Earth, whom the Christians despise as the domain of Satan and treat accordingly -- thus the looming environmental apocalypse that will surely kill us even if by some miracle we escape extinction by thermonuclear war. 

(To read the rest, go here.)