"Fighting for the Work of the Lord"

"Fascism should more appropriately be called CORPORATISM because it is a merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini (from Encyclopedia Italiana, Giovanni Gentile, editor). http://raenergy.igc.org/republicanfascistparty.html

January 12, 2005
Counter Punch
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp01132005.html

"Fighting for the Work of the Lord"

Everybody's Talkin' About Christian Fascism

By

GARY LEUPP

Commentators right and left are talking about fascism in the U.S. of A.
Libertarian conservative Lew Rockwell, in a recent article entitled "The
Reality of Red-State Fascism," declares, "what we have alive in the US is an
updated and Americanized fascism."

Fellow libertarian Justin Raimondo, in a piece called "Today's Conservatives
are Fascists," calls the neocons shaping U.S. foreign policy "fascists, pure
and simple." United Methodist minister Rev. William E. Alberts accuses some
of Bush's followers of upholding a "super religion displaying tendencies
similar to Hitler's super race with its fascist ideology of superiority."

Meanwhile the Revolutionary Communist Party circulates in the tens of
thousands a statement declaring that "Bush and his people" are "Christian
Fascists---dangerous fanatics who aim to make the U.S. a religious
dictatorship and to force this upon the world." This is quite a wide
spectrum of anti-fascist opinion.

I think it's good the f-word is out there, and the issue on the table.
Fascism needs to be discussed. I thought so in October 2002, when I wrote an
essay posted on CounterPunch, "Talking to Your Kids About Fascism." It was a
presented as a quiet talk one might have with preteens, delivered with the
simple clarity and sobriety one might assume when talking with one's young
about drug use or sex or any serious issue. My point at the time was
fascism's not just a phenomenon unique to 1930s and 40s and defeated in 1945
but something that can recrudesce. One should be alert for warning signs.

That was over two years ago, before the criminal invasion of Iraq, based on
lies, and the cynical exploitation of racist-based fear. It was before
British officers complained that their U.S. counterparts in Iraq were
treating the Iraqis like Untermensch (subhumans, a term the Nazis applied to
various non-Aryan groups). It was before the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo
torture revelations, and the reorganization of the "intelligence community"
to better disseminate disinformation in the service of ongoing war. It was
before the Bush campaign to amend the constitution, for the first time to
specifically prevent the expansion of liberties. It was before persons in
and around the administration defended Japanese-American wartime
concentration camps with an eye towards new camps for other groups in the
future. The fascist tide has surged in the interim, as I thought, back in
2002, was very likely.

A Fascist Movement

I'm not suggesting that the state has become fascist. We remain a bourgeois
democracy, in which you are free to vote for the corporate-sponsored
Republican or Democrat of your choice. You can still maneuver around as best
you can in a marketplace controlled by ever fewer people. You can access a
broad range of websites, protest in the streets (under carefully controlled
conditions), and say what we think in emails and phone calls (although the
authorities can legally monitor them as they please). You can still write
and maybe have published letters to the editor criticizing the regime. The
country itself remains pre-fascist.

Nor is there, a mass-based fascist party yet. The Republicans may morph into
such, but there remain the occasional Ron Pauls. (I have to note, though,
that the Texas Republican Congressman himself opines that "a total police
stateis fast approaching.") What we have is a fascist movement, even if its
storm troops themselves do not, by and large, conceive of it as such. Many
of them simply think they're God's Army, having nothing in common with
Hitler's Brownshirts, whom they learned in school were bad people defeated
by fine Americans. They will be insulted if told they resemble the Nazi
supporters of the 1930s, but in many respects they do.

Fascism feeds on fear. Hitler's Reichmarshall Hermann Goering declared that
"people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy.
All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and attack the
pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It
works the same in every country." Question for discussion, ladies and
gentlemen: How does this apply here? Are the myriad threats the movement has
used to frighten all who will listen (weapons of mass destruction, mushroom
clouds over New York, Muslims in general, liberal college professors,
homosexuals) working to get people to do the bidding of leaders in this
country?

Fascism also feeds on ignorance. "Good Germans" were truly persuaded that
Jews, Slavs and Bolsheviks threatened them in 1939. Fascism is inherently
anti-intellectual, deploying emotions (national pride, resentment at
"outsiders," feelings of injury, millenarian hope) and targeting prominently
among internal enemies those who challenge its self-validating myths. A key
factor in the American variety is a frontal assault on whole fields of
science, especially those challenging the Biblical depiction of the earth as
merely 6000 years old.

A top Bush aide actually told the New York Times' Ron Suskind that
administration officials disparagingly dismiss what they call "the
reality-based community"---specifically, people who "believe that solutions
emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality" as irrelevant.
"That's not the way the world really works anymore," he declared. "We're an
empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality---judiciously, as you will---we'll act again, creating
other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will
sort out. We're history's actors. . . and you, all of you, will be left to
just study what we do."

In other words, truth is for wimps; forget about it. We are the champions,
the powerful, we make it up as we go along and if you want a piece of it,
embrace the delusion. We will punish the French for rationally rejecting the
attack on Iraq, and for that matter for inflicting the Enlightenment (with
its emphasis on unmanly, unheroic rational empiricism) a few centuries back.
We will punish the CIA for obnoxiously promoting reality-based intelligence
over the requested, required disinformation before the Iraq attack. This is
the sort of fascistic thought not only trumpeted by right wing talk radio,
but from countless pulpits, cable news, and the White House---proudly
irrational, fear mongering, sneering, creating its own reality with the
calculated support of large sections of corporate America.

Gott Mit Uns

"Christian fascism," the Maoists call it, emphasizing its social agenda
which presently includes reversing Roe vs. Wade, banning gay marriage,
promoting school prayer, challenging science, and generally attacking the
strict separation of church and state. The libertarians in contrast focus on
the agenda of the neocons, who as it happens are primarily secular Jews
highly supportive of Israel's Likud Party and influential in shaping foreign
policy after 9-11, particularly as it pertains to what they've been calling
"the Greater Middle East." Clearly the term "Christian fascist" doesn't
describe these people, who may have mixed feelings about a movement
currently useful to their foreign policy agenda but which could turn on them
and make life uncomfortable for many people who reject fundamentalist
Christianity. If fascists, they are of a different if kindred variety.
Everyone applying the f-word agrees that the fascists have no regard for
civil liberties and have used 9-11 to vitiate the Bill of Rights.

The question in my mind is this: Given that this fascist tide is so related
to a post 9-11 foreign policy so shaped by non-Christians, can we indeed
call the movement "Christian fascist"? If one does so, one acknowledges the
obvious: that Bush's social base is largely a Christian fundamentalist one,
committed to what it perversely terms a "family values" agenda. But
Christian fundamentalists, who have been agitating for years for prayer in
the schools, textbook censorship, public display of the 10 Commandments,
etc., haven't from the grass roots been demanding U.S. military action to
achieve regime change in the Middle East. The movement to achieve that
central aspect of the fascist program comes from the elite, with the neocons
in and out of government playing key roles. Their plans for the Middle East
do happen to dovetail with the fundamentalists' "End Times" hopes and
expectations for that region, such that even the collapse of the original
justifications for the Iraq War doesn't daunt the latter in their support
for what they see as God's plan. The neocons in power, in concert with their
fundamentalist colleagues (Bush and Cheney among them) have played the
Christian fascists at the grass roots like a harp.

Does calling the fascist trend in general "Christian fascist" send the wrong
message to those Christians who reject it and find it irreconcilable with
what they consider Christianity? Surely such believers are the majority
among the 75-80% of the American people who identify themselves as
Christians. Is it unfair to staunch Catholics, who follow their church's
teachings on issues such as abortion and homosexuality and might, say, vote
to ban gay marriage but who passionately oppose the war? Might we, noting
the non-Christian input into this fascist trend refer to it merely as
"religious fascism"? Or just "American fascism"?

Yes, you have at the summit Bush and Cheney, registered Methodists who may
or not sincerely believe in the theology of John Wesley, which is not all
that dissimilar to that of his contemporary Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, but
derive support from the religious right, especially the less educated among
them. But then you have the above-quoted Methodist minister Rev. William E.
Alberts too. The problem is not any specific religion but the specific
necessity of crisis-ridden capitalism to transform the world, exploiting
religion whenever it's useful to do so. Hitler embarked on his
world-transforming mission depicting himself as devout God-fearing man; in
Mein Kampf he refers repeatedly to "the Lord," "the Almighty," and Jesus as
"the great founder of a new doctrine." "I am fighting for the work of the
Lord," he declared, and a whole lot of German Christians, Protestants and
Catholics, believed him. Soldiers for the Wehrmacht wore belt buckles with
the slogan Gott mit uns (God is with us).

Christian Anti-Fascism

On the other hand, some Christians rejected the exploitation of their faith.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran cleric who died in a concentration
camp at age 39 in 1945, was the antithesis of the Christian fascist. In his
book Ethics, he charged that fellow Christians failed to directly attack the
specificity of evil in his time. Bonhoeffer was executed for his involvement
in a heroic attempt to assassinate Hitler. He was, in the then-respectable
view of the fascists, a terrorist. Martin Niemoeller, another Protestant
pastor, was interned in a prison camp for eight years, freed in 1945. He had
sermonized against aspects of the regime. After his liberation he suggested
he and other Protestants hadn't done enough. Although the quotation is
disputed Niemoeller is said to have stated, "First they came for the
Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came
for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not
speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not
speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for
me."

It is really for such Christians of today to reject and refute the unholy
association between their faith and the "work of the Lord" that Bush claims
he is achieving, and to speak out against fascist trends occurring here and
now in the name of a man who counseled his followers, "Love your enemies,
bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you." Surely there is
here the basis of a Christian anti-fascist movement.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct
Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands
and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The
Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in
Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor
to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and
Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.



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