Amerikanska Fascister: Den kristna högern och kriget mot Amerika

English version below

Swedish: Är inte fascism ett alldeles för starkt ord när det gäller den mest militanta kristna högern (som är en väldigt stor grupp i USA)? Chris Hedges, en veteran inom amerikansk journalistik (krigsreporter och NYT byråchef m.m.), tycker inte det utan skriver en bok för att varna. Robert D. Steele, en veteran inom amerikansk underrättelseverksamhet, håller med och klämmer till med Christo-Fascism, en etikett som nu också spetsats till ytterligare på Bloggar.se sedan en tid tillbaka: kristnazism.

Det är också mycket motiverat att varna för islamofascism och islamism idag, men om det bara stannar där...... Typiskt exempel i Svenska Dagbladet: Svenskarna som vill dö för islam. När ägnar sig t.ex. SvDs ledarsida någon gång åt att titta på den infytelserika kristna högern? Den finns ju knappt, enligt dessa ensidiga ideologer. Islamister är oftast utanför samhället. Kristokrater sitter i ledande postioner över hela USA. En liten pik slinker också med i form av Ingen undgick väl sommarens ”läkare utan gränser” i Storbritannien, och den stora förekomsten av ingenjörer i terroristgrupper är väl belagd.

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America

The Swedish introduction got a bit too long again. There is really no genuine Christocratic Movement here in Sweden. But don't worry. The creeping global fascism will simply take another route here. National Socialism with a distinct racism profile, propaganda against islam - above once again on the editorial page of Svenska Dagbladet - and a general attack on pluralism and tolerance. This will make it easy for the government to install a surveillance regime. 'We must protect our citizens'.

American readers need no longer introduction to Chris Hedges, one of the more famous journalists and authors among the literati population. But just in case: here is a long interview with Hedges on Truthdig.com where he also talk about one of his other books “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” - Below is an article where Hedges himself summarizes the ideas behind the book American Fascists.

The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age -- he was then close to 80 -- we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" were stories of this failure -- personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers -- those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.

Robert D Steele, on the other hand might benefit from a short introduction. He is simply one of the most knowledgeable persons in the USA when it comes to intelligence/espionage, war on terror, the current state in the USA, and you name it. A short biography on The Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College offers a few hints of his background:

Mr. Robert D. Steele

Position: External Researcher

ROBERT D. STEELE is a retired Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. He is the founder and president of Open Source Solutions, Inc., and is an acknowledged expert on computer and information vulnerabilities. Mr. Steele holds graduate degrees in International Relations and Public Administration from Leigh University and the University of Oklahoma. He has also earned certificates in Intelligence Policy from Harvard University and in Defense Studies from the Naval War College.

To this you can add some info from the Steele Bio from wikipedia:

Robert David Steele Vivas (b. July 16, 1952 New York City), is a former Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer for twenty years and was the second-ranking civilian (GS-14) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988-1992. Steele is a former clandestine services case officer Central Intelligence Agency. He is the founder and CEO of OSS.Net, Inc. as well as the Golden Candle Society. Steele also was a member of the Adjunct Faculty of Marine Corps University in the mid-1990's.

The reason why Steele is mentioned here is that he is one of the most productive reviewers at Amazon.com, today as the number 41 review on the Amazon list of reviewers. He is simply a superior reviewer, so why bother to re-invent the wheel when we have Steele?

Robert D Steele review at Amazon.com:

Last Call for Sanity in Face of Christo-Fascism,

March 14, 2007

By	Robert D. Steele

Of all the books I have read, inclusive of a good number on religion, on knowledge, and on the pathologies of power, this book is perhaps the single clearest, most up to date, and most compelling definition of the extreme right in America as the world's new fascists.

I created the image that I am uploading with the review several years back, when Condi Rice and others had the temerity to call General Tony Zinni a traitor when Zinni, the most recently retired Command-in-Chief of the US Central Command, made a clear public case for NOT invading Iraq. Collin Powell was more subdued, saying "if you break it, you own it," but Bush-Cheney do not compute nuances, and were not listening. They both reflected this book's basic premise, that when dissent is considered treason, one is dealing with a neo-fascist regime.

The author is uniquely qualified as both a graduate of a top-level divinity school, and a world-class investigative journalist, to make this case.

He opens the book with an annotated list of fourteen features of fascism that set the stage, and I list them here because of their importance--buy the book to get the whole picture:

• 1. Cult of Tradition
• 2. Rejection of Modernism
• 3. Action for Action's Sake
• 4. Critics are Modernists
• 5. Dissent is Treason
• 6. Fueled by Frustration
• 7. Lacking Identity, Contrives Birthright
• 8. Humiliated and Delusional vis a vis external enemies
• 9. Pacifism is evil
• 10. Elitist contempt for weak (similar to poorest of whites contempt for hard-working blacks)
• 11. Cult of Hero, Cult of Death
• 12. War as Sexual Sublimation
• 13. Selective Populism (generally White versus All, but Colored can "Become" White)
• 14. Newsspeak, Hijacking of Language

This very educated and quietly balanced author cites Karl Popper's seminal work on Open Society and its Enemies on the pathological outcomes from faith in excess, faith that is intolerant of others. It is clear throughout this book that America is under siege from two faiths in excess--the external far enemy of violent intolerant Islam, and the more subversive internal danger of neo-Nazi fascists in waiting, mobilizing the dispossessed whites who do not read a lot, and get "all they need to know" from Pat Robertson's 700 Club and other similar self-serving channels whose primary role is to raise cash for the Hitler's in Waiting.

Continued here

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