The American Religious Reich

OR
How I learned to Goose Step While Loving The Lord


I’ve been noticing a pattern in the Christian community of late. Not in the mainstream Christian community by any means, but in the small, loud fringe community that has, by their very loudness and cohesiveness, come to power in recent years. Because their actions are so very reminiscent of the actions and tactics and rhetoric of Hitler and his brown shirts I call them The Religious Reich, A bit of word play on Religious Right, but frighteningly close to the truth as you will see... So, that said, let's take a look at how the Religious Reich stacks up against the Nazism these days:

Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, wrote an article about fascism which appeared in Free Inquiry magazine -- a journal of humanist thought. Dr. Britt studied the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile). He found the regimes all had 14 things in common, and he calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism. The article is "Fascism Anyone?," Lawrence Britt, Free Inquiry , Spring 2003, page 20. My comments will be in the {curly brackets} following Dr. Britt's observations.

The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism by Dr. Lawrence Britt

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

{One certainly can't say that Nationalism is not on the rise! Flags fly EVERYWHERE!}

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

{One need look no farther than Guantanamo Bay and the so called "Patriot Act" for evidence of that.}

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

{"Islamic Terrorists"... need I say more?}

4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

{While record deficit spending is building up a National Debt that our great great great grand children will still be paying off military spending is still at embarrassingly high levels. Especially when you consider that ALL other governments INCLUDING our traditional enemies have CUT their military spending by 50% or MORE! Source: Peace Action}

5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homo-sexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

{The Religious Reich is fighting to overturn the gains both gays and women have made in the areas of equal employment and having their specific health needs met. Also the battle over Roe v. Wade and the fight over Equal Marriage has heated up in the last 2 yeas as well so yes, they are encouraging rampant sexism!}

6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

{I have many friends in the media who are sometimes afraid to report on stories that might anger the Religious Reich. I would call that indirect control.}

7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

{I don't recall a single "Green" or "Yellow" alert day in the last 2 years, do you? I DO recall a good many news stories straight from the Office of Homeland Security about this potential terrorist threat or that potential terrorist threat that never materialized though.}

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

{Just this weekend we had a GLARING example of just how the Repugnican Party has become entangled with the Religious Reich in the form of that broadcast that DeLay and Frist and other Repugnican leaders made through Dobson's Family Research Council's network that was broadcast to thousands of churches nationwide! It's nigh on impossible to tell the difference between a Republican Party Plank and a Fundamentalist Christian Minister's religious edict these days!)

9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

{How many times have we seen this? From Enron to Bechtel industrial and business aristocracy are untouchable!}

10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

{Just look at how the power of the unions have been gutted in the past few years. No longer does the worker have the power of a strong union to organize against the huge corporations in order to get wages that keep up with inflation and the standard of living. Worse yet the government has demonized the unions much like it did at the turn of the 20th century.}

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

{I see this every day. These "hit or missives" get forwarded to a wide variety of people. Often I get back comments calling me an "anti-Christian intellectual bigot" and an "over educated idiot" to name but a few. The disdain these people have for the educated is quite honestly frightening!}

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

{OH YEA! Even though the FBI reports that crimes have been DOWN for the last 4 years all you hear from them is "get tough on crime" talk and how "the criminal has more rights than the victim". Part of that rhetoric is the whole "get tough on drugs" nonsense that expresses itself in making it harder for those with a legitimate need for the pain killers to get the medications they so desperately need! every year hundreds of chronic pain patients take their own lives because they can no longer stand having to wait to receive the drugs that will ease their pain. Why? So some politician can say he's "tough on drugs".}

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

{Just look at all of Bush's buddies that have followed him to the White House. Look at Frist, he's got his whole family on the payroll! DeLay as well! Ditto McCain, Feinstein, and everyone else in Washington! You'd think it was some kind of public trough for politicians for God's sake!!}

14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

{The last election was just about as close to fraudulent as you can get without being able to make a case! Too few voting machines in the heavily Democratic precincts while in the mostly Republican strongholds they had machines that never got used! And just who decided where the machines were sent? A Republican. Then there were the smears... GEEBUS! NO ONE knows how to run a smear campaign like a Repugnican! They practically invented it! And let's not even talk about the monkey fuck of an election before that!}

So all in all the Religious Reich and the Repugnican Party get 14 out of 14... a perfect score! If it smells like a duck and it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck I don't have to see it swim to be sure it's a duck.

That's my opinion and you are welcome to it.

Julie Johnson aka “The Great Spoon“

Apocalypse now? I don't think so.

Today the History Channel ran a fascinating program on the Book of Revelations... especially fascinating in that they went into great depth into why John of Patmos used the imagery and florid language he choose to use and what he actually meant by it as opposed to what the fundamentalists would have you believe it means. If you ask any legitimate biblical scholar, Revelations was never meant to be taken literally! During the days of the first century CE you did not want to write anything that might piss off the Roman authorities! No siree Bob! Pissing off the Romans was one way to cause your health to become very bad very quickly indeed!

And since John was already in not so good stead with Rome (having already been exiled to Patmos for God’s sake after all) he was not too keen to further piss the powers that be off any more than could possibly be helped. So he wrote in Greek for one thing. But every learned Roman read Greek so he borrowed from the imagery of the Jewish Book of David among others in order to assemble a set of metaphors the churches he was writing to would understand as relating to criticism of Rome and her Emperors, but the Roman authorities would take to be the raving of a religious nut case. Thus when he speaks of “the Whore of Babylon” he is actually talking about Rome, see? Now that makes sense. That is something I can fully understand and even admire. I mean you HAVE to admire the guy for coming up with this ploy! It’s positively brilliant! He could have used a code, but codes raise suspicions in and of themselves and can be broken far too easily. But no, he opted to use religious imagery that his enemies would overlook but his friends would be able to read as plainly as if he had written it in clear, everyday Latin! Brilliant!

And so for those FundaMentalist Christians who still insist that everyone take the Book of Revelations literally all I can say is BUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! You really mean that??? BUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA!

That's my opinion and you are welcome to it.

Julie Johnson aka “The Great Spoon“

So, Where Are We Now?

So, Where Are We Now?


It’s all over but the shouting. The autopsy is done and the full report will be out in 2 weeks. The Schindlers and the Schiavos are planning separate funerals. And the Pope is dead. So where are we now that we’ve had our guts wrenched out? We’re here ->




Just about in the same place we were it seems to me but hopefully a lot more prepared for the curve balls life may throw us. In millions of homes around this great nation of ours millions of people have been having deep discussions with their loved ones about their wishes should life find them where Terri Schiavo was.

Though I wonder, did the Pope have a living will? In his last moments was there a discussion as to whether to keep his unresponsive body alive on a dialysis machine and a ventilator or to let him pass on even before his brain activity had ceased as is the natural path we all take into death? It’s possible that he could have been kept alive days, weeks, maybe months longer even if his EKG was a low or lower than that of Terri Schiavo. But is there anyone who have argued to do that? A cynical person could charge that in light of the discussions going around in Rome about electing a much older man to he Holy See this time to avoid having one man influencing the course of the Roman Catholic Church for as long a time as John Paul II did could say his death was “hastened”. After all, science could have kept him “alive” longer. A man can make a lot of changes when he is in a seat of power that long. Perhaps electing an old, more frail man to the post is their way of instituting term limits? Could they have “let him go” without doing everything medically possible first? Could they have plotted to let him die sooner than science could kept him alive? Of course they did. It would have served no moral or medically ethical sense to prolong his life in the condition he was in. And so he was allowed to pas away naturally.

A quote by Thomas Jefferson comes to mind when I think about the endless court battles between the Schindlers and Schiavos; “The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and engrafted into the machine of government, have been a formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man." For with the involvement of every leader of the Religious Right, fringe group, and major religion what should by rights been a private family fight settled in a few months or at worst a couple of years, was drawn out into a 10+ year battle played nightly in living rooms from coast to coast. And we the public, with our perverse need for titillation egged on the press, demanding to be spoon fed every vicious and gory detail of something that was by all rights none of our business and in doing so provided a pulpit for every religious ideologue to use to promote their personal agenda. It was a propagandist’s dream, custom made for self-promotion and cult recruiting. And let’s not forget that august body, the Congress and their interference with the help of President Bush in passing an un-Constitutional law caused this case to be needlessly drug out weeks longer that it already had. And just what sort of people are our democratically elected leaders? Let’s take a look:

29 have been accused of spousal abuse

7 have been arrested for fraud

19 have been accused of writing bad checks

117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses, as has Bush

3 have done time for assault

71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit

14 have been arrested on drug-related charges, even more have been investigated for this, ditto Bush

8 have been arrested for shoplifting

21 are currently defendants in lawsuits

84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year

And of those who involved themselves in this case, ALL were guilty of being responsible for one or more of those statistics. Yup, that’s who I want to set the moral tone of an argument... a bunch of wife beating, drunk embezzlers. Sheesh!

We should be ashamed of ourselves. For poking our collective noses in where it didn’t belong. For despite all the public involvement in what should have been an intensely private matter, the outcome was not changed except that it was drawn out far longer than was entirely necessary. The courts did their duty and ruled in the only way the law allowed them to and rightfully according to the law. Some will say that the law needs to be changed then. Others say that that the law, as it stands is fine. If you have been following the last few issues of this minor publication you know where I stand... I agree with the courts and think the law is fine as it is.

That's my opinion and you are welcome to it.

Julie Johnson aka “The Great Spoon“