George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5648.htm

George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism

Rev. Rich Lang
Trinity United Methodist Church Seattle. <oddrev@yahoo.com>

02/14/04: (ICH) The men who wrote the Constitution of the United States knew that we human beings have a tendency to 'not get along with each other'. They knew that if power accrued into the hands of an elite the experiment of democracy (power spread out into the realm of the people) would be over. So they created a system of checks and balances which blocked access to any one person, or any one special interest or elite gaining too much power over others. Thus our executive, legislative and judicial branches of government "checked" each other. The media was yet another "check" on the accrual of too much power as was the Bill of Rights which was written into the Constitution. The system wasn't perfect but it kept alive the possibility of true democracy. It kept alive the dream that one day "we the people" could live in a peaceful commonwealth where every person has what they need to survive and thrive.

That dream died in December 2000 when the checks and balances of our Constitution collapsed and George Bush was inserted into the Presidency of the nited States. September 11, 2001 furthered the atrophying of democracy handing the country into the hands of an emerging Corporate (and I say Christian) Fascism.

Since that time we have witnessed and have been unable to prevent the emergence of an Imperial Presidency that has the unrestricted power to declare war against any country he chooses. The Imperial Presidency has brought to an end the Constitutional mandate that 'ONLY CONGRESS' has the authority to declare war. It has furthered weakened international law and has undermined the potential of the United Nations to spread democracy throughout the earth.

The President has also gained unrestricted power to round up unlimited numbers of American citizens and incarcerate them in military brigs or concentration camps for the rest of their lives. He can keep them from ever again communicating with friends, families, and attorneys, simply on the president's certification that

the incarcerated are "terrorists," as he has done with Jose

Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi. The President may also now kill American citizens abroad solely on the basis of his certification that the one killed is a "terrorist". Just ask the family and friends of Ahmed Hijazi, anAmerican killed with a U.S.-fired missile in Yemen. Therefore suspending the Constitutional right: "no person shall be denied life, liberty or property without due process of law."

Ominous signs are all around us concerning the accrual of power into the hands of the Presidency. If Mr. Bush stays in office I think our future will continue to witness shrinking political rights, financial collapse and endless war. Part of the power and seduction of this administration emerges from its diabolical manipulation of Christian rhetoric. I want to flesh out the ideology of the Christian Fascism that Mr. Bush articulates. It is a form of Christianity that is the mirror opposite of what Jesus embodied. It is, indeed, the materialization of the spirit of antichrist: a perversion of Christian faith and practice...."

No surprise there... progressives love fascism and the nazis loved progressivism.

H. G. Wells, one of the most influential progressives of the 20th century, said in 1932 that progressives must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis.” Regarding totalitarianism, he stated: “I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless logic.” Calling for a “‘Phoenix Rebirth’ of Liberalism” under the umbrella of “Liberal Fascism,” Wells said: “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.”

The poet Wallace Stevens pronounced himself “pro-Mussolini personally.”

The eminent historian Charles Beard wrote of Mussolini’s efforts: “Beyond question, an amazing experiment is being made [in Italy], an experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism.”

Muckraking journalists almost universally admired Mussolini. Lincoln Steffens,for one, said that Italian fascism made Western democracy, by comparison, look like a system run by “petty persons with petty purposes.” Mussolini, Steffens proclaimed reverently, had been “formed” by God “out of the rib of Italy.”

McClure’s Magazine founder Samuel McClure, an important figure in the muckraking movement,described Italian fascism as “a great step forward and the first new ideal in government since the founding of the American Republic.”

After having vistited Italy and interviewed Mussolini in 1926, the American humorist Will Rogers, who was informally dubbed “Ambassador-at-Large of the United States” by the National Press Club, said of the fascist dictator: “I’m pretty high on that bird.” “Dictator form of government is the greatest form of government,” Rogers wrote, “that is, if you have the right dictator.”

Reporter Ida Tarbell was deeply impressed by Mussolini's attitudes regarding labor, affectionately dubbing him “a despot with a dimple.”

NAACP co-founder W. E. B. DuBois saw National Socialism as a worthy model for economic organization. The establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, he wrote, had been “absolutely necessary to get the state in order.” In 1937 DuBois stated: “there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”

FDR adviser Rexford Guy Tugwell said of Italian fascism: “It's the cleanest,neatest,most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious.” In late 1934 he noted: “I find Italy doing many of the things which seem to me necessary.... Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as FDR has.”

New Republic editor George Soule, who avidly supported FDR, noted approvingly that the Roosevelt administration was “trying out the economics of fascism.”

Playwright George Bernard Shaw hailed Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini as the world’s great “progressive” leaders because they “did things,” unlike the leaders of those “putrefying corpses” called parliamentary democracies.

The education reformer and socialist John Dewey spoke of the “social possibilities of war” and the “immense impetus to reorganization” that it afforded. He added,with an air of hopefulness,that the conflict might force Americans “to give up much of [their] economic freedom”; to abandon their “individualistic tradition” and “march in step”; and to recognize “the supremacy of public need over private possessions.”

The progressive financier George Perkins said the “great European war … is striking down individualism and building up collectivism.”

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1796

The United States Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes's words in their own defense.

Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.

Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti-Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. While Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.

During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists. In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."

Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great interest," he told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."

Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible."

Hitler's struggle for a superior race would be a mad crusade for a Master Race. Now, the American term "Nordic" was freely exchanged with "Germanic" or "Aryan." Race science, racial purity and racial dominance became the driving force behind Hitler's Nazism. Nazi eugenics would ultimately dictate who would be persecuted in a Reich-dominated Europe, how people would live, and how they would die. Nazi doctors would become the unseen generals in Hitler's war against the Jews and other Europeans deemed inferior. Doctors would create the science, devise the eugenic formulas, and even hand-select the victims for sterilization, euthanasia and mass extermination.

During the Reich's early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.

Political concepts have been bastardized on this thread. I have repeatedly pointed out the basic failings of these alternative theories of what fascism and the nazi movement was......it had nothing to do with current progressives, and everything to do with reactionaries. A creative writing class is not history. Fairy tales and revisionism changes nothing in history. Intellectual honesty is sadly missing.

The hate of all things Christian related begins here.

I don't know how many times I've been criticized for bringing up the presidency of George W Bush...who just had the gall to do this on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina:



No comment from the usual suspects on the blog by a Methodist minister written in 2004...instead, a "history lesson" from the Depression era.

We have several GOP candidates for POTUS who are exploiting the pseudo-Christian right wing...Cruz, Huckabee, Jindal, Rubio, Jeb!&%*#, even Seaoat's favorite Kasich, to a lesser degree. These people represent a "clear and present danger" to our system of government. Now Trump has aligned himself with Palin...she's one of them. If you convince enough people that GOD is on your side, you can get away with murder, literally, as demonstrated in our RECENT PAST (as opposed to 80 years ago) by George W Bush, who should be in prison instead of dancing on graves.

No need for comment hit piece

2seaoat wrote:Political concepts have been bastardized on this thread. I have repeatedly pointed out the basic failings of these alternative theories of what fascism and the nazi movement was......it had nothing to do with current progressives, and everything to do with reactionaries. A creative writing class is not history. Fairy tales and revisionism changes nothing in history. Intellectual honesty is sadly missing.

Direct quotes and historic facts are only fairy tales to those that must ignore them in order to believe otherwise.

Lol... you can't even dispute them so you use vague derision. Why bother? Everyone can see through that tactic.

What's funny is that bush gets blamed
For crap in Katrina and a Democratic governor and Democratic mayor were tardy in their judgment of asking for FEMA help. It's a giant joke reallly.

PkrBum wrote:

2seaoat wrote:Political concepts have been bastardized on this thread.  I have repeatedly pointed out the basic failings of these alternative theories of what fascism and the nazi movement was......it had nothing to do with current progressives, and everything to do with reactionaries.   A creative writing class is not history.  Fairy tales and revisionism changes nothing in history.  Intellectual honesty is sadly missing.

Direct quotes and historic facts are only fairy tales to those that must ignore them in order to believe otherwise.

Lol... you can't even dispute them so you use vague derision.  Why bother? Everyone can see through that tactic.

They might be tangentially related to the subject, but are basically a weak response to the subject, which is the years 2000-2008...more recent history, not some pathetic revisionism that tries to manipulate history to fit a warped worldview. I am fully aware that there were many in this country who supported Hitler, including Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker, who helped finance the Nazis.

Floridatexan wrote:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5648.htm

George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism

Rev. Rich Lang
Trinity United Methodist Church Seattle.
.......

So far as I've ever been able to tell, the Baptists have always considered the Methodists as one of the weak-sisters of American Protestantism.

EmeraldGhost wrote:

Floridatexan wrote:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5648.htm

George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism

Rev. Rich Lang
Trinity United Methodist Church Seattle. <oddrev@yahoo.com>
.......

So far as I've ever been able to tell, the Baptists have always considered the Methodists as one of the weak-sisters of American Protestantism.

And that has to do with what, exactly?

I think you have to go back beyond the loss of G H W Bush to President Clinton and the uprising of Christians who were going to bring morals back to America...and that was before the oral office debacle.

The Family Research Council - James Dobson was pouring out radio show after radio show on morality and the state of America. Jerry Falwell was spewing from the pulpit about morality in America. Both of them, along with many others, built up a "moral majority" that quickly caught the eye (I think) of the Republican party as a voter base.

In my opinion, the church in America has failed. It's not about forcing religious tenets through legislation. Go read what Jesus said, church.

Good post to bring the matter to light, FT. But I don't feel it is about a leader who has tried to bring about "Christian Fascism." I think it is about weak Christians who cannot deal with people one on one as Jesus did. He did not bring changes to a government. That was not the plan. Many so called Christians need to go back and review what their Teacher taught them. The Republicans are only looking to a voter base. Which shows a basic shallow intention of representing the good of the entire country.