Prometheus Unbound

This past summer Arizona Reverend Steven Anderson was spreading the love. This from AP:

In his August 16th sermon, Anderson quoted Old Testament passages about the kind of people that God hates, and said they apply to President Obama. Anderson told his congregation that he doesn’t advocate taking up arms, but he does pray that Obama will die for the good of the nation.

My guess is that the media attention doubled attendance at his church. Oh, and he doesn’t like Jews either:

And here he is ranting against President Obama:

I think I dislike this use of Walt Whitman. It feels like a debasement of his poetry—like using the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita to sell soda. And what’s up with the Leni Riefenstahl vibe and the fascist salutes (one toward the middle and one at the end)?

The more I think about this the more I hate it. The ontological mysteries (to which Whitman’s poems are addressed) are hijacked for the selling of pants. Ontological mysteries are turned into the functional, the fake. It is an artificial spontaneity, a mimicry of authenticity, like the evolved tricks of this octopus:

Whitman wrote his poetry under inspiration; Levi’s appropriates his poetry for market manipulation. Ironically, most people’s exposure to Whitman’s energies will only ever come via this insincere and debased Romanticism; this simulacra.

Rush Limbaugh, the titular head of the Republican Party, has brought the Far Reich’s “love it or leave it” trope to new heights, calling on a New York Times reporter to off himself if he has a problem with global pollution issues. Here’s Limbaugh’s recent radio statement to Andy Revkin of the New York Times:

This guy from The New York Times, if he really thinks that humanity is destroying the planet, humanity is destroying the climate, that human beings in their natural existence are going to cause the extinction of life on Earth — Andrew Revkin. Mr Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?

Limbaugh also likened Revkin to a jihadi.

But it’s not like Limbaugh is out of sync with his party. Here’s what Republican Daryl Metcalfe, a Pennsylvania congressman in high wack-job mode, hysterically said this week about coordinated global pollution control measures:

Any veteran lending their name, to promote the leftist propaganda of global warming and climate change, in an effort to control more of the wealth created in our economy, through cap and tax type policies, all in the name of national security, is a traitor to the oath he or she took to defend the Constitution of our great nation! Remember Benedict Arnold before giving credibility to a veteran who uses their service as a means to promote a leftist agenda. Drill Baby Drill!!!

There’s a good reason (barring a huge terrorist attack or a collapse of the economy) that Republicans will be out of power for some years. The current public faces of the Republican Party are, frankly, unhinged.

And here’s Pat Buchanan on what now appears to be the next authoritarian right wing trend that is likely to attract greater public attention (and subsequent association with the Republican Party):

In the brief age of Obama, we have had “truthers,” “birthers,” tea party activists and town-hall dissenters. Comes now, the “Oath Keepers.” And who might they be? Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are “either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia.” Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders.

Andrew Sullivan wonders whether, at this rate of nuttiness, Republican Party identification (now at 20% of Americans) actually represents a new floor—or a new ceiling.

What hath the Republican Party created? Now not even Lindsey Graham is conservative enough for the teabagging purist revolutionaries! It’s delicious to see a longtime road warrior of the religious right rolled over (however briefly) by the tires of the very reactionary populist movement that Graham has, for so many years, given aid and comfort to.

It’s pretty obvious (at least to me) that what the Republican Party has nurtured (and is now being eaten by) is a nativist authoritarian movement impatient with diversity, nuance, democratic procedure, and dialogue. The Democrats are now “the devil.” And you don’t talk to the devil, do you? You kill the devil. And you can’t really have a functioning civil democracy where such Manichean obnoxiousness overtakes and completely poisons the public square, can you? I wish the teabaggers ill. They’re know-nothing neofascists, and the next terrorist attack could bring their champions to power. It’s a dangerous time for our country. I’m worried.

Eh, I thought right wingers wanted America to succeed.

Viva la morte?

No to fascism!

Where do you bring a poster that says this?

• To protest a march of Nazis through a Jewish neighborhood?
• To protest a convention of Holocaust deniers?
• To protest Adolf Hitler?

Well, no. If you’re part of the psychologically unhinged far right in 21st century America, you bring it to Democratic congresswoman, and Catholic mother of six, Nancy Pelosi’s townhall meetings! You see, you do this because you’ve come to believe that the party of Roosevelt (you know, the guy who led the United States in World War II against fascism ) is actually a fascist party. (Or socialist. You actually are a bit confused about this. But you just know it’s really, really bad. Glenn Beck said so.) 

Oh, and if you are part of the Republican base you apparently are also likely to believe that America’s Democratic Party has given us a Kenyan-born zombie cannibal with a blood smeared mouth for president! No, I’m not kidding. Look:

This poster is popular  among Republican media sources. And what has fueled this outrageously divorced from reality perception? Health care insurance reform! Here’s Andrew Sullivan’s summary of health care insurance reform:

Here is what we are debating: should we demand that insurance companies provide policies to anyone regardless of pre-existing conditions? Should we help the working poor buy that insurance with subsidies? Are competitive exchanges for health insurance a good or bad thing? Would a public option or a co-op help bring down healthcare costs? Does it make sense for the government to study the effectiveness of various treatments as a guide for doctors? These are all worth debating – and if you break it down into these questions, a majority would back them.

 

This is the Trojan Horse of fascism—health care insurance reform? And Nancy Pelosi is a Nazi, and Barack Obama is the Manchurian candidate? Isn’t the logic of such rhetoric violence upon the objects of the rhetoric? And aren’t we starting to see such violence—from the recent shoot-up of the Holocaust Museum, to the murder of an abortion doctor in a church, to the hostility of townhall disrupters? Ultimately, you can’t actually let Hitler live, can you? You’ve got to do something about it, right? If you really, really believe that Hitler has come to power, you stop him. And you’re a hero for stopping him, right?

Right?

Don’t you know that at this very minute, somewhere in America, there are unhinged right-wingers feeding on a steady diet of Obama demonology fantasizing the murder of the president? And you don’t think that the rest of us should be outraged at this sort of disproportionate rhetoric—and its normalization  among the Republican base?

Really?

They just portray Barack Obama as a blood-mouthed and minstrel painted monster, and share the image around the Internet. No big whoop. Rush Limbaugh used this image at his website today. And Drudge also featured the image at his website. And the image, as a poster, is being plastered around Los Angeles, and will no doubt find its way to other urban areas soon. This is what it means to be a projective and paranoid neo-authoritarian American racist in the 21st century. And this is the response of the far right to the nation’s first African American president. No grace. No mercy. No decency. What a gross coarsening of the public realm. Absorb what this image means, its basic lack of civility, and the encouragement to Obama demonology that it fuels. Isn’t the cumulative logical effect of the far right’s response to Obama, assassination? And isn’t this how unbalanced people will interpret this kind of image? It’s a virtual Wanted poster, something you distribute to identify murderers. If Obama is a monster, then he must be stopped, right?

Right?

The word socialism, however ill-applied to a centrist politician like Barack Obama, nevertheless gives people the excuse to hate, and think in extreme and Manichean terms about him. This poster is the Orwellian two minutes hate image of our time. It’s the culminating image of a conservative movement that has completely lost its moorings and its sense of proportion.

Hermann Goering to Captain G. Gilbert, Nuremberg, 1945:

“Naturally the common people don’t want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

And here’s an image of Goering, taken by an American soldier, after he poisoned himself with cyanide while in U.S. custody:

Though perhaps apocryphal, Goering is also purported to have said in response to liberal intellectual and urban culture (such as existed in Berlin): “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.”

They’re hoping for it, aren’t they?

According to the Wall Street Journal, on Saturday in Iran, a young man, returning home from an acting class, went missing. It turns out that, though he was not a government protester, he was caught in the crossfire between the protesters and government forces, and was shot dead in the street:

At the crack of dawn, his father began searching at police stations, then hospitals and then the morgue. Upon learning of his son’s death, the elder Mr. Alipour was told the family had to pay an equivalent of $3,000 as a “bullet fee”—a fee for the bullet used by security forces—before taking the body back, relatives said. Mr. Alipour told officials that his entire possessions wouldn’t amount to $3,000, arguing they should waive the fee because he is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war. According to relatives, morgue officials finally agreed, but demanded that the family do no funeral or burial in Tehran. Kaveh Alipour’s body was quietly transported to the city of Rasht, where there is family.

Yes, you read that right. The vile Iranian regime, in an attempt to humiliate the young man’s father and family, tried to make the father pay $3,000 for the government bullet that killed his son.

In Iran this is, apparently, not an unheard of practice.

In what way is it again that God in government, and religious belief in general, is supposed to moderate the bestial impulses in man? If devout servants of an overtly religious regime can hold claim to their devoutness—and do this—then religion can pretty much be used to justify anything, right?

How is this different from any other form of nihilism? Isn’t this just religiously sanctioned nihilism?

I mean, WTF!?!

And hence so is global peace.

Andrew Sullivan said something today that completely blew me away:

[T]he use of the Koran in resisting oppression of this kind, now confirmed all over the place, strikes me as a vital gesture. It puts the lie to the idea that Islam is not, at its core, a religion of peace, however hijacked by the fundamentalists and fascists. It is of a part with the color green and the cries into the night of Allah O Akbar. In this pitched battle, there is also a struggle for the soul of Islam. It is so so heartening to see decent people fighting back to reclaim their faith. Without these Muslims, the world will know no peace.

The gestures of nonviolence offered by the protesters, and their appropriation of Gandhi, accompanied by their Islamic religious expression, must necessarily give lie to the idea that Islam in action is necessarily a religion of violence, and not one that can be sympatico  with peace and nonviolence. This is an important thing to remember from this historic moment. The Iranian regime’s current band of clerics need not be indicative of Islam’s future. Like Martin Luther King, a Christian who saw in the Hindu Gandhi an ally in the practice of humane religion, so Muslims in Iran today are allying in their spirits with Gandhi against their clerics, and using their Korans to justify it.

Think about that, and the breakdown of stereotypes it suggests about the nature of Islam, and of Muslim openness to the non-Muslim world, and the way that Muslims read their own scriptures. Fundamentalism need not own the flag of Islam, nor the Koran, and the people in the streets of Iran this past week suggests that it doesn’t.  

Please visit Sullivan’s blog this weekend and follow his exceptional Iran coverage. His blog is functioning right now as a kind of clearing house for up-to-date Iran information and links.

Here’s an Iranian protester holding up a saying of Gandhi:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

It’s a reminder of how viscerally Antisemitic and anti-Western the Iranian regime is. The Ayatollah Khamenei at Friday prayers today in Tehran:

“The competition for the election was very clear. Enemies and dirty Zionists tried to show the election as a contest between the regime and against it. . . . Zionists and the bad British radio said it was a challenge to the regime.”

Is that what they said? Those dirty Jews and naughty Brits! This ugly, paranoid, and psychologically insular regime will obviously not go gently into its good night. The regime’s clerical rulers clearly intend this week to shed a lot of blood in the streets and arrest a lot of people in midnight-raids.

Oh, and by the way, after the Ayatollah’s speech the crowd, packed with regime supporters, chanted “Death to the United States! Death to the UK! Death to Israel!” In other words, the regime’s axis of evil is still firmly in place: America, Britain, and the Jews.

We’ve got the narrative and the rationale for Khamenei’s abuse of his own people now, don’t we? He will repress Iranians who don’t support him and make it about us.

For the BBC report on Khamenei’s speech today, click here. Do it because Khamenei wouldn’t want you to see it.

The Department of Homeland Security intelligence assessment on right wing extremism (April 2009) was vociferously panned by Shout Radio and Fox News conservatives. But the report now seems rather prescient in the light of two violent far-right incidents in the past two weeks (the murder of an abortion doctor in a church, and the murder of a black security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum).

The Homeland Security intelligence assessment is on-line here. The document is actually not that long (just nine pages), and is worth reading. I found, for example, this paragraph rather disconcerting:  

[T]he advent of the Internet and other information age technologies since the 1990s has given domestic extremists greater access to information related to bomb-making, weapons training, and tactics, as well as targeting of individuals, organizations, and facilities, potentially making extremist individuals and groups more dangerous and the consequences of their violence more severe. New technologies also permit domestic extremists to send and receive encrypted communications and to network with other extremists throughout the country and abroad, making it much more difficult for law enforcement to deter, prevent, or preempt a violent extremist attack.

That part about there being information on the Internet that tells people how to target individuals (presumably for murder or assassination) is especially upsetting. Let’s hope, for the sake of our nation, that President Obama survives the day-in day-out hostility continually being ginned-up towards him by Shout Radio, Fox News, and the extremist Internet sites. I assume that there are more than a few Dostoevskian “underground men” or “lone wolves” out there who fantasize about themselves entering the history books as the white supremacist “patriot hero” who “took out” America’s first black and “Muslim” president. 

The grassy knoll of the far-right mind?

Salon today has a rather long article listing and discussing various right-wing Obama hysteria claims, such as:

• Obama is the Antichrist;
• he is determined to take away your guns; and
• he is trying to flood America with Palestinian refugees

But what struck me as particularly disturbing about the article, especially in light of Bill O’Reilly’s repeated and vocal linking of Dr. George Tiller to Nazi eugenicists, is the far-right’s readiness to link Obama to Nazism and eugenics. Specifically, there are people on the right who loudly and persistently claim that Obama is a eugenicist, and he has a program in place akin to the Hitler Youth, which will be used by him to maintain his power via unlawful thuggery.

The clear implication of some of the far-right’s rhetoric is that Obama should be assassinated for the good of the Republic, and for the restoration of the rule of law.

In short, I can’t help but fear that the murder of Dr. Tiller was watched very closely by some Lee Harvey Oswald-type Dostoevsky “underground men” for clues as to how an Obama assassination might go down, and how it might be dealt with by right-wing media outlets. I felt, for example, that Bill O’Reilly’s shrugging dismissiveness and defiant—”I had nothing to do with it”—defense of his own rhetoric directed at Dr. Tiller is precisely the kind of response that Fox News and Shout Radio will muster in the event that President Obama is assassinated while in office. In other words, there are obviously people on the far-right who are hoping to generate the atmosphere for an assassination, even as they plan to declaim responsibility should it happen.

This is a painful subject for liberals, and we don’t even want to think about the assassination of President Obama, and what it would mean for America. Indeed, within the Salon article there is a sense of ironic disbelief, as if to say, “Surely, these people cannot be serious. They’re crazies. And the smarter among them must be joking!”

But the far-right is serious. Deadly serious. We are not even six months into Obama’s presidency, and since the election the far-right has become more hysterical, not less. That ought to tell us something. 

In fact, toward the beginning of the Salon article, the author was clearly trying to make light of—and mock—Obama hysteria by saying,

“Marooned on a grassy knoll of the mind, the right has spun new and scarier fantasies about the president, tales that would send any patriotic, gun-toting Christian fleeing across the border to Canada, if only the Canadians weren’t so damn socialist.”

Grassy knoll? Scarier fantasies?

Freud would say, “In your attempt to make a humorous remark, have your ears heard what your mouth has spoken?”

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Here’s O’Reilly defending his Tiller rhetoric in the aftermath of Tiller’s murder. For Tiller’s name, you can simply substitute Obama’s (should he ever be assassinated):

Salon recently interviewed Barack Obama’s 84 year old great uncle, Charles Payne. Obama’s uncle, a veteran of World War II, helped to liberate Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald. Here’s the part of the interview in which he describes what he witnessed at Ohrdruf:

Do you remember the day when you discovered the Ohrdruf camp?

Ohrdruf was in that string of towns going across, south of Gotha and Erfurt. Our division was the first one in there. When we arrived there were no German soldiers anywhere around that I knew about. There was no fighting with the Germans, no camp guards. The whole area was overrun by people from the camp dressed in the most pitiful rags, and most of them were in a bad state of starvation. The first thing I saw was a dead body lying square in the middle of the front gate.

A camp inmate?

It turns out that it was a Polish or Russian camp inmate, who had gone over and become a guard for the Nazis. So he was guarding and helping starve the other people. Then when the Americans came, he tried to blend in with the regular inmates. But they recognized him and beat his head in with a tire iron.

What else did you see?

Inside the gate was an area where a bunch of the camp inmates had been machine gunned and were all lying on the ground. Each one had their tin cup in their hand or lying next to them.

Salon’s full interview with Obama’s great uncle is here.

And here are some images of Ohrdruf from the U.S. Holocaust Museum archives:

U.S soldiers, April 1945, looking at gallows erected between barracks at Ohrdruf. . . .

And here are the bodies of some of the victims at Ohrdruf, April 6, 1945. . . .

And here are still more bodies (photo taken April 4, 1945). . . .

A German born opponent of Nazi Germany, John Heartfield’s political art parodied the pretensions of Hitler’s regime and deconstructed its murderous nature. Below is a man set on a medieval wheel of torture turned into a swastika:

More John Heartfield images here.

And here is a man at Auschwitz, apparently shot on the barbed wire of a fence, and left to hang there:

More “Bearing Witness to the Holocaust” images here.

At around 11:30 this morning, I was blown away by what I saw at Matt Drudge’s website. Drudge made use of a classic antisemitic visual template—the sinister, overlarge, and shadowy Jew—as a way of supporting his “reporting” on the besieged Pope Benedict. In his visit to Israel, the pope has been under criticism from some Jews for not apologizing for Catholic complicity in the Holocaust. I was so shocked at Drudge’s blatant use of an antisemitic trope to support his lead story, that I felt it should be preserved (see below). About a half hour after I saved the below image, Drudge had switched to a different image and story. Therefore, over the course of the morning, I don’t know how long Drudge had run with this banner image, but here it is:

The clear implication of the image is that sinister and shadowy Jewry is harassing an old man (and given that the aged and decrepit John Demanjuk was recently deported for trial to Germany for Nazi war crimes, it seems hardly a coincidence that Drudge is evoking right-wing Catholic resentment toward Jews). Drudge apparently knows that some of his loyal audience is at least reflexively antisemitic. He frequently runs, for example, images and advertisements against a favorite conservative bogey, George Soros, implicitly depicting him as an eastern European Jew conspiratorially involved in the undermining of America.

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Below are two antisemitic propaganda images from World War II. The first is of a shadowy Jew, behind curtains, clearly plotting subterfuge against Catholic Vichy France and Nazi Germany:

And here is a fascist cartoon characterization of Oslo in 1941, suggesting that behind the shoulders of global leaders—such as Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—is always a lurking and outsized world dominating Jew:

I think that Drudge, when he invokes such antisemitic visual tropes, knows exactly what he is doing. I don’t think it’s innocent or merely coincidental. In my view, Drudge uses postmodern irony to generate ambiguity about his intentions—even as he manages to feed his non-ironic and earnest paleo-conservative core audience the kind of demonological archetypes that they so clearly crave.

Source for World War II images: Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (Sam Keen 1986, pp. 20, 35).

Apparently, support of torture goes with being a Republican these days. A Republican veteran of the Marines tells Rush Limbaugh that Americans shouldn’t torture, and implies that there’s something emotionally wrong with anyone who would be so sick as to advocate torture, and Limbaugh shuts down the veteran’s audio, lets loose on him, and says that the veteran is not a Republican. Talk about a big tent!:

Sounding like a 1920s German fascist or communist impatient with bourgeois parliamentary democracy in the Weimar Republic, Salon.com reports that a tea bag protester expressed his wish that, on 9/11, our nation’s Congressional building had simply been obliterated. This is really illiberal creepy political expression for an American:

Another seemingly sedate protester, Brian Smith, a marketer from Greenville, S.C., who was in Washington on business and came by the rally, wandered equally off message. “I love my country and I don’t like what’s going on,” Smith said. “Government — to be honest with you, and this will probably be misquoted, but on 9/11, I think they hit the wrong building. They should have gone into the Capitol building, hit out, knocked out both sides of the aisle, we’d start from scratch, we’d be better off today.” I pointed out that “they” did try to hit the Capitol. “Yeah, I know, they missed,” he said. “The wrong sequence. If someone had to go, it should have been the Capitol building. On that day I felt differently, but today that’s the way I feel.”

What an outrage for an American to talk this way about our country’s very symbol of representative democracy: the U.S. Capitol building. This man is a proverbial canary in the right wing coal mine. Such expression is a sign that the far right in this country may be harboring fantasies that populist-backed authoritarianism is better than the slow and messy process of partisan democratic politics accompanied by compromise. And where, oh where, are the sane voices among establishment Republicans, condemning and disassociating themselves from the conspiratorial and fringe rhetoric that these tea bag parties have generated?

Centuries of Christian antisemitism helped lay the groundwork for the emergence of 20th century racial antisemitism, and many German Christians perceived no conflict between Christianity and their association with the Nazi Party. Below are two Catholic priests in Nazi salute alongside Wilhelm Frick and Joseph Gobbels:

Source: United States Holocaust Museum