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The Iron Cargo Cult and Its Appeasers
by arendt
...."From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."
....-Winston Churchill
ghost dance (n.) Either of two group dances associated with a messianic religious movement among Native American peoples of the Southwest and Great Plains in the late 19th century. Ghost dance prophets foretold the imminent disappearance of whites, the restoration of traditional lands and ways of life, and the resurrection of dead ancestors.
The movement began with a dream by Wovoka...He claimed that, in his dream, he was taken into the spirit world and saw all Native Americans being taken up into the sky and the Earth opening up to swallow all Whites and to revert back to its natural state...
"ghost dance" at www.answers.com
Political Cargo Cults have arisen before in the wreckage of the American Dream - the one led by Ross Perot, for example. As with the prototypical cult, they believe that by recreating the ephemera of a unique circumstance, they will be rewarded as they were in the earlier case. So, we have seen people gulled into recreating the worst of the 1950s (mindless consumerism, anti-liberal blacklists, misogyny, pharisaical religiosity) in the false hope of recreating the prosperity of the 1950's economy, which produced 50% of the world's output. Of course, without respect for science, respect for organized labor, and investment in middle class entitlements, and the fortuitous destruction of the rest of the world's industrial plant, the hope can be nought but aboriginal ritual superstition.
Recently, though, we have witnessed the arrival of what can only be called "The Iron Cargo Cult" - a totalitarian version of the cult that moves religious delusion from the pathetic to the deadly. I am, of course, referring to the religious insanity known as the Rapture. By and large, once the Rapture cult gets a grip on a geographical region, that region is as far beyond rescue by normal politics as Eastern Europe was in the Iron Curtain era. (Normal politics cannot defeat rigged e-voting and a host of other criminal mechanisms employed by the Bush cult.)
The Rapture has nothing to do with authentic Christianity. It is the biggest religious con game since the Pope was selling indulgences in Germany. The whole movement, which until recently has been an almost exclusively Anglo-Saxon sect, was manufactured out of thin air in the mid 1800s in Britain. It is no accident that this movement first appealed to rural poor people, traditionally a most reactionary group. As industrialism cranked up, they were left behind by the advances of urban centers. Instead of accepting the advances and trying to improve their lot, as the labor movement did successfully, the rural poor feared and rejected those advances.
Of course, those same advances interacted badly with the mostly-unchanged aristocratic structures in Europe to produce World War I. The Great Depression piled on top of the devastation of that war to push many European working class people to choose from a vertiable smorgasbord of hyper-nationalist, authoritarian movements. Every country from Romania to Great Britain had such movements. During the Depression, America had them too; but we dodged a bullet thanks to Franklin Roosevelt. (And no thanks to the unindicted industrialists who hired General Smedley Butler to stage a coup.) For forty years in America, only die-hard racists and other self-marginalized people clung to the death-loving Rapture cult, instead of seeking opportunity in the richest, most free, and most generous country the world had ever seen. Liberal democracy delivered prosperity and security to working people, legislated against racism and discrimination, stopped a senseless war, and tried (but failed) to rein in an out-of-control CIA.
But, the corporations, who will not relent until they have stamped out every last decent thing that Rooselvelt did, have spent the last twenty five years engineering a successful rollback of liberal democracy and middle-class employment in America. To cover their tracks, the corporations have unleashed an overt propaganda campaign to fuel the resentment and puerile self-righteousness of the "angry white guys". This campaign has conditioned those white guys, who were the first victims of the corporate counter-revolution, to believe that they were instead the victims of Affirmative Action, femi-Nazis, the ACLU, atheists, or Political Correctness. The Rapture is their version of a ghost dance, right down to "being taken up into the sky".
As a psy-ops operation, the Rapture is wildly successful for the corporate overclass. It simultaneously votes the GOP into office to the immense financial and legal benefit of the CEO class and focusses all the anger for the destruction of the working-class in America on the very people who have tried to defend it: the Democratic Party. But, better than that, it convinces the suckers not to demand anything in "this world", but rather to support an insanely aggressive military policy in hopes of blowing us all to kingdom come to bring on the Rapture.
What a masterful racket! The victim will only wake up when a medieval, authoritarian society has been imposed on him with modern computer technology, police-state weapon systems, and propaganda campaigns. It will only be by mis-calculation that the planet might be reduced to a nuclear cinder, as the Rapture-ators suicidally desire. The corporations are just following that well-known rule of politics: never interrupt your opponent while he is committing suicide. They have accomplished the famous boast of the robber baron, Jay Gould, who said in 1886: "I can hire half of the working class to kill the other half."
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The basic issue that is splitting the Democratic Party is whether to respond to this religious insanity with tolerance or with principled resistance, in the American tradition of thinking for yourself. The astonishingly ineffectual "non-activist" wing of the Democratic Party plays nice with George Bush - its poster boy, Holy Joe Lieberman, can't pander enough to warmongering neo-Christianity.
Myself, I'm with the activist wing of the party. Its time to call a mental case a mental case - before we all wind up locked in the looney bin run by Dick Cheney and administered by the five Catholic fanatics on the Supreme Court. The rabid religious right has declared open war on science. The Bush administration has placed their partisans in charge of America's scientific establishment, with orders to wreck those parts of it that run afoul of the fatwas of the American Taliban. Its about time that our side took off the gloves, since the other side has been wailing away with brass knuckles for over a decade. And, its not like we don't have ammunition laying about to be used. Two cases in point.
Case 1 - The selective use of evidence by religious believers:
"Faith is an impostor. This can be readily seen in the way that all the extraordinary phenomena of the religious life...are seized upon by the faithful as confirmation of their faith. At these moments, religious believers appear like men and women in the desert of uncertainty given a cool drink of data...This is the very same faith that will not stoop to reason when it has no good reasons to believe. If a little supportive evidence emerges, however, the faithful prove as attentive to data as the damned. This demonstrates that faith is nothing more than a willingness to await the evidence - be it the Day of Judgment or some other downpour of corroboration. It is the search for knowledge on the installment plan: believe now, live an untestable hypothesis until your dying day, and you will discover that you were right.
"But in any other sphere of life, a belief is a check that everyone insists upon cashing this side of the grave: the engineer says the bridge will hold; the doctor says the infection is resistant to penicillin - these people have defensible claims about the way the world is. The mullah, the priest, and the rabbi do not."
- Sam Harris "The End of Faith" p. 66.
Isn't this selective application of the rules exactly the game played by the corporate media with regard to the Bush Administration? Faced with the most corrupt, lawbreaking regime ever to infest our government, the media seems willing to withhold drawing the slightest conclusion, much less connect enough dots that they could pass for a case of political smallpox. Meanwhile, Democrats are subject to a fact-checking Inquisition and a presumption of venality. In short, the corporate media believes - in the religious fanatic sense of the word - in Bush. They have betrayed their mission in a democracy: to report the facts without taking sides.
Case 2 - The Resemblance of Bush tactics to Communist tactics in Eastern Europe:
The reason the media shies from drawing any conclusions is because the only conclusion to be drawn is that Bush is slowly, steadily creating a one-party police state. Just read these quotes about the Communist takeovers in Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1948:
(All quotes below from "Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945", by Tony Judt.)
"Stalin thus initially pursued a tactic already familiar from the Popular Front years of the thirties...favouring the formation of 'Front' governments, coalitions of Communists, Socialists and other 'anti-Fascist' parties, which would exclude and punish the old regime and its supporters but would be cautious and 'democratic', reformist rather than revolutionary.
"...it is...worth emphasizing that neither Stalin nor his local representatives were in any doubt as to their long term goal...As Walter Ulbricht, leader of the East German Communists, explained privately to his followers when they expressed bemusement at Party policy in 1945: 'It's quite clear - its got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control.'
By these same Popular Front tactics ("The 11th commandment: speak no ill of any Republican" - R. Reagan), the fundamentalist operatives took control of the GOP, elbowing aside moderates and grabbing the levers of power.
"Control, in fact, mattered much more than policies. It was not by chance that in every coalition government - 'Fatherland Front', 'Unity Government' or 'bloc of anti-Fascist parties' - in eastern Europe, Communists sought control of certain key ministries: the Ministry of the Interior, which gave the Party authority over the police and security forces as well as the power to grant or withhold licenses to print newspapers... "(pp 130-1)
As soon as they gained control of Congress, the radical GOP launched a corrupt, partisan, special prosecutor at Bill Clinton. Simultaneously, their corporate arm turned a once-independent news media into a bunch of tabloid reporters, begging for juicy scraps instead of fact-checking.
"In the course of 1946,...Vulnerable or unpopular politicians from non-Communist parties were targeted for public opprobrium, while their colleagues consented to this mistreatment in the hope it would not be applied to them...Typical of the charges was one against the (Bulgarian) Agrarian journalist Kunev, accused him of having, in an article, "in a truly criminal manner called the Bulgarian government political and economic dreamers.' " (p 132)
Since the initial character assasination of Al Gore, the corporate media have, by their above-mentioned selective application of the rules of evidence, editorially murdered the political careers of Max Cleland, Howard Dean, and John Kerry, and the media careers of Dan Rather, Bill Maher, and the Dixie Chicks. Today, they are savaging John Murtha. Meanwhile, 40% of the GOP, the DLC wing of corporate cronies and religious nut-cases like Joe Lieberman, vote for legislation and appointments that serve the GOP, not their own constituents. Such are the results of tolerating the intolerable.
"The Communist state was in a permanent condition of undeclared war against its own citizens. Like Lenin, Stalin understood the need for enemies, and it was in the logic of the Stalinist state that it was constantly mobilizing against its foes - external, but above all, domestic." (p192)
What clearer parallel with a proto-Stalinist police state could we have than the incessant drum-beating for enemies by the Bush Cabal? They see enemies everywhere, but especially at home. Ashcroft called dissent treason. Under Bush, the unwritten rules of political demonstrations have been re-written to resemble some banana republic - protestors locked in cages out of sight, subjected to random arrest on trumped up charges; audience pre-vetted to eliminate any potentially unfriendly attendees.
"The trials and purges, and the accompanying chorus of mendacious commentary, helped degrade whatever remained in eastern Europe of the public sphere. Politics and government became synonymous with corruption and arbitrary repression, practiced by and for the benefit of a venal clique, itself rent by suspicion and fear...
The only resource upon which Communist managers could consistently rely was labor-intensive production pressed to the breaking point...there was a distinctively cynical quality to Communist misrule: old-fashinoned abuses were now laboriously embedded in a rhetorical cant of equality and social progress, a hypocrisy for which (none of the previous exploiters) had felt the need." (p194)
Again, the parallel practically slaps you in the face. The relentless Orwellian rhetoric of the Bush Gang about spreading democracy, even as they loot America and destroy its democratic institutions, is rhetorical overkill that can only work on America today because of the Iron Cargo Cult and its death grip on the minds of America.
How is it that the American media, which found "reds under the beds" for fifty years, cannot notice a totalitarian takeover in progress in the heart of American government? Easy answer: because they are part of the takeover. They are the witch doctors fanning the flames of the Cargo Cult insanity - lining their own pockets and placing their own relatives in positions to profit from the coming corrupt theocracy.
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The situation in America today resembles the situation in Czechoslovakia in January, 1948. We are on the verge of a complete coup by totalitarian forces which already largely control our government. We have reached this point by our suicidal tolerance of religious fanaticism. The kind of one-sided application of the rules performed by the corporate media and the self-righteous fundamentalist ministers is the very definition of the word "partisan". To meet such naked, cynical partisanship with tolerance, as the non-activist wing of the Democratic Party is doing, is criminally incompetent. Real Americans (and future historians) will lump the current party leadership with Neville Chamberlain and the appeasers. Chamberlain could have stopped Hitler before violence broke out, but failed to do so because of an outmoded code of conduct that blinded him to the radical sociopaths across the table. The failure of the Democratic Party leadership to enforce party discipline at the Alito hearings was the Munich of that failed leadership. In fact, they were worse than Munich, because Alito promised nothing; and not even the most deluded of Democrats could claim "Peace in our Time". The current leadership of the Democratic Party are dead men walking. America had better pray that its version of Winston Churchill shows up soon, or our Republic is history.
God save me from people who are certain god has saved them.
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