Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Are the Thugs and Corrupt and Mediocre Partisans Destroying the USA?

host · 01-05-2007, 11:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

........You should give (some) of our elected officials and the public more credit in recognizing a dangerous movement to politicize particulary religous beliefs. The Senate responded in one case and the American people reponsed on a broader level.

Beyond this particular issue, my point is that, more often than not, the political system has proven throughout our history that it works.....

I dunno, dc_dux....I just came across this guy Chris Hedges in the last 12 hours.
My past threads concern AIPAC, JINSA, and the ties to these organizations of the political right; Cheney, some current and many former US military officers, and most of the PNAC members.....and Hedges observations, I'm finding, are extremely close to my own.

The first quote box is from a GWU student newspaper, reporting on a panel that Hedges was part of, a month ago, 30 days after the november election. He doesn't seem to share your optimism.....Hedges and I may be over reacting, but there is a possibility that you are doing the opposite.

We live in interesting times, and our political opposition has been increasinglly behaving as if it has gone bonkers.....lotsa blood, wasted money, and the power of GEEEE-ZUSSSS, to boot....

Quote:

http://www.gwhatchet.com/media/stora....gwhatchet.com
by Andrew Metcalf
Hatchet Reporter
Issue date: 12/7/06 Section: News

.....Sponsored by World Can't Wait - Drive out the Bush Regime, the panel discussion featured a journalist, a CIA veteran and activists who spoke about President George W. Bush. The panel attracted about 150 people.......

....Titled, "It's Worse Than You Think: Where the Bush Regime is Taking the World and Why They Still Must Be Stopped," the panel also included former New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges, who spoke about the Christian right movement.

Hedges, a member of the Presbyterian Church and son of a minister, criticized the evangelical movement's intolerance towards opposing views and warned of an emerging global Christian empire.

"This ideology has the seeds of religious fascism," he said, comparing the Christian right to Nazism because of its intolerance of opposing groups and viewpoints.

"All Americans must give up passivity and defend tolerance," he said in conclusion.......

Quote:

http://www.harpers.org/FeelingTheHate.html
Soldiers of Christ
Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters
Posted on Monday, May 30, 2005. Originally from May 2005. By Chris Hedges

.,,,, I have traveled to Anaheim, California, to observe the rising power of the evangelical political movement at first hand. Orange County, along with Colorado Springs, is a center of the new militant Christianity, and it is here, among friends, that the National Religious Broadcasters association—which brings together some 1,600 Christian radio and television broadcasters, who claim to reach up to 141 million listeners and viewers—is holding its annual convention.....

... Scores of men and women, all conservatively dressed in coats and ties or skirts, stand expectantly, waiting for a sign to beckon them next door to the Anaheim Convention Center, where speeches, booths, and seminars await......

.... Early Sunday morning, in a ballroom on the second floor of the Hilton Hotel, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism is hosting a breakfast. Several hundred people, all dressed in the appropriate skirts and business suits of American churchgoing people, are seated at round tables with baskets of bread, fruit plates, and silver pitchers of coffee. Waiters serve plates of scrambled eggs and creamed spinach. I count no more than half a dozen people who are not white. On the platform is a huge picture of the Dome of the Rock, the spot in Jerusalem where the third Temple will be rebuilt to herald, at least according to the Christians in the room, the second coming of Christ. Some 400,000 Christian tourists visit Israel each year, and, what with the precipitous decline in Israel's tourism industry in recent years, these people have become a valued source of revenue.

The strange alliance in this case is premised upon the Dominionist belief that Israel must rule the biblical land in order for Christ to return, though when he does, all Jews who do not convert to Christianity supposedly will be incinerated as the believers are lifted into heaven; all this is courteously left unmentioned at the breakfast. The featured speakers include Avraham Hirschsohn, who is the new Israeli minister of tourism, and Michael Medved, a cultural conservative and a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. .....

....The Christian writer Kay Arthur, who can barely contain her tears when speaking of Israel, professes that although she loves America, if she had to choose between America and Israel, “I would stand with Israel, stand with Israel as a daughter of the King of Kings, stand according to the word of God.” She goes on to quote at length from Revelation, speaking of Jesus seated on a throne floating about Jerusalem as believers are raptured up toward him in the sky.

* * *

After breakfast I have a look at the charred remains of public bus #19 in the convention hall. Its sides are scorched black, and the doors in the center of the bus are twisted hideously. Within, the bus's steel frame is bent outward and shattered. The exterior has been adorned with banners bearing biblical quotations: “I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them” (Amos 9:15); “And I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse” (Genesis 12:3).

The bus, owned by a Christian Zionist group calling itself The Jerusalem Connection International, was destroyed by Palestinian suicide bombers in January 2004, killing eleven people. According to information from the group, its president, retired U.S. Brigadier General James Hutchens, looks at “issues related to Israel from a Biblical perspective.” The bus has been displayed at The Hague and in numerous rallies throughout the United States. At a table next to the bus, a Jerusalem Connection official hands out pamphlets encouraging the reader to “Bring Bus #19 to Your Community!”....
* * *

On Monday night James Dobson, the founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, holds an informal reception and talk with his son, Ryan. The walls are decorated with red, white, and blue bunting, and people are eating popcorn, hot dogs, and pizza. There are Ping-Pong tables set up in the corners, and in the center of the room are three bar-stool chairs and another Ping-Pong table, this one bathed in light. Several men are wearing umpire uniforms.

Dobson is perhaps the most powerful figure in the Dominionist movement. He was instrumental three years ago in purging the moderate chairman of the NRB from his post and speaks frequently with the White House. He was a crucial player in getting out the Christian vote for George W. Bush. Dobson says he was born again at the age of three during a church service conducted by his father, a Nazarene minister.......

Quote:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionande...22/hedges.html

INTERVIEW:
Chris Hedges
January 31, 2003 Episode no. 622
Read This Week's January 05, 2006
Go

Read more of Bob Abernethy's interview with NEW YORK TIMES reporter Chris Hedges, author of WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING:

Q: Your father was a Presbyterian minister and you studied at the Harvard Divinity School. What were your ideas about war before you saw it for yourself?
A: My father, who had fought in World War II, essentially became a pacifist after the war. He was a very early opponent of the Vietnam War and took us as children to antiwar demonstrations. He told me when I was about 12 that, if the war was still going when I was 18 and I was drafted, he would go to prison with me......I remember one July Fourth parade when I was about ten, and these guys were going by in their caps. And he said, "Never forget. Most of those guys were in the back, fixing the trucks." So I grew up in a home where war was seen for the abomination that it was.

On the other hand, I also grew up in a home with parents who were social activists, so my entire childhood was colored by the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement. When my father died in 1995, he was very involved in the gay rights movement. And I learned, because we lived in a small town in upstate New York, the cost of taking a moral stand -- that it was unpopular. I ...I felt the sting of what it meant to stand up for what you believe in or to support a cause that was just and, certainly at its inception, how difficult that was.

That developed, I think, a lot of anger in me -- anger at seeing my father, whom I admired, belittled by people in our town. I also read a lot as a teenager about the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War, and I very much wanted that epic battle to define my own life. I used to regret as a teenager that I had not been of age in the thirties, that I couldn't go fight fascism like my hero George Orwell. By the time I was a divinity student, the military dictatorships in Latin America were carrying out horrendous crimes -- the "dirty war" in Argentina, Pinochet in Chile, the civil war in El Salvador. When I got to El Salvador, the death squads were killing 800 to 1,000 people a month, and I felt that, as a young man, this was as close as my generation was going to come to fighting fascism. And that is what propelled me toward war -- not because I was any kind of a gun nut, not because I came as a voyeur -- which some people do -- but out of a sense of justice, out of a sense of idealism.

Q: That's why you became a war correspondent -- you wanted to do justice?
A: Yes, although I would temper that by saying that because of studying Christian ethics, because of [reading] Reinhold Niebuhr, I was never a utopian. I never believed that human institutions could create perfect societies, or perhaps even just societies. I always had a very skeptical view; I always distrusted power, no matter whose hands power was in. And I always felt that my role was to be an outsider, to stand with the victim -- whether that was in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas, or in El Salvador against the military. So I never embraced liberation theology. I was always very guarded about [it]. I mean, obviously, there were some aspects of it that we needed to hear. But I approached it with a great deal of skepticism.

Q: Would you sum up the wars you covered, the places you were, what happened to you?
A: I started with the war in El Salvador. I was there for five years. I covered the conflict in Nicaragua as well. After leaving Central America, I went to the Middle East. I took a sabbatical to study Arabic. I went to Jerusalem just in time for the first intifadah. I covered the civil war in the Sudan -- I traveled in from Kenya with the SPLA [Sudan People's Liberation Army] guerrillas. I covered the civil war in Algeria, the civil war in Yemen. I worked in the Punjab during the height of the Sikh separatist movement -- I was there for six weeks.

I covered the Persian Gulf War. I made two incursions into the marshes [in southeast Iraq], when Saddam Hussein was draining them, with Shiite guerrillas in small boats from Iran. I spent weeks with Kurdish fighters in the north on the front lines, where there was sporadic fire between Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish guerrillas. I should add also [that] at the end of the Persian Gulf War, I was in Basra with the Shiite rebels when I was captured and held prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard [and] eventually released.

In 1995, I went to Sarajevo, and that summer was one of the worst of the war. I covered the implementation of the Dayton peace agreement and then the war in Kosovo. War has marked most of my 15 years abroad. I've been in ambushes. I've been strafed by MIGs, pounded by very heavy artillery in Sarajevo -- 155 Howitzers, 90-millimeter tank rounds. I was shot at by Serb snipers, shot at by Israeli snipers. I've seen far too much of violent death.

Q: So now you've written about what war is. What's your conclusion?
A: The goal of the book was to portray the disease that war is and how that disease in wartime infects and destroys individuals and societies. I had started writing at Harvard on a Nieman fellowship after I left the war in Kosovo, but it took on a kind of urgency after 9/11. I woke up and realized in New York that we'd all become Serbs, that all of that flag-waving, all of that jingoism, that mass suppression of individual conscience -- which I had seen in countries in war around the globe Ð was now part of my own society, part of where I lived. And it frightened me.

I'm not a pacifist. Wars are always tragic, but probably inevitable; I would think they are inevitable. I supported the intervention in Bosnia. I supported the intervention in Kosovo. I feel that we failed as a nation by not intervening in Rwanda. If we've learned anything from the Holocaust, it is that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. You have blood on your hands, and we do for Rwanda.

But I also understand what war can do, especially when you fall into the dark intoxication that war brings. That process of dehumanizing the other, that ecstatic euphoria in wartime, that use of patriotism as a form of self-glorification, that worshiping of the capacity to inflict violence -- especially in a society that possesses a military as advanced as ours -- all of those things I wanted to expose in the book, so that people would at least understand war for the poison that it is.

Q: You call it an addiction.
A: Yes. I think for those who are in combat, it very swiftly can become an addiction. War is its own subculture. It can create a landscape of the grotesque that is, perhaps, unlike anything else created by human beings. There is that rush of war. In an ambush, when danger is that present, there is no past. There is no future. You are thrust into the present in a way that is like a drug. I mean, even colors are brighter. War is Zen, and that becomes a very heady way to live. We ennoble ourselves in war, especially those of us who leap from conflict to conflict.

In Sarajevo, for instance -- when you left, you would be sitting in Paris for four or five days [and] all you did was hunger to go back. The culture [of war] took you over. I remember stepping outside of war zones in El Salvador or the Balkans into peaceful environments, and the familiar had a quality of what Freud calls "the uncanny." Everything that was familiar seemed strange, because everything that was strange had become familiar.....

.....War is one of the most heady and intoxicating, addictive enterprises ever created by humankind.......

.......A: In the war in the former Yugoslavia, religion was not the cause of the war. First of all, most Yugoslavs had very little religious education. I remember sitting around with a bunch of Muslim troops from the Fifth Corps. Not only was I the only one among the group who spoke Arabic; I soon realized I was the only one who'd ever read the Qur'an. The notion that they were fighting for religious identity was absurd. It was part of the myth of war.

What happened in the former Yugoslavia, and what happens in all fratricides, is what Freud calls the "narcissism of minor difference," where you seize on absurd differences -- you know, dialectic differences.......

.....Q: When you were covering war, you found that the effects on you were such that you sought out the company of people who were in love. Would you talk about that a little bit?
A: We used to call it the "Linda Blair effect" in Bosnia. You think you've suddenly found the one, normal person that you can have a rational conversation with, and then after 15 minutes their head starts to spin around. It's just amazing how almost everyone becomes infected with the rhetoric of wartime, and they just parrot back the clichŽs they're handed. Whatever disquiet they feel, it's as if they can't express it. They're robbed of language.

In every conflict I've been in, the only antidote is people who find their fulfillment, their sense of being, in love. In the Balkans, these were often couples who had mixed marriages and, therefore, they were immune from the rhetoric; to paint all Serbs as evil, or all Muslims as evil, or all Croats as evil was to denigrate the spouse, to dehumanize the spouse -- which they couldn't do. These [relationships] are always sanctuaries -- sanctuaries that I went to in the war in Salvador. And this is something that I've thought about years later.

It doesn't mean that they didn't become victims. It doesn't mean that they weren't eventually wiped out. But it provided a small circle of sanity in the midst of the insanity, where all of that rhetoric, all of that drive for the ruthless annihilation of the other was held at bay, always by couples, which is why, usually, when you look at people who intervene in a town or a village to help a minority under threat, it's usually couples -- one of whom has that kind of moral quality and knows they have to take a moral stance, and the other who has that kind of compassion and caring that the daily maintenance of taking care of another requires. ........

......Q: Your whole book is an effort to face the truth about war. And you recommend again and again that we do that in this country. In the present climate, I suspect many Americans would find your book filled with very troubling judgments about the United States.
A: I was very conscious as I wrote the book not to denigrate the profession of soldiering. A friend of mine, Jack Wheeler, who graduated from West Point and was one of the forces behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, an officer in Vietnam, read it through for that reason. And he pushed me hard. In the introduction, where I talk about how I admire the qualities of the professional soldier, he said, "You have to name two." He was right, and that was hard. I named Ulysses S. Grant for holding the Union together and General Wesley Clark, who was, within the military, one of the driving forces behind the intervention in Kosovo and Bosnia. Both [are] military leaders I respect.

I gave a talk at West Point, and I certainly found an understanding among the older officers who teach there, many of whom had been through Vietnam. Just because you're a professional soldier doesn't mean you like war. In many ways, those who have been through war hate it in a way that only those who have been through war can hate it. Yet they know that they have a job to do.

This isn't a book that is going to be used in peace studies programs, necessarily. It certainly exposes the evil of war, the poison of war; it says not only that there are nevertheless times we have to wage war, but also that it is morally imperative for us to use violence -- certainly in the cases of Kosovo, Sarajevo, Rwanda.....

Q: And now in Iraq -- can you imagine things that would come to light, reasons for going to war that would, in your opinion, justify it?
A: There's only one reason that would justify a war with Iraq, and that is if there is evidence of a real threat against us by the Iraqis. ....And at least up until now, that evidence has not been presented to anyone by the Bush administration.

Q: When you came back from Kosovo, you spent a year reading the classics. What were you trying to understand?
A: I did that on the advice of James Freedman, the former president of Dartmouth, and it was one of the smartest things I did because, of course, Thucydides, Cicero, Virgil -- all of these great writers dealt with the same issues. Virgil and Cicero came out of a very bloody civil war that ended with the reign of Augustus.

I was freed from the cant of my own society and allowed to grapple with those issues in a way that brought them into clearer focus. I saw, for instance, in writers such as Aristotle how great minds in societies are limited. Even though Aristotle opposed slavery, he believed that slavery would never be eradicated. It allowed me to come back and look at our own society and my own life in a way that I hadn't before. And then, quite frankly, I found that a lot of the writing of Catullus, this great lyric Roman poet, just spoke to me over hundreds of years in a very powerful and moving way. I memorized a lot of Catullus's poems. And when I went to visit Kurt Schork's grave in Sarajevo, I stood over it and recited the poem that Catullus had written to his own brother who died near Troy. .....

........I'm not saying we shouldn't go after Osama bin Laden. Of course, we should. But that alone, in and of itself, is not going to solve our problem. If that's all we do, it may, in fact, make it worse.....

..... If we continue with this very ham-fisted and self-righteous imperialism, we're just not going to have many friends out there at all. One fifth of the world's population, most of whom are not Arabs, looks at us as a nation through the prism of Chechnya, Palestine. And we just don't look very good.

Q: What do we need to do?
A: In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we need to put a brake on the Israelis. It's not in Israel's interest to accelerate this conflict, and it's certainly not in ours. The Europeans are better on this. I just don't think we acknowledge the horrific suffering the Palestinians are going through. We minimize it. We don't understand that for many of these young kids, the only way they have left to affirm themselves is through death, through suicide.

We have to give them other ways to affirm themselves. Until that happens, this conflict isn't going to end. We have the power to go in there and change things. But because everything has become subordinated to the war on terror, we're not doing so.

Quote:

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/tr...pt_hedges.html
3.07.03
Politics and Economy
Transcript: Bill Moyers Talks with Chris Hedges

......The General was admirably candid. Quote: "We need to condition people that this is war. People get the idea this is going to be antiseptic. Well, it's not going to be. People are going to die."

I read those words just after finishing this book, WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING. Its author, Chris Hedges, knows about war, knows about people dying from close up experience. As a foreign correspondent for the NEW YORK TIMES, Chris Hedges covered the Balkans, the Middle East, including the first Gulf War where he was captured by the Iraqis, and Central America.

Last year he was a member of the team of reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize for the NEW YORK TIMES coverage of global terrorism. Chris Hedges now writes the column, "Public Lives." He's also, by the way, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School. Welcome to NOW.

HEDGES: Thank you.

MOYERS: When you hear the General describe an attack of 3,000 missiles on Iraq, what comes through your mind?

HEDGES: Well not images of shock and awe. Images of large numbers of civilian dead. Destroyed buildings. Panic in the corridors of hospitals. Families that can't reach parts of a city that have been devastated and are desperate for news of their loved ones. All of the images of war that I've seen for most of the past two decades come to mind.

MOYERS: I heard a description of 'shock and awe' again on National Public Radio yesterday and then they came on with a report, a first-hand report from Kurds in Northern Iraq of how they had been tortured by Saddam Hussein. Cruelly, brutally, creatively tortured. Is there any kinship between what happens to civilians in a war like we're about to launch and what happens to them under the regime of a Saddam Hussein? And is there any moral relativism there?

HEDGES: Well, I don't think you can justify unleashing 3,000 precision-guided missiles in 48 hours because Saddam Hussein is a torturer, which he is. And I covered that whole withdrawal of the Iraqi forces from Northern Iraq. I was not only in the subterranean bowels of the Secret Police Headquarters where we found not only documentation but videotapes of executions. Horrible torture centers. People being— you know where the meat hooks were still sort of fastened into the ceiling of soundproofed rooms.

And then these mass graves. We were digging up as many as a thousand, 1,500 people. But that does not give you a moral justification to carry out what is, quite candidly, indiscriminate attack against civilians. That's what's going to happen when you drop this number of high explosive devices in an urban area.

MOYERS: Does the inevitability of civilian casualties make this war illegitimate?

HEDGES: Well, I think the war is illegitimate not because civilians will die. Civilians die in every conflict. It's illegitimate because the administration has not, to my mind, provided any evidence of any credible threat. And we can't go to war just because we think somebody might do something eventually.

There has to be hard intelligence. There has to be a real threat if we're going to ask our young men and women to die.

Because once you unleash the "dogs of war" and I know this from every war I've ever covered, war has a force of its own. It's not surgical. We talk about taking out Saddam Hussein. Once you use the blunt instrument of war, it has all sorts of consequences when you use violence on that scale that you can't anticipate. I'm not opposed to the use of force. But force is always has to be a last resort because those who wield force become tainted or contaminated by it. And one of the things that most frightens me about the moment our nation is in now, is that we've lost touch with the notion of what war is.

At the end of the Vietnam War, we became a better country in our defeat. We asked questions about ourselves that we had not asked before. We were humbled, maybe even humiliated. We were forced to step outside of ourselves and look at us as others saw us. And it wasn't a pretty sight.

But we became a better country for it. A much better country. Gradually war's good name if we can, between quotes, can say was resurrected. Certainly during the Reagan Era. Granada, Panama. Culminating with the Persian Gulf War, where a war — the very essence of war was hidden from us. And the essence of war is death. War is necrophilia. That's what it is.

MOYERS: Tell me, having covered the first Gulf War, what the men and women who are about to go into Iraq are going to experience.

HEDGES: Well, the ones who are up on the front line are — especially as they prepare to go into battle — are going to have to come face-to-face with the myth of war. The myth of heroism, the myth of patriotism. The myth of glory. All those myths that have the ability to arouse us when we're not in mortal danger.

And they're going to have to confront their own mortality. And at that moment some people will be crying, some people will be vomiting. People will not speak much. Everyone will realize that from here on out, at least until the fighting ends, it will be a constant minute-by-minute battle with fear. And that sometimes fear wins. And anybody who tells you differently has never been in a war.

MOYERS: And yet you say in your book that the first Gulf War, that we made war fun.

HEDGES: For those who weren't there. You know the — I was with the U.S. Marine Corps and they hated CNN. They hated that flag-waving jingoism that dominated the coverage on, or dominated so much of the coverage…all those abstract terms that create the excitement back home become obscene to those who are in combat.

MOYERS: You say also in the book that the first Gulf War made war more fashionable again.

HEDGES: Right.

MOYERS: What do you mean by that?

HEDGES: Well, it was, you know, so much of commercial news has now become an extension of the entertainment industry. And the war became entertainment. The Army had no more candor than they did in Vietnam. But what they perfected was the appearance of candor. Live press conferences. And well-packaged video clips of Sidewinder missiles hitting planes or going down chimneys. You know, this kind of stuff.....

.....So it was completely mythic, or mendacious narrative that was presented to us. And I was a little delayed getting back to New York because I was a prisoner with the Iraqi Republican Guard. But I remember landing into New York and even then the mood was that we'd just won the Super Bowl.

And it frightened me and it disgusted me. And it wasn't because I didn't believe that we shouldn't have gone into Kuwait. I believe we had no choice. But I certainly understood that we, as a nation, had completely lost touch with what war is. And when we lose touch with what war is, when we believe that our technology makes us invulnerable. That we can wage war and others can die and we won't — then eventually, if history is any guide, we are going to stumble into a horrific swamp.

MOYERS: I read your book last night. One of the most chilling and haunting scenes in here is when, I think you were in El Salvador, and a young man was near you, calling out, "mama."

HEDGES: Yeah.

MOYERS: "Mama."

HEDGES: It's not uncommon when soldiers die that they call out for their mother. And that always seems to me to cut through the absurd posturing of soldiering.

MOYERS: Three times when you were in El Salvador you were threatened with death. You received death threats. The Embassy got you out.

HEDGES: That's right.

MOYERS: You went back.

HEDGES: Yes. Because I believe that it was better to live for one intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant my own death, rather than go back to the routine of life.

MOYERS: You're right, you know. War is an addiction, as you say. Let me read you this: "during a lull I dashed…" this is you.

HEDGES: Right.

MOYERS: Read this for me.

HEDGES: "During a lull I dashed across an empty square and found shelter behind a house. My heart was racing. Adrenaline coursed through my bloodstream. I was safe. I made it back to the capital. And like most war correspondents, I soon considered the experience a great cosmic joke. I drank away the fear and excitement in a seedy bar in downtown San Salvador. Most people, after such an experience, would learn to stay away. I was hooked. "

MOYERS: You were hooked on?

HEDGES: War. On the most powerful narcotic invented by humankind is war.

MOYERS: What is the narcotic? What is it that's the poisonous allure?

HEDGES: Well the Bible calls it, "The lust of the eye." And warns believers against it. It's that great landscape of the grotesque. It's that power to destroy.

I mean one of the most chilling things you learn in war is that human beings like to destroy. Not only other things but other human beings. And when unit discipline would break down or there was no unit discipline to begin with, you would go into a town and people's eyes were glazed over. They sputtered gibberish.

Houses were burning. They had that power to revoke the charter. That divine-like power, to revoke the charter of another human being's place on this planet. And they used it.

MOYERS: I would have thought that being captured and held by the Iraqis as you were, would have cured you of your addiction. But yet it didn't.

HEDGES: No.

MOYERS: So I still don't understand it. I have to be honest. I mean I just don't understand why you keep putting yourself back into that which you hate.

HEDGES: Well, because the experience itself, that adrenaline-driven rush of war. That sense that you know we have a vital mission that, as journalists, that we ennoble ourselves. I mean I think one of the things I tried very hard to do in the book was show the dark side of what we do.

I mean I admire the courage and the integrity of many of the men and women I worked with, but I do think there is a very dark side to what we do. And it becomes very hard to live outside of a war zone. It's why this small — my comrades, these groups of war correspondents and photographers — would leap from war-to-war.

It's no accident that I was covering the war in Kosovo with people I had covered the war with in El Salvador two decades earlier. You go out of Sarajevo and be in a hotel in Paris and would be pacing the halls because you couldn't adjust....

MOYERS: But doesn't it also create a sense of camaraderie among men who are fighting it. What happens then?

HEDGES: Comradeship is something that's attainable. Everyone can attain in wartime. Once you have that external threat. I mean I think we felt this a little bit after 9-11. We no longer faced death alone. We faced death as a group.

And for that reason it becomes easier to bear.

MOYERS: How do you explain the phenomenon that while we venerate and mourn our own dead from say 9-11, we're curiously indifferent about those we're about to kill.

HEDGES: Because we dehumanize the Other. We fail to recognize the divinity of all human life. We— our own victims are the only victims that hold worth. The victims of the Other are sort of the regrettable cost of war. There is such a moral dichotomy in war. Such a frightening dichotomy that the world becomes a tableau of black and white, good and evil.

You see this in the rhetoric of the Bush Administration. They are the barbarians. I mean we begin to mirror them. You know for them we're the infidels and we call them the barbarians.

MOYERS: It happened in the Johnson Administration too. The President spoke of bringing the coonskin home.

HEDGES: Right. But that's because war is the same disease. And that's the point of the book is that it doesn't matter if I'm an Argentine or El Salvador or the occupied territories or Iraq. It's all the same sickness.

MOYERS: The world is sick too, this is a savage world, as we keep being reminded…

You do think that United States faces a threat? A threat from whatever we want to call it? That produced 9/11? You think we are at danger?

HEDGES: Yes. But not from Iraq.

MOYERS: So how do we, taking into account the moral issues that you raise…

HEDGES: Right.

MOYERS: How do we protect ourselves, defend our security, do the right thing and yet not be taken by surprise again?

HEDGES: By having the courage to be vulnerable. By not folding in on ourselves. By not becoming like those who are arrayed against us. By not using their rhetoric and not adopting their worldview.

What we did after 9/11 was glorify ourselves, denigrate the others. We're certainly, now at this moment, denigrating the French and the Germans who, after all, are our allies. And we created this global troika with Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon.

One fifth of the world's population, most of whom are not Arabs, look at us through the prism of Chechnya and Palestine. And yes, we certainly have to hunt down Osama bin Laden. I would like to see those who carried out 9/11, in so far as it is possible, go on trial for the crimes against humanity that they committed. But we must also begin to address the roots of that legitimate rage and anger that is against us.

It has to be a twofold battle. We are not going to stop terrorism through violence. You see that in Israel. In some ways, the best friend Hamas has is Ariel Sharon, because every time the Israelis send warplanes to bomb a refugee camp or tanks into Ramallah, it weakens and destroys that moderate center within the Palestinian community.

And essentially creates two apocalyptic visions. One on the extreme right wing of Israeli politics. And certainly one on the extreme wing of the Palestinian community. And when these apocalyptic visionaries move to the center of society, then the world becomes exceedingly dangerous. And that's what I fear. And that's what— and, but that requires us not to resort, which is a natural kind of reaction, a kind of almost knee-jerk reaction, to the use of force when force is used against us.

MOYERS: So is it enough in this kind of world just to be good?

HEDGES: Well, nobody's good. I mean we're all sinners and God loves us anyway. That's the whole point. And we live in a fallen world and it's never between the choice is never between good and evil.

The choice… or moral and immoral, as Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us. The choice is always between immoral and more immoral. And I don't think…

MOYERS: I don't think Americans feel immoral about what happened to them on 9/11. Or…

HEDGES: Well, nor should they.

MOYERS: Nor when listening to the report of Saddam Hussein's torture of his own people. That I don't think they feel the same way as they think he feels.

HEDGES: Well, he's a tyrant. And you know we… 9/11 is not the issue. The issue is once we unleash force of that magnitude. And I think theologians like Niebuhr would argue that we must do so and ask for forgiveness.

That we, you know, when you make a choice in the world, and of course one always has to, one has to remember that there are consequences for that choice that create injustice and tragedy for others. And that's what is important to always remember and be aware of.

I think you go back and read Abraham Lincoln and he was very aware of this. And that's what made him a great leader. And in many ways a great moral philosopher.

MOYERS: Can people who plan wars, presidents and generals, afford to be influenced by people like you who abhor war? Who anguish over war?

HEDGES: Well, I think any soldier that's been through combat hates war in the way that only somebody who's seen war can. It's those that lose touch with war and find it euphoric that frighten me.

MOYERS: But doesn't power exercised with ruthlessness always win?

HEDGES: Power exercised with ruthlessness always is able to crush the gentle and the compassionate. But I don't believe it always wins. Thucydides wrote about the war with Sparta that, yes, raw Spartan militarism in the short-term could conquer Athens. But that beauty, art, knowledge, philosophy, would long outlive Sparta and Spartan militarism.

And he consoled himself with that. I think in the short-term, yes, violence and force can win. But in the long-term, it leaves nothing but hollowness, emptiness. It does nothing to enrich our lives or propel us forward as human beings.

MOYERS: What would you like most as — what would you most like us to be thinking about this weekend as it looks as if war is about to happen?

HEDGES: That this isn't just about the destruction of Iraq and the death of Iraqis. It's about self-destruction....

MOYERS: What have you learned as a journalist covering war that we ought to know on the eve of this attack on Iraq?

HEDGES: That everybody or every generation seems to have— seems not to listen to those who went through it before and bore witness to it. But falls again for the myth. And has to learn it through a tragedy inflicted upon their young.

That war is always about betrayal. It's about betrayal of soldiers by politicians. And it's about betrayal of the young by the old.

MOYERS: I believe that George W. Bush tonight as you and I talk is convinced he's about to do good. A necessary act that he thinks is making a moral claim on the world. Do you believe that?

HEDGES: I believe that he feels that. But I think anybody who believes that they understand the will of God and can act as an agent for God is dangerous.

MOYERS: If the NEW YORK TIMES asked you to go cover the war in the next month, would you go?

HEDGES: No. No, I'm finished.

MOYERS: The book is WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING, by Chris Hedges. Thank you for being with us.

Quote:

http://www.theocracywatch.org/chris_hedges_nov24_04.htm

This is an article by Chris Hedges that no major publication would print.

THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN FASCISM

By -- CHRIS HEDGES

15 Nov 2004

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

The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at 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. 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 was 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. ..... the rolls of home movie film he took of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. .... I watched hours of the grainy black and white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of religion, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil nor the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand wringing by Democrats in the wake of the election, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them "demonic" and "satanic," would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the Biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.

His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering......

I couldn't get this to resolve at the link where it was originally published, so....

Quote:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1739438/posts

Letter From Canada: The New Christian Right (Nation Moonbat Goes Nuts Over Tories Alert)
The Nation ^ | 11/02/2006 | Chris Hedges

Posted on 11/15/2006 10:30:05 PM PST by goldstategop

.....The new Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, inspired by the neocons to the south, appears determined to visit the worst excesses of George Bush's Presidency on his own country. He plans to pull Canada out of the Kyoto Protocol and expand military spending. He defended Israel's massive bombing of southern Lebanon, even as Israeli warplanes bombed a clearly marked UN observation post, killing a Canadian peacekeeper. He was the first world leader to cut off funding after Hamas took over the Palestinian Authority. The decision was made despite Hamas having taken power after winning democratic elections that not only were recognized as free and fair but fulfilled demands made by the West. Harper has extended the mission for the 2,200 Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, where forty-two have died so far. He has slashed $1 billion in funding that assists the most vulnerable Canadians, including cuts in adult literacy programs, legal aid to gays and lesbians, and measures to assist unemployed youth, despite a near-record surplus of $13.2 billion for 2005-06. If the Bush Administration launches an attack on Iran there is little doubt that Harper would line up behind Washington. When the Canadian prime minister was asked about Iran before his recent speech to the UN General Assembly, he called Iran "the biggest single threat the planet faces." And he sneers at Canada's long tradition of antimilitarism and generous social services, once calling Canada "a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its...social services to mask its second-rate status."

But that is not the worst of it. The Prime Minister, who has begun, in very un-Canadian fashion, to close his speeches with the words "God Bless Canada," is also a born-again Christian. And Harper is rapidly building an alliance with the worst elements of the US Christian right.

Harper, who heads a minority government, is a member of the East Gate Alliance Church, part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a denomination with 400,000 members that believes in the literal word of the Bible, faith-healing and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. Women cannot be ordained in his church, homosexuality is a sin and abortion is murder. Canada, however, is unused to public displays of faith, and Harper has had to tread more lightly than George Bush. But many fear the prime minister is taking a cue from the Bush Administration and slowly mobilizing Canada's 3.5 million evangelicals--along with the 44 percent of Canadians who say they have committed themselves to Christ--as a power base. Harper has spent the past three years methodically knitting a coalition of social conservatives and evangelicals that looks ominously similar to the American model.....

.....Harper has a lot of American help. James Dobson has set up a Canadian branch of his Focus on the Family three blocks from the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. The organization, called the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, provides political expertise to and otherwise supports Harper's allies in the bid to turn Canada into an Americanized Christian state. Dobson, who rails against Canada's defense of gay rights and legalization of same-sex marriage, buys radio time in Canada to attack the nation's tolerance of gays and calls for legislation to roll back these measures. The proliferation of new Christian groups is dizzying, with organizations such as the National House of Prayer, the Institute for Canadian Values and the Canada Family Action Coalition, whose mission is "to see Judeo-Christian moral principles restored in Canada," publishing election guides, working with sympathetic legislators and mobilizing Canadian evangelicals in local and national campaigns. These groups turn frequently to American Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell, who came to Canada two years ago for an "Emergency Pastors Briefing" to rally 400 evangelical ministers against a bill before Parliament that included a provision making it a hate crime to denounce homosexuals. Other stalwarts, like former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed and televangelist John Hagee, have come north to spread their toxic message to the newly energized Canadian evangelical church. And in the Harper government they have found not only a willing convert but an important ally.

Harper's hold on power, like that of George Bush, is shaky. He too has no clear mandate to transform Canada, but this has not stopped his minority government from steadily undermining social programs and a once enlightened foreign policy that liberal Americans could only envy. .....

Quote:

Get Carter
The flap over Jimmy Carter's new book underscores that the Israel lobby in the United States exists to serve only the interests of the Israeli right wing.
www.thenation.com/doc/20070108/hedges

.........The Israel lobby in the United States does not serve Israel or the Jewish community--it serves the interests of the Israeli extreme right wing. Most Israelis have come to understand that peace will be possible only when their country complies with international law and permits Palestinians to build a viable and sustainable state based on the 1967 borders, including, in some configuration, East Jerusalem.

This stark demarcation between Israeli pragmatists and the extreme right wing was apparent when I was in the Middle East for the New York Times during Yitzhak Rabin's 1992 campaign for prime minister. The majority of American Jewish organizations and neoconservative intellectuals made no pretense of neutrality. They had morphed into extensions of the right-wing Likud Party. These American groups, to Rabin's dismay, had gone on to build, with Likud, an alliance with right-wing Christian groups filled with real anti-Semites whose cultural and historical ignorance of the Middle East was breathtaking. This collection of messianic Jews and Christians, leavened with rabid American imperialists, believed they had been handed a divine or moral mandate to rule the Middle East, whether the Arabs liked it or not.

When Rabin, who had come to despise what the occupation was doing to the citizenry of his own country, was sworn in as prime minister, the leaders of these American Jewish organizations, along with their buffoonish supporters on the Christian right, were conspicuous by their absence.....