News+and+politics religion philosophy the cynic librarian: Xtian-Fascism Awareness Week

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Xtian-Fascism Awareness Week

I've been critical of Leiter on his views of Derrida and Foucault. But let's let bygones be bygones. He's got something going here with his idea of holding a Xtian-Fascism Awareness Week in response to David "I Lied Before the PA Legislature" Horowitz's proposed plan for an Islamo-Fascism week.

Leiter quotes from an excellent article by Chris Hedges--whose work I have linked to several times--that sums up perfectly what it is that a Xtian-Fascist represents. In the article Hedges quotes a Harvard professor of his who worked with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, and Albert Schweitzer to undermine the Nazi terror machine. Hedges writes:

Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" were stories of this failure -- personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers -- those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.

These Christian utopians promise to replace this internal and external emptiness with a mythical world where time stops and all problems are solved. The mounting despair rippling across the United States, one I witnessed repeatedly as I traveled the country, remains unaddressed by the Democratic Party, which has abandoned the working class, like its Republican counterpart, for massive corporate funding.
I bet you never heard about this in your history classes. Nor will you ever hear about in the so-called free press.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is this real christianity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZSGK5lvYMY

Faustus and FrankenKitty said...

No, it's not. It is a bright young girl who likes to do Jesus pictures.