There was a time when I worked up into feverish states worrying about the actions and methods of the American Christian Conservative. It seemed hypocritical to praise peace, liberty and freedom while oppressing the world and committing genocide. At some point a man taught me that the leaders of the free world have very pressing issues and sometimes very bad people destroy things and these people have to be stopped. It was possible that the Christian right were not the bad guys.
There the facts are, telling a tale of democracy riding on horseback burning towns and destroying lives. On television and radio the story continues every night if one chooses to partake. The reason it continues is because of bad blood from the past. America has a long history of creating dissent among foreign people, overthrowing their governments and installing new dictators. It is an odd way to do business.
We can choose not to be a part of it. We can choose to fight genocide by our leaders. We can decide not to use sweatshop clothes. Most people continue to stand still until the wars move to a new part of our world, while North America is haunted with shame and guilt. We know that one day we will get ours and hope that that day will not include us, hoping that those who do not intentionally oppress will be free from the karmic debt.
In such cases it is difficult to find just what we are being protected from. Yet still the powers that be claim that we must be protected from some foreign terror cell, a man who hates everything we hold dear or some ideology that works against what we believe and strive to live for. The trouble with these claims is that with any amount of research in to what we are told to hate we learn that we are those people’s brothers and sisters or that our government is lying to us. This can be unnerving the first time we hear it. After hearing it enough we become jaded and quit caring.
This apathy may be the plan of those leaders. If we can stomach another invasion, overthrow, terrorist threat, assassination or genocide we will let these people do as they wish to us. We will allow our Christian leaders to commit atrocities and war crimes with as much leniency as we can, as there past actions speak louder than we could. They have killed as many people as have stood up to them, taking the lives of innocent people that have discovered their crimes and had the gall to speak up against their tyranny. And this series of assassinations resulted in a quieting of their people.
It could be less horror filled than these claims. Christian conservatives believe that their ideology is right for all people, worldwide. This is the official reason they fight the battles they do. As such, they tend to be both heroes and oppressors around the world and within their borders.
Because the right wing has held power in America for the last 25 years, the left has created myths regarding their true intentions, such as pictures of the prominent men and women as reptiles from outer space or members of satanic cults. There is a vast amount of media regarding “proof” that these men and women are not fighting for the Christian cause, but for some strange dark purpose that we are not supposed to know.
Of course, these same arguments would be made if the liberal left wing were in power and have been since Barrack Obama became president. The same numerology and claims of black magic secret society membership that worried me about Bush II are also used to undermine the new president. Because people with differing notions live within borders with each other, no people will ever be entirely happy with their government.
Fundamentalism is bred from guilt and is the perfect cover for corruption. When a leader such as George Bush II discusses his conversion to Christianity before becoming the leader of the free world, he prefaces wordily that he was an irresponsible drunk who was spoiled rotten and filled with a superiority complex, concerned not with the workings of worldwide politics, but with partying and trying to push his life as far as he could go. He claims that Christ allowed him to quit drinking a few years before he became president and that with his faith he was able to free himself from those demons, to the extent that he hosted daily Bible studies in the White House.
There is also a religious fervor that develops due to the guilt of his family’s environmental destruction of the world, his father’s genocides while in charge of the CIA and the dark places that that kind of terrorism and war crimes come from. Instead of creating a better world than the one that his father left us, George Bush II created a religious war to replace the economic-ideologically driven cold war. This was created through the media, as after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks of the World Trade Center the news and print coverage concerning this issue was filled with slander against the Muslim religion. As the government is smart to enough to know that most people do not research things for themselves and take the words of a trusted individual as truth, those that wished to start a religious war were able to do so.
The Christian Fundamentalist movement in America began with the radicalization of religion and the need for a figurehead to speak for these lonesome and disenfranchised people located in the heartland of America. By the 1970s, because xenophobic and God-fearing people felt that their country was going sour, noticing that drug use was rampant and there were eccentric and zany people everywhere, there was a need for someone who could cross barriers and lead the people into a new world. This person needed to return America to the important foundation that it was build upon in the beginning.
The Christian Right’s leader needed to believe in the Holy Bible he was sworn in on. They needed someone to stand up for the issues that they held dear, including right to life legislations, a ban on homosexual marriage, allowing prayer in school, keeping their children off of drugs and fighting for the freedom of America. He needed to be able to fight the enemies America had made over the years, at the time they were Communists but soon after it became clear that America had many. He needed to fight for capitalism and spread the ideals that made America strong. It seemed that this man was going to be Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan did not like communists. His career was began as a spook in Hollywood, ratting out various people that seemed to carry communist sympathies. He was a prolific writer, spending most of his thoughts on visions for America and how to spread their ideals around the world. This writing became musings about world peace. He realized that there needed to be creative ways to deal with all the troubles that haunted the world. When writing about Vietnam after the war ended he claimed it was a “nation that acts like a homicidal maniac.” This hypocrisy seems funny in retrospect as we now can see that it was not the Vietnamese who were acting in that way. The whole conflict at home and abroad was a class differentiation.
Reagan’s writings look overly paranoid and nervous, noting that America has enemies on all corners of the earth. It appears this way, but one must note that as President he may have been privy to information that most people do not have. He could have known of the enemies that America has now, or perhaps he realized that the actions George Bush I as the leader of the CIA was going to have repercussions. It is not as if one arm of the government is blind to the workings of another.
One of Reagan’s most important works was the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with Russia. This effectively stopped the arms race that haunted the world for so long and led to the end of the Cold War with the USSR. It is a unique treaty between two enemies, which allowed both nations to focus their resources on other projects.
Another of the projects that Reagan focused America on was the Star Wars program and a satellite missile defense initiative, effectively militarizing space and bringing us to this point in world history, when we can easily shoot any place in the world with a bomb coming down from a satellite floating peacefully around the world. We can also live without fear of missiles from the other side of the planet, as our SDI missile defense allows the military to shoot down missiles as they come towards America. This could have happened early in 2011 as there is video of a cruise missile coming towards Los Angeles, California, but the city was never struck. It is possible, because America is currently in three official wars.
Reagan was a good spokesman for the right, but generally spoke in a non-secular way. His policies reflected the interests of conservative America but his actions were not always of the theological beliefs. This is true for both Bush’s as well. Although they were speaking of issues regarding family values and working hard to appear to be the vehicle that Christian America could rely on, it seems by their actions that they were simply pandering to their voters and giving them the feeling that they were winning. It is wise politics to do so if they want power for their own purposes.
Perhaps people need to fear someone or something to continue to consume idly and live in their oppressive, excessive way guilt free. The fear is instilled as an attempt to control the masses. People have fear the world ending for ages and xenophobia is even more innate. Therefore it is easy to create fear in the dark recesses of our minds through the use of disinformation and internal strife. This is why the media does not care about communists anymore and focuses on the hate of the Middle East towards North America like it is unfounded. Fear is written in to the Christian religion and is used to keep people acting a certain way. This could be why it seems ok for the leaders to spread hatred and fear monger in the way they famously do.
Democracy cannot come from killing innocent civilians. Democracy cannot come from cluster bombs. Hope comes from honest and true actions and so we must peer at the actions of these people with a wary eye. Although they claim to be Christian, the Neo-Conservative movement is notorious for genocide. Perhaps people waving a false flag of Christianity commit the oppression. This is in order to get votes from the majority of Americans, to keep the hope that they live in a true democracy alive. They pander to this group but support their own dreams and help their own people.
Acting in the interest of the conservative right, George Bush I created a war on drugs, throwing people in jail for holding a plant, while they create and distribute narcotics to people as often as possible. This is, in fact, a sin in the bible, unless the illegal plant is the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” or the “Forbidden Tree of Life.” This plant is said to hold much knowledge but be able to tear people apart. Yet we cannot hold some plants, unless the chemical compounds are synthesized into a pill that causes more harm than the original fruit would have. These companies are now the largest in America and most people in North America are on some kind of psychoactive prescription, such as mood stabilizers, anti-depressants or anti-psychotics.
Wrapped in a world of crime and deceit one must wonder, does this social disorder come for the laws set forth by the jailers or is rebellion innately human? Either way the prison population of America outnumbers the population of Canada. Why are these laws in place? Is it because of the Christian scripture? Scripture relates to many laws, but paranoia like this breeds mania.
Fundamentalism has become the base of the modern Cold War. This modern conflict was begun through covert operations and brought to the forefront by attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, Sept 11 2001. But the war is cursed with ignorance and hypocrisy from the beginning as the Koran explains that both sides of this religious war technically worship the same being. The Torah came first in the series, leading the Jewish people out of Israel, second came the Holy Bible that spoke of the Son of God walking amongst the Semitic people, third came the Koran that was used by Mohammed to convert those that had not already became followers of Jesus’ dad to worshiping the Semitic God, Allah. Allah can be written as Yahweh, which is an alternate pronunciation and often argued to be the Christian got instead of the former.
A war such as one that has recently begun by those Christian fundamentalists that are in charge in America is fodder for fear incited in the fundamentalists, as the Bible mentions that this is one of the steps towards that end of the world, judgment day and the apocalypse. The strange thing is that when people quote the Bible to mention this, it does not appear that people like George Bush I read it, nor do they fear it.
So what is the true agenda of the religious right? Although many people claim their agenda is in full swing and they are simply trying to commit these war crimes for their own absurd and dark purposes, in truth the Conservative Christian movement belongs to the people. The people want to teach creationism in school. They want to get right of the socialist welfare state. They would like to protect their liberties and freedoms. They want to ban the use of mind-altering substances. They want to be tough on crime. They want to ban abortions and stem-cell research, as every human life has the rights of every other one, no matter how old they are. They want to keep illegal immigrants out of their country. For the most part they would also like to support big business, as it is capitalism and they have a good product at a good price.
These are small battles, insignificant when looking at the real human rights abuses and crimes perpetrated by their figureheads. Leaders such as Reagan, Bush I and Bush II are leading them on. It sounds paranoid to suggest the government is letting their people believe that their voices have been heard.
They are misled to believe that they are influencing American politics. The true decision makers make policies that are good for their own economic well being, not the greater worlds spiritual wellness, as the Christian religion would suggest is proper. These figures in power create peons to fight for causes the simple Christian people of the right want. With this misdirection they can make any decision they want. They have total control. With just a little coaxing, an argument over something as insignificant as gay marriage, people can be blinded to the real trouble that lies over them: This horrible group of terrorists hell bent on destroying the world live in America, they are in charge and they have already done their damage.
The only hope is that some day these men will die, and that if the religion they claim to accept as theirs is true, then they will feel the suffering and pain that they have given to the other side of the world. Only then will we be free from these men, as they are old now and have worked their whole lives to do this. There is no telling why. These mysteries are such as those that line the turbulent waves of the universe. Perhaps they are doing what is right, but for some strange reason cannot tell us that they are.
As for now, only some can speak clearly and spread the world that we no longer have to live in fear. As much as the media tells us we must live in fear, and all the proof that we are shared about the scary and twisted state of world affairs, we are able to wake in the morning with sunshine and smell the dew. We are able to live in the world free from their troubles, for we did not do what they did. We have to tell them without concern for ourselves that we can piece together what they have done. With so many that have been killed for fighting against them it is difficult to find the strength, but one day the rest of us will stand up and fight for peace again. And that day is still today, we are just finding more subversive ways to do so.
Bibliography:
Frum, David. The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush
New York: Random House, 2003
Reagan, Ronald, Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson, Martin Anderson, George Shultz. Reagan In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America New York: The Free Press, 2001
Bush, George W. Decision Points New York: Random House, 2010
Chomsky, Noam, David Barsamian. Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post 9/11 World New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005
Frum, David. Dead Right New York: BasicBooks, 1994
The Koran (Penguin Translation) Mecca: Penguin Classics, 632
The Holy Bible (The New International Version) Grand Rapids: Zondervan Corp, 1973
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