Fascists in Our Midst
By Chris Hedges
June 29, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "Scheerpost"
----The Supreme Court is
relentlessly funding and empowering
Christian fascism. It not only overturned
Roe v. Wade, ending a constitutional right
to an abortion, but ruled on June 21 that
Maine may not exclude religious schools from
a state tuition program.
It has ruled that a Montana state program to
support private schools must include
religious schools. It ruled that a 40-foot
cross could remain on state property in
suburban Maryland. It upheld the Trump
administration regulation allowing employers
to deny birth control coverage to female
employees on religious grounds. It ruled
that employment discrimination laws do not
apply to teachers at religious schools. It
ruled that a Catholic social services agency
in Philadelphia could ignore city rules and
refuse to screen same-sex couples applying
to take in foster children.
It neutered the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It
watered down laws allowing workers to combat
sexual and racial harassment in court. It
reversed century-old campaign finance
restrictions to permit corporations,
private groups and oligarchs to spend
unlimited funds on elections, a system of
legalized bribery, in Citizens United v
Federal Election Commission.
It permitted states to opt out of the
Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. It
undercut the ability of public sector unions
to raise funds. It forced workers with legal
grievances to submit their complaints to
privatized arbitration boards. It ruled that
states cannot restrict the right to carry
concealed weapons in public. It ruled that
suspects cannot sue police who neglect to
read them their Miranda warnings and use
their statements against them in court.
Outlawing contraception, same-sex marriage
and same-sex consensual relations are
probably next. Only 25 percent of those
polled say they have confidence in Supreme
Court decisions.
I do not use the word fascist lightly. My
father was a Presbyterian minister. My
mother, a professor, was a seminary
graduate. I received my Master of Divinity
from Harvard Divinity School. I am an
ordained Presbyterian minister. Most
importantly, I spent two years reporting
from megachurches, creationist seminars,
right-to-life retreats, Christian
broadcasting networks and conducted hundreds
of hours of interviews with members and
leaders of the Christian right for my book
American Fascists: The Christian Right and
the War on America, which is banned at most
“Christian” schools and universities.
Before the book was published, I met at
length with Fritz Stern, author of The
Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the
Rise of the German Ideology, and Robert O.
Paxton, who wrote The Anatomy of Fascism,
two of the country’s most eminent scholars
of fascism, to make sure the word fascist
was appropriate.
The book was a warning that an American
fascism, wrapped in the flag and clutching
the Christian cross, was organizing to
extinguish our anemic democracy. This
assault is very far advanced. The connecting
tissue among the disparate militia groups,
QAnon conspiracy theorists, anti-abortion
activists, right-wing patriot organizations,
Second Amendment advocates, neo-Confederates
and Trump supporters that stormed the
Capitol on Jan. 6 is this frightening
Christian fascism.
Parallel Institutions
Fascists achieve power by creating parallel
institutions — schools, universities, media
platforms and paramilitary forces — and
seizing the organs of internal security and
the judiciary. They deform the law,
including electoral law, to serve their
ends. They are rarely in the majority. The
Nazis never polled above 37 percent in free
elections in Germany. Christian fascists
constitute less than a third of the U.S.
electorate, about the same percentage of
those who consider abortion to be murder.
This flagrant manipulation of law was
displayed in two of the most recent Supreme
Court decisions, where those who support
this ideology have a 5-to-3 majority, with
the less extremist Chief Justice John
Roberts often adding a sixth vote. In
overturning Roe v. Wade, the court, in a
five to four decision, argued that states
have the power to decide whether abortion is
legal. The same court conversely came down
against “states’ rights,” in striking down
strict restrictions on carrying concealed
firearms.
What the ideology demands is law. What the
ideology opposes is a crime. Once a legal
system is subservient to dogma an open
society is impossible.
Blow-by-blow autocratic power is being
solidified by this monstrous Christian
fascism which is bankrolled by the most
retrograde forces of corporate capitalism.
It looks set to take control of the U.S.
Congress in the midterm elections. If former
President Donald Trump, or a Trump-like
clone, is elected in 2024, what is left of
our democracy will likely be extinguished.
The Society They Intend to Create
These Christians fascists are clear about
the society they intend to create.
In their ideal America, our “secular
humanist” society based on science and
reason will be destroyed. The Ten
Commandments will form the basis of the
legal system. Creationism or “Intelligent
Design” will be taught in public schools,
many of which will be overtly “Christian.”
Those branded as social deviants, including
the LGBTQ community, immigrants, secular
humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims,
criminals, and those dismissed as “nominal
Christians” — meaning Christians who do not
embrace this peculiar interpretation of
Bible —will be silenced, imprisoned, or
killed.
The role of the federal government will be
reduced to protecting property rights,
“homeland” security and waging war. Most
government assistance programs and federal
departments, including education, will be
terminated. Church organizations will be
funded and empowered to run social-welfare
agencies and schools.
The poor, condemned for sloth, indolence,
and sinfulness, will be denied help. The
death penalty will be expanded to include
“moral crimes,” including apostasy,
blasphemy, sodomy and witchcraft, as well as
abortion, which will be treated as murder.
Women, denied contraception, access to
abortion, and equality under the law, will
be subordinate to men. Those who practice
other faiths will become, at best,
second-class citizens. The wars waged by the
American empire will be defined as religious
crusades. Victims of police violence and
those in prison will have no redress. There
will be no separation of church and state.
The only legitimate voices in public
discourse and the media will be “Christian.”
America will be sacralized as an agent of
God. Those who defy the “Christian”
authorities, at home and abroad, will be
condemned as agents of Satan.
Homegrown Fascism
How did the historians of Weimar Germany and
Nazism, the professors of Holocaust studies,
the sociologists and the religious scholars
manage to miss the rise of our homegrown
Christian fascism?
Immersed in the writings of Hannah Arendt,
Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedländer, Joachim
Fest, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Theodor Adorno,
they never connected the dots.
Why didn’t church leaders thunder in
denunciation at the grotesque perversion of
the Gospel by the Christian fascists as they
sacralized the get-rich-with-Jesus schemes
of the prosperity gospel, imperialism,
militarism, capitalism, patriarchy, white
supremacy and other forms of bigotry? Why
didn’t reporters see the flashing red lights
that lit up decades ago?
Most of those tasked with reporting on and
interpreting history, social movements and
religious beliefs have failed us. They spoke
about the past, vowing “never again,” but
refused to use the lessons of the past to
explain the present. It was not ignorance.
It was cowardice.
To confront the Christian fascists, even
in universities, meant career-canceling
accusations of religious bigotry and
intolerance. It meant credible threats of
violence from conspiracy theorists who
believed they were called by God to murder
abortion providers, Muslims and “secular
humanists.”
It was easier, as many academics did in
Weimar Germany, to believe that the fascists
did not mean what they said, that there were
strains within the movement that could be
reasoned with, that opening channels of
dialogue and communication could see the
fascists domesticated, that if in power the
fascists would not act on their extremist
and violent rhetoric. With few exceptions,
German academics did not protest the Nazi
assumption of power and the wholesale
dismissal of their liberal, socialist and
Jewish colleagues.
Although my book was a New York Times best
seller, Harvard told my publisher it was not
interested in my appearing at the school. I
gave a lecture on the book at Colgate
University, where I had earned my
undergraduate degree, organized by my mentor
Coleman Brown, a professor of ethics. I held
a seminar, also organized by Coleman, with
the professors of philosophy and religion
after the talk. These professors wanted
nothing to do with the critique. When we
left the room, Coleman muttered, “the
problem is they do not believe in heretics.”
I was asked in 2006 to speak at the
inauguration of the LGBT center at Princeton
University when I was the Anschutz
distinguished fellow in American studies. To
my dismay, the faculty facilitators had
invited representatives from the right-wing
Christian student group who see any
deviation from heterosexuality as a
psychological and moral abnormality.
Christian fascist pastors in Texas and
Idaho, who have driven countless young
people struggling with their sexual identity
to suicide, have called for the execution of
gay people as recently as a few days ago.
“There is no dialogue with those who deny
your legitimate right to be,” I said,
looking pointedly at the LGBTQ students. “At
that point it is a fight for survival.”
The faculty member organizing the event
leapt from her chair.
“This is a university,” she said to me
curtly. “Your talk is over. You can’t say
those kinds of things here.”
I sat down. But I had made my point.
Unlimited Tolerance
All those tasked in our society with
interpreting the world around us forgot, as
philosopher Karl Popper wrote in The Open
Society and Its Enemies, that “unlimited
tolerance must lead to the disappearance of
tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance
to those who are intolerant, if we are not
prepared to defend a tolerant society
against the onslaught of the intolerant,
then the tolerant will be destroyed, and
tolerance with them.”
These scholars, writers, intellectuals, and
journalists, like those in Weimar Germany,
bear much of the blame. They preferred
accommodation over confrontation. They stood
by as the working class was stripped of
rights and impoverished by the billionaire
class, fertilizing the ground for an
American fascism.
Those who orchestrated the economic,
political, and social assault are the major
donors to the universities. They control
trustee boards, grants, academic prizes,
think tanks, promotion, publishing and
tenure.
Academics, looking for an exit, ignored the
attacks by the ruling oligarchy. They
ascribed to the Christian fascists,
bankrolled by huge corporations such as
Tyson Foods, Purdue, Wal-Mart and Sam’s
Warehouse, attributes that did not exist.
They tacitly gave the Christian fascists
religious legitimacy. These Christian
fascists are an updated version of the
so-called German Christian Church, or
Deutsche Christen, which fused the
iconography and symbols of the Christian
religion with the Nazi party.
The theologian Paul Tillich, the first
non-Jewish German professor to be
blacklisted from German universities by the
Nazis, angrily chastised those who refused
to fight “the paganism of the swastika” and
retreated into a myopic preoccupation with
personal piety.
Victor Klemperer, stripped of his position
as a professor of Romance languages at the
Technical University of Dresden when the
Nazis came to power in 1933 because he was
Jewish, mused in his diary in 1936 what he
would do in post-Nazi Germany if “the fate
of the vanquished lay in my hands.” He wrote
that he would
“let all the ordinary folk go and even some
of the leaders … But I would have all the
intellectuals strung up, and the professors
three feet higher than the rest; they would
be left hanging from the lamp posts for as
long as was compatible with hygiene.”
Fascists promise moral renewal, a return to
a lost golden age. They use campaigns of
moral purity to justify state repression.
Adolf Hitler, days after he took power in
January 1933, imposed a ban on all
homosexual organizations. He ordered raids
on homosexual clubs and bars, including the
Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, and
the permanent exile of its director, Magnus
Hirschfeld. Thousands of volumes from the
institute’s library were tossed into a
bonfire. This “moral cleansing” was cheered
on by the German public, including German
churches. But the tactics, outside the law,
swiftly legitimized what would soon be done
to others.
I studied at Harvard with theologian James
Luther Adams. Adams was a member of the
underground anti-Nazi Confessing Church in
Germany led by the Lutheran pastor Martin
Niemöller. Adams was arrested in 1936 by the
Gestapo and expelled from the country. He
was one of the very few to see the deadly
strains of fascism in the nascent Christian
right.
“When you are my age,” he told us (he was
then 80), “you will all be fighting the
Christian fascists.”
And here we are.
The billionaire class, while sometimes
socially liberal, dispossessed working men
and women through deindustrialization,
austerity, a legalized tax boycott, looting
the U.S. Treasury and deregulation. It
triggered the widespread despair and rage
that pushed many of the betrayed into the
arms of these con artists and demagogues. It
is more than willing to accommodate the
Christian fascists, even if it means
abandoning the liberal veneer of
inclusiveness. It has no intention of
supporting social equality, which is why it
thwarted the candidacy of Sen. Bernie
Sanders.
In the end, even the liberal class will
choose fascism over empowering the left-wing
and organized labor. The only thing the
ruling oligarchy truly cares about is
unfettered exploitation and profit. They,
like the industrialists in Nazi Germany,
will happily make an alliance with the
Christian fascists, no matter how bizarre
and buffoonish, and embrace the blood
sacrifices of the condemned.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning
journalist who was a foreign correspondent
for 15 years for The New York Times, where
he served as the Middle East bureau chief
and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He
previously worked overseas for The Dallas
Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor
and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris
Hedges Report.”
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