Feminism is now something Christians can 're-claim'. This is probably more of a statement about the degeneracy of American Evangelicalism. So desperate to stay in the good graces of the culture, the movement continues to embrace not only its traditional Right-wing positions regarding economics and empire but it is also desperate to cater to the social libertarian (even libertine) trajectory of society.
Even while many of the movement's intellectuals
have come to understand that Classical Liberalism is precarious and apart from
a social consensus will slip quickly into libertarian decadence and degeneracy,
the Evangelical movement cannot resist the temptation to bend as far as it can
in order to accommodate, in order to remain relevant and to put it bluntly....
keep the numbers up. They can fill mega-churches because of this. If Evangelicals
ever started to preach New Testament ethics and its ethos of antithesis, it's
no great leap to say their churches would quickly empty and the movement would
become a wasteland... reflecting what it really is.
Feminism is witchcraft. It's rebellion against
the Biblical order. That the world embraces it is hardly shocking but what is outrageous
is the way in which Evangelicals have sought to appropriate old feminist
figures like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. These were godless
women who opposed Biblical teaching but Evangelicalism has already so-embraced
feminism that there's a desperate push to try and create a conservative version
of the movement. This is also witnessed in the personages of various
Evangelical women in leadership and the whole embrace of FOX news and its
utilisation of sexualised feminism. The Ann Coulter types have become very
powerful in the role of loud, trashy women barking conservative values and
militancy.
Rather than reject the movement wholesale
Evangelicals have realised that feminism is here to stay and is already a
viable and forceful, even dominating presence in their churches. So instead
they have sought to re-cast and revise its origins. There's the 'good' and
'Christian' feminism of the 19th and early 20th centuries
and this is contrasted with the bad feminism of the defectors, the Sanger's and
Steinem's who ruined the movement.
It's contemptible and almost unbelievable and no
one would have believed this could have happened. If you had described the
scenario thirty, even twenty years ago, people would have laughed at the notion.
Returning to the 'Fascism is a Leftist Ideology'
narrative, the Right has drawn an analogy between fascist Brown Shirts and contemporary
Leftist violence. It's the Democrats or in this case more properly Leftists who
are the violent extremists. Historically they point to the Weather Underground
and the outbreaks of violence at war protests. Today, they point to Antifa and
accuse them of being paramilitary street thugs who are out to make trouble and
beat down dissent and opposition.
Of course the Antifa (Anti-Fascist) movement is
engaged in a schizophrenic exercise because according to the American and Alt-Right,
they are in fact the fascists themselves. Someone has obviously made a dreadful
mistake in that they've identified themselves as fighting... themselves? It's
all pretty silly but it's a common theme found within Right-wing circles.
Antifa is of course a movement unworthy of Christian support but it's also been
interesting to note how the mainstream media has been less than friendly toward
them and has even gone so far as to identify them with Russian subversion. And
it goes without saying that law enforcement shows an extra degree of hostility
toward them.
The Leftist radicals of the 1960's and 70's that
in the name of revolution took to depositing bombs and robbing banks are in
many ways the antithesis of the Brown Shirts and their attempts to convey a
militarist order and express a form of vigilante nationalist populism.
Obviously it was pure thuggishness and yet the Brown Shirts viewed themselves
not as revolutionaries but reactionaries out to clean up the streets,
destroying the Leftists and even the decadent elements of the old order. This
is not even remotely in tune with the mindset of a group like the Weather
Underground. They viewed themselves as partisans and paramilitaries at war with
the system. Robbing banks was a revolutionary act. It was in their view legitimate
to attack and steal from the institutions of the system. It was part of the
war. Fascist thugs were an arm of the system and were seeking to re-capture and
reinforce it through nationalisation and militarisation. Both camps turned to
violence and both claimed to represent the best interests of the people but
their understandings of society, their motives and goals were very different
and completely opposed to each other.
Ironically the methods of the 1960's and 70's
underground were appropriated by the Right Wing during the 1980's and 90's as
the militia movement began to embrace a similar type of strategy and
anti-Establishment way of thinking, but from the Right. Their über-patriotism
blurred as America became a tribalist ideal but the American government became
the enemy. Or to put it another way, the Right went so far to the Right that its
reactionary extremism seemed to fall off the spectrum and became revolutionary.
At this point the Left-Right divide blurs and
becomes somewhat obsolete and this is reflected in the strange distortions and
inversions of historical narrative. Some of it though is purely cynical and
manipulative, deceitful ploys to confound the narratives of their opponents.
For the Right, Anti-immigration is now about
human rights. The Right pretends they don't want those poor immigrants to be
exploited and that's why they want it stopped. Blocking immigration and
clamping down on immigrants in country is for their own safety. It's an amazing
propaganda line. One has to hand it to them. They have sought to turn the issue
on its head and what is all too often racist bigotry and scapegoatism is
re-cast as loving concern for one's fellow man. But this isn't enough. There
has been a concentrated campaign to go after the Left and in some outrageous
instances they have even sought to 'claim' figures like Martin Luther King as
representative of their own views. It's laughable and completely revisionist as
anyone who was conscious before the 1990's knows. Martin Luther King was hated
by the Right and especially the Christian Right but that chapter of history has
gone down the memory hole.
It's the Democrats that are the racists we're
told. If they are (in some sense) advocates of racist policy it's due to their
support for Wall Street and the empire, but that's not a line you're going to
hear from the Right.
Lame and misleading appeals are made to the
Democrats and Jim Crow, the KKK and the rest as if that's an honest reporting
of the history. Those same Democrats and their ideological descendants are virtually
all Republicans now. That was mostly true by 1980 but it's especially true as
of 2016. To counter this reality the Right has tried to re-write the history of
presidential politics from 1968-1980 and they have attempted to flush Nixon's
Southern Strategy down the memory hole and pretend none of that happened. The
seminal event that began to pull Southern Democrats apart, leading to their
exodus into the GOP was the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Johnson was despised for
this and Nixon sought to capitalise on it in 1968, a process that would
continue until the advent of the Reagan presidency. The same period also saw Southern
Blacks move rapidly from the GOP over to the Democratic Party.
Usually the Wallace campaign is cited as having
hurt Nixon's strategy but in another sense it allowed him to appear as a
moderate, a point which granted him an overwhelming Southern victory in the
national landslide of 1972, helped by Wallace's elimination from the race in
May of the same of the year.
The Democrats are racists (we're told) because
their defense of abortion is tantamount to Black genocide. Margaret Sanger's
racist comments are utilised as is the Progressive interest in Eugenics. Of
course this is also disingenuous. Not to defend Sanger but her motives were not
primarily about Black people. She is not a person to be admired and yet she has
also been slanderously misrepresented on multiple fronts by social
conservatives and the Christian Right.
As far as the Progressives go, the lines aren't
so clear. Many Progressives were Republicans, a point many on the Right seem to
not realise, have chosen to forget or attempt to explain away. Truth be told
the Progressive paradigm of the early 20th century doesn't exactly
fit in today's terms. Progressivism has strong communitarian aspects which
attempt to temper what was perceived as out of control liberalism and its
destructive social and economic tendencies. Many Conservatives and Right-wing
thinkers in our day have come to the same conclusions. Additionally
Progressivism was born during a period in which the 'progress' ethos overlapped
with the mindset and goals of many Christians, hence the press for temperance
and other such social improvements. This would be true in the case of the
so-called Social Gospel but in a broader sense the near dominance of
Postmillennial ideology (pre-WWI) also found a common cause.
Today of course Progressivism is associated with
social-liberalism and yet again when the whole abortion/Sanger/Black genocide
card is pulled out, it rests on historical misrepresentation and fallacy.
Environmentalists are racists because they want
to keep the ban on DDT and because of that millions of Black Africans suffer
from the effects of malaria. Never mind the fact that many scientists argue
that today's mosquitoes are DDT resistant but the truth is whether you agree
with environmental concerns about DDT or not, the motives are not racist. They
are complex as DDT harms the larger environment which eventually harms humans
as well. But the Right-wing and Libertarian apologists for DDT insist it's
completely safe and effective despite all the evidence to the contrary.
And like the Nazis, the Democrats are
Anti-Semitic because they're the ones who are more likely to exhibit sympathy
toward the Palestinians and to be critical of Israel. Any questioning of
Zionist Israel immediately becomes Anti-Semitic and so once again, the
Democrats and Liberals of today are more like the Nazis. In all actuality the
Democrats are just as sold-out for Israel as are the Republicans. It's the
Christian Right influenced by Dispensational theology that has taken this
Israeli-devotion to near fanatical levels and any paltry attempt by the
Democrats to call for reasonableness, negotiation or compromise is decried as
failing to support Israel. Dispensational propagandist, zealot and false
prophet Hal Lindsey went so far in 1990 as to accuse any Christians who didn't
support Zionism as being Anti-Semitic. And any theological system which didn't
recognise the perpetuity of the Abrahamic land-covenant was Anti-Semitic. He cynically
and rather unconvincingly tried to tie in Supersessionism (which if expressed
correctly is the doctrine of the New Testament) with the embrace of Nazism and
the Holocaust.
Actually in the days following the May 1948
declaration creating the state of Israel, the nation was a favourite of the
Global Left. It was viewed as a necessary consequence of and response to
Right-wing fascism and centuries of Anti-Semitic bigotry. So what changed?
Two things can be easily pointed to. One is the
shift in Israeli policy with regard to the Six Day War of 1967. The Israelis
seized territory and began to effectively colonise it. The 1948 borders were
recognised by many as legitimate and indeed the British and the UN had been
involved in trying to create the Zionist state. Israeli terrorists had driven
the British out but they were still supported by many in the larger world. The
testimony of the Holocaust was powerful and their nation-state project garnered
sympathy.
But after 1967 Israel politics shifted hard to
the Right and by the end of the 1970's Likud was in power. Likud (and the
previous Herut) was the hard-line party connected to the Mandate era
paramilitaries of Irgun, bringing figures like Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir,
Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu to power. Shamir had even been part of the
Stern Gang, the overtly fascist group that broke with Irgun. But by the 1970's
these figures flowed into Right-wing Likud which many people have rightly identified
as fascist in nature. It was Likud that added a racial element to the Israeli
battle with the Palestinians and would later form a fairly cozy alliance with
Apartheid South Africa.
Menachem Begin is of course to be praised for
the Camp David agreement with Anwar Sadat, and yet the general tenor and
trajectory of Likud has been toward a manifestation of Israeli fascism.
It is for these reasons that the Left has come
to oppose Israel, not due to fascist sympathies or some kind of latent
Anti-Semitism. There was a great deal of Anti-Semitism in the old American
Establishment, in Ivy League circles, the sectors that once more thoroughly
dominated Wall Street and the circles of power in Washington. While
Anti-Semitism has not entirely evaporated it is has certainly lessened as a
force within American society. Today, Anti-Semitism exists (as a force) only on
the fringe Right, in Neo-Nazi and certain John Birch-style conspiracy circles.
Well, the Nazis were National 'Socialists' after
all. That makes the Leftists.
Of course so were the Soviets and their
Socialist Republics. Now the American Right tends to struggle on that point and
can't quite explain why they hated each other so much and battled on the
streets of Germany, Italy, France and elsewhere. I've heard some recently try
to say it was because the Nazis were 'national' socialists while the Soviets
were 'international' socialists. Nice try, but that won't do.
The problem is I rarely read or hear anyone on
the Right who can even begin to define socialism let alone tackle any of its
nuances. The Democratic Party, let alone Bernie Sanders do not represent or
promote Socialism. Sanders use of the label is something of a stunt.
Socialism under the Nazis was more a form of
nativist and protectionist economic nationalism. Fascism usually sought to
avoid the extreme forms of laissez-faire
while at the same time opposed Marxist socialism and its elimination of private
property and class distinction. Fascism rejected multi-party democracy as
harmful to the nation which must always come first. Today they would point to
the dysfunctional American Congress as 'Exhibit A' and parliamentary systems
can be even worse. Additionally they were hostile to trade unions and socialist
calls to end class distinction.
Moreover, the American right is largely either
unaware or unwilling to engage in discussion regarding the significance of
Stalin's 'socialism in one country' doctrine. While he did not wholly abandon
support for socialist politics abroad he abandoned principled internationalism
and the call for permanent revolution. Trotsky warned about this and vehemently
opposed it until his death. In abandoning international revolution, the USSR
became the centre of world communism, the sort of vanguard for the nations.
This simply focused attention and power on the Soviet bureaucracy, re-created class
in the USSR (the Nomenklatura or Red
Bourgeoisie) and turned society in a nationalist direction. This reality
combined with Stalin's totalitarian programme and personality cult left the
USSR with Stalinism, a far cry from
orthodox Marxism or Leninism. This USSR-centric focus led the Communist bloc
into conflict. During his lifetime Stalin maintained a firm grip on the nations
that would become the Warsaw Pact but it led to serious conflict with leaders
like Tito and Mao. They necessarily became dissidents, deviationists,
revisionists and the like and were a threat to the claims of the Stalinist
system.
Much more could be said about so-called
'Cultural Marxism' and the attempts by the American Right to paint any
government programme or regulation as 'socialism'.
It's clear that the term is not understood and
to this day the ideology of the Nazis continues to be misunderstood and for
most part is used a label to pin on others. It's ignorance of this history and
the larger context for WWII that has allowed this revisionism to occur. The
Christian Right is for the most part extremely ignorant of both the Scriptures
and history. That's a statement I will stand by with abundant confidence. Their
leaders bear most of the blame and have done great harm in laying the
groundwork for the lies to be planted. They continue to aggressively plant this
rotten seed and as a consequence they have closed minds and built walls that
will not allow their followers to seriously investigate the history. This
coupled with an unrelenting propaganda campaign has left most Evangelicals in a
state of arrogant and defiant confusion.
Continue reading Part 3/Final
Continue reading Part 3/Final