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Excerpts from articles about the politics of fear-mongering - II
Religion & using fear to control "White" By Joe the Voter
Today, in America, Christianity is finding itself faced with political pressure, mostly from the conservative right, to take sides, pitting American against fellow American. There is an obvious appeal to the more right-winged fundamentalist Christians who feel their "grip" sliding away. I believe this fear is not founded in any fact but is, instead, the result of a deliberate manipulation of those who's real agenda is totally unrelated to religion. Anyone with even an unfounded fear regarding something they hold dear, becomes easy prey for manipulation from those who claim to have the method of their "salvation" at hand. Irrelevant arguments are presented and framed in political terms. At no time has our government sought to undermine, manipulate or otherwise control even the fundamentalists in the free practice of their beliefs…..
Bigotry is fast becoming a major tool of the conservative movement because religious conservatives seem to all agree that God makes mistakes and that it is up to them to sort them out and segregate them from other "good" Christians. To me this is not a very Christian attitude toward a fellow human and fellow American. But again, it is a great political tool used to divide us…..
There is a long history, not exclusively attributable to Republicans, to manipulate the religious beliefs and faiths to curry favor for their political agendas, agendas that are right-leaning are far more likely to favor the wealthy above the average American. Lies are common as are more subtle campaigns of mis information, fear and bigotry, in order to enlist Christians to sponsor their political goals. Sadly too few look beyond the fear and imagined threats, buying the rhetoric and, thus, vote against their own best interests….
Religion & using fear to control "White" America By Joe the Voter – OpEd – August 12, 2010
History of McCarthyism by Stephan Salisbury
In “Mosque Mania: Anti-Muslim fears and the Far Right” Stephan Salisbury provides vivid details the history of McCarthyism:
Sixty years ago, on February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy rose before a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, and delivered the famous speech in which he waved a sheet of paper and claimed that on it were the names of -- there is dispute -- 57 or 205 known communists “working and shaping policy in the State Department.” In doing so, he put his incendiary, eponymous stamp on the most oppressive period of the Cold War, and as it turned out, the nation was ready for the message.
McCarthyism did not emerge on that cold day solely from the fevered imagination of the Wisconsin senator. There had been a drumbeat of anti-Communist red-baiting, hearings, speeches, treason charges, and grandstanding coming from Washington for years. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, anti-communist informer Whittaker Chambers, ambitious congressman Richard Nixon, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, President Harry Truman -- all did yeoman’s work in preparing the soil for McCarthy and his reckless accusations of “20 years of treason!”
There are some substantial differences between then and now. Most importantly, McCarthy operated from within the political system, using his subcommittee chairmanship as a vehicle for pseudo-investigations and attacks. When his Senate colleagues turned on him following a particularly reckless campaign against the U.S. Army, McCarthy was stripped of his chairmanship and his power. A true demagogue, he had no organization to speak of, only those who feared him and those who followed him.
By contrast, while some extreme anti-Muslim sentiment is in evidence in Washington, the real juice for an anti-Muslim movement is now bubbling up outside the Beltway, much as virulent racist hysteria has, in the past, bubbled up from the grassroots. In that regard, it’s worth noting that about a third of America’s five to eight million Muslims are African American.
- On its website, the Tea Party curtsies to the U.S. Constitution and then quickly cuts to the chase: “But this question must be asked based on repeated violence committed by Islamists in the name of religion: Is Islam nothing more than a front for terrorism?” Tennessee’s lieutenant governor, Ron Ramsey, a Republican candidate for governor, went out of his way last month to characterize Islam as a “cult” which may not warrant First Amendment protection: “You can even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, a way of life, or a cult -- whatever you want to call it...”
The proliferation of, and acceptance of, such talk, particularly from major political candidates, may be preparing the American ground for the emergence of a leader who can synthesize the demonizing and scapegoating of Muslims, fears augmented by severe economic anxiety, the maturing of extreme rightwing activism, and a widespread and growing contempt for official Washington. If that happens, the nation -- and American Muslims -- could face something far worse than McCarthy, who held sway in a golden era of rising expectations and general economic growth.
Mosque controversies will be the least of it then.
Mosque Mania: Anti-Muslim fears and the Far Right” by Stephan Salisbury – tomdispatch.com August 10, 2010
History of religious intolerance in America by David Rosen
In an excellent article - titled “Shameless schemers like Sarah Palin, the Tea Partiers and right-wing Christians trying to start a new religious war against Muslims” - published on Counter Punch, David Rosen, details the long history of religious intolerance in America.
In the days following the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush, a born-again Christian, in a spontaneous and unscripted statement blurted out the unspoken truth that guided the U.S.’s initial military counter-attack campaign in Afghanistan: "This crusade," he said, "this war on terrorism." While Bush’s admission was later repudiated and disappeared from the public discourse, it define the unstated goal of the ultra-reactionary Christians who were his core-constituency and knew full well what he meant.
At the heart of Bush’s crusade agenda was an invocation of the "shock and awe" tradition that defined religious wars since the grand crusades of the Middle Ages and an acknowledgement that they needed to be applied in Afghanistan. The grand crusades waged by the Roman Church were against Muslims and Jews to capture and hold ancient Jerusalem and the Holy Lands, and to defeat Orthodox or Eastern Christianity. Many perished. Similar, crusaders were waged against Christian heretics, including early Protestants, and done so in the name of their absolutist god.
This tradition was brought over to the New World with the Pilgrims and other early British settlers. The worst and most sustained form of religious war in America has been waged against the Native people. For all the annual whitewashing that takes place at Thanksgiving Day parades, early Puritans fought the Pequot Indians in Eastern Connecticut until 1637 when the General Courts of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Colony launched a war of extermination against them. (Native people found that the Pilgrims stunk, literally; Europeans rarely bathed, believing it unhealthy, and seldom were naked, believing it immoral.) The white Christian race and religious crusade against Native North American people persisted for centuries.
Pilgrims also imposed religious intolerance on themselves. Early Massachusetts Bay Colony settlers were aligned with the Church of England and looked badly upon those who contested their orthodoxy. Those challenging Calvinist dogma were subject to banishment, whipping, branding, ear-lobbing and even hanging. Early leaders like Thomas Hooker, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were banished. Early Quaker settlers in Plymouth were also banished and four were hung publicly.
Over the subsequent centuries, Americans have witnessed repeated bouts of religious intolerance. Not surprisingly, these episodes were often accompanied by the same shrill rhetoric we find shouted today by those opposing the Muslim center.
The Know Nothing movement grew out of the Second Great Awakening or the Great Revival of the 1830s and became the American Party that flourished during the late-‘40s and early-‘50s. It got its name when members where asked the party’s positions and simply said, "I know nothing." It drew together Protestants who felt threatened by the rapid increase in European immigrants and, most especially, Catholics, flooding the cities. It felt that Catholics, as followers of the Pope, were not loyal Americans and were going to take over the country. It had strong support in the North that witnessed large-scale Irish immigration after 1848. The American Party captured the Massachusetts legislature in 1854 and, in 1856, backed Millard Fillmore for president, who secured nearly 1 million votes, a quarter of all votes cast.
The Ku Klux Klan was established in 1866 and, during Reconstruction, began a systematic campaign against freed African Americans. However, by the ‘80s, it had lost its way as a racialist organization. It was revitalized in the wake of the Atlanta trial of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman who had been falsely charged and convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old white Christian girl, in 1913. In 1915, after the Georgia governor commuted his sentence, Frank was forcibly removed from the state penitentiary where he was being held by a mob of white Christians and lynched. Subsequently, many of those who participated in Frank’s murder came together to re-launch the Klan.
In the late-‘10s, the Klan aligned with nativists, eugenicists and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) to not only promote temperance but racialist and anti-immigrant policies. As WWI hysteria mounted, ASL’s New York representative, William Anderson, equated being pro-German with being anti-American: German beer, saloons and breweries were the unnamed enemy. He had a deep antipathy toward Catholics, accusing the Church of mounting an “assault on law and order,” of opposing Prohibition because it was promoted by Protestants and accusing it of engaging in “efforts to destroy [the Prohibition] victory and bring back the saloons.” Anti-Catholic antipathy contributed to the defeat of the country’s first Catholic nominee, Al Smith’s, in the 1928 presidential election.
Many other episodes of religious intolerance have taken place since the ‘20s. However, John Kennedy’s 1960 presidential victory marked the moment in American history when anti-Catholic appeals in national election were no longer acceptable. Similarly, the growing acceptance among Christian evangelicals of the notion of the “last days” has lead to a weird embrace of Jews and Israel and may have contributed to a moderation in anti-Semitism.
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In the days before 9/11, most informed people accepted Islam as a variant within the Abrahamic tradition. However, in the aftermath of the attacks, even this claim came under suspicion. Earlier this summer, Ron Ramsey, a Republican candidate for governor of Tennessee, claimed that Islam is a “cult” that did not deserve First Amendment protection: “You can even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, a way of life, or a cult -- whatever you want to call it... .” Challenged by a diverse assortment of Tennesseans, including traditional conservatives, Ramsey has backed off this assertion.
If truth be told, the Manhattan Muslim center is both a real issue and a fictitious spectacle. It is real in the sense that its being built at the designated site on Park Place will be a victory for religious tolerance. America is undergoing a profound economic and cultural realignment. Traditional white society is giving way to a truly multi-cultural America; conventional Protestantism is giving way a significant increase in the Catholic populous (mostly Hispanics) and growing Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities.
A century-and-a-half ago white Protestants came to accept Irish immigrants as white. While hard to imagine today, early Irish immigrants, those who came to America in the wake of the 1848 famine, were seen by many traditional Protestants as “niggers,” not really different from African Americans. Faced with the inevitabilities of post-Civil War modernization, old-world Protestants changed. And with it, racism changed.
The challenge that faces today’s Anglo-American Protestant descendents, those who see Muslims as “niggers,” is whether then can change and accept America as a multi-cultural society.
“Shameless schemers like Sarah Palin, the Tea Partiers and right-wing Christians trying to start a new religious war against Muslims” - by David Rosen – OpEd - August 16, 2010
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