Category Archives: Civil Rights

JUSTICE: “Our Invisible Revolution” / Chris Hedges

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Chris Hedges“Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?” the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay “The Idea Is the Thing.” “If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them.”

Berkman was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.

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RACIST, MISOGYNISTIC, XENOPHOBIC BIGOTS: “The Tea Party IS the Ku Klux Klan of the 21st Century”

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grayson_1_590_417h/t: Truthdig

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Daily Kos

CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTIONISM: “The Far-Right Christian Movement Driving the Debt Default” / Deborah Caldwell

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No ChristianityIf the U.S. breaches its debt ceiling this week, bringing with it the global financial panic economists predict, leaders of a little-known far-right movement called Christian Reconstructionism can claim partial responsibility. Their goal: to eradicate the U.S. government so that a theocratic Christian nation emerges to enforce biblical laws. 

That’s right — laws out of the Book of Leviticus prohibiting adultery, homosexuality, and abortion, with penalties including death by stoning.

The key leader of this movement is Gary North, founder of the Institute for Christian Economics in Tyler, Texas. He’s a long-time associate of Ron Paul, intellectual godfather of the Tea Party movement — the very people responsible for Congressional deadlock over the government shutdown and debt ceiling debate.

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WHITE-WING RADICAL FUNDAMENTALISM: “The Tea Party is the American Taliban” / The Newsroom

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h/t: The Far Left Side

CHRISTIAN THEOCRACY: “The Radical Christian Right and the War on Government” / Chris Hedges

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Chris HedgesThere is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America. Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives. This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the government, calls for the eradication of social “deviants,” beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these “deviants” are removed, other “deviants,” including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The “deviant” government bureaucrats, the “deviant” media, the “deviant” schools and the “deviant” churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these “deviants” will be annulled. “Christian values” and “family values” will, in the new state, be propagated by all institutions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless indoctrination.

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The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements, pervades the ideology of the Christian right. The movement uses religion to sanctify military and heroic “virtues,” glorify blind obedience and order over reason and conscience, and pander to the euphoria of collective emotions.

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All ideological, theological and political debates with the radical Christian right are useless. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion.

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Fascist movements begin as champions of civic improvement, communal ideals, moral purity, strength, national greatness and family values.

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The rise of Christian fascism is aided by our complacency.

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