The Manchurian Clergyman

by **rain** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 11:31 am

Rev. John Hagee's War The Manchurian Clergyman By WERTHER In the 1920s, explaining the growing phenomenon of religious fundamentalism and how it battened Prohibition upon a suffering nation, H.L. Mencken described Southern Baptism as "a theology degraded almost to the level of voodoo." Eighty years on, we could remark, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," but we would be wrong. Things have not remained the same, they have deteriorated. For if there is one thing worse than Elmer Gantry, it is Elmer Gantry with a foreign policy. Not content with polluting the fields of evolutionary biology and stem-cell research with Stone Age dogmas, these zealots have now tried their hand at statecraft. The latest specimen in Barnum's traveling museum of oddities is John Hagee, director of Christians United for Israel. As profiled in The Wall Street Journal [1], this dervish from the West Texas wastes seemingly lives, breathes, and excretes but one obsession: his love of Israel, above and beyond anything else, including, apparently, the country of which he is nominally a citizen. We will not provide a comprehensive summary of the article other than to note that he and his followers are particularly active in cheering on the carnage in Lebanon. To that end, he was in the imperial capital of Washington last week to hound Congressmen about their duty of fealty to Israel as if those gunsels of AIPAC needed any instruction. Apparently, the bigger and bloodier the war, the closer the day of Armageddon looms. And the end of the world is what he seeks. [2] Two revealing details stand out. The first is that the President of the United States actually sent a message of congratulations to Hagee's Washington clambake. Paradoxically, the chief executive stated that Hagee and his acolytes are "spreading the hope of God's love . . ." This statement is somewhat difficult to square with the fact that Hagee, who held one of his previous séances in an Israeli Air Force hangar, seems to positively lust for bloodshed. He is not only a strong supporter of the Iraq fiasco and the leveling of apartment blocks in Beirut, but has also written a book fomenting readers to put political pressure on their government to attack Iran. This is a new development in the annals of American politics. While the head magistrate is expected to belong to an organized religion and show ceremonial piety when the occasion demands it, it is unprecedented for a president to take such public interest in a fringe cult. It is doubtful whether the genial, (bootleg) whiskey-drinking Warren Gamaliel Harding ever sent a congratulatory telegram to the spirit-rappings of Aimee Semple McPherson. Nor can we picture Silent Cal bestowing his best wishes on a congregation of snake-handlers in the hollows of the Cumberland Ridge. But, as we have observed, these are different times. The second interesting detail was the fact that Hagee's convention had a Democratic speaker: Rep. Eliot Engel of New York. Nominally a liberal (with an ADA rating of 90), Engel instructed the multitude of Armageddon cultists that Israel's enemies "do the work of Satan." Just the right words to inflame halfwits; who says the American political system is rigged? The Zionist "Christian" phenomenon has three interesting aspects, psychological, religious, and political. It is taught in most curricula that man is a mammal, and, that like all others of his phyla, indeed all living things, his most basic instinct is for survival, an instinct that trumps even his incurable vanity. Yet these specimens that we have described evidently welcome physical extinction, indeed, they devote much of their emotional energy to it, as the rest of us look forward to food, or sex, or taking a day off work with an iron-clad and phony excuse. What accounts for this? To Hagee's motives we may apply a discount. As the Journal article describes, Hagee's IRS filings have been subject to some revision, and he is most assuredly not poor. Which leads to the question: if Armageddon lies at hand, why does he accumulate such earthly dross as mere shekels (to use his preferred unit of currency)? Can the process of Rapture, whereby the saved one is drawn up into the ether, allow him to bring his treasure chest along? Or is he merely a figure squarely in the Gantry tradition, along with his colleagues Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson? The reader will have to draw his own conclusion. His followers are a more difficult case. They make no material profit from their peculiar obsession; rather, one would wager it is a net expenditure on their financial balance sheets. Why do they do it? It is certain that being a propane retailer in Plano, Texas, is a transcendently horrible experience. Perhaps such miserable creatures long for the soaring narrative of blood and fire, satanic beasts, and climactic battles, purely to dispel the pointless quotidian grind. But why Armageddon, rather than, say, a Shriner's banquet? Eight decades ago, the burghers of Sinclair Lewis's Saulk City became Elks or Rotarians, rather than Wahabbites devoted to a foreign power. We leave it to psychohistorians to divine why these times are different. The religious aspect also intrigues us. Zionist "Christianity" dates to no earlier than the 1830s, when the English scam artist John Darby inflicted his dispensation upon the world. The word "rapture," needless to say, exists nowhere in the King James Bible. The bloodlust of our End Times fanatics is the polar opposite of the Sermon on the Mount, the summa of Jesus' earthly teachings, an element of the Scripture which fundamentalists seem oddly reluctant to proclaim. What they profess to believe is a measurably anti-human theology. While Buddhists claim to deny the importance of sensory reality, these anchorites go further, actively welcoming destruction and mayhem. A more accurate comparison might be to the death cult of the Aztecs. Finally, there are the political ramifications. The crucial plot device (even more significant than brainwashing) in John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate is the identity of the traitors. Those who would subvert the government were able to place themselves strategically to do so by wrapping themselves in the flag and playing the hyperpatriot. Hagee's mummery is similar, with one important difference. He lauds every disastrous policy of a self-styled patriotic and conservative administration, and plays the yahoo cultural hick on the home front, a sure sign of 100 percent Americanism. Yet unlike Angela Lansbury, the villainess of the Frankenheimer epic, he takes no pains to conceal his real loyalty. It is perhaps a measure of the difference between 40 years ago and now that someone can declare his obeisance to a foreign power and lobby openly on Capitol Hill. But it is downright troubling that such a person should receive encouragement from the President. When the definitive psychopathology of the American experiment is written, "the Rev." John Hagee may well merit a lengthy footnote. Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst. <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/werther07292006.html">www.counterpunch.org/wert...92006.html</a>

by **Hugh Manatee Wins** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 1:13 pm

Fundamentalism really uses the mechanism of splitting the personality as explored in the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind control studies. From an article below about the psychology of fundamentalism- "Such is the power and pleasure of splitting as a mechanism of defense. In the absolute reliance on that mechanism fundamentalism renders up its secret." "Life in its complexity demands too much of us. That in a nutshell is the fundamentalist message. Only death can deliver one from the threat life poses. Only when life is done is one safe from a return of the projections and an eruption of the repressed." The drive behind both suicide and religious war is the idea that something terrible like pain or evil is unfixable and can only be eliminated altogether. So the sinful world "must" end in a purging ball of fire when Daddy has had enough foolishness and kills his children to "save them." Ignorance about psychology and the ability to heal trauma with some humane therapy (which is compassion combined with information) has fundamentalists projecting their anxieties onto "evil" others. This is a perfect tool for getting soldiers and fascist-friendly civilians. Fundamentalists experience something like a split personality when they tell themselves that some moment or ritual suddenly changes them completely, they are "reborn." But that identity must be sustained by attacking evil others and it only a temporary battle since Daddy will destroy everything soon because that is the only way that Good can really eliminate Evil. What a perfect congruence of destructive neurosis for a scientific fascist dictatorship to tap into to make them tools of division, hate, and violence "in the Lord's name," thousands and millions of so-called Manchurian Candidates aching to be Christian soldiers. Only the 'man' in Manchuria is The Man using propaganda to incite the incitable by hitting their culture war hot buttons, "evil homos, paedophiles, family-hating women, liberals, blacks, Muslims, socialists, teachers," etc. Hitler used the same scapegoat device. And, according to reports, the US Air Force Academy is full of them ready to drop Cluster Bombs of Virtue on Muslim targets. from the op article- <blockquote>Quote:<hr>his most basic instinct is for survival, an instinct that trumps even his incurable vanity. Yet these specimens that we have described evidently welcome physical extinction, indeed, they devote much of their emotional energy to it, as the rest of us look forward to food, or sex, or taking a day off work with an iron-clad and phony excuse. What accounts for this?<hr></blockquote> If you really want to understand the human psyche and fundamentalism to see its role in American politics, this is must reading. This psychology of fundamentalism is well laid out in this rather long and detailed article, also from the Counterpunch website, called 'The Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism' by Walter Davis- <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/davis01082005.html">www.counterpunch.org/davis01082005.html</a> <blockquote>Quote:<hr>In Apocalypse, a patient study of Christian fundamentalism based on extensive interviews over a five year period with members of apocalyptic communities Charles Strozier identifies four basic beliefs as fundamental to Christian fundamentalism.  (1) Inerrancy or biblical literalism, the belief that every word of the Bible is to be taken literally as the word of God; (2) conversion or the experience of being reborn in Christ; (3) evangelicalism or the duty of the saved to spread the gospel; and (4) Apocalypticism or Endism, the belief that The Book of Revelations describes the events that must come to pass for God's plan to be fulfilled. .... My effort will be to describe the inner structure of the psyche implied by fundamentalist beliefs by examining those beliefs in terms of the psychological needs they fulfill. .... I. Literalism "I don't do nuance." Dubya Literalism is the linchpin of fundamentalism; the literalization, if you will, of the founding psychological need. For an absolute certitude that can be established at the level of facts that will admit of no ambiguity or interpretation. (Fundamentalists, ironically, are the true positivists.) But to eliminate ambiguity and confusion one must attack its source. Figurative language. That is the danger that must be avoided at all costs because in place of the literal figurative language introduces the play of meaning. The need to sustain complex connections at the level of thought (not fact) through the evolution of mental abilities that are necessarily connected with developing all the metaphoric resources of language. The literal in contrast puts an end to thought. It offers the mind a way to shut down, to reify itself. It thereby exorcises the greatest fear: interpretation and its inevitable result, the conflict of interpretations and with it the terror of being forever bereft of dogmatic certitudes. .... II. Conversion Fundamentalism is in love with a single and common story it never tires of telling. This story is the key to the nature of the transformation it celebrates and the absolute split that transformation produces. A subject finds itself lost in a world of sin, prey to all the evils that have taken control of one's life. A despair seizes the soul. One is powerless to deal with one's problems or heal oneself because there is nothing within the self that one can draw on to make that project possible. The inner world is a foul and pestilent congregation of sin and sinfulness. And there's no way out. One has hit rock bottom and (so the story goes when it's told best) teeters on the brink of suicide. And then in darkest night one lets Him into one's life. And all is transformed. Changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Before one was a sinner doing the bidding of Satan. Now one is saved and does the work of the Lord. The old self is extinguished. Utterly. One has achieved a new identity, a oneness with Christ that persists as long as one follows one condition: one must let him take over one's life. Totally. All decisions are now in Jesus' hands. He tells one what to do and one's fealty to his plan must be absolute. There can be no questioning, no doubt. For that would be the sign of only one thing-the voice of Satan and with it the danger of slipping back into those ways of being that one has, through one's conversion, put an end to forever. .... The most striking thing about this narrative is the transparent nature of the psychological defense mechanism from which it derives and the rigidity with which it employs that mechanism. Splitting. Which as Freud and Klein show is the most primitive mechanism of defense employed by a psyche terrified of its inner world. The conversion story raises that mechanism to the status of a theological pathos. Though the story depends on recounting how sinful one's life once was(often in great even "loving" detail) the psychological meaning of conversion lies in its power to wipe all of that away. Magically one attains a totally new psyche, cleansed, pristine, and impermeable. One has, in fact, attained a totally new self-reference. .... Psychoanalysis delivers the subject over to itself as the one relationship that cannot be transcended. Conversion delivers the subject from itself.  .... Such is the power and pleasure of splitting as a mechanism of defense. In the absolute reliance on that mechanism fundamentalism renders up its secret. III. Evangelicalism Evangelicalism is the manic activity whereby the split in the psyche that conversion creates is projected onto the world. Thereby one confirms the identity one has attained through a fresh exorcism of the one that conversion vanquished. Evangelicism offers the fundamentalist the only way to sustain the reborn self: by trying to recreate the experience of one's conversion in others in order to reenact an unending exorcism. .... ...evangelical activity is based on a total lack of respect for the minds of those they are trying to convert. That lack of respect is, however, necessary. Anything less would be a confession of doubt. Which would make the other a threat when they can only be one thing: an image of what one was prior to conversion... .... Through evangelicalism one engages in the repetition compulsion that has become one's innermost necessity. The only way to prevent a return of the projections is through their continued projection. By locating them outside oneself and waging an "attack" on that externalization one is delivered from the fear of what can no longer be within. Everything bad is now outside oneself and one must do everything to keep it there. One can share with one's auditor the confession in the abstract that one is a "sinner" too but the discussion better shift quickly to the evils of the world: to homosexuals and abortion and the entertainment industry and best of all the imperiled state of a nation bereft of "moral values." One is well tuned then. The manic drive has been unlocked and sweeps to a revenge upon anything that can be even remotely associated with one's former self; for one has entered a dream state and readies desire for wrathful discharge upon a world drenched in sin. Evangelicalism offers the psyche a chance to be cleansed again of everything that may still fester deep within somewhere, longing to break out. This is an operation fundamentalism shares with its most famous offshoot-Alcoholics Anonymous. Though splitting and projection produce denial, one is always in danger of slipping. One needs a ritual to reestablish who one is by again exorcising what one was. What the meeting does for the alcoholic proselytizing does for the fundamentalist. IV. Apocalypticism-The Heart of the Ulcer "Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing the personal one." Freud .... The world becomes the polluted chamber of one's foulest imaginings with no way to check the demands of that vision. Within the psyche an even greater transformation occurs. One craves the constant exercise of an emotion that one must just as strenuously disclaim. Hatred. One needs fresh supplies of it as badly as the U.S. needs to ransack the globe for fresh supplies of oil. No matter how loudly one proclaims one's salvation, purified in the blood of the lamb, hatred has become the innermost necessity to which one is wedded. And that necessity has now broken lose of any containment. Hatred of one's former self is no longer sufficient. One now hates the world and is driven to seek out everything in it that one can claim caused or can cause an inner condition other than the purity of the saved. One hates, that is, everything that resists surrender and absolute obedience to the system of literalism and literal commands to which one has committed oneself. As the scope of what one hates grows apace it finds fruition in the binary opposition that is essential to it. Good and Evil divide the world in two, giving ontological form to the rigidity of the split that defines the fundamentalist psyche. All differences, all particularities, all complexities must give way to the demands of a comprehensive abstraction. And the fury of that abstraction can and will brook no exceptions. Everything thus resolves itself into the ultimate necessity required by the informing hatred. One longs for and demands an end to all the contingencies that have from the beginning been sources of fear and confusion. It is what one has always sought. To be done with all of it. With the contingency of the human. To be done with all ambiguity and complexity and confusion. Done with the feeling that history has no purpose other than chaos or meaningless repetition. Done with embodiment itself- and all the unwelcome desires it imposes on us. Done with the very sources of all that one hates and fears. To locate it all ontologically in a single principle-evil-and then be rid of it all once and for all through the triumph of that force that has the power to extinguish it all. Literalism tried to keep the world at bay by reducing everything to the simplest formulas, the mind itself to the most unproblematic blink of consciousness in stupified adherence to the narrow fixations needed to banish metaphor, ambiguity, and uncertainty. But it wasn't enough. The world keeps seeping it. There must be a way to be done with it, once and for all. To find what one has craved from the beginning. The end. And a proper end-one that will give sublime expression to the desire that has fed the whole thing. Death. The longing for death transformed into a sublime celebration of death. Life in its complexity demands too much of us. That in a nutshell is the fundamentalist message. Only death can deliver one from the threat life poses. Only when life is done is one safe from a return of the projections and an eruption of the repressed. One has always longed for deliverance into a realm free of desire and all its temptations. Death alone offers the comfort one seeks. The resentment in which the psyche has centered itself demands no less. One must work one's hatred of the world into a frenzy and feed that hatred with sublime images of evil in order to bring it to a fevered pitch. Release and satisfaction then come with the delivery of that world over to the hands of an angry God expressing his wrath in an orgy of pure destructiveness. Thank God for The Book of Revelations. For the only way both to satisfy and to purge one's hatred is to express it on a massive world-shattering scale. The death one seeks projected into the death one delivers. The self is thereby done with life and freed for transport of the saved split off self to a realm of bliss freed from all cares. A psyche wedded to thanatos has found in thanatos the final solution. One's resentment against life has been turned into a righteous and of necessity cosmic attack upon it. <hr></blockquote>

The Manchurian Clergyman

The Manchurian Clergyman

Answer: Armageddon is global suicide, the end of Evil.

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