Religious Long Cons and the Levers of Power

BY KATHLEEN WALLACE

 JULY 12, 2024

THE DYING MAN-GOD
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The history of governments utilizing religion to obtain an acquiescence from citizens who otherwise might find fault with the overall project has been long established. Even so, and for all of the many crimes and faults coming down from the American “founding fathers” one of the worthy attempts was that of separation of church and state. It was, like all things they did, likely fueled by self interest in that these guys knew that times change, opinions shift and you don’t want to be on the wrong end of a new wave of religion in your government. Best to just attempt to keep a barrier in place because you or yours could be on the opposite side of such human superstitions. Of course, over the years religion has wiggled its way into halls of power, but the generally accepted precedent was that it was to stay in its own lane. Most even religious individuals understood this, but through the decades, there’s been a rumbling push to disrupt this long-established underpinning of the country. One of the few aspects worth saving.

Ironically, those who deeply fetishize the views against gun control from men who had…..what like muskets? Well they have conveniently decided to become cafeteria constitutional constructionists, taking a little lack of personal arms control jello but passing up the religious separation mashed potatoes. They pick and choose at that buffet, making sure their plate is an unhinged blend of food unpalatable to all but their shady ilk.

What better way to subjugate and silence the masses than to utilize religion? Anyone with an eye to the horizon can tell that, barring massive technological innovations created not for wealth, but for society betterment (truly only likely if it comes from an arena not under the control of late-stage capitalism), than we are headed to some serious resource deprivation and climate change chaos in our near future. I’m sure the Federalist groups have been salivating at worldwide theocracies and their level of control with such issues at hand. It’s also one of the most effective ways to keep the rabble at each other’s throats, sometimes literally, and to continue the plunder and parasitism in a fluid manner, maintaining that unfair perch as things get weird and rough at the bottom.

As far as limiting individual rights…..perhaps a lack of bodily autonomy? No worries when you are in that power elite group—you always have the means to get what you want, be it a European abortion or simple access to birth control—it’s for the workers to have no means to control their lives. Rules for thee, not for me. It’s simply an extension of the already in place, wage-work or die, your body truly belongs to the state. A marriage of religion and government takes the steam out of much of the population who might revolt as many already have a tragic fascist and patriarchal mindset from their upbringing. The rest are left toiling and scraping along, just trying to survive the dark times.

Think of what many core Christian ideals entail……wealthy individuals getting stuck in needles and such. At one point, the leaders of Rome decided that the best thing to do would be a hostile takeover of the religion and the insistence on subservience and being lamb-like became quite an instrument of control in its own right. If you can’t beat them, join them and change the narrative to what you want it to be. Humbling the human spirit to become herd animals leads them all to the slaughter much more easily, even if the slaughter comes from working them to death over decades, while being presided over by hypocritical religious overlords. What we are seeing attempted now is not different from so many moments in history, that of those already on the top as far as resource extraction and wealth deciding that they greedily need to control the very soul of their population to ensure the continuance of their power.

This enterprise in the United States has been quietly simmering, whether it be the manner in which the we want less-government conservative types like a Goldwater (a dick yes, but a fairly consistent dick, philosophically) were hijacked into eventually falling in the evangelical Christian camp and now loving government intervention (as long as it is imposing your will on a class of people who you don’t belong to) or the way our government has obtained a rubber stamp from the population over the years by framing imperialism into a convenient—oh those Muslims aren’t part of “civilized” society so it’s probably fine to bomb them with white phosphorus. All of these actions have been setting the stage for a white Christian theocracy with almost no real push-back from any of the parties along the decades that could have brought mitigation or the cessation of such nonsense.

Currently, we are looking at actual road-maps to install a nation such as this. Project 2025 is an atlas of a looming hellscape for most. A nation that gets rid of endeavors like Head Start, presumably to open up any needed “charity” to religious institutions. As in, you want to eat, take this bible and ingest it first before I help. So proselytization at the end of a gun or the end of a soup bowl. And, of course, the assistance from religious groups is woefully inadequate to deal with social ills clearly from a background of our no-nets capitalism (even if you can tolerate the implied conversion connected with it). It just won’t do the job. In short, it’s a recipe to create a more miserable existence for all but the very lucky few at the top who control the reins of power through the merger of church and state. It’s what they’ve been wanting all along, the top probably not really believing in any of it, but knowing this is the optimum way to control the workers. They have a willing bureaucratic class of believers (the Amy Coney Barretts and such) to do the actual work and malignant monsters like Clarence Thomas who simply seem to enjoy inflicting pain writ large due to some sort of festering inner insecurity. If I have to hate myself so much, I want the rest of the world to be as miserable as I am kind of guys……..

We have seen when given the opportunity to actually vote in regard to many of the pet projects of the religious reactionary right, most people don’t want that to be part of their lives, even in solidly red states. The problem is that the more it is normalized, the more it will become what seems like an impossible edifice to dismantle. Once religion and manipulation has firmly taken over just ask the woman burning at the stake or the guys with their hearts cut out how easy it is to speak reason to monolithic power structures of religion and the state.

Sadly this is all real, unlike the controlled and make-believe opposition of high level Democrats who will simply use a slide towards superstition as a happy fundraising method. At this point, those of us who do not believe in trash religion ruling our lives will need to work on “proselytizing” just as hard as they have and sadly, due to our politeness, they have quite a head start on us (that head start they are fine with). We need to keep in mind that a harsh materialistic mindset (as in people have no tangible inner spark, we are all just wormfood) is not the appropriate antidote to the plastic violent fakery they are selling. Each and every single one of us is full of wonder, imagination and have a true right to lives of meaning. We are not to be trifled with in such a manner by the charlatans.

Kathleen Wallace writes out of the US Midwest. Her writing is collected on her Substack page.

Similar to Biden, NATO Is Aged and Unfit for 

Leadership

BY MEDEA BENJAMIN

JULY 12, 2024
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Image by Marek Studzinski.

As NATO wrapped up its Summit and Biden held a crucial press conference, the media frenzy continued to focus on Biden’s age and cognitive abilities. Is he too old and disoriented to lead the “free world”? Was he able to get through his press conference without stumbling too many times? Lost in the media coverage about the Summit, however, has been a serious discussion of NATO’s advanced age and NATO’s ability to lead the “free world.”

At 75, NATO has not aged well. Back in 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron was already sounding the alarm, accusing NATO of being “brain dead.” While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given NATO a new lease on life, NATO’s embrace of Ukraine actually makes the conflict–and the world–more dangerous.

Let’s remember why NATO was founded. As the contours of the Cold War were emerging after the devastation of WWII, 10 European nations, along with the U.S. and Canada, came together in 1949 to create an alliance that would deter Soviet expansion, stop the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent, and encourage European political integration. Or, as the alliance’s first Secretary General Lord Ismay quipped, its purpose was “to keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

It is decades now since the Soviet Union has disintegrated and European nations have been well integrated. So why is NATO still hanging on? When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, along with its military alliance called the Warsaw Pact, NATO could have–and should have–declared victory and folded. Instead, it expanded from 16 members in 1991 to 32 members today.

Its eastward expansion not only violated the promises made by Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but it was a grave mistake. U.S. diplomat George Keenan warned in 1997 “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era.” Indeed, while NATO expansion does not justify Russia’s 2022 illegal invasion of Ukraine, it did provoke Russia and inflame tensions. NATO members also played a key role in the Ukraine’s 2014 coup, the training and arming of Ukrainian forces in preparation for war with Russia, and the quashing of negotiations that could have ended the war in its first two months.

After two years of brutal war, the NATO Summit focused on how to shore up Ukraine’s flailing efforts to repel Russia. The insistence on setting up a “Trump-proof” scenario that would guarantee Ukraine billions in military aid for years to come and an “irreversible path” to NATO membership is really a guarantee that the war will drag on for years–precisely because NATO membership is Russia’s number one concern. There was no talk at the Summit of how to end the war by moving towards a ceasefire and peace talks. Why? Because NATO is a military alliance. The only tool it has is a hammer.

We have seen NATO illegally and unsuccessfully wield that hammer in country after country over the past 30 years. From Bosnia and Serbia to Afghanistan and Libya, NATO has justified this violence and instability as defending “the Rules-Based Order,” while repeatedly violating the core precepts of the UN Charter.

NATO is now a military behemoth with partners far beyond the North Atlantic that encircle the globe from Colombia to Mongolia to Australia. It has proven to be an aggressive alliance that initiates and escalates wars without international consensus, exacerbates global instability, and prioritizes arms deals over humanitarian needs. NATO provides a cover for the U.S. to place nuclear weapons in five European nations, bringing us closer to nuclear war in violation of both the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. NATO is endangering us all in a desperate attempt to reassert U.S. global hegemony in what is now a multipolar world.

NATO’s 75th anniversary is an opportune time to take stock of NATO’s outdated world view and violations of international law. NATO should be laid to rest so we can revitalize and democratize the proper venue for dealing with global conflicts: the United Nations.

Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the peace group CODEPINK and the human right organization Global Exchange. Follow her on twitter at @MedeaBenjamin.

The Empire, Not Just Biden, Has Dementia

BY ANIS SHIVANI

JULY 12, 2024
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I had just left Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and started heading west on Highway 138 toward the coast a hundred and fifty miles away when the Biden/Trump debate started. I could only catch a few minutes of it before I lost the signal for the next few days. So it was only the following week that I was able to catch up on what had happened. But I heard enough in just those few minutes to find it shocking, even for my jaded senses. Not only was Biden’s voice hoarse and pretty much undecipherable, but his sentences and logic made no sense at all. Meanwhile, Trump, in his very first response, sounded solid and authoritative, his voice booming—even if his content was likewise junk. But at least he was in control of the protocols of language, whereas Biden seemed to have lost the speech function altogether.

I have generally been skeptical of people saddling Biden with Alzheimer’s or dementia going back to 2019 when he started running for election. My mother had Alzheimer’s so I have personal familiarity with its ravages, and I’m careful to make such diagnoses from a distance. There was no doubt that compared to 2012 (when Biden handily demolished Paul Ryan in the debate), not to mention much earlier in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s—much as you might disagree with his racist, punitive, sexist actions—Biden had suffered severe cognitive decline. There were the outbursts against voters in the audience during 2019-2020. He seemed to be receiving some form of pacifying medication, when the rants and rages, or the inordinate attention to women’s hair or little girls’ bodies, got too much to bear. They probably administered some cocktail of medication for him to successfully get through the “debate” with Bernie Sanders, who unilaterally laid down arms anyway and let himself, and the left movement, be savaged. The debates with Trump in the fall of 2020 were more subdued affairs, when the cognitive decline was more obvious, and Biden had the excuse of Covid not to have to campaign in public.

Since then, his handlers seem to have been able to mostly hide him away, except for the rare occasion when he appears in public and each time is manifestly more fragile and incoherent. This whole cover-up got blown in the debate in such a manner that nobody can unsee it. Any doubts as to his mental decline have been removed.

The empire has in fact been running for the last four years on auto-pilot. The darkest, craziest, most doomsdayish forces in the deep state have actually been managing this empire, without any democratic input, or any care for the sentiments of the public. No one listens. It is in fact Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Janet Yellen and other insane apparatchiks who decide the policies that Biden then rubber stamps, since he has no brain left to argue otherwise.

To a large extent, this explains Biden’s meandering inaction, or rather full complicity, in the Gaza genocide. It explains the mad drive toward direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia in a way that reminds us of Dr. Strangelove. It explains the total withdrawal of any progressive policy initiatives in the first year of the administration and letting Manchin and Sinema ensure that nothing substantive passed. Obama, Clinton, or a president Kamala Harris would never have given one hundred percent license to Israel to do whatever it wanted, no matter their own Zionist inclinations; the complete passivity is not normal.

Nobody is there to stop the runaway train, and there hasn’t been for four long years. That’s an amazing fact, a testament to the empire’s ability to run on the writ of nameless bureaucrats who are actually autocrats driven by passionate narrow agendas that have no regard for democratic sentiments. It doesn’t matter if seventy or eighty percent of the people oppose the Gaza genocide, or if overwhelming numbers of young people want student debt forgiveness, or none of the people except deep state operatives are for war with Russia. The deep state on auto-pilot doesn’t care about any of it.

Biden’s speech patterns are not an impediment or stutter but a rhetorical style suited to the moment. I don’t want to go all the way back to, say, FDR or LBJ or JFK or Nixon, but each president, in the mode of spectacle, has a pattern of speech that reflects the needs of the moment. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but there’s a pretty strong correlation. Bill Clinton’s convoluted reasoning—hair-splitting, if you will—worked well with the triangulation and Third Way strategies involved in imposing a neoliberal way of life upon an unsuspecting public. George W. Bush’s macho West Texas swagger—as fake an artifact as we’ve ever seen in American politics—suited the Project for a New American Century’s designs to forcefully implement the next phase of the New World Order upon recalcitrant foreign countries. Barack Obama’s resort to high-minded vagueness reflected the unease of the elites toward the devastation neoliberalism had wrought and their unwillingness to do anything about it except to seek refuge in verbal flights of fancy. Trump came along with his fake working-class grievances and the simplistic reduction of the world to those who belonged and those who didn’t in the wake of a neoliberalism that had reached the end of its persuasiveness for non-believers.

To resuscitate what was left of the American empire, what was then needed was a vacant mind, a vacant stare, a man who came so far from the past—a literal walking zombie from the era before consciousness of race and class registered even on neoliberal terms—that global military aggression could proceed apace again, as if the last fifty years hadn’t happened.

And that’s what Biden’s rhetoric—and it is a form of rhetoric, even if demented—represents at every moment: It is as if the last fifty years of even gestural progress in social justice terms hadn’t occurred. It is as if domestically we were living in the age of opposition to busing and Storm Thurmond’s hold on the South, and in the arena of foreign policy there were those who believed that Kissinger’s détente toward Russia had gone too far in the direction of pacification. The deep state needed that kind of leader to revive its fortunes against a Trump who threatened to cease perpetual war, not give due respect to enemies real or imagined, and instead direct the country to a form of crass vulgarism whose culmination he represented in his own body and spirit.

The interview with George Stephanopoulos was even worse than the debate. This is when I first came around to accepting the Alzheimer’s thesis. On the one hand, his political instincts seemed as sharp as ever. Biden knew exactly how to deflect every one of the awkward questions Stephanopoulos directed at him about whether he would submit to cognitive tests, whether he would consider stepping aside, and whether he would feel shame if Trump won because of his weakened condition. He had the correct political answer ready in every instance to deflect attention from the real problem. His defiance—I would say arrogance—knew no bounds in this interview, as it hasn’t in other settings since the debate debacle. He remains immovable, regardless of whether he has Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or some other neurodegenerative syndrome that causes the slurred speech and stiff gait.

After the first few hours and days when his position seemed quite untenable, it’s possible that he may have rallied enough support to outlast the storm, being able to convince the party elites that to displace him now would be even more disastrous than going forward with a replacement. Someone is doing the convincing.

In the Stephanopoulos interview, he barely mentioned even the token gestures toward progressive policies that his administration has enacted, such as the minimal student debt forgiveness, or helping some undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens. He kept raving about expanding and fighting the wars and being the only one who could stand up to Russia. That’s it, the wars are what his mind has distilled to. One domestic policy he never forgets to mention, however, is the reduction in the price of insulin for seniors, but aside from war, both in the debate and in the interview, it’s as if he has no other presidential function to perform. Quite aptly, his big demonstration of cognitive facility is supposed to occur at the press conference heralding NATO’s 75th anniversary in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, fully two weeks after the debate.

In the 1990s, we were wayward horndogs, newly liberated from Reaganite 1950s family consensus and suburban bliss (minus feminism), and Clinton gave us the ribald, semi-repressive tunes to sing by, fake jazz and all. In the 2000s, we needed to revive past wars without awkward remembrance of our own role in creating historical backlash, so we ordered up a Texas cretin, or one who acted like one for the duration of the presidency. In the current stage of empire, the rising competitors are all but ready to speed past us in the race, and all we can do is muster up incoherent idiots who harken back to an America that has ceased to exist, in the form of bringing back that extinct reality intact via Trump, or forgetting that the world has changed drastically in fifty years if we go with Biden. Essentially, they are mirror images of each other, since in the debate Trump also narrowed his own talking points to just a handful of enemies that needed to be beaten, as if he couldn’t be bothered to contemplate the range of policy options available to him. They both have very few words left, at least to go by the evidence of the debate.

Again, it is remarkable to think that the empire has been firing on all cylinders without an ignition key or a driver all this time. When it has a chance to run like this, infinite war and destruction on a planetary scale are empire’s natural and only instincts. It has no goodness left in it to release when left unchecked.

What about Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom and the other younger leaders who have the right vocabulary? Essentially, they are all post-Obama wordmongers, wanting to stay within neoliberalism’s confines in a world that is disgusted with neoliberalism, even if ordinary people cannot articulate the problem in so many words. Theoretically these “challengers” to senile Biden exist, but it’s interesting that empire in its last days always seems to fixate on doddering old fools who have quite literally lost control of their body functions and cannot connect the tongue to the mind. The theoretical counterforce, in the form of those who are still able to articulate empire’s rationale, is just that, theoretical, meant to appease, built into the system as a validating force but not much more than that.

It is interesting that the entire country got upset with Biden for not having the words to justify worldwide slaughter and the destruction of the planet. The genocide was quite okay, the media would never challenge him on that, but not being able to articulate why we are complicit in the genocide presents an insurmountable problem. All the economic tyranny—the doubling or tripling of the cost of living in the Biden years—is fine, not worthy of getting riled over, but the media cannot stand someone who does not articulate empire’s rationale the way that Obama did in the years of his terroristic onslaught on innocent nations, and the impact this has on the quality of life of citizens in this country. That’s the problem with Trump too, although he does it intentionally.

In that sense, the media—and most of the American people—have not yet caught on to the degree to which Biden’s speech pathologies are in fact perfectly synchronized with where the empire stands at this point, and the need for a vacuum for the deep state to step in after Trump’s unholy utterances. No words are needed at this point. Biden’s vacant stare, when he is searching for words that just won’t come to him at the start or in the middle of a sentence, is where the empire really stands: staring at the pure abyss.

It is the abyss of forgetfulness and madness and denial, shrouded by an arrogance so deep that the complete failure of the body is not enough to rectify it. It is also why RBG and Diane Feinstein went the way they did, protected until the last by enabling servants, just as Jill Biden and the president’s closest associates are pretending that someone is there when nobody is.

Anis Shivani is the author of many critically-acclaimed books of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. His recent political books include Why Did Trump Win?, A Radical Human Rights Approach to Immigration, and Confronting American Fascism.