"American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America"

In a Salon article dated today, Michelle Goldberg (author of "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism") interviews Chris Hedges, a reporter with decades of experience looking at totalitarianism in such places as the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central American, and has a new book out: "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America". Hedges now sees the rise of the religious right in the US in the same terms of totalitarianism:

You're right, "fascism" or "fascist" is a terribly loaded word, and it evokes a historical period, primarily that of the Nazis, and to a lesser extent Mussolini. But fascism as an ideology has generic qualities. ... I think there are enough generic qualities that the group within the religious right, known as Christian Reconstructionists or dominionists, warrants the word. Does this mean that this is Nazi Germany? No. Does this mean that this is Mussolini's Italy? No. Does this mean that this is a deeply anti-democratic movement that would like to impose a totalitarian system? Yes.

You know, I come out of the church. I not only grew up in the church but graduated from seminary, and I look at this as a mass movement. I give it very little religious legitimacy, especially the extreme wing of it.

Hedges knows what he is talking about. He has seen fascism in operation, up close and personal. He has seen how those unaware of the power of totalitarianism can be caught completely by surprise in an open society , as they are being rounded up and shipped off:

Although I came later to the Balkans, I had a good understanding of how Milosevic built his Serbian nationalist movement. These radical movements share a lot of ideological traits with the Christian right, including that cult of masculinity, that cult of power, rampant nationalism fused with religious chauvinism. I find a lot of parallels. ... People have a very hard time believing the status quo of their existence, or the world around them, can ever change. There's a kind of psychological inability to accept how fragile open societies are.
You saw the same thing in the cafe society in Sarajevo on the eve of the war in Bosnia. Radovan Karadzic or even Milosevic were buffoonish figures to most Yugoslavs, and were therefore, especially among the educated elite, never taken seriously. There was a kind of blindness caused by their intellectual snobbery, their inability to understand what was happening. I think we have the same experience here. Those of us in New York, Boston, San Francisco or some of these urban pockets don't understand how radically changed our country is, don't understand the appeal of these buffoonish figures to tens of millions of Americans. ...
My friends in Pristina had no idea what was going on in Kosovo until they were literally herded down to the train station and pushed into boxcars and shipped like cattle to Macedonia. And that's not because they weren't intelligent or perceptive. It was because, like all of us, they couldn't comprehend how fragile the world was around them, and how radically and quickly it could change. I think that's a human phenomenon.

His warning is even more powerful given that he is himself a person of faith. His father was a Presbyterian minister. He himself graduated from Harvard Theological Seminary. He cannot be characterized as being just one of us 'angry atheists'.

Read the Salon interview. And I think I'll have to read Hedges book.

Jim Downey