My Name Is Legion -- Part 2 of 2

Like witch hunts, like McCarthyism, like modern Conservative Christopathy, once begun, the lie just goes on and on like a firestorm, gaining power and ferocity, destroying everything it touches until something stops in its tracks.

A second fraud that accompanied the Blood Libel was the lie of the Desecration of the Host, described here:

...According to the Christian doctrine of Transubstantiation, the wafer consecrated in the ceremony of Eucharist becomes thereby the actual body of Jesus (Protestants dropped the doctrine and consider the wafer only a symbol of the body, not Jesus himself; Catholics still hold it). The myth was the belief that Jews secretly stabbed, tormented and burned the consecrated wafer (this belief brought Judeophobia to a new peak of irrationality, since Jews obviously did not believe in Transubstantiation). This charge brought more persecution and massacre. Most of the forty infamous cases took place in Germany and Austria.

A third lie was the Poisoning of the Wells, also described here:

The third myth was referred to at the end of our last class, namely the Black Death. In this case the relation between the myth and its consequential massacres was direct and obvious. Between 1348 and 1350, one hundred million people, a third of Europe’s population, died of an epidemic caused by the bacillus “pasteurella pestis.” In centers with denser populations, such as monasteries, the proportion of dead people was higher.

People had extreme reactions, either seeking recourse to religion through repentance and supplication to God, or reverting to licentiousness, lawbreaking and savagery. These two types of reaction often combined to accuse the Jews of having poisoned the wells and therefore being the cause of the death (after so much persecution, Christians could imagine that the Jews might seek revenge).

Pope Clement VI came out to defend the Jews, as did the emperors, but massacres broke out throughout Europe. All appeals to reason were ineffective, and in many places Jews were killed even before the plague had visited the locality.
...

Substitute terrorism for plague and this last detail -- that at least initially, the Pope tried to defend the Jews even as the mobs murdered them -- strikes the most frightening parallel to modern Conservatism.

That, as in the examples of both John of Capistrano and Rush of Limbaugh, the most virulent and murderous rhetoric starts out on the fringes, and begins with the most wildly provocative bullshit the local priest/Hate Radio jocks can dream up.

But it always gains traction because it is anchored in a basic article of faith that the Leaders cannot denounce without negating the very foundation of their own authority. And so John of Capistrano who, among other things, was instigator of the mobs who burned 41 Jews in the city of Breslau, 36 Jews in the Berlin marketplace, and the annihilated of the entire Jewish community of Liegnitz, ends up as with the nickname "Scourge of the Jews" and becomes a saint of the Catholic Church.

And Rush of Limbaugh, ranting wingnut fringe imbecile, ends up being feted by the 1994 Republican Congress as the “Majority Maker”.

Of course, the Pope and Bishops/the Republican Establishment denounce it all as inflammatory, but are ultimately boxed in by their own Canon. Because since the whole Religion/Party is predicated on their need for eternal and righteous rage over a primal, unforgivable grievance (Crucifixion /The New Deal) against an enemy (The Jew/The Liberal) that the movement’s core dogma preaches is intractably evil, in the end fanaticism wins the day, and the war of words and deeds inevitably becomes a down-spiraling hatespeech arm’s race.

In “Constantine’s Sword” – a formidable history of Christianity, from what was on the cafeteria menu at Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix Middle School the day Jesus was crucified (otter frites, wolf milk, tater tots) to what the Pope is doing…right…now – author James Carroll makes the case again and again that is the evolutionary nature of that aggressively supercessionist, schizophrenic aspect of Christian faith that drove it, since its inception, towards an ultimately genocidal Antisemitism.

On p. 227 he described the internal landscape of the terrified mind of the Middle Ages Catholic as it drives irresistibly towards mass murder.

See how it reads when I substitute the word “Liberal” for “Jew”, “Conservative” for “Christian”, and the various lies leveled against the Jews of that age with the various lies Conservatives level against Liberals every single fucking day:

“It was a small step in the Conservative imagination from that newly sharpened sense of permanent Liberal culpability to a conviction that Liberals were preparing to not only destroy a surrogate of America, but “us”. Liberals were believed ready to sabotage the war on terror, if they could, not only destroying the American way of life but Americans as well.
…

The anti-Liberal mobs may have waved the banner of an insane rhetoric making it seem they were irrationally avenging the crimes of some long gone Hippy, or defending the nation’s children, but their very ferocity and the longevity of Hate Radio show that they were defending themselves.

From what?

Not from villains conjured by some chimerical fantasy based on nothing real, but on the threat logically deduced from a solemn doctrine of the GOP, one dramatically reiterated – indeed this liturgy was key to the development of Republican “best sellers” – on every AM Hate Radio station every single day.

Namely that Liberals are traitors who side with our mortal enemies and are secretly working to bring down the country.

In a dozen ways as we have seen, the Cross itself had been conscripted into that campaign, which was as much self-defense as revenge. And now every Christopathic pulpit in the United States would become an infallible promulgator of that same doctrine.”

Which brings us right back to our own 21st Century rodeo, and an understanding that the lies and slanders of the well-funded propaganda ministers of the Right are not random, nor uncoordinated.

Far from it.

If Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity did not exist the Right would have to invent them, because they serve an incredibly important function in the overall plan.

Because each time Falwell opens his bibble spigot to, say, blame the ACLU for 9/11 and is not instantly defrocked by acclamation and run out of the country on a rail...

Each time Rush Limbaugh tells another lie and chuckles and doesn’t get his license pulled and fined into penury...

Each time Ann Coulter calls for the murder of political opponents and is applauded instead of jailed...

Each time the casually homicidal rhetoric on the Right is conspicuously ignored by the MSM while the fact that the Left uses the word “fuck” a lot sends them leaping onto their writing desks, shrieking and clutching their petticoats...

Each time one Republican Leader


after another


after another


after another


snuggles up to these loathsome freaks instead of denouncing them, the threshold for what is acceptable for the Wingnut Base to do and say gets lower.

And let’s face it, these are not exactly the kind of people who arrived at their positions by careful reasoning in the first place.

These are not people likely to give up their seats ringside at the book burning just because burning books is wrong and a betray in fact of everything they claim to love in theory, because for them it doesn’t matter. They follow a higher truth, and in so doing they believe – fiercely – that the nobility of their ends justifies any means, no matter how monstrous.

With God on their side and what they suppose to be a love of country in their hearts, they loudly and methodically betray everything their God stands for and every value that makes their country extraordinary.

Again from James Carroll, the stark, sad litany of hate and tragedy from centuries gone by, now repeating itself again here and now (emphasis added):

P. 336

Pope Nicholas III, in promulgating the by now customary Sicut Judaeis, altered this bull that was instituted to protect the Jews. Not surprisingly, the Dominican Pope added a new requirement for the whole Church, mandating “sermons and other means for the conversion of the Jews.” Now this preaching had the ultimate credential, and was undertaken throughout Europe. In what did such sermons consist?

P. 337

…here is an example of a sermon preached to Christians by a leading Dominican, Giordano da Rivalto, in Florence on November 9, 1304:

“I say first of all that they will repeat it [the crucifixation] in their hearts with ill will --- wherefore they are evil at heart and hate Christ with evil hatred; and they would, were they able, crucify him anew every day…They are hated throughout the world because they are evil towards Christ, whom they curse.”

And how do Jews curse Christ?

And how do Liberals curse America?

By refusing to convert.

By refusing the Surge.

…
The inbuilt momentum of such feelings opens to a new perversion when Dominican Giordano goes on to make the charge of contemporary crucifixion concrete by declaring in his sermon that Jews steal the Eucharistic host to blaspheme it. Giordano claims to have personally witnessed such a desecration --- and have seen with his own eyes an apparition of the youthful Jesus. Come upon the scene to stop it. By this miraculous intervention, as Jeremy Cohen summarizes, Giordano, Jesus “rallied the local Christian population to slaughter 24,000 Jews in punishment for their evil deed.

At last, Jesus himself had been recruited as a booster of mass killings of Jews.

P. 338
Giordano stoops to yet another level of denigration by claiming that Jews continue to murder Jesus down to the present by kidnapping a Christian boy every year and crucifying him. When we saw this libel before, it was being spread by barely literate rabble-rousers, and was resoundingly condemned by representatives of the official Church.

When we saw this libel before, it was being spread by barely literate wingut-bloggers, and was resoundingly condemned by representatives of the Administration

But now the promulgator is the authorized official himself.

Does anyone else hear in this a clear echo of the President and especially the Vice President of the United States, now sufficiently girded by the inflammatory words of the demagogues on the Right that they felt perfectly safe inferring that a vote for John Kerry was a vote to let your children be blown up?

That Democrats do not care about the safety of this country?

That if you do not uncritically support the Dear Leader, you are validating the enemy?

Rage-drunk on an imaginary cork from a non-existent bottle, every day the Right tumbles deeper into darkness. And history shows without any doubt what waits for us all if their trajectory is allowed to continue uninterrupted and they are permitted to drag this nation fully into the abyss behind them, building to this kind of crecscendo:

P. 340
…
After 1348, anti-Jewish stereotyping became more vicious, with the Christian mind fixed on the Jew not merely as an enemy, as before, but as a mortal threat.

…
Popes, bishops and some princes following Clement VI’s lead, would continue to defend Jews from violence and forced conversion, but they would also intensify their sponsorship of programs of prosthelytyzing, which itself became more coercive after the plague. The inability of ecclesiastical and political leaders to grasp, as Rosemary Radford Ruether put it, “that the mob merely acted out, in practice, a hatred which the Church taught in theory and enforced in social degradation whenever possible” was never more tragic or dangerous.”

…
Through the decade of the 1380s, a particularly ferocious anti-Jewish preacher named Ferrant Martinez operated out of Seville. In his sermons, he identified Jews as the obstacle to the prosperity and amity that were properly due to the faithful followers of Jesus. If Martinez was restrained at all, it was only because neither the king nor the archbishop would tolerate open calls for violence, but then, in 1390, both the king and the archbishop died. Pressure had been building for half a century, and Martinez lit the fuse.

This is why I believe it is not only worth expending a little precious time speaking of these modern witch hunters, but absolutely imperative that each of us confront them and their lies wherever and whenever we can, as directly, clearly and bluntly as conditions permit.

Because when fascists in robes or uniforms or suits and ties begin to bray, it is up to us – each one of us, as best we can – to drown them out and sit them the fuck down, every single time.

Up to each of us, in our own way, to play La Fucking Marseilles.

as loud as possible.

End Part 2 of 2.