The Blood Libel and The Party of God

When your political Glass House is built almost entirely out of whopping great lies and eliminationist rhetoric that you just keep escalating with no end in sight, maybe you don't want to be tossing around the term "blood libel".

"If you don't like their ideas, you're free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible."
--Sarah Palin

Because maybe someone will actually take the time to dig below the yawning, yapping emptiness of another wingnut talking point and point out that there are actually deeply disturbing parallels between the poisonous, paranoid, rage-drunk, Big Lie bullshit on which the GOP now completely depends for its hold over its illiterate masses...

...and the poisonous, paranoid, rage-drunk, Big Lie bullshit on which the medieval Catholic Church that invented the "blood libel" depended for its hold over its illiterate masses.

Like, for instance, Part I of an essay by yours truly, from four years ago entitled "My Name is Legion".

Here's a snip:

...
Civilization has shown us this ugly countenance before.

Many times.

It is our dark side, and like an opportunistic virus it swims in the shit inside our reptile brains and waits for us to be weak or afraid or greedy. Then it comes roaring out of the shadows yet again, offering us scapegoats to blame and fury to tuckpoint up the hollow places in our souls.

It offers us the warmth of a sick fever, the comfort of the grave. It offers us the chance to play god in the only way it understands a god to be: not loving or merciful or wise, but brutal and exterminating.

It offers us a giddy, teevee-friendly Armageddon, where the Bad People all perish in awesome explosions far away leaving behind only the good, the pure, the righteous.

And really reasonable gas prices.

And all it asks in return is your soul.

A long time ago I believed in that quaint method of dealing with lunatics best summed up by Rameses II in “The Ten Commandments”. The “Let him rave on, that men will know him mad.” school of thought, (which always seemed very reasonable if you assume the person involved isn’t Moses.)

I no longer believe this kind of benign neglect works, but many nice people still do. They wonder “Why waste precious adjectives on the likes of Coulter and Hannity? Limbaugh and Falwell?”

Why bother zeroing in on these obviously unhinged, obviously evil bottom-dwellers and the moral plague rats who blindly and orgiastically follow them down and down and down forever?

They and the homunculi who shower them with cash and cachet and oinky, monosyllabic praise are unreachable. As lost to the discourse of civilized society as the dead. As unmoved by reason, compassion or simple truth as an asteroid, their orbits are affected only by the gravity of hate and fear, lies and power.

So why speak of them at all?

And I think the best place to begin to answer that question is with the story of little Billy Norwich, in the Year of Our Lord 1144.

This site sums up the narrative in brief, chilling detail:

In 1144 CE, an unfounded rumor began in eastern England, that Jews had kidnapped a Christian child, tied him to a cross, stabbed his head to simulate Jesus' crown of thorns, killed him, drained his body completely of blood, and mixed the blood into matzos (unleavened bread) at time of Passover. The rumor arose from a former Jew, Theobald, who had become a Christian monk. He said that Jewish representatives gathered each year in Narbonne, France. They decided in which city a Christian child would be sacrificed.
…

This site provide illuminating examples of how the Fox News of the 12th Century fairly and balancedly reported on these lies…

…
At the dawn of day, on the Monday [March 20, 1144] after Palm Sunday, that detestable messenger of the Jews set out to execute the business that was committed to him, and at last the boy William, after being searched for with very great care, was found. When he was found, he got round him with cunning wordy tricks, and so deceived him with his lying promises....

HOW ON HIS GOING TO THE JEWS HE WAS TAKEN, MOCKED, AND SLAIN....

Then the boy, like an innocent lamb, was led to the slaughter. He was treated kindly by the Jews at first, and, ignorant of what was being prepared for him, he was kept till the morrow. But on the next day [Tuesday, March 21], which in that year was the Passover for them, after the singing of the hymns appointed for the day in the synagogue, the chiefs of the Jews.... suddenly seized hold of the boy William as he was having his dinner and in no fear of any treachery, and ill-treated him in various horrible ways.
…

And so began the despicable tradition of the Blood Libel.
...

Or perhaps some people might find Part II of that same post to be a little less history-lesson and a little more on-contemporary-point:

My Name is Legion -- Part 2 of 2

...
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...

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.
...

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 Conservativism.

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”.
...

I'm sure something clever about "those who forget history being condemned to vote Republican" would be appropriate here, but watching the proudly hateful and defiantly ignorant legions that now gather under the banner of Palinism devolving into orcs in almost-real-time has left my reserves of humor a little short this month.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, as long as Howie Kurtz can keep milking her fan club for ratings he will continue to find ways to dutifully sniff Sarah Palin's panties and call it news.