There Is Nothing Quite So Bracing

As watching this pillock using the late Christopher Hitchens as a vehicle to lecture us po' dumb ol' Liberal Fifth Columnists on Islamofascism and the Middle East.

...

The totalism of Islam is as dangerous as any other totalism – and liberals better understand that about it.

Yes, it is vital to make distinctions between the various ways in which Islam is practised across the world – which reveals some potential for reform, in the way that Christianity and Judaism have reformed and examined themselves over the past century. But the resilient absence of a collective understanding that religious violence simply is not worth it – the realization that most Christians came to after the Thirty Years War or, as Hitch has it, definitively after the First World War – is a real problem.

Yes, the bloody scythe of Islamic totalitarianism slashing across the Middle East is a threat so malevolent it is rumored Mr. Sullivan briefly considered cutting short his Burning Man vacation in order to muse about it from behind a keyboard...

...just before getting back to the job of pounding out column after column reviling Barack Obama as the second coming of Dick Cheney for daring to suggest that there may be something the United States might be able to do beyond doing absolutely nothing whatsoever to mitigate the disaster of a monster we helped create.

Mind you, I think staying the hell out of it ("Our Mess, But Not Our Fight") is the least awful of all the terrible alternatives available: I just don't happen to believe that everyone who thinks slightly otherwise is automatically a puppet dancing to Halliburton's and Raytheon's tune.

But leaving that Assad for a moment, let us have a look at this here timeline which'n our expatriate British cousins have done rote down for us:

...that religious violence simply is not worth it – the realization that most Christians came to after the Thirty Years War or, as Hitch has it, definitively after the First World War...

Well that is certainly going to come as amazing news to the both the Protestants and Catholics of my ancestral home who, last time I checked, were killing each other pretty good right up through the 1990s:

Also Mr. Hitchens' flat-footed assertion (in the video) that there are no Christians left anywhere on Earth who still maintain that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of God reveals either a basic ignorance of the here-and-now professed belief of hundreds of millions of Fundamentalist Christians so staggering that it blows a minivan-sized hole in the credibility of anything else he has to say on the subject of faith, or a crass willingness to simply lie in public in order to score a debating point so flagrant that it blows a minivan-sized hole in the credibility of anything else he has to say on the subject of faith.

But leaving that Assad for a moment as well, let's talk about the toxicity of an aggressive, expansionist, totalizing faith.  One that tortures scripture to justify its brutal methods.  One that uses institutionalized terrorism to expropriate the wealth of those it subjugated and to maintain economic and political control over vast swaths of territory.  One that uses threats of terror backed up by frequent public executions to enforce its will.

Now I could be talking about these assholes:

But I could just as easily be talking about these assholes --

-- who were marching out and proud in our nation's capital long after both the Thirty Years' War and World War One were over.

Who could rightfully claim an ancient heritage -- a White Supremacist Christian heritage -- that they could trace all the way back to before the founding of the Republic.

Who, over the years, publicly lynched thousands of our fellow Americans who stood up to them...while much of the rest of the country dealt with these atrocities by looking the other way.

Who operated their terrorist training camps and death squads with the tacit (and often open) approval of local elected officials.

Whose murderous, Bible-based ideology has proved to be incredibly durable, surviving one massive military and legislative defeat after another by splintering, mutating and coming back in a different guise, again and again.

Whose hateful, Bible-based mythology has remained enduringly popular with vast numbers of angry, ignorant losers who desperately need someone to tell them that they are, in fact, blessed and highly favored by God and suffer here in the material world because of the trickery and betrayal of various heretics and godless scumbags like you and me.

It's weird that when discussing the history of religious terrorism, people constantly skip right over the fact that Slavery and White Supremacy in America were not merely economic and cultural institutions, by relied on explicit, religious claims for legitimacy.  From Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens' "Corner-Stone Speech":

...

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.

...

It is the first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another star in glory.” The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws. This stone which was rejected by the first builders “is become the chief of the corner” the real “corner-stone” in our new edifice.

...

We have made enormous strides in the days since the Klan ruled the South, but let's not kid ourselves; since the end of the Civil War, in this country most of our domestic terrorists and their fellow travelers died in their beds, of old age, having passed their diseased fairy tales along to the next generation like hemophilia.  So before we get too righteous about how clean and orderly our modern Christianity has become, I think it would be worth meditating on the question of how much the murderous ghosts of our American ISIS are still with us.

And how deeply the modern Republican Party and Conservative movement still depend for their vitality on relentlessly conjuring those ghosts.