Part 1 – Amnesia and Radicalism of the Other
Can you say the words, “Radical Christian Extremism”? If not, you are either woefully ignorant of the extremists currently at work in Christianity and the Trump-led Republican Party1 or you are already a part of this violent ideology. If you want to fight an ideology you cannot use lethal weapons to do it. You may as well try to fix your smart phone with a hammer. You fight an ideology with logic, rationality and education. An idea-ology is by definition a system of thought. If you fight ideas with guns you may as well call yourself “Big Brother”, Stalin or Hitler. They are the ones that advocate squelching ideas with death. The implicit reasoning goes something like this: if you kill everyone who believes an idea you disagree with, there will be no one left to think the thought; therefore, the idea will vanish. Aside from pure logical ignorance, history has shown us that if you throw this kind of gas on a thought based fire you will spread the ideology, both pro and con, much faster than it would have spread on its own. Hitler, Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito’s insistence on nationalism and fascist ideology has made fascism the most despicable of terms. Yet Nationalism lives on popularly in the Republican Party2. George W. Bush and company made the spread of terrorist thugs and tribal warfare in foreign countries into a global recruitment tool for the Islamic Caliphate and the state enforcement of shari’a law3. In this kind of state, religious education of the Quran and Sunnah is mandatory and relentless. Similarly, the radical Christian extremists in our country would get rid of the separation of Church and State (some of them deny it ever existed in our system of government4). They would impose religious training that would deny evolution and climate change. They would not only ban abortions but punish those who get abortions5. They would put abortion health providers to death. They would have the state kill homosexuals by law6. Currently, they publish the names and addresses abortion health providers, murder them and murder innocent people in abortion clinics calling themselves “warriors for the babies”.
When this violent Christian extremism happens in our country we want to call the perpetrators deranged and crazy. When violent Islamic extremism happens we call it ideological. Notice the hypocritical difference: Christianity is never blamed for its extremists but Islam is blamed for its extremists. Now I know, because my wife tells me this quite often, that logical consistency is not held in high regard by most folks but isn’t there some kind of imperative built into our anatomy, essential to language, for order and consistency? Does each of us make up our own private language? Do we only imagine we can communicate? Are we really fine with having reality comprised of word salad? If words and ideas have any meaning whatsoever, isn’t meaning itself dependent on making sense? Even if we deny logic and rationality, don’t we have to do it based on logic and rationality? How would one make an argument otherwise? Sorry, but if we give up on logic, rationality and consistency and opt for pure ideological narcissism we cannot even claim to be mammalian, animal, plant or mater7.
We demand that Muslims publicly denounce and refuse those that call themselves followers of Muhammad and kill in his name. Trump has recently stated that Muslims are intentionally hiding extremists and that he would crack down on them. Yet, when people kill in the name of Jesus, Christianity or “the babies” we want to call them crazy and deranged. We do not allow ourselves to think the thought that Christians should just as publicly and vehemently oppose violent extremism in Christianity as much as Muslims should oppose it in Islam. Do we equally demand that an anti-abortion zealot turn in dangerous Christian extremists? Are we willing to prosecute and deport any or all of them for their silence?
If we completely expunge Christian ideology by making their extremists simply ‘crazy’ and we insist at the same time that Islam is a religion which condones violence aren’t we being just as crazy, from a rational point of view, as the terrorists? Perhaps, the vengeful and jealous God which demands eternal Hell as justice for mortal sin should be rethought from a “warrior for the babies” perspective. Is it possible for the extreme condemnation and judgement of God to be taken as a blessing by God to kill those sinners who ‘murder babies’ and deny the ‘true’ God. If you thought defending God violently would keep you from going to eternal Hell, could it be thought as perhaps the dark side of thinking 70 virgins are waiting for you in Heaven when you kill in the name of God. Have Christians really forgotten the Dark Ages, Crusades and witch burnings? If you make the claim Islam is inherently violent, how could you in the same breath and of a sound mind not make the same claim of Christianity?
Well, it is easy, you simply think that your God is the ‘true’ God and theirs is not. They worship false gods and you know the ‘true’ God. You know this because ‘the Bible tells you so” and the ‘Holy Spirit” confirms it. No shadow of doubt can enter your mind because that would be the devil and you might be seduced into eternal torment with such thinking. Every religion and secular political ideology has its de-legitimizing stepping off points for extremism. We are all responsible for recognizing and reacting to attempts to hide or justify ideological weaknesses in our own backyard first. Sure there are ‘Crazies’ but as Foucault tells us in “Madness and Civilization” there is an uncanny, symbiotic relationship between insanity and rationality. Is it essential to rationality as Foucault claims? It makes for an interesting philosophical question. In any case, the treacherous territory between nut-cases and ideological enticements demand alertness and the most sober reflection if we want to avoid the apparent blindness of one’s own insanity and responsibility for our collective mental health. It is way too easy to make the devil ‘Other’ and ourselves the ‘not-Devil’. This is what is at the basis of Trump’s xenophobia. It is the easy way out to blame the ‘other’ and at the same time justify ourselves. The only problem is this sociological behavior perpetuates and exacerbates our own extremism and will never resolve it. The adamant insistence to turn a blind eye to ourselves is the mechanism that perpetuates radical extremism no matter what side of the ideological spectrum you adhere to.
For too many decades far right Republicans and fundamentalist Christians have been sowing to the worst in human behavior: negativity, condemnation, anger, distrust, suspicion, violence and war. Now they are reaping Trump. Why did they turn a blind eye to their own tactics? Because, in the short term, it got them votes. I would also suggest that the relative increases in human comfort and health sciences, especially in the U.S., kept the old line conservatives more attuned to human tragedy and weakness. They were less able to deny their own fallibility and dependence. They realized complaining and negativity did not change anything and only perpetuated their own misery. In any case, the lack of a positive message for those outside ‘the fold’ ultimately condemned Republicans to a narrow demographic range of the population. They were never able to convince many outside Kansas that aspirations unrealized are worth having. They promised them the ‘free market’ without government interference would give them their hearts desire. When it did not, they told the disenfranchised people they did not try hard enough, it was their fault. For the last several decades, they told them the Federal Government stole their dream and robbed the market of what they could have had. The found a demon, a terrorist to account for their constituents misery. If it was not their fault it must be the Government’s fault, the terrorists fault, the abortion providers fault, the homosexuals fault, the blacks fault, the Mexicans fault, the Muslims fault, on and on. In the end, all they gave their folks were empty promises and negative reasons for their misery.
Part 2 – Amnesia and the Magical Disappearance of Power
The real reason the Republican dream turned into a nightmare was instead of assigning fault and failing on ‘free market’ promises they fundamentally depended on people’s innate tendency for passivity and fantasy to keep them in office. They became the nanny state for excuses. They promised action but delivered empty and negative rhetoric. Reflection takes work on the part of an individual. Understanding one’s complicity in ones problems is the first step to overcoming one’s problems. The next step is action. When we deny our dependence on others and essential connection to each other we deny the most useful adaptation we have as humans, our intelligence. Intelligence, as is language, is not an individual will-to-power. It is fundamentally different from narcissism and individual mastery. If we help each other we help ourselves. If all of us only help ourselves we all end up in a miry bog.
The government is not antithetical to help, it is the tool for help. As individuals it is our job to make it work for us and not against us. If it is inefficient, it is our job to make it efficient not by killing it but by electing politicians the fix problems. Killing the government will not magically solve our problems, blaming the government will not solve any problems neither will bloating it with corporate politicians. Making the government a scapegoat for our problems will not solve them. Leaving us to manage on our own is really only a way for the vultures of capitalism to pick our bones dry. When we help each other we thrive. When we tear each other down and the organizations we have historically made, to realistically address problems we cannot change as individuals, we are left to the Darwinian marketplace which tells us in advance that we are all on our own against the power grubbers of capitalism (get your degree at Trump University).
I am not suggesting capitalism is inheritably bad, only that it has no external checks and balances to prevent market monopolies and vast over-reaches by its own pools of powerful interests. It must rely solely on its own inner dynamics and self-regulation to allegedly keep the ‘haves’ in check and promote the well-being of the ‘have-nots’. Therefore, the system is completely intrinsic to itself. In contradistinction, our system of government has, if you will, ‘state-planned’ checks and balances in the form of a constitution. Intervention is planned by the foresight of the Founders by three distinct branches of government. External intervention is a necessary and essential structural element of our Constitution. While the Austrian Economists may conveniently ignore the political basis of our own state planning in the U.S. Constitution as non-relevant to their extremist critique of state-planned economies there is an apparent contradiction between our form of government and their admonitions about a ‘free market’. The Founders would not tell us that the structure of our government rests on selfishness. They had a vision they coded into law that rests on a structural fairness for all based on protected divisions of power. They assumed happiness was not left to the wind of the market and vehemently rejected European Mercantilism. To the contrary of the Austrian Economists, they did not see liberalism as the (re-written and revised) historical basis rampant in Mercantilism but as the excesses of Aristocracy and power of the few.
Capitalism as Adam Smith tells us is firmly rooted in selfishness8. He does not take selfishness to be negative but a positive incentive for mastery and acquisition. As a note, he did however root out making money on money (interest) as an unacceptable selfishness9. The Austrians put no such constraints on the market. There is a bit of a magic trick, now you see it now you don’t, in raising an artificial distinction between “state-planned” control and interests of the powerful “market-planned” economy. Selfishness, left to its own devices, unmediated by anything other than individual will has historically not resulted in a balanced and prosperous state but an autocracy, an oligarchy, a mercantilism; the haves and the have-nots as we currently say. It has never had a history of mediating itself in some sort of stable and efficient distribution of goods and services despite what the Austrian Economists10 would have us believe.
While the Austrians are quick to criticize state planning as liberalism in which they mean socialism and fascism, they are quite silent when market manipulation, collusion and ‘corporate planning’ are brought to the fore from within the market. Their main basis for dealing with this is telling us that intervention by the state causes these deformities; bubbles and bursts in the market. The trick here is to change the terms from externality, what is plainly and historically visible in the consolation of power, to an internal (shall we dare suggest Hegelian) confluence of hypotheticals. If we can adequately maintain a new and improved history of the world which does not implicate unfettered commerce and economy but always attributes the deformities of power, not to the ones that have the real power in terms of, shall we say, dollars and cents but to the ones they try to keep on their payroll, we implicate the worker bees not the queen bee. The queen disappears in the hive while all the workers are left to fight it out amongst themselves for the crumbs of the existence. This well-financed illusion creates a synthesis for market failures based on a superimposed and critically differentiated other, the government. The result is that the market, unhinged and unaltered by government intervention is whole (hole), complete unto itself. The market can now will itself as self-determined. What gets lost is even the remote possibility that distortions in the market can come about not just from the super-imposed, state-controlled hubris of the government but from any other form of market control and manipulation from within the market.
The next step as the right has continually reminded us is to make the government so small we can drown it in a bathtub. The natural consequence of this is what we would call anarchy. By the term ‘anarchy’, referring specifically to no government, can we assume that the ‘free market’ would also magically take care of or have no need for this type of human organization? Can we then dump the U.S. Constitution so apparently and vehemently revered by the right to make way for the pure internal-ism of the market? When the System is complete by virtue of its own internal dynamics why would we need a government anymore. Why couldn’t the object of such disdain, disorder, and human misery simply be done away with so the beauty of the market could finally have its day? Surely, the market would correct itself and ensure that an equal playing field would be had by all. You can now wake up on the count of three.
Part 3- The Consummation of ALL in Trump
The narcissism of Trump is a creation of this utopic myth where the lion and the lamb lay down in perfect harmony…albeit, in a members only (white, straight, Mayberry reality but forget the details). This protectionist strategy leaves out some important details about who goes in the ark before the flood but never-mind that. Trump tells us to trust him. Everything will be fine. He will make us great again. He will win. He is very intelligent. The siren song continues, pay no attention to that masked billionaire behind the curtain. He is Trump, the Great and Powerful (swish, swish, boom, boom, fart, fart). Here again we have bumped into a learned tactic from the Austrians…the sleight of hand where the rich and powerful disappear in a puff of smoke and all is well in Pleasantville. Have we all found ourselves in “The Truman Show” where the right has convinced us of the infallibility of the ‘free market’? The rich are not really rich, they do not pull any strings or exercise any power OR if they do it is only because the government is bought and paid for (by the ones the market movers created and require for their own existence in the first place). All our problems are due to the evil other, the immigrant, the homosexual, the blacks, the government, ad nausea. The market is blameless in itself. It can do no wrong. Liberalism is synonymous with totalitarianism. The market is synonymous with freedom and individualism. We have been feed a steady diet for decades of ‘focus on the watch while we pick your pocket and sell you your own watch’. In this cocoon, all aspirations will be met if you only work hard and have faith in The Donald. The word ‘slavery’ has been done away with, we now call it interest on credit…Adam Smith’s vehement exception to the virtue of selfishness. When workers are paid slave wages and credit is offered we blame the worker when the payments are not met. Surely, the market could not be guilty of usury. People like Trump are not the problem, just listen to him, he will tell you who the real problem is. Corporations are people too. They do not squeeze the blood out of people. People do not have to borrow money. Surely they can live on $7.25 an hour. If they can’t, they should get another job but don’t let the undocumented worker take their jobs at an even lower hourly rate.
How many wacky theories about the ‘free market’ will we have to endure before people finally realize that the market will run over people if it is not intelligently regulated by something other than itself? It is possible for humans to govern themselves wisely without giving free reign to survival of the fittest in market economy. Is it possible for external checks and balances to work in government? It is not all or nothing, us or them, good versus evil. The evil is in the excesses that hides between our eyes in the fanciful illusions created by an invisible hand which separate us from one another, from wisdom and intelligence, in our shared languages; desires, logic and reason. When ‘we’ becomes irrelevant and ‘me’ is all that matters these words which we commonly understand fall into an abyss, Alice in Wonderland, where up is down and down is up and sense can be held at the mercy of the highest bidder.
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1 Trump Selects a White Nationalist Leader as a Delegate in California
Trump retweets another apparent white supremacist
DONALD TRUMP’S SOCIAL MEDIA TIES TO WHITE SUPREMACISTS
2 An Exhausted Democracy: Donald Trump and the New American Nationalism
3 The rate of terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups and the rate of fatalities in those attacks increased dramatically after the invasion of Iraq. Globally there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year before and 199.8 after) and a 237 percent rise in the average fatality rate (from 501 to 1,689 deaths per year). A large part of this rise occurred in Iraq, which accounts for fully half of the global total of jihadist terrorist attacks in the post-Iraq War period. But even excluding Iraq, the average yearly number of jihadist terrorist attacks and resulting fatalities still rose sharply around the world by 265 percent and 58 percent respectively.
The Iraq Effect: War Has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide
Also, if you have not read or seen this website, it is certainly worth reading. It puts the cost of war and the cost of peace in economic terms and the results are quite interesting…
The Economic Cost of Violence Containment
4 The Myth of the Separation of Church and State
5 Kevin Swanson Agrees With Trump: Abortion ‘Ought To Be A Criminal Action’
Donald Trump’s ‘Punishment’ Talk Exposes Abortion Foes’ True Face
GROUP ATTACKING PLANNED PARENTHOOD LINKED TO EXTREMISTS
Here is a Press Release by Operation Rescue on the execution of an abortionist murderer. Troy Newman is the President of Operation Rescue. He is another “warrior for the babies”.
Operation Rescue West
California Life Coalition
Joint Press Release
For Immediate Release
September 3, 2003
Contact: Troy Newman, Director, Operation Rescue West (316) 841-1700
Cheryl Sullenger, Director, California Life Coalition (619) 277-0725
Execution of Paul Hill Nothing Less than Murder
Paul Jennings Hill is scheduled to die by lethal injection today in the state of Florida for the murder of a Pensacola abortionist and his security guard in 1994. The following is a joint statement released by Operation Rescue West and the California Life Coalition regarding today’s execution:
“Today’s scheduled execution of Paul Hill is not justice, but is another example of the judicial tyranny that is gripping our nation. A Florida judge denied Rev. Hill his right to present a defense that claimed that the killing of the abortionist was necessary to save the lives of the pre-born babies that were scheduled to be killed by abortion that day. Our system of justice is based upon ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ but in Rev. Hill’s case, there was no justice because the court prevented him from presenting the legal defense that his conduct was justifiable defensive action.
“There are many examples where taking the life in defense of innocent human beings is legally justified and permissible under the law. Paul Hill should have been given the opportunity to defend himself with the defense of his choosing in a court of law. Because he was denied this right, the full truth and motivations behind Hill’s actions were kept hidden from the jury. If Paul Hill’s life can be taken by the state without the full advantage of the protections afforded him by due process simply because of the unpopularity of his views, then we have to wonder who is next? No one is safe from being denied a defense by an out-of-control and biased judicial system. Execution under these circumstances is nothing less than murder of a political prisoner.
“We pray for Paul Hill today, for his wife and children, and for our nation that sees no value in the lives of the innocent victims of abortion that Hill endeavored to rescue, but instead protects and defends their killers. Today, it is justice that has been aborted. May God have mercy on us!”6 If you have not seen this clip of Rachel Maddow exposing the Republican candidate’s support of the “kill the gays” pastor, it is well worth watching
7 Animals are consistent. They have adaptations and ritualistic behaviors that enable them to survive. They breed, give birth, and in some form or another, biologically and/or behaviorally, help their young adapt to their environment. If they do not, their species will eventually go extinct. Physics is not purely random. Electrons want to satisfy conditions set in motion by protons and neutrons. Sub-atomic particles have flavors: up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom; color, spins, quarks, quirks, massless, etc. They are not purely chaotic. There is a situational sense of them which is the ‘glue’ of existence. Yet, all of this phenomena has its mal-adaptations and randomness. To the extent that these destructive behaviors are successfully repressed is to the same extent that species and matter can exist. To the extent that they are expressed the consequence of extinction and entropy are introduced. Violence may have short term advantages in nature but it seems that nature prefers avoidance, cooperation, breeding and other more successful tools for conflict resolution.
The early Greeks thought of all this as phusis from which we get our modern word ‘physics’. The point being, rationality, logic, consistency, predictability are all essential conditions of existence. They can certainly be denied but only by affirming them. Nihilism and pure destruction is not an answer to them, only a narcissistic refusal to think or acknowledge the other. Consistency demonstrates order but is not necessarily rationality and logic. It could be argued that rationality and logic recognize order as such; that it is not merely determined by order and the corresponding behavioral response of consistency. However, the appeal to reflection does not result in some sort of freedom from order only an awareness of it. In any case, if language is the determinate factor for rationality and logic it may not be as far as we think from audible, visual and behavioral communication we see in animals and plants and the constraints and interrelations we see in matter. Since we are the only ones that can insist on an essential difference there is always the anthropomorphic exception to the argument for an essential difference in order and consistency and rationality and logic.
8 The Free Market: Capitalism and Socialism – Part 1
The Free Market: Capitalism and Socialism – Part 2
9 In Adam Smith’s most famous work, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” he devotes over 100 pages to banking regulations. Of those who live “by profit” he states:
His employers constitute the third order, that of those who live by profit. It is the stock that is employed for the sake of profit, which puts into motion the greater part of the useful labour of every society. The plans and projects of the employers of stock regulate and direct all the most important operations of labour, and profit is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society as that of the other two. 1.11.264
10 Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School and Regulation
Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School
Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School and the Problem of Suffering
Theoria and Austrian Economics [from what I can see]