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December 14, 2004
Republican Hate Crimes
Pat Buchanan and Reverend Jerry Falwell both joined FOX News anchors in citing minor controversies involving holiday displays to sound the alarm that Christmas is under "attack" from "secular progressives." Buchanan, an MSNBC analyst and former Republican presidential candidate, claimed in his December 13 nationally syndicated column: "What we are witnessing here are hate crimes against Christianity."
What's truly under attack in this country is the Democratic Party, the separation of church and state, and every other religion. Think about it... how many times a day do you hear a pundit, newscaster, or rightwing 'author' proclaim that 'liberals'
are anti-Christian, treasonous, immoral, sinful...in short, guilty of everything that the Holier-than-Thous loudly proclaim is 'wrong with this country.'
It's ALL our fault, folks... everything that's wrong in this country in their eyes, is our fault. WE are the problem, you see... THEY are the solution. Create a straw man, divide and conquer. It's a very simple, ancient equation, but always effective.
See how well it's been used in very recent history to turn a population against the very same straw man:
"The national government will maintain and defend the foundations on which the power of our nation rests. It will offer strong protection to Christianity as the very basis of our collective morality. Today Christians stand at the head of our country. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press -- in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of LIBERAL excess during the past years." -- Adolph Hitler; Taken from The Speeches of Adolph Hitler, 1922-1939, Vol. 1, Michael Hakeem, Ph.D. (London, Oxford University Press, 1942), pp. 871-872.
As a strategy, it's brilliant. Always works. Through the judicious use of fear and creation of a siege mentality, you can very easily turn a nation on itself, like a rabid animal attacking its own body, until its weakened, destroyed, its will broken. Then it's so simple to control, to rape and pillage.
We are allowing them to frame the debate, and as long as we do that, we will always lose. The single most important thing to remember is never, never attack christianity... it plays right into their hands. We MUST talk/address this for what it is -- an attack on Judaism, Islam, and even mainstream Christianity by a small group of hateful, vicious fundamentalists -- the neo-fascist American Taliban.
<link> http://claudialong.com/blog/2004/12/14/republican_hate_crimes.html