Armageddon Soon?

Comment by Larry Ross, October 29, 2004

In the following article Jan provides some excellent analysis of the beliefs, and the extent of the power and threat of American fundamentalists and rapture believers. She was raised in this environment and “know it at a cellular level, and I never underestimate it’s potency”.

Also, her parallels between Bush and Putin are insightful. Both men refuse to accept any objective truths that contradict what they want people to believe about Beslan and Iraq. They do not want their own agenda and power to be challenged.

However there are additional powerful forces in the US that work with the Conservative Christian Right, Israeli beliefs and power, American Fundamentalists and Rapturists, mentioned by Jan.

These forces are not based on lunatic religious beliefs, but rationally-based on the profits, power and prestige that draw people into the 'military - industrial - political - academic - corporate - media' complex. This is a hugely powerful force. Although it is rationally-based, it is blind to the trends and disastrous consequences of it's own behaviour or how it is used to implement the lunatic religious agenda.

These twin US forces, the blindly rational joined with the irrationally religious, control an earth-destroying nuclear arsenal. They are linked to other big nuclear arsenals in Britain and Israel. Individually or together, they can set off a nuclear disaster that could destroy life on earth many times over, by "accident, miscalculation or act of madness" as Kennedy warned to the UN in 1961. Similar warnings by many famous people both before and after 1961 have been ignored. Also, it has been demonstrated by many near misses and triggering incidents that the world could have been plunged into instant disaster. Yet, mysteriously, 'business as usual' goes on. The US and Russia pretend the threats are minor and they keep them in place. Thousands of nuclear missiles are poised to strike both nations but there is no comment and no change. That helps teach or condition most people not to be concerned about the threats to their own or children’s future. They get accustomed to living with the possibility of instant global death. As with the Iraq war, they have found protest has not worked, so people don't bother any more. 100,000 Iraqis, mainly women and children, have been killed by Bush and Blair's continuing and relentless illegal bombing according to a Lancet Survey. (Radio NZ Oct 29, 2004) Very few demonstrate or even care about this barbarity. Media headlining teaches them that things like Joseph Lomo's liver is more important. Bush claims the bombing will increase.

In spite of the demonstrable magnitude and immediacy of these annihilation threats, they are generally ignored by the media. They are not discussed by most people who themselves may be embedded in the complex of forces and less able to see them objectively, or take any remedial action. Also, the sheer hugeness of the twin forces, tends to put people into 'denial - nothing I can do - what will be, will be - business as usual - they know best' attitudes. Couple that with the varying and sometimes extreme pressures of a person's normal life such as mortgage, job, career, deadlines, responsibilities, projects and interests, family etc, etc. Also, the few that express awareness and opposition to these threats are treated as 'suspect' as 'going against conventional wisdom' as 'potentially subversive' as possibly 'serving the enemy'. It is the same in Christchurch New Zealand as in “Anytown” USA. The media here tend to ignore or suppress dissenting views while headlining trivia. They editorially express support for Bush's barbarous wars based on lies in spite of easily accessible facts to the contrary. Like the book "1984" few people get to know about the dissenting views. People are kept in a ‘bubble or cocoon’ of deceit. They are relentlessly conditioned by the authority apparatus, supported by the media, that the enemy is whoever they say it is - whether it be communists, terrorists or other. "You are either with us or against us" is part of the Bush intimidating and conditioning formula that works well, inhibits questioning and dissent, and silences most potential opposition. It makes the killing of 100,000 women and children in Iraq excused by Bush as "collateral damage" a routine and acceptable background fact.

This analysis may help explain why the opposition is not stronger.

Although President Bush of the USA is the high priest of these destructive forces, the best dissenting material still comes from people and organizations in the US. I believe we have to stay engaged and help them. Bush may take further steps to suppress dissent in the name of "freedom and democracy" and increase the volume of propaganda and lies..

As a rationalist, I do not agree with Jan's belief in "the ongoing Divine Plan" or "God's perfect will" or his "working disciples". However I thank Jan for illuminating this subject so well and agree with her that we must stand together "as strong pillars" and continue our work for human survival, for a sustainable and just global society, for real democracy, and for real freedom from hunger, illiteracy, disease and oppression and nuclear threats.

 Larry Ross

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THIS MOMENT

 

We are moving toward a key fiery moment, and one that carries within it the potential for conflagration. 
As I see them, the key issues are:

 Little Men and Power at All Cost

You will add you own realisations here, but the two \'little men\' of the moment are Bush and Putin. 
Small physically and with very different personalities, they have highly significant features in common:

-  They rule using fear

A classic example of this type of fear tactic can be seen in Dick Cheney's campaign speech in Iowa last week.  "It is absolutely essential," he declared, "that.. We make the right choice because, if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again" - implying that a vote for John Kerry would make another terrorist attack on the US more likely.  (John Edwards' response: "What he said was meant to scare voters, period.  It was way over the top and, I think, un-American.")

-  They use the threat of international terrorism as a political ploy to increase their own power, to turn public attention away from crucial local and global issues which demand to be addressed, and to serve their own ends. 

Bush did this with 9/11, Putin has just done this with Beslan.  It becomes very clear that by attempting to paint the Beslan massacre as 'international terrorism' (even though those in the gymnasium report seeing no-one who looked Arab, and are clear that the demands made by the hijackers were specifically that Russia withdraw its 300,000 troops from Chechnya and grant Chechnya the independence it has been very actively seeking since 1991) Putin hopes to achieve three things - international sympathy, diversion from the real issues around Chechnya, an excuse to tighten the screws and take far more power for himself. 

Yes, the Beslan massacre was terrible, and many children died.  But Amnesty International calculates that 200,000 Chechens have been killed by Russian soldiers, including 35,000 children.  Another 40,000 children have been seriously injured, 32,000 have lost at least one parent and 6,500 have been orphaned.  Does Putin see the irony when he refuses to talk 'with such beasts'?  Chechnya has a legitimately elected president in hiding and its current president (Kremlin backed and there because Putin made sure there was no real opposition to him at the polls) follows a Putin appointee who was assassinated. 

Now Putin is attempting to take total power in Russia itself, declaring that elected representation will be replaced by appointees.  And it is not only Putin tightening the screws.  Bush is making sure that the Patriot Act quietly, effectively and increasingly does away with US rights and freedoms. Both men represent an exclusivist, intolerant 'Right' - Bush, for all his bluster, acting out a scary Christian Right scenario, Putin trying to make people forget that he is a KGB man to the core.

-  They are both cunning, self-serving and rarely become the 'fall guy'.  Putin was quick to place the entire blame for the Beslan massacre onto 'international terrorists'.  He refused to take any responsibility for the fact that his absolute refusal even to consider independence for Chechnya was the catalyst for the hostage-taking or that poor training meant that full frontal attack was the only method the army had of dealing with the crisis.  Bush has managed to sidestep any responsibility for choices made that led to a weakened US economy, the Iraq war, to Abu Ghraib etc.  (Even Rumsfeld, when pushed to take responsibility for prisoner abuse, was to say, "How the hell am I expected to know what goes on in the middle of the night half a world away!")

 

The Agenda of the American Christian Right

The twelve Left Behind 'novels' by American fundamentalists Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins spell out the 'end time' agenda.  A necessary conflagration in the Middle East, Rapture, Armageddon etc.  And that agenda, at least in mindset and outline, is bought into by not only Bush but by many of his key underlings.  It is of huge concern that American Liberals do not take this mindset seriously, claiming that it represents a small lunatic fringe.  They see America as basically liberal, but 'liberals' in fact occupy academic 'ghettos' on the Eastern and Western seaboards.  Go anywhere outside the main cities and small town Americans are focused on themselves or on a fundamentalist agenda - acquired for millions (many of them non-Christians or mainstream Christians) by reading the Left Behind books.  By July 2002 sales of the first book alone, Left Behind, had topped 7 million, and there is a separate series written specifically about the children and for children!!  In the Left Behind books the Antichrist is the UN, specifically its Secretary General. In that context I wonder why Bush's refusal to have the UN involved in any way in Iraq?

These same 'novels' are the highest selling books of all time, avidly read as truth not only in America but around the world (including NZ).  Nutty they may be, incredibly dangerous and influential politically at this moment they without doubt are.  Rapturist theology has produced unlikely bedfellows - the conservative Christian Right and Israel - each currently using the other to fulfil its own agenda; Israel supported by the US to stockpile nuclear 'weapons of mass destruction', the US using Israel's belligerence for its own 'end-time' ends.  It is a theology which seeks to push the world to the end-time, has no sense of long-term future for 'believers', so pays no attention to environment, resources, improvement of international relations, or responsible long-term economic policy.  All of this is clearly in evidence in Bush's term in office.

It is impossible to understand political events and attitudes in this moment if we do not have some grasp of the fundamentalist and the apocalyptic mindset.  That is a mindset I was born into and know at a cellular level, and I never underestimate its potency!

 

The Media

There are signs that the worm is turning, and that many media outlets, no longer politically compliant, are finding their own voice.  This is particularly true of movie makers who, in a quest for balance and truth, are beginning to present another perspective.  Films to watch out for:

The Corporation

The Fog of War - a fascinating interview with Robert McNamara

The Hamburg Cell - a look at 9/11 from the pilots' perspective

Control Room - The Iraq War and Al Jazeera

Brothers and Others - the impact of 9/11 on US Muslims

On Power, Dissent and Racism - An interview with Noam Chomsky

 

Leadership

Will these 'little men' remain in power?

Both of them are determined that they will (we can see the same pugnacious attitude reflected in John Banks and the Auckland mayoral race).  Some Russian parliamentarians are daring to speak out.  Bush by last week had moved 11% ahead in the polls.  He will win the election against a Democrat candidate who has simply failed to this point to engage the American people, failed to deliver a powerful and cogent policy, failed to inspire the confidence of the masses, failed to look like a 'commander in chief'.  What is needed is a candidate with the really fearless penetrating Ray 1 mind.  Kerry's Ray 3 mind can make no headway. (It is very likely that Bush had his toughest Democrat opponent, Howard Dean, 'killed' by the media early on in the primaries). 

 
America and the world at large has lessons to learn around leadership, integrity, and the ongoing Divine Plan which the next four years will bring to the fore in a dramatic way.  Our call at this time, as working disciples, is to stand as steady as we possibly can and to call in God's perfect Will for this crucial moment.  There is much to be worked through globally in a very short time frame.  We simply need to call in the potent catalysts for that 'working through', and then to stand as strong pillars.

 
Jan