The Right Wing Rationale VI: The only thing we have to fear...is our own thoughts.

A line of thought can be followed from Augustine’s Confessions through Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies on to Wagner’s Parsifal and ultimately Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Ironically, it would be wrong to look for the roots of anti-Semitism in Augustine per se. In fact, if anything, Augustine can be seen as a church philosopher who reintroduced the Old Testament God into Christian thought. The resultant tendency within Christianity is a certain mean spiritedness that fifteen hundred years later the nascent U.S. conservative movement would evoke in such utterances as Barry Goldwater’s “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” We are, after all, fighting the Devil. It is just possible that Marx was mistaken when he characterized religion as “the opium of the people”. In its most extreme manifestations, far from having a sedative effect, religion has launched one bloody crusade after another. It may be more accurate to lay any manifestation of drug-induced behavior at capitalism’s door. The right wing seems to find in globalized capitalism a kind of thorazine for the masses. Characterized as essentially schizophrenic by the U.S. right wing, Islamic fundamentalists and revanchist communist leaders in former Soviet states alike are being asked to take the cure at the Thorazine-dosed waters of globalized capitalism. Salman Rushdie, a poster boy for the Islamic bashers, (he was, after all, the victim of a fatwa placed upon him by the Ayatollah Khomeni), looking plump, shiny and affluent as a result of the rewards heaped upon him for his “martyrdom,” told Bill Moyers on PBS television that Islam needed to “modernize.” Mr. Moyers neglected to ask Rushdie what he thought of the U.S. president’s having resorted to a regimen of medieval torture and abnegation of both the Geneva Convention and a right of habeus corpus that goes back to the year 1215 in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Another of the right wing poster boys, in this case, Zbigniew Brzezinski, when asked during an interview on C-Span to comment on the brutality of the regimes that have cropped up in various post-Soviet states, including his own Poland, laughingly concluded that politics in those countries was irrelevant, since they are now rolling in “money, money, money,” and that’s all that really counts. Telegraphing his own deep roots in medieval tradition, Zbigniew caught himself referring to Poland’s “peasantry,” then paused and said, “perhaps I should say ‘farmers’.” In order to truly understand the right wing rationale one must never lose sight of its roots in a tradition of Holy War that, as the example of Augustine makes clear, goes back to the very origins of what historians once unabashedly referred to as the Dark Ages. Without a demon to fight, perhaps it would be more direct to assert without the Devil to fight, the right wing has no driving force. Over the long course of history the devil has worn many disguises—Muslim hordes, Jews, Freemasons, free thinkers, communists, abortionists—but most menacing of all is the devil that lurks within each of us. In Book 33 of the Confessions, Augustine worries that "whenever it happens that I am more moved by the singing than by the thing that is sung, I admit that I have grievously sinned, and then I should wish rather to have not heard the singing".