Holy War on a Global Scale?

That the U. S. military was teaching its officers at the Joint Forces Staff College that it was necessary to destroy the Muslim religion, including nuking Mecca and Medina, is horrific in its utter disregard for human life and for the unrelenting chaos it would unleash in a world containing 1.4 billion Muslims. The fact that this was being taught to the officers who will comprise the next generation of military leaders evidences a military clearly out of control or conspiratorial at the highest level.

That the recommended target was not a nation or other political entity, but Muslims themselves and hence the Islamic religion, demonstrates that this is a proposal for a massive, global holy war. But how did such a proposal reach this level of advocacy in the U.S. military?

Jeff Sharlet in an article titled Christianity In the Military: Are Chaplains Becoming Increasingly Fundamentalist? on Huffington Post describes the process of biased selection and promotion by which  the military's chaplaincy has been taken over by Christian fundamentalists. The chaplaincy, which for most of its existence has been apportioned to religions and their denominations by percentage of the nation's population, is now about 80% fundamentalist. The chaplains themselves previously had a liberal university or college education along with their seminary training. Many chaplains now come from bible colleges and have limited background in world and cultural history. The chaplaincy was intended to serve the religious needs of soldiers of the various denominations. Fundamentalist chaplains view their task as converting soldiers to their religious views, indeed, Sharlet points out that they regard the military as a mission field. Sharlet recounts the experience of one chaplain who protested this Christian fundamentalist bias in the chaplaincy and was forced from the chaplaincy.

Seymour Hersh, the highly regarded New Yorker Magazine investigative reporter, in an article titled Seymour Hersh Unleashed, which covers Hersh's speech to the American University campus in Qatar, is quoted as saying "Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta." The JSOC is the Joint Services Operations Command.

Hersh also said that much of the mind set among the higher echelons of military leadership is that of the Crusades in which they are defending Christians against Muslims.

Finally, Jeff Sharlet in a Harper's Magazine article titled Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military, records, among other things, the bizarre practice of some Christian soldiers stationed near a small Afghanistan village of painting "Jesus Kill Mohamed" on the front of their Bradley Fighting Vehicles, broadcasting this taunting slogan with a bullhorn from the roof of their compound, an erstwhile public school, and then charging out into the night to shoot angry Muslims who fire at them from the windows of their homes.

In all this it should not be forgotten that G. W. Bush, when launching the war against Iraq, used the term "crusade," for which he later apologized. It has become the fashion of politicians, especially  Republicans, to convey their impolitic meaning and then apologize for it. Generally the press lets them get away with it.

It is evident that a powerful group or groups of fundamentalist Christians are intent upon taking over our government, especially its military, and using it to further the global conquest of Christianity. The dimensions of the holy war that will result are staggering, especially considering the nuclear and biological weapons now available. In my judgment the so-called "War on Terror" is but the first overt step in this process. The gravity of the situation requires that we make a vigorous effort to make this a public issue demanding thorough government investigation, transparently carried out and reported. There will be a deafening cry of an attack on religious freedom, but Christian fundamentalists have made their religious beliefs a threat to our society and through our society to the rest of the world. There is already a good deal of information available on the web and in books by Susan Jacoby, Jeff Sharlet and Anne C. Loveland.

  Newhard

Suggested reading on this topic:

Books:

The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby.

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet.

American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 1942-1993 by Anne C. Loveland.

Articles:

Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military by Jeff Sharlet published in Harper's Magazine  may be found at http://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/0082488

U.S. Military Taught Officers: 'Hiroshima' Tactics for 'Total War' on Islam, Wired Magazine May 10, 2012. This article may be found at http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/total-war-islam/all/1

The U.S. military's 'anti-Islam classes.' This is a video showing some of the slides Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley showed in his course urging the nuking of Mecca and Medina. It can be found on Al Jazeera at http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2012/05/2012512105527585215.html

Christianity in the Military: Are Chaplains Becoming Increasingly Fundamentalists? This article by Jeff Sharlet on Huffington Post may be found at

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-sharlet/christianity-in-the-milit_b_747585.html

The Job

The job has become central to much of the global unrest. Joblessness was a primary force in the Egyptian revolution. Greeks have to emigrate to find jobs. The Portuguese government has advised the jobless to do likewise. The want of jobs has caused large riots in France and England. And job creation keeps being a focus of American politics, albeit a very fuzzy ineffective one. Most importantly, the massive movements of people from poor rural areas to urban areas, creating enormous slums, is occurring because people are seeking jobs.

The global impact of joblessness may lead one to think of the job as an economic entity. But what is the job? It is more than a system for distributing the gross domestic product, radically unequal though that is. It functions heavily in providing self identity. One of the most common questions we ask of each other is, "What do you do for a living?" The job dominates a large part of our lives as we perform the duties for which we are paid. We rely on it to provide the wherewithal to accomplish whatever else is of prime importance to us. The job often positions us in society. With a job you are somebody, without it you are nobody. My father, an auto mechanic, was proud that he never "went on the dole" during the Great Depression even though on occasion, he earned less than a WPA worker on relief. When joblessness rises so do the divorce and suicide rates. Once we realize the burden we have placed on the job we can begin to appreciate its significance in contemporary society.

In capitalist societies we have left this crucial sociological element in the hands of those who have no fundamental interest in it other than to minimize the number of them to increase profit. Is there not a glaring contradiction between the fundamental necessity of jobs for humanity placed in the hands of those who see them as a liability? This is compounded by the fact that the companies that provide jobs are themselves pawns in the financial world of arbitrage and to the rumor-driven greed that can alter that company's stock value and the employment of thousands overnight. This is no foundation for as fundamental a purpose as the job is supposed to fulfill.

Work was not always in the form of a job as we now know it. The job as we understand it is a rather recent invention dating roughly from the 18^th century. In his book The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 Robert Steinfeld describes the emergence of so called "free labor" from the feudal environment in England. He is at pains to demonstrate that much of this labor was not free because of English legal restrictions on the worker. He also stresses that a contract between an employee and an employer does not constitute free labor, e.g. indentured servitude. In general things were heavily weighted in favor of the employer. They still are despite the union movement to try to balance the relationship by pitting numbers of workers against ownership wealth.

We thus have, in addition to the above noted liabilities, a system that is inherently unfair to workers. With all these liabilities, what are the remedies?

In an article by Frank Joyce titled Is It Possible To Build An Economy Without Jobs?  to be found on Alternet at

http://www.alternet.org/visions/155186/is_it_possible_to_build_an_economy_without_jobs_?page=entire, the remedy for the unfairness of the employer/employee relationship is to be found in employee owned cooperatives. The examples offered by Joyce are small to medium sized businesses, although some are international in scope. This size range indicates to me that this form of business organization may require a level of interaction not available to large organizations such Bechtel, a major infrastructure builder or an Alcoa aluminum plant. It also does not change other onerous features of the capitalist system, e.g. uncontrolled speculation.

Others, including FDR in his Four Freedoms speech, which included a freedom from want as a right and Jefferson in his desire for an America of small farmers see economic security as a necessary condition for democracy. Robert Theobald in his 1966 book titled The Guaranteed Income: Next Step in Economic Evolution? saw that democracy's requirement for an independent citizenry made economic independence a prerequisite for democracy's existence. Without this economic support the capitalist system will progressively move wealth and the power it generates into fewer and fewer hands. Plato long ago delineated this progression from democracy to oligarchy to tyranny. In the end the job, as currently understood, cannot be the economic basis for democracy.

 

In the current debate about jobs progressives should make a large issue of the requirement of democracy for an adequate  income for citizen independence. It is not a question of whether people do or do not deserve it, but whether democracy will be made viable. Along with all the other reasons for an adequate distribution of the gross domestic product, e.g. crime reduction, family wellbeing, adequate food, etc., the viability of our democracy should figure importantly in a progressive push for a guaranteed citizen income. We need to articulate a well developed plan and then push it. The political right senses this need, which is why they have tried to make "entitlement" a dirty word and why, at root, they are enemies of democracy.

 

Bob Newhard