Afghanistan update: American incompetence, cruelty and arrogance is on display

Shoaib Walizada, who interpreted for the U.S. Army for four years, was among those turned down. “I get phone calls from the Taliban saying, ‘We will kill you’ — they know who I am and that I worked for the Americans,” he said.

Once the US is gone, there is going to be a bloodbath.  The New York Times writes:

KABUL, Afghanistan — It was an offhand comment, blurted out in frustration. It may have destroyed Shoaib Walizada’s chances of earning a cherished visa to the United States.

Mr. Walizada, who interpreted for the U.S. Army for four years until 2013, said that he had complained one day, using profanity, that his assigned combat vest was too small. When the episode came to light later that year, Mr. Walizada’s preliminary approval for a visa was revoked for “unprofessional conduct.”

Mr. Walizada, 31, is among thousands of Afghans once employed by the U.S. government, many as interpreters, whose applications for a Special Immigrant Visa, or S.I.V., through a State Department program, have been denied.

“I get phone calls from the Taliban saying, ‘We will kill you’ — they know who I am and that I worked for the Americans,” Mr. Walizada said. He has delayed marriage because he does not want to put a wife at risk, he said, and he has moved from house to house for safety.

The slightest blemish during years of otherwise stellar service can torpedo a visa application and negate glowing letters of recommendation from American commanders. In the last three months of 2020 alone, State Department statistics show, 1,646 Afghans were denied one of the special visas, which are issued to applicants satisfying demanding requirements and rigorous background checks even though interpreters would already have passed security screenings.  

Among reasons cited for denial were the failure to prove the required length of service, insufficient documentation, failure to establish “faithful and valuable service” and “derogatory information.” (emphasis added)

About 18,000 Afghans have applied for the visa they need to get out of the country. They now live in fear of being hunted down and slaughtered by the Taliban. Meanwhile, the US blithers, dithers, fumbles, stumbles and bumbles around at its arrogant, incompetent leisure. The now-inevitable tragedy just comes closer and closer.

A rot of arrogance, incompetence and mean spiritedness infests US military and State Department mindsets and operations. Apparently, fixing this is beyond the capacity of Biden and his administration. The US is projected to be fully withdrawn by mid-July. 

The fascist GOP has no interest in fixing things like this. Their priority is breaking things and establishing a fascist state, not fixing what is broken. The moral rot and the evil in American policy and operations is clear to see for anyone with the moral courage to actually look. So, a bloodbath it will be. 

Radical right accelerationist ideology: hell-bent on taking democracy down and replacing it with utopia

Prepping for doomsday, which is right now, not next week, month or year 

In my humble opinion, the election of the last president, a fascist, crook, traitor and liar, and his 1/6 coup attempt finally and fully opened Pandora’s box. The evil it and the complicit fascist GOP (FGOP) unleashed is still gushing out. The Democratic Party remains paralyzed, clueless and stymied by staunch FGOP, non-compromise opposition to any Democratic defense of democracy or the rule of law. The New York Times writes:

For QAnon it is “The Storm,” when mass violence will topple the elite cabal of pedophiles who they imagine to be running the government. White-power groups in the United States have long promised a catastrophic race war. And in Germany and Austria, neo-Nazis herald an imagined putsch on “Day X” — when the democratic order collapses and they take over.

All are examples of “accelerationist” ideologies, which promise a moment when the institutions of government, society and the economy will be wiped out in a wave of catastrophic violence, clearing the way for a utopia that will supposedly follow.

Accelerationism has long been a feature of white-power groups and other far-right militias. But now, experts say, accelerationist thinking is proliferating in ways that could threaten not just public safety, but the stability of democracy itself.

“In many ways we can see how Jan. 6 was a kind of loosely formed coalition around this idea of accelerationism,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, the director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, said of the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building last January.  

Mainstream leaders, she believes, are failing to heed the risk that coalition could pose. “My fear is that we are, as a country, starting to treat that like a one-time fluke rather than as a potential turning point.”

“I have thought a lot about the parallels with the Weimar Republic,” the fragile period of democracy in Germany whose collapse allowed the Nazis to take power, she said. It was marked by a series of attacks, failed coups and other efforts to undermine democracy. And even though actions like Hitler’s beer-hall putsch failed, German democracy was ultimately not strong enough to withstand the chaos.
“For me, the parallel is that I think a lot of people want to see Jan. 6 as the end of something,” she said. “I think we have to consider the possibility that this was the beginning of something.” 

Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists have long spoken of Day X — a moment of crisis, both feared and longed for, when Germany’s social order would collapse, requiring committed far-right extremists, in their telling, to save the nation.

The NYT goes on to write that preparing for Day X and precipitating it is increasingly blurred. One expert on violence, democracy and civil society in Germany points out that accelerationism sanctifies violence. The radical right’s mythic days of reckoning are a call to action and an excuse for terrorism.
The expert asserts that “When Day X doesn’t come and people get frustrated, they might start plotting terrorist attacks, something to trigger Day X or just to act.”

Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago historian and one of the foremost experts on the white-power movement in the United States asserts that one must understand that this kind of apocalyptic fantasy for believers is that a violent overthrow of democracy like Day X is not the thing what begins the apocalypse. It is what ends the apocalypse. Most of these radical right crackpots hate democracy and pluralism, and for some, maybe even secularism.

Belew comments that “all of this activism is already in a state of encounter with the end of the world.” The fear and hate-driven radicals point to immigration, intermarriage and falling birthrates as leading to a time when countries like the United States will no longer be majority white. She asserts that “for people in this ideology, that’s already the end of the world. That sense of emergency is really important to understand, because I think without that, the degree of — both the degree of fear and the degree of violence don’t make a lot of sense.”

The NYT goes on:

The bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 168 people, including 19 children, was carried out by far-right militants who took inspiration from “The Turner Diaries,” a 1978 novel that depicts a violent revolution in the United States, followed by a mass genocide of nonwhite people. And in 2015, a white supremacist gunman cited the desire to start a “race war” as his reason for killing nine Black people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. (emphasis added)

Americans who still believe in democracy and the rule of law, need to understand this threat. There are tens of millions of Americans and Europeans who believe the radical right and fascist lies and share the fears of White Supremacists, racists and bigots throughout the world. It's not clear to me how far this toxic rot and fear has settled into democratic societies and governments in Canada, Australia and elsewhere. 

I blame the ex-president and the FGOP for a significant slice of the blame for this toxic moral rot and bigotry-racism, maybe ~35% worldwide and ~80% in the US. The US has fallen as a moral force in defense of democracy, the rule of law and truth. Biden has yet to be able to restore US influence and restraint on radical right extremism. Maybe he won't be able to do that in his four years in office, given the all-out FGOP opposition and dissent in his own party he has to try to deal with.

Or is that assessment of culpability by the US federal government, and toxic two-party politics, over the top hyperbole, unjustifiable and/or not supported by facts and/or sound reasoning?

Chapter review: The Uses and Abuses of History

Drat! I thought this was going to be a short review. Crud, foiled again. Darn those Christian nationalists! -- Germaine, 2021

Context

Chapter 6, The Uses and Abuses of History, is in investigative journalist Katherine Stewart’s 2019 book, The Power Worshippers: The Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Stewart spend 10 years in a deep dive into the powerful American Christian nationalism (CN) political movement. CN is now a dead-serious, anti-democratic global movement to Christianize and save the entire planet from whatever CN believes it needs to be saved from. 

In my mind, this book describes what increasingly looks to me like a nascent, early, form of some maybe milder variant of the utter brutality of totalitarianism that Hannah Arendt described in her 1951 masterpiece of human savagery, mass murder and brutal oppression, The Origins of Totalitarianism. 

It is still early days for this new form of oppression, or righteous enlightenment if that is how one wants to see it. CN ideology-dogma is cloaked in the righteousness and infinite love of the its vision of God. It is hard to tell what this ravenous (or loving) beast is going to evolve into.  

I feel no affinity or sympathy for what CN is and how it does its work. It scares the hell out of me because it is based on endless lies, deceit, emotional manipulation and motivated reasoning. The CN political and religious movement epitomizes moral cowardice because it relies on ruthless dark free speech to (i) accumulate power and wealth for people at the top, and (ii) enforce God's strict laws and morals on all of the rest of us. 

The Museum of the Bible - fabricating history

Stewart centers chapter 6 around a powerful CN propaganda factory and training site called the Museum of the Bible. She discusses the backers, thinkers and lies-based propaganda tactics that the museum is based on. It is not a real museum because it is based on a fabricated CN version of history. This CN operations site claims to be nonsectarian, but it is purely Christian sectarian. The most influential people behind CN operate there at least intermittently. Wealthy donors like the DeVos family, heirs to the Amway fortune, and David Green, founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby Stores[1], and his family (Steven Green, president of Hobby Lobby) are anti-democratic, autocratic and aggressive about spreading the CN's lies about history, especially American history. 

As usual for CN operations, this political operation gets religious tax privileges to subsidize the spread of its lies and slanders throughout the US and rest of the world. The CN leadership are hard core globalists and dead serious about converting the entire planet to belief in their false version of history and Christianity.

David Barton: the creator-in-chief and proselytizer-in-chief of CN’s fake history

David Barton rose from a math teacher and religious school administrator in the small town of Aledo in Texas to one of the top influencers and propagandists in the CN movement. He created TV ads and other materials that were and still are loaded with lies and out of context distortions of various truths. The religious right has fallen for all of it. Barton produced a film was shown at churches that depicted the Founding Fathers as Christian nationalists who founded a Christian nation based on Barton’s version of history. Like Barton’s other productions, it was a pack of lies and distortions. Nonetheless, that film was what snagged the Green family, with their power and wealth, and hauled them into the CN movement. 

Barton had refashioned and sold himself to the religious far right as a “historian” of “America’s Christian Founding.” Over time, Barton’s writings came to be scrutinized by real historians who debunked Barton's version of history and all the lies it was and still is based on. But that didn't matter for far right Christians. They and the Green family loved it and bought it all. The Green family hired Barton to produce ads that lie about America founded as a Christian nation. Stewart writes:

Like the bulk of David Barton’s own work, the Hobby Lobby ad was a mash-up of quotes wrenched out of context and dragooned into service of the Christian Nation myth. Rob Boston, senior advisor at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, .... posted a lengthy rebuttal .... remarking that it would “take a small book to dissect” and catalog all the distortions and calling it “an insult to the intelligence of its readers.” 

The error in the detail there was to provide cover for the great lie at the center of Christian nationalism. What David Bartion and the leaders of the Hobby Lobby corporation don’t want you to know is that America’s founders explicitly and proudly the world’s first secular republic. It seemed the point of the Hobby Lobby ad was not to celebrate America’s history but to counterfeit it. (emphasis added)

The Green family went on to set up a tax privileged 501(c)(3) nonprofit and raise about $500 million for the Museum of the Bible, which was intended “to bring to life the living word of God, to tell its compelling story of preservation [whatever that means -- White Supremacy?], and to inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible.” 

Some of Barton’s and CN’s escapades

To shorten this long, sordid story, here are some highlights of the lies and distortions that chapter 6 is loaded with.

Barton’s one-way wall of separation: According to Barton, the first Amendment was “never intended to separate Christian principles from government.” Instead the wall of separation of church and state “was originally introduced as, and understood to be, a one-directional wall protecting the church from the government.” None of Barton’s assertions here are true. All are factually false. Barton and CN clearly want the government (1) to be powerless over what they want to do, and (2) to be powerless to prevent CN from turning government into a Christian theocracy and forcing their faux religion on all of us.

Barton’s fans: Mr. Barton has some enthusiastic fans, including the Green family, the DeVos family Newt Gingrich Mike Huckabee and etc. The chapter mentions a slew of such fine folks. Their enthusiasm is palpable. For example, Huckabee once said “I almost wish there would be a simultaneous telecast, and all Americans would be forced -- forced at gunpoint no less -- to listen to every David Barton message.” That’s real enthusiasm! 

Fact-checking blows up: By 2000, real historians were fact-checking Barton’s version of history and publishing works showing how false it was. Fact-checking didn't work. Instead, it backfired. Stewart writes:

Yet the adverse coverage did little to stop the Barton juggernaut. If anything, it affirmed his authenticity in the eyes of his followers. .... Barton’s demagoguery met with immediate scrutiny. According to National Public Radio, “We looked up every citation said was from the Bible but not one of them checked out. The History News Network soon named [Barton's 2012 book] The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson ‘the least credible history book in print.’ .... At the root of all the controversies over Barton’s work, one inevitably finds the same fundamental falsification of American history. Christian nationalism, by its nature, must deny the extraordinary achievement of America‘s founders in creating the world’s first secular republic and replace it with the kind of shabby religious-nationalist mythology that characterizes reactionary movements around the world. .... But it makes a certain kind of sense: you have to tell lots of little lies to promote one big lie.

But none of that mattered. Barton’s pseudo-history is too valuable to the Christian nationalist machine to let facts and scholarship get in the way, and his standing with his own audience has continued to soar. 

The situation with Barton’s The Jefferson Lies book got to be so nutty that his publisher decided to stop printing and distributing the book. That’s real crackpottery in action.

Secrecy is de rigueur: The CN movement likes to operate as quietly as possible, for obvious reasons. In 2004 the GOP hired Barton to help Bush and other Republicans to win elected offices. Barton flogged the evangelical community relentlessly for votes. Stewart writes: “His efforts, he told the online magazine Beliefnet, were ‘below the radar . . . We worked our tails off to stay out of the news.’ The effort proved critical in clinching George W. Bush’s narrow win over John Kerry.”

Barton on voting and civic duty: Stewarts writes: “President Donald Trump, he has said, is running on a ‘CEO model.’ Christians who fail to support the Trump presidency are ‘taking a very selfish view of what we do with voting. It’s not your vote, it’s God’s vote,’ says Barton. .... he paired up with evangelists Lance Wallnau, who wrote a book comparing Trump to king Cyrus, and Andrew Wommack, who has said opposition to Trump is ‘demonic deception’ and ‘one of the signs of the End Times.’”

Clearly, a citizens civic duty (a/k/a one’s duty God) is to vote for who CN leadership tells people to vote for and what their duty is after voting, i.e., support who the CN told them to vote for.

Yanking God out of public schools caused SAT scores to drop: According to Barton, in 1987 God told him to look up the date when the Supreme Court ruled against school-sponsored prayer and the trend in SAT scores before and after that date. The data indicates that in 1963 SAT scores stopped increasing and began a sharp decline. That was right after (1) the 1962 Supreme Court decision in Engel v. Vitale where, as Stewart put it, the court “yanked God out of America's classrooms,” and (2) a 1963 Supreme Court decision that school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools was unconstitutional. 

As we all know, correlation does not necessarily mean there is causation. But that inconvenient truth does not faze CN or Barton. Barton simply ignored massive changes in 1963 that expanded school systems to reach previously disadvantaged children. That correlated with, probably at least partly caused, increased numbers of test takers and decreased the average SAT scores. Barton also ignored the inconvenient fact that by the time of the Engel v. Vitale decision, most public schools had already kicked God out of the classrooms. 

Conclusion

Chapter 6 goes on and on like this, e.g., Barton calls the Bible “the document that is the true founding document of America” and characterizes the CN mission as one to “eradicate Bible poverty” by evangelizing “unreached people groups.” This review doesn't even include a description of what CN is doing to public school textbooks nationwide and how it has penetrated the US military and is spreading their poison and lies there with official military support. This chapter is just as much fun as a barrel of enraged monkeys (snakes?), because something about like that is what it describes.

One last thought, CN and Barton have lofty goals and they are patient, willing to work as long as they live. They acknowledge that they, or at least the CN ideology and dogma, are in this war forever.

Footnote: 

1. The Green family was the plaintiffs in an important religious Supreme Court decision in the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. dispute. In that case, the five CN judges on the court decided that secular business corporations can possess religious belief systems and have the right to exert their freedom of conscience. According to Stewart, “Even if that means refusing to comply with federal law regarding the provision of comprehensive health insurance to female employees.” As is common for the CN crowd, the Green family is preoccupied with sex and the sex lives of everyone around them. They demand that people they can control adhere to their beliefs about contraception and abortion as much as they can force their power on others. Obviously, they want the power to force their beliefs on all Americans, whether they want it or not.

We are on the eve of destruction

“Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.” -- John Locke, 1689, making a now forgotten statement of truth

Everything powerful I look at in American politics points to the rise of the rise of darkness and complacent incompetence. That is being replaced some form of kleptocratic, hateful, fascist Christian sharia. The fall of democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties is the goal among most conservatives. What most liberals what is unclear to me. The evidence of impending destruction is everywhere. So is public ignorance of the situation. Some see the seriousness of the threat, maybe 10-15% of Americans. Most do not.

In an earlier post here, I argued for the firing of Merrick Garland as a defender of indefensible partisan political power over the rule of law. I stand by that argument and repeat it. Fire Garland, right now. I also argue for the impeachment and removal of all nine justices on the US supreme court for the same reason. Impeach and remove them all, right now. Obviously, none of that has a snowball's chance in hell of becoming reality.

It appears that almost no one in either party in power in congress, the executive branch or federal courts is serious about vindicating the rule of law. Not Democrats. And absolutely not Republicans. Both stand for tyranny. Neither is fit to govern.

Questions: Is it unjustified or irrational to argue for getting rid of both the Democratic and Republican Parties as unfit to govern because they are pro-tyranny and anti-rule of law? If so, why does the rule of law for politicians, rich people and big corporations keep eroding, while the rest of us keep getting whacked? Or is just that a personal delusion?

🎜 You don't beleive, we're on the eve of destruction? 🎜

Humanity is a hot mess, if you ask me.  As Tom Cruise said in my favorite movie of all time (Born on the Fourth of July), “Everything’s falling apart.” 

Politics (with its stubborn tribalism), religion (with its pushy Christian/Islamic Nationalism), environment (with humanity’s slow systematic murdering of the planet), unchecked negative emotions (and all their ramifications/baggage), questionable morality (there’s a can-and-a-half of worms for ya), … you name it.  The world is barreling down a path of self-destruction, and at an ever-increasing speed. “It’s all falling apart.”  And I personally believe it’s irreparable.

When I think about all the dysfunction going on, it makes me wonder where we “went wrong” as a species.  And it makes me wonder if who we are today was destined to happen.  Indulge me in this thought experiment:

Suppose that Earth’s history was re-booted; a cosmic “do-over,” as in back to the primordial soup stage.  As Slimeous Erectus 😉 (a lame attempt at comedy relief) continues to develop over the eons, stage after stage (this thing, naturally evolves into that thing, that naturally evolves into that thing, etc. and etc.), into humanity as we know it today, here’s the question:

What do you predict would be that re-boot’s eventual outcome, as it relates to humanity’s status quo of today?  For example…

-Do you agree with me that humanity would have become exactly as it has become to this day?  In other words, were we, by our human nature, destined to turn out as we have?  Make your agree/disagree arguments.

-Do you think that somewhere along the line, humanity would have been able to rise above who we have become today, and learned to work with, rather than against Earth, and each other?  A Dawn of Correction situation? If yes, what do you see as the impetus for that? Give me specifics.

-Other?

How do you envision an Earth do-over panning out?

Thanks for thinking about it, posting and recommending.