Re: France and some other European countries, like some posters to this board, refuse to see the on going world wide war between modernist and reactionary forces. It appears they will continue to try not to see it until it appears on the Champs Elysee. And that's a shame because Paris is such a pretty town.
I'm afraid that civil warfare between "modernist and reactionary forces" will sooner break out in the US --and that's another shame because America was such a great beacon of freedom....
mediamonitors.net
Excerpt:
What was missing from the conversation, edited out perhaps, was any effort to identify any corresponding imbalance in Western philosophy and Christian and Jewish theology and practice. In its place was a concerted effort to ignore and obscure even the most obvious of the many failings and flaws that bedevil so-called Western modernity from within.
Referring to September 11th, Moyers asked, "Why didn't this attack come from Christian fundamentalists? Why didn't it come from orthodox Jews?" One of the Jewish conferees had a ready answer. "First of all, Christian fundamentalists, whether you believe them or not, have come to terms with modernity. They are happy to live in the United States, which has embraced modernity. They don't like certain aspects of the culture, but they don't believe that the best thing to do for their version of the kingdom of God is to destroy modernity," replied David Aikman.
What could be further from the truth? Many Christian fundamentalists believe precisely that the best thing to do for their version of the kingdom of God is to destroy modernity. As yet another Texan, the late Grace Halsell, who, like Moyers, worked in the Johnson White House, pointed out in Forcing God's Hand: Why Millions Pray for a Quick Rapture and the Destruction of Planet Earth, more than 30 million Christian Zionists across the United States fervently hope and pray that, in their lifetimes, the modern world will be destroyed in a final battle, Armageddon, the conflict between good and evil at the end of the world. Moreover, many of them work industriously toward that goal, putting their efforts and their money behind Israeli plans for the creation of a greater Israel. In what Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal called "the strange marriage of convenience between the U.S. Christian Right and Israel," U.S. Christian Zionists are providing political and financial support for the return of American Jews to Israel and the hundreds of still growing Jewish-only settlements established on illegally occupied Palestinian lands. Such illegal settlements are widely acknowledged to be the greatest obstacle to peace in the Holy Land. U.S. Christian Zionists support the illegal settlements in the fervent belief that their actions will hasten Armageddon, the end of the modern world, and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. On July 9, a group of 400 American and Canadian Jews immigrating to Israel arrived in Tel Aviv on an El Al charter flight from New York. Each of the new Israeli settlers was supported by a grant of $5,000 from American evangelical Christians and each received additional funds through the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a group with which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, among other prominent U.S. political figures, is associated.
Why did Moyers let Aikman's glib falsehood pass unchallenged? Could he have failed to take note of Christian Zionism and its proponents' alarming influence in American politics and foreign policy? Hardly, given that North Texas, where Moyers grew up, is the sentimental home of the socially and politically influential Christian doomsday cult. Its founder, an alcoholic Confederate Civil War veteran named Cyrus Schofield who wrote his own thoughts into the margins of what has come to be known as the Schofield Reference Bible, became the pastor of Dallas' First Congregational Church in 1882. His Armageddon theology, also known as Dispensationalism, is now taught in some 200 Bible colleges, seminaries, and institutes across the USA, including the large and influential Dallas Theological Seminary, where Hal Lindsey studied. Lindsey, author of the 1974 best-seller, The Late Great Planet Earth, which sold over 28 million copies and was made into a documentary film narrated by Orson Welles, popularized Armageddon theology and reshaped it in so-called modern Western consciousness into an apocalyptic nuclear third world war scenario that takes place in the Middle East. Today, three-fourths of those who attend the National Religious Broadcasters annual convention believe in Armageddon theology, and "fast-paced end-time thrillers" are big sellers in bookstores across the U.S.
[...]
At the same time, Christian Zionism's primitive, dark, and violent theological doctrines, as dogmatically held and arguably at least as socially and politically influential as any of the supposedly evil doctrines that some Western critics are wont to see in Islam, are thriving in a Western economic, social, and political environment characterized by decades of unparalleled economic success, technological advancement, social progress, and triumphant political and cultural hegemony. Following the Vietnam War, American fundamentalists, including the Rev. Jerry Falwell, looked for inspiration to Israel's victories over its Arab neighbors. In the decades since America's ignominious defeat in Vietnam, conservative ideologues beguiled by Christian Zionism's violent theology have increasingly found fulfillment and taken a vicarious but nonetheless pathological pleasure in Israel's war against Palestinian civilians and its other Arab neighbors. The new "war on terrorism" provides for more immediate and direct expressions of Christian Zionism's animosity toward any and all who stand between militant Christian fundamentalists and their dreams of and desire for rapture, heavenly release, on a schedule of their own making.
[snip]
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