Onward Christian Soldiers
From the introduction of Edward Abbey’s Good News:
“As each solitary human sought to preserve his own integrity, so each nation strove to ensure its survival at the expense of all others. The fragile webs of a planetary economy frayed apart in an ever-intensifying struggle for the resources to support a worldwide industrial system. One breakdown in a small Mideastern nation led to massive dislocations, anger and panic in great nations thousands of miles away. War became continuous, limited in scale but never ceasing, breaking out in a new locality as it subsided into chaos and civil war in another.”
Good News was published in 1980.
And in 2006, after everything we’ve already seen, from the 1967 War to the present conflict in Iraq, we now have Christian Zionists calling for the United States to attack Iran, since that’s supposedly a necessary precondition for Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.
Sound strangely reminiscent? A nation full of fanatics lusts for confrontation with other nations based on bizarre racial and religious motives and the desire to establish some sort of monoculture of the cleansed?
And it’s all achieved, again, through the propagandizing of the citizenry with “news” of eminent attacks, threats and danger that never materializes.
What’s the difference between a swastika and a cross?