I saw Jesus Camp. I really don't know what to say about it, other than things that have already been said. My mother tuned out the political implications of what she called "child abuse." Heidi Ewing and Rachael Grady so masterfully diagnosed the mechanics of the cancer that has stricken America. It is, for me, as though America was a close relative who is dying of some terminal disease, Huntington's. No longer able to control its actions, overcome by madness and failing historical memory, few can help it. Both parties take the outwardly fascist faction of the Republican Krieg Machina to bed, at our Constitution's peril. I implore all Americans capable of rational thought, not to tolerate the intolerant. Hedges, ex-President Carter, Phillips, Dawkins Altemeyer, etc, may spit books out by the hundreds, but try telling a schizophrenic that what he believes is untrue. Evidence and reason have no effect. During the Jesus Camp documentary, the interplaying of individualist fairy-tales ("God has a plan for you, he knew you before you were born," etc) and abortion politics is disturbingly clear, as is their political agenda, summed up in a few sentences: "Rise up righteous government! Bring down corrupt government! They took God from your public schools, but they cannot take God from our hearts!" coupled with the pastor's admission of theo-fascist, antidemocratic sentiment.
I don't want to play the political game of 1920s Russia: People denouncing one another simply to save their lives. Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of We, was betrayed by colleagues and former friends as the Bolsheviks cracked down on the literary world. This again happened late in Stalin's life, when his maddening addiction to power brought paranoia and unimaginable fear. He, with his secret police, began a witch hunt.
Why is it so frighteningly difficult for people to see through this God-talk and self-righteousness? Leo Tolstoy wrote in Resurrection, "Could it be that all of this talk about justice, goodness, law, religion, God, and so on, was nothing but so many words to conceal the grossest self-interest and cruelty?"1. Yes, Count Tolstoy. It not only could be, it is.
Many revolutions in the past, most of them, especially the one most similar to what our Christian Fascists envision, the Iranian Revolution, ended much worse than what they originally opposed. Certainly, as Becky Fischer says, "[She'd] like to see kids laying down their lives for the Gospels," they do not care how red the streets become. No revolutionary ever did. Anyone who believes that their ends justify their means is disturbingly frightening, and anyone who puts the glory of God over the quality of human life, I think, is extremely dangerous.
Stalin, who was a god to the Russian urbanites, starved millions upon millions of rural farmers, and killed even more urbanites in industrial projects. And yet, he was still seen as a god.
This is extremely similar to the Judeo-Christian god, who drowned all but two of his people, ordered Abraham to kill his firstborn, ordered death for any petty crime, left half of his people to the will of the other half, and left his own son to be crucified by his tyrants.
-Stalin left his son to die in a German concentration camp, preferring to keep his captured German general, who was worth more to him than his only son and possible successor.
-Stalin ruled with an iron fist, and the penitentiaries and secret police prisons, not to mention the infamous Gulags, were always filled to the brim.
-A significant portion of the population was exploited for the industrial population. The rural farmers lost their tools and most of their belongings under the NEP, and all of what they produced belonged not to them for any negotiable trade, but to the State, or, "Collective," or, Stalin himself.
-Stalin destroyed icons and religious places and banned such practices, and replaced them with himself as a god. His portrait hung in every home, and statues of himself were erected in every park.
-Stalin viewed himself as the Father of the People.
-Those who followed him were rewarded with cars and vacations, and those who did not were destroyed. Every once in a while he would "answer a prayer" and remove a name from his execution list, which he drew up himself.
-His wife was distant from him. After a public scuffle between them, she died.
-Kirov's popularity in the legislative, pseudo-democratic Delegate, caused Stalin much jealousy. Not only did he order Kirov murdered, but the entire Delegate as well.
Stalin is the Judeo-Christian God according to comparison between his biography and chronicle of his time in power, and the Bible itself.
Is this what we want for America?
Works Cited
Tolstoy, Leo. Resurrection. Penguin Classics. New York, New York. 1966.
History International. Stalin: Man of Steel.
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