By Ed Driscoll
In response,
Mark Steyn quips, “Don’t
Fire Until You See The Whites of Their Cassocks:”
When I first saw the headline, I
assumed it must all be a little less obviously bone-crushingly stupid or at any
rate more nuanced once you got into the story. But I invite you to look at the accompanying
poster for the Equal Opportunity training brief issued by the
Army Reserve in Pennsylvania. It lists “extremist” groups, starting with
“Evangelical Christianity” at Number One, “Al Quaeda” (misspelled under any
Roman rendering of Arabic) at Number Five, “Hamas” at Six, and “Catholicism”
rounding out the Top Ten.
Think of the number of people
involved in the creation, printing and distribution of this graphic – and along
the way not one of them stopped to say, “Hey, this is totally dumb.”
Shades of then-New
York Times editor Bill Keller’s screedy meltdown in 2011 when he initially
claimed that Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann believed in “fervid subsets of
evangelical Christianity,” when the
former is a Catholic and the latter a
Lutheran.
The London Daily Mail has
closeups of the images from the Army Reserve’s presentation
to recruits and adds:
A slideshow presentation shown to US
Army Reserve recruits classifies Christians, including both evangelicals and
Roman Catholics, as religious extremists, placing them in the same category as
skinheads, the Ku Klux Klan, Hamas and Al Qaeda.
The presentation also warned that
members of the military are prohibited from taking leadership roles in any
organization the Pentagon considers ‘extremist,’ and from distributing the
organization’s literature, whether on or off a military installation.
The opening slide warns that ‘the
rise in hate crimes and extremism outside the military may be an indication of
internal issues all [armed] services will have to face.’
Citing a Southern Poverty Law Center
report as evidence that extremism is on the rise, the Army Reserve presentation
blames ‘the superheated fears generated by economic dislocation, a
proliferation of demonizing conspiracy theories,the changing racial make-up of
America and the prospect of 4 more years under a black president who many on
the far right view as an enemy to their country.’
The Southern
Poverty Law Center you say? In the latest edition of the Weekly Standard,
Charlotte Allen has a lengthy read-the-whole-thing profile of “The
King of Fearmongers:”
This leads to
yet another SPLC irony: Its severest critics aren’t on the conservative right
(although the Federation for American Immigration Reform, another “hate group”
on the SPLC’s list, has done its fair share of complaining), but on the
progressive left. It may come as a surprise to learn that one of the most
vituperative of all the critics was the recently deceased Alexander Cockburn,
columnist for the Nation and the leftist webzine CounterPunch.
In a 2009 article for CounterPunch titled “King of the Hate Business,”
Cockburn castigated Dees and the SPLC for using the 2008 election of Barack
Obama as America’s first black president as yet another wringer for squeezing
out direct-mail donations from “trembling liberals” by painting an apocalyptic
picture of “millions of [anti-Obama] extremists primed to march down Main
Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm
and a Bible under the other.” Cockburn continued: “Ever since 1971 U.S. Postal
Service mailbags have bulged with Dees’ fundraising letters, scaring dollars
out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of
hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC.”
Cockburn was
following on the heels of Ken Silverstein, who in 2000 wrote an article for the
reliably liberal Harper’s magazine titled “The Church of Morris Dees.”
Silverstein accused the SPLC of manufacturing connections between the “hate
groups” that it highlighted in its numerous mailings—back then the groups on
the SPLC list tended to be mostly fringe militia organizations—and the
Columbine-style school shootings and a wave of black-church arsons during the
1990s that were a staple of the SPLC’s direct-mail panic pleas. “Horrifying as
such incidents are, hate groups commit almost no violence,” Silverstein wrote.
“More than 95 percent of all ‘hate crimes,’ including most of the incidents
SPLC letters cite (bombings, church burnings, school shootings), are
perpetrated by ‘lone wolves.’ Even Timothy McVeigh [perpetrator of the 1995
bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people], subject
of one of the most extensive investigations in the FBI’s history—and one of the
most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC’s—was never credibly linked to
any militia organization.”
Silverstein
followed up with more of the same in a 2007 blog post for Harper’s:
“What [the SPLC] does best . . . is to raise obscene amounts of money by
hyping fears about the power of [right-wing fringe] groups; hence the SPLC has become
the nation’s richest ‘civil rights’ organization.” In 2001 JoAnn Wypijewski
wrote in the Nation: “Why the [SPLC] continues to keep ‘Poverty’ (or
even ‘Law’) in its name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical
understanding of the marketing possibilities in class guilt.” Silverstein had
already noted in his 2000 Harper’s article that “most SPLC donors are
white.”
What has
infuriated the SPLC’s liberal critics is their suspicion that Morris Dees has
used the SPLC primarily as a fundraising machine fueled by his direct-mail
talents that generates a nice living for himself (the SPLC’s 2010 tax filing
lists a compensation package of $345,000 for him as the organization’s chief
trial counsel and highest-paid employee) and a handful of other high ranking
SPLC officials plus luxurious offices and perks, but that does relatively
little in the way of providing the legal services to poor people that its name
implies.
In contrast to
all of the above, back in 2011 on his Captain Capitalism blog,
Aaron Clarey spotted the National Guard actually promoting religion. Well,
religion of a sort:
As the
late Michael Crichton observed in 2003, “I think that you
cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one
form, it merely re-emerges in another form.” The above National Guard image
flips the century-old “Progressive” notion of “the
moral equivalent of war” on its head; as I
asked at the time when I linked to Aaron’s post, “Does this
mean that concurrently, the Peace Corps will be tooling around in heavily armed
Abrams tanks, just to offset the absurdity?”
But back to the
original topic at hand. As Rush Limbaugh recently noted, “We are
living in a dying country.” Evidently, the Army — or at least
some branch of it — has decided to accelerate the process. Linking today to the
post on the Army labeling Evangelicals and Catholics as religious extremists,
Kathy Shaidle responds, “Is
America worth saving?”
Our elites don’t
seem to think so. (See also: Obama, Barack.) Aaron’s new book is titled Enjoy
the Decline; he posits that decline is exactly what
America’s ruling class and low-information voters both want; there’s little the
rest of us can do to change this collective death wish; we might as well have
some fun before the lights go out. (Perhaps
literally.)
Good night
America, drive safe; it’s been fun!
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