Neo-Conservatism is the Rise of Neo-Paganism

I was reading this article by Glenn Greenwald, and it he unknowingly gives a great Girardian critique of neo-conservative ideology. He states the following:

On a different note, is the curriculum for history classes in some American states restricted to learning about Hitler and the Nazis and 1938 and Hitler and Germany? It must be, because there are many right-wing fanatics whose entire understanding of the world is reduced in every instance to that sole historical event -- as though the world began in 1937, ended in 1945, and we just re-live that moment in time over and over and over:

Love war? You are Churchill, a noble warrior. Oppose war? You're Chamberlain, a vile appeaser. And everyone else is Hitler. That, more or less, composes the full scope of "thought" among this strain on the right.

This is great Girardian analysis, from an obviously non-Girardian. He has really stumbled on the truth of the situation. For Neo-Conservatives World War II was the founding murder. The great collective violence that unified the nation. Neo-conservatism isn't just a political movement it is a pagan religion. It wants to keep repeating this founding, collective and unanimous violence. Their rituals aren't working very well, people are just too skeptical of this new religion, they aren't joining in. So Neo-Conservatives keep rehearsing the ritual, finding new Hitlers, hoping they find someone sufficiently evil to make their rituals, incantations and human sacrifices work. A successful ritual would gather all believers and all dissenters into a cohesive, unified group, focused on the designated evil. Neo-Conservatism is the ideology of the lynch mob, it's this continuing search for an evil that we can all agree on and that we can do away with unanimously. Each event has the same characters, the evil man du jour is Hitler, the Neo-Conservatives are always Churchill and anyone who doesn't believe in these charades are appeasing Chamberlains. Greenwald is right, that's the entirety of Neo-Conservative "thought". World War II has been turned into this mythical event by which all else must be interpreted. This is obviously in stark contrast to Christianity. Christianity holds that the life, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the great interpretive event.

Kasey Chambers - I Still Pray

Contagion: A Journal of Violence, Mimesis and Culture

Great News!!! All back volumes of the great Girardian journal Contagion have been digitized and are available to download.

Do They Really Need Another Massive Human Sacrifice?

This is awesome evidence for the contemporary American reality of mimetic theory.



I don't think this yearning, expectation, and hope for another large scale human sacrifice similar to 9/11 is something that's outside of conservative thought. I believe the need for human sacrifice is at the very center of contemporary, Fox News conservatism. They need the power of a televisual spectacle to unite people. They need the blood to flow, so they can feel the love.

They really don't care that much for fighting "terrorism", what they really care about is the unity that comes about after a large scale terrorist attack/human sacrifice. I don't think they're capable of actually conducting the sacrifice themselves so they must rely on the "terrorists" to don the sacrificial mask.

Mr. Bykofsky thesis seems to be that we need continuing human sacrifice to maintain unity and keep internal conflict at bay. We need human sacrifice. Some kind of massive human burnt offering to maintain our unity. He realizes that massive sacrifices, conducted by outside executioners, that unveil an evil that we can all agree on will give us the ability to project our internal disagreements, violence, disunity, psychosis and whatever else may be keeping us from being at one with our neighbor and place these negativities onto an outside other, as we did in Iraq.

There were stories about people celebrating 9/11 and it was understood that those celebrations were conducted by "Islamofascists", but Mr. Bykofsky column puts in doubt the notion that it was only "Islamofascists". Ancient human sacrifices were indeed celebrations, which relieved great stress. We are dealing with a very primitive religion here, a religion of human sacrifice. The greatest threat to American Christianity is Fox News conservatism.

The Sick Longing for Massive Destruction

The Iraq War is a conundrum. No one can figure out the reasons for the invasion of Iraq. People from across the political/theological spectrum have put in enormous effort and have set forth the most creative and far-fetched reasons behind the invasion. The WMD thing was plainly bogus from the start. That Saddam was behind 9/11 was just plain ludicrous. The grab for oil was a plausible reason, but definitely not an immediate justification for the invasion of a country and the 100's of billions of dollars thrown away.

The great question remains "Why?". I think we must stop trying to come up with strategic or rational reasons. The pro-war neocons are not rational people, they're ideology is a reversion to the pagan past. A past filled with human sacrifice and witches, of darkness and demons, of pogroms and persecutions.

I read this article by Stu Bykofsky, I don't know who he is and I don't believe the article is satire (you never know anymore). Actually some of the stuff I think is most likely satire usually turns out not to be.

Mr. Bykofsky doesn't believe the human sacrifices of 9/11 and the Iraq War have been sufficient. He thinks Americans are separated from each other, that we don't have any common bonds.

There was a large thread going through the pro-war movement (movement is the wrong word, mostly it was just people sitting in front of their TVs) of this need for unity. Like the whole thing was a big football game. We all had to cheer for the same team, and if you weren't cheering loud enough for our team you must be for the other team.

I'm still not getting to the point I want to make. The conservative movement is obsessed with "Liberals". They can't stand this separation from the "Liberals", they want us all together, all tearing at the same meat. All cheering for the deaths of whoever has been designated by Fox News as the "bad guy(s)". They want to feel the electrifying thrill of unity, of all the differences and barriers falling away, everybody for once playing by their rules, holding their opinions and playing their game. They want to belong to the crowd, the unified crowd. They're sick and tired of confrontation and disagreements, of arguments and conflict. They long for large-scale human sacrifice, some kind of horrific spectacle of human death and destruction that unveils an evil that we can all agree on. That all these happy people doing their own thing will finally feel the anger they feel, that they'll finally have a purpose that they can pursue without being checked by laws or the opinions of others.

They want to stick the sword into somebody and let out the primal scream that cleanses one of low-esteem and loneliness. Instead of it being lonely me and the "them" who thwart me, it can be the beautiful and exhilarating "Us" against the evil "them".

It's the longing to be part of a lynch mob. The freedom to unreservedly thwart whatever you happen to see as evil at that moment. To be around people who wholeheartedly agree with you, who are thinking the same thoughts, who, as the mutilated "evil" lies dead before them, feel all their insecurities and the barriers between individuals dissolve. To stand around the mutilated corpse of a person or a country and finally be able to call the people around them "buddies" and sing some kind of macabre version of "Kum By Yah". To finally have society ordered to their liking.

They long for sacrificed dead bodies and the mob unity that is always found around them. They long for decisive violence and death that clearly delineates good and evil, a human sacrifice that will bring us all together.

Mercy Now

This is a great song by Mary Gauthier.

Rene Girard on YouTube

Haven't actually listened to this, but certainly seems pretty interesting.

COV&R Conference

The 2007 Colloquium on Violence and Religion conference is coming up in July. The list of abstracts looks pretty interesting, can't wait to read the actual papers. As an extra I'll link to video of Rene Girard's speech Violence, Victims and Christianity.

King Josiah

The latest scholarship and research seems to show that King Josiah had an enormous influence on Biblical history. This is related to our recent discussion on Achan, because it seems that Joshua in the Book of Joshua was actually a not-so-well disguised projection of King Josiah. King Josiah instituted sweeping reforms and the Book of Joshua seems to be propaganda for those reforms. Margaret Barker, though not dealing with Joshua or the politics re the Book of Joshua, has a great speech on the the symbolic reforms of King Josiah. What Did King Josiah Reform?

The Forgiving Victim

James Alison's visit to the House of Mercy was very formative in my Christian theological developement. Quite possibly the best sermon I've ever witnessed, Staggered Vision. Anyway, he seems to be conducting a class in London. I suggest to run, not walk to it.

The Iraq War Did Not Take Place?

I think it was Baudrillard who said the first Gulf War did not take place. Well I think it's my contention that the current Gulf War isn't really a war, but that it's some kind of post-modern, international atonement ritual. An attempt on the macro-level to revive the primitive schemes and forms of collective/mob murder. It was an attempt to restore confidence in the voice of the mob. Anyway, I came across this today, I think the remarks of right-wing pundit Dick Morris are relevant to our discussions on the atonement and scapegoating. Mr. Morris asserts,

MORRIS: I think that withdrawal from Iraq — it obviously gives al Qaeda a huge victory. Huge victory. On the other hand, if we stay in Iraq, it gives them the opportunity to kill more Americans, which they really like.

One of the things, though, that I think the antiwar crowd has not considered is that, if we’re putting the Americans right within their arms’ reach, they don’t have to come to Wall Street to kill Americans. They don’t have to knock down the trade center. They can do it around the corner, and convenience is a big factor when you’re a terrorist.

There it is the atonement theme of someone else supposedly dying for us, dying so that we don't have to, regardless of whether paranoia/lies form the basis of the belief in the supposed need for the sacrifice.

Richard Koenigsberg has been doing some great work re the sources of war and genocide.

In the atonement ritual are two goats. One goat which was Azazel, somehow synonymous with evil/Satan/the Devil, was led outside the city of the walls and thrown over a cliff. The other goat which was Yahweh was killed in front of the people and the blood brought into the temple to repair creation and bind the people together and cover the people from the violence of other members of the community.

So in the Iraq war we have two sets of people, two sacrificial classes. The first class is comprised of the Iraqi people. They, from the perspective of the persecutors in the ritual, correspond to the Azazel goat, they represent evil and are unceremoniously killed outside the camp. All sin is laid on the Azazel goat, making us into innocents.

This is all from the American perspective. The Yahweh goat corresponds to the American soldiers. From Koenigsberg,

According to Marvin, “The community celebrates and reveres its insiders turned outsiders. From within the boundaries, the community fears and worships these outsiders it consumes to preserve its life.” Soldiers are celebrated, revered and worshipped because they (like Christ) take the sacrificial burden upon themselves. They are the designated victims who are required to suffer—and perhaps to die—for other members of the group. The soldier is an “insider turned outsider,” member of the community who has been thrust outward from within the nation’s boundaries in order to do battle over there—on foreign soil.

He asserts that we delegate the execution of our soldiers to our enemies.

War as a unifier of the national community works best when people are able to avert their eyes from the sight of the victims; when they don’t have to look closely at what happens to the bodies of soldiers. People enjoy the idea of war, but would prefer to participate at a distance. They would rather not see the maimed bodies. Sight of a soldier’s mutilated body drains warfare of its glory.

Jesus in the Gospels represents both goats in the atonement. He is Yahweh who is killed in front of the people, but He is also the Azazel goat which is led outside the walls carrying the sins of the people, carrying the violence and dissension of the people and thrown over the cliff. The Yahweh goat is a substitute for the High Priest who also represents Yahweh. The goat is a substitute for the High Priest, so the High Priest can be resurrected in the Holy of Holies and walk out of the temple raised from the dead. The atonement ritual is a unifier, it disguises the violence done to Yahweh and the scapegoat. Jesus making the ritual come alive in history shows that it is the mob that is actually killing the Yahweh goat which is the substitute for the High Priest.

Lovers in a Dangerous Time

Lovers in a Dangerous Time from Bruce Cockburn and a cover from Barenaked Ladies.