What is astonishing about this marriage of convenience is that their version of evangelical Christianity believes that biblical prophecy leads to Armageddon and finally to the conversion of the Jews to Christ. According to the most influential of the Christian Zionists, Hal Lindsey, the valley from Galilee to Eilat will flow with blood and "144,000 Jews would bow down before Jesus and be saved, but the rest of Jewry would perish in the mother of all holocausts". These lunatic ravings would matter little were they not so influential. Lindsey's book, The Late Great Planet Earth, has sold nearly 20m copies in English and another 30m-plus worldwide.

Against this crazy theological background, an ideological battle is now being waged. Despite the fact that apocalyptic prophecy as read by the Christian right ends with another holocaust, some Israeli politicians and journalists are encouraging fundamentalists to stick by the implications of their narrative. In a recent column in the Jerusalem Post, Michael Freund called upon evangelical Christians to lobby against the pressure being put on George Bush by Tony Blair and Colin Powell. "If Jesus were alive today," he wrote, "the US state department would likely criticise him for being a Jewish settler and an obstacle for peace."

Some people might not have agreed with my decision to leave the GOP two years ago, but at least I did it for the reasons I said I did. I was honest about what brought me to that decision.

What makes the actions of the Bush administration so troublesome is the lack of honesty.

It amounts, in the end, to a pattern of deception and distortion; ultimately that does not respect the wisdom of the American people.

I was reading Rise and Fall of the Third Reich last night and found, in Shirer's intro, this statement: "Adoph Hitler is probably the last of the great adenturer-conquerors....the curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb...." What struck me then was the real comparison (of the New American Century) with Hitler's Nazi party, which is in a drive for domination based on a perception that they were right for the world. World domination, for them, was destiny.

Bush is no Hitler, but he doesn't have to be. And in this I'm agreeing with Dana, when he says Today we face nothing less than the Germans faced in the 1930s... In many ways Bush and the New American Century guys are not like the Nazis, so that comparison might seem odious to some - but in one essential way they are like the Nazis, they have that arrogance, that assumption that they are right for the world, and if the world chooses otherwise (as in the 2000 elections), that is the world's mistake.

(I mentioned this post to my wife, and she wondered about my assumption that Bush and friends are driven by this elitist sense of the superiority of their intentions, or by mere greed. I think we're mistaken if we assume the latter. If they were mere crooks, if they were merely unprincipled, they would not present the same problem. However they are proponents of an anti-democratic ideology, and they are propelled by an ideological force to be reckoned with. If we oppose them on the basis that they're representatives of the greedy rich, and nothing more, we will lose.)

Last night I saw a report on the Dean rally where they emphasized how Dean is using the Internet to establish grassroots support, and it sounded quite like the notes I sent to Jock Gill when he first met with the Dean people. That was good to hear.

I have to stress, though, that the real importance of nodal politics is not in successful support for specific candidates, but in the successful construction of a more democratic model, with increased participation and increased understanding of the process and the issues. We get there by building a network, many connections and many nodes, and distributing quality information over that network, ensuring that there is at every node someone who can facilitate understanding of the messages we're distributing.

The Meetups are not enough if we don't find a way to network those organizations effectively and if we don't reach into communities not served by Meetup. I suppose if I have an issue with the Dean campaign, it's because I don't think they're doing enough. We should be cultivating leaders and giving them talking points, and the understanding that works behind the talking points, so that they can build a following that asks the right questions, and asks those questions because they understand why the questions are important. I'm afraid that presidential politics is too targeted on the specific end to see the value of the means.

Let the Dean people prove that I'm wrong about that... I'd like to see them expand to a more sophisticated use of "nodal politics." I can support that in a big way.

Discuss Politics

posted by jon lebkowsky on 6:02 AM
permanent link to this entry

Politics