On Wednesday, Annandale toxic metal preacher Bradlee Dean's Son of Liberty Radio Facebook page, an administrator posted a meme using an image of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges and a quotation from a 2010 talk by Hedges in Berkeley (and possibly included in Hedges' 2011 collection, The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress, now in its third printing by the The Nation Books).
Detached from all context, the meme has spread widely across the Internet. On the Sons of Liberty Facebook, 572 people liked the image, and 709 fans shared it.
The SOLR caption: "Right on. Look at what America has tolerated."
Dean also shared the meme on his "brand" Facebook page, along with the headnote, "Look at what America has tolerated?" The image was shared by 1796 fans and liked by 969.
Bluestem wonders if any of Bradlee Dean's fans or staff have ever picked any of Hedges' columns or books. A senior fellow at the Nation Institute, Hedges' catalogue ranges from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning to American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.
His bio is most instructive--and possibly horrifying for Bradlee Dean's radio flock.
The blurb for American Fascists at Amazon Books suggests that Dean's fans might gain new understanding if they read the tome:
Twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists first spoke of the United States becoming a Christian nation that would build a global Christian empire, it was hard to take such hyperbolic rhetoric seriously. Today, such language no longer sounds like hyperbole but poses, instead, a very real threat to our freedom and our way of life. In American Fascists, Chris Hedges, veteran journalist and author of the National Book Award finalist War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, challenges the Christian Right's religious legitimacy and argues that at its core it is a mass movement fueled by unbridled nationalism and a hatred for the open society.
Hedges, who grew up in rural parishes in upstate New York where his father was a Presbyterian pastor, attacks the movement as someone steeped in the Bible and Christian tradition. He points to the hundreds of senators and members of Congress who have earned between 80 and 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups as one of many signs that the movement is burrowing deep inside the American government to subvert it. The movement's call to dismantle the wall between church and state and the intolerance it preaches against all who do not conform to its warped vision of a Christian America are pumped into tens of millions of American homes through Christian television and radio stations, as well as reinforced through the curriculum in Christian schools. The movement's yearning for apocalyptic violence and its assault on dispassionate, intellectual inquiry are laying the foundation for a new, frightening America.
American Fascists, which includes interviews and coverage of events such as pro-life rallies and weeklong classes on conversion techniques, examines the movement's origins, its driving motivations and its dark ideological underpinnings. Hedges argues that the movement currently resembles the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s, movements that often masked the full extent of their drive for totalitarianism and were willing to make concessions until they achieved unrivaled power. The Christian Right, like these early fascist movements, does not openly call for dictatorship, nor does it use physical violence to suppress opposition. In short, the movement is not yet revolutionary. But the ideological architecture of a Christian fascism is being cemented in place. The movement has roused its followers to a fever pitch of despair and fury. All it will take, Hedges writes, is one more national crisis on the order of September 11 for the Christian Right to make a concerted drive to destroy American democracy. The movement awaits a crisis. At that moment they will reveal themselves for what they truly are -- the American heirs to fascism. Hedges issues a potent, impassioned warning. We face an imminent threat. His book reminds us of the dangers liberal, democratic societies face when they tolerate the intolerant.
Here's the speech from which the quotation in the meme is drawn; you'll hear the remarks beginning at 12:11:
Screenshot: Conservative Christian Bradlee Dean's Sons of Liberty Radio, which opposes the separation of church and state, posted this Chris Hedges meme.
Since Hedges, sometimes described as a Christian socialist, isn't singing in the same choir, perhaps the page admin might want to think this one through--or read Hedges' books. In addition to Christian Fascists, Bluestem recommends Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
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