By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them

By Mark Crispin Miller, AlterNet. Posted August 31, 2004.

Following is an excerpt from Chapter 6, The Clear and Present Danger, from Mark Crispin Miller's book, "Cruel and Unusual: Bush and Cheney's New World Order."

The radical collapse of all distinction between church and state and the promotion of an angry "Christianity" as the USA's official state religion have grown increasingly apparent as the Bush regime has turned more grandiose and reckless after 9/11. That revolutionary program has gradually come into view despite the press's failure to expose it, and despite the random efforts of the White House to conceal it ("Well, I – first of all, I would never justify – I would never use God to promote policy decisions," Bush said, without conviction, to Brit Hume in an interview on September 22, 2003). A cursory survey of Bush/Cheney's foreign and domestic innovations will make clear that from the start, this regime has been hard at work transforming the United States into a theocratic system, and, globally, at the gradual creation of a nominally Christian New World Order.

Although the president made quite a show of mounting no rhetorical attack on Islam or on Muslims in the dark days after 9/11, as if to reassure the world that the United States was not intent on waging a religious war, that tolerant pose was shortly overwhelmed, those words of peace obliterated, by much graphic counter-evidence. The United States was obviously mounting a "crusade" – as Bush himself so tactlessly announced on September 16, 2001. All he meant was "a broad cause," Ari Fleischer reassured reporters two days later, and yet Muslim residents of the United States (and of Afghanistan) could not be blamed for thinking otherwise. At once John Ashcroft's troops began to sweep illegally through Muslim neighborhoods, hauling off "suspected terrorists" by the hundreds and treating them as enemy aliens, and there was like harassment by police departments all across the country.

Soon, moreover, some of Bush's best-known co-religionists and sometime spiritual advisers started venting anti-Muslim propaganda. Franklin Graham called Islam "a very evil and very wicked religion," and Pat Robertson, who compared the Koran to "Mein Kampf," declared, projectively, about the Muslims: "They want to coexist until they can control, dominate and then, if need be, destroy." Said Jerry Falwell: "I think Muhammad was a terrorist." The White House offered no rebuke.

Bush himself has carefully avoided venting such anti-Islamic sentiments in public. He has also tried not to repeat the word "crusade," or otherwise betray the war-like zeal that motivates his strain of Christianity. At this he has been less successful, unable, as he is, to mask his true intentions and desires. Five months after urging his "crusade" on 9/16, he did it once again in speaking to our troops in Anchorage. (The Canadians, he said, "stand with us in this incredibly important crusade to defend freedom, this campaign to do what is right for our children and our grandchildren.") I am not a fanatic, Bush sometimes tries to say – and then, as ever, contradicts his wan pretense at moderation and humility with some insanely grandiose remark. "I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God," he awkwardly assured Bob Woodward. However, Woodward also reports the president's explanation for his refusal to consult his dad for guidance: "You know, he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to."

God told him to run for president, Bush says, and God told him to strike al Qaeda, and God told him to occupy Iraq. "I haven't suffered doubt," Bush said to Woodward (adding, without irony, "I hope I'm able to convey that in a humble way"). For all his weak demurrals, Bush does in fact perceive the "war on terrorism" as a new crusade, as a member of his family makes explicit:

George sees this as a religious war. He doesn't have a p.c. view of the war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know.

Of course, it would be comforting to see this only as a case of individual mania, which reasonable people – Christian and non-Christian – might shrug off. And yet this is no laughing matter, as Bush is not alone in his apocalyptic frame of mind, but aided and abetted very powerfully. Having variously seized our nation's government, the GOP also pursues "religious war."

Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media studies at New York University and the author of The Bush Dyslexicon. He lives in New York City.

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