Look at the crowds savaging the walls and halls of the U.S. Capitol.
Who are they? Where did this mob come from?
Well over a decade ago, an American journalist saw them and wrote about them.
Chris Hedges, who once wrote for the New York Times as foreign correspondent covering wars, famine and fallen states, published a rather remarkable book in 2006 entitled American Fascists. It’s subtitle: The Christian Right and the War on America.
Tracing this American religious strain from 16th-century Calvinism in Europe, Hedges goes deeper, and examines this movements inner motivations.
Hedges explains:
The movement is fueled by the fear of powerful external and internal enemies whose duplicity and cunning is currently at work. These phantom enemies serve to keep believers afraid and it is a heightened state of alert, ready to support repressive measures against all who do not embrace the movement. (Hedges 29)
When neoliberalism rose to power int ‘80s and ‘90s, it did so on the backs of the black peer, whom it consigned to the prisons: and to many white workers, who lost their manufacturing jobs and their worlds of rising wages, and were shuttled off into the struggles of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement).
They were swept into worlds of wonder, of high volume Fatih, and to war against the wealthy.
It’s American Christian fascism, y’all (in Hedges’s words) — and it can only get worse.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
