As I await, with anxiety, agita, and despair, for the Electoral vote count on January 6th, reading about the threats of challenge to the vote from an alarmingly robust number of freely elected sitting government officers who have forsaken country for party, I am reminded of this piece, which I wrote, as I recall, in June or perhaps July of 2020.
This cohort, which seeks to subvert the democratic process to which they pay lip service of support, are, to a man and woman, proudly self identifying Christians.
Back in those long ago days when people joked, we used to say that Jews had guilt, Christians had shame.
If this pack of treasonous fascist frauds are any measure of that trope, not any more.
Not any more.
It’s no secret that a lot of disdain, dismay and despair is being hurled at so-called and self-identified Christians by those on my side of the political aisle for their delirious embrace of the current criminal enterprise that is the executive branch of the United States government.
Needless to say, much of this invective derives from what is justly perceived as their decidedly un-Christian behavior. It might be worth stepping away from the religious part of the equation and focus instead on the political consequences of that apparently incomprehensible embrace.
Adolf Hitler didn’t invent Fascism. But once he borrowed it from Mussolini and ran with it, Hitler certainly polished it into a bright, shiny and malevolently appealing object, and managed to run his thousand-year Reich into the ground in only thirteen gruesome years.
No one needs to be reminded of Hitler’s mass murder of Jews—well, actually, it seems that many do need this reminder, but for the current discussion here, that’s neither here nor there—but it’s often forgotten that he had a certain distaste for Christianity, as well.
Of course, this distaste didn’t translate into extermination of men, women and children on a mechanized scale that must have made Henry Ford’s buttons pop with pride. That disassembly line was reserved for Jews and other cosmopolitans identified as subhuman vermin by the self-designated master race.
Rather, the things that left Der Fuhrer cold about Christianity was all the, you should pardon the expression, Jesus stuff that the post Calvary crucifixion cadre of believers hijacked from its Jewish roots.
All that compassion. All that humility. Feed the poor. Love thy neighbor. And the Ten Commandments, for Christ’s sake, were just so damned Mosaic in their intent.
And let’s not forget Monotheism in the first place, for fuck’s sake. All brought to you by the Jews, thank you very much.
Jesus was, after all, a nice Jewish boy from the middle east with what, even then, had to have been a weird home life and one seriously dysfunctional upbringing. “Mom? Dad?”
It isn’t Jesus’ fault that he was arrested, tried, convicted and executed as a terrorist and agitator by the fascist occupiers of his nation. Nor is he responsible for the cherry picking of his “teachings” that his disciples, the majority of whom weren’t even around back when he’d walked on water, engaged in to build what they figured and hoped might be the next big thing in totemic idol worship.
I am, of course, being facetious here, to make a point. Jesus, as we understand this fiction, no more existed than any other mythical creature of the various divine figurations, or pantheons of deities, or Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny, or hey, God, for that matter. The endlessness of the success of this myth speaks volumes about the fatuous gullibility that is mankind’s greatest trait. Under the right circumstances, we’ll believe anything, especially if it confirms what we’ve wanted to believe all along.
The need to be a member of a club made up of whatever looks like the cool kids to any given eye, to find a shared identity, has been, far too frequently a source of peril and disaster for humanity at large.
And of course, avid religious conviction is the model for such clubs, from the first fire worshiper cowering in the cave mouth in awe to the fervently doubt-free ideologue of any and all political stripes that pissed you off on this platform this very morning.
Yes, the hysterical fervor that underpins religious devotion has found a number of new venues and homes in the USA, not necessarily supernatural or even spiritual in nature, to enrich or destroy, depending upon, of course, one’s feelings about the pursued agendas.
Take, for example, the Inquisitional nature of the pursuit for heresy, expiation and damnation among the gatekeepers of the current iteration of the progressive left. A frisson of Torquemada, a lagniappe of Stalin, and there you have it.
But, as ever, I digress.
Back to Adolf Hitler, the man who made fascism the seductive and appealing brand it remains to this day. Over the decades, every determined effort to eliminate this pernicious poison has been deflected by an oligarchic class that recognizes a profitable idea when it sees it.
It’s all too clear, to me and those like me anyway, that Hitler’s dismissal of the Judeo part of Judeo-Christian unknowingly but unerringly set the pattern for the modern evangelical American Christian crowd.
The rejection by the current contemptuous and contemptible right wing Protestant horde, of beliefs that were, for centuries, identified as Christian traits—tenets of faith that were paid lip service to and hypocritically ignored, to be sure, but at the very least acknowledged as aspirations—is in perfect service to the fascist ideals and principles laid down by the Austrian architect of German National Socialism.
Compassion, brotherly love, kindness, humility—those things are all for pussies.
So just as Hitler’s fascists suborned the word “Socialist,” depriving it of its actual meaning, unintentionally confusing the living shit out of an alarming number of fucking morons these dark and benighted days, the enraged and terrified shmucks of the clown posse of Fascist America use “Christian” as no more than at best an alias, or at worst a nickname, for “Nazi.”
Of course, that fatuous gullibility of humanity I mentioned above comes into play here, as the evangelical fervor, that inchoate need to believe, a passion that once might have been put into the service of a near limitless variety of supernatural bullshit, now worships a kleptocrat and his organized crime extended family.
This criminal enterprise, which, for those of you too young to recall, once was an actual political party, has devolved into what can best be identified as a white supremacist terrified butch death cult, to a great extent due to the transposition of Fascism into “Christianity.”
And there is a special place in Hell—if only, right?—reserved for the pastors and shepherds of this flock. Falwell, Graham, Osteen, Bakker, White and the rest of these frauds, these charlatans, these mountebanks-this mendacious pack of ethically debased and sneeringly debasing moral cripples give the most loathsome of hypocrites a bad name.
So, to be abundantly clear, it’s not entirely hypocrisy that’s an issue here.
Next time you’re confused when one of these troglodytic supernaturalists, whether pastor or parishioner, plays the Jesus card in the name of indifference, cruelty, and inhumane treatment of and hatred for his fellow man, often but not always someone not of their pale-faced tribe, it’s worth remembering that those pioneers of fascism and their modern oligarchic descendants hoped and prayed to god it would all work out this way.
Or, and let’s be honest, anybody with half an ounce of sense and self-awareness knows all too well that they just went through the motions of beseeching god. That’s how Fascist Americans, or as they choose to identify, “Christians,” signal their virtue.
And here, finally, is where we find true hypocrisy. Consider that the majority of these people go out of their way to misgender trans women and trans men, and think it’s the height of comedy laughs galore to express their contempt in this regard with their idea of the devilishly clever, “I identify as a…”
…And yet, these selfsame people who deny others the right to personal identity, expect, no demand, to be taken at their word when they identify themselves with the pronoun “Christian.”
And they say irony is dead.
As ever, I remain,
Howard Victor Chaykin…a Prince—who respects pronouns as much as the next guy.