Bush's State-Based Religion
Is a New Fascist Movement
The alliance of right-wing Protestants and Catholics who brought President George W. Bush into the Presidency, and are campaigning for the President on so-called "religious issues," is a "new Nazi movement," charged Lyndon LaRouche at the conclusion of his April 7 webcast. This movement has to be identified for what it is, and fought, if the United States is going to survive, LaRouche said.
On April 3, the former Democratic Presidential candidate had issued a sharp statement, ripping away the mask of the "religious right." This grouping is nothing but an unconstitutional "state-based religion," he said. Here is the statement in full:
"The delusion is, that the array of pro-Bush religious fruitcake collection, built of a partnership, forged in large part by Billy Graham, between Jonathan Edwards/Darbyite Protestant fruitcakes and dark-age fascist, nominal Catholics, is not a lobby directed to influence government; it is a Bush-government-created state religion, created and deployed to impose a de facto dictatorship on the U.S.A.
"Think of the Gallican churches of France's pro-Frondist Louis XIV and the mimickry of Louis by Napoleon Bonaparte's imperial state religion. Think of the Roman Empire's use of its Pantheon as a state religion, and the action by Constantine to make Christian bishops agents of Constantine's Pantheon. Think of the Venetian-Norman ultramontane empire founded upon the presumption of the fraudulent `Donation of Constantine' dogma. Think of Venice's use of the Habsburg faction it created, as an adjunct of Norman Anjou heritage, to launch the religious warfare of the 1492-1548 interval against the institution of the nation-state created by the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance of Christianity.
"Think of the way in which the fascist right wing, organized under the banner of the Bush faction's new state religion, has been used to mobilize the African-American clergy around the Moonies' pioneering in introducing a right-wing system of state religion in which the `faith-based initiatives' are recruiting pastors who used to be civil-rights loyalists, creating a network of churches assembled thus to worship money.
"Look at the unity of George Bernard Shaw's key role in creating the British fascist movement of Chesterton, et al., which produced the Distributists and the thundering nitwits of the Nashville Agrarian. Think of William Yandell Elliott, and of Brzezinski, Huntington, Kissinger, et al. Think of the American Enterprise Institute's Novak and its penetration of the Catholic parishes and religious orders of eastern Europe. Think of the effort by the Anglo-Americans, to intimidate the Catholic Church to abandon its resistance to that evil which was and is the Enlightenment: another case of the effort to impose state-based religion as an instrument of Anglo-American imperial tyranny.
"The only way to defeat this religious guise for a new fascist movement is to expose it for what it is in fact, another (explicitly anti-constitutional) state-based religion."
Against the Constitution
When he was asked to elaborate on the importance of campaigning against this right-wing "religious" crew at his webcast, LaRouche stressed the fact that what Bush's backers are doing, by creating this "mass movement," is strictly against the prohibition included in the U.S. Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution, against the establishment of any religion.
The Founding Fathers were aware of the history of the use of religions to control populations, when they created our form of government, LaRouche said. There was a history in the world as a whole, of religions which were created by government in order to control people.
He explained: "Now, when we modified our Constitution, for separation of church and state, we were aware of this, and we banned it. And George Bush has done it! It's a violation of the Constitution.
"Now, this state-based religion has two principal elements in the United States. It's based on one thing, the so-called `wild Protestants,' who were organized around the Nashville Agrarians, as the Thunder Cults, which is based on those Southern revival meetings where they produced more babies than they saved. Where the preacher did it: He saved souls in the tent, and went and made more outside the tent, back of the tent. The other thing was done from Britain: a variety of Catholic doctrine, which was partly invented from Britain and came from other sources, which is the right-wing fascist wing of the Catholic movement in the United States, today.
"So you take the fascist Protestants and the fascist Catholics, and you put them together, and you call it a faith-based initiative. And what they worship is money. The biggest weapon used by government against the Civil Rights movement, has been the faith-based religion which has gone in to buy pastors in churches, to try to kill the Civil Rights movement by this operation.
"What we have here—to make this as short as possible—what we have, is an orchestrated operation which now centers around Karl Rove, and the idea is to use this kind of religion by bringing—.
"You know, [my wife] Helga and I met with Cardinal O'Connor in 1994, in his office in New York. He said: Look at all these guys coming in, these crazy Protestants are coming in, trying to get into the Catholic Church, the diocese. What are they doing to me?
"And this is what it is.
"So, the Bush crowd, or the crowd behind Bush, typified by what Karl Rove does, has created a religion around certain religious figures, including Billy Graham, and they've used this thing to create a systemic religious movement, which was used in two elections—especially in the last one—to organize a vote-suppression movement which gave an election, fraudulently, by virtue of votes pressured, to George Bush. That is a state-based religion.
"Look at what happened with the Schiavo case: all the orchestrations. You see, every effort is to substitute the manipulation of religious insanity, actually, for politics. You saw that in the Schiavo case, the way it was orchestrated. Now, if we don't recognize that, do you know what this is? Do you know what faith-based religion is? It's the new Nazi movement. This is the mass movement of Nazis, and if you let this thing run loose, and treat it like it was something you just don't talk about, for fear of upsetting people, you know where you're going to end up? This is where you're going to end up: No country, buddy.
"This is fascism. It's a violation of the Constitution, because we know that the government of the United States, a section of it, the people in government, are running a religious cult around the theme of the faith-based initiative, as a movement to control the politics of the population. That is precisely what the amendment of the Constitution prohibited, and that is what is being done.
"The President of the United States is unconstitutional!"
Mobilization Against Senate Filibuster
During the November 2004 election, the "issue" which the Bush sponsors used to mobilize the "faith-based" fascists was gay marriage. Today, it's the question of judges and the Supreme Court.
According to press accounts, various "faith-based" groups are currently pouring millions of dollars and other resources into a full-scale mobilization to eliminate the Senate filibuster as a weapon against the tyranny of a legislative majority. This effort is intended to create conditions that would further Bush Aministration plans for a reactionary, fascist makeover of the Federal court system and the Supreme Court.
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, told the New York Times that his organization's campaign for the rule change on the filibuster has far surpassed what they did on the issue of same-sex marriage during last year's Presidential campaign. Dr. Richard Land, who heads up the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said his organization, along with other "social conservative" groups, has been telling Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to "pull the trigger . . . so we will know who to have a primary candidate against in 2006." James Dobson of Focus on the Family rants that "judicial hostility to faith, and especially Christianity, has never been greater than today."
Nor does this campaign stop at lobbying. The "religious right" campaign has recently taken aim at sitting judges, including Republicans appointed by President Bush, who refused to bend to their will on the question of the Terri Schiavo case. Administration enforcer Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), the House Majority Leader, has gone so far as to threaten action against these judges. Reports of death threats against the judges also abound.
These actions, in fact, beg comparison with a section of the mass support for Hitlerian fascism, which was also created from the top, with financial aid from the authorities. "Family values" were a leading aspect of the ideology to which Hitler appealed—as long as the families were of "pure German blood." Hitler's movement was "anti-abortion," as well (unless those aborted happened not to be of pure German blood). And the "law," which was in fact made by the Führer, was always presented as the "will of the people," which the dictator was merely putting into action.
Such "pure democracy" goes hand in hand with dictatorship, and that is what the unconstitutional removal of the rights of the minority in the Senate, through eliminating the filibuster, would lead toward.
