Biden's Holy Wars

Christian fundamentalism is the unbroken thread winding its slinky way throughout the history of the United States.  It writhes on to this very day, above the surface among right-wing factions, and more or less below the surface among liberals who purport to be more rational. This more enlightened, more occult liberal version is either approved or ignored  by the mainstream media.

Joe Biden is a conservative Catholic, whose hardcore religious fundamentalism often escapes the traditional bounds of liberal discretion. He is certainly not immune to the hardcore religious dogma which has kept the colonialist, repressive, inquisitorial mindset alive in North America for upwards of 400 years.  He, like most leaders, has used his religion as a moral excuse for inhumane policies ranging from his longtime opposition to abortion,  via the Hyde Amendment, to his full- throated support of the antisocial austerity policies espoused by the Reagan inspired Democratic Leadership Council he helped to found in the 1980s.

But nowhere is Biden's religious fundamentalism more apparent than in the thick coats of pious gloss he applies to his proxy war on Russia and his fanatical support of the State of Israel's genocide of the Palestinians trapped in occupied Gaza.

Biden went  full fire and brimstone last week when that godless heretic Donald Trump committed  his shocking sacrilege against NATO, even going so far as to invite the great satan Putin to invade the member-states who don't plunk their fair share into the collection basket. It was one of many times recently that Biden has  referred to his NATO not as the European arm of the military-industrial complex, but as a "sacred" fraternity united against undemocratic (read: godless) Russia.

Biden's entire re-election campaign revolves around the enemies without and the Public Enemy Number One and "existential threat" to the soul of our nation within: Donald Trump.The liturgy known as Russiagate is the required catechism. 

Although the dictionary defines the word "sacred" as "dedicated or set apart for the worship of a deity," or "something or someone  "worthy of religious veneration," Biden certainly has a facile way of hurling it about.

"We have a "sacred obligation to our military families," he sermonized last spring, "because there is nothing more sacred or more American."

But on another occasion he argued that "there is nothing more sacred than the right to vote," a right which is enshrined in "the sacred Constitution."

Biden, as a Catholic school pupil during the Cold War, was always taught to say his rosary for the conversion of Russia. He learned all about the miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, who appeared to three Portuguese peasant children in 1917, around the time of the Russian revolution, to expressly warn them about a communist i menace so catastrophic that the children  were instructed by the mother of Jesus to only divulge the details to the Vatican, which was to keep the documents under lock and key almost a century. And Biden also learned that the anti-Muslim crusades were not a series of land-grabbing  atrocities carried out over a period of over 200 years, but rather virtuous pilgrimages for the saving of non-believing souls. How do I know this? Because I attended a Catholic elementary school, too, and this was the relentless propaganda that was drummed into me. It was a curriculum and catechism devised and decreed by the Vatican. Some pupils outgrew or disowned this dogmatism. Others, obviously, have not.

So it comes as no surprise, to me anyway, that the two enemies that Biden has chosen to fight are Russia and the Muslims that centuries ago reconquered the Middle East from all manner of European usurpers. It explains why Biden is a self-described Christian Zionist with an unwavering loyalty to the state of Israel, the formation of which officially expelled Palestinians fom the "holy land" in 1948. As a devout, fundamentalist Catholic, he believes that when the end of the world comes, he will be bodily resurrected into heaven directly from Zionist-controlled Jerusalem.

When it comes to war, Biden gets downright medieval in his rhetocic.  His crusade to expand and strengthen NATO to all of Europe and even beyond, his exhortation to the whole world to join forces against Russia is not only a throwback to the Cold War. It's a throwback to Pope Urban II's exhortation in 1095 to nobles, knights, clergy and peasants alike to join in a militant pilgrimage to Byzantium, ostensibly to defend a Greek monarch against the Turks -  but really while they were at it,  to reconquer Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Palestine from Islamic rule.

Pope Urban got around the Church's official aversion to war and murder by redefining what was to become more than two  hundred years' worth  of "crusades" against Muslims  - multigenerational long pilgrimage in which participating European  volunteer-combatants would be absolved of all their sins and guaranteed a place in heaven.

George W. Bush made liberals cringe when he cast his invasion of Iraq as a "crusade." Biden thus far has not verbally succumbed out that retrograde mindset by using the "C" word himself regarding his ideological wars. But he and his fellow hawks are always striving to overcome the Vietnam Syndrome described by neocons, in which our "sickly inhibitions" against war damage whatver war effort is currently underway.

For example, just as Tucker Carlson allowed Putin to tell his side of the story, the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny conveniently died in a Siberian prison - right before his wife was taking the stage at a NATO confab in Munich. Right as the House of Reps was balking at sending more money and weaponry to Ukraine. 

Right as the fate of political prisoner Julian Assange, exposer of Crusader Bush's war crimes, is being decided in a British court.

Just as "Genocide Joe" insisted that he witnessed the beheadings of Israeli babies by Hamas, Pope Urban II before him had urged genocide by atrocity propaganda. He  told his troops of pilgrims that Muslim "savages" were eviscerating their (non-existent) Christian slaves just to see how far their intestines could be  spread upon the ground. The pope also inspired his target audience with the specter of mass sexual assaults by Musliims upon on Christian women. Urban prissily did not go into specifics explaining that talking about the horror would actually be worse than the actual horror. . Of course, Pope Urban didn't have a New York Times to spread the graphic unproven  details for him.. Plus, most people were not that literate back then.

Enlightened liberal fanatics like Biden just can't seem to help embracing the same kind of mythical, mystical past they accuse the "deplorables" of clinging to.

The sacralizing of war and all kinds of ,cruelty is how they justify  their crimes to themselves.. It's what lets all of them  sleep at night.

 It also what makes Biden risk his own re-election for the sake of a religious fundamentalist idea, even it it means the second coming of Trump. Biden seems to be holding on for the second coming of Christ. Until then, his faith turns America iinto a pariah state in the eyes of the world.

We must face the likelihood thathe truly does believe that Israel's murder of 30,000 Palestinians and counting is simply a matter of righteous self-defense.

As Jeff Sharlet observes in his excellent history of American fundamentalism, "The Family.""

"Our attempts to shunt fundamentalists into the outer circle of kooks and haters and losers and left-behinds, undemocratic dimwits who do not understand the story the rest of us have agreed to live by. Our refusal to recognize the theocratic strand running throughout American history is as self-deceiving as fundamentalism's insistence that the United States was created a Christian nation."`

Sharlet writes in his book that the National Prayer Breakfast, begun as a yearly event during the Eisenhower administration, and at which every president siince has delivered a religion--themed speech  actually got its start as an anti-labor, anti-New Deal movement in the 1930s, as a nifty means to promote capitalistic greed and wealth inequality in the name of Jesus. The annual event also serves as a back-channel for foreign leaders - including foreign despots who are officially personae non grata with the State Department -and influential business people to wheel and deal in  safety and comfort, to be a part of the religious experience. The only requirement is a personal acceptance of Jesus.

For his own part, Biden did not disappoint the war profiteers in the audience. At oone point in his speech, he actually seemed to conflate the United States with the body of Jesus Christ:

"But we’re the beacon to the world.  The entire world looks to us.  That’s not hyperbole. 
"
This is an idea.  This idea was made real before the soul became flesh, before this dream became a fact.  It was prayed for, it was hoped for, it was believed in.  That’s the story of America."

Biden alluded to the famous passage from the New Testament's Gospel of St. John: "The word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory as it were the only begotten son of the Father, full of grace and truth."

I rest my case.