In Europe before World War One Jews
were better integrated into German society than almost anywhere else on the
continent.  There were lots of
intermarriages as well.  In Bosnia
Christians and Muslims lived together peacefully under Tito’s Communist rule,
far and away the mildest form of Communist rule that had ever existed.  Again there was intermarriage.  In Rwanda Hutus and Tutsis had lived
together peacefully for a long time, and again there was much intermarriage.

All these societies were examples
of multiethnic groups living together and benefiting from one another’s
presence.  All three degenerated
into hells of murder, torture, rape, and worse.

How did it happen?  By a process we see going on around us
today in this country.  

The worst men and women, people
motivated by a lust for power and a hatred for those different from themselves
successfully pried a society apart, dividing neighbors first with suspicion and
distrust, and then with hatred, and finally with violence.  It did not happen all at once and was
carefully orchestrated by those primarily responsible.

They did it through slowly
escalating media abuse, slowly escalating political rhetoric, and slowly
escalating threats of violence, followed in time by violence.  The best short study of this process is in
Chris Hedges War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.  Anyone would be well advised to read this small book.  Nothing of our common concern is more important than the
issues it discusses, in my view.

If you have more time, read Claudia
Koonz’s The Nazi Conscience, a longer and deeper study of how
Germany was transformed from a tolerant and decent society to the moral
cesspool of Nazi rule.  All the time those leading the process did so
in the name of morality and those allowing themselves to be led agreed.

You will be impressed with the
common pattern emerging in all these accounts.

In the US today the same logic, and
I think the same forces, are following the same pattern.  It began under Nixon, perhaps when Pat
Buchanan advocated splitting the country because they would get “the larger
half.”  Buchanan’s faux patriotism
has not changed at all since then: he remains one of our biggest traitors successfully
masquerading as a patriot.

Beginning with Nixon and Buchanan’s
efforts, certain elements have never ceased in their efforts to turn Americans
against one another in their quest for power, because power, and its deepest
consummation, violence, blossoms only when there is distrust and division.  How many of my readers remember Pat
Robertson and Jerry Fallwell’s efforts to blame Pagans, feminists, and gays, among others, for
9-11?  What would have happened to
a Pagan temple in many cities if we were large enough to have them?  But their efforts to demonize gays,
feminists, and Pagans fell short of their hopes. On balance we were too
familiar to too many.

Today these same forces are
focusing on Muslims: beating the drums for war with Iran, advocating overriding
the Bill of Rights to stop an Islamic Cultural Center in New York, and now
attacking mosque construction throughout the country.  This latest escalation proves that their supposed concern
for 9-11 families (some of them were Muslims by the way, as were some of the “First
Responders” and others who thwarted terrorist efforts in this country) was a
lie and a subterfuge. 

If Muslims can be made the Jews of
an American Reich invading and killing people posing no threat to it, people
thousands of miles from our shores, we cannot be allowed to think of Muslims as
good people.  American Muslims must be demonized. 
We must be turned against them as mindlessly and finally as brutally as
Germans were turned against Jews, Orthodox Serbs against Bosnian Muslims, and
Hutus against Tutsis.

The issue isn’t really Muslims.  The issue is the deep need to breed
fear and hatred of other people whether they be Pagans or feminists or gays or
liberals or Muslims, because that energy then can be harnessed to feed power.

If you think I am exaggerating,
read those books, or at least Hedges’ small volume.

Intoxication

With the end of the Cold War we as
a nation rapidly became drunk on power. 
If power is a kind of spiritual force, Washington DC became a magnet for
it, because here was more potential for its growth than anywhere else for the
moment.  (China’s time may come,
but not yet.)  Chris Hedges gets it
right in my opinion. “In the rise to power we become smaller, power absorbs us,
and once power is attained we are often its pawn.” (168) America is getting absorbed.

From a African Pagan perspective, Malidoma Some writes   “When power comes out of its
hiddenness, it shrinks the person who brought it into the open and turns that
person into a servant.  The only way that overt power can remain visible
is by being fed, and he who knows how to make power visible end up trapped into
keeping that power visible….

“Whoever creates that kind
of visible power must then stay in the service to that which he creates. . . .
To display power is to become servile to it in a way that is extremely
disempowering.  This is because the service is fueled by the terror of
losing the fantasy of having power.” (62-3)

In a few short years we
have as a country and a culture embraced torture, kidnapping the innocent and guilty alike
off foreign streets, sending killers and killing machines into other countries
to kill the innocent and guilty alike, waged open ended war and occupation with no
standard for victory, and having an all consuming fear that we must continue all this so as to
show we are powerful.  This is an
utter degradation of our national image. Worse, those responsible have traded a
free society for one abjectly servile to power, and demanding similar servility
from all its citizens.  Many,
captivated by its promise, happily serve, as did many Germans, Serbs, and  Hutus.  If we do not push back, and push back strongly, we will
follow this sad well trodden path.