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American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
Chris Hedges
Free Press
January 2007
On Sale: January 9, 2007
256 pages
ISBN: 0743284437
EAN: 9780743284431
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
Twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other radio
and televangelists first spoke of the United States becoming
a Christian nation that would build a global Christian
empire, it was hard to take such hyperbolic rhetoric
seriously. Today, such language no longer sounds like
hyperbole but poses, instead, a very real threat to our
freedom and our way of life. In American Fascists, Chris
Hedges, veteran journalist and author of the National Book
Award finalist War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,
challenges the Christian Right's religious legitimacy and
argues that at its core it is a mass movement fueled by
unbridled nationalism and a hatred for the open society. Hedges, who grew up in rural parishes in upstate New York
where his father was a Presbyterian pastor, attacks the
movement as someone steeped in the Bible and Christian
tradition. He points to the hundreds of senators and members
of Congress who have earned between 80 and 100 percent
approval ratings from the three most influential Christian
Right advocacy groups as one of many signs that the movement
is burrowing deep inside the American government to subvert
it. The movement's call to dismantle the wall between church
and state and the intolerance it preaches against all who do
not conform to its warped vision of a Christian America are
pumped into tens of millions of American homes through
Christian television and radio stations, as well as
reinforced through the curriculum in Christian schools. The
movement's yearning for apocalyptic violence and its assault
on dispassionate, intellectual inquiry are laying the
foundation for a new, frightening America. American Fascists, which includes interviews and coverage of
events such as pro-life rallies and weeklong classes on
conversion techniques, examines the movement's origins, its
driving motivations and its dark ideological underpinnings.
Hedges argues that the movement currently resembles the
young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s
and '30s, movements that often masked the full extent of
their drive for totalitarianism and were willing to make
concessions until they achieved unrivaled power. The
Christian Right, like these early fascist movements, does
not openly call for dictatorship, nor does it use physical violence to suppress opposition. In short, the
movement is not yet revolutionary. But the ideological
architecture of a Christian fascism is being cemented in
place. The movement has roused its followers to a fever
pitch of despair and fury. All it will take, Hedges writes,
is one more national crisis on the order of September 11 for
the Christian Right to make a concerted drive to destroy
American democracy. The movement awaits a crisis. At that
moment they will reveal themselves for what they truly are
-- the American heirs to fascism. Hedges issues a potent,
impassioned warning. We face an imminent threat. His book
reminds us of the dangers liberal, democratic societies face
when they tolerate the intolerant.
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