We're in a Battle with Satan!

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Beth Hunter

Pauline Jelenick, in Salon.com, reports that Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin is bleating, far and wide, that the counterterror war is a battle with Satan. Boykin is the new undersecretary for...(warning: spewing opportunity ahead)....intelligence. According to Jelenick, Boykin said, of a 1993 battle with a Muslim militia leader in Somalia, "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol." Also worth repeating here (thanks, Pauline): "Appearing in dress uniform before a religious group in Oregon in June, Boykin said Islamic extremists hate the United States 'because we're a Christian nation...and the enemy is a guy named Satan."

Now, I fear that dipping my pen into the "this is a Christian country" epithet will cause me just one brain anyeurism I don't particularly need this afternoon (I have much cleaning to do around the house...I will, however, consider these words while scrubbing the toilet today.) Instead, I wish to focus on the word "Satan." Here's what Satan really means.

From Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons":

"[M]ost people pictured satanic cults as devil-worshipping fiends, and yet Satanists historically were educated men who stood as adversaries to the church. Shaitan. The rumors of satanic black-magic animal sacrifices and the pentagram ritual were nothing but lies spread by the church as a smear campaign against their adversaries. Over time, opponents of the church, wanting to emulate the Illuminati [I'll define that in a moment], began believing the lies and acting them out. Thus, modern Satanism was born."

Further, explains Dan Brown, the church claimed the word 'Lucifer' was a reference to the devil, but the Illuminati "insisted Lucifer was intended in its literal Latin meaning – bringer of light." Or Illuminati.

One quick detour to explain who the Illuminati were:

[I]n the 1500s, a group of men in Rome fought back against the church. Some of Italy's most enlightened men – physicists, mathematicians, astronomers – began meeting secretly to share their concerns about the church's inaccurate teachings. They feared that the church's monopoly on 'truth' threatened academic enlightenment around the world. They founded the world's first scientific think tank, calling themselves 'the englightened ones.' [Illuminati.] [Again, from Dan Brown.]

The reason I've brought all this stuff up is to say that Bush & Co. is essentially characterizing every citizen of the U.S. and every foreign person, group or country who disagrees with their policies as Satan. For Satan, we'll recall, is an adversary of the powers-that-be.

Pauline Jelenick also says this in her article: "Rumsfeld on Thursday repeated the Bush administration position that the war on terrorism is not a war against Islam, but against people 'who have tried to hijack a religion.'" Exsqueeze me, but first of all, assuming that rhetoric were true, what's it our business to run around the world clamping down on people who are trying to hijack a religion? And need I remind anyone that the first of the Crusades was a war by the Christians against the Muslims?

More importantly, here we've got Bush & Co. claiming the "terrorists" are hijacking a religion (Islam), while at the very same time Bush & Co. is hijacking our democracy and turning it in to a totalitarian regime; by all appearances, they have successfully hijacked what was formerly regarded as the Republican Party; and they have hijacked the true tenets of the Christian religion upon which they rely to justify their own very real Crusade, and have thereby made pawns out of the truly religious.

And now, a refreshing quote from Hermann Goring, Luftwaffe commander, in an

April 18, 1946 interview (from Nuremberg Diary, by Gustave Gilbert):

It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attached, denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

Chilling, eh? But I can't leave here without an uplifting quote, so I offer up the University of Utah's 2003 commencement speech given by Terry Tempest Williams:

When minds close, democracy begins to close. Fear creeps in, silence overtakes speech. Rhetoric masquerades as thought. Dogma is dressed up like an idea. And we are told what to do, not asked what we think. Security is guaranteed. The lie begins to carry more power than the truth until the words of our own founding fathers are forgotten and the images of television replace history. An open democracy inspires wisdom and dignity of choice. A closed society inspires terror and the tyranny of belief. We are no longer citizens. We are media-engineered clones wondering who we are and why we feel alone. Lethargy trumps participation. We fall prey to the cynicism of our own resignation.

When democracy disappears, we are asked to accept the way things are.

I beg you... do not accept the way things are.

Question. Stand. Speak. Act.

More later, from somewhere in America.

Beth Hunter

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/10/con03202.html