It Can Happen Here: A Fascist Christian America, Volume I

Copyright © 2000 by George E. Lowe.

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Contents

Preface

A Foreword, Foreshadowing, And Forewarning

Volume I

Chapter 1:

Chapter 2:

Chapter 3:

Chapter 4:

Chapter 5:

Chapter 6:

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10:

Chapter 11:

Chapter 12:

Chapter 13:

Chapter 14:

Chapter 15:

Chapter 16:

Chapter 17:

Chapter 18:

Chapter 19:

Chapter 20:

Chapter 21:

Chapter 22:

Chapter 23:

To Professor W.W. Black of Findlay, Ohio

for a lifetime of friendship,

encouragement, and inspiration,

and to Charlotte

for over 46 years of almost bliss,

who transformed me

from an Eastern, but not sophisticated hick,

to joint seekers together in the wild,

wondrous world beyond Northeastern Pennsylvania.

PREFACE

In the mid-30s, as Hitler was consolidating power in Germany, Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel with the ironic title, It Can’t Happen Here, describing a takeover of the American government by an alliance of right-wing politicians and fundamentalist preachers. The thesis of my non-fiction book (in two volumes) with the non-ironic title, It Can Happen Here, is that we are in danger of becoming what Lewis warned against 65 years ago, a Fascist Christian America.

The American people received a wake up call in March of AD 2000 when George W. Bush followed in the footsteps of his father, Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, and other Republican politicians who visited Bob Jones University in South Carolina. The antiblack, anti-Catholic and anti-Mormon teachings of the university shocked the nation and sent young George scurrying for cover.

But the television talking heads were soon dismissing the incident as a passing phenomenon on the far out fringe. That was a reflection, as Garry Wills has noted, of a seemingly invincible ignorance among those in the nation’s religious and secular mainstream of the power and reach of the Fundamentalist movement in contemporary America.

Far from being an isolated phenomenon, this is an obsession that grips a huge segment of the American public. Sales of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, a book outlining an apocalyptic theology identical to that of Bob Jones University, have exceeded 30 million, which means that it is probably in circulation in close to half of the families in the United States.

According to this literal reading of the New Testament’s Book of Revelation and selected portions of the Old Testament (Ezekiel/

Daniel), the world is hurtling rapidly toward the End Times in which the Antichrist will appear and provoke a general destruction of the human race as a prelude to the Second Coming of their Lord Jesus Christ. (See pp 20-25, 312, 319-20,Volume I and pp 170-74,Volume II)

I observed these religious obsessions in action as a liberal, civil service mole in the Reagan administration at the Department of Education, surrounded by right-wing Fundamentalist Christian conspirators. I played a major role in frustrating an attempt by Fundamentalist Republican political appointees to leak allegations of a long-standing sexual affair between the elder George Bush and his staff director and thereby block his re-nomination as the Vice Presidential candidate in 1984. (See pp 320-21,Volume I)

What is particularly alarming about the apocalyptic/end time obsessions of such people is that it propels many of them to seek to provoke the End Time through violent acts. And as I will also demonstrate, it inclines them—and others in the non-Fundamentalist right—toward a fixation on Star Wars (Reagan’s Magnificent Sci/Fi Obsession; the SDI-Strategic Defense Initiative) as a nuclear war panacea. (See Volume I pp 282-84, 304-314 and Volume II 176-76)

Indeed, for many in the GOP (Lott/Helms/Cochran/ Robertson/Falwell) Ballistic Missile Defense is their Holy Grail—in political-military terms and for religious-prophetic purposes. Once operational it will allow an aggressive thermonuclear war to be fought, our people protected, and Armageddon-WW III to be initiated in order to bring Jesus back for His Second Coming with only a minimum of American casualties. (See pp 69-70, 306-10, 433-36)

I spent a major portion of my life fighting against the Dr. Strangeloves of the Military Industrial Complex and the related Scientific-Technological Elite, which President Eisenhower warned us about so unexpectedly in January 1961.(See p. 80,451-53) In the 1960s I served in a Top-Secret navy unit in the Pentagon that sought to expose the dangerous preventive-pre-emptive war strategies of the Strategic Air Command and its military and civilian allies. And I was personally responsible for leaking General Curtis LeMay’s proposal to use nuclear weapons to bomb North Vietnam back into the Stone Age. (See pp 108, 182-84, 441-43)

Now I see the same dangerous tendency in the mad rush to build a ballistic missile defense system (BMDS) behind which a future right-wing administration could persuade itself that it was immune to nuclear attack and thus free to pursue a provocative foreign and military policy. A combination of Star Wars and the Apocalypse could result in a preventive U.S. nuclear strike against a rogue nuclear state or even Russia and China. (See pp 306, 310) It is imperative, therefore, that the American people know where the Republican presidential candidate stands on these vital issues. Does George W. Bush, who attributes his religious conversion at age 40 to the personal mentoring of the Fundamentalists Billy Graham and his Midland Texas, chief of staff and eminence grise, Don Evans, actually subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible, particularly of the book of Revelation? Where does Bush stand on appointing such Fundamentalists to positions in his administration, particularly in the national security area? (See pp 258-260) John F. Kennedy was required to go before the Southern Baptist ministers in January 1960 during the Presidential Campaign to answer questions about the Catholic Church and its influence on his policies. It is imperative that Bush (and Gore) be required to appear before a similar gathering of mainstream religious and secular leaders to answer the even more critical religious questions of the moment. (See Volume I pp 474-75 and Volume II 173-74) This is no mere theoretical or political exercise. As I demonstrate in this book, Ronald Wilson Reagan was a true believer in a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation (and Ezekiel). They were at the roots of his fixation on the Evil Empire and Star Wars/SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative-Mutual Assured Survival)—a fixation that was held in check only by the constant vigilance and intervention of his senior traditionalist/pragmatic advisers and his wife Nancy and her astrologers. (See pp 255-57, 261-281)

If we are not to be subjected to another and even more dangerous President, it is imperative that the intellectual, political and journalistic leaders of our imperiled nation closely examine the lessons of this book.

A FOREWORD,

FORESHADOWING,

AND FOREWARNING

In my half century struggle against the foes of our open democratic society, our republican institutions, the traditions of political civility and compromise, the necessity for balance, stability, and sustainability of the Earth’s eco-systems, I have found the enemies of democracy-republicanism-constitutionalism and the forces of reaction, extremism and revolution in many places: the political party structure, the military and the Pentagon, the large defense contractors, private and corporation-funded think tanks, private foundations, religious organizations and their media affiliates, hate radio, the Internet, and in a wide cross-section of private interest groups, magazines, newspapers, columnists, pundits, TV, and newspapers.

In almost every instance with a few outstanding exceptions, my arguments have never been against all the individuals in the groups or organizations with which I have disagreed and constantly fought (with ideas) over the last five decades of the twentieth century.

Wendell Wilkie was once asked after his presidential campaign how he was going to live with some of his political enemies he had so recently lambasted and he replied, It was all campaign rhetoric. Throughout The Age of Deterrence (1964) and in this work I have especially railed against the US Air Force. But I really didn’t and don’t mean the average patriotic airmen /women who so bravely and dedicatedly defended the US in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the

Gulf, Kosovo-Serbia, and everywhere else in our victorious Cold War and post-war limited conflicts of the late twentieth century. No, I was consciously indicting the strategic and nuclear policies of some of the Air Force leadership, generals, and its RAND Corporation doctrinaires.

I believed then (1958-70) and now that there were real thermonuclear war lovers in RAND-SAC and high Air Force councils who actually and honestly believed in the air-atomic-hydrogen bomb airpower doctrines of massive retaliation-counterforce-pre-emptive-preventive war, first-strike. And they accepted all the related clever rationales, dreamed up by RAND, Brodie, Teller, Kissinger, Kahn, LeMay, Power, Wohlstetter, Kaufmann, Ellsberg, J.Schlesinger, Brzezinski, Perle, Nitze, as well as the other high priests of the nuclear age including all the so-called Wizards of Armageddon.’’ And these aging Cold War hawks, neo-hawks and crazies’’ were especially militant and dangerous during the Reagan years. (See the post-Cuban Missile Crisis, US Air Force proposal to seek and develop a first-strike capability. It was a plan which McNamara referred to in a November 21, 1962 [memo] he wrote to President Kennedy, recommending that the proposal be rejected as a U.S. policy objective (Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush & Nuclear War, New York: Random House, New York, 1982, 49).

These nuclear gladiators and atomic war lovers were absolutely convinced, like the fanatic followers of Peter the Hermit in 1095 who launched the First Crusade against the Moslem rulers of Jerusalem, with the stirring words God wills it, that modern thermonuclear wars should not only be fought, but with proper planning (plus lots of shovels, holes, dirt and doors) they could be won. Recall General Tommie Power’s infamous definition of victory: Two Americans and one Russian. On December 12, 1960, after hearing Kaufmann’s infamous lecture on counterforce, an angry Power bellowed, Why do you want us to restrain ourselves? … Restraint! Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards! And then the angry General said, Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!"

Kaufmann—his patience exhausted—snapped back, ‘Well, you’d better make sure that they’re a man and a woman.’ At that point, Power stalked out of the room. The briefing was over. (Fred Kaplan. The Wizards of Armageddon. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983, 246.)

Always remember that during the Cold War any scheme feasible and imaginable was recommended in secret Washington corridors of power if it might have contributed to total victory in the Cold War over all our Communists enemies, the USSR, China, Cuba, North Vietnam, North Korea, or anyplace else where atheism, socialism, or Communism lurked.

Obviously this obsession with total victory in total nuclear war by the Military Utopians and right-wing atomic warriors has receded now that the Cold War is over and won. SAC has been disbanded and its bombers, missiles, and tankers have been reassigned to new Air Force Commands. But many thermonuclear warriors, "gladiators,’’ feel cheated that they never had the chance to use their superbly trained crews and superior weapons against the "commies’’. Perhaps they can one day be used against those who continue to deny Christ, prevent His Second Coming, or are aimed at new Great Threats like the Chinese Yellow Peril or Satanic Islamic Fundamentalists.

I also have no argument against the brave pilots and dedicated crews of TAC who defended, by close air support, our ground troops, Army and Marines in Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War, and Kosovo. Nor do I have any quarrel with the Air Transport Command who with great efficiency, risk, and valor broke the Berlin Blockade in 1948, supplied the Marines and Army in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf and Kosovo, or the pilots and airmen in the various R&D and Technical Commands.

And most certainly we must applaud the superb professional performance of the various Air Force, Navy, Army, and Marine pilots during the 78-Day War over Serbia and Kosovo in the spring of 1999. This military air campaign was a testament to the great skill, bravery, and dedication of these efficient implementers of modern American airpower. Indeed, the implications of total air control in the twenty-first century may open new avenues of political-military-diplomatic theory and practice in furthering our national interests and in the service of international humanitarian concerns.

But today my running battle and dispute is with the Religious Utopians: the Fundamentalists-Conservative Evangelicals-Pentecostals’ leadership and their highly controversial and deadly dangerous doctrine of the Rapture-Tribulation-Armageddon/WW III-Second Coming of Jesus’ Millennial Kingdom ruled with the help of the returned Raptured Church. My rage and contempt is directed against their preacher-politicians’ attempt to gain or "grab’’ political power in America. And then they will attempt to impose their Christian America Agenda on no longer free Americans as well as the non-Christian world. They would also control, via their presidential Manchurian Candidate II, America’s strategic nuclear weapons (and the SDI) poised to impose the American Millennium and Protestant Fundamentalist Christianity on the entire world.

Nor have I any conflict with the millions of Born Again-True Believers who attempt to follow the basic Christian principles of love, compassion, justice, and service that Jesus set forth in His Sermon on the Mount and in His life’s ministry. For the most part I’m sure they deeply love the Lord and their personal Jesus. And they live out their largely middle class lives as loving parents and grandparents, often reflecting simple Christian piety. They are also excellent citizens of local community service organization for the sick, poor, unfortunate, disabled, unloved, powerless or outcasts of society as was their Lord Jesus Christ.

However, my very strong disagreements have always been with the would be religo-political king makers like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Jimmy Swaggart, Beverly and Tim LaHaye, the James Dobson Family, Gary Bauer, James Robison, the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, the Traditional Values Coalition, Operation Rescue etc., to say nothing of their far right fellow-haters and extremist allies under their white and non-Jewish skins, the Aryan Nation and the Christian Identity Church. And not to be forgotten are the extremist Christian Reconstructionists who supply the key ideas for This Fascist Christian Nation/Christian Theocratic agenda of the Fundamentalist leadership and political king makers.

All of these organizations and individuals have violated and continue to subvert the traditional Baptist and American cornerstone principle of the separation of church and state as Jesus said so wisely Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s. Period amen period. Thank You Jesus! No matter how hard Pat Robertson and his Christian Nation allies try to convince themselves and the rest of us that no such principle exists nor should it, America’s revolutionary separation of church and state is rooted in 17th Century Baptist religious teachings, in 18th century Anglo-American thought, in American federal and state Constitutions, and is reflected in 224 years of American history and traditions. No Christian or historical revisionism can overthrow these historical facts in direct opposition to the fallacious claims of this Christian Nation advocates of the Christian Right.

These preacher-politicians and their religious-political organizations are all aimed at enlisting the Fundamentalist-Conservative Evangelical-Pentecostals as the controlling political force within the Republican Party that cannot be ignored, in Washington, in America, and the world. They want more, much more, than just a seat at the table as Ralph Reed said in his resignation remarks: They want the table and ultimately the Oval Office and are determined to win, grab, or seize political power early in the twenty-first century legitimately or illegitimately. The wonderful end (Christian America) justifies any means. The Fundamentalists will be able then to implement and advance their religious agenda both at home and abroad backed by the police and military power of the American State at all levels.

Or in everyday language, the Fundamentalists desire this supreme political power so that they can force their religious beliefs down the gagging throats of all Americans. They would accomplish this through the policing and military power of the state. The Fundamentalist would control laws and legislation at all levels in all branches of government: the American theocracy at its finest. In other words, I believed then, during the l98l-89 Reagan years, and I am even more convinced now, a decade later, as the events of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first unfold, that the ultimate objectives of the Fundamentalist Christian extreme, radical right is to create a Christian America. The Fundamentalists will try to accomplish this as fast as objective conditions allow, and then as they seize all the sources of political-military power, they will try to establish a Christian American theocracy. The terribly dangerous and deadly international policies of this Christian Nation-Theocracy, particularly as they relate to Armageddon-WW III, will then be implemented, resulting in a Christian American Millennium.

Specifically, this Fascist Christian America would then implement a series of provocative war-like policies such as an "incident’’ in Jerusalem that blows up the Dome of Omar in order to create those Armageddonic conditions that would allow Jesus Christ to return for a second time. (See Robert Stone’s The Damascus Gate and Kai Bird’s The Color of Truth (1999) on William Bundy’s 40 page paper of October 1964 which suggested that the US essentially provoke’’ another Gulf of Tonkin incident.’’ (NYTBR, April 4, 1999 p.12 of review by Mark Danner)

Unfortunately for the peace of the world, to say nothing of "the peace of Jerusalem,’’ billions of non-Christian lives would be sacrificed in the process of carrying out the Fundamentalists’ self-fulfilling prophecy. These orthodox Fundamentalist-Religious Utopians must plan, work, pray, and conspire to create Armageddon and World War III because, according to their own understanding of biblical prophecy, Jesus Christ cannot, will not, come back unless Armageddon happens first!

Why is the world put at risk for such an absurd, bloody, and unChristlike doctrine? Because the Fundamentalists have created almost out of whole, and not so holy cloth an elaborate doctrinal scenario that I call their Holy Chain Reaction: The Rapture-Tribulation-Armageddon-WW III-Second Coming of Jesus (with the Raptured Church in tow)-The Lord Jesus Christ’s Millennial Kingdom (administered with the help of the conveniently returned Raptured Church). That is what the dangerous doctrine of fullblown Premillennial Dispensationalism cries out for, all in the name of forcing or hastening the return of their Lord Jesus Christ

What follows is my attempt to diagram Key Aspects of Fundamentalist Doctrine, their Master Plan, and Grand Strategy for America and the world, AD 2000-2025.

1. ISRAEL RESTORED(1948)-JERUSALEM UNITED (1967)

2. THE RAPTURE(of Born Again Christians to Heaven)-144,000 Jewish Converts Evangelize the World

3. THE 7-YEAR TRIBULATION-Two 3-1/2 Year Phases: floods/ plagues/ famines & III Temple Rebuilt by Jews 4.. ARMAGEDDON/WW III-Jesus & RAPTURED CHURCH return to end WW III and save Mankind from destroying itself.

5. JESUS ESTABLISHES HIS MILL ENNIAL KINGDOM with

RAPTURED CHURCH’S ASSISTANCE-Joint rule for 1,000 Years of Peace/Prosperity

6. SATAN SET FREE-SATAN, rechained & put way forever in fiery pit.

7. FINAL JUDGMENTS

8. A NEW JERUSALEM/NEW HEAVEN/NEW EARTH

9. 10. LIGHTS OUT FOR ETERNITY

All Born Agains will be with Jesus in Heaven. All others will be condemned to suffering in Hell forever, and ever. Amen.

There are four outstanding but interrelated events that I would like to summarize here, especially those that encompass the Fundamentalists’ Master Plan and Grand Strategy, which I have distilled from Fundamentalist Orthodox literature and is included in detail in Volume II.(pp.338-379)

1. Their future main event of history will be the Second Coming of their Lord Jesus Christ. Consequently everything must be done to bring about history’s second greatest event. History’s #1 event was the First Coming of Jesus Christ.

2. But Jesus can’t and won’t come back unless the following two critical events happen or are made to occur by American Fundamentalists with covert or overt assistance by ultra-Orthodox Jewish Fundamentalists and the absolutely necessary 144,000 Jewish converts (Jewish Billy Grahams).

A. The Conversion of144,000Jews. When this event happens then and only then the Rapture will take place. Immediately the Raptured Church (the royal family of God, Thieme 73) will be beamed/snatched up/raptured to Heaven to wait out the 7-year Tribulation with Jesus. As for these Jewish Billy Grahams they will convert the world to Christianity until the Tribulation is over. Recall the syllogism No 144,000 Jewish converts = No Rapture. This Rapture is also the greatest recruiting scam in history: Become a Born Again Christian, and you’ll be Raptured to Heaven, escape the Tribulation/Armageddon, and return with Jesus and enjoy joint rule of the Earth with Jesus for 1,000 years of peace, plenty, prosperity, free face lifts, and unlimited, Viagra-free fornication. No wonder so many American Fundamentalists have already signed up for that tipless cruise.

B. The Jews in the last half of the Tribulation rebuild the Third Temple. The rebuilding of the Third Temple is a key End Time Sign that Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus is just around the corner. The ultra-Orthodox Jews and their American Fundamentalist co-conspirators are equally obsessed with their absolute God-given certainty that the Third Temple of the Jews must be, will be erected, on the exact site of David’s and Herod’s Temples. A Sacred/Holy place that is now very inconveniently occupied by the Dome of Omar and the Al Aqsa Mosque—the third holiest spot of Islam. The Fundamentalist’s solution: Blow it up or encourage God to destroy it by one of His well-placed Western Asian earthquakes. The destruction of the Dome of Omar/Rock presents the Jewish ultra-Orthodox and American Fundamentalists with a very great obstacle: The wrath of one billion, nuclear-armed, vengeful, maddened Moslems. Once again Hal Lindsey reassures his Born Again-True Believers-Real Christians, Obstacle or no obstacle, it is certain that the Temple will be rebuilt. prophecy demands it. (Lindsey 56). In his Damascus Gate, Robert Stone sums up the rationale for any future Fundamentalist plot/conspiracy: The purpose is to destroy the enemy shrines on the Temple Mount. To wipe them away and build the Temple of the Almighty. And that fictional future may indeed turn out to be the most terrible historic fact of the 21st century—if the American and Jewish Fundamentalists triumph in their mad, horrible, monstrous, conspiracy to hasten the return of their Messiah.

C. And the American Fundamentalists actually do believe, based on God/Jesus’ actual, inerrant words found in Revelation, that Jesus will not return with power and great glory(Matt. 24:30), until and unless Armageddon-WW III takes place. Then, General Lord Jesus Christ returns with the Raptured Church in tow, victoriously ends WW III, and establishes his Millennial Kingdom. Jesus will rule from His Great White Throne, assisted by the fully assault-armed Raptured Church, for a thousand years of peace, prosperity, and endless fornication. And that’s the way our secular, democratic-republic will end if the Vital Center does not hold—2000-2012—against the Fundamentalist Christian Theocratic Fascist forces already within our cities’ walls.

Furthermore the Fundamentalists have massively popularized this entire sequence (Hal Lindsey has sold 30 million copies of The Late Great Planet Earth), written extensively about it, and it’s been incorporated into Prophetic Bibles. It has launched thousands of militant sermons, TV programs, (like Robertson’s subversive 700 Club, Jack Van Impe’s ministries, Hal Lindsey’s TV prophecies), and countless related books, and movies. Over 20 million copies of Fundamentalist Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind novels have been sold to date, and a Fundamentalist movie is in the works. These publishing phenomena make believable Pat Robertson’s claims of one hundred million related Born Again, True Believers. Their syllogisms are unbreakable and as follows:

1. No Rapture = no Holy Chain Reaction

2. No Armageddon-World War III = no

Second Coming of Jesus = no Millennial Kingdom

So here is where my half-century struggle against neo-fascism has finally taken me—deep into the throes of Christian fascism, American-style. It began in East Orange, New Jersey (l939), year six into Hitler’s thousand-year Reich through year thirteen at his Berlin bunker. Hitler had the Antichrist’s obsession with the Jew. If the European Jews couldn’t be converted, then they should be shot, burned, or otherwise murdered in a "final solution’’ to the problem of the eternal Jew: the vile, rat-like, stiff-necked, big hooked nose, Christ-killers of Hitler’s evil anti-Semitic propaganda campaign.

And now today, AD 2000-01, the Jew is presented by the generous American Fundamentalists with another chance to deny Christ again or embrace Jesus as the true Messiah for whom the Jewish People have been waiting thousands of years. On this point Fundamentalist doctrine is crystal clear: God, Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, or Hal Lindsey are giving 144,000 potential Jewish Billy Grahams the greatest deal and opportunity of all time and history.

First, the Raptured Church of Born Again, True Believers, Real Christians are snatched, raptured, or beamed up to Heaven to be with Jesus while God’s awful wrath is poured out on the Earth for seven years, culminating in Armageddon-WW III. Jesus Christ arrives back on Earth with the Raptured Church in the nick of time before mankind completely destroys itself.

Such a deal is offered to the Jews by the Fundamentalists! Once the Raptured Church leaves Earth to be with Jesus, the l44, 000 newly converted Jews, the infamous "Jewish Billy Grahams,’’ will have the Herculean task of converting the entire world to Christianity during the awesome seven-year Tribulation period. And on this point the Fundamentalist doctrine is once again crystal clear as the following syllogisms suggest:

No l44, 000 Jewish converts = No Rapture; No Rapture = No Tribulation; and No Armageddon = No Second Coming of Jesus = No Millennial Kingdom

But suppose, just suppose, the Jews of America and the World simply won’t cooperate with this Fundamentalist scenario and doctrine and refuse to convert in the early twenty-first century any more than they have for the last 2,000 years. I predict that as this non-Jewish conversion phenomenon becomes more and more apparent and necessary, the Fundamentalists will get more and more desperate and critical of the Jews’ stubbornness. They have never really forgiven the Jew for denying Jesus once and now by the Jews’ stiff-necked attitude they and they alone prevent the Lord Jesus Christ from coming back for a second time! Thus the Jews are Christ-killers squared; two times they will have denied Him, and they deserve a unique final solution—thermonuclear vaporization of all the Jews.

Even though General LeMay and General power may be dead, SAC dismantled, and other Utopian Fascist-True Believers in Total Victory Through Airpower are dead, retired, or dispersed, the potential for a civilization-destroying thermonuclear World War III lives on. Moreover, it should be noted that only thermonuclear weapons could carry out the bloody prophecies of Revelation. There are simply not enough American iron bombs and the means of delivering them to cause the destruction of all the cities of the world (Rev. l6: l9) and the death of at least one-half of the world’s population (Rev. 9:l5-l8 and 6:8). In America thousands of these thermonuclear weapons still exist under the direct and personal control of the President of the United States. They could fall, as the result of a future Fundamentalist election victory, AD 2000-l2, into the hands of another Fundamentalist President of the United States who knows exactly what he wants to do with them and is truly convinced that his God is directing his finger to and on the nuclear button. These ultimate presidential actions will result in final victory for Protestant Christainity—uniquely American style—over all the religions and nations of the Earth. (See Samuel Huntington’s thesis in his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996). And make no dry skull and bones about it, the full-blown American SDI /BMD of Governor Bush, Senators Lott, Helms, and Cochran is the Fundamentalists ‘key weapons system to ensure the final Fundamentalist Protestant Total Victory over all the world’s cultures and civilizations. (New York Times April 22, 2000 and May 24, 2000.)

Likewise these very same atomic-thermonuclear weapons could fall into the hands of Fundamentalists worldwide as contemporary secular states with thermonuclear weapons are taken over by Fundamentalist religious leaders determined to create theocracies for the greater glory of God, Jesus, Allah, Hindu Gods, or Chinese deities. Since all these Fundamentalists have an open, unique channel to their God, they may be tempted, if encouraged or directed to use these thermonuclear weapons to advance their own religious fortunes and bring eternal glory to their God and related civilization.

That is why Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God makes such an important contribution to understanding this cancer-like growth of fundamentalism at the heart of Christainity, Judaism, and Islam. In the late twentieth century, fundamentalism has emerged as one of the most powerful forces at work in the world, contesting the dominance of modern secular values and threatening peace and harmony around the globe. (Inside cover, my italics.)

And that is also why Frances Fitzgerald’s Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War is also so important: It shows how Reagan’s $60 billion science-fiction/religious obsession now seems almost certain to outlive him. (NYTBR, April 16, 2000 p7). In fact, the Congressional Budget Office on April 25, 2000, stated that even a limited missile defense (SDI/ Star Wars lite) allegedly against rogue nations would cost another $60 billion by 2015. (New York Times April 26, 2000). Only the American Military-Industrial-Religious Complex will love this doomboggle of Governor Bush’s full-blown sea-space based BMD, the bully-boy son of Reagan’s SDI, that could cost hundreds of billions of dollars. (Time June 5, 2000)

But Americans should never fear. I am almost optimistic, given the history of the non-use of nuclear weapons and their deterrence of total World War III (l945-2000) that as long as we maintain a secure second strike Great Deterrent backed up by a modern balanced military establishment, the final war (or Armageddon) will not happen. Especially, if we continue to place our Great Deterrent at the service of a secular democratic-republican-constitutional nation state dedicated to civilian control of the military, separation of Church and State, and continuance of three independent branches of government.

Then, and only then, will we have better than an even chance for the US ship of state to sail confidently into the twenty-first century and the third Christian Millennium with our liberties, freedoms, and democratic institutions intact, living, and breathing on a healthy blue-green oasis in the midst of infinite cold black space.

And if we are especially vigilant and declare with Thomas Jefferson eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man, we can avoid the Fundamentalists’ most desired future: A Christian American theocracy enforcing the Amerikan Millennium astride the Globe ruled by Fundamentalist Protestant preacher-politicians of the returned Raptured Church supported by their Military Utopian and conservative-ideological Utopian allies. The exciting Fundamentalist promise of the early Reagan years would be fulfilled finally by biblical prophecy in the early twenty-first century.

Will the Center hold? Or will the blood dimmed tide’’ allow men of passionate intensity’’ to seize the future from the Vital Center and ride that "rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem’’ to political power in a Fascist Christian America early in the Third Amerikan Millennium?

That’s what this book is all about. For I am even more convinced, than was Sinclair Lewis in 1935 that It Can Happen Here, early in the 21st century.

VOLUME I

CHAPTER 1:

"EASTERN, BUT NOT

SOPHISTICATED" 1939-53

I. Introduction: How I Became a Boy Anti-Fascist

M y first political awareness of the great struggle raging in the 1930s and 40s among the titanic forces of democracy, fascism, and communism began at Ashland Grade School in East Orange, New Jersey in 1939. Our teachers, especially Miss Baldwin (fifth grade) and Mrs. Murdock (music) were very pro—English and anti—German. Many of my classmates were Jewish and we had a scattering of central European Jewish refugees in our very middle class neighborhood at the edge of Newark. One eighth grader was even a member of Fritz Kuhn’s German-American Bund. He had a blond crewcut and was very unpopular with the rest of us.

As Hitler began his conquest of Europe our teachers responded by encouraging us to boycott German-made Horner harmonicas, introduced us to the red wax-covered Gouda cheese and read us Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates. Mrs. Murdock also taught us the music of the countries that bore the brunt of Hitler’s aggression. To this day I recall with great pleasure those pieces of classical music that Mrs. Murdock exposed us to: Dvorak’s New World Symphony’’ (Czech), Grieg’s’’ Peer Gynt Suite’’ (Norway), Elgar’s’’ Land of Hope and Glory’’ (English), and the’’ Marseilles’’ (French). And for holding back Hitler’s ally Stalin, she taught us the words and music of Finlandia’’ by Sibelius. And we all learned to sing the popular White Cliffs of Dover although I doubt as a birdwatcher of over fifty years that there were or are any real American Bluebirds, Sialia Sialis flying over those famous chalk cliffs.

We also knitted colorful afghan squares for bundles for Britain. Some of the more skilled knitters received beautiful gold and white pins with the royal crest from an English charity, but I never did. In honor of brave, doomed Czechoslovakia we visited its sparkling glass exhibit at the New York World’s Fair in l940. Miss Baldwin took three of her 5A class students, Billy Morris, Marjorie Morgan and me, in the rumble seat of her old Chevy to Flushing Meadows with its shining white Trilon and perisphere that still reflect in my memory. There at that glorious fair I first saw myself on TV and marveled at the technological future that stretched ahead of us. It is ironic that in l940 the former presbyterian Reverend Billy Graham at the New York World’s Fair also saw his first TV image.

They had a camera there, and as you walked by you could see yourself on a screen. We never thought it would amount to anything, though. It seemed too incredible! (Andrew Delbanco, review of Just as I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham, The New Republic (October 6, 1997, 32.)

I have always had great difficulty in distinguishing Billy, the Evangelist, Pastor to Presidents, and inventor of golf course spirituality (in Garry Wills’ phrase) who has preached Christianity to more people than anyone in history (New Republic 31), from Billy, the Fundamentalist Apologist. This second Billy is a super TV pitchman par excellence for the Biblical prophecies of Revelation, Daniel, and Ezekiel. He still hears the hoof beats of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, followed closely and quickly by Armageddon-World War III, the Second Coming of Jesus, His Millennial Kingdom or even perhaps the American Millennium?

It all depends on AD 2000, the dangerous decade ahead into the early twenty-first century and the nature of the Third Christian Millennium AD 2000-3000. But I assure you, there will be more, much more, of this peculiar evangelical-fundamentalist vision of a

Fascist Christian America which I believe we are not only slouching toward but in fact racing ominously toward this planned, fundamentalist, religious rendezvous: o with the American-Republic dream ? o with history herself and indeed o with the Master of the Universe’s very creation itself?

Time, chance, cabals, and conspiracies will determine to whom the twenty-first century and the third Christian Millennium does indeed, or will belong: in W. B. Yeats’ prophetic words from his Second Coming (1921), the best’’ who lack all conviction’’ or the worst’’ who are full of passionate intensity"?

Students in Miss Baldwin’s fifth grade in 1939-40 were in a sense more aware of the war in Europe, than our parents. She certainly influenced us to be pro-English and passionately antiHitler. This early political choice brought me in conflict with my father for the first, but not the last time.

My father was road master of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, the shortest distance between New York and Buffalo, The Route of Phoebe Snow, the woman in white who traveled the DL&W wiping her white gloves on the window sills to prove the cleanliness of anthracite coal. We lived in East Orange because dad’s railroad division went from Hoboken to Dover. His favorite newspaper was the tabloid New York Daily News and he reveled in its anti—British and often pro—German political cartoons by Batchelor. But my crowd preferred the New York Times because of its pro—English and anti-German-Nazi-Fascist tone, its better war news and detailed military maps. However, we did like the Daily News comics (Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon) and the interesting Sunday News features about the Lost Continent of Mu,’’ the Secrets of the Pyramids’’, and the’’ Prophecies of Nostradamus.’’

The Times became even more important in our lives after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa (Red Beard) against communism in June l94l. We no longer worried about German paratroopers landing on London, or the British fleet fleeing to Halifax or New

York, but we hoped that somehow, somewhere, the Nazi Panzers could be stopped in the vast steppes of Russia.

In that anxious summer of l94l the war fronts looked especially bad for the Russians and the British as the New York Times war maps showed ever larger parts of Russia falling to Hitler’s onrushing armies and becoming blacker and blacker as the Nazis surged toward Moscow and Cairo.

II. High School and College Days In Search of History and Politics

My grandfather, George E. (Poppy) Lowe, died in August l94l and as my father took his father’s job the family (brothers Bob and Dick) moved to Scranton in northeastern pennsylvania halfway between New York City and Buffalo. I enrolled in the eighth grade at Madison Grade school with a large Jewish population very near our church, Westminster presbyterian.

A few months later the Japanese carrier task force of Admiral Nagumo attacked the American fleet at pearl Harbor and sank or seriously damaged seven battleships of the Great American Deterrent lined up on Battleship Row at Ford Island. But fortunately the three American aircraft carriers were at sea and undamaged.

Three days after pearl Harbor, Adolph Hitler unexpectedly declared war on the US and amazingly, in less than a week FDR was able to mobilize America and the world’s few remaining democracies against German fascism and Japanese militarism, a fantastic achievement that had eluded Roosevelt since the mid-30s. FDR had thus guaranteed his high place in American and world history as the organizer and leader of our victorious armed forces over Germany and Japan in our last good war.

Scranton in the 1940s was a relatively prosperous city of l30 thousand, third largest in the state, noted for its hard coal, rail roads and textiles. The Protestants and Jews lived on the hill and in Greenridge, the Roman Catholics: Polish, Czech, Irish and Italian in the rest of the valley, the flats, or up north in Dunmore with the Sicilians. Gradually the wealthier and professional Protestants moved out of town to the mountain suburbs, leaving Scranton largely to the immigrants and their children deposited there by the D.L.and W. Railroad in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Where do you work a John? On the Delaware, Lackawan, and what do you do a John on the Delaware, Lackawan? I push, apush a truck on the Delaware Lackawan, on the Delaware Lackawan, awan, awan.

From a teenager’s perspective all our social life revolved around the YMCA, or the church youth groups largely Protestant (Methodist and Presbyterian). There really was very little dating or social intercourse between the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish teenagers of Scranton. Many of my friends were naturally anti-Jewish, but we had to be taught to be anti-Catholic in Sunday school, Church retreats, and summer Bible camps.

My Presbyterian religious training took place at Westminster Presbyterian Church under the inspiring leadership of Ms Ethel Ray Robinson, head of Christian Education, our local demi-god, the white-maned Dr. Peter K. Emmons; and the ever helpful church secretary, Ms Osborne. Westminister Church was a hotbed of excellent youth activities, dances, plays, sports and all sorts of social events that appealed to teenagers during the war years (l94l-45). High school days at Central High revolved around study, serious reading at the Scranton Public Library, playing bridge with family and friends, and constant bird watching. My best friend was Peter Price and we shared a love of birds, book, and bridge, which along with church just about sums up my teens.

Sometime during high school I was given a beautiful, illustrated edition of Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. I had been an active bird watcher ever since spring 1940 when I first identified a Cardinal, Blue Jay, and Brown Thrasher in an abandoned Victorian estate a few blocks from our red brick apartment building in East

Orange, New Jersey. I sat down and nearly devoured Darwin’s masterpiece in one sitting. I could hardly believe it was so exciting and as a boy naturalist nearly everything Darwin wrote was interesting. Early on I was a convert to the theory of evolution: the finches did it for Darwin and the warblers for me. Later over a twenty year period (1964-88), I actually observed the increasing bill sizes of the Yellow Throated Warbler (dendroica dominica) as it competed on Maryland’s Eastern shore for loblolly pine cone seeds with the Pine Warbler (dendroica pinus). Thus I was absolutely convinced of the truth of Darwin’s observation of his Galapagos Island finches and his theory of evolution.

Despite my evolution convictions I saw no conflict with a presbyterian upbringing and chats with Reverend Peter K. Emmons, Pastor of Presbyterian Church, concerning turkey buzzards, hawks, and God. Furthermore during that decade of my high interest in Presbyterianism in Scranton and Grove City College (194150) I have no memory of any religious discussion of Revelation, Creationism or Armageddon.

I do remember reading Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry in high school, but its religious fundamentalism, charlatanism and hypocrisy were so alien to the accepted Presbyterianism of Scranton (or Grove City for that matter) that it simply made me want to read Lewis’ Babbitt and Dodsworth and enjoy them I did. I did not question the dour, unemotional brand of Scottish Calvinism being preached by Dr.Emmons at Westminister Presbyterian Church.

However, I was influenced historically and religiously by two plays that Ethel Ray Robinson directed at the church and in which I had small parts: Harriet (the story of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin); Maxwell Anderson’s Journey to Jerusalem (the story of the young Jesus visiting the Temple). I recall my first Seder and the memorable words Next year in Jerusalem. I also recall clanking milk bottles in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. What these plays, preaching, and church activities accomplished was to turn me into a rather traditional Presbyterian with a distrust of Roman Catholic political power. I was blessed by a very good classical high school education, bound for a small western Pennsylvania town, Grove City and a conservative Presbyterian college of 1000 students, mostly World War II vets. I didn’t develop the typical anti-Catholic prejudice of most of my fellow Protestants as my mother was born a German Catholic (Langendorfer) with Irish Roman Catholics in her family tree (Callahan). Unlike many of my Protestant classmates I dated Irish Catholic girls from the south side. And one of my best friends and birding buddy, Joe Buydos, was a devout Czech Roman Catholic.

Nor did I acquire the typical anti-Semitism of many classmates, probably because I had known and went to grade school with Jewish friends in East Orange and at Madison Grade School in Scranton. In addition, the 600 Block of North Irving Avenue had many Jewish kids whom I got to know and tried to convert to bird watching and bridge.

World War II was ending, despite Hitler’s terror weapons the V-1 and V-2, as I entered my senior year at Central High. Like most teenagers we knew that if the war in Europe and Asia lasted long enough we would be drafted and serve overseas. But Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender on V-E Day, May 7, ‘45 was followed by the nearly incomprehensible news of two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by a gigantic new, secret bomber, the B-29. These tremendous historical events were succeeded, it seemed, almost simultaneously by the unconditional surrender of Japan on VJ-Day, August 15,1945, and the end of gas rationing. I’m not sure which was a bigger event in my life then.

In the previous April, the fifteen-year struggle between the two great protagonists ended as FDR and Adolf Hitler died within weeks of each other and Henry Luce’s American Century, not Hitler’s thousand-year German Millennium came to pass. For the moment it seemed that democracy at last had triumphed over the evil and malignant forces of fascism and militarism.

But things are never what they seem, especially in history and grand strategy. The two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and

Nagasaki were also aimed at the Soviet Union and world communism. They served as a radioactive warning to Stalin about moving too far or too fast in Western Europe or in the Far East. From the late l940s to the early l990s the West under steadfast American leadership waged a relentless and terribly expensive Cold War against the Soviet Union and its allies—real or imagined.

Throughout this nearly one-half century struggle American democracy, and the free enterprise system (capitalism) and Western Christendom were engaged in a global crusade against atheistic Soviet and world communism that ended in the early 1990s. With the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the implosion of the Soviet Union, the collapse of world communism as a global competitor to capitalism, and the related worldwide triumph of democratic institutions, America was the world’s only remaining superpower.