America Goes Fundamentalist

By: Andrew_McKillop

The unfunny thing is that it was fundamentalist, already. The Todd Akin's definition of "legal rape", the death of Neil Armstrong removing an ikonic symbol of American technological prowess, and a recurring spate of gory killings have all been given the usual mix-and-mingle media treatment to tweak out the most sensational fundamentalist themes, to a backdrop of news from Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan and elsewhere that runs along the same lines. Outside America, the world is run by scary, violent, bearded and begowned religious nutjobs who know nothing about technology. But inside the USA the fundamentalists are clean-shaven, wear a suit and tie and are techno geeks: the US media tells its witless viewers and listeners that America is so very different.

Believe us and be glad!

Religious fundies outside the pale are not Apple-conscious. Second-rate foreign technology players like South Korean Samsung are, obviously, thieves and plagiarists only able to slavishly copy America. We are asked to sincerely believe that a fundamentalist in a suit, if they are American, is much less scary than a foreign fundamentalist in a beard, even if both of them spout more or less the same rubbish and both of them pray in public an awful lot too much. 

Missouri Republican Congressman Todd Akin is par for the course, telling all the friendliest of government-friendly media that women can't become pregnant from what he defined as "legitimate rape". Over in Iran, at present, the fundies are still a little further ahead: they say that women who have extramarital sex "cause earthquakes".

The war of the fundies, on women and "minorities" who dont happen to agree with their fairy stories, is basically the same, West and East. The Todd Akin row only brings up to high ground what many people simply call the US rightwing war on women. Possibly related to the war for a job in a "jobless recovery", showing that women are better at home having legal sex and babies, this war is now basic meat for the US Republican Party. Reverting to its real fundamentals of devout men who understand religion and know how to make decisions about women's body parts, sexual relations and reproduction, the Party also has "forthright views" on womens' rather low rights to equality in employment and pay for the same work.

The fundies have problems with Neil Armstrong, due to his rigorous apolitical stance, refusal to take sides, and general dignity but American techno-fundamentalism really profits from teaming latterday technological gadgets and gimmicks, with their so-called and so-fundamental "world vision". Confusing Windows with Wonder, and Apple with America, the US fundies equate that slender prowess with residual ability to destroy any enemy they invented or discovered, anywhere.

The agenda, for American fundies is unchanged from the Cold War: the world needs domination - by America. US tech prowess, shown by those beautiful little ikons on a Apple gadget screen which inferior Asians have dared to copy, can and will give the US the upper hand in the final battle of Right against Wrong, that is always coming. War is good. Rejoice.

KEEP PRAYING
 We can laugh at the Egyptian cleric who said that a husband and wife cannot be completely naked while having sex. Much less funny, US fundies have had no problems teaming up with the most impeccably extremist Islamic regimes of the Gulf petro states, to finance and arm Syrian bearded fundie fighters waging war against the Syrian regime - and Syrian "unbelievers", whoever they happen to be. Like their US counterparts, the Syrian jihadists intend to prevent men and women working together, schooling together, or even praying together after the Final Victory - in the US case this would only bring back segregation, with a new twist.

In the early days of the Taliban, who surprising as it may seem had numerous friends and supporters in US rightwing circles before they began their habit of going a little too far and bombing girls schools, the Taliban also had a strong line in Praying for Victory. The problem was and is that the fundies can only go one way: they have to escalate the verbiage, then move up to war and spread the violence their doctrines make us familiar with.

Exactly as in the Akin case, and any gory lone killer event the US media will give instant and total attention to, the fundamentalist religious angle will always be present. Akin, like any self-respecting Taliban or Saudi cleric and their fellow religious fundies knows more about everything than you do. Whether it is the forces of Good and Evil and where "we" must strike first, or the real and right status of women, they know more about everything than we do. In an age of doubt and uncertainty, this "confidence" comes in handy.

The fundies of the US type, to be sure, have to be a little less arrogant than their bearded opposite numbers in foreign lands, but their action is the same. One supporting theme used by the Akin Party in the US (AKA as Republicans) is that women simply do not want to be paid as much as men do, because their real aim is to get married and raise kids: ergo there is no such thing as rape because supposedly unwanted and mistimed pregnancies are in fact a choice made by women and "cannot be" accidents.


The same applies in Islamic-organized mass killings of persons who obey "competing doctrines", either inter-Islamic in the shape of Shia-Sunnite fightouts, or Islamic-Christian killings, which is already the shape of present and coming things in the Syrian civil war. For the fundies and because of their "religious qualifications" or simply because of their "devotion", their call for mayhem is pure and they are above reproach: such is piety.

ENTER THE BREIVIKS
To be sure, the fundies fight amongst themselves - while awaiting the Final Struggle. Anders Behring Breivik, the man who killed 77 people in a bomb and gun rampage just over a year ago, was judged "sane" by a Norwegian court and sentenced to 21 years in prison. He however styled himself, like any fundie, East or West, as an ultranationalist - and in his case a religious Christian - who killed his mostly adolescent victims "to fight multiculturalism" in Norway, that is encroaching Islam and the supposed Marxism that runs alongside Islam.

During the 1980-1988 Afghan war of the USSR, of course totally unlike the 2001-2014 Afghan war of "Christian nations", the war against impious Marxism was a major rallying point for US fundies and their Taliban friends of the time. Later on, it wasnt, but other political considerations and ingredient had squeezed into the rotten soup of war aims and themes, especially The War on Terror. The important point is that Anders Breivik is only an European high latitude national version of this global fundie story.

The media of the government-friendly sort and type has done everything to make us think that the actions of a Breivik should not be simply dismissed as those of a lunatic. Likewise the jihadists who so splendidly attacked the equally-mad Colonel Gaddafi's regime in Libya, in 2011 were not presented as loonies, or as dangerous fundies, as long as they took out Gaddafi. By moving the cursor ever forward to the right, always the same direction, the conditions for more, more frequent and more murderous wars are being set up by fundies, East and West.

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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