Republican Jihad and the Bigot’s Playbook

By Charlie Barber
Staff Writer

“Tolerance is a very dull virtue.  It is boring.  Unlike love, it has always had a bad press.  It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.  No one has ever written an ode to tolerance, or raised a statue to her. Yet…this is the only force which will enable different races and classes and interests to settle down together…” - E.M. Forster

“...as long as people continue to believe absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.”  - Voltaire/Desmond MacCarthy
“They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
      And then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
      And then they came for the Jews, and and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
      And then . . . they came for me, and and by that time no one was left to speak up.” - Pastor Martin Niemoeller

As the headline screamed from my morning paper that “Obama backs mosque near ground zero,”  I realized that a minority group small enough to attack without electoral repercussions had emerged just in the nick of time for Republican fear and loathing gurus to use against Democrats in November. The problem with attacking Mexican Americans in Arizona, was that their brothers and sisters all over the country would become so offended that they would show up big time on election day in November.
Hispanic Americans have been, after all, the fastest growing minority for twenty years and more. Whatever their social conservatism, Republican attacks on their Mexican racial relatives have overshadowed any reservations they might have had about voting with Democrats and liberals. Cuban Americans in Florida, for example, are so fed up with such blatant racism that they are likely to join Hispanics all over the country in their intention to register, vote, and punish Republicans at the polls. Charlie Crist bailed on the Republicans and the Tea Party, I suspect, more for that reason than anything else.
What was needed was a minority that could be blamed for just about everything, but whose voting population was small in number, like Jews in Christian Europe from Constantine through the Holocaust.
Muslims, of course!  Just the thing for the likes of Newt Gingrich.
No matter that the targeted Imam in New York was a leader in reconciliation among the faiths in that city, behaving almost like a, well…like a Christian…
It occurred to me, however, that Newt and company might be making a big mistake by giving public recognition to a Muslim Cleric notorious for his tolerance of other faiths, like the North Dakota Muslim, isolated from members of his own faith, who decided to have his children raised Lutheran so that they would have a religious upbringing of some meaningful kind. As a Christian, I am somewhat familiar with that man’s dilemma, having decided that my children would benefit from being raised Jewish by their mother, after the two of us separated, because of the profound spirituality of that faith.
Given the assault on tolerance for the sake of political and economic gain, I thought about a recent conversation I had with an agnostic recluse I met while canoeing in northern Wisconsin, named “Fisherman Pete.”
Although Pete didn’t have much use for religion, especially the organized kind, he was a man of faith in the beauties of nature, the loyalty of his dog, and the restorative qualities of beer.  He figured that, while my friend and I were only drinking water, and consuming currants and granola, we were still in a canoe, using only paddles, and therefore, “OK.”
When we stopped at a campsite, Pete told us about a fascinating book he had picked up at a rummage sale in Outagamie County, the home of the late Senator Joe McCarthy. It was a detailed playbook on how to separate people from their senses, money, and political freedom, by playing on their hatred of “other” religions, races and ethnicities. Since religion is a national badge in places like Europe, Asia, and Africa it has been easy to translate those hatreds over here, even though the Bill of Rights and strict constructionist applications of “habeas corpus” sometimes get in the way.
The list of racial and religious hatreds is long, and Pete’s bigotry book had tips on how to exploit every one of them. Although Pete offered me his precious find to xerox,  I told him “thanks,” but it wouldn’t be necessary. Enough copies seem to have found their way into the hearts and minds of way too many people already. But after reading just a few pages I had a lot of questions to ask him:
HPR:  Why do so many American Protestants believe that America Catholics take direct orders from the Pope in Rome?

FP:  It’s not just American Protestants.  The guy whose name is on your town in North Dakota, Otto von Bismarck, was so freaked out about the Pope that he persecuted all Catholic politicians in the 1870’s.  He forgot to cancel elections, however, and they got stronger, so he conned them into hating labor union voters as “Godless,” even though many of those voters were Catholic.  Pretty slick.  That one’s still in the playbook.

HPR:  Have Catholics hated Protestants just as much?

FP:  Oh sure, especially where they were dominant, but they had to lay low in the U.S. so long because of the power of Protestants.  A hundred years ago they joined forces with Jews in America to demand a more secular based society in order to combat Protestant domination of the State, but nowadays their leadership here worries that they may have been too successful. The book also has some nasty references to Luther and that nun he married, as well as Cromwell’s destruction of what he called ‘graven images,’ but what civilized people called Renaissance and Baroque Art.  The latter point was actually true in the 1640’s, but not nowadays.  Fortunately for professional bigots, most people don’t have long attention spans for the facts, just for their hatreds.
HPR: I’m a teacher from the North Side of Chicago originally, and I have had lots of students and friends who are Muslims, all decent people. I mean this stuff from Republicans like Peter King in New York is just disgusting, and the Tea Party people are so bad, many of my Republican friends just wish they would go away. Were the Democrats ever this bad?

FP:  Oh yes, back before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, especially in the South.  After their change of heart and U.S. laws, however, southern voters deserted the Democrats for the Republican Party.  But there was plenty of racism in the North as well—among Democratic as well as Republican voters.  Dr. King proved that in Chicago before he was killed in Memphis, and George Wallace proved it in Michigan and Wisconsin in 1968, before he was shot in 1972 and decided that tolerance might be a better idea in the long run.

HPR:  But how can so many otherwise decent people fall prey to such hateful notions, when peddled by politicians around the world whose motives should be obvious?

FP: It’s easy, even necessary, to hate other people, when you secretly hate yourself, or if you are an unemployed or underemployed politician.

HPR:  Thanks Pete. I agree. It is dangerous to elect people who exploit hate to gain political power.

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