The Prosperity Gospel, Christo-Fascism and the War in Ukraine: The Struggle for Justice
Document Type
Editorial
Publication Date
5-7-2022
Abstract
"Ukraine is no longer a country known mainly in the West through fairy tales. Fairy tales are sweet, but the language most needed to help us to understand what is occurring throughout America and much of the world today is the language that comes from the critique of political economy. Sometimes I feel that I have descanted much too long on the topic of anti-capitalist critique, turning with increasing vehemence against the inchoate ravings of the MAGA crowd with their tourist’s concern with facts, a jingle jangle of insentient Bible-thumpers, seemingly whitewashed of any hope to once again join the human race. Their untroubled decline into the gravesite of their own banalities would be risible if it were not so damningly dangerous. While I do not profess to know their quiddities, parts of their autochthonous makeup that trifles with counterfeit ideas about racial purity and feeds their ethnonationalist drug habit is descended from pure Nazi ideological stock dating back to the German nationalist, anti-communist, racist and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture of post-World War I Germany. The Trumpists had the good fortune to branch forth at the very point of democratic decline illustrated by Obama’s presidency, which championed imagery over substance. Obama’s reign raised so much hope among progressives but ended up purged of its storied magniloquence and was left languishing on the tattered sofa of desultory political reruns. The modus operandi of the Republican regime was a pompous brutality that engulfed America in a night-world of callowness where intelligence does not need to be imposed upon the mind and where bragging about one’s own capacity for hate and inflicting pain and embarrassment upon ‘woke’ liberal opponents could get you a seat at the grand banquet, assuming your critical repute was high enough. And if you could display such a hideously malevolent rictus as, say, Jim Jordan, while going off nonstop on the libs without needing to catch one’s breath, then you became part of the club."
Recommended Citation
McLaren, P. (2022). The prosperity gospel, Christo-fascism and the war in Ukraine. PESA Agora. https://pesaagora.com/columns/the-prosperity-gospel-christo-fascism-and-the-war-in-ukraine/
Copyright
PESA Agora
Comments
This article was originally published in PESA Agora in spring 2022.