Report: Commanders telling troops the Iran war is part of God's plan to cause Armageddon

Debate Room
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Reporting from Meidas tonight:

  1. According to the Huffington Post and the New Republic, U.S. military commanders are reportedly telling troops the Iran war is “all part of God’s divine plan,” with one noncommissioned officer alleging a commander said “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” comments the officer said “destroy morale and unit cohesion” and violate constitutional oaths.
  2. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation says it received over 110 complaints describing commanders’ “unrestricted euphoria” over a “‘biblically-sanctioned’ war” and their fixation on how “bloody all of this must become” to fulfill fundamentalist Christian “End Times” prophecy.

This is the first solid evidence I’ve seen of overt war-mongering and violence-valorizing with Evangelical end-times prophecy as the driver. I have had zero doubt that this has been a privately held belief amongst evangelicals for decades but until now, it has been confined so far as I could see to private in-group virtue-signaling efforts. Now it is actually going to get a LOT of people killed. Already has, in fact.

Just more proof that fundagelical “values” have always been far darker than they let on. When you strip all the window dressing away, it is not just about the patriarchy or abortion but about bringing about the End of Days. Which they may well achieve – just not in the way they think or with the free ticket to heaven bypassing all the suffering for them personally.

I lay this directly at the feet of Pete Kegsbreath who is exactly one of these religious nutters, whose pastor is one of these nutters and who has “invited” leadership to regular prayer meetings instilling this codswallop for months now.

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Portugal’s D7 visa is looking better every fucking day…

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On the other hand you’ll be thousands of miles closer to all this action … once this metastasizes enough, I wonder if anywhere will be safe – or at least whether you can accurately predict / try to land someplace relatively safe. Still, more and more people ARE pulling the trigger and leaving the US, from recent reports I’ve seen.

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These strike me as fair critiques. If HuffPost and New Republic took this up uncritically with no independent verification then I’d have some concerns about their journalism. I felt the story was lent legitimacy by them being involved.

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…or it could be someone making a mountain out of a molehill.

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That is also possible. He does clearly have an axe to grind. And that guy has said some questionable things in the past IIRC.

We can see how it shakes out in the next day or two. It seems to have gone more or less viral and is being picked up by multiple independent journalists aside from Meidas. If it’s without substance the cracks should start to show pretty quickly.

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Oh did you not hear? The Bush Jr’s government (page 198) had top officials who were using Christian end of the world nonsense to influence the decisions of Bush Jr, and others.

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No, TBH I wasn’t paying nearly so much attention back then. But not terribly surprising.

What’s still new here AFAIK is trying to whip the rank and file into a frenzy on the basis of religious fervor. Although dog knows what horseshit has been sold to idealistic youngsters since time immemorial to give their life and limb for the fatherland.

What rings true about the reports is its impact on unit cohesiveness and morale. Imagine being Jewish or even just Catholic and some holy roller expects you to be excited about fundamentalist eschatology. Just totally creeped out reactions, I would imagine.

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There is a symbiosis of dual mythologies in America. One of exceptionalism and the other of identity. Bush Jr. is just a marker on the evolutionary path of these dual mythologies in America. Donald Trump is the logical extension of 50+ years of this symbiosis.

The mythologies in question are the American Dream and religious\racial identity. Republicans are merely the most recent provocateurs in appropriating and exploiting mythologies. To understand why we’re here, you need to understand how we got here.

In the 1960’s, Nixon realized there was a concentration of disenfranchised Democratic voters in the American South who felt threatened by the Democratic party push for civil rights. While George Wallace was actively promoting segregation, Nixon devised his “Southern Strategy”. By using racist dog whistles, such as law and order and State’s rights he was able to lure these Democrats over to the Republican party. He convinced Strom Thurmond to defect to the Republican party and endorse him.

Jump ahead to Reagan…or just before Reagan. Jerry Falwell realized his flock was a potent political force. He even branded it as The Moral Majority. Reagan was the first Republican to capitalize on this new religious right. He actively courted this demographic and they have remained a core base of the party ever since. By the mid term elections in 1994 the Evangelicals were firmly embedded in the Republican platform.

In 1972, there were no references to God or religious references in the Republican party platform. By 1980 they devoted an entire section to abortion. By 2012 the party platform held 10 direct references to God and 19 devoted to religious issues. The identity magnet was complete and ready for Trump to cash in on it.

The second mythology Republicans have exploited to perfection is the American Dream. This is actually a recent mythology, springing from the book The Epic of America from 1931. Marketed as a tonic for an ailing nation during the depression, it has become anything but that. His core tenet of “social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable” has been perverted into a dystopia of greed and privilege.

Here’s where the man behind the curtain rears his ugly head. Republicans have traditionally been the party of business and finance. Small government, big profits. By appropriating the disenfranchised into the fold, along with the promise that “you too can get a seat on the gravy train” they have established a reliable electorate to keep them in power.

The most recent trifecta by Republicans has ensured de-regulation, tax breaks, wealth redistribution and a class war to keep the masses fractured to the point they don’t realize they’ve been pawns in a game in which they were never intended to receive a turn to play…but they do get to show off their shiny identity badge…

For over 5 decades America has been programmed to interpret identity as intelligence and mythology for competence. America is the Dunning-Kruger effect on a national scale.

This recent outrage over Armageddon and Jesus coming back because Trump is the chosen one is merely an extension of this strategy…as well as proof of how well it worked.

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This can be traced further back. At least to RJ Rushdoony and Christian Reconstructionism (early 1960s), though I would argue Billy Graham got the ball rolling by insinuating his way into the inner circles of the Presidency by becoming a sort of counsellor / pastor to Presidents (1950s). Of course all the way back to Darby in the early 19th century, Christian fundamentalism has been a reformist / revanchist / conformist movement in character, which is why the more modern power-seeking trends found fertile ground. What kept it somewhat in check until Falwell was the fear of the dreaded “social gospel”, the idea that people have any needs to address beyond “accepting Jesus”. It was, as you point out, Falwell and his successors who broke the taboo of political involvement and also invented the wedge identity of the “pro-life” movement to provide a rallying cry during a time when overt racism and bigotry were falling out of effectiveness and increasing their marginalization from polite society. (Alas – we appear to be entering a phase where bigotry is now acceptable again).

I like the way you tie this to the more secular fantasy of the American Dream. Coming as I do from fundamentalism I tend to overlook it at times. Although I imagine that fundamentalists see little difference between their own fever dreams and the “American Dream”. They have a habit of appropriating anything remotely resonant with their core dogmas and then reinventing it in their own image, then pretending to be both the inventor and protector thereof.

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Graham met with every President since Truman. He was always available to do a funeral for one of them when asked, too… He was more apolitical than Falwell.

Falwell was the first to really come out and say, if you give us a reversal of Roe v. Wade, you commit to white evangelical identity issues, we will deliver on election day. The monied interests that have always bought politicians put this together and merged Falwell and business together to throw the red meat at Falwell’s cult and achieve de-regulation, favorable legislation and tax breaks for the business class.

This is why the American Dream is so critical to the strategy. Religion only goes so far…you need to throw the dream of wealth out there. Convince these wage slaves that they have a chance to make it big…and how any regulation, oversight and tax increases might hurt them when they do…so voting for us is a voter to protect your interests in the future when you, too, make it big.

It’s the magician’s trick of misdirection on a grand scale…and it works.

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Yes he was more apolitical. Also interesting to me, it was Christianity Today – a publication he founded, and which to this day is considered a publication of the relatively liberal arm of evangelicalism – that, in the 1960s, was running essays questioning whether a fetus is a person. That is why the notion that “life begins at birth” was famously derided as “the doctrine younger than a McDonald’s Happy Meal” as it was invented out of whole cloth in the 70s.

How times have changed. Graham’s son, Franklin, is basically a fundamentalist nutter.

But I would still argue that Billy Graham, however unwittingly, showed that evangelicals could be taken seriously in the halls of power, and have real influence there. It rendered the concept thinkable, if ever so tentatively. And it was an evolution, a movement of the Overton Window, that gradually led to Rushdoony, Falwell, and the rest.

Wealth and/or temporal power and influence. Fundies have always been a bit like incels in that they are resentful that they aren’t taken seriously – not by the ladies in this case, but by secular society. To be a fundamentalist was to be ever on the outside looking in. You can’t have nice things, or fun, or acceptance by the wider host society. Those aren’t “godly”. For them now to have temporal power, means not so much that ordinary fundamentalists can start enjoying life, but it DOES mean they can prevent everyone else from enjoying life. Especially Muslims, immigrants, non-whites, non-believers.

And as for non-ordinary fundamentalists or fundamentalist-friendly persons like the clowns Trump has surrounded themselves with – THEY can have luxury junkets and drunken orgies on the taxpayer dime and it’s something for ordinary pew-warmers to admire from afar at least. So long as it owns the libs. Or … something.

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Here’s some additional context besides the MRFF reports above, from Zeteo.com:

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When you are responsible for the greatest assembled military in the world, along with being an instrument of the largest debtor nation in history, it seems almost unavoidable to tout ideology, dogma and myth to keep everyone on board with your proclaimed exceptionalism…and to keep anyone from looking at the sand your castle was built on…

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Narrator: “Meanwhile, at the Washington Post …”

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This may be why, Jeff…

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Narrator: “But that wasn’t all …”

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