Red Scare, Black Terror

Or, what Karlheinz Drescher did not say in his book God and the Fascists regarding the Vatican’s complicity in abetting and aiding the rise of contemporary fascism, or direct and indirect involvement in “the Black Terror”. It needs to be said because it is still relevant to what is going down today.

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Suspicion Into Superstition

There is an interesting article by David Shariatmadari in today’s Guardian about the contemporary conspiracy theory craze — “The truth is rushing out there“. It is worth spending a few moments on as a reflection on contemporary paranoid style which has become well nigh epidemic.

This seems like a fortuitous occasion, then, to draw a distinction between suspicion and superstition. “Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of the truth”, William Blake recorded in one of his Proverbs of Hell. Conspiracy theory is a case in point, and also bears on what I call Khayyam’s Caution (after the Persian Sufi poet Omar Khayyam): “only a hair separates the false from the true”. I don’t think I can ever emphasise this enough as a corrective to a misleading dualistic way of thinking and perception.

God and Fascism

I am currently reading a book — one of a few I have on the go at the moment — by Karlheinz Deschner entitled God and the Fascists. It was originally published in 1965 in German with the title Mit Gott und die Faschisten. It documents the various alliances between European fascism and the Christian Churches in Italy and Germany.

I’ve mentioned the Nazi programme and agenda of “Positive Christianity” in the past and the parallel alliance of Shintoism, Buddhism and Japanese fascism at the same time known as “Holy War Buddhism” or “Imperial Way Buddhism”, documented in Brian Victoria’s Zen At War. I decided I needed to do more research into religion and fascism given that these things are becoming, once again, very closely associated and even mutually entangled. If “Islamofascism” makes any sense as a term (and I think it is much abused) then so does Christofascism or Buddhist Fascism. Fascism is no more inherent to Islam than it is to Christianity or Buddhism. It is the psychology of fascism that needs to be understood, not the garb in which fascism adorns and cloaks itself.