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mariacallous · 4 months ago

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The Greeks had their chariots. Patton had his tanks. Now, a handful of soldiers are riding into combat in one of the most unusual-looking vehicles in the history of warfare: an armed Cybertruck.

In a video posted to messaging platform Telegram last week, Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Russia’s Chechnya region, showed off a pair of Tesla’s distinctive boxy electric pickup trucks painted forest green and armed with what appear to be Soviet-era DShK 12.7 x 108 mm heavy machine guns—vehicles he claimed had been sent to fight alongside Russian forces taking part in the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

The footage shows the vehicles patrolling down a dirt road as part of a four-vehicle platoon, with several soldiers manning their weapons mounted on their truck beds and blasting airborne targets out of the sky.

“Mobility, convenience, maneuverability: such qualities of an electric vehicle are in great demand here,” Kadyrov wrote on Telegram.

The new footage came just over a month after Kadyrov published an initial video to Telegram showing off a Cybertruck armed with a Russian Kord 12.7 x 108 mm heavy machine gun. That Cybertruck, Kadyrov claimed in a separate Telegram post made the day before unveiling the fresh pair of vehicles, had recently been disabled “remotely” by Tesla chief Elon Musk, who had previously denied gifting the notorious warlord the vehicle in the first place, likely because it’s prohibited under US sanctions on Russia.

“This is not manly,” Kadyrov seethed on Telegram over the remote shutoff. (Tesla did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)

It was only a matter of time before some enterprising combatant somewhere slapped a machine gun on a Cybertruck. Both regular militaries and irregular forces around the world have been whipping up “technicals”—or “nonstandard tactical vehicles” improvised from civilian rides—for more than a century. While the general concept of armored cars outfitted with firearms presaged the outbreak of World War I by at least a decade, the conflict accelerated their production and fielding—and, in moments of necessity, innovation. In one of the earliest documented manifestations of the technical, French navy lieutenant Maxime François Émile Destremau prepared a defense of the strategically important coaling station in the city of Papeete in Tahiti against a pair of German cruisers in September 1914 by tearing six 37 mm cannons off the warship under his command and mounting them on six Ford trucks to repel potential landing parties, according to the 2004 book On Armor. As long as the automobile has existed, so has the technical.

The technical as most defense observers know it, built on commercial flatbed pickup trucks like the rugged and reliable Toyota Hilux and Land Cruiser, became a fixture of modern irregular warfare during the so-called “Toyota War” of the 1980s that saw militia forces from Chad achieve a decisive victory over the Libyan military thanks to the superior mobility and maneuverability afforded by their lightweight vehicles. (Chadian forces discovered that, at an appropriately high speed, technicals could traverse open areas mined with Soviet-era munitions without risk of setting them off.)

Since then, technicals have become a fixture of conflicts like the US military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Syrian and Libyan Civil Wars, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And those conflicts continued to prompt a flurry of novel innovations when it comes to improvised fighting vehicles. Examples include Libyan militants mounting a S-5 rocket pod meant for an aircraft on the back of a truck and a Land Cruiser outfitted with a Russian-made 14.5 mm ZPU-2 antiaircraft gun that American soldiers traded two cans of chewing tobacco for to secure Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021—the latter of which is now in a US military museum. (Does a DShK on a shopping cart count as a technical? That’s up for debate.)

All of those innovations open up the question: Will an armed Cybertruck actually make for a good technical on the battlefield?

Despite the many issues that have plagued the Cybertruck since its release, the vehicle isn’t necessarily the worst option. While the Cybertruck currently has a maximum range of 340 miles (or 500 miles with an extra battery pack)—well behind the roughly 570- to 700-mile range of the Hilux—the former is actually quicker, capable of accelerating up to 60 mph between 2.6 and 3.9 seconds, depending on the model, a noteworthy achievement given the vehicle’s size and weight.

In terms of safeguarding its occupants from external threats like small arms fire, the Cybertruck’s steel “exoskeleton” offers purportedly superior protection to that of the conventional pickup truck, a feature that Tesla has been quick to flaunt on promotional materials. Finally, the Cybertruck, as an electric vehicle, is freakishly quiet, offering an element of stealth that the US Defense Department in particular has eyed in recent years compared to other fossil-fuel-powered ground vehicles.

“There are some attributes that work,” David Tracy, a cofounder of the car website The Autopian and a former auto engineer, tells WIRED. “It’s off-road capable and has big 35-inch tires and good ground clearance. It has stainless steel panels that can take some amount of abuse. From a defense standpoint—as in, ‘How safe am I in the vehicle?’—if you were to take a stock Hilux or a stock Cybertruck, the Cybertruck would probably be the better choice in a firefight.”

If technicals are built for speed and maneuverability, then the Cybertruck “offers significant benefits over the Hilux,” Tracy says.

“It is absolutely, absurdly quick,” he says. “In a drag race between the two, the Hilux would be an ant in the Cybertruck’s rearview mirror. If you need speed and agility, and it isn’t necessarily going through rigorous off-roading or being fired upon regularly, then it could actually work fine.”

Despite these potential tactical benefits, defense analysts aren’t convinced the Cybertruck has a place on the modern battlefield. As retired Marine colonel Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, tells WIRED, the armed vehicles flaunted by Kadyrov on Telegram “are totally cool and totally useless.”

“They are cool because they look like something out of a video game and portray Kadyrov as a sort of futuristic warlord,” Cancian tells WIRED in an email. “They are useless because they don't provide a new capability, except perhaps a bit of stealth.”

Indeed, the Cybertruck is not totally suited for hostile and chaotic environments like the front lines of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. First, the EV’s exoskeleton actually consists of steel panels attached to a standard “unibody” frame that’s more akin to the chassis of a conventional car rather than the “body-on-frame” design of most pickup trucks like the Hilux. This design, according to Motor Trend, makes the former a weaker and less resilient vehicle. Second, while the Cybertruck is certainly off-road capable, it’s still significantly heavier than Hilux, which can make maneuverability and traction on rough terrain a challenge. Third, while its armor portends to offer at least some additional coverage compared to the conventional pickup truck-based technical, the vehicle’s bulletproofing only appears to work with subsonic rounds like the .45 ACP ammo used in Tesla’s tests and not the ubiquitous NATO-standard 5.56 mm round or, say, a shot from a .50 caliber rifle. (Though, to be fair, aftermarket armor packages for the vehicle do exist.)

Beyond design and engineering challenges, there’s also the critical matter of maintenance and logistics, the lifeblood of any motorized conflict. As Tracy points out, the Cybertruck’s unique complexity and software-forward design (like the lack of a physical connection between steering wheel and wheels) means a distinct lack of spare parts and higher potential for catastrophic system failures, challenges that all but guarantee that the vehicle is unable to operate reliably and ensure consistent uptime—not necessarily ideal for troops whose lives may depend on them.

“Simplicity is everything; simplicity and parts availability,” Tracy says. “If you’re driving a complex vehicle and there’s a failure of some sort and you need someone to flash it with a computer, you’re hosed if you’re in the middle of nowhere. The beauty of the Hilux is that they’re very tough, for one, but they can be repaired with simple tools and fairly ubiquitous parts. The Cybertruck does not really make a whole lot of sense in that regard.”

“It’s great that it is safe in a crash and can take a bullet,” he adds. “But if you break a control arm and can’t get the part, it’s pretty useless.”

Plus, the Cybertruck’s reliance on charging stations would make a fleet of armed vehicles “likely impossible to support” in any sort of protracted conflict like that taking place in Ukraine, according to CSIS’s Cancian.

“I doubt there are garages or mechanics near the front lines who can fix these complex devices, which are so unlike the fossil fuel vehicles that the region is accustomed to,” he says. “Further, I doubt there are many recharging stations in the battle area. Unlike with fossil fuel vehicles, where the fuel can be brought to the vehicle if necessary, the Cybertrucks must go to the recharging point.”

How the Cybertruck will actually perform in a combat situation remains to be seen. But if the Kadyrov video is any indication, it’s only a matter of time before an armed Cybertrucks makes the transition from YouTube sensation to tried-and-true, battle-tested technical.

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dailyanarchistposts · 2 months ago

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Chapter Ten. Apocalyptic Violence

…This was a “moment of madness”—a revolutionary, romantic moment when an entire society seems to be up for grabs. In these moments, fundamental change appears irresistible; for a brief moment, “all seems possible, all within reach.” Across time, people who get caught up in moments of madness imagine that their own “radiant vision” is at hand: a workers’ paradise, a grassroots democracy, fraternité-egalité-liberté, or the Second Coming of Jesus. The utopian imagination is—suddenly, powerfully, briefly—inflamed by the immediate prospect of radical change, by visions of an apocalypse now.

—Stephen D. O’Leary describing the “Great Awakening” of the 1700s[203]

The Gilead Baptist Church outside of Detroit is on a four-lane highway called South Telegraph Road. The drive down South Telegraph Road to the church, a warehouse-like structure surrounded by black asphalt parking lots, is a depressing gauntlet of boxy, cut-rate motels with names like Melody Lane and Best Value Inn. The highway is flanked by a flat-roofed Walgreens, Blockbuster, discount liquor stores, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Bob’s Big Boy, Sunoco and Citgo gas stations, a Ford dealership, Nails USA, the Dollar Palace, Pro Quick Lube and U-Haul. The tawdry display of cheap consumer goods, emblazoned with neon, lines both sides of the road, a dirty brown strip in the middle. It is a sad reminder that something has gone terribly wrong with America, with its inhuman disregard for beauty and balance, its obsession with speed and utilitarianism, its crass commercialism and its oversized SUVs and trucks and greasy junk food. This disdain for nature, balance and harmony is part of the deadly, numbing assault against community. Ten or fiften minutes negotiating the traffic down South Telegraph Road make the bizarre attraction of the End Times—the obliteration of this world of alienation, noise and distortion—comprehensible. The manufacturing jobs in the Detroit auto plants nearby are largely gone, outsourced to other nations with cheaper labor. The paint is flaking off the cramped two-story houses that lie in grid patterns off the highway. The plagues of alcoholism, divorce, drug abuse, poverty and domestic violence make the internal life here as depressing as the external one. And the congregation gathering today in this church waits for the final, welcome relief of the purgative of violence, the vast cleansing that will lift them up into the heavens, and leave the world they despise, the one they ruined or that was ruined for them, to be wracked by plagues and flood and fire until it, and all those they blame for the debacle of their lives, are consumed and destroyed by God. It is a theology of despair. And for many, the apocalypse can’t happen soon enough.

The guru of the End Times movement is a small, elderly, gnomelike man with his hair dyed coal black, a battery-powered earpiece and a pedantic, cold demeanor. His name is Timothy LaHaye, a Southern Baptist minister and coauthor, along with Jerry Jenkins, of the Left Behind series of Christian apocalyptic thrillers that provide the graphic details of raw mayhem and cruelty that God will unleash on all nonbelievers when Christ returns and raptures Christians into heaven. Astonishingly, the novels are among the best-selling books in America with more than 62 million in print. They have been made into movies, as well as a graphic video game in which teenagers can blow away nonbelievers and the army of the Antichrist on the streets of New York City. These books have come to express, for many in the Christian Right, the yearning they feel for the Rapture, the end of history, the end of time. Once Christ returns and believers are lifted into heaven, the Earth will, they are told, enter a period of tribulation. The tribulation will lead to a final, gruesome battle between Christ and the forces of the Antichrist, with “bodies bursting open from head to toe at every word that proceeded out of the mouth of the Lord as he spoke to the captives within Jerusalem.”[204] In the novels those Christians, who hastily converted once the righteous were lifted into the clouds, have to drive carefully to avoid hitting splayed and filleted corpses of men and women and horses. The soldiers in the army of the Antichrist, facing the warrior Christ, are defeated in the final moments as “their flesh dissolved, their eyes melted, and their tongues disintegrated.” And after pages of graphic violence, readers are told that the soldiers of the Antichrist “stood briefly as skeletons in now-baggy uniforms, then dropped in heaps of bones as the blinded horses continued to fume and rant and rave.”[205]

LaHaye and Jenkins had to distort the Bible to make all this fit—the Rapture, along with the graphic details of the end of the world and the fantastic time line, is never articulated in the Bible—but all this is solved by picking out obscure and highly figurative passages and turning them into fuzzy allegory to fit the apocalyptic vision. This stygian nightmare is, rather, a visceral and disturbing expression of how believers feel about themselves and the world. The horror of apocalyptic violence—the final aesthetic of the movement—at once frightens and thrills followers. It feeds fantasies of revenge and empowerment. It is an ominous reminder that failing to follow God’s commands will ensure their own eternal damnation. LaHaye has a checkered past that includes years working for the John Birch Society and many more peddling quack theories such as “temperament analysis,” which purports to be a system to identify predominant characteristics, strengths and weaknesses to help people make vocational, personal and marital decisions. He was previously known for books such as Spirit Controlled Temperament, Transformed Temperaments, The Male Temperament and Your Temperament: Discover Its Potential, all variants of astrology.[206] In short, before becoming the champion of a Christian America and the apocalypse he made his living as a fortune-teller. LaHaye has helped found and lead numerous right-wing groups, including the Council for National Policy, and he is not only the nation’s best-selling author, but also one of the dominionists’ most powerful propagandists.

LaHaye has come to the conference with his wife, Beverly, who founded Concerned Women of America, an antifeminist group with 540,000 women “who were committed to protecting the rights of the family through moral activism.”[207] They were the early pioneers in the Christian Right’s attack on the school textbook industry, helping to orchestrate a series of lawsuits against publishers who printed material they found offensive or anti-Christian. They sit together at a table to sign their books, and the line snakes down the corridor, with many people clutching multiple books for signatures. LaHaye, along with two other well-known apocalyptic preachers—including Gary Frazier, the glib, silver-tongued founder of the Texas-based Discovery Ministries, Inc., which leads “Walking Where Jesus Walked” tours in Israel—travels the country holding daylong End Time conferences, such as today’s event at the Gilead Baptist Church. Tickets to the event in Detroit cost $20. Frazier and LaHaye also take pilgrims to visit Israel, where they stand on the hill of Megiddo—better known as Armageddon—that in the Book of Revelation is the site of the final battle between the forces of Christ and the Antichrist. In the lobby of the church, just outside the sanctuary, a television set on a stand continuously runs one of the tapes of a “Walking Where Jesus Walked” tour next to a table filled with Frazier’s books, CDs and DVDs.

LaHaye insists that everything in the Bible is literally true. All events in the modern world are described and represented, he says, in the Bible. All has been predicted. The Bible is primarily a book of prophecies that predict the events that will take place shortly before the worldwide cataclysm. This belief relies on a curious hybrid of allegory and literal interpretation. When Revelation 9:1–11 says that monsters will appear whose faces are “like human faces,” with “hair like women’s hair,” “teeth like lions’ teeth,” “scales like iron breastplates” and “tails like scorpions and stings,” LaHaye assures us they will appear. These monsters, which will have what look like crowns of gold on their heads, will torture unbelievers for five months, although not kill them. He quotes from some of the more disturbing passages in the Book of Revelation to remind his listeners of how terrible it will be for nonbelievers: “And in those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die and death will fly from them” (Revelations 9:6).

“Everything we believe is based on the principles of this book,” LaHaye tells the group from the church pulpit, holding up his Bible.

“How do we know this is a supernatural book?” LaHaye asks. “Fulfilled prophecies prove that this was not written by men,” he says. “One thousand prophecies, as the Bible tells us, five hundred of which have already been fulfilled.”

The apocalyptic fantasy calls on believers to turn their backs on the crumbling world around them. This theology of despair is empowered by widespread poverty, violent crime, incurable diseases, global warming, war in the Middle East and the threat of nuclear war. All these events presage the longed-for obliteration of the Earth and the glorious moment of Christ’s return. In this scenario, the battle at Armageddon will be unleashed from the Antichrist’s worldwide headquarters in Babylon once the Jews again have control of Israel. The war in Iraq, along with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, only brings the world one step closer to the end.

LaHaye, his head poking up from behind the wooden pulpit, tells the story of the origins of his series of apocalyptic books to those in the pews in front of him. He was on an airplane, he says, watching a pilot flirt with an attractive flight attendant. The pilot had a wedding ring. The flight attendant did not. He wondered what would happen if the Rapture happened at that moment. What would happen if hundreds of millions of saved Christians were raptured into heaven and the unsaved left behind, including those who were insufficient Christians, along with Muslims, Catholics and Jews? He convinced Jerry Jenkins, a former sportswriter, to help him set his vision down in a series of novels. He and Jenkins went on to imagine the Rapture and what would happen when it set loose the Tribulation and a worldwide war. In their vision, this war would be waged by a band of new believers, called the Tribulation Force, against Satan and the Antichrist. In the end, seas and rivers would turn to blood, searing heat would burn men alive, ugly boils would erupt on the skin of the disfavored, and 200 million ghostly, demonic warriors would sweep across the planet, exterminating one-third of the world’s population. Those who join forces with the Antichrist in the Left Behind series, true to LaHaye’s conspiracy theories, include the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, Iraq, all Muslims, the media, liberals, freethinkers and “international bankers.” The Antichrist, who heads the United Nations, eventually moves his headquarters to Babylon. These demonic forces battle the remaining Christian believers—those who converted after the Rapture took place, remnants of extremist American militia groups, who in the novels are warriors for Christ, and the 144,000 Jews who convert. This, through pages of dense, stilted and leaden prose, is what has captivated tens of millions of American readers. And LaHaye tells those in front of him that he believes that their generation may be the “terminal” generation. He warns his listeners to get right with God as fast as they can because there is not much time left.

Gary Frazier, with his thick head of silver hair, is the most engaging of the speakers. He has a soft Texas twang, at times a soaring eloquence and easy cadence. He begins by flashing a drawing of a monster, taken, he says, from a dream of Nebuchadnezzar that was interpreted for the king by Daniel in Second Daniel. King Nebuchadnezzar sees in his dream a statue with a head of gold, iron teeth, bronze claws, arms and chest of silver, stomach and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron and clay.

“‘Here’s what it means,’” Frazier quotes Daniel as saying. “‘You, Nebuchadnezzar, are the head. That’s the Babylonian Empire. You rule over the whole world, but there’ll come a second empire behind you,’ and historically, we know now as we look back, that was the Medo-Persian Empire.” Frazier explains that the stomach and thighs of bronze are the Hellenistic Empire. The two legs of iron, he says, represent the Roman Empire.

“You see what God did was in this simple dream of Daniel, God set the boundaries, the parameters, that there would never be more than four world empires in the entire history of time,” Frazier explains. “It would be the Babylonians defeated by the Medes and the Persians, who were then later defeated by the Greeks, who were defeated by Rome, but the interesting part is found in the two feet and the ten toes of part iron and part plate.”

He tells the congregation that the 10 toes stand for ethnically mixed cultures that will unite and rise up to dominate the world before the Rapture. He describes this empire as the European Union, or what he says is a revived form of the Roman Empire. This final empire will be destroyed by God to usher in the 1,000-year reign of Christ.

Frazier says the final chapter in human history started in 1948 with the foundation of the state of Israel, something predicted by the Bible. Less noticed but equally important, he tells the crowd, was the 1948 Benelux Conference that brought together Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium. This too, he says, fulfilled biblical prophecy. Just as God had to restore Jews to the land of Israel before the End Times, so too did God have “to raise Europe back up in order to bring to pass this revived form of the ancient Roman Empire.”

He explains that while each of the other empires fell, Rome “has never gone away,” his voice dipping ominously. Instead of falling to an outside invader, Rome “collapsed,” “imploded,” due to its own “degradation and perversion.” “You see, there’s never been a society in the history of the world that has openly accepted and embraced homosexuality and lesbianism that has survived,” he explains, because while homosexuals and lesbians may not reproduce, “they are busy recruiting.”

“We’re seeing the shaping, the rebirthing, the revising of the ancient Roman Empire that will ultimately be the world power,” Frazier says of the European Union, the figure of the metallic man with the iron legs on the screen behind him.

He explains that Europe, because it has so few Bible-believing Christians, will not see large sections of its population lifted to heaven in the Rapture. The United States, however, will be devastated when tens of millions of its Christians disappear, including half of the military. America will suddenly become “a Third World” power, and Europe, ruled by the Antichrist, will dominate the planet.

“These prophecies were never given to scare us but to prepare us for the second coming of Jesus Christ,” he says.

The second sign of the End Times, he says, will be the rise of radical Islam. This too, he says, is predicted in the Bible.

“Now,” he says, “I realize that we’re living in a community that has a large Arab constituency. I want you to know something as I begin this portion of this particular message. Not all Muslims are terrorists. I want you to know that. But I also want you to know that to date every terrorist has been a Muslim. Hello? I want you also to know that the scripture’s clear on a couple of things, and I’m going to say some things today in the next few moments that may be construed as being intolerant. I want you to understand that. I’ve been called that on more than one occasion. And if you get mad at me about it, you’ll get over it, all right?

“In the days following 9/11,” Frazier says, “I heard our leadership say that we’re not at war with the religion of Islam, that there were Islamic radicals who had taken over the religion and they’re the ones we have a problem with. Folks, I’m here to tell you right now, I want to apologize to you on behalf of our president and our political leadership because they lied to us. We are at war with the religion of Islam, and it is not a handful of radical Islamists who are taking over the religion and hijacking it.”

He speaks about the child martyrs in the war between Iran and Iraq, in which the Iranian clerics sent young boys into the minefields to clear the way for troops and returned their remains, Frazier says, in urns to their families.

“Can you explain to me how in the West that we would understand a person who would strap dynamite upon themselves and blow themselves up along with innocent men and women and children with the promise that they would have seventy brown-haired—I mean blond-haired, blue-eyed—virgins for their unlimited sexual pleasure in this place called paradise? And the parents of that person then throw a party celebrating the destruction of their child. You want to tell me you understand that kind of mentality?

“Islam,” Frazier says dramatically, “is a satanic religion.”

He tells the crowd that his honesty and candor have brought him threats. He insists he has Muslim friends and that some Muslims who live in America love this country. But he warns about “a second kind of Muslim” who is in America for “the wrong reasons.”

These Muslims want to export their religion and achieve their goal of “world domination,” he explains.

“You show me a country that is dominated by Muslims, and I’ll show you a country where people are dying, where there are no freedoms or rights, and people being persecuted on a daily basis,” he says. “God help us if they ever were to get in control, in charge here in the United States of America.”

He warns of Muslim “sleeper cells” waiting to carry out new terrorist attacks. He illustrates his point with a hypothetical story about a Muslim doctor forced to accept a nefarious mission or receive the heads of his three children in a box.

Frazier stops, pauses and slowly scans the crowd, which sits silently, expectantly for his next sentence.

“I thank God for our men and women who are fighting over there because if they weren’t fighting there, we’d be fighting right here in the streets of America. I’m convinced of that,” he says, and the sanctuary erupts in loud applause.

Once the Antichrist takes power, the second temple in Jerusalem will be rebuilt. Followers of the Antichrist will be branded on their hands and foreheads with “the mark of the Beast,” which Frazier says could well be “biochips” implanted under the skin. It will be impossible to buy and sell in the new world without this mark. Those who convert to Christ will receive “the mark of the Father” on their foreheads, but they will become outcasts and persecuted in the Antichrist’s worldwide empire. Most will be martyred and killed.

“Do you see this?” he asks. “We’re the first generation that’s ever had the possibility of this happening in our lives.

“Does that apply to you?” he asks. “Do you have to be concerned about taking the mark? Absolutely not. You can’t have but one mark. You’re safe if you already have it—the blood of Jesus Christ that cleanses away my sin and yours.”

He goes on to say that the loved ones of many in this room, who are not saved, will be branded with the mark of the Beast because they will be left behind.

America, according to Frazier, LaHaye and many other leaders in the movement, is being ruled by evil, clandestine organizations that hide behind the veneer of liberal, democratic groups. These clandestine forces seek to destroy Christians. They spread their demonic, secular-humanist ideology through front groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, the Trilateral Commission and “the major TV networks, high-profile newspapers and news-magazines,” the U.S. State Department, major foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), the United Nations, “the left wing of the Democratic Party,” Harvard, Yale “and 2,000 other colleges and universities.”

America must repent, Frazier tells his audience. It must ask God to cleanse the moral stains that infect the nation and its godless inhabitants. The nation must swiftly dismantle the barriers between church and state and bring God back into the schools, the government, the media, the entertainment industry, the workplace, the courts and the home. Time is running out. If America, as a nation, does not get right with God very soon, it will face terrible retribution. The sins that have befallen America, the moral license, the high rates of premarital sex, homosexuality, abortion, pornography, the adultery and the greed and lust that have beset the country must be stamped out. America must become submissive and heed God’s prophets or be destroyed. If the Christians in this room fail, if they do not wipe out vice, sin and corruption, if they do not establish a Christian America soon, God will begin to carry out acts of vengeance.

Frazier ends the conference with a call for those in the room to commit or recommit their souls to Christ.

“This afternoon as we bring our time together to a close, it’s not about being a Baptist; we went through that earlier. It is not about being a Methodist, or charismatic, or Assembly of God or an Episcopalian,” he says softly. “It is about knowing in your soul.”

He asks those before him if they are sure that if Christ appeared today they would go to heaven.

“I’m not trying to trick you,” he implores the bowed heads. “I’m trying to reason with you. For you see, one day the life that you and I know will be over. So I just wonder, is there a stirring in your heart? Am I speaking to you? Is He calling your name? He is. He is knocking on the door of your life? The door handle is on the other side. Where does it open? You have to open it. How do you do that? Well, the way I did it years ago was to call on the name of the Lord, and I prayed. I’m going to ask you this afternoon if there is a stirring in your heart.” He prays:

“Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I’m a sinner, and right now as an act of my own free will, I agree with You that I have sinned, and I want to ask You to forgive me of the sin that separates me from You. Come into my life; save my soul—and right now, with heads bowed and eyes closed, I just wonder if any of you have prayed that prayer. Here is what I’m going to ask you to do: Will you lift your head and look at me and make eye contact with me? I just want to see your face. No one is looking around. If you prayed that prayer, here is what I’m going to ask you to do—will you lift your head and look at me and make eye contact with me? I just want to see your face. No one is looking around. If you prayed that prayer and you really mean it then just lift your head, look at me so I can see your…God bless you, God bless you…I can’t really see the balcony because of the angle here, but if you are in the balcony will you slip your hand up for just a moment…God bless you, God bless you, yep, yeah, God bless you…you…you…and God bless you back there.”

Several people in the pews begin weeping softly.

Frazier tells them God has taken their sins away.

“And now when God looks at you, he doesn’t see your sins, your mistakes, He sees the blood of Jesus that washed your sin away,” he intones.

He invites all those who raised their hands or looked him in the eye to stand and come down to the front of the church. A couple dozen people slowly make their way past those in the pews to walk down the aisles to the front. Frazier gathers them around him in a tight circle. As the group forms, several church members wearing tags that say “counselor” silently enter the sanctuary through the double doors at the back. They wait, hands folded in front of them, to pray with the new converts, to tell them they need to come to church and to offer to help guide them toward new life.

Frazier thanks God for looking past the congregation’s sins.

He tells the small group in front of him not to go back to their friends or family, not to retrieve their belongings from the pews.

“We are going to ask you to walk right back to that door,” he says, pointing to where the counselors with the name tags are waiting to receive the group. “Would you all just step right through that door? And while they are going, folks, can we just do what the angels in heaven are doing?”

He starts to clap. The crowd follows his lead. The men and women file down the aisle as the crowd applauds, each being met by an individual counselor who takes their arm and guides them to a secluded corner in the lobby. The process begins.

What I watch reminds me of a lazy spring afternoon nearly 25 years ago, when Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age—he was then close to 80—we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

The warning came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of leaders in the Christian Right who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors in America had found a mask for fascism in patriotism and the pages of the Bible.

Adams was not a man to use the word “fascist” lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, with dissidents such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents inside his suitcase to hide the rolls of home movie film he took of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked. The border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities, he said that would, in the event of prolonged social instability, catastrophe or national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of Christianity, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed empty platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked. His long discussions with church leaders and theologians in Nazi Germany—some of whom collaborated with the regime, some of whom resisted and most of whom remained silent—were the defining experiences of his life. He was preoccupied with how liberal democracies, which could never hope to compete with the fantastic, utopian promises of personal and collective salvation offered by totalitarian movements, could resist. Adams was a close friend of the theologian Paul Tillich, a vocal opponent of the Nazis who in 1933 became the first non-Jewish professor barred from German universities and soon went into exile. Tillich, he reminded us, taught that the role of the church was in society, that the depth of its commitment and faith were measured by its engagement with politics and culture. It was this engagement that alone gave faith its vibrancy and worth. Tillich did not retreat from the looming crisis around him. He spoke out against the intolerance and hatred preached by the Nazis before they came to power. And Tillich angrily chastised those in the church who, preoccupied with narrow Christian piety, were passive. He thundered against this complacency and begged Christians to begin to “take time seriously.”

Adams had seen how the mask of religion hides irreligion. He reminded us that “our world is full to bursting with faiths, each contending for allegiance.” He told us that Hitler claimed to teach the meaning of faith. Mussolini used to shout, “Believe, follow, and act,” and told his followers that fascism, before being a party, had been a religion. Human history is not the struggle between religion and irreligion, Adams said. “It is veritably a battle of faiths, a battle of the gods who claim human allegiance.”

Democracy is not, as these Christo-fascists claim, the enemy of faith. Democracy keeps religious faith in the private sphere, ensuring that all believers have an equal measure of protection and practice mutual tolerance. Democracy sets no religious ideal. It simply ensures coexistence. It permits the individual to avoid being subsumed by the crowd—the chief goal of totalitarianism, which seeks to tell all citizens what to believe, how to behave and how to speak. The call to obliterate the public and the private wall that keeps faith the prerogative of the individual means the obliteration of democracy. Once this wall between church and state, or party and state, is torn down, there is an open and subtle warfare against love, which in an open society is another exclusive prerogative of the individual. In the totalitarian world, there are those worthy of love and those unworthy of it. In the totalitarian world, the private sphere becomes the concern of the state. This final restriction of the freedom to love—the freedom of a Christian to love a Muslim or the freedom to love those branded by the state as the enemy—heralds the death of the open society. The promises of Christian harmony, unity, happiness—in short a utopia—held forth by the dominionists have a seductive quality that will never be countered by the tepid offerings of democrats, who at best can offer citizens the opportunity to seek their own happiness and construct their own meaning.

We must, Adams also told us, watch closely what these new fascists accused their opponents of planning. For radical movements expose their own intentions and goals by tarring their enemies with their own nefarious motives. These movements assume that those they attack are, like themselves, also hiding their true agenda, also plotting to silence and eradicate opponents. This common form of “projection” was, on a smaller scale, on display during the Florida recount in 2000. The Republicans accused Al Gore of attempting to steal the election through court fiat, the very theft being secretly orchestrated by the Republicans. Richard Hofstadter was one of the first to grasp the role of projection in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”:

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.[208]

Adams, like Bonhoeffer, did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the biblical message, would arise from the institutional church or the liberal, secular elite. His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was withering. These institutions—self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent—were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He saw how easily the German universities had been Nazified. He told me, I suspect only half in jest, that if the Nazis took over America, “60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute.” He had seen academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class. Adams also reminded us that American intellectuals and industrialists openly flirted with fascism in the 1930s. Mussolini’s “corporatism,” which created an unchecked industrial and business aristocracy, appealed to many American industrialists at the time, who saw it as an effective counterweight to Roosevelt’s New Deal. In July 1934, Fortune magazine lavished praise on the Italian dictator for his defanging of labor unions and his empowerment of industrialists at the expense of workers. And Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here told the story of a conservative politician, “Buzz” Windrip, backed by a nationally syndicated radio host, Bishop Peter Paul Prang, who is elected president and becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime and a liberal press.

The New York Times in 1944 asked Vice President Henry Wallace to answer the questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they? The Vice President’s answers were published on April 9, 1944, as the war against the Axis powers and Japan was drawing to a close. He wrote:

The really dangerous American fascist…is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation.[209]

Adams knew that resentments and bigotry lurk below the surface of all democratic societies and can be roused, under the right conditions, to promote a creed that calls for the destruction of democracy. What is evil about these systems of intolerance and persecution is not the foot soldiers who carry out the crimes, but the organization that mobilizes and unleashes these dark passions. He worried that such a movement was, late in his life, again on the march. It was more sophisticated than in the past, more cleverly packaged, and this time without serious opposition. The hatreds were again being stoked. The labor unions and progressives who had been able to battle back in the 1930s were spent forces. The despair of tens of millions of Americans, unable to find manufacturing jobs or work that offered fair wages and benefits, would lead them, he knew, into the arms of these fanatical preachers. The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement. If these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children—in short, the promise of a brighter future—the specter of American fascism would beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory. Adams had seen it once. He knew what it looked like. He feared it was coming again.

Toward the close of the Second World War, Adams was asked to give a lecture about the Nazi faith to a large group of U.S. Army officers preparing for service in the occupation army in Germany. He described the views expressed by the officers at the meeting as “an orgy of self-righteousness.” Bigotry, in all its forms, had to be vigorously fought. He was not going to let this opportunity escape him. Adams wrote later:

This self-righteousness, I decided, ought somehow to be checked. Otherwise I might succeed only in strengthening the morale of a bumptious hundred-percent “Americanism,” and that was not the faith we were supposed to be fighting for. Toward the end of the lecture I recapitulated the ideas of the Nazi “faith,” stressing the Nazi belief in the superiority of the Teutons and in the inferiority of other “races.” I also reminded the officers of similar attitudes to be observed in America, not only among the lunatic and subversive groups but also among respectable Americans in the army of democracy. Then I asked these Army officers to pose one or two questions to be answered by each man in his own conscience. First: “Is there any essential difference between your attitude toward the Negro and the Jew, and the Nazi attitude toward other ‘races’—not the difference in brutality but a difference in basic philosophy?” “If there is an essential difference,” I said, “then the American soldier might logically become a defender of the Four Freedoms [freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear], but if there is no essential difference between your race philosophy and that of the Nazis, a second question should be posed: “What are you fighting for?” I blush when I think of some of the responses I received. I was immediately besieged with questions like these: “Do you think we should marry the nigger?” “Aren’t Negroes a naturally indolent and dirty race?” “Haven’t you been in business, and don’t you know that every Jew is a kike?” Questions like these came back to me for over an hour. I simply repeated my question again and again: “How do you distinguish between yourself and a Nazi?” Seldom have I witnessed such agony of spirit in a public place. Many of these Americans who could not distinguish between themselves and Nazis came from “religious” homes, or they claimed to be representatives (or even leaders) of the American faith. Apparently their faith was quite different from the faith behind the Four Freedoms. On the other hand, many of them no doubt would have disclaimed possessing anything they would call faith, yet all of them, whatever their answers to these questions, spoke the faith that was in them, and for many of them it was a trust in white, gentile supremacy—faith in the blood.[210]

Adams, finally, told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. The Nazis had used “values” to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered, culminating in the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin and the permanent exile of its director, Magnus Hirschfeld. Thousands of volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a bonfire. The stripping of gay and lesbian Germans of their civil rights was largely cheered by the German churches. But this campaign legitimized tactics, outside the law, that would soon be employed against others. Adams said that homosexuals would also be the first “social deviants” singled out and disempowered by the Christian Right. We would be the next.

Those arrayed against American democracy are waiting for a moment to strike, a national crisis that will allow them to shred the Constitution in the name of national security and strength. And those in the movement often speak about such a moment with gleeful anticipation. Howard Phillips, a right-wing strategist who helped Jerry Falwell create the Moral Majority, has warned Christians to be ready. “My friends, it is time to leave the ‘political Titanic’ on which the conservative movement has for too long booked passage,” he told the Council for National Policy. “Instead, it is our task to build an ark so that we can and will be ready to renew and restore our nation and our culture when God brings the tides to flood.”[211]

Debate with the radical Christian Right is useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It is a movement based on emotion and cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday school. Naive attempts to reach out to the movement, to assure them that we, too, are Christian or we, too, care about moral values, are doomed. This movement is bent on our destruction. The attempts by many liberals to make peace would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. These dominionists hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution, a world they blame for the debacle of their lives. They have one goal—its destruction.

Alvin Toffler wrote that if you don’t have a strategy you end up being part of someone else’s strategy. There are isolated groups and individuals who, at some cost, are fighting back. The nonviolent protests of the Reverend Mel White’s Soulforce outside of Christian universities and service academies that discriminate against gays and lesbians are, according to the ideas of theologians such as Adams and Tillich, acts of faith. The clergy and rabbis who have banded together in Ohio to challenge the tax-exempt status of the megachurches that promote “Christian” candidates are performing an act of faith. The rulings of independent judges—such as the Republican-appointed Judge John E. Jones III in Dover, Pennsylvania—who have prohibited the teaching of creationism in public schools because it is not science, are acts of faith. Cardinal Roger Mahony, the head of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest, has called on Catholics to be prepared to defy the laws now being considered in Congress and backed by the Christian Right that make it a felony to shield or protect or offer support to illegal immigrants. Such civil disobedience would be an act of faith. The hate-crimes legislation now stalled in Congress because of bitter opposition from the Christian Right must be made law. Its passage would be an act of faith. Programs to protect or establish community, to direct federal and state assistance to those truly left behind, those trapped in America’s urban ghettos and blighted former manufacturing towns, are acts of faith. And the valiant struggle by former Vice President Al Gore and others to wake us up to the impending catastrophe that will beset us if we do not curb global warming is an act of faith. The accelerated rate of global warming could, within a decade, bring about epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves. To face this challenge, to do something about it, is to embrace a theology of hope, of life. To do nothing, to paint these ecological catastrophes as messages from an angry God rather than the folly of humankind, to believe blithely that global warming is a fiction and God alone determines human fate, is to accept this theology of despair, this radical evil. There are battles, big and small, that we can join. Many of them are being waged nearby, at our local school board. So much of maintaining a democracy is simply about showing up, and Adams felt that none of us had a right to profess our faith without this daily involvement in the life and well-being of our community, our nation and the planet Earth. “Repeatedly,” Adams told us, “I heard anti-Nazis say, ‘If only 1,000 of us in the late twenties had combined in heroic resistance, we could have stopped Hitler.’”

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain ends with Huck facing the moral dilemma we now face: whether to pay homage to a false moral code, one which has become law, or to damn ourselves in the eyes of many by opposing it. Here is Huck, faced with the choice of turning in his friend and escaped slave Jim, or living in defiance:

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter—and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote: Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. Huck Finn. I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had Apocalyptic Violence in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.[212]

The radical Christian Right calls for exclusion, cruelty and intolerance in the name of God. Its members do not commit evil for evil’s sake. They commit evil to make a better world. To attain this better world, they believe, some must suffer and be silenced, and at the end of time all those who oppose them must be destroyed. The worst suffering in human history has been carried out by those who preach such grand, utopian visions, those who seek to implant by force their narrow, particular version of goodness. This is true for all doctrines of personal salvation, from Christianity to ethnic nationalism to communism to fascism. Dreams of a universal good create hells of persecution, suffering and slaughter. No human being could ever be virtuous enough to attain such dreams, and the Earth has swallowed millions of hapless victims in the vain pursuit of a new heaven and a new Earth. Ironically, it is idealism that leads radical fundamentalists to strip human beings of their dignity and their sanctity and turn them into abstractions. Yet it is only by holding on to the sanctity of each individual, each human life, only by placing our faith in tiny, unheroic acts of compassion and kindness, that we survive as a community and as individual human beings. These small acts of kindness are deeply feared and subversive to these idealists, as the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman wrote in Life and Fate.

I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.[213]

Plato and Aristotle defended slavery and often attacked Athenian democracy, but this does not mean they should not be read for their deep and penetrating insights into political systems and ethics. Sigmund Freud understood little about love, viewed religion as infantile regression and viewed nearly every human motive through the lens of human sexuality, but at the same time Freud gave us one of the most powerful windows into and vocabularies for the workings of the subconscious. The Bible was written by numerous people over hundreds of years with wide and often varying concerns, some of which were and are morally indefensible. Within its pages, however, lie powerful passages that help illuminate our lives and our place before the mystery of human existence. I, too, struggle, like the writers of the Bible, to understand. I, too, often get it wrong. But it is the honesty and rigor of the search, the doubts and reverses, the mistakes and regrets, the ability to stand up again and keep trying that ultimately express faith. This humility before the unknowable, the acceptance that there is much we will never understand, makes possible self-criticism, self-awareness, self-possession and self-reflection. They make possible compassion and acts of kindness. They allow us to see ourselves in the stranger, to reach out in solidarity to those who travel with us on this dusty, brief and often lonely road of life. This honesty and humility make possible a diverse and tolerant human community. They sustain life and, in the midst of it all, impart hope.

I do not deny the right of Christian radicals to be, to believe and worship as they choose. But I will not engage in a dialogue with those who deny my right to be, who delegitimize my faith and denounce my struggle before God as worthless. All dialogue must include respect and tolerance for the beliefs, worth and dignity of others, including those outside the nation and the faith. When this respect is denied, this clash of ideologies ceases to be merely a difference of opinion and becomes a fight for survival. This movement seeks, in the name of Christianity and American democracy, to destroy that which it claims to defend. I do not believe that America will inevitably become a fascist state or that the Christian Right is the Nazi Party. But I do believe that the radical Christian Right is a sworn and potent enemy of the open society. Its ideology bears within it the tenets of a Christian fascism. In the event of a crisis, in the event of another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown or huge environmental disaster, the movement stands poised to manipulate fear and chaos ruthlessly and reshape America in ways that have not been seen since the nation’s founding. All Americans—not only those of faith—who care about our open society must learn to speak about this movement with a new vocabulary, to give up passivity, to challenge aggressively this movement’s deluded appropriation of Christianity and to do everything possible to defend tolerance. The attacks by this movement on the rights and beliefs of Muslims, Jews, immigrants, gays, lesbians, women, scholars, scientists, those they dismiss as “nominal Christians,” and those they brand with the curse of “secular humanist” are an attack on all of us, on our values, our freedoms and ultimately our democracy. Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.

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