#seminari trading

[liesmyth]

taken from the dash

tagging @gaynfl @therinos @valarinde @rubensmuse @gracelandmp3 @megasilverfist @antspaul @mircallaruthven & anyone who sees this and wants to do it. no pressure!!

[bethanydelleman]

https://www.tumblr.com/bethanydelleman/751189492516388864/in-a-social-standpoint-is-caroline-bingley-not?source=share

I've always wondered this. Early in the novel Darcy looks down on the Gardiners because they are engaged in trade - I think that is one of his objections to Elizabeth's family during the first proposal? But he is literally best friends with Bingley who is also from trade - and has no problem marrying his sister to him! Is this because Bingley is richer than the Gardiners so it doesn't matter any more?

The whole difference is "in trade" vs. "from trade". Bingely has never worked a day in his life, Mr. Gardiner works, he even has to plan his vacation to Derbyshire around work while Bingley can do whatever he pleases.

Let me show you the quotes:

We are told that the Bingleys have a habit of “associating with people of rank”. Which means that people of rank have agreed to associate with them.

Mrs. Gardiner admits, “We live in so different a part of town, all our connections are so different.” They are not associating with the same people as the Bingleys.

The Bingleys live as if they are gentry class, “but as he was now provided with a good house and the liberty of a manor“

The Gardiners live as people who work “lived by trade, and within view of his own warehouses”

All of the Bingleys have a gentleman/woman’s education, the sisters “had been educated in one of the first private seminaries in town”

Mr. Gardiner might be able to put his children in a similar position, but Mr. Gardiner is in trade right now.

Bingley himself has never worked a day in his life, he lives off the income of his inheritance. “Mr. Bingley inherited property to the amount of nearly a hundred thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to purchase an estate, but did not live to do it. 

So to sum up, the Gardiners might be able to put their children in a similar position as the Bingleys, but currently they are people who are in trade. The Bingley's fortune is from trade, but they no longer associate with it.

Link to previous post

[officiallordvetinari]

Below are 10 featured Wikipedia articles. Links and descriptions are below the cut.

On February 17, 1974, U.S. Army Private First Class Robert Kenneth Preston (1953–2009) took off in a stolen Bell UH-1B Iroquois "Huey" helicopter from Tipton Field, Maryland, and landed it on the South Lawn of the White House in a significant breach of security. Preston had enlisted in the Army to become a helicopter pilot. However, he did not graduate from the helicopter training course and lost his opportunity to attain the rank of warrant officer pilot. His enlistment bound him to serve four years in the Army, and he was sent to Fort Meade as a helicopter mechanic. Preston believed this situation was unfair and later said he stole the helicopter to show his skill as a pilot.

J. R. R. Tolkien, a fantasy author and professional philologist, drew on the Old English poem Beowulf for multiple aspects of his Middle-earth legendarium, alongside other influences. He used elements such as names, monsters, and the structure of society in a heroic age. He emulated its style, creating an impression of depth and adopting an elegiac tone. Tolkien admired the way that Beowulf, written by a Christian looking back at a pagan past, just as he was, embodied a "large symbolism" without ever becoming allegorical. He worked to echo the symbolism of life's road and individual heroism in The Lord of the Rings.

The construction of the first World Trade Center complex in New York City was conceived as an urban renewal project to help revitalize Lower Manhattan spearheaded by David Rockefeller. The project was developed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The idea for the World Trade Center arose after World War II as a way to supplement existing avenues of international commerce in the United States.

The Coterel gang (also Cotterill, fl. c. 1328 – 1333) was a 14th-century armed group that flourished in the North Midlands of England. It was led by James Coterel—after whom the gang is named—supported by his brothers Nicholas and John. It was one of several such groups that roamed across the English countryside in the late 1320s and early 1330s, a period of political upheaval with an associated increase in lawlessness in the provinces. Coterel and his immediate supporters were members of the gentry, and according to the tenets of the day were expected to assist the crown in the maintenance of law and order, rather than encourage its collapse.

Eunice Newton Foote (July 17, 1819 – September 30, 1888) was an American scientist, inventor, and women's rights campaigner. She was the first scientist to confirm that certain gases warm when exposed to sunlight, and that therefore rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels could increase atmospheric temperature and affect climate, a phenomenon now referred to as the Greenhouse effect. Born in Connecticut, Foote was raised in New York at the center of social and political movements of her day, such as the abolition of slavery, anti-alcohol activism, and women's rights. She attended the Troy Female Seminary and the Rensselaer School from age 17–19, gaining a broad education in scientific theory and practice.

Simonie Michael (Inuktitut: ᓴᐃᒨᓂ ᒪᐃᑯᓪ;  first name also spelled Simonee, alternative surnames Michel  or E7-551; March 2, 1933 – November 15, 2008) was a Canadian politician from the eastern Northwest Territories (now Nunavut) who was the first Inuk elected to a legislature in Canada. Before becoming involved in politics, Michael worked as a carpenter and business owner, and was one of very few translators between Inuktitut and English. He became a prominent member of the Inuit co-operative housing movement and a community activist in Iqaluit, and was appointed to a series of governing bodies, including the precursor to the Iqaluit City Council.

The St. Johns River (Spanish: Río San Juan) is the longest river in the U.S. state of Florida and it is the most significant one for commercial and recreational use. At 310 miles (500 km) long, it flows north and winds through or borders twelve counties. The drop in elevation from headwaters to mouth is less than 30 feet (9 m); like most Florida waterways, the St. Johns has a very slow flow speed of 0.3 mph (0.13 m/s), and is often described as "lazy".

Warlugulong is a 1977 acrylic on canvas painting by Indigenous Australian artist Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Owned for many years by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the work was sold by art dealer Hank Ebes on 24 July 2007, setting a record price for a contemporary Indigenous Australian art work bought at auction when it was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for A$2.4 million. The painting illustrates the story of an ancestral being called Lungkata, together with eight other dreamings associated with localities about which Clifford Possum had traditional knowledge. It exemplifies a distinctive painting style developed by Papunya Tula artists in the 1970s, and blends representation of landscape with ceremonial iconography. Art critic Benjamin Genocchio describes it as "a work of real national significance [and] one of the most important 20th-century Australian paintings".

William Samuel Sadler (June 24, 1875 – April 26, 1969) was an American surgeon, self-trained psychiatrist, and author who helped publish The Urantia Book. The book is said to have resulted from Sadler's relationship with a man through whom he believed celestial beings spoke at night. It drew a following of people who studied its teachings.

Zebras (US: /ˈziːbrəz/, UK: /ˈzɛbrəz, ˈziː-/) (subgenus Hippotigris) are African equines with distinctive black-and-white striped coats. There are three living species: Grévy's zebra (Equus grevyi), the plains zebra (E. quagga), and the mountain zebra (E. zebra). Zebras share the genus Equus with horses and asses, the three groups being the only living members of the family Equidae. Zebra stripes come in different patterns, unique to each individual. Several theories have been proposed for the function of these patterns, with most evidence supporting them as a deterrent for biting flies. Zebras inhabit eastern and southern Africa and can be found in a variety of habitats such as savannahs, grasslands, woodlands, shrublands, and mountainous areas.

[cartermagazine]

Today In History

Alfred L. Cralle was a Black businessman and inventor, who invented the ice cream scooper, patent #576,395 on this date February 2, 1897.

Alfred L. Cralle was born in Kenbridge, Lunenburg County, Virginia just after the end of the American Civil War. He attended local schools and worked with his father in the carpentry trade as a young man, becoming interested in mechanics. Cralle went to Washington, D.C., and attended Wayland Seminary, one of several schools founded by the American Baptist Home Mission Society to help educate Blacks after the American Civil War.

He settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he first served as a drug store and hotel porter. Alfred noticed that servers at the hotel had trouble with ice cream sticking to serving spoons, and he developed an ice cream scoop.

The patented “Ice Cream Mold and Disher” was an ice cream scoop with a built-in scraper to allow for one-handed operation. Cralle’s functional design is in modern ice cream scoops. He later became a general manager for the Afro-American Financial, Accumulating, Merchandise, and Business Association.

CARTER™️ Magazine

[daniclaytcn]

oh i have so many ideas for a father brian backstory!

option 1 He grew up as the middle child in a large disfunctional family, church was the quiet place to get away from it all. wasn't attracted to any girls and had weird feelings about romance and love in general and church was the one constant so he worked hard in school and was a first gen uni student. joined the seminary after graduating. figured out his sexuality there but it didn't matter because of his celibacy vows, and then this beautiful repressed firefighter with a mustache comes and makes him question if celibacy is worth it. might look into changing denominations to allow him to be part of a clergy without having to be celibate

option 2 Grew up in the middle of nowhere in the south, dad was a carpenter and he was expected to learn the trade as well and take over from his dad. did that for a dfew years and then decided to travel the us and offer his carpentry services wherever he went (wood-working specifically. maybe the red string theory is that abuela has a beautiful oak dining table that was made by a young brian). while travelling he figured out that for him life would be more meaningful if he figured out his why, and for him that turned out to be his faith. so, seminary, vows of celibacy yadda yadda, and it's fine and sure he's known some beautiful people in his life but my god, that eddie diaz firefighter guy

option 3 grew up privileged but lonely somewhere on the east coast, parents too busy with their jobs to care. went to college, changed his major to theology after taking an elective. found that becoming a priest and being responsible for your own parish was right up his alley of taking care of people and being somebody people were seeking out and depending on. forming lasting connections with the members of his church. feeling less lonely and never feeling like he was missing out on anything. and then bam, eddie fucking diaz and his handsome mustache calling him father and suddenly he's thinking about what it would be like to start a family of his own, his own blood.

option 4 Grew up with parents and extended family who were all in the military, moved around a bunch never settling. figured out he didn't want to joing the military for a bunch of reasons but telling his parents it was because he's a pacifist and them making jokes about joining the seminary then, like a fucking goody two shoes. brian joining out of spite and finding himself there. moving to la because of the proximity to some military base where his favourite relative is stationed. and then ex army medic eddie diaz stumbles into his confessional and trauma dumps and brian can't forget about it.

this is all so beautiful...i love that in every single universe father brian meets eddie and is captivated by his big tortured brown eyes 💖

[dailyanarchistposts]

Chapter One. Faith

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal. —Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies [1]

I grew up in a small farming town in upstate New York where my life, and the life of my family, centered on the Presbyterian Church. I prayed and sang hymns every Sunday, went to Bible school, listened to my father preach the weekly sermon and attended seminary at Harvard Divinity School to be a preacher myself. America was a place where things could be better if we worked to make them better, and where our faith saved us from despair, self-righteousness and the dangerous belief that we knew the will of God or could carry it out. We were taught that those who claimed to speak for God, the self-appointed prophets who promised the Kingdom of God on earth, were dangerous. We had no ability to understand God’s will. We did the best we could. We trusted and had faith in the mystery, the unknown before us. We made decisions—even decisions that on the outside looked unobjectionably moral—well aware of the numerous motives, some good and some bad, that went into every human act. In the end, we all stood in need of forgiveness. We were all tainted by sin. None were pure. The Bible was not the literal word of God. It was not a self-help manual that could predict the future. It did not tell us how to vote or allow us to divide the world into us and them, the righteous and the damned, the infidels and the blessed. It was a book written by a series of ancient writers, certainly fallible and at times at odds with each other, who asked the right questions and struggled with the mystery and transcendence of human existence. We took the Bible seriously and therefore could not take it literally.

There was no alcohol in the manse where I grew up. Indeed, my father railed against the Glass Bar, the one bar in town, and the drinking in the VFW Hall. We did not work on Sunday. I never heard my father swear. But coupled with this piety was a belief that as Christians we were called to fight for justice. My father took an early stand in the town in support of the civil-rights movement, a position that was highly unpopular in rural, white enclaves where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most hated men in America. A veteran of World War II, he opposed the Vietnam War, telling me when I was about 12 that if the war was still being waged when I was 18, he would go to prison with me. To this day I carry in my head the rather gloomy image of sitting in a jail cell with my dad. Finally, because his youngest brother was gay, he understood the pain and isolation of being a gay man in America. He worked later in life in the gay-rights movement, calling for the ordination and marriage of gays. When he found that my college, Colgate University, had no gay and lesbian organization, he brought gay speakers to the campus. The meetings led gays and lesbians to confide in him that they felt uncomfortable coming out of the closet to start an open organization, a problem my father swiftly solved by taking me out to lunch and informing me that although I was not gay, I had to form the organization. When I went into the dining hall for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the checker behind the desk would take my card, mark off the appropriate box, and hand it back, muttering, “Faggot.” This willingness to take a moral stand, to accept risk and ridicule, was, he showed me, the cost of the moral life.

The four Gospels, we understood, were filled with factual contradictions, two Gospels saying Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, while Luke asserted that John was already in prison. Mark and John give little importance to the birth of Jesus, while Matthew and Luke give differing accounts. There are three separate and different versions of the 10 Commandments (Exodus 20, Exodus 34, and Deuteronomy 5). As for the question of God’s true nature, there are many substantive contradictions. Is God a loving or a vengeful God? In some sections of the Bible, vicious acts of vengeance, including the genocidal extermination of opposing tribes and nations, appear to be blessed by God. God turns on the Egyptians and transforms the Nile into blood so the Egyptians will suffer from thirst—and then sends swarms of locusts and flies to torture them, along with hail, fire and thunder from the heavens to destroy all plants and trees. To liberate the children of Israel, God orders the firstborn in every Egyptian household killed so all will know “that the Lord makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel” (Exodus 11:7).[2] The killing does not cease until “there was not a house where one was not dead” (Exodus 12:30). Amid the carnage God orders Moses to loot all the clothing, jewelry, gold and silver from the Egyptian homes (Exodus 12:35–36). God looks at the devastation and says, “I have made sport of the Egyptians” (Exodus 10:2). While the Exodus story fueled the hopes and dreams of oppressed Jews, and later African Americans in the bondage of slavery, it also has been used to foster religious chauvinism.

A literal reading of the Bible means reinstitution of slavery coupled with the understanding that the slavemaster has the right to beat his slave without mercy since “the slave is his money” (Exodus 21:21). Children who strike or curse a parent are to be executed (Exodus 21:15, 17). Those who pay homage to another god “shall be utterly destroyed” (Exodus 22:20). Menstruating women are to be considered unclean, and all they touch while menstruating becomes unclean (Leviticus 15:19–32). The blind, the lame, those with mutilated faces, those who are hunchbacks or dwarfs and those with itching diseases or scabs or crushed testicles cannot become priests (Leviticus 21:17–21). Blasphemers shall be executed (Leviticus 24:16). And “if the spirit of jealousy” comes upon a man, the high priest can order the jealous man’s wife to drink the “water of bitterness.” If she dies, it is proof of her guilt; if she survives, of her innocence (Numbers 5:11–31). Women, throughout the Bible, are subservient to men, often without legal rights, and men are free to sell their daughters into sexual bondage (Exodus 21:7–11).

Hatred of Jews and other non-Christians pervades the Gospel of John (3:18–20). Jews, he wrote, are children of the devil, the father of lies (John 8:39–44). Jesus calls on his followers to love their enemies and to pray for their persecutors (Matthew 5:44), a radical concept in the days of the Roman Empire. He says we must never demean or insult our enemies. But then we read of Jesus calling his enemies “a brood of vipers” (Matthew 12:34).

The Book of Revelation, a crucial text for the radical Christian Right, appears to show Christ returning to earth at the head of an avenging army. It is one of the few places in the Bible where Christ is associated with violence. This bizarre book, omitted from some of the early canons and relegated to the back of the Bible by Martin Luther, may have been a way, as scholars contend, for the early Christians to cope with Roman persecution and their dreams of final triumph and glory. The book, however, paints a picture of a bloody battle between the forces of good and evil, Christ and the Antichrist, God and Satan, and the torment and utter destruction of all who do not follow the faith. In this vision, only the faithful will be allowed to enter the gates of the New Jerusalem. All others will disappear, cast into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14–15). The Warrior’s defeat of the armies of the nations, a vast apocalyptic vision of war, ends with birds of prey invited to “gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great” (Revelation 19:17–18). It is a story of God’s ruthless, terrifying and violent power unleashed on nonbelievers:

The fourth angel poured his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch men with fire; men were scorched by the fierce heat, and they cursed the name of God, who had power over these plagues, and they did not repent and give him glory. The fifth angel poured his bowl on the throne of the beast, and its kingdom was in darkness; men gnawed their tongues in anguish and cursed the God of heaven for their pain and sores, and did not repent of their deeds. (Revelation 16:8–11)

There is enough hatred, bigotry and lust for violence in the pages of the Bible to satisfy anyone bent on justifying cruelty and violence. Religion, as H. Richard Niebuhr said, is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people.[3] And the Bible has long been used in the wrong hands—such as antebellum slave owners in the American South who quoted from it to defend slavery—not to Christianize the culture, as those wielding it often claim, but to acculturate the Christian faith.

Many of the suppositions of the biblical writers, who understood little about the working of the cosmos or the human body, are so fanciful, and the accounts so wild, that even biblical literalists reject them. God is not, as many writers of the Bible believed, peering down at us through little peepholes in the sky called stars. These evangelicals and fundamentalists are, as the Reverend William Sloane Coffin wrote, not biblical literalists, as they claim, but “selective literalists,” choosing the bits and pieces of the Bible that conform to their ideology and ignoring, distorting or inventing the rest.[4] And the selective literalists cannot have it both ways. Either the Bible is literally true and all of its edicts must be obeyed, or it must be read in another way.

Mainstream Christians can also cherry-pick the Bible to create a Jesus and God who are always loving and compassionate. Such Christians often fail to acknowledge that there are hateful passages in the Bible that give sacred authority to the rage, self-aggrandizement and intolerance of the Christian Right. Church leaders must denounce the biblical passages that champion apocalyptic violence and hateful political creeds. They must do so in the light of other biblical passages that teach a compassion and tolerance, often exemplified in the life of Christ, which stands opposed to bigotry and violence. Until this happens, until the Christian churches wade into the debate, these biblical passages will be used by bigots and despots to give sacred authority to their calls to subjugate or eradicate the enemies of God. This literature in the biblical canon keeps alive the virus of hatred, whether dormant or active, and the possibility of apocalyptic terror in the name of God. And the steady refusal by churches to challenge the canonical authority of these passages means these churches share some of the blame. “Unless the churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, come together on this, they will continue to make it legitimate to believe in the end as a time when there will be no non-Christians or infidels,” theologian Richard Fenn wrote. “Silent complicity with apocalyptic rhetoric soon becomes collusion with plans for religiously inspired genocide.”[5]

As long as scripture, blessed and accepted by the church, teaches that at the end of time there will be a Day of Wrath and Christians will control the shattered remnants of a world cleansed through violence and war, as long as it teaches that all nonbelievers will be tormented, destroyed and banished to hell, it will be hard to thwart the message of radical apocalyptic preachers or assuage the fears of the Islamic world that Christians are calling for its annihilation. Those who embrace this dark conclusion to life can find it endorsed in scripture, whether it is tucked into the back pew rack of a liberal Unitarian church in Boston or a megachurch in Florida. The mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches, declining in numbers and influence, cannot hope to combat the hysteria and excitement roused by these prophets of doom until they repudiate the apocalyptic writings in scripture.

The writers of Genesis, as the Reverend William Sloane Coffin has pointed out, who wrote about the creation of the world in seven days, knew nothing about the process of creation.[6] They believed the earth was flat with water above and below it. They wrote that God created light on the first day and the sun on the fourth day. Genesis was not written to explain the process of creation, of which these writers knew nothing. It was written to help explain the purpose of creation. It was written to help us grasp a spiritual truth, not a scientific or historical fact. And this purpose, this spiritual truth, is something the writers did know about. These biblical writers, at their best, understood our divided natures. They knew our internal conflicts and battles; how we could love our brother and yet hate him; the oppressive power of parents, even the best of parents; the impulses that drive us to commit violations against others; the yearning to lead a life of meaning; our fear of mortality; our struggles to deal with our uncertainty, our loneliness, our greed, our lust, our ambition, our desires to be God, as well as our moments of nobility, compassion and courage. They knew these emotions and feelings were entangled. They understood our weaknesses and strengths. They understood how we are often not the people we want to be or know we should be, how hard it is for us to articulate all this, and how life and creation can be as glorious and beautiful as it can be mysterious, evil and cruel. This is why Genesis is worth reading, indeed why the Bible stands as one of the great ethical and moral documents of our age. The biblical writers have helped shape and define Western civilization. Not to know the Bible is, in some ways, to be illiterate, to neglect the very roots of philosophy, art, architecture, literature, poetry and music. It is to fall into a dangerous provincialism, as myopic and narrow as that embraced by those who say everything in the Bible is literally true and we do not need any other kind of intellectual or scientific inquiry. Doubt and belief are not, as biblical literalists claim, incompatible. Those who act without any doubt are frightening.

“There lives more faith in honest doubt,” the poet Alfred Tennyson noted, “believe me, than in half the creeds.”[7]

This was my faith. It is a pretty good summary of my faith today. God is inscrutable, mysterious and unknowable. We do not understand what life is about, what it means, why we are here and what will happen to us after our brief sojourn on the planet ends. We are saved, in the end, by faith—faith that life is not meaningless and random, that there is a purpose to human existence, and that in the midst of this morally neutral universe the tiny, seemingly insignificant acts of compassion and blind human kindness, especially to those labeled our enemies and strangers, sustain the divine spark, which is love. We are not fully human if we live alone. These small acts of compassion—for they can never be organized and institutionalized as can hate—have a power that lives after us. Human kindness is deeply subversive to totalitarian creeds, which seek to thwart all compassion toward those deemed unworthy of moral consideration, those branded as internal or external enemies. These acts recognize and affirm the humanity of others, others who may be condemned as agents of Satan. Those who sacrifice for others, especially at great cost, who place compassion and tolerance above ideology and creeds, and who reject absolutes, especially moral absolutes, stand as constant witnesses in our lives to this love, even long after they are gone. In the gospels this is called resurrection.

Faith presupposes that we cannot know. We can never know. Those who claim to know what life means play God. These false prophets—the Pat Robertsons, the Jerry Falwells and the James Dobsons—clutching the cross and the Bible, offer, like Mephistopheles, to lead us back to a mythical paradise and an impossible, unachievable happiness and security, at once seductive and empowering. They ask us to hand over moral choice and responsibility to them. They will tell us they know what is right and wrong in the eyes of God. They tell us how to act, how to live, and in this process they elevate themselves above us. They remove the anxiety of moral choice, the fundamental anxiety of human existence. This is part of their attraction. They give us the rules by which we live. But once we hand over this anxiety and accept their authority, we become enslaved and they become our idols. And idols, as the Bible never ceases to tell us, destroy us.

I have seen enough of the world over the past two decades—for although I graduated from seminary I was not ordained, and instead worked in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans as a foreign correspondent—to grasp that men and women of great moral probity and courage arise in all cultures, all nations and all religions to challenge the oppressor and fight for the oppressed. I also saw how the dominant religions of these nations were often twisted and distorted by totalitarian movements, turned into civic religions in which the goals of the movement or the state became the goals of the divine. The wars I covered were often fought in the name of one God or another. Armed groups, from Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Serbian nationalists in the former Yugoslavia, were fueled by apocalyptic visions that sanctified terrorism or genocide. They mocked the faiths they purported to defend.

America and the Christian religions have no monopoly on goodness or saintliness. God has not chosen Americans as a people above others. The beliefs of Christians are as flawed and imperfect as all religious beliefs. But both the best of American democracy and the best of Christianity embody important values, values such as compassion, tolerance and belief in justice and equality. America is a nation where all have a voice in how we live and how we are governed. We have never fully adhered to these values—indeed, probably never will—but our health as a country is determined by our steadfastness in striving to attain them. And there are times when taking a moral stance, perhaps the highest form of patriotism, means facing down the community, even the nation. Our loyalty to our community and our nation, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “is therefore morally tolerable only if it includes values wider than those of the community.”[8]

These values, democratic and Christian, are being dismantled, often with stealth, by a radical Christian movement, known as dominionism, which seeks to cloak itself in the mantle of the Christian faith and American patriotism. Dominionism takes its name from Genesis 1:26–31, in which God gives human beings “dominion” over all creation. This movement, small in number but influential, departs from traditional evangelicalism. Dominionists now control at least six national television networks, each reaching tens of millions of homes, and virtually all of the nation’s more than 2,000 religious radio stations, as well as denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention. Dominionism seeks to redefine traditional democratic and Christian terms and concepts to fit an ideology that calls on the radical church to take political power. It shares many prominent features with classical fascist movements, at least as it is defined by the scholar Robert O. Paxton, who sees fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cultures of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”[9]

Dominionism, born out of a theology known as Christian reconstructionism, seeks to politicize faith. It has, like all fascist movements, a belief in magic along with leadership adoration and a strident call for moral and physical supremacy of a master race, in this case American Christians. It also has, like fascist movements, an ill-defined and shifting set of beliefs, some of which contradict one another. Paxton argues that the best way to understand authentic fascist movements, which he says exist in all societies, including democracies, is to focus not on what they say but on how they act, for, as he writes, some of the ideas that underlie fascist movements “remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language,” and “many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions.”[10]

“Fascism is…a kind of colonization,” the Reverend Davidson Loehr noted. “A simple definition of ‘colonization’ is that it takes people’s stories away, and assigns them supportive roles in stories that empower others at their expense.”[11] The dominionist movement, like all totalitarian movements, seeks to appropriate not only our religious and patriotic language but also our stories, to deny the validity of stories other than their own, to deny that there are other acceptable ways of living and being. There becomes, in their rhetoric, only one way to be a Christian and only one way to be an American.

Dominionism is a theocratic sect with its roots in a radical Calvinism. It looks to the theocracy John Calvin implanted in Geneva, Switzerland, in the 1500s as its political model. It teaches that American Christians have been mandated by God to make America a Christian state. A decades-long refusal by most American fundamentalists to engage in politics at all following the 1925 Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian “dominion” over the nation and eventually over the earth itself. Dominionism preaches that Jesus has called on Christians to build the kingdom of God in the here and now, whereas previously it was thought that we would have to wait for it. America becomes, in this militant biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan. Under Christian dominion, America will be no longer a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and “Christian values” form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all. Labor unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and “homeland” security. Some dominionists (not all of whom accept the label, at least not publicly) would further require all citizens to pay “tithes” to church organizations empowered by the government to run our social-welfare agencies and all schools. The only legitimate voices in this state will be Christian. All others will be silenced.

The racist and brutal intolerance of the intellectual godfathers of today’s Christian Reconstructionism is a chilling reminder of the movement’s lust for repression. The Institutes of Biblical Law by R. J. Rushdoony, written in 1973, is the most important book for the dominionist movement. Rushdoony calls for a Christian society that is harsh, unforgiving and violent. His work draws heavily on the calls for a repressive theocratic society laid out by Calvin in Institutes of the Christian Religion, first published in 1536 and one of the most important works of the Protestant Reformation. Christians are, Rushdoony argues, the new chosen people of God and are called to do what Adam and Eve failed to do: create a godly, Christian state. The Jews, who neglected to fulfill God’s commands in the Hebrew scriptures, have, in this belief system, forfeited their place as God’s chosen people and have been replaced by Christians. The death penalty is to be imposed not only for offenses such as rape, kidnapping and murder, but also for adultery, blasphemy, homosexuality, astrology, incest, striking a parent, incorrigible juvenile delinquency, and, in the case of women, “un-chastity before marriage.” The world is to be subdued and ruled by a Christian United States. Rushdoony dismissed the widely accepted estimate of 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust as an inflated figure, and his theories on race often echo those found in Nazi eugenics, in which there are higher and lower forms of human beings. Those considered by the Christian state to be immoral and incapable of reform are to be exterminated.[12]

Rushdoony was deeply antagonistic toward the federal government. He believed the federal government should concern itself with little more than national defense. Education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches. Biblical law must replace the secular legal code. This ideology, made more palatable for the mainstream by later disciples such as Francis Schaeffer and Pat Robertson, remains at the heart of the movement. Many of its tenets are being enacted through the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, currently channeling billions in federal funds to groups such as National Right to Life and Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing, as well as to innumerable Christian charities and organizations that do everything from running drug and pregnancy clinics to promoting sexual abstinence-only programs in schools.[13]

While traditional fundamentalism shares many of the darker traits of the new movement—such as a blind obedience to a male hierarchy that often claims to speak for God, intolerance toward nonbelievers, and disdain for rational, intellectual inquiry—it has never attempted to impose its belief system on the rest of the nation. And it has not tried to transform government, as well as all other secular institutions, into an extension of the church. The new radical fundamentalisms amount to a huge and disastrous mutation. Dominionists and their wealthy, right-wing sponsors speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past. They engage in a slow process of “logocide,” the killing of words. The old definitions of words are replaced by new ones. Code words of the old belief system are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings. Words such as “truth,” “wisdom,” “death,” “liberty,” “life,” and “love” no longer mean what they mean in the secular world. “Life” and “death” mean life in Christ or death to Christ, and are used to signal belief or unbelief in the risen Lord. “Wisdom” has little to do with human wisdom but refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the system of belief. “Liberty” is not about freedom, but the “liberty” found when one accepts Jesus Christ and is liberated from the world to obey Him. But perhaps the most pernicious distortion comes with the word “love,” the word used to lure into the movement many who seek a warm, loving community to counter their isolation and alienation. “Love” is distorted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those who claim to speak for God in return for the promise of everlasting life. The blind, human love, the acceptance of the other, is attacked as an inferior love, dangerous and untrustworthy.[14]

“The goal must be God’s law-order in which alone is true liberty,” wrote Rushdoony in Institutes of Biblical Law:

Whenever freedom is made into the absolute, the result is not freedom but anarchism. Freedom must be under law or it is not freedom…. Only a law-order which holds to the primacy of God’slaw can bring forth true freedom, freedom for justice, truth, and godly life. Freedom as an absolute is simply an assertion of man’s “right” to be his own god; this means a radical denial of God’s law-order. “Freedom” thus is another name for the claim by man to divinity and autonomy. It means that man becomes his own absolute. The word “freedom” is thus a pretext used by humanists of every variety…to disguise man’s claim to be his own absolute…. If men have unrestricted free speech and free press, then there is no freedom for truth, in that no standard is permitted whereby the promulgation or publication of a lie can be judged and punished.[15]

As the process gains momentum—with some justices on the Supreme Court such as Antonin Scalia steeped in this ideology—America starts to speak a new language. There is a slow and inexorable hijacking of religious and political terminology. Terms such as “liberty” and “freedom” no longer mean what they meant in the past. Those in the movement speak of “liberty,” but they do not speak about the traditional concepts of American liberty—the liberty to express divergent opinions, to respect other ways of believing and being, the liberty of individuals to seek and pursue their own goals and forms of happiness. When used by the Christian Right, the term “liberty” means the liberty that comes with accepting a very narrowly conceived Christ and the binary worldview that acceptance promotes.

America’s Providential History, by Mark A. Beliles and Stephen K. McDowell, published in 1989, is the standard textbook on American history used in many Christian schools. It is also a staple of the home-schooling movement. In this book, authors Beliles and McDowell define the term “liberty” as fealty to “the Spirit of the Lord.” The work of “liberty” is an ongoing process, one mounted by Christians, to free a society from the slavery imposed by “secular humanists.” This process frees, or eradicates, different moral codes and belief systems, to introduce a single, uniform and unquestioned “Christian” orientation. Liberty, in a linguistic twist worthy of George Orwell, means theocratic tyranny:

The Bible reveals that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Corinthians 3:17)…. When the Spirit of the Lord comes into a nation, that nation is liberated. The degree to which the Spirit of the Lord is infused into a society (through its people, laws and institutions) is the degree to which that society will experience liberty in every realm (civil, religious, economic, etc.).[16]

The Global Recordings Network, a missionary group striving to bring “the Name of Jesus” to “every tribe and tongue and nation,”[17] gives close attention to the meaning of “liberty” in their teachings. A tape of a missionary lesson plays: “I want to make you understand this word ‘liberty.’ It is written in God’s book: ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.’ Some say there is not enough liberty in this land, but if that is true, it is because there is not enough of the Spirit of the Lord. What do you think yourselves? Do people do as God commands them? Do they love each other? Do they help each other? Do they speak the truth? Do they flee from fornication and adultery? You know there are those who steal, who lie, who kill, and who worship things that are not God. These things are not of the Spirit of God, but of the spirit of Satan. Then how can there be true liberty?”[18]

The “infusion” of “the Spirit of the Lord” into society includes its infusion into society’s legal system. Liberty is defined as the extent to which America obeys Christian law. When America is a Christian nation, liberty becomes, in this view, liberation from Satan. This slow, gradual and often imperceptible strangulation of thought—the corruption of democratic concepts and ideas—infects the society until the new, totalitarian vision is articulated by the old vocabulary. This cannibalization of language occurs subtly and stealthily. The ghoulish process leaves those leading the movement mouthing platitudes little different from the bromides spoken by those who sincerely champion the open, democratic state.

These tactics, familiar and effective, have often been used by movements that assault democracies. This seemingly innocent hijacking of language mollifies opponents, the mainstream and supporters within the movement who fail to grasp the radical agenda. It gives believers a sense of continuity and tradition. Radical logocides paint themselves as the defenders of an idealized and more virtuous past. Most revolutionary movements, from those in Latin America to those shaped by Islamic militancy in the Middle East, root their radical ideas in what they claim are older, purer traditions.

While the radical Christian movement’s leaders pay lip service to traditional justice, they call among their own for a legal system that promotes what they define as “Christian principles.” The movement thus is able to preserve the appearance of law and respect for democracy even as its leaders condemn all opponents—dismissed as “atheists,” “nonbelievers” or “secular humanists”—to moral and legal oblivion. Justice, under this process of logocide, is perverted to carry out injustice and becomes a mirage of law and order. The moral calculus no longer revolves around the concept of universal human rights; now its center is the well-being, protection and promotion of “Bible-believing Christians.” Logocide slowly and stealthily removes whole segments of society from the moral map. As Joseph Goebbels wrote: “The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative.”[19]

Victor Klemperer, who was dismissed from his post as a professor of Romance languages at the University of Dresden in 1935 because of his Jewish ancestry, wrote what may have been the first literary critique of National Socialism. He noted that the Nazis also “changed the values, the frequency of words, [and] made them into common property, words that had previously been used by individuals or tiny troupes. They confiscated words for the party, saturated words and phrases and sentence forms with their poison. They made language serve their terrible system. They conquered words and made them into their strongest advertising tools [Werebemittel], at once the most public and the most secret.”[20]

And while all this took place, he points out, most Germans never noticed.

“The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models,” Robert O. Paxton wrote in Anatomy of Fascism:

They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.[21]

There are at least 70 million evangelicals in the United States—about 25 percent of the population—attending more than 200,000 evangelical churches. Polls indicate that about 40 percent of respondents believe in the Bible as the “actual word of God” and that it is “to be taken literally, word for word.” Applied to the country’s total population, this proportion would place the number of believers at about 100 million. These polls also suggest that about 84 percent of Americans accept that Jesus is the son of God; 80 percent of respondents say that they believe they will stand before God on the Day of Judgment. The same percentage of respondents say God works miracles, and half say they think angels exist. Almost a third of all respondents say they believe in the Rapture.[22]

American fundamentalists and evangelicals, however, are sharply divided between strict fundamentalists—those who refuse to grant legitimacy to alternative views of the Christian tradition—and the many evangelicals who concede that there are other legitimate ways to worship and serve Christ. Evangelicals, while they often embrace fundamentalist doctrine, do not always share the intolerance of the radical fundamentalists. While a majority of Christian Americans embrace a literal interpretation of the Bible, only a tiny minority—among them the Christian dominionists—are comfortable with this darker vision of an intolerant, theocratic America. Unfortunately, it is this minority that is taking over the machinery of U.S. state and religious institutions.

In a 2004 study, the political scientist John Green identifies those he calls “traditional evangelicals.” This group, which Green estimates at 12.6 percent of the population, comes “closest to the ‘religious right’ widely discussed in the media.” It is overwhelmingly Republican; it is openly hostile to democratic pluralism, and it champions totalitarian policies, such as denying homosexuals the same rights as other Americans and amending the Constitution to make America a “Christian nation.” Green’s “traditional evangelicals” can probably be called true dominionists. There are signs that this militant core may be smaller than even Green suggests, dipping to around 7 percent of the population in other polls, such as those conducted by George Barna.[23] But the potency of this radical movement far exceeds its numbers. Radical social movements, as Crane Brinton wrote in The Anatomy of Revolution, are almost always tiny, although they use the tools of modern propaganda to create the illusion of a mass following. As Brinton noted, “the impressive demonstrations the camera has recorded in Germany, Italy, Russia and China ought not to deceive the careful student of politics. Neither Communist, Nazi, nor Fascist victory over the moderates was achieved by the participation of the many; all were achieved by small, disciplined, principled, fanatical bodies.”[24] These radicals, Brinton went on, “combine, in varying degrees, very high ideals and a complete contempt for the inhibitions and principles which serve most other men as ideals.” They are, he said, “practical men unfettered by common sense, Machiavellians in the service of the Beautiful and the Good.”[25] And once they are in power, “there is no more finicky regard for the liberties of the individual or for the forms of legality. The extremists, after clamoring for liberty and toleration while they were in opposition, turn very authoritarian when they reach power.”[26]

Traditional evangelicals, those who come out of Billy Graham’s mold, are not necessarily comfortable with the direction taken by the dominionists. And the multitude of churches, denominations and groups that do lend their support in varying degrees to this new movement are diverse and often antagonistic. While right-wing Catholics have joined forces with the movement, many of the movement’s Protestant leaders, including D. James Kennedy, disdainfully label the Catholic Church a “cult.”[27] These variances are held in check by the shared drive for political control, but the disputes simmer beneath the surface, threatening to tear apart the fragile coalitions. And those few evangelicals who challenge the dominionist drive for power are ruthlessly thrust aside, as the purges of the old guard within the Southern Baptist Convention three decades ago illustrate.

It is difficult to write in broad sweeps about this mass movement and detail these conflicts, since there are innumerable differences not only among groups but among believers. In the megachurches, there are worshippers and preachers who focus exclusively on the gospel of prosperity—centered on the belief that God wants Christians to be rich and successful—and who have little interest in politics. There are strict fundamentalists who view charismatics—those who speak in tongues—as Satan worshippers. There are small clusters of left-wing evangelicals, such as Jim Wallis’s Sojourner movement and Ron Sider’s Evangelicals for Social Action, who believe the Bible to be the literal word of God but embrace social activism and left-wing politics. There are evangelicals who focus more on what they can do in their communities as Christians than on what God’s army can do to change the course of American history. And there are old-style evangelists, such as Luis Palau, who still tell Christians to keep their hands clean of politics, get right with Jesus and focus on spiritual and moral renewal.

But within this mass of divergent, fractious and varied groups is this core group of powerful Christian dominionists who have latched on to the despair, isolation, disconnectedness and fear that drives many people into these churches. Christian dominionist leaders have harnessed these discontents to further a frightening political agenda. If they do not have the active support of all in the evangelical churches, they often have their sympathy. They can count on the passive support of huge numbers of Christians, even if many of these Christians may not fully share dominionism’s fierce utopian vision, fanaticism or ruthlessness. The appeal of the movement lies in the high ideals its radicals preach, the promise of a moral, Christian nation, the promise of a renewal. Its darker aims—seen in calls for widespread repression of nonbelievers; frequent use of the death penalty; illegalization of abortion, even in case of rape and incest; and the dismantling of public education—will, if achieved, alienate many who support them. But this combination of a disciplined, well-financed radical core and tens of millions of Americans who, discontent and anxious, yearn for a vague, revitalized “Christian nation,” is a potent new force in American politics. Dominionists wait only for a fiscal, social or political crisis, a moment of upheaval in the form of an economic meltdown or another terrorist strike on American soil, to move to reconfigure the political system. Such a crisis could unleash a public clamor for drastic new national security measures and draconian reforms to safeguard the nation. Widespread discontent and fear, stoked and manipulated by dominionists and their sympathizers, could be used by these radicals to sweep aside the objections of beleaguered moderates in Congress and the courts, those clinging to a bankrupt and discredited liberalism, to establish an American theocracy, a Christian fascism.

The movement has sanctified a ruthless unfettered capitalism. In an essay in Harper’s magazine titled “The Spirit of Disobedience: An Invitation to Resistance,” Curtis White argued that “it is capitalism that now most defines our national character, not Christianity or the Enlightenment.” Although the values of capitalism are antithetical to Christ’s vision and the Enlightenment ethic of Kant, the gospel of prosperity—which preaches that Jesus wants us all to be rich and powerful and the government to get out of the way—has formulated a belief system that delights corporate America. Corporations such as Tyson Foods—which has placed 128 part-time chaplains, nearly all evangelicals or fundamentalists, in 78 plants across the country—along with Purdue, Wal-Mart, and Sam’s Wholesale, to name a few, are huge financial backers of the movement.

White concludes that “ours is a culture in which death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives.” This “legality” makes the systematic exploitation of human workers—paying less than living wages, while failing to provide adequate health care and retirement plans—simply a “part of our heritage of freedom.” White goes on to excoriate our nationalist triumphalism and our unleashing of “the most fantastically destructive military power” the world has ever known in the course of “protecting and pursuing freedom.” Among the resultant diseases of culture, he lists the “grotesque violence of video games and Hollywood movies,” the “legality of abortions [which] at times covers over an attitude toward human life that subjects life to the low logic of efficiency and convenience,” meaningless work, mindless consumerism, a distorted sense of time, housing developments where houses are “coffins” and neighborhoods are “shared cemeteries” and, “perhaps most destructively, the legality of property rights [which] condemns nature itself to annihilation even as we call it the freedom to pursue personal property.”[28]

The power brokers in the radical Christian Right have already moved from the fringes of society to the executive branch, the House of Representatives, the Senate and the courts. The movement has seized control of the Republican Party. Christian fundamentalists now hold a majority of seats in 36 percent of all Republican Party state committees, or 18 of 50 states, along with large minorities in the remaining states. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives earned approval ratings of 80 to 100 percent from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups: the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council.[29] Tom Coburn, elected in 2004 as senator from Oklahoma, called for a ban on abortion in his campaign, going so far as to call for the death penalty for doctors who carry out abortions once the ban went into place. Senator John Thune is a creationist. Jim DeMint, senator from South Carolina, wants to ban single mothers from teaching in schools.[30] The 2004 Election Day exit polls found that 23 percent of voters identified themselves as evangelical Christians; Bush won 78 percent of their vote. A plurality of voters said that the most important issue in the campaign had been “moral values.”[31]

The Bush administration has steadily diverted billions of dollars of taxpayer money from secular and governmental social-service organizations to faith-based organizations, bankrolling churches and organizations that seek to dismantle American democracy and create a theocratic state.[32] The role of education and social-welfare agencies is being supplanted by these churches, nearly all of them evangelical, and the wall between church and state is being disassembled. These groups can and usually do discriminate by refusing to hire gays and lesbians, people of other faiths and those who do not embrace their strict version of Christianity. Christian clinics that treat addictions or do pregnancy counseling (usually with the aim of preventing abortion) do not have to hire trained counselors or therapists. The only requirement of a new hire is usually that he or she be a “Bible-believing Christian.” In fiscal year 2003, faith-based organizations received 8.1 percent of the competitive social-service grant budget.[33] In fiscal year 2004, faith-based organizations received $2.005 billion in funding—10.3 percent of federal competitive service grants.[34], [35] The federal government awarded more than $2.15 billion in competitive social-service grants to faith-based organizations in fiscal year 2005, 11 percent of all federal competitive service grants.[36] Faith-based organizations are consistently winning a larger portion of federal social-service funding, a trend that has tremendous social and political consequences if it continues. The Bush administration has spent more than $1 billion on chastity programs alone. Thirty percent of American schools with sex-education programs teach abstinence only. Not only is there little accountability, not only are these organizations allowed to practice discriminatory hiring practices, but also, as research shows, while abstinence-only programs can sometimes get teenagers to delay sex, they also leave young men and women unprepared for sexual relations, resulting in higher rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

It is perhaps telling that our closest allies in the United Nations on issues dealing with reproductive rights, one of the few issues where we cooperate with other nations, are Islamic states such as Iran. But then the Christian Right and radical Islamists, although locked in a holy war, increasingly mirror each other. They share the same obsessions. They do not tolerate other forms of belief or disbelief. They are at war with artistic and cultural expression. They seek to silence the media. They call for the subjugation of women. They promote severe sexual repression, and they seek to express themselves through violence.

Members of the Christian Right who have been elected to powerful political offices have worked in several instances to exclude opponents and manipulate vote counts. The current Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, a stalwart of the Christian Right, was the secretary of state for Ohio as well as the co-chair of the state’s Committee to Re-Elect George Bush during the last presidential election. Blackwell, as secretary of state, oversaw the administering of the 2004 presidential elections in Ohio. He handled all complaints of irregularities. He attempted to get the state to hand over all election polling to Diebold Election Systems, a subsidiary of Diebold Incorporated, a firm that makes electronic voting machines and has close ties with the Bush administration. By the time of the elections he had managed to ensure that Diebold ran the machines in 35 counties. In an August 14, 2003, fund-raising letter, Walden O’Dell, CEO of Diebold, told Republicans that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”[37] O’Dell and other Diebold executives and board members are supporters of and donors to the Republican Party.[38]

Blackwell, an African American, oversaw a voting system in which African Americans, who vote primarily Democratic in national elections, found polling stations in their districts, especially in heavily Democratic areas such as Cleveland, grossly under-staffed. There were in these polling stations long lines with delays that sometimes lasted as long as 10 hours, sending many potential voters home in frustration. Aggressive poll monitors questioned and often disqualified new voters because of what the monitors claimed was improper registration. Blackwell banned photographers and reporters from polling places, making irregularities and harassment harder to document. The Diebold machines recorded record high turnouts—124 percent in one of the precincts—where Bush won overwhelming victories and low voter turnout in districts that went for Democratic Senator John Kerry.[39] Kerry campaign workers reported numerous irregularities, including the discovery of a machine that diverted votes from Kerry to Bush. Ray Beckerman, part of the Kerry campaign, said that he found that touch-screen voting machines in Youngstown were registering “George W. Bush” when people pressed “John F. Kerry” during the entire day. Although he reported the glitch shortly after the polls opened, it was not fixed. All reports of irregularities, including complaints about precincts where votes were counted without the presence of election monitors, passed through Blackwell’s office.[40] Nothing was ever done. Indeed, Blackwell went on after the elections to issue to county boards of elections a demand that voter registration forms be printed on “white, uncoated paper of not less than 80-pound text weight,” a heavy card-like stock. This allowed his office to disqualify registrations because the paper was not thick enough.[41] The ruling has, his critics say, jeopardized the right of tens of thousands of would-be voters to participate in the next elections. As the Christian Right gains control of state offices throughout the country, it is being tarred by opponents with similar accusations.

Followers in the movement are locked within closed systems of information and indoctrination that cater to their hates and prejudices. Tens of millions of Americans rely exclusively on Christian broadcasters for their news, health, entertainment and devotional programs. These followers have been organized into disciplined and powerful voting blocs. They attend churches that during election time are little more than local headquarters for the Republican Party and during the rest of the year demand nearly all of their social, religious and recreational time. These believers are encased in a hermetic world. There is no questioning or dissent. There are anywhere from 1.1 million to 2.1 million children, nearly all evangelicals, now being home-schooled.[42] These children are not challenged with ideas or research that conflict with their biblical worldview. Evolution is not taught. God created the world in six days. America, they are told, was founded as a Christian nation and secular humanists are working to destroy the Christian nation. These young men and women are often funneled into Christian colleges and universities, such as Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, Pat Robertson’s Regent University, and a host of other schools such as Patrick Henry University. They are taught, in short, to obey. They are discouraged from critical analysis, questioning and independent thought. And they believe, by the time they are done, a host of myths designed to destroy the open, pluralist society.

Most of America’s fundamentalist and evangelical churches are led by pastors who embrace this non-reality-based belief system, one that embraces magic, the fiction of a “Christian nation” in need of revitalization, and dark, terrifying apocalyptic visions. They preach about the coming world war, drawing their visions from the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. They preach that at the end of history Christians will dominate the earth and that all nonbelievers, including those who are not sufficiently Christian, will be cast into torment and outer darkness. They call for the destruction of whole cultures, nations and religions, those they have defined as the enemies of God.

As American history and the fundamentalist movement itself have changed, so have the objects of fundamentalist hatred. Believers were told a few decades ago that communists were behind the civil-rights movement, the antiwar movement and liberal groups such as the ACLU. They were racist and intolerant of African Americans, Jews and Catholics. Now the battle against communism has been reconfigured. The seat of Satan is no longer in the Kremlin. It has been assumed by individuals and institutions promoting a rival religion called “secular humanism.” The obsession with the evils of secular humanism would be laughable if it were not such an effective scare tactic. The only organized movement of secular humanists who call themselves by that name is the American Humanist Association (AHA), which has about 3,000 members and whose credo was published in the 1933 Humanist Manifesto I and the 1973 Humanist Manifesto II. Its Humanist Magazine has a minuscule circulation. In terms of influence, as Barbara Parker and Christy Macy wrote, “these humanists rank with militant vegetarians and agrarian anarchists, and were about as well known—until the Religious Right set out to make them famous.”[43] But it is not important who is fingered as Satan’s agent, as long as the wild conspiracy theories and paranoia are stoked by an array of duplicitous, phantom enemies that lurk behind the scenes of public school boards or the media. As the movement reaches out to the African American churches and right-wing Catholics, it has exchanged old hatreds for new ones, preferring now to demonize gays, liberals, immigrants, Muslims and others as forces beholden to the Antichrist while painting themselves as the heirs of the civil-rights movement. The movement is fueled by the fear of powerful external and internal enemies whose duplicity and cunning is constantly at work. These phantom enemies serve to keep believers afraid and in a heightened state of alert, ready to support repressive measures against all who do not embrace the movement. But this tactic has required the airbrushing out of past racist creeds—an effort that, sometime after 1970, saw Jerry Falwell recall all copies of his earlier sermons warning against integration and the evils of the black race. The only sermon left in print from the 1960s is called “Ministers and Marchers.” In the sermon Falwell angrily denounces preachers who engage in politics, specifically those who support the civil-rights movement. The effort to erase the past, to distort truth and reinvent himself as a past supporter of civil rights, is a frightening example of how, if a lie is broadcast long enough and loud enough, it becomes true. Distortions and lies permeate the movement, which fends off criticism by encasing its followers in closed information systems and wrapping itself in Christian vestments and the American flag.

The movement is marked not only by its obsessions with conspiracy theories, magic, sexual repression, paranoia and death, but also by its infatuation with apocalyptic violence and military force. On its outer fringes are collections of odd messianic warriors, those ready to fight and die for Christ. These include American Veterans in Domestic Defense, a Texas group that transported former Alabama Supreme Court justice Roy Moore’s 2.6-ton 10 Commandment monument by truck around the country. Moore, who graduated from the U.S. military academy at West Point, lost his job as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court after he defied a judge’s order to remove his monument from the Montgomery judicial building. He and his monument instantly became celebrities for those preaching that Christians were under siege, that there was an organized effort to persecute all who upheld God’s law. These carefully cultivated feelings of persecution foster a permanent state of crisis, a deep paranoia and fear, and they make it easier to call for violence—always, of course, as a form of self-defense. It turns all outside the movement into enemies: even those who appear benign, the believer is warned, seek to destroy Christians. There are an array of obscure, shadowy paramilitary groups, such as Christian Identity, the members of which, emboldened by the rhetoric of the movement, believe they will one day fight a religious war. Military leaders who stoke this belief in a holy war are lionized. After leading American troops into battle against a Somalian warlord, General William Boykin announced: “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his God was an idol.” General Boykin belongs to a small group called the Faith Force Multiplier, whose members apply military principles to evangelism in a manifesto summoning warriors “to the spiritual warfare for souls.” Boykin, rather than being reprimanded for his inflammatory rhetoric, was promoted to the position of deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence. He believes America is engaged in a holy war as a “Christian nation” battling Satan and that America’s Muslim adversaries will be defeated “only if we come against them in the name of Jesus.”[44]

These visions of a holy war at once terrify and delight followers. Such visions peddle a bizarre spiritual Darwinism. True Christians will rise to heaven and be saved, and all lesser faiths and nonbelievers will be viciously destroyed by an angry God in an orgy of horrific, apocalyptic violence. The yearning for this final battle runs through the movement like an electric current. Christian Right firebrands employ the language of war, speak in the metaphors of battle, and paint graphic and chilling scenes of the violence and mayhem that will envelop the earth. War is the final aesthetic of the movement.

“Now, this revolution is not for the temperate,” the Ohio pastor Rod Parsley shouted out to a crowd when I heard him speak in Washington in March of 2006. “This revolution—that’s what it is—is not for the timid and the weak, but for the brave and strong, who step over the line out of their comfort zone and truly decide to become disciples of Christ. I’m talking about red-blooded men and women who don’t have to be right, recognized, rewarded or regarded…. So my admonishment to you this morning is this. Sound the alarm. A spiritual invasion is taking place. The secular media never likes it when I say this, so let me say it twice,” he says to laughter. “Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! They say this rhetoric is so inciting. I came to incite a riot. I came to effect a divine disturbance in the heart and soul of the church. Man your battle stations. Ready your weapons. Lock and load!”

BattleCry, a Christian fundamentalist youth movement that has attracted as many as 25,000 people to Christian rock concerts in San Francisco, Philadelphia and Detroit, uses elaborate light shows, Hummers, ranks of Navy SEALs and the imagery and rhetoric of battle to pound home its message. Ron Luce, who runs it, exhorts the young Christians to defeat the secular forces around them. “This is war,” he has said. “And Jesus invites us to get into the action, telling us that the violent—the ‘forceful’ ones—will lay hold of the kingdom.” The rock band Delirious, which played in the Philadelphia gathering, pounded out a song with the words: “We’re an army of God and we’re ready to die…. Let’s paint this big ol’ town red…. We see nothing but the blood of Jesus….” The lyrics were projected on large screens so some 17,000 participants could sing along. The crowd in the Wachovia sports stadium shouted in unison: “We are warriors!”[45]

The use of elaborate spectacle to channel and shape the passions of mass followers is a staple of totalitarian movements. It gives to young adherents the raw material for their interior lives, for love and hate, joy and sorrow, excitement and belonging. It imparts the illusion of personal empowerment. It creates comradeship and solidarity, possible only as long as those within the movement do not defy the collective emotions of the crowd and willingly devote themselves to the communal objective, in this case creating a Christian America and defeating those who stand in the way. It gives meaning and purpose to life, turning a mundane existence into an epic battle against forces of darkness, forces out to crush all that is good and pure in America. And it is very hard for the voices of moderation to compete, for these spectacles work to shut down individual conscience and reflection. They give to adherents a permissiveness, a rhetorical license to engage in acts of violence that are normally taboo in a democratic society. It becomes permissible to hate. The crowds are wrapped in the seductive language of violence, which soon enough leads to acts of real violence.

Apocalyptic visions inspire genocidal killers who glorify violence as the mechanism that will lead to the end of history. Such visions nourished the butchers who led the Inquisition and the Crusades, as well as the conquistadores who swept through the Americas hastily converting en masse native populations and then exterminating them. The Puritans, who hoped to create a theocratic state, believed that Satan ruled the wilderness surrounding their settlements. They believed that God had called them to cast Satan out of this wilderness to create a promised land. That divine command sanctioned the removal or slaughter of Native Americans. This hubris fed the deadly doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Similar apocalyptic visions of a world cleansed through violence and extermination nourished the Nazis, the Stalinists who consigned tens of thousands of Ukrainians to starvation and death, the torturers in the clandestine prisons in Argentina during the Dirty War, and the Serbian thugs with heavy machine guns and wraparound sunglasses who stood over the bodies of Muslims they had slain in the smoking ruins of Bosnian villages.

The ecstatic belief in the cleansing power of apocalyptic violence does not recognize the right of the victims to self-preservation or self-defense. It does not admit them into a moral universe where they have a criminal’s right to be punished and rehabilitated. They are seen instead through this poisonous lens as pollutants, viruses, mutations that must be eradicated to halt further infection and degeneration within society and usher in utopia. This sacred violence—whether it arises from the Bible, Serbian nationalism, the dream of a classless society, or the goal of a world where all “subhumans” are eradicated—allows its perpetrators and henchmen to avoid moral responsibility for their crimes. The brutality they carry out is sanctified, an expression of not human volition but divine wrath. The victims, in a final irony, are considered responsible for their suffering and destruction. They are to blame because, in the eyes of the dominionists, they have defied God.

Those who promise to cleanse the world through sacred violence, to relieve anxiety over moral pollution by building mounds of corpses, always appeal to our noblest sentiments, our highest virtues, our capacity for self-sacrifice and our utopian visions of a purified life. It is this coupling of fantastic hope and profound despair—dreams of peace and light and reigns of terror, self-sacrifice and mass murder—that frees the consciences of those who call for and carry out the eradication of fellow human beings in the name of God.

Societies that embrace apocalyptic visions and seek through sacred violence to implement them commit collective suicide. When Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, as they do, sanction preemptive nuclear strikes against those they condemn as the enemies of God, they fuel the passions of terrorists driven by the same vision of a world cleansed and purified through apocalyptic violence. They lead us closer and closer toward our own annihilation, in the delusion that once the dogs of war, even nuclear war, are unleashed, God will protect Christians; that hundreds of millions will die, but because Christians have been blessed they alone will rise in triumph from the ash heap. Those who seek to do us harm will soon have in their hands cruder versions of the apocalyptic weapons we possess: dirty bombs and chemical or biological agents. Those who fervently wish for, indeed, seek to hasten the apocalypse and the end of time, who believe they will be lifted up into the sky by a returning Jesus, force us all to kneel before the god of death.

If this mass movement succeeds, it will do so not simply because of its ruthlessness and mendacity, its callous manipulation of the people it lures into its arms, many of whom live on the margins of American society. It will succeed because of the moral failure of those, including Christians, who understand the intent of the radicals yet fail to confront them, those who treat this mass movement as if it were another legitimate player in an open society. The leading American institutions tasked with defending tolerance and liberty—from the mainstream churches to the great research universities, to the Democratic Party and the media—have failed the country. This is the awful paradox of tolerance. There arise moments when those who would destroy the tolerance that makes an open society possible should no longer be tolerated. They must be held accountable by institutions that maintain the free exchange of ideas and liberty. The radical Christian Right must be forced to include other points of view to counter their hate talk in their own broadcasts, watched by tens of millions of Americans. They must be denied the right to demonize whole segments of American society, saying they are manipulated by Satan and worthy only of conversion or eradication. They must be made to treat their opponents with respect and acknowledge the right of a fair hearing even as they exercise their own freedom to disagree with their opponents. Passivity in the face of the rise of the Christian Right threatens the democratic state. And the movement has targeted the last remaining obstacles to its systems of indoctrination, mounting a fierce campaign to defeat hate-crime legislation, fearing the courts could apply it to them as they spew hate talk over the radio, television and Internet. Despotic movements harness the power of modern communications to keep their followers locked in closed systems. If this long, steady poisoning of civil discourse within these closed information systems is not challenged, if this movement continues to teach neighbor to hate neighbor, if its followers remain convinced that cataclysmic violence offers a solution to their own ills and the ills of the world, civil society in America will collapse.

“Hope has two beautiful daughters,” Augustine wrote. “Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.”[46]

Anger, when directed against movements that would abuse the weak, preach bigotry and injustice, trample the poor, crush dissent and impose a religious tyranny, is a blessing. Read the biblical prophets in First and Second Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah and Amos. Liberal institutions, seeing tolerance as the highest virtue, tolerate the intolerant. They swallow the hate talk that calls for the destruction of nonbelievers. Mainstream believers have often come to the comfortable conclusion that any form of announced religiosity is acceptable, that heretics do not exist.

The mainstream churches stumble along, congregations often mumbling creeds they no longer believe, trying to peddle a fuzzy, feel-good theology that can distort and ignore the darker visions in the Bible as egregiously as the Christian Right does. The Christian Right understands the ills of American society even as it exploits these ills to plunge us into tyranny. Its leaders grasp the endemic hollowness, timidity and hypocrisy of the liberal churches. The Christian Right attacks “cultural relativism,” the creed that there is no absolute good and that all value systems have equal merit—even as it benefits, in a final irony, from the passivity of people who tolerate it in the name of cultural relativism.

The most potent opposition to the movement may come from within the evangelical tradition. The radical fundamentalist movement must fear these Christians, who have remained loyal to the core values of the Gospel, who delineate between right and wrong, who are willing to be vilified and attacked in the name of a higher good and who have the courage to fight back. Most liberals, the movement has figured out, will stand complacently to be sheared like sheep, attempting to open dialogues and reaching out to those who spit venom in their faces.

Radical Christian dominionists have no religious legitimacy. They are manipulating Christianity, and millions of sincere believers, to build a frightening political mass movement with many similarities with other mass movements, from fascism to communism to the ethnic nationalist parties in the former Yugoslavia. It shares with these movements an inability to cope with ambiguity, doubt and uncertainty. It creates its own “truth.” It embraces a world of miracles and signs and removes followers from a rational, reality-based world. It condemns self-criticism and debate as apostasy. It places a premium on action and finds its final aesthetic in war and apocalyptic violence.

The pain, the dislocation, alienation, suffering and despair that led millions of Americans into the movement are real. Many Americans are striking back at a culture they blame for the debacle of their lives. The democratic traditions and the values of the Enlightenment, they believe, have betrayed them. They speak of numbness, an inability to feel pain or joy or love, a vast emptiness, a frightening loneliness and loss of control. The rational, liberal world of personal freedoms and choice lured many of these people into one snake pit after another. And liberal democratic society, for most, stood by passively as their communities, families and lives splintered and self-destructed.

These believers have abandoned, in this despair, their trust and belief in the world of science, law and rationality. They eschew personal choice and freedom. They have replaced the world that has failed them with a new, glorious world filled with prophets and mystical signs. They believe in a creator who performs miracles for them, speaks directly to them and guides their lives, as well as the destiny of America. They are utopians who have found rigid, clearly defined moral edicts, rights and wrongs, to guide them in life and in politics. And they are terrified of losing this new, mystical world of signs, wonders and moral certitude, of returning to the old world of despair. They see criticism of their belief system, whether from scientists or judges, as vicious attempts by Satan to lure them back into the morass. The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.

Those in the movement now fight, fueled by the rage of the dispossessed, to crush and silence the reality-based world. The dominionist movement is the response of people trapped in a deformed, fragmented and disoriented culture that has become callous and unforgiving, a culture that has too often failed to provide the belonging, care and purpose that make life bearable, a culture that, as many in the movement like to say, has become “a culture of death.” The new utopians are not always wrong in their critique of American society. But what they have set out to create is far, far worse than what we endure. What is happening in America is revolutionary. A group of religious utopians, with the sympathy and support of tens of millions of Americans, are slowly dismantling democratic institutions to establish a religious tyranny, the springboard to an American fascism.

[lboogie1906]

Ambassador Charles R. Stith (August 29, 1949) is a businessman, diplomat, former educator, author, and politician. He is the Chairman of The Pula Group, LLC. He is the non-executive Chairman of the African Presidential Leadership Center. He established and directed Boston University’s African Presidential Center. He presented his Letter of Credence as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the US to the United Republic of Tanzania. He served as the Ambassador during the traumatic period after the bombing of the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam.

He received an appointment to the Faculty of the Boston University Department of International Relations and taught a course on Africa and Globalization. He retired from Boston University. He was on the Advisory Committee of the Office of the US Trade Representative and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Council of American Ambassadors. He is the author of For Such a Time as This: African Leadership Challenges and Political Religion. He is the Senior Editor of the annual African Leaders State of Africa Report and author of many articles, which have appeared in such publications as the African Business Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Denver Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Chicago Sun-Times.

He is a graduate of Baker University, the Gammon Theological Seminary, and Harvard University Divinity School (Th.M). He is the founder and former National President of the Organization for a New Equality.

He was one of the architects of the regulations redefining the Community Reinvestment Act.

Before heading ONE, he was the Senior Minister of the historic Union United Methodist Church in Boston. He was an appointee to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. He has served on the National Advisory Boards of FannieMae and Fleet InCity Bank, the editorial board of WCVB-TV, and the boards of West Insurance, Inc. and the Wang Center for Performing Arts, among others. He is the recipient of several honorary doctorates. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #omegapsiphi

[inmateofthemind]

Have Some TWST Fan Lore Part 2: Corlux Key Seminary

Quite literally the largest of the arcane academies, acting as an "all are welcome" paramilitary institution for mages of all sorts. It is revered for its music program, particularly its marching band. - the description that would be on Corlux's in-game info card if it were canon

------------------------

A Very Brief Background

According to legend, Corlux Key Seminary was originally opened by a collective of special forces mages led by a wizard of power so fantastic that he could supposedly create living worlds out of paint and paper. These mages guarded their kingdom of light with such ferocity that they were referred to as 'living locks', which was fairly ironic considering their weapons were shaped to resemble keys.

With that said, however, the lead mage truly believed that people of all talents and backgrounds were welcome to their land if their hearts were 'pure'; after all, unconventional talents had been proved to win the day over and over in the long lens of history. As such, Corlux Key Seminary was created in honor of that wizard and his friends by offering a variety of programs for students to harness their skills.

-------------------- Current Staff {pronouns} (Twisted From)

Headmistress: Evangeline Lighthaven {she/her} (twisted from the Blue Fairy of Pinocchio)

Deputy Headmaster: Sir Shy {he/they} (twisted from Mad Madam Mim of The Sword & the Stone)

Literature and Drama: Godehard Norris {he/him} (twisted from Mother Gothel of Tangled)

Science: Maureen Desrosiers {she/her} (twisted from Maurice of Beauty and the Beast)

Social Studies: Saylor Anker {she/her} (twisted from Captain Hook of Peter Pan)

Mathematics: Jóna Quasar {they/them} (twisted from Dr. Delbert Doppler of Treasure Planet)

Foreign Languages: Augustus Scholaris {he/him} (twisted from Dr. Milo Thatch of Atlantis: the Lost Empire)

Physical Education: Babur Shah {he/him} (twisted from Shere Khan of Jungle Book)

Music/Band: Inti & Wayna {genderfluid & he/him respectively} (twisted from Yzma & Kronk of The Emperor's New Groove)

Teacher's Assistant: Solfilius Bellflower {he/him} (twisted from Rapunzel of Tangled)

'Jacks of All Trades' Grunts: Carnelian & Saul {both he/him} (twisted from Jasper & Horace of 101 Dalmatians)

all staff members created by @inmateofthemind

------------------------

Students of Note, sorted by school year at time of 1st Arcane Exchange

FRESHMAN

Orpheus Fairbairn {he/him}* (twisted from King Stephen of Sleeping Beauty) created by @inmateofthemind

Helena Jupiter {she/her} (twisted from Hercules of Hercules) created by @ramshacklerumble

Caelum 'Cal' Sokół {he/him}* (twisted from Jim Hawkins of Treasure Planet) created by @inmateofthemind

SOPHOMORE

Klaus Hasencamp {he/him} (twisted from The White Rabbit of Alice in Wonderland) created by @simons-twsted-children

Puck Pratt {he/him, trans}* (twisted from Peter Pan of Peter Pan) created by @inmateofthemind

Fiamma Trein {she/her} (twisted from Cinderella of Cinderella) created by @inmateofthemind

JUNIOR

Penny Chase {she/her} (twisted from Copper of The Fox and the Hound) created by @inmateofthemind

Ruby Del Zorro {she/her} (twisted from Tod of The Fox and the Hound) created by @inmateofthemind

Kentigern Vaughan {he/him} (twisted from Wart of The Sword in the Stone) created by @inmateofthemind

*= does not participate in the 1st Arcane Exchange

---------BONUS---------------

GRADUATES/ALUMNUS

Kallisto Shroud {she/her} (twisted from the Muses of Hercules) created by @cyanide-latte

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Tidbits & Trivia

Night Raven College and Royal Sword Academy can bicker about having the power; Corlux Key Seminary is content to boast about having the numbers. There are a grand total of twenty dormitories across the entire campus, though the joke among students is that there are actually twenty-three. This is due to some of the dorms having gotten a rebranding of name some years back, but people will use the new and old names interchangeably. It isn't uncommon for freshmen to be deliberately told to retrieve something from one of the dorms using the old name for it so that they will wander around for hours trying to find it.

Corlux Key Seminary is located in the far north of the Shaftlands; not exactly neighbors with Harveston, but close enough that the more troublesome youth of the town are threatened with being sent there if they don't shape up.

Corlux's inclusivity even goes as far as the dress code; as long as the students are wearing academy-issued attire and it's properly clean, they're golden as far as the rules go. This is actually a selling point for students who are exploring their gender identity, or even just for people who want to wear quote-unquote 'gender-specific attire' just for the sake of comfort. Rather recently, one student even turned down their invite to Royal Sword Academy specifically because 'they don't allow guys to wear skorts/skirts there; hard pass'.

As Corlux is currently under the reign of a fae, all students are granted protection from minor cantrips and spells by what is referred to as a 'pulchra osculum' ('beautiful kiss'). This is a TWST-fan!verse term created by myself which I will explain at a later date, but the basic idea is that it's a minor protection spell.

Corlux is officially listed as paramilitary due to their structure not being fully comparable to a traditional military school, though there is a kind of 'honors program' sponsored by official military institutes from across the nations to help those with serious aspirations for the armed forces. The way to distinguish those students from the general populace is an armband emblazed with a specific crown modeled after a symbol worn by a legendary 'Keywielder', as the military-aspiring students are called.

Even if students do not choose to enlist into any kind of military service upon graduation, they will receive top-of-the-line training for a variety of careers. As mentioned previously, one of the school's most famed aspects is their marching band that has seen several of its former members go on to be professional musicians of some kind.

------------------------

Author's Notes

As previously mentioned, Corlux Key Seminary is an arcane academy created by yours truly to serve...well, a lot of purposes, actually;

Play around with the idea of what a TWST military school would look like while also having a bit of flexibility for fun

Give the girlies/girlie-identifying folks of TWST a place to be educated since there don't seem to be a whole lot of those in canon (at least from what I've seen)

Place a few extra Kingdom Hearts references into TWST (you mean to tell me that four of the Great Seven are the villains of the Princesses of Hearts, with one of those Seven even being Maleficent herself, because of sheer coincidence? I think NOT, friend!)

Because this is a fanverse for a piece of media, which means we live by the credence 'I did it because I could' xD

This is all in good fun between a small group of friends who are doing something fun with a game we all enjoy. Just let us have our thing and feel free to engage if you like it :)

Taglist: @cyanide-latte @simons-twsted-children @tixdixl @ramshacklerumble (let me know if you also want to be tagged)

[thepastisalreadywritten]

SAINT OF THE DAY (January 31)

On January 31, the Roman Catholic Church honors St. John Bosco (or “Don Bosco”), a 19th-century Italian priest who reached out to young people to remedy their lack of education, opportunities, and faith.

John Bosco was born on 16 August 1815 to a family of peasant farmers in Castelnuovo d'Asti — a place which would one day be renamed in the saint's honor as “Castelnuovo Don Bosco.”

John's father died when he was two years old, but he drew strength from his mother Margherita's deep faith in God.

Margherita also taught her son the importance of charity, using portions of her own modest means to support those in even greater need.

John desired to pass on to his own young friends the example of Christian discipleship that he learned from his mother.

At age nine, he had a prophetic dream in which a number of unruly young boys were uttering words of blasphemy.

Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary appeared to John in the dream, saying he would bring such youths to God through the virtues of humility and charity.

Later on, this dream would help John to discern his calling as a priest.

But he also sought to follow the advice of Jesus and Mary while still a boy:

He would entertain his peers with juggling, acrobatics and magic tricks, before explaining a sermon he had heard, or leading them in praying the Rosary.

John's older brother Anthony opposed his plan to be a priest and antagonized him so much that he left home to become a farm worker at age 12.

After moving back home three years later, John worked in various trades and finished school in order to attend seminary.

In 1841, John Bosco was ordained a priest.

In the city of Turin, he began ministering to boys and young men who lived on the streets, many of whom were without work or education.

The industrial revolution had drawn large numbers of people into the city to look for work that was frequently grueling and sometimes scarce.

Don Bosco was shocked to see how many boys ended up in prison before the age of 18, left to starve spiritually and sometimes physically.

The priest was determined to save as many young people as he could from a life of degradation.

He established a group known as the Oratory of St. Francis de Sales and became a kindly spiritual father to boys in need.

His aging mother helped support the project in its early years.

John's boyhood dream came to pass:

He became a spiritual guide and provider along with his fellow Salesian priests and brothers, giving boys religious instruction, lodging, education, and work opportunities.

He also helped Saint Mary Dominic Mazzarello form a similar group for girls.

This success did not come easily, as the priest struggled to find reliable accommodations and support for his ambitious apostolate.

Italy's nationalist movement made life difficult for religious orders, and its anti-clerical attitudes even led to assassination attempts against Don Bosco.

But such hostility did not stop the Salesians from expanding in Europe and beyond.

They were helping 130,000 children in 250 houses by the end of Don Bosco's life.

“I have done nothing by myself,” he stated, saying "it was Our Lady who has done everything through her intercession with God."

John Bosco died in the early hours of 31 January 1888, after conveying a message:

“Tell the boys that I shall be waiting for them all in Paradise.”

Pius XI beatified him on 2 June 1929 and canonized on 1 April 1934.

He is a patron saint of young people, apprentices, and Catholic publishers and editors.

[cruger2984]

THE DESCRIPTION OF SAINT OSCAR ROMERO Feast Day: March 24

The night before he was murdered while celebrating Mass, Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador said on the radio:

'I would like to appeal in a special way to the men of the army, and in particular to the troops of the National Guard, the police, and the garrisons. Brothers, you belong to our own people. You kill your own brother peasants; and in the face of an order to kill that is given by a man, the law of God that says 'Do not kill!' should prevail. No soldier is obliged to obey an order counter to the law of God. No one has to comply with an immoral law. It is the time now that you recover your conscience and obey its dictates rather than the command of sin… Therefore, in the name of God, and in the name of this long-suffering people, whose laments rise to heaven every day more tumultuous, I beseech you, I beg you, I command you! In the name of God: Cease the repression!'

Simultaneously, Romero had eloquently upheld the gospel and effectively signed his own death warrant.

When he was appointed archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, Bishop Romero was considered a very 'safe' choice. He had served as auxiliary bishop there for four years before his three years as bishop of Santiago de Maria.

Oscar’s father wanted him to be a carpenter—a trade for which he demonstrated some talent. Seminary classes in El Salvador preceded his studies at Rome’s Gregorian University and his ordination in 1942. After earning a doctorate in ascetical theology, he returned home and became a parish priest and later rector of an interdiocesan seminary.

Three weeks after his appointment as archbishop, Romero was shaken by the murder of his good friend Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande, a vigorous defender of the rights of the poor. Five more priests were assassinated in the Archdiocese of San Salvador during Romero’s years as its shepherd.

When a military junta seized control of the national government in 1979, Archbishop Romero publicly criticized the US government for backing the junta. His weekly radio sermons, broadcast throughout the country, were regarded by many as the most trustworthy source of news available.

As Romero finished speaking, a red car came to a stop on the street in front of the chapel. A gunman emerged from the vehicle, stepped to the door of the chapel, and fired one, possibly two, shots. Romero was struck in the heart, and the vehicle sped off.

He died at the Chapel of Hospital de la Divina Providencia in San Salvador on March 24, 1980 at the age of 62.

Romero’s funeral was celebrated in the plaza outside the cathedral and drew an estimated 250,000 mourners.

His tomb in the cathedral crypt soon drew thousands of visitors each year. On February 3, 2015, Pope Francis authorized a decree recognizing Oscar Romero as a martyr for the faith. His beatification took place in San Salvador on May 23, 2015, and he was canonized on October 14, 2018.

[banji-effect]

We, the undersigned organizations, write to express our urgent concern regarding dire and escalating violence in Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territory, which continues to result in significant human suffering and loss of civilian life.

We condemn all violence against civilians by Hamas and the Israeli military. In this critical moment, we believe it is imperative that U.S. policymakers take measures to immediately de-escalate the violence to prevent the further loss of civilian life. We urge Congress and the Administration to:

Publicly call for a ceasefire to prevent the further loss of life;

Prioritize the protection of all civilians, including by urgently securing the entrance of humanitarian aid into Gaza and working to secure the release of hostages; and

Urge all parties to fully respect international humanitarian law.

We implore Congress and the Administration to abstain from rhetoric that exacerbates violence and to unequivocally condemn all violations of international law. Over the last several days, the Israeli government has cut all food, fuel, and humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip. On October 12, Israel issued an evacuation order for the entire northern Gaza Strip, telling residents to evacuate south of Wadi Gaza. This amounts to approximately 1.1 million people. The U.N. is calling for this order to be rescinded, warning it will have “devastating humanitarian consequences.”

We again urge Congress and the Administration to publicly call for, and help to facilitate, an immediate ceasefire to prevent the tragic loss of more innocent Palestinian and Israeli lives. Thank you for your urgent consideration.

Sincerely,

Alliance of Baptists American Baptist Churches USA American Friends Service Committee American Muslims for Palestine Americans for Justice in Palestine Anera Arab American Institute Auburn Theological Seminary Center for Civilians in Conflict Center for Jewish Nonviolence Center for Victims of Torture Church of the Brethren, Office of Peacebuilding and Policy Churches for Middle East Peace Common Defense Council on American-Islamic Relations Demand Progress Democracy for the Arab World Now The Episcopal Church Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Fellowship of Reconciliation Freedom Forward Friends Committee on National Legislation Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect Grassroots International Historians for Peace and Democracy If Not Now Institute for Policy Studies New Internationalism Project International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Jewish Voice for Peace Action Just Foreign Policy Justice Democrats Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention MADRE Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Minnesota Peace Project MPower Change Action Fund National Council of Churches National Iranian American Council Neighbors for Peace Nonviolent Peaceforce PAX Pax Christi USA PC(USA) Office of Public Witness Peace Action Project on Middle East Democracy Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft Quixote Center ReThinking Foreign Policy Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights RootsAction September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows Sojourners The Duty Legacy The Unitarian Universalist Association The United Methodist Church - General Board of Church and Society The Zomia Center United Church of Christ United for Peace and Justice UNRWA USA Women for Weapons Trade Transparency Working Families Party World BEYOND War Yemen Freedom Council Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation Yemeni Alliance Committee

[dastardly-homo-writing]

(Queer) Pride and Prejudice || Chapter Four

Chapter Four: Jane is Positively Smitten with Ms. Bingley

When Jane and Lezzie were alone, the former, who had been cautious in her praise of Ms. Bingley before, expressed to her sister just how very much she admired her.

“She is just what a young woman ought to be,” said she, and with no shortage of words continued: “sensible, good-humoured, lively; and I never saw such happy manners!—so much ease, with such perfect good breeding!”

“She is also handsome,” replied Lezzie, “which a young woman ought likewise to be, if she possibly can. Her character is thereby complete.”

“She has lovely eyes. I felt I should perhaps tell her so but I did not want to behave too forwardly,” fussed Jane.

“Oh Jane, you think too much. I am confident you shall have plenty of opportunity to tell her of her most rapturing eyes at the nearest occasion—seeing as you have such an uncontrollable need to do so.”

“You tease me so, Lezzie! I was very much flattered by her asking me to dance a second time. I did not expect such a compliment.”

“Did not you? I did for you. But that is one great difference between us. Compliments always take you by surprise, and me never. What could be more natural than her asking you again? She could not help seeing that you were about fifteen times as pretty as every other woman in the room. No thanks to her gallantry for that. Well, I should say, she certainly is very agreeable and appears good-natured. For these qualities I give you leave to like her. You have liked many a stupider person. Do not even let me begin on the lady who was married, and with not one but two children—”

“Dear Lezzie!”

“Oh! you are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general. That lady was purposely deceptive with you from the start. And now you have nothing but the most unblemished perspective of Ms. Bingley. You never see a fault in anybody. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in your life.”

“I would not wish to be hasty in censuring anyone; but I always speak what I think.”

“I know you do, Jane; and it is that which makes the wonder. With your good sense, to be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of others! Affectation of candour is common enough—one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design—to take the good of everybody’s character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad—belongs to you alone. And so you like this Ms. Bingley’s sisters, too, do you? Their manners are not equal to hers.”

“Certainly not—at first. But they are very pleasing women when you converse with them. Miss Bingley is to live with Ms. Bingley, and keep her house; and I am much mistaken if we shall not find a very charming neighbour in her.”

Lezzie listened in silence, but was not convinced; their behaviour at the assembly had not been calculated to please in general; and with more quickness of observation and less pliancy of temper than her sister, and with a judgement too unassailed by any attention to herself, she was very little disposed to approve them. They were in fact very fine ladies; not deficient in good humour when they were pleased, nor in the power of making themselves agreeable when they chose it, but proud and conceited. They seemed more suited to be siblings of the rather stand-offish Ms. Darcy, Lezzie thought.

The sisters were rather handsome, had been educated in one of the first private seminaries in town, had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, were in the habit of spending more than they ought, and of associating with people of rank, and were therefore in every respect entitled to think well of themselves, and meanly of others. They were of a respectable family in the north of England; a circumstance more deeply impressed on their memories than that their sibling’s fortune and their own had been acquired by trade. She chose not to point out these observations to Jane.

Ms. Bingley inherited property to the amount of nearly a hundred thousand pounds from her father, who had intended to purchase an estate, but did not live to do it. Ms. Bingley intended it likewise, and sometimes made choice of her county; but as she was now provided with a good house and the liberty of a manor, it was doubtful to many of those who best knew the easiness of her temper, whether she might not spend the remainder of her days at Netherfield, and leave the next generation to purchase. One of her sisters was also said to have accused her of avoiding as many financial calculations as possible.

Her sisters were anxious for her having an estate of her own; but, though she was now only established as a tenant, Miss Bingley was by no means unwilling to preside at Ms. Bingley’s table—nor was Mrs. Hurst, who had married a man of more fashion than fortune, less disposed to consider his house as her home when it suited her. Ms. Bingley had not been of age two years, when she was tempted by an accidental recommendation to look at Netherfield House. She did look at it, and into it for half-an-hour—was pleased with the situation and the principal rooms, satisfied with what the owner said in its praise, and took it immediately.

Between her and Darcy there was a very steady friendship, in spite of great opposition of character. Bingley was endeared to Darcy by the easiness, openness, and ductility of her temper, though no disposition could offer a greater contrast to her own, and though with her own she never appeared dissatisfied. On the strength of Darcy’s regard, Bingley had the firmest reliance, and of their judgement the highest opinion. In understanding, Darcy was the superior. Bingley was by no means deficient, but Darcy was clever. They were at the same time haughty, reserved, and fastidious, and their manners, though well-bred, were not inviting. In that respect their friend had greatly the advantage. Bingley was sure of being liked wherever she appeared, Darcy was continually giving offense. Their behaviour was even more frequently perceived as offensive within groups of heterosexual men, but this more often than not included an element of jealousy. Any person who met Darcy might feel jealous, in fact, of their unbridled confidence in their own significance.

The manner in which they spoke of the Meryton assembly was sufficiently characteristic. Bingley had never met with more pleasant people or prettier girls in her life; everybody had been most kind and attentive to her; there had been no formality, no stiffness; she had soon felt acquainted with all the room; and, as to Miss Bennet, she could not conceive an angel more beautiful. Darcy, on the contrary, had seen a collection of people in whom there was little beauty and no fashion, for none of whom they had felt the smallest interest, and from none received either attention or pleasure. Miss Bennet they acknowledged to be pretty, but she smiled too much.

Mrs. Hurst and her sister allowed it to be so—but still they admired her and liked her, and pronounced her to be a sweet girl, and one whom they would not object to know more of. Miss Bennet was therefore established as a sweet girl, and Ms. Bingley felt authorized by such commendation to think of her as she chose.

“I cannot rid my mind of the most wonderful smile of Miss Bennet!” Bingley said, walking alongside Darcy to the stable one evening, “In my boldness I thought to compliment her, but I should not want to seem too forward. No, it would not be proper.”

Darcy shook their head, masking their endearment at their friend’s unfailing earnestness. “Bingley, I count ourselves a most lucky friendship. We shall never have to fight for the same lady’s attention.”

[cartermagazine]

Today In History Alfred L. Cralle was a Black businessman and inventor, who invented the ice cream scooper, patent #576,395 on this date February 2, 1897. Alfred L. Cralle was born in Kenbridge, Lunenburg County, Virginia just after the end of the American Civil War. He attended local schools and worked with his father in the carpentry trade as a young man, becoming interested in mechanics. Cralle went to Washington, D.C., and attended Wayland Seminary, one of several schools founded by the American Baptist Home Mission Society to help educate Blacks after the American Civil War. He settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he first served as a drug store and hotel porter. Alfred noticed that servers at the hotel had trouble with ice cream sticking to serving spoons, and he developed an ice cream scoop. The patented "Ice Cream Mold and Disher" was an ice cream scoop with a built-in scraper to allow for one-handed operation. Cralle's functional design is in modern ice cream scoops. He later became a general manager for the Afro-American Financial, Accumulating, Merchandise, and Business Association. CARTER™️ Magazine carter-mag.com #wherehistoryandhiphopmeet #historyandhiphop365 #cartermagazine #carter #staywoke #alfredcralle #blackhistorymonth #blackhistory https://www.instagram.com/p/CoKOIYorJK8/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[dailyanarchistposts]

Imperialism, Capitalism, and the State

To understand the current situation, we must first demystify the political system in Iran.

Iran must be understood as a capitalist society and its state, both before and after the revolution, as a capitalist state. No amount of demagogic proclamations can change the fact that the Iranian state, while possessing many features peculiar to itself, is nonetheless a particular form of bourgeois class rule, a fact visible not only in its internal social relations, but also in the role it plays in the world system.

Through the course of the nineteenth century, Iran went through a process of integration and peripheralization into the rising capitalist world system. The Qajar dynasty (1794 to 1925) that ascended the Peacock Throne at the end of the previous century was quickly caught in the “Great Game” between the Tsarist Russian Empire and the British Empire as they both became more assertive in Asia. Military defeats resulted in the imposition of unequal treaties that not only led to a loss of territory but also included terms that established political and economic dominance. Iran was opened up to European commodities, while domestic production increasingly became geared towards the world market.[2]

Qajar Iran was a system that can be described as tribal-feudalism.[3] The state was not a centralized modern state. The Shah (king) ruled through various local nobles, landlords, tribal-chiefs, and senior clergy who formed the landed aristocracy and played the role of the respective powers in their locality. The latter ruled over a large mass of peasant villagers and nomadic tribes-people. There was no national army, only armies tied to local lords and chiefs. People were divided up according to ethnic groupings, tribal or religious sects, and spoke a variety of languages and dialects.

In the urban centers, which often served as provincial capitals, the center of economic life was — and to a large extent still is today — the bazaar, the traditional commercial center in the urban Middle East, with the merchants and artisans who inhabit it being collectively known as bazaari.[4] The bazaar was not just the center for shops and trade, it also often contained public baths, tea houses, as well as the central mosque. It is common for bazaari and clergy to have familial relations. Wealthy bazaaris fund the mosques and seminaries, religious processions, donate to charitable foundations, and form the main financial support for many religious affairs. Landholdings of the senior clergy and wealthy merchants increased over the course of the 19th century, with the clergy gaining land through religious endowments and donations by rich aristocrats and merchants. This relationship between the bazaari, as the traditional bourgeoisie, and the clergy is important for understanding the politics of modern Iran, and the 1979 revolution in particular, for it was this clerical-bazaari alliance that lay at the heart of the revolution, serving as the base of the Islamic Republic.

This process of integration into the world market, particularly in the form of European domination, contributed to the development of bourgeois national consciousness among merchants, clergy, and artisans. Struggles against foreign concessions and other forms of foreign domination became more commonplace as the merchant bourgeoisie of the bazaar became more assertive, solidifying a bourgeois form of national consciousness. This combination of a material-financial force in the merchants and the ideological force of the clergy transformed the traditional bourgeoisie into a genuine political force.

The integration and peripheralization characteristic of the nineteenth century brought with it close economic ties between Iranian and Russian merchants, but also contributed to the embryonic development of a modern working class. The reality of this process hit home in Iran when the global depression of the 1870s provoked a drop in agricultural prices. Worsening conditions in the countryside forced peasants to leave their villages in search of work. Naturally, they were drawn to the growing industrial centers of the Russian Caucasus, particularly the new oil industry, the center of which being the city of Baku.

Baku’s oil fields were a crucible for working-class radicalism. In the late nineteenth century, the city attracted hundreds of thousands of Iranian migrant workers to the growing industry where they encountered the organizing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP), itself formed in 1898. Not only Iranians, but people from all over the region traveled to work in the industry, with the result that the city boasted a significant multi-ethnic and multi-religious working class. Employers stoked hostilities often, and Iranian workers and activists in the region became involved in many of the strikes organized by the party. It was a strike wave in Baku that sparked the events that would lead to the Russian Revolution of 1905. Amidst this wave, workers gained crucial experience in party activities and strikes, and it was during the same year the Social Democratic Party of Iran (SDPI) was founded.[5]

The 1905 Revolution would directly influence bourgeois national revolutions in Asian nations such as China and Turkey, but given its proximity and its historical ties, it was felt most immediately in Iran. For Russian and Iranian Social Democrats, the revolution in Iran was directly tied to the revolution against the Tsar. Following the Tsarist reaction just north of the border, many revolutionaries turned their attention south to Iran. The revolutionary wave landing in Iran at the end of the year marked a crucial turning point, ushering in the twentieth century with the Constitutional Revolution and Civil War (1906–1911).[6] This revolution had a number of parallels with the one in Russia, and can even be seen as an extension of the latter, as it proved to be a similarly bourgeois national-democratic revolution with a strong social democratic element. Although it would not succeed in fundamentally altering the state or economic relations, it was nonetheless of great cultural-political significance, and every political tendency that will go on to shape the landscape of 20th century Iran draw their roots there. It also prolonged the bazaari-clergy alliance that had developed in the protests against foreign concessions, but did so while introducing a revolutionary element into the nascent working class and social democratic movement. Along with the struggle for a national assembly, or Majlis, we also witness the appearance and growth of the anjumans, or provincial councils that — as with the soviets — became sources of popular power that pushed the revolution further. In 1909, the first modern industry-wide trade union was established in Tehran among print shops and newspaper workers. 1910 saw the first industry-wide strike, which included all the major newspapers in Tehran. Their demands included, among other things, the eight-hour day and the installation of a minimum wage.

Faced with the threat of revolution from below and an ascendant Germany that was becoming increasingly more assertive in the Middle East, the Russian and British empires put their differences aside and came to an agreement in Asia which was formalized as The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The agreement made the division of Iran into Russian and British spheres of influence official, and served as a decisive step in the construction of alliances that would eventually erupt into world war.[7] The December 1911 Russian-British invasion and occupation of Iran put an end to the revolutionary wave that had been ongoing since 1905. The Tsarist armies in particular oversaw a reign of terror against Iranian and Russian revolutionaries. While the parliament survived, it did so merely as a basis for aristocratic rule. The constitutional revolution posed, for the first time in Iran, the still crucial question: how should radical socialists relate to broader, popular democratic revolution? And it did so while demonstrating another persistent truth: in the face of social revolution bourgeois democrats will turn to imperialism and reaction.

Two years after the Anglo-Russian intervention that ended the Constitutional Revolution, the imperialist rivalry broke out into world war in 1914. Although the Iranian government officially declared neutrality, it proved powerless to prevent Iran from becoming part of the Middle Eastern theater of war between the Anglo-Russian alliance (‘Entente Powers’) and the Ottoman-German alliance (‘Central Powers’). The war had devastating effects on Iran, as it did on any place that was treated as a battleground for imperialist slaughter. Roughly two million people died from the violence of war, famine, and disease. The situation underscored Iran’s colonial situation, as the country was helpless in the face of foreign powers that effectively did as they pleased within its borders.

At this point, Iran proved to be an independent nation only in name, with the central government serving as a mere shadow for other powers. As was the case before the constitutional period, the central government had no real power outside of the nation’s capital, and even there, such power was constantly disrupted by foreign intervention. Local tribal chiefs and aristocrats seized the opportunity to assert themselves and by the end of the war, clearly constituted the actual powers in their respective regions, going so far as to strike deals and sign treaties with imperialist powers directly without any involvement of, or mediation from, the central government.

The 1917 Russian Revolution fundamentally altered the situation, and breathed new life into the revolutionary forces. The Bolsheviks removed Russian forces from Iran while abolishing all Russian treaties and concessions over the country. The fall of the Romanov Tsar also marked the removal of the Qajars’ principal patron. Following the removal of Russian and Ottoman forces at the end of the war, the British became the dominant imperialist power in the Middle East. The British had initially thought to turn Iran into a protectorate, but the possibility proved untenable. Anti-British sentiment was increasing, and they had quite simply spread themselves too thin. Most importantly, the October Revolution had ushered in a new threat of social revolution. Bolsheviks-aligned Iranian socialists formed the Adalat (Justice) Party, which in 1920 became the Communist Party of Iran. More than perhaps anything else, it was the October Revolution that threatened both the British and the local ruling aristocracy. By 1920, this threat had spread to the northern province of Gilan with the establishment of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran. The Red Army now had an official presence on Iranian soil, and succeeded in pushing out both British and Iranian forces from the area.[8]

This presence forced a change in the imperialist strategy of the British. Whereas the latter had thus far supported various local nobles and tribal chiefs in an effort to maintain their influence, this tactic (in addition to direct occupation) was beginning to prove unstable in the face of the Bolshevik threat. Alongside many among the Iranian ruling class, the British searched for a strongman who could seize power, restore order, and protect their interests from the threat of social revolution. It was in this context that an officer from the Cossack Brigades named Reza Khan distinguished himself as the best candidate for the job.9 He was encouraged to organize a coup, the result of which would be an insurance of security and the withdrawal of British forces from the region.

[whatisonthemoon]

On How the Moonies Take Advantage of Imperialist Crises in Today’s Philippines

▲ Pictured: A class at the International Peace Leadership College prior to the rehabilitation program

The Philippines has a long history of facing violence and exploitation, as well as violent repression. The brutal crackdown on alleged drug users and dealers by President Rodrigo Duterte’s “War on Drugs” is one example that has has left over 27,000, mostly from poor and working-class backgrounds, murdered.  Thousands of others have been subjected to extrajudicial killings, indiscriminate bombing, and widespread human rights abuses at the hands of the government and its security forces, under both Duterte and Marcos Jr., often for alleged "terrorist activity". This violence is directly linked to the country's history of imperialism and feudalism, which continue to shape Philippine society today. 

The Unification Church, also known as the Moonies, has taken advantage of this exploitative system in a number of ways. One way, since at least the early 90s, has been to deceive women in the Philippines into marrying men in South Korea. Many of these women joined the Unification Church out of sincere faith in Moon, believing that they had found a God-centered “solution” to the problems of society, and were receiving their “matching” out of religious duty. Many were also tricked into joining the Unification Church, having the matching and blessing framed as a career opportunity abroad, with some of their families pushing them to go through with the matching so they could send financial support back from abroad. Many of these women were of course sent to church-owned factories or to become “help” for church leaders, some were even directly brought into the sex trade, but thousands are known to have been matched to farmers in rural Korea who were not church members but had saw an ad in the newspaper put out by the UC, framing the blessing as a marriage service. According to Toshiko Tsujimoto in "Church Organization and Its Networks for the Filipino Migrants: Surviving and Empowering in Korea," the Filipino Catholic Center in Seoul had women escaping these marriages come to their doors almost every day in the 2000s, speaking up about the abuse and violence they were enduring. The UC, in cooperation with their front organization and “Abel UN” Universal Peace Federation, have also taken advantage of Duterte’s War on Drugs. The church operates the International Peace Leadership College (ILPC), which was originally a seminary for Philippine Moonies but now it trains arrested drug users in Unification theology and martial arts and "character education,” as well as having these “students” (inmates) do community service.

Many of the participants in this program eventually join the church and become members of its student group, CARP. The program has been used as a recruitment tool for the Unification Church, and its ultimate goal is to prepare a thousand missionaries to go out into the world every year.

The UC has poured millions of dollars into courting many of the Philippines’ top families belonging to this bureaucrat capitalist class that controls the government, military, and economy. The UC in the Philippines is known for their “VIP Providence,” which had members faithfully tend to the country’s top government, military, and cultural leaders. The UC has also paid many of these leaders to attend their conferences, speak at events, and become members of their various organizations and boards.  The violences of the Unification Church go back beyond the 90s, as UC members were known to have organized in the Philippines on behalf of the WACL in the 70s, and later on CAUSA and other related organizations. These organizations were also said to have funded and organized vigilante violence against communists, even supporting paramilitary “death squad” groups that are responsible for the deaths of thousands who were rumored to be connected or sympathetic to communism. This includes thousands of social workers, teachers, nuns, priests, activists, etc., since the ousting of Marcos.  These groups often coordinate with the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police, and can effectively act as a cover for the Philippine government to avoid accountability. These groups have been identified countless times posing as “New Peoples Army,” committing heinous terrorist attacks as a form of “black propaganda” against the communists.

The legacy of the violent drug policies and the historic “labor export” policies are already continuing under the new president, Bongbong Marcos, and his vice-president, Duterte's daughter, as countless Filipinos continue to be red-tagged, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. The Philippines remains a country deeply affected by the legacy of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism, and its citizens continue to be vulnerable to exploitation and violence from both local and international actors, including from the Korea-based Unification Church and its related organizations. Even with the abhorrent repression, the Filipino people continue to organize and struggle to overthrow feudalism, bureaucrat captailism, and imperialism. It is worth learning from their work and struggle, which has fueled a 50-year war for social and national liberation, and doing what we can to support them!

Related articles

One Account of Being Trafficked into Prostitution Through UC “Blessing”

Human trafficking is despicable. Here is one Filipina’s story of slavery in the Unification Church

The UC should be held responsible for supplying weapons that killed young Filipino activists

The Broad Counterinsurgency Strategies of the US in the 80s, and a Glimpse into the UC’s Role

In 1985 the Washington Times sponsored a fund for the Contras who committed atrocities, and trafficked drugs to the US

Moonies demanded $2,000 from Koreans who wanted to have Filipinas as “housemaids and sex partners.”

UNESCO Report: Korean-Filipino marriages under the UC sparked controversy and animosity

[pagesofkenna]

the funniest thing about being mormon is remembering that other christians take the same terminology, like, WAY more seriously that we do

like for example whenever I hear someone talking about being in Seminary I have to force myself to remember that they mean 'church trade college', like for adults, like a four year degree in church which they do to get church job... and not a gaggle of mormon teens taking an extra elective class in highschool, barely paying attention

you see that priest over there? he is sixteen years old. we trust him to say the communion prayer and little else. that bishop is a thirty year old man who works a desk job the rest of the week