22.Oct.2012 : MONDAY - George McGovern R.I.P., the Opiate of Exceptionalism, Romney's Heartless Advice, Our World is Dying, 5 Effects of Fracking, Christians Support Discrimination, Iraqi Babies' Birth Defects, Corporatist 2-Party Duopoly, Israel Commits Barbarism, .gov URL Spam Campaign, Stop Trusting Banks, Chomsky in Gaza, the Fall of America, Corporate War Against Science, the 1%'s Power & Privileges

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George McGovern:A Life Devoted to Liberalism

eorge McGovern, the United States senator who won the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1972 as an opponent of the war in Vietnam and a champion of liberal causes, and who was then trounced by President Richard M. Nixon in the general election, died early Sunday in Sioux Falls, S.D. He was 90.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/14112-george-mcgovern-a-life-devoted-to-liberalism

Utah's Largest Paper Endorses Obama

owhere has Mitt Romney's pursuit of the presidency been more warmly welcomed or closely followed than here in Utah. The Republican nominee's political and religious pedigrees, his adeptly bipartisan governorship of a Democratic state, and his head for business and the bottom line all inspire admiration and hope in our largely Mormon, Republican, business-friendly state.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/14106-utahs-largest-paper-endorses-obama

The Opiate of Exceptionalism

magine a presidential candidate who spoke with blunt honesty about American problems, dwelling on measures by which the United States lags its economic peers. What might this mythical candidate talk about on the stump? He might vow to turn around the dismal statistics on child poverty, declaring it an outrage that of the 35 most economically advanced countries, the United States ranks 34th

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/14110-focus-the-opiate-of-exceptionalism

Mitt Romney's Heartless Advice to a Woman Whose Pregnancy Might Have Killed Her

Mormon women remember Romney's advice when he was a church leader, and there wasn't much 'moderate' about it.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/mitt-romneys-heartless-advice-woman-whose-pregnancy-might-have-killed-her

5 Disturbing Stories About Mitt Romney That Expose His Private Worldview

A close look at Romney's past reveals many warning signs -- some even worse than driving with his dog on the roof.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/5-disturbing-stories-about-mitt-romney-expose-his-private-worldview

Wake Up! Our World Is Dying and We're All in Denial

Had we been in a trance? I wanted to shout, "Wake up! Please wake up! Our old future is gone. Matters are urgent. We have to do something now."

http://www.alternet.org/visions/wake-our-world-dying-and-were-all-denial

5 Weird and Frightening Effects of Fracking You May Not Know About

We know fracking has environmental and health damages, but there are other terrifying consequences.

http://www.alternet.org/fracking/5-weird-and-frightening-effects-fracking-you-may-not-know-about

Israel Takes Control of Gaza-Bound Ship

Israeli Prime Minsiter Benjamin Netanyahu praised the military action and insisted that despite what the activists claim, there “is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” He added that “if human rights were really important to these activists they would have sailed for Syria,” reports the Associated Press.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2012/10/20/israel_seizes_european_ship_bound_for_gaza_strip_to_break_blockade.html

The thorny issue of religious belief and discrimination law (again)

Black & Morgan v. Wilkinson (unreported, 18 October 2012, Slough County Court) – Read judgment. The Christian owner of a B&B in Berkshire was found to have discriminated against a gay couple by refusing to allow them stay in a double-bedded room because of her belief that all sexual activity outside of marriage is wrong.

http://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2012/10/20/the-thorny-issue-of-religious-belief-and-discrimination-law-again/

Why (some) Christians support discrimination

Plenty of claims that removal of discrimination violates principles of religious freedom. Even that provision of exemptions for religious organisations is “forcing Christians back into their churches.” Removing them from the public square!

http://openparachute.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/why-some-christians-support-discrimination/

More Iraqi babies suffer birth defects caused by US weapons
A recent study shows a spiraling numbers of birth defects, ranging from congenital heart defects to brain dysfunctions and malformed limbs, among Iraqi babies as a result of weapons used by the US and UK forces.
http://presstv.com/detail/2012/10/20/267785/more-iraqi-kids-fall-victim-to-us-war/

Romney-Ryan ticket to return a more militarized version of Bush era
A Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan administration would bring back to American foreign and domestic policy all the worst elements of the Bush administration, along with a greater degree of militarism, home-grown fascism, and a greater likelihood of war with such countries as Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, China, and Russia.
http://presstv.com/detail/2012/10/20/267713/romneyryan-ticket-return-of-bush-era/

US committing holocaust for regime change in Iran: Analyst
A prominent political analyst says the US-led sanctions against the Islamic Republic are “jeopardizing the lives of millions of patients” in Iran by trying to achieve the “grand delusion” of installing a pro-West regime in the country.
http://presstv.com/detail/2012/10/19/267634/iran-bans-ussanctioned-holocaust/

Zionist Jews biggest donors to presidential bids of Obama, Romney
Zionist Jews are the biggest donors that finance the US presidential election campaign of both the Democratic President Barack Obama as well as his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.
http://presstv.com/detail/2012/10/20/267807/zionist-jews-fund-obama-romney-campaigns/

New York Times Flacks for Jewish Groups Against 15 Major Christian LeadersYou have to know American Jewish "leaders" are really riled up when they call on the New York Times to flack for them against 15 leaders of Christian churches who had the audacity to send a letter to the US Congress, which said, with proper Christian indignation:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/New-York-Times-Flacks-for-by-James-Wall-121021-930.html

Prescient About America: George McGovernGeorge McGovern, who has just died, was prescient about America. When he ran for president 40 years ago, he well-understood what the federal government of the United States had become, among other national dysfunctions.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Prescient-About-America-G-by-Karl-Grossman-121021-778.html

An Exceptional America CAN have a Bloodless Revolution Overnight! It sounds too good to be true, but it isn't, and we are surely at risk of much worse happening 'overnight', if Romney gets to fulfill his DAY ONE hopes. So let's take a look at how a few major changes, by making ours a citizen owned, self-reliant, largely money-less society, can improve our individual personal situations, on micro- to macro- (like family, social, employment, health, educational, and environmental, including property) levels. This would also give us a better standing in the world than we've EVER known, and will put us in a good position to pay off the deficit, and to help other countries in more permanent and meaningful ways. It would also change the way that the Constitution, and thus, law itself, will be presented, changed and simplified, and enforced clearly and fairly.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/An-Exceptional-America-CAN-by-Kim-Cassidy-121021-226.html

Clear and Present Danger: The Corporatist Two Party DuopolyCorporatism (or Corporate Fascism) --A term often first attributed to Benito Mussolini of Italy in the early 1900's defining the complete merger of the corporations with the nation state. Also, often referred to as just Fascism. Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt wrote an article about fascism ("Fascism Anyone?," Free Inquiry, Spring 2003, page 20). Studying the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile), Dr. Britt found they all had 14 elements in common. He calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Clear-and-Present-Danger--by-Dr-Tom-Baldwin-121020-168.html

Israel Again Commits Barbarism and PiracyIsrael again egregiously violated fundamental international law.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Israel-Again-Commits-Barba-by-Stephen-Lendman-121021-586.html

Spam campaign tricking thousands with shortened .gov URLs
Symantec has reported an increase in spam messages containing .gov URLs. Cybercriminals are using 1.usa.gov links in their spam campaigns to trick users into thinking the links lead to genuine US government Web sites.
http://thehackernews.com/2012/10/spam-campaign-tricking-thousands-with.html

6 Reasons to Stop Trusting Banks

Recently, the Federal Reserve has been allocating $40 million each month to help lower mortgage rates, according to the Washington Post. With this money, the U.S. government is hoping that the banks will grant loans at lower rates to boost the housing market. It’s a great plan… unless the banks decided not to modify the loan rates and keep most of the money for itself anyway, which is exactly what they’re doing, despite already making record profits as of late.

http://www.care2.com/causes/6-reasons-to-stop-trusting-banks.html

Jewish Domination? Occupation More Likely
The recent attack on Free Gaza’s Greta Berlin and Colonel Ann Wright suggests that we have crossed a red line -- Jewish domination within the Palestinian solidarity movement belongs to the past. We are now, it seems, under Zionist occupation, and we are subject to all the symptoms of Israeli abuse and Zionist brutality.
http://www.countercurrents.org/atzmon201012.htm

Chomsky In Gaza: Academic Boycott “Will Strengthen Support For Israel”
Legendary MIT linguistics professor and political author Noam Chomsky has been visiting the Gaza Strip for a linguistics conference and as a demonstration of political solidarity.
http://www.countercurrents.org/almeghari201012.htm

Children Under Attack in Pakistan and Afghanistan

Six children were attacked in Afghanistan and Pakistan this past week. Three of them, teenaged girls on a school bus in Peshawar, in the tribal region of western Pakistan, were shot and gravely wounded by two Taliban gunmen who were after Malala Yousufzai, a 14-year-old girl who has been bravely demanding the right of girls to an education. After taking a bullet to the head, and facing further death threats, she has been moved to a specialty hospital in Britain. Her two wounded classmates are being treated in Pakistan. The other three children were not so lucky. They were killed Sunday in an aerial attack by a US aircraft in the the Nawa district of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, not so far from Pakistan.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32812.htm

More Scams From the Secret Police

How misleading can a "news" article get? Try this headline: "Federal Reserve bombing plot foiled in NYC". There never was a plot to foil. There never was a plot independent of the FBI to foil. The plot was of the FBI's own devising and instigation. There never was an ongoing crime for the FBI to detect and stop.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32809.htm

The Fall of America and the Rise In Spirit

It wasn't very long ago when the worldview of the United States was one of a country that represented justice, democracy, freedom and moral accountability, even if only in the minds of the naive. Unfortunately, not only does the U.S. no longer remind anyone of these values, but the mention of these values is now scorned by many ordinary Americans that have gobbled up the Military-Industrial-Complex paradigm of the fascist global government.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32811.htm

Afghan girl 'beheaded for refusing prostitution'

Afghan police have arrested four people who allegedly tried to force a woman into prostitution and beheaded her when she refused.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/9615231/Afghan-girl-beheaded-for-refusing-prostitution.html

The corporate war against science

Dishonesty: Source and cure

The 1%'s Power and Privileges

Bush, Blair Wanted For Crimes Against Humanity: Boyle


Countdown to Armageddon


Gaza-bound Ship 'Attacked By Israel Forces'

Israeli navy seizes European Gaza aid ship

Rise of the Machines - USA

Presidential Candidate JILL STEIN on War on Drugs, Women's Rights, and more...

CIA Demands Drones Despite 80% Civilian Death Rate

Millions of Evangelical Christians Want to Start WWIII to Speed the “Second Coming”

Neocons are Using Religion to Rile Them Up to Justify War Against Iran

By Washington's Blog
[REPRINT]

................. The Founding Fathers weren’t particularly anti-Islam.

But millions of Americans believe that Christ will not come again until Israel wipes out its competitors and there is widespread war in the Middle East. Some of these folks want to start a huge fire of war and death and destruction, so that Jesus comes quickly.

According to French President Chirac, Bush told him that the Iraq war was needed to bring on the apocalypse:

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”…

There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.

And British Prime Minister Tony Blair long-time mentor, advisor and confidante said:

“Tony’s Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks. He believed strongly at the time, that intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone – Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil, making lives better.”

Mr Burton, who was often described as Mr Blair’s mentor, says that his religion gave him a “total belief in what’s right and what’s wrong”, leading him to see the so-called War on Terror as “a moral cause”…

Anti-war campaigners criticised remarks Mr Blair made in 2006, suggesting that the decision to go to war in Iraq would ultimately be judged by God.

Bill Moyers reports that the organization Christians United for Israel – led by highly-influential Pastor John C. Hagee – is a universal call to all Christians to help factions in Israel fund the Jewish settlements, throw out all the Palestinians and lobby for a pre-emptive invasion of Iran. All to bring Russia into a war against us causing World War III followed by Armageddon, the Second Coming and The Rapture. See this and this.

This all revolves around what is called Dispensationalism. So popular is Dispensationalism that Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series has sold 65 million copies.

Dispensationalists include the following mega-pastors and their churches:

• Jerry Falwell

• Pat Robertson

• Billy Graham

They are supported by politicians such as:

• Newt Gingrich

• Joseph Lieberman

• John McCain

• Texas Senator John Cronyn

• Former House Minority Whip Roy Blunt

• Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay

• And others

Dr. Timothy Webber – an evangelical Christian who has served as a teacher of church history and the history of American religion at Denver Seminary and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Vice-President at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lombard, IL, and President of Memphis Theological Seminary in Tennessee – notes:

In a recent Time/CNN poll, more than one-third of Americans said that since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, they have been thinking more about how current events might be leading to the end of the world.

While only 36 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible is God’s Word and should be taken literally, 59 percent say they believe that events predicted in the Book of Revelation will come to pass. Almost one out of four Americans believes that 9/11 was predicted in the Bible, and nearly one in five believes that he or she will live long enough to see the end of the world. Even more significant for this study, over one-third of those Americans who support Israel report that they do so because they believe the Bible teaches that the Jews must possess their own country in the Holy Land before Jesus can return.

Millions of Americans believe that the Bible predicts the future and that we are living in the last days. Their beliefs are rooted in dispensationalism, a particular way of understanding the Bible’s prophetic passages, especially those in Daniel and Ezekiel in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. They make up about one-third of America’s 40 or 50 million evangelical Christians and believe that the nation of Israel will play a central role in the unfolding of end-times events. In the last part of the 20th century, dispensationalist evangelicals become Israel’s best friends-an alliance that has made a serious geopolitical difference.

***

Starting in the 1970s, dispensationalists broke into the popular culture with runaway best-sellers, and a well-networked political campaign to promote and protect the interests of Israel. Since the mid-1990s, tens of millions of people who have never seen a prophetic chart or listened to a sermon on the second coming have read one or more novels in the Left Behind series, which has become the most effective disseminator of dispensationalist ideas ever.

***

During the early 1980s the Israeli Ministry of Tourism recruited evangelical religious leaders for free “familiarization” tours. In time, hundreds of evangelical pastors got free trips to the Holy Land. The purpose of such promotional tours was to enable people of even limited influence to experience Israel for themselves and be shown how they might bring their own tour group to Israel. The Ministry of Tourism was interested in more than tourist dollars: here was a way of building a solid corps of non-Jewish supporters for Israel in the United States by bringing large numbers of evangelicals to hear and see Israel’s story for themselves. The strategy caught on.

***

Shortly after the Six-Day War, elements within the Israeli government saw the potential power of the evangelical subculture and began to mobilize it as a base of support that could influence American foreign policy. The Israeli government sent Yona Malachy of its Department of Religious Affairs to the United States to study American fundamentalism and its potential as an ally of Israel. Malachy was warmly received by fundamentalists and was able to influence some of them to issue strong pro-Israeli manifestos. By the mid-1980s, there was a discernible shift in the Israeli political strategy. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish state’s major lobbying group in Washington, D.C., started re-aligning itself with the American political right-wing, including Christian conservatives. Israel’s timing was perfect. It began working seriously with American dispensationalists at the precise moment that American fundamentalists and evangelicals were discovering their political voice.

**

Probably the largest pro-Israel organization of its kind is the National Unity Coalition for Israel, which was founded by a Jewish woman who learned how to get dispensationalist support. NUCI opposes “the establishment of a Palestinian state within the borders of Israel.”

***

In their commitment to keep Israel strong and moving in directions prophesied by the Bible, dispensationalists are supporting some of the most dangerous elements in Israeli society. They do so because such political and religious elements seem to conform to dispensationalist beliefs about what is coming next for Israel. By lending their support-both financial and spiritual-to such groups, dispensationalists are helping the

future they envision come to pass.

***

Dispensationalists believe that the Temple is coming too; and their convictions have led them to support the aims and actions of what most Israelis believe are the most dangerous right-wing elements in their society, people whose views make any compromise necessary for lasting peace impossible. Such sentiments do not matter to the believers in Bible prophecy, for whom the outcome of the quarrelsome issue of the Temple Mount has already been determined by God.

Since the end of the Six-Day War, then, dispensationalists have increasingly moved from observers to participant-observers. They have acted consistently with their convictions about the coming Last Days in ways that make their prophecies appear to be self-fulfilling.

***

As Paul Boyer has pointed out, dispensationalism has effectively conditioned millions of Americans to be somewhat passive about the future and provided them with lenses through which to understand world events. Thanks to the sometimes changing perspectives of their Bible teachers, dispensationalists are certain that trouble in the Middle East is inevitable, that nations will war against nations, and that the time is coming when millions of people will die as a result of nuclear war, the persecution of Antichrist, or as a result of divine judgment. Striving for peace in the Middle East is a hopeless pursuit with no chance of success.

***

For the dispensational community, the future is determined. The Bible’s prophecies are being fulfilled with amazing accuracy and rapidity. They do not believe that the Road Map will-or should-succeed. According to the prophetic texts, partitioning is not in Israel’s future, even if the creation of a Palestinian state is the best chance for peace in the region. Peace is nowhere prophesied for the Middle East, until Jesus comes and brings it himself. The worse thing that the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations can do is force Israel to give up land for a peace that will never materialize this side of the second coming. Anyone who pushes for peace in such a manner is ignoring or defying God’s plan for the end of the age.

***

It seems clear that dispensationalism is on a roll, that its followers feel they are riding the wave of history into the shore of God’s final plan. Why should they climb back into the stands when being on the field of play is so much more fun and apparently so beneficial to the game’s outcome? As [one dispensationalist group's] advertisement read, “Don’t just read about prophecy when you can be part of it.”

 

Not a Problem with Judaism … Or Christianity
 

Most Americans confuse Zionism and Judaism.
 
But many devout Jews are against Zionism, and Zionists can be Christian.
 
Those who say that criticizing Zionism is anti-semitic are misleading people for their own ulterior motives which have nothing to do with ensuring the safety of the Jewish people.
 
Israeli Zionists are no more true to the cultural heritage of the Jewish people than Christian Zionists are.
 

Atheist War Hawks Manipulate Believers to Beat the Drums of War
 

Leo Strauss is the father of the Neo-Conservative movement, including many leaders of the current administration.

Indeed, many of the main neocon players – including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Stephen Cambone, Elliot Abrams, and Adam Shulsky – were students of Strauss at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years.

The people pushing for war against Iran are the same neocons who pushed for war against Iraq. See this and this. (They planned both wars at least 20 years ago.) For example, Shulsky was the director of the Office of Special Plans – the Pentagon unit responsible for selling false intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass. He is now a member of the equivalent organization targeting Iran: the Iranian Directorate.

Strauss, born in Germany, was an admirer of Nazi philosophers and of Machiavelli. Strauss believed that a stable political order required an external threat and that if an external threat did not exist, one should be manufactured. Specifically, Strauss thought that: 

A political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat . . . . Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured

(the quote is by one of Strauss’ main biographers).

Indeed, Stauss used the analogy of Gulliver’s Travels to show what a Neocon-run society would look like:

“When Lilliput [the town] was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect.” (this quote also from the same biographer)

Moreover, Strauss said:
 

Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic . . . Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.

So Strauss seems to have advocated governments letting terrorizing catastrophes happen on one’s own soil to one’s own people — of “pissing” on one’s own people, to use his Gulliver’s travel analogy. And he advocates that government’s should pretend that they did not know about such acts of mayhem: to intentionally “not know” that Rome is burning. He advocates messing with one’s own people in order to save them from some “catastophe” (perhaps to justify military efforts to monopolize middle eastern oil to keep it away from our real threat — an increasingly-powerful China?).

What does this have to do with religion?

Strauss taught that religion should be used as a way to manipulate people to achieve the aims of the leaders. But that the leaders themselves need not believe in religion.

As Wikipedia notes:

In the late 1990s Irving Kristol and other writers in neoconservative magazines began touting anti-Darwinist views, in support of intelligent design. Since these neoconservatives were largely of secular backgrounds, a few commentators have speculated that this – along with support for religion generally – may have been a case of a “noble lie”, intended to protect public morality, or even tactical politics, to attract religious supporters.

So is it any surprise that the folks who planned war against Iraq and Iran at least 20 years ago are pushing religious disinformation to stir up the evangelical community?

I’ve recently seen a swarm of spam claiming that all Muslims are evil, that they want to take over the world and establish a Muslim caliphate, and that they want to nuke Iran. They misquote Muslims and use false statements to try to stir up religious hatred.

They are simply promoting the Straussian playbook: stir up religious sentiment – even if you are personally an atheist – to create and demonize an “enemy”, so as to promote war …

Postscript 1: While there are certainly some Arab terrorists, Islam cannot be blamed for their barbaric murderous actions, just as Christianity cannot be blamed for the Norwegian Christian terrorist – Anders Behring Breivik’s – actions.

University of Chicago professor Robert A. Pape – who specializes in international security affairs – points out:

Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.

And the 9/11 hijackers used cocaine and drank alcohol, slept with prostitutes and attended strip clubs … but they did not worship at any mosque. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

Postscript 2: Neoliberals and Neoconservatives are very similar in many ways. And because Neocons are not conservative, nothing in this post is meant to criticize conservatism.

Postscript 3: Most evangelicals are not dispensionalists, and so do not want to bring on armageddon.

The Theology of Armageddon | Common Dreams

The Theology of Armageddon | Common Dreams

[REPRINT]

by Robert C. Koehler

The woo-woo nuttiness of it all defies the imagination, beginning with the idea of a course in “Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare” at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Nuclear ethics?

Does that mean no nuclear weapons should ever be used to promote sexual harassment?

Well actually, turns out the point of the mandatory course recently canceled by the Air Force after officers of numerous faiths complained to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation about it and TruthOut published an exposé in July — was to give officers in the first week of missile-launch training a Bible-verse-studded indoctrination in faux-Just War Theory, cynically known in the ranks as the “Jesus Loves Nukes” training.

“Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war.”

This verse, Revelation 19:11, has nothing to do with Just War Theory, Christian or otherwise. It sounds more like the theology of Armageddon, or the ethics of end times — scary enough on the social fringe but, my God, here was the U.S. Air Force, guardian of the country’s nuclear arsenal, pushing it as a basic part of missile-launch training.

There were plenty of other religiously pushy declarations in this mandatory course, such as these words from Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist who teamed up with the U.S. military after the war to develop its space and missile programs, regarding his surrender to the Americans in 1945:

“We knew that we had created a new means of warfare and the question as to what nation . . .we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else,” von Braun is quoted as saying. “We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.”

This is too strange to be irony. The Nazi rocket wizard sought moral reassurance in Christian exceptionalism, and his words then became part of America’s official ethics of nuclear war: We’re with Jesus on that white horse, and if/when we launch Armageddon, we’re only doing the work of the Lord. To my mind, there are few people on the planet scarier than self-proclaimed “Christian soldiers,” at least those who feed from the evangelical trough and belong to the U.S. military, because their agenda transcends rationality. In righteousness they judge and make war.

But my sense of shock and awe over this nuclear ethics course isn’t simply about evangelicals in the military and their zeal to proselytize. It’s about the official sanctioning of a nuclear morality that allows their use: that transforms America and its military machine into an instrument of the will of God.

The canceled course was called Christian Just War Theory. Even leaving aside the “Christian” part, this theory — or rather the public-relations perversion thereof (Just Window Dressing) — is at the center of the smug delusions of armed righteousness in this country and beyond. Some form of it is used to justify every modern war when, in point of fact, an honest reading of just war theory makes modern war impossible.

“Civilians are never permissible targets of war . . .”

What part of this do we not understand? Even Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, has acknowledged the moral quicksand of modern war, commenting in 2003 that “we must begin asking ourselves whether as things stand, with new weapons that cause destruction that goes well beyond the groups involved in the fight, it is still licit to allow that a ‘just war’ might exist.”

Of course, the theory is always presented with wiggle room, making it, you know, fair for the war makers, too: “The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatant,” Vincent Ferraro explains in his discussion of the principles of the theory, as referenced atjustwartheory.com. “Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.”

Aha, loophole! While the actual point of the theory is to acknowledge — to bless — a people’s need to fight back in self-defense against an aggressor, or to protect the innocent, its language is so hopelessly wishy-washy that its blessing is there for the taking for any armed cynic who wants moral cover. A warring nation has unlimited permission to kill indiscriminately as long as it “makes every effort” to avoid killing civilians.

Thus Harry Truman announced, on Aug. 9, 1945: “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”

There is no moral honesty in a discussion of war for the simple reason that there can’t be. War is its own end, the perversion of every just cause. As soon as we begin worshipping it, we can tolerate moral authority only as a cover for our crimes. Before you know it, Jesus loves nukes.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.