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06/23/2005:

"George E. Lowe: Can "It" Happen Here? Hasn't "It" Already? A Fascist Christian America"

Sometimes we come across an eye-opening book by an American who is not part of the author circuit, and this is the case with the two-volume set, It Can Happen Here. George E. Lowe wrote a book in 1964 called The Age of Deterrence, but then went on with his career in the military. He served as a speech writer in the Reagan Department of Education, where he told BuzzFlash, he awoke to the threat from radical religious zealots taking over the Republican Party.

Lowe's two-volume collection is a labor of love (originally and prophetically written in 2000) that offers a provocative and persuasive explanation about how the Neo-Cons became a logical partner with the "Rapture" Christians, whose goal is to precipitate Armageddon and a Second Coming of Christ. One clear common political goal is increasing weapons production, because it will both enrich the Neo-Con corporate interests and help precipitate a Messianic age for the radical fundamentalists.

For many BuzzFlash readers, following the subtleties of the religious right fanatics is a challenge. But Lowe takes the reader on a journey through the strange permutations of Christian extremism and the danger it presents to America as a Constitutional democracy. Moreover, the Christian fanatics seek a World War III, because it will lead to the triumphant return of a resurrected Christ and a transformed Israel.

* * *

BuzzFlash: You published a two-volume set -- -- It Can Happen Here: A Fascist Christian America -- -- in 2000. You pretty much forecast what has come to happen in the United States since then, although we don't officially have a fascist Christian America.

George E. Lowe: We're heading fast toward it.

BuzzFlash: There's certainly the assertion by everyone from Antonin Scalia to Bill Frist to General Boykin and John Ashcroft that America is a country where God is king.

George E. Lowe: The famous phrase is: "I have no king but Jesus."

BuzzFlash: You were ahead of the curve on this. What made you so motivated to write two volumes, together hundreds of pages, about this topic?

George E. Lowe: The answer is I lived among them. When the Reagan Administration came in, I was Secretary of Education Bell's speech writer. I looked around and who did I see? Gary Bauer as an Assistant Secretary. Bob Billings, one of the founders of the Moral Majority -- -- another Assistant Secretary. Civil rights was handed over to Alan Keyes and Clarence Thomas. They dumped a lot of strange people into the department that had Hal Lindsey's book, The Late, Great Planet Earth, and the Good Shepherd's Yellow Pages. They had little cards that they would post up in the halls saying, "Listen to Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye." They were revolutionaries. And here I am, an American historian, worried about this, because I was fighting the military fascists in the sixties. Here we get Christian fascists, and I just couldn't comprehend it.

BuzzFlash: What has happened since you wrote the book to accelerate this? Why has the influence of the radical Christian fundamentalists gone from being somewhat in the background and somewhat at arm's length to being an overt part of the Bush Administration?

George E. Lowe: As I say on the cover of my book, it's that they've taken over the party of Lincoln. You could just look at the electoral map and you know that. It's the old Confederacy. And they've expanded it to the new booming Southwest. That and the Mountain West is their core base. There are people that essentially are the old David Duke crowd -- the Northern European, white, Protestant, small town, middle and lower-middle classes -- and their time has come. They're tired of all these foreigners that came in after '48 or after the Civil War, and all those two million Jews and all those Southern European Catholics -- those dusty people -- all those. They feel it's time to take back America. In essence, this is the revenge of the South for losing the Civil War.
Full: buzzflash.com

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