The old Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev once compared religious leaders who attacked the Soviet Union as comparable to the priests who threw holy water on the weapons of the Czar’s armies. But Pat Robertson has gone Nikita once better, advising the U.S. government on National Cable Television (actually the Family Channel, formerly the Christian Broadcasting Network) to murder Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, whose popular democratic government, according to Reverend Pat, threatens to become a haven for 'Communist infiltrators' and Muslim terrorists. Reverend Pat then issued what the mass media called an 'apology' stating that he was just frustrated with Chávez.
First of all, the charges are crackpot. Communists don’t 'infiltrate' societies except in the propaganda of their exploiters and oppressors. Communists are of the people and fight for the people, to advance the economic, social and political rights of the people in order to create socially just societies that are really run by the people. The Muslim religious right in their general views have much more in common with Robertson than with Communists anywhere on earth or with the non-Communist progressive government of Venezuela, whose only connection with some Muslim countries is oil production.
Then there is the question of Robertson’s apology. How many people have been frustrated with Reverend Pat, Jerry Falwell, and the right-wing religious fundamentalists who have been throwing holy water on the Republican Party and every repressive and reactionary policy pursued by Republican administrations since the 1970s? How many gay men and lesbians were physically and psychologically attacked by Falwell’s and other fundamentalists fomenting hysteria in their circles by claiming that AIDS was both God’s revenge against gays and was being consciously spread by gays into the heterosexual population? How many women were physically and psychologically assaulted by Robertson’s and other fundamentalists vilifying advocates of reproductive rights and helping to create the climate of opinion in which a number of doctors who perform pregnancy terminations have been killed or maimed by killers who thought they were doing God’s work?
Yet no one has come forward on national television or even local access broadcasting with a call to 'take out' Robertson because of the suffering his has inflicted on Americans. If they did of course they would be quickly arrested for making terrorist threats as would anyone who made such a threat in writing or in public speech against President Bush or, one would assume, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, or any other leader looked upon favorably by the Bush administration.
Venezuela by the way is deeply Roman Catholic country whose people elected Hugo Chávez in a free election and continue to support him in spite of the attempt by Venezuelan rich and the U.S. government to overthrow him. Chávez’s 'crime' is that he has not gotten in with the drill of sacrificing the Venezuelan people to the IMF-World Bank-WTO system and their criminal policy of forcing poor countries to reduce spending for schools, medical care, sanitation, public transportation, and subsidies on basic foodstuffs in the name of creating a global 'free market' that will ultimately produce world economic growth and make everyone everywhere 'middle class.'
You don’t have to be a right-wing religious fanatic to believe in such lunacy, but it helps, since large numbers of poor people will starve or at the very least have their already low life expectancies seriously shortened, and it must be comforting to believe that they will go to heaven for their sacrifice. Chávez is more interested in building schools and housing for the poor and in finding ways to permit the Venezuelan people to share more equitably in the nation’s oil resources. That is the real 'crime' that the Bush administration and its close ally Pat Robertson have against him.
Of course, Reverend Pat’s suggestion that the U.S. government murder Hugo Chávez, which in today’s world would be called 'state terrorism,' isn’t exactly new in postwar U.S. foreign policy. The revolutionary Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba, was the target of direct CIA assassination plots in 1960 and his eventual murder by his political enemies had at the very least indirect CIA support. The Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. government representatives turned over long lists of names of Communist party activists in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Indonesia in 1965 (where an estimated one million people were murdered by the right-wing military government which came to power) and many other countries where U.S. supported right-wing dictatorships came to power.
The Indonesian leader Sukarno was also the target of a CIA assassination plot earlier and the plots to murder Fidel Castro in the 1960s and 1970s were both legendary and legion. These plots, though, were carried out covertly until Ronald Reagan in the 1980s went after leaders of 'rogue states' like Libya’s Quadaffi, trying to bomb the right target to kill the leader in the Hollywood action adventure tradition.
The open use of political murder as an instrument of foreign policy is along with the torture of prisoners and the denial of due process and habeas corpus rights to alleged enemies a barbaric retrogression to a world of warlords and gangsters. A 'religious leader' adopting such arguments makes a more powerful case against religion as the foundation of a moral order than the writings of a million atheists ever could.
There are of course untold numbers of progressive religionists who both preach and practice the Golden Rule: Do Unto Others as you would have Others Do Unto You. There are denominations and groups within all of the world’s major religions who have fought for peace, equality and social justice for all people here on earth and continue to do so. These are not the people though who collect hundreds of millions for their 'television ministries' as they buy and sell cable networks and run interference for the most reactionary sectors of American society.
Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, et al, crossed the constitutional line establishing the separation of Church and State a long time ago and got away with it. Today, they are as much a part of the Republican Party was the Roman Catholic Church was a party of the Christian Democratic party of Italy in the decades after WWII (although Italy did not have such a commitment to the separation of Church and State).
It is time that both secular and religious people who are not ultra-right begin to fight back against this sinister alliance. First, the tax exemptions of religious groups who are in effect major activist groups inside the Republican Party can be investigated and removed by a government willing to do so. Those who dress racism, sexism, and homophobia in religious garb deserve to be condemned rather than catered to. Those who casually call for the murder of foreign heads of state, or anyone for that matter, should be held accountable for their statements. To passively accept a political climate in which such statements are made by authority figures is to insure that such statements will be eventually acted upon.
--Norman Markowtiz can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
