Robertson: Putin Is Doing God's Work
Thursday, March 03, 2022
Pat Robertson came out of retirement to provide his take on Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It should come as little surprise that someone with a long track record of ridiculous pronouncements would come up with something like this:
This is hardly surprising, given the arbitrary nature of Robertson's entire worldview."I think you can say, well, Putin's out of his mind. Yes, maybe so," said Robertson, 91. "But at the same time, he's being compelled by God. He went into the Ukraine, but that wasn't his goal. His goal was to move against Israel, ultimately."
Image by Paparazzo Presents, via Wikipedia, license.
Robertson then cited verses from the book of Ezekiel that note how nations will come together to rise up against Israel, suggesting that Ukraine is merely a "staging ground" for an eventual Armageddon battle.
"God is getting ready to do something amazing," he said. "And that will be fulfilled."
But there is a moral dimension this whopper is covering up like a rug -- at least for anyone who might have missed the fact that Robertson apparently saw fit only to comment on Putin's sanity rather than his barbaric immorality, that is.
Consider also the kinds of things Robertson and others like him have a habit of saying after natural disasters:
God grants blessings and curses on nations and people based on their allegiance and obedience to Him. If things are going well, you're living right; if things are going badly, you're living wrong. And it is Robertson himself who can divine the hierarchy of sins that most trouble God.As Don Watkins once explained, the Ten Commandments, which the likes of Robertson hold out as the basis for morality, amount to a set of arbitrary rules laid out by an abusive father who will "beat you up" if you don't comply and who might pat you on the head if you do. Watkins argues convincingly that this is hardly a source of guidance for one's life.
Robertson's pronouncements taken together over time provide an eloquent demonstration of the accuracy of this analogy.
-- CAV
5 comments:
Yo, Gus, the sad thing is how many supposed Objectivist-adjacent people say much the same thing. (One wonders what Rand would have said to her supposed followers praising a Russian tyrant invading a semi-free nation leaning west. If ears could physically catch fire from mere words, that might be the occasion.) One fellow I mentioned to you wrote in one forum (and without any push-back), "Putin is doing God's work." Why? Because he's cleaning the clock of the pedophiles running the New World Order, and the people on that forum are favorable toward QAnon inanity. Another one who runs his own different forum writes that while Putin is bad, all of the people against him, including Zelensky, are members of the "predator class," and the only reason they're so upset about Russia invading Ukraine is because that's where they launder their money; the big guys won't be hurt by the economic sanctions, while the 98% will get it good and hard because that's what the predator class thrives on. The QAnon guy's just insane, but the other guy is in many respects indistinguishable from the Democratic Socialists of America, who in some ways savor of Trump's condemnation of NATO:
“DSA reaffirms our call for the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict,” the DSA said in a statement.
“While the failures of neoliberal order are clear to everyone, the ruling class is trying to build a new world, through a dystopic transition grounded in militarism, imperialism, and war. Socialists have a duty to build an alternative.”
The socialist group continued that “much of the next ten years are coming into view through this attack” and closed by saying, “no war but class war.”
A rational person might stop and think, "Huh, if I'm talking like a Bernie Bro, maybe I'm being a moron," but these are clearly not rational people. It does put one in mind of No. 3 in your roundup a week ago.
Snedcat,
(1) It sounds like child trafficking hysteria, which seems to be the version of It's for the children among tribalists who paint themselves as right-wing.
(2) I had a comment I did not let through moderation about the very item you mention. It did not offer any kind of counter-argument, but it did insult the author of the piece I pointed to.
Gus
Yo, Gus, you write, "It sounds like child trafficking hysteria, which seems to be the version of It's for the children among tribalists who paint themselves as right-wing."
There is a bit of that nanny-ism involved, but it's much darker than that. Remember the Satanic Panic of the 80s, with associated beliefs (not common to all anti-Satanic loons) that stolen children were being sexually abused and sacrificed? QAnon includes strands that are a bizarre continuation of that, or, perhaps better put, a recourse to the same deep-seated fears underlying it, and it's historically long-standing. It's strongly reminiscent of the blood libel of the Jews in the Middle Ages, as many have pointed out, and before that it was the same passel of abuse heaped upon Christians as, chuckle chuckle, officially an atheist group (their basic crime under Roman imperial governance, as they did not worship the gods of the state): That they practiced orgies, incest, infanticide, and cannibalism at their communions. (There are many discussions of this by historians; an interesting one is this, "Incest, Infanticide, and Cannibalism: Anti-Christian Imputations in the Roman Empire.") You can also see it, amusingly, in a pre-Meiji Japanese vampire novel about Catholic priest vampires, where the story seems to have been inspired by the image of partaking of the blood and flesh of Christ. (And as I mentioned to a couple of our Chinese friends in St. Louis Cathedral, Christianity does make a big deal about blood, since it’s such a vital substance that makes for quite powerful imagery. That’s why Christianity adopted the image of being washed in the blood of the lamb from Mithraism, definitely a soldier’s religion, in which baptism consisted of being drenched in the blood of a slaughtered lamb: A powerful image transubstantiated, you might say, for Christianity.)
Basically, the psychological root of this is, I’m sure, one of the basic roots of tribalism, whereby the outsiders, by not sharing the beliefs or customs of one's own group, must therefore be opposed to them, and thus if they reject what we know to be good, then there is no evil of which they are not capable. It's the so-called outgroup homogeneity effect (or bias) kicked into overdrive: "The out-group homogeneity effect is the perception of out-group members as more similar to one another than are in-group members..." Thus, if there are some you can point to as holding one belief, then all people opposed to you must hold it too. (You can see this, for example, in Nancy MacLean's grotesque piece of lies and hatchetry Democracy in Chains, in which she in effect tries to connect every rightist thinker after the 1950s to the Koch Brothers as some sort of right-wing hive-mind Borg, and for which she has been widely praised by many lefties in their own blood libels of anyone to the right of, say, Noam Chomsky. In a very different way, you can see it in the way many hardcore Christian types and even a few of their pseudo-Objectivist fellow-travelers attribute every possible vice to homosexuals, including a supposed predilection for pedophilia.)
[More to follow.]
[Next part.]
The conspiracy theorizing you see coheres closely with that attribution of uniformity of belief and lack of any scruples due to the rejection of the good projected upon everyone else, or at least the particular group one fears. Mind you, of course there are some pedophiles in prominent places today, not all of whom have hanged themselves or been hanged by others yet, and unlike past ages there is a strain in certain strands of counter-cultural thought that is opposed to age restrictions in sexual activity as just another of the arbitrary prohibitions erected by Christian bourgeois society that must be destroyed in seeking enlightenment through nihilism. However, it does not follow, to put it mildly, that the entire Deep State is at root a machine designed to facilitate pedophilia, provide a steady supply of children’s blood for satanic rituals, or whatever other blood libels QAnon makes up as it goes along (or more precisely its followers, since of course QAnon just hints like a latter-day Nostradamus and urges its followers to make it up as they go along). You might look at it as a sort of sequel to Watkin’s essay: Not only should you seek communities based on cognitive values, communities will in the long run sort themselves out around cognitive values. You can see that in the fetid sites I mentioned in my first comment: Over the decade-plus they’ve been around, they’ve slowly shaken out those who do not share their founders’ cognitive values (which are, suffice it to say, not entirely rational at root), not even by banning them but by simply providing no value to anyone seeking to argue with them, and congealed around particular broad views of the world that project ridiculous uniformity on their particular targets of ire.
You can see that in the whole projection of uniformity of beliefs, motivations, and actions on the notional “predator class” the second guy goes on and on and on about: They did this and they did that for this end and that purpose, all homogeneous and interchangeable. Ukraine is nothing more than the home base of their corrupt dealings; all of them are alike, all Ukrainian leaders including Zelensky are interchangeable and equally corrupt, and all of them, be they surnamed Clinton, Biden, Bush, Soros, Koch, or Zelensky (yes, him too, because this guy is so blitheringly unversed in history, recent or ancient, that he doesn’t know that Zelensky was elected to fight corruption and actually made a number of measures to make good on that pledge, though they met opposition in the courts), are equally responsible for the invasion of Ukraine. That’s because like every Marxist, in the end he views them as uniform classes, as determined by their class, utterly interchangeable, and all guilty of the same crimes that they all planned out together. Thus, everything going on in Ukraine right now was planned out by Biden’s team months in advance, and everything at all is planned by these guys. Any evidence that they’re a bunch of idiots blundering through disasters of their making and of many other actors’, is ignored; the sheer contingency of history as the consequences of interacting, unpredictable actions by many different actors is mental terra incognita to this guy. (And now Biden’s team trying to cut deals with Venezuela and Iran brokered by Russia in the most shameful display of blithering incompetence and stupidity in recent record is...what? The latest cunning plan of the predator class? Or is it fools rushing into traps they’re intellectually disarmed from seeing?)
[And finally.]
So yes, it’s hard to take that guy seriously, mostly because he himself appears to take so little seriously. He gives a strong impression of utter incuriosity about pretty much anything outside persuasion techniques and seeing through the Narrative—forget dogmatic slumber, it’s a dogmatic coma. He represents the butt-end of Keynes’ quip, “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.” How much worse it is to be the slave of some defunct advertising executive!
And more to the point, who was the economist slave to? One interesting thing when studying the histories of all the different fields in the humanities and social sciences is seeing the way philosophical ideas trickled down and played out in the 19th and early 20th centuries. People like Weber and Simmel, Dilthey and Collingwood, Durkheim and G.H. Mead, all the great founders of disciplines of whom only the first is at all famous any more but all of whom are of basic importance historically and intellectually, were explicitly philosophically trained and philosophically minded. (Dilthey wanted to produce a fourth Kantian critique for historiography and the social sciences, for example.) Then you see later generations of scholars, as the lines between disciplines institutionalized, referring not to philosophers but to them, at best to Marx (also thoroughly indebted to philosophy of a most rancid sort), and then later generations contenting themselves with methodological shadow-boxing within the boxing rings these founders set, accepting their terms of any debate. Yes, there’s free will, so Tracinski’s not entirely wrong in arguing against the view of Objectivists (or at least the position he stakes out as arguing against) that only ideas determine history, but his factors are at play and effective in the long term only to the extent they encourage thinkers to develop other philosophical ideas, and so he’s not entirely right either. And if you’re not interested in philosophical ideas at all but some hobby-cum-stalking horse like the Narrative and techniques of persuasion, then you’ve abandoned the intellectual realm entirely and are entirely the slave of any glib thinker whose narrative persuades you.
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