The GOP Is No Longer Just "Using" QAnon: The GOP Now IS QAnon-- What Does This Mean? Part I
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The GOP Is No Longer Just "Using" QAnon: The GOP Now IS QAnon-- What Does This Mean?
Part I--
Introduction--
In the course of the last month or so, Donald Trump has ended his "side chick" type of flirtation with the proto-terrorist conspiracy cult QAnon, and entered into a full-blown public political marriage with them. Hence, the overwhelming majority of those who represent the GOP leadership and activist base has embraced this new relationship and incorporated it fully into their election strategy. This has very big and horrifying implications for the GOP's post-election strategy, which should be self-evident to those not suffering from election day tunnel vision.
As ugly and frightening as this reality is, I believe a conversation about it is needed in order to be prepared for what comes next.
Certain facts about QAnon bear repeating for purposes of background.
Part I--
The QAnon conspiracy is inordinately fixated on pedophilia, and has fabricated a conspiracy theory which is centered on their belief that liberals, socialists, Democrats and non-Christians are conducting satanic abuse and murder rituals, trying to gain and consolidate power by kidnapping, mutilating or cannibalizing Christian babies and children. One might legitimately suggest that those most prominent in advancing this theory are themselves pedophiles, and have used their movement as a cover for their own criminal pursuits.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/05/qanon-jim-watkins-pink-pedophilic-links/
https://www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/
This is actually a very old conspiracy theory, not merely a recent delusional figment of a some psychotic's imagination. It is known historically as "The Blood Libel."
[The origins of the blood libel — also known as the ritual murder charge — date back to the Middle Ages. The first accusation against Jews for allegedly killing Christian children emerged in 12th-century England following the death of a boy named William in Norwich. Years later, a monk, Thomas of Monmouth blamed local Jews for the boy’s murder, accusing them of killing William in a perverse re-enactment of Jesus’s crucifixion.The accusation then transformed into blood libel in the 13th century on the continent, when a blood motif was added. Now, Jews were accused of killing Christian children to obtain their blood.]
https://antisemitism.adl.org/blood/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellant
In the 14th Century, this historical lie was revived under conditions of the spread of Bubonic Plague, following decades of war, famine and economic collapse in Europe. The cult which revived it became known as "The Flagellants."
Originally, the Flagellants spun out of the Catholic Church as a sect which sought to end the plague by becoming the bearers of suffering and pain, who believed it was upon them to absorb God's punishment and thereby redeem humanity of its sins, which were supposedly the reasons God brought the plague upon mankind to begin with.
So, these groups of hooded monks would form brigades which would march into the centers of towns and villages, remove their shirts and flog themselves with nail studded whips, and scourge themselves until they bled to death, or very close to it. Because of the state of hysteria and doom which prevailed at this time, incredulously they grew in number instead of their ranks being depleted by these episodes of self-mutilation. One must remember that the Black Death depopulated Europe to the point that one half of its parishes simply disappeared, and life for the average person was brutal, dismal and short.
https://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century-ebook/dp/B004R1Q296
As the crisis devolved further, the Flagellants became even more extreme and outwardly violent, not content with abusing themselves, and began physical attacks on the most convenient scapegoats of Europe at the time, the Jews. An anti-semitic conspiracy theory was promulgated that the Jews, who had already been historically persecuted as "Christ-killers" had actually started the plague.
For various reasons, the Jews had a marginally higher survival rate than others of the plague. It has been thought that their segregation into ghettoes in Europe and stricter dietary and sanitary laws were a contributing factor, but now scientific research is pointing toward genetic resistance as well. Recent studies have indicated that those individuals with specific auto-immune disorders which may be hereditary such as Crohn's Disease had a higher immunity and survival rate.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/black-death-immunity-gene-crohns-disease-health
Whichever factors were at play, the Jews were suspected of perfidy because of their higher survival rate, and this was used to justify making them the targets of mass hysteria and violence in large scale.
The origins of the Blood Libel came from the lie that Jews were surviving by kidnapping and cannibalizing Christian babies and drinking their blood as a cure. Also spread was the lie that the Jews used this blood in making its Passover bread. Soon, the flagellants grew and became violent mobs, which went from town to town to hunt down and attack or murder the Jews who lived there, not simply to flagellate themselves. This is where the expression "throw the Jew down the well" comes from, because that is what they did, as they carried out many massacres over the years. The murders were so numerous that the Pope at the time, Clement VI issued two Papal Bulls exonerating the Jews from responsibilty for the plague in order to stop these pogroms, but by this time the flagellants growth and the spreading hysteria meant that these Papal edicts were ignored. And the killing continued.
Eventually the plague ran its course, and the character of Europe's culture underwent a positive change gradually with the "Renaissance" in which the anti-semitic pogroms abated somewhat, though the persecution and discrimination continued. Likewise the blood libel conspiracy remained a continuing factor of cult insanity within the Church.
The Blood Libel once again erupted centuries later as a political mass phenomena under the leadership of the anti-semitic Czar of Russia, Alexander III, infamous for launching the pogroms against the Jews of Russia, Ukraine and Poland. He blamed Jewish "socialists" for the anarchist assassination of his father, Czar Alexander II, and deployed both his secret police, the Okhrana, and his calvary the Cossacks to conduct systemic murder and pillaging against them, from the universities to the "shtetels." It was a pre-revolutionary period in Russia, in which war, famine and economic dislocation fed the paranoia of a collapsing Imperial dynastic family which required a scapegoat to blame, that once again found the Jews as its target.
https://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/the_czars_and_the_jews/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion
Integral to these pogroms was the Okhrana forgery of an infamous document entitled "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a booklet alleging a grandiose conspiracy of rich Jewish families for global conquest and the elimination of Christianity. A major feature of "Protocols" was a revival of the Blood Libel, which became a popular theme of the conspiracists. This document was widely circulated, and in the early 20th Century was translated and became integral to the theorists who created the National Socialist ideology of Adolph Hitler, namely, that there existed a "Jew/communist conspiracy" to destroy Aryan racial purity, wipe out Christianity, and to use their control of banking and business to achieve world conquest.
["To what an extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic ... For once this book has become the common property of a people, the Jewish menace may be considered as broken."]
["With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale"]
--Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf
https://academic.oup.com/hgs/article/29/2/212/562402
Jews were depicted in gross caricatures as satanic looking and animalistic predators, rapists, and in the form of an Octopus or Spider's web, which was encircling vulnerable Christian families and blonde haired children for consumption.
The Blood Libel, resurrected by QAnon today, was the centerpiece around which the majorities of the rabid anti-semitic holdovers in the European Churches were used to recruit to the fascist movements of Europe, blaming Jews for the World War, the loss of that war, the rise of Bolshevism, the mass death caused by The Spanish Flu, and later The Great Depression.
From this history, only the willfully blind would fail to see that the emergence of such religious based conspiracy-driven violent cults has occurred most frequently in reaction to devastating long wars, pandemics, natural disasters, economic crises and revolutions, in which rationality, political stability and people's faith in their institutions collapsed. Even the United States was vulnerable to this throughout the 1930's under similar conditions and the growth of radical movements. "America First," the isolationist pro-fascist movement funded by infamous anti-semite Henry Ford, (who reprinted in his "Dearborn Independent" newspaper a pamphlet titled "The International Jew," later reprinted in German by the Nazis) was the US analogue to what was happening in fascist Germany and Italy. But for the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt in those times, the US might have gone that way, but thankfully did not.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/
This bloody and ugly blot upon human history has once again been brought to life by today's version of "America First" thanks to Trump, complete with a new and improved version of the Blood Libel. This is the actual nature of the QAnon horror which has seized control of the Republican Party, and against which we Democratic activists are actually in conflict.
A successful result in this election will emphatically not ensure its defeat. It only serves to buy us time to help build up our forces. This, I hope, is clear to all as we mobilize over the course of the next weeks.
End, Part I
Part II-- QAnon Repurposes The Blood Libel Into A New "Culture War," Version 2.0
