LLB08 Nov 2004
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...Even apart from armageddon, the prevailing image for the fundamentalist is the image of war, rationalised and justified as a crusade. Among the casualties already incurred in this war have been books. If the printed word can serve to convey the will of God, it can also, the fundamentalist believes, convey the will of Gods adversary. In consequence, the last few years (80’s) have witnessed a new wave of censorship in the United States. In communities in more than 30 American states, major works of both fiction and non-fiction have been banned -- not only from schools, and school libraries, but from public libraries as well, so that even adults do not have access to them. All of this is part of what the fundamentalist “Liberty Federation (The Moral Majority) describes as its crusade against the “religion of secular humanism”. In theory, the only grounds for acting against a book are supposed to be obscenity, pornography, or unsuitability for minors. In practice, books have been condemned for sexual explicitness (Even biology texts), for the depiction of “Unorthodox family arrangements”, for unflattering representations of American Authority, for criticism of business and corporate ethics, for questionable political ideas, and for speculation about Christ. The list of works to have come under attack includes Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Soul On Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Goodbye Columbus and Portnoys Complaint by Philip Roth, Jaws by Peter Benchley, The Abortion and other novels by Richard Brautigan, Manchild In The Promised Land by Claude Brown, Kramer vs. Kramer by Avery Corman, The Godfather by Mario Puzo, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, 1984 by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, Lord Of The Flies by William Golding, A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway, The Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger, established 19th century classics by Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allen Poe, and (most perplexingly) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn -- not to mention the American heritage dictionary and the dictionary of American slang.
As we have said, fundamentalists see themselves as engaged in a war against the anti-christ, whom they usually regard as embodied by communism and the soviet union. And yet, paradoxically, the consequence of many fundamentalist policies tend to further precisely the very objectives of the anti-christ they purport to oppose. By advocating American isolationism, for example, and by issuing dire pronouncements about the EEC, fundamentalism is in effect seeking to alienate the United States from her most important allies, driving a wedge into NATO. By proscribing books such as those listed above, fundamentalism is in effect alienating America herself from her own cultural heritage and her most intelligent citizens -- if not, indeed, from intelligence in general. No calculated program could possibly be more congenial to the aims of the KGB. One could reasonably argue that fundamentalism is in fact doing the KGB’s work for it.
From the Messianic Legacy Lincoln Leigh Baigent
