Saturday, February 11, 2017
قتلة تجب معاقبتهم
ميشيل كيلو
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بلغ السيل الزبى، وصار من المحتم أخذ موقف يقطع مع سياستي النظامين ضد شعبيهما، لأن من الخير للمسيحيين أن يضحوا، مع غيرهم، من أجل حرية مواطنيهم ووطنهم، بدل الغرق مع هذين النظامين في مستنقعات الوحشية المذهبية والاختناق إنسانيا ووطنيا بيد الإجرام!
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لم يترك النظام الأسدي وسيلة ضغط وإفساد إلا وجرّبها من أجل إرغام مسيحيي سورية على حمل السلاح ضد شعبهم. تواصل ضباط مخابرات الأسد مع بعض رجال الدين المسيحي العملاء لهم، ليكلفوهم بتجنيد شبّان مسيحيين عاطلين من العمل مقابل رواتب مغرية، ويقنعوا الكنيسة بوجود تهديد إرهابي لها، يمكن أن يصل في أي وقت إلى بيوت رعاياها. ولجعل جهدهم مقنعا، وضعت المخابرات ملصقاتٍ مرعبة على جدران الكنائس والأحياء التي يغلب عليها الطابع المسيحي تسمي "الجهات الإرهابية" التي ستستهدفها، وأسماء من سينسفون الكنائس، وأرسلت حرّاسا مسلحين، ليقفوا قرب أبوابها، ويثيروا قدرا من الذعر يدفع المسيحيين إلى الالتحاق بمليشيات السلطة، ثم أعلنوا أنهم لن يتمكّنوا من القيام بحماية المسيحيين، إن بقي شبانهم رافضين للسلاح. وأخيرا، تواصل المخابراتيون مع أحزابٍ ينضوي فيها مسيحيون، كالحزب القومي السوري الاجتماعي، وتواصلوا مع أتباعها وضغطوا عليهم، وأغروهم بحمل السلاح بذريعة حماية مناطقهم وأهليهم، وعندما وجدوا أن رد فعلهم ليس إيجابيا بما يكفي، انتقلوا إلى وضعهم أمام الأمر الواقع، فاغتالوا مسيحيين أو أخفوهم وعزوا مقتلهم واختفاءهم إلى المسلمين، أو فبركوا أكاذيب عن فتياتٍ اغتصبهن مسلمو الأحياء المجاورة لهم، أو اختطفوا سيدات مسنات وكبار سن يحظون باهتمام اجتماعي خاص، وألقوا أخيرا السلاح بصور عشوائية في شوارع الأحياء المسيحية، أو طرقوا أبواب منازلها، وهدّدوا شبانها بسوقهم إلى الجيش، إذا لم يقبلوا الدفاع عن أحيائهم. وبعد حين، وجد من قبلوا التطوع أنفسهم في دير الزور أو حلب أو القلمون أو الساحل... إلخ مرتزقة يقتلون الأبرياء، كغيرهم من مرتزقة لبنان والعراق وأفغانستان وبنغلادش... إلخ. لئن كان القسم الأكبر من الشباب المسيحي ما زال خارج مليشيات النظام، فإن بعض مرتزقتهم ارتكبوا جرائم كلفهم بارتكابها النظام، بغرض توريط المسيحيين، ووضعهم أمام خيار الانخراط الإكراهي في تنظيماته، عبر إغلاق جميع دروب النجاة في وجوههم، وترك خيار وحيد أمامهم، هو حمل السلاح، بحجة أنه لم يبق لديهم غيره لرد ما يُحدق بهم من أخطار داهمة.
وسط هذه السياسات الإجرامية، المنظمة على أعلى مستوى وإلى أبعد حد، والنابعة من تصورٍ أرسى السلطة على تكويناتٍ ما قبل مجتمعية/ ما دون وطنية هي الطوائف، التي عمل دوما لإقامة تحالف يجمعها ضد المجتمع عموما، وأغلبيته خصوصا التي يشك في قدرته على كسب ولائها، واختار مواجهتها سياسة وحيدة تجاهها. ومع أن النظام ترجم سياساته منذ أعوام إلى وضعٍ استهدف إلحاق الطوائف الأخرى به، فإن تصميمه على تحويل ثورة الحرية إلى حرب طائفية جعله يمارس ضغوطا يومية على الطوائف عامة، والمسيحيين خاصة، لاعتقاده أن انخراطهم في الحرب سيفضي إلى ردود أفعالٍ إسلامية عنيفة ضدهم، إن لم تحدث قام هو بها، ستستفز الرأي العام المسيحي في دول الغرب، وستدفع به إلى معاداة الثورة، وتصديق أكاذيب الأسدية حول الحدث السوري، باعتباره إرهابا، وليس ثورة حرية ضد استبداده وظلمه، مع ما سيترتب على ذلك من عائد داخلي وخارجي إيجابي عليه. في سياق هذه الخطة، فتك النظام بمسيحيي مناطق عديدة، واستغل قتلهم علي يديْ أجهزته لإقناع الغرب بأنه "حامي الأقليات" عامة، و"أتباعه" المسيحيين منها بصورة خاصة.
واليوم، بلغ الإجرام ببعض مسيحيي سورية والعراق حدا جعل أحدهم ينذر مواطنيه المسلمين، الذين طردتهم مليشيا الحشد الشيعي من بيوتهم، فلجأوا مكرهين إلى منازل قرى مسيحية مهجورة، بضرورة مغادرتها خلال ثلاثة أيام، وإلا أخرجتهم مليشياه التابعة للحشد الشيعي منها بالقوة. ومع أن جهات كنسية عراقية دانت سلوكه، واعتبرته فرديا لا يمثل غير صاحبه، فإن وجود مسيحيي المشرق يحتم إدانتهم القتل على الهوية، وبرفض السلاح والاشتراك في القتل، وفتح بيوتهم للمشرّدين والمهجرين من مواطناتهم ومواطنيهم، وتقاسم رغيف الخبز وجرعة الماء معهم، اقتناعا منهم بأن مصير المسيحيين ليس غير جزءٍ من بقية مواطنيهم، وأن مأساتهم فرع من مأساة المسلمين، إخوتهم في الوطن والحضارة والثقافة واللغة والتاريخ والآمال. وعلى الكنائس السورية والعراقية إدانة أي خروج على موقفها هذا، ومطالبة المسلحين من المسيحيين برد السلاح إلى النظامين الطائفيين، وإلا طالبت رعاياها بفرض حجر اجتماعي وديني عليهم.
واليوم، بلغ الإجرام ببعض مسيحيي سورية والعراق حدا جعل أحدهم ينذر مواطنيه المسلمين، الذين طردتهم مليشيا الحشد الشيعي من بيوتهم، فلجأوا مكرهين إلى منازل قرى مسيحية مهجورة، بضرورة مغادرتها خلال ثلاثة أيام، وإلا أخرجتهم مليشياه التابعة للحشد الشيعي منها بالقوة. ومع أن جهات كنسية عراقية دانت سلوكه، واعتبرته فرديا لا يمثل غير صاحبه، فإن وجود مسيحيي المشرق يحتم إدانتهم القتل على الهوية، وبرفض السلاح والاشتراك في القتل، وفتح بيوتهم للمشرّدين والمهجرين من مواطناتهم ومواطنيهم، وتقاسم رغيف الخبز وجرعة الماء معهم، اقتناعا منهم بأن مصير المسيحيين ليس غير جزءٍ من بقية مواطنيهم، وأن مأساتهم فرع من مأساة المسلمين، إخوتهم في الوطن والحضارة والثقافة واللغة والتاريخ والآمال. وعلى الكنائس السورية والعراقية إدانة أي خروج على موقفها هذا، ومطالبة المسلحين من المسيحيين برد السلاح إلى النظامين الطائفيين، وإلا طالبت رعاياها بفرض حجر اجتماعي وديني عليهم.
بلغ السيل الزبى، وصار من المحتم أخذ موقف يقطع مع سياستي النظامين ضد شعبيهما، لأن من الخير للمسيحيين أن يضحوا، مع غيرهم، من أجل حرية مواطنيهم ووطنهم، بدل الغرق مع هذين النظامين في مستنقعات الوحشية المذهبية والاختناق إنسانيا ووطنيا بيد الإجرام!
Friday, February 10, 2017
This man stood up to Trump. In Turkey he was branded a terrorist
A photo of Fatih Yildirim's protest beside a Jewish family took America by storm. Back home the reaction was very different
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Yildirim, seen here with his family, became a follower of Gulen while in high school (Fatih Yildirim)
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ANKARA - It was a picture that melted hearts around the world. Two dads - one Muslim, one Jewish - with their kids on their shoulders, united against Donald Trump's executive order banning citizens of seven countries from travelling to the United States.
But for Fatih Yildirim, the Muslim dad in the picture, becoming a viral sensation has been bittersweet. While he was lauded in global media outlets as diverse as Time and Good Housekeeping, back in his native Turkey Yildirim became the subject of a hostile media campaign that branded him a terrorist.
His experience is a reminder of the often topsy-turvy nature of politics in Turkey, a Muslim-majority country that has high hopes for Trump's presidency.
It is also a personal story about how families have been ripped apart by one of the most spectacular political rifts in the country's modern history. The photograph has put his already strained relationship with his family in danger of permanent rupture.
"Because this picture came out, I lost my last remaining ties with my family," he said. "I'm scared to call my dad or mum now."
Yildirim, a warehouse manager, is part of a deeply contentious group known as the Gulen movement. Founded by Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic cleric from northeastern Turkey, it began amassing supporters from the late 1960s.
By emphasising the importance of education, over several decades Gulen forged a network of high-achieving but secretive followers who went on to secure jobs in the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the military and the police.
When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP party came to power in 2002, it forged a marriage of convenience with the Gulen movement. By harnessing the strength of its followers, the party was able to push back against those in the state structure opposed to its open embrace of Islam.
Hundreds of officers were purged from the military in cases that were later shown to be based on thin or fabricated evidence.
Yildirim, now 37, became a follower of Gulen when he was in high school after being introduced to the movement by a friend.
He has lived in the United States since 2002 after first travelling there on an exchange programme. He met his future wife, Amy, while working in a pizza restaurant. They got married, had three children and lived what Yildirim describes as a normal, quiet family life in Schaumburg, a suburb of Chicago.
Yildirim, seen here with his family, became a follower of Gulen while in high school (Fatih Yildirim)Growing tensions
Back in Turkey, the relationship between the Gulen movement and the ruling AKP was growing increasingly fraught.
In 2013, it imploded. Leaked recordings, apparently taped by Gulenist police officers, allegedly showed corruption reaching right to the heart of Erdogan's inner circle. The former allies were now publicly at war. Erdogan accused the Gulen movement of forming a "parallel structure" inside the state and vowed to flush it out.
Yildirim's family, staunch supporters of the AKP, grew ever more upset by his continued devotion to Fethullah Gulen. In 2015, the father-of-four lost his job as a sales and ticketing agent with Turkish Airlines, the national flag-carrier — a decision Yildirim believes was based on his links to the movement. His mother and father had no sympathy.
"They said you got what you deserved," he said. "Since then, things became difficult. They made it very clear."
On July 15 last year, a violent coup attempt shook Turkey to its foundations. Putschist officers opened fire on civilians and bombed the Turkish parliament, leaving 248 people dead.
The government claimed that the plot was masterminded by Gulen, who since 1999 has lived in exile in a mountain retreat in Pennsylvania. For Yildirim, that meant that the tensions with his family grew worse.
The rise of Trump
Just four days after the failed coup, Donald Trump won the Republican nomination. Having previously bristled at the billionaire businessman's calls for a ban on Muslim immigration to the United States, Erdogan began to warm to him.
It emerged that members of the Gulen movement had donated to the campaign of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. Trump, meanwhile, praised the Turkish leader for his "impressive" success in thwarting the attempt to overthrow him - and dodged a question about human rights concerns.
An article by retired general Mike Flynn, now Trump's national security adviser, suggested that the United States should support Turkey's demand that Gulen be extradited to Turkey.
Less than a month after Trump's inauguration, analysts warn that Ankara's hopes will almost certainly end in disappointment. The idea that his administration will reduce US support for Syrian Kurdish forces, seen by Turkey as a grave threat to its own national security and stability, already seems likely to be misplaced.
But for now, Turkish officials and pro-government media appear to be pursuing a wait-and-see policy. It was left to the prime minister, Binali Yildirim, to criticise the controversial travel ban. Erdogan has said that some of the new president's language is "disturbing" but has also praised him for publicly chiding a CNN reporter.
A different perspective
It was into this context that the photo of the protest at Chicago's O'Hare airport emerged. While international media leapt on the image of Yildirim and Rabbi Jordan Bendat-Appell as a symbol of interfaith harmony, Turkey's pro-government outlets branded Yildirim a member of the "Gulenist Terror Organisation", known in Turkey as FETO.
The channel 24 TV, owned by a businessman who once said that was "in love" with Erdogan, hinted at a wider conspiracy. Its news report asked: "After the defeat of Hilary Clinton, who they openly supported, what kind of role is FETO going to play in protests aimed at weakening Donald Trump?"
Melih Gokcek, the mayor of Ankara, claimed that Gulenists were working in conjunction with the billionaire financier George Soros to undermine the new president.
Pro-FETOs who live in USA, are organizing the protests against TRUMP together with SOROS in the USA...
Yildirim says openly that he is a supporter of the Gulen movement but dismisses the claim that his protest was somehow orchestrated by the group as "nonsense".
He and his wife made a spur-of-the-moment decision to join the airport demonstration, he said.
"We were following on the news, we saw the protests. My wife went on the woman's march in Chicago. I said why don't we go and take some cookies to those lawyers giving pro bono services. She said it was a great idea."
"The Turkish media is trying to manipulate the situation but it's not true. No one sent me there."
Because this picture came out, I lost my last remaining ties with my family. I'm scared to call my dad or mum now.Fatih Yildirim
He rejects the label that he is a terrorist. He also says that he remains "unconvinced" by the Turkish government's accusations against the Gulen movement, insisting that he has never seen any evidence of wrongdoing or criminal activity.
That view of the group would be challenged by the many prominent Turks convinced that they were targeted by the opaque network. While questions remain about the coup, British ministers and diplomats have said repeatedly that they believe the movement had a hand in it.
Alan Duncan, a foreign office minister, told the foreign affairs committee last month: "It's very clear that there were many Gulenists involved in the coup, but we don't have the information or evidence to decide definitively."
Yildirim believes that the Turkish campaign against him was an attempt by the Turkish government to turn the Trump administration against the Gulen movement.
He said: "I think they're trying to use me to say to the Trump administration: 'Look this movement here is working against you. So you should persecute them or extradite Gulen'."
Swept up in the moment
The biggest blow for Yildirim was personal. While he was able to shrug off some negative news stories, Yildirim fears the damage with his family may be far more lasting. He does not know if he will speak to his parents again.
He had no idea the photograph would capture the world's imagination in the way that it did. "I didn't know it was going to go viral," he said.
"How could I know? I thought I was doing something normal. I didn't think I was doing anything extraordinary - and I still don't think that. We weren't saving someone from a fire, or a river. We were just standing up for human rights."
He has asked himself if it was a mistake to give his name to the photographer but, ultimately, he believes that the picture has done more good than harm.
It shows, he said, that "all these minorities, all these oppositions, can get together and stand up for something."
"It is bad for me but around the world it is creating a better image," he said. "I'm happy to be part of it."
Trump's desperate search for a 'Reichstag Fire'
Given his serious unpopularity, an incident for illegal power grab is increasingly a dangerous possibility.
![The Reichstag in flames during the Nazi ascent to power in Berlin, February 27, 1933 [Fox Photos/Getty Images]](http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2017/2/7/d57791e20cc44acf9ef4bfd683e34297_18.jpg)
The Reichstag in flames during the Nazi ascent to power in Berlin, February 27, 1933
Donald Trump and his top Islamophobe nomenklatura gathered at the White House, now led by the militant crusader Stephen Bannon, are on a desperate lookout for their "Reichstag Fire" and their favourite propaganda outlet, Fox News, is franticly searching for it - even in Canada.
"Reichstag Fire" was an arson attack on the Reichstag, the German parliament, in Berlin on February 27, 1933. The incident was soon abused by Adolf Hitler and his gang to demand a suspension of civil liberties in systematic preparation for his putsch for total fascist power.
Ever since, the term "Reichstag Fire" is used metaphorically to mark a dreadful event abused by any proto-fascist movement to blame an amorphous internal enemy, to be coupled with an external enemy, and rapidly from there rapidly move towards a total control of the state apparatus by criminalising and crushing public dissent.
Given the fact of Trump's serious unpopularity with a significant portion of American society, this "Reichstag Fire" incident is increasingly a dangerous possibility.
From the historic Women's March in Washington to widespread airport rallies against his Muslim ban, Trump and his handlers know only too well his loss of the presidential popular vote by about three million nationwide is now growing into widespread public discontent, state-level gubernatorial opposition, and systematic resistance by the judiciary branch.
Fake news and Fox News
Soon after the executive order late in January banning Muslims from seven countries for 90 days to enter the United States, the Trump administration was given what it thought was its "Reichstag Fire" moment to justify its draconian measures and push for even more.
The incident presented itself when reports emerged that a gunman had attacked a Muslim centre in Quebec, Canada. Fox News, Trump's most trusted source of fake news, instantly came forward and reported the perpetrator was a Moroccan Muslim.
This, however, like most other things on Fox News, was a case of bogus reporting. The suspect of the mass murder in Quebec was, in fact, a violent "white nationalist" named Alexandre Bissonnette, who is a notorious character known to the local authorities for his racist Islamophobic views. Not only was the perpetrator of this crime no Muslim, but, in fact, Muslims were his direct targets.
None of this, however, prevented Fox News from jumping to the conclusion that the act of terror was perpetrated by a Moroccan Muslim and, on the basis of this false news, the White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer instantly jumped the gun, declaring it a vindication of Trump's Muslim ban.
Demonisation and official persecution of Muslims, just as Jews were in Nazi Germany, will progress apace until he manufactures his 'Reichstag Fire'.
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But the proverbial cake in this desperate search for a "Reichstag Fire" goes to the notorious Kellyanne Conway, Trump's top chatterbox consigliere, who, in an interview soon after the Muslim ban, referred to two Iraqi refugees as "masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre" with baldfaced charlatanism.
There is no such thing as a "Bowling Green massacre." She just made it up - and the dimwitted interviewer just stared at her and did not object to this fiction. Yes, two Iraqis were arrested in that city for allegedly having ties to an explosive device used against US troops in Iraq.
But there was no "Bowling Green massacre", except in the viciously demented mind of Conway, the flowering achievement of American charlatanism.
State of emergency
Trump and his handlers are desperate to find a Muslim "Reichstag Fire" and they will use the incident to further demonise Islam in the US and push for a Muslim registry or even worse.
The illegal and unconstitutional Muslim ban is only the first salvo. Trump has a longer spectrum in mind. Demonisation and official persecution of Muslims, just as Jews were in Nazi Germany, will progress apace until he manufactures his "Reichstag Fire".
In addition to a domestic threat, Trump and his gang will need a foreign war to safeguard his presidency for this and the next terms. He never stopped campaigning after his win. He knows for a fact he is a vastly unpopular president. His entire first term will be spent campaigning for the second.
"Donald Trump needs a war," Bradley Burston correctly diagnoses and further adds, "But not just any war. He needs just the right global non-Christian, all-powerful, all-frightening, non-white, non-negotiable enemy. He needs a Holy War."
The only "Holy War" Trump can wage is of course against Muslims.
Standing next to him is one Steve Bannon, an obsessed crusader you have to go back all the way to characters such as Raynald of Chatillon or Guy of Lusignan of the Crusaders period to find the likes of him: vicious, malignant, hatred of Muslims and Jews definitive to who and what he is.
Bannon has a malignantly illiterate conception of a perpetual war between Islam and Christianity that he has picked up off some lunatic website like his own Breitbart, fully on display in a vile speech he gave via Skype to a gang of like-minded militant Christians in 2014.
At one crucial point in this speech he says: "I believe you should take a very, very, very aggressive stance against radical Islam," and if you thought he means "radical Islam" and not "Islam", he immediately corrects you by adding: "If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing. I think they kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna, or Tours, or other places … It bequeathed to us the great institution that is the church of the West."
From Samuel Huntington to New Atheists to Benjamin Netanyahu to Bannon's Christian zealotry have been pointing to an all-out war with one final standing Muslim country not entirely subservient to the US Christian militarism: Iran.
Trump's National Security Adviser - and Bannon's fellow militant Islamophobe - Michael Flynn just came out putting Iran on notice.
Consistently raising public awareness and mobilising civil disobedience against Trump's policies have now become the hallmarks of a whole new generation of anti-war civil rights movement in the US.
Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.
Thursday, February 9, 2017
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable
A MUST READ!
By Paul Blumenthal
WASHINGTON ― In 2009, the historian David Kaiser, then a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, got a call from a guy named Steve Bannon.
Bannon wanted to interview Kaiser for a documentary he was making based on the work of the generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe. Kaiser, an expert on Strauss and Howe, didn’t know Bannon from Adam, but he agreed to participate. He went to the Washington headquarters of the conservative activist group Citizens United, where Bannon was then based, for a chat.
Kaiser was impressed by how much Bannon knew about Strauss and Howe, who argued that American history operates in four-stage cycles that move from major crisis to awakening to major crisis. These crises are called “Fourth Turnings” — and Bannon believed the U.S. had entered one on Sept. 18, 2008, when Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke went to Capitol Hill to ask for a bailout of the international banking system.
“He knew the theory,” Kaiser said. “He obviously enjoyed interviewing me.”
Bannon pressed Kaiser on one point during the interview. “He was talking about the wars of the Fourth Turnings,” Kaiser recalled. “You have the American Revolution, you have the Civil War, you have World War II; they’re getting bigger and bigger. Clearly, he was anticipating that in this Fourth Turning there would be one at least as big. And he really made an effort, I remember, to get me to say that on the air.”
Kaiser didn’t believe global war was preordained, so he demurred. The line of questioning didn’t make it into the documentary — a polemical piece, released in 2010, called “Generation Zero.”
Bannon, who’s now ensconced in the West Wing as President Donald Trump’s closest adviser, has been portrayed as Trump’s main ideas guy. But in interviews, speeches and writing — and especially in his embrace of Strauss and Howe — he has made clear that he is, first and foremost, an apocalypticist.
In Bannon’s view, we are in the midst of an existential war, and everything is a part of that conflict. Treaties must be torn up, enemies named, culture changed. Global conflagration, should it occur, would only prove the theory correct. For Bannon, the Fourth Turning has arrived. The Grey Champion, a messianic strongman figure, may have already emerged. The apocalypse is now.
“What we are witnessing,” Bannon told The Washington Post last month, “is the birth of a new political order.”
DREW ANGERER VIA GETTY IMAGES
Strauss died in 2007, and Howe did not respond to requests for comment. But their books speak for themselves. The first, Generations, released in 1991, set forth the idea that history unfolds in repetitive, predictable four-part cycles ― and that the U.S. was, and still is, going through the most recent cycle’s tail end. (In Generations, Strauss and Howe became perhaps the first writers to use the term “millennials” to describe the current cohort of young people.)
Strauss and Howe’s theory is based on a series of generational archetypes — the Artists, the Prophets, the Nomads and the Heroes — that sound like they were pulled from a dystopian young adult fiction series. Each complete four-part cycle, or saeculum, takes about 80 to 100 years, in Strauss and Howe’s reckoning. The Fourth Turning, which the authors published in 1997, focuses on the final, apocalyptic part of the cycle.
Strauss and Howe postulate that during this Fourth Turning crisis, an unexpected leader will emerge from an older generation to lead the nation, and what they call the “Hero” generation (in this case, millennials), to a new order. This person is known as the Grey Champion. An election or another event — perhaps a war — will bring this person to power, and their regime will rule throughout the crisis.
“The winners will now have the power to pursue the more potent, less incrementalist agenda about which they had long dreamed and against which their adversaries had darkly warned,” Strauss and Howe wrote in The Fourth Turning. “This new regime will enthrone itself for the duration of the Crisis. Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Where leaders had once been inclined to alleviate societal pressures, they will now aggravate them to command the nation’s attention.”
Cyclical models of history are something academics kick around every now and then, said Sean Wilentz, an American history professor at Princeton University. But the idea has not caught on among historians or political actors.
“It’s just a conceit. It’s a fiction, it’s all made up,” Wilentz said about cyclical historical models. “There’s nothing to them. They’re just inventions.”
Michael Lind, a historian and co-founder of the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank, has called Strauss and Howe’s work “pseudoscience” and said their “predictions about the American future turn out to be as vague as those of fortune cookies.”
But Bannon bought it.
“This is the fourth great crisis in American history,” Bannon told an audience at the Liberty Restoration Foundation, a conservative nonprofit, in 2011. “We had the Revolution. We had the Civil War. We had the Great Depression and World War II. This is the great Fourth Turning in American history, and we’re going to be one thing on the other side.”
Major crises “happen in about 80- or 100-year cycles,” Bannon told a conference put on by the Republican women’s group Project GoPink that same year. “And somewhere over the next 10 or 20 years, we’re going to come through this crisis, and we’re either going to be the country that was bequeathed to us or it’s going to be something that’s completely or totally different.”
The “Judeo-Christian West is collapsing,” he went on. “It’s imploding. And it’s imploding on our watch. And the blowback of that is going to be tremendous.”
War is coming, Bannon has warned. In fact, it’s already here.
It’s war. It’s war. Every day, we put up: America’s at war, America’s at war. We’re at war.White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, 2015
“You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China,” he said during a 2016 radio appearance. “They are motivated. They’re arrogant. They’re on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian West is on the retreat.”
“Against radical Islam, we’re in a 100-year war,” he told Political Vindication Radio in 2011.
“We’re going to war in the South China Seas in the next five to 10 years, aren’t we?” Bannon asked during a 2016 interview with Reagan biographer Lee Edwards.
“We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism,” he said in a speech to a Vatican conference in 2014. “And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.”
In a 2015 radio appearance, Bannon described how he ran Breitbart, the far-right news site he chaired at the time. “It’s war,” he said. “It’s war. Every day, we put up: America’s at war, America’s at war. We’re at war.”
To confront this threat, Bannon argued, the Judeo-Christian West must fight back, lest it lose as it did when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453. He called Islam a “religion of submission” in 2016 — a refutation of President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 description of Islam as a religion of peace. In 2007, Bannon wrote a draft movie treatment for a documentary depicting a “fifth column” of Muslim community groups, the media, Jewish organizations and government agencies working to overthrow the government and impose Islamic law.
CARLOS BARRIA / REUTERS
“There’s clearly a fifth column here in the United States,” Bannon warned in July 2016. “There’s rot at the center of the Judeo-Christian West,” he said in November 2015. “Secularism has sapped the strength of the Judeo-Christian West to defend its ideals,” he argued at the Vatican conference. The “aristocratic Washington class” and the media, he has claimed, are in league with the entire religion of Islam and an expansionist China to undermine Judeo-Christian America.
This sort of existential conflict is central to Strauss and Howe’s predictions. There are four ways a Fourth Turning can end, they argued, and three of them involve some kind of massive collapse. America might “be reborn,” and we’d wait another 80 to 100 years for a new cycle to culminate in a crisis again. The modern world — the era of Western history that Strauss and Howe believe began in the 15th century — might come to an end. We might “spare modernity but mark the end of our nation.” Or we might face “the end of man,” in a global war leading to “omnicidal Armageddon.”
Now, a believer in these vague and unfounded predictions sits in the White House, at the right hand of the president.
“We’re gonna have to have some dark days before we get to the blue sky of morning again in America,” Bannon warned in 2010. “We are going to have to take some massive pain. Anybody who thinks we don’t have to take pain is, I believe, fooling you.”
“This movement,” he said in November, “is in the top of the first inning.”
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