Zimbabwe's Turn to the Dark Side

When I learned this morning that Robert Mugabe's tactics of thuggery and violence had caused his opponent for the Zimbabwean presidency, Morgan Tsvangirai, to withdraw from the run-off election and go into hiding at the Dutch embassy, I was, like many people who have been following the election crisis, dubfounded, and I was even more disturbed when I saw a BBC broadcast showing armies of pro-Mugabe supporters with clubs and machetes walking through fields preparing to kill or maim anyone who did not support his tenuous hold on power.

Mugabe has completed his turn from from a Nelson Mandela-like figure to the African equivalent of Darth Vader. The question is what will happen next. The African leaders who are most able to exert pressure on Zimbabwe—particularly South Africa and Mozambique, because they control Zimbabwe's access to the sea—seem unwilling to do so. The New York Times, for instance, notes that South Africa has consitently opposed action by the United Nations Security Council, perhaps because it is concerned that any pressure on the regime could cause it to collapse completely, creating an even greater humanitarian crisis that would destabilize the entire region.

Yet, Brendan O’Neill, writing in Spiked, suggests the problem may not be the lack of outside involvement in Zimbabwe. Ironically, it may be just the opposite: The ardent support of Morgan Tsvangirai by outside governments has encouraged him to look outside the borders of Zimbabwe for support instead of developing a stronger grassroots network within the country. "The events of the past 24 hours demonstrate that Western governments’ relentless exploitation of the Zimbabwe crisis has helped to disenfranchise the Zimbabwean people," he write. "Literally. The logic of Western pressure has made the MDC reliant on the favour and flattery of external forces, rather than on the grit and the votes of its own mass support base."

In withdrawing from contention, Tsvangirai is trying to avoid further violence and possibly genocide. O'Neill, however, sees his actions as inappropriate. This is a time, he contends, in which the Zimbabwean people need to take matters into their own hands. But what does that mean? Is the opposition prepared for armed insurrection? Do they have enough guns? This is certainly what the Mugabe government is preparing for, as his supporters parade through the streets chanting, "Win or war!"

One of the most interesting and potentially important forces for change lies not with military action but with the country's Christian churches. The Tablet writes of Mugabe's struggles to control Christians in the country by encouraging them to become "truly Zimbabwean" or "patriotic." The Anglican Bishop of Harare has done so, though the Catholic Church, as well as other Protestant groups, have stood firm.

The importance of Zimbabwe's Christian churches should not be discounted. They provide a ready grassroots network as well as a moral vocabulary that can help them critique the ruling regime without descending into violence. Faith, not force, may yet hold the key to finding a solution to Zimbabwe's challenges before the nation's instability engulfs all of southern Africa.

Did the Irish save European civilization?

A few weeks ago, I met someone who worked for the European branch of the American Center for Law and Justice (Pat Robertson's answer to the ACLU). We chatted about his work, and he discussed his latest project, which, in a nutshell, amounted to the subversion of the European Union.

Dum. Dum. Dum.

The issue in question involved the Treaty of Lisbon, which was rejected last week by the Irish people. The Treaty, what the New York Times called "a painstakingly negotiated blueprint for consolidating the European Union’s power and streamlining its increasingly unwieldy bureaucracy," was supposed to reform and solidify the governance of Europe. But for more conservatively minded folks, the Treaty's streamlining procedures also meant that member states would give up much of their control over legislation and regulations in the areas of health care and family life. (In other words, states would no longer be able to regulate abortion and gay marriage.)

The ECLJ brief details the concerns.

But while people may disagree with the ECLJ over the controversial moral issues involved, the serious questions about the approval process that they raise are significant. The major problem with the Treaty is that it amounts to a back-door approval of a European governing system without the democratic consent of the people. Ireland, because of its constitution, was the only member state of the European Union that actually voted on it. The 18 member states that already approved the Treaty did so through more diplomatic (that is, closed) means.

Of course, one can see the Lisbon Treaty as a procedural issue, something that ordinary people wouldn't care to understand or be bothered with. But is that any way to begin a government?

Xenophobic race-baiters, unite!

A few months ago, after watching an insipid History Channel documentary on the anti-Christ of Revelations, it occurred to me that the fundamentalist description of the anti-Christ—that he would be charismatic, come from nowhere, inspire a devoted following that captivated the world, etc.—bore some serious resemblances to Barack Obama.

Of course, in no way, shape or form do I think such a portrayal of Obama is accurate. In fact, I think it is, in a word, kinda nuts and is driven not by religious conviction but out of a xenophobic fear of Obama's "Otherness"—i.e., his race, his name, his non-Western roots. In fact, one could see this xenophobic fear of Obama as reflecting a deeper racial prejudice that is no longer socially acceptable to air in public.

Anyway, when I noted the connection, I became curious, and so I Googled the phrase “obama antichrist” to see what the Religious Right was thinking about it. It turns out that the weblog Wonkette apparently did a similar search in October of 2006 and found only 16,000 pages on Google containing the two words. At the time, Dick Cheney was a far more popular target, with 169,000 pages. This was during the heated mid-term elections, which means that the epithet of "antichrist" was probably used by Democrats, not Republicans. The difference, of course, is that the use of the term by fundamentalist Christians is far more explosive.

The day of the Texas and Ohio primaries, things were far different. I Googled “obama antichrist” at about 9:00 in the morning and got 292,000 pages. Then, in preparing to email some friends about my find, I Googled it again at about 10:30 a.m. and got 382,000. Something, it seems, was brewing, and it has continued to brew.

Since then, the number of pages associating Barack Obama and the End of Days have ebbed and flowed with his chances. Today, when I searched the terms, the number surpassed one million for the first time.

Some of these pages are humorous ones, but many more, like this one, aren’t.

While this is far from a scientific survey, in many ways, the growth of the association between Barack Obama and the demonic on Google seems suggestive of a larger trend, particularly among Christian evangelicals, that occasionally bubbles to the surface.

This leads to some serious questions, not about the eschatological significance of Barack Obama—after all, the antichrist has been everyone from the pope to Colonel Sanders (whose chicken has to be demonic)—but about the tactics that the Religious Right could use later on during the general election. If you want to mobilize evangelical voters, and you don’t care how you do it, you can create a grassroots campaign naming him as the antichrist and warning about the demonic regime he will institute once elected. (This is not unusual. John Guest, the leader of a evangelical megachurch in Pittsburgh, where I live, called John Kerry “Satan’s candidate” in 2004.)

Time will tell.