Summary: Another example of the hate and ignorance that have become central aspects of Republican thinking, provided by Rush Limbough.
Today’s foreign policy analysis from the Right, provided by Rush Limbaugh on his show of October 14:
Now, up until today, most Americans have never heard of the combat Lord’s Resistance Army. And here we are at war with them. Have you ever heard of Lord’s Resistance Army, Dawn? How about you, Brian? Snerdley, have you? You never heard of Lord’s Resistance Army? Well, proves my contention, most Americans have never heard of it, and here we are at war with them. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. It means God. I was only kidding. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. That’s what the lingo means, “to help regional forces remove from the battlefield,” meaning capture or kill.
So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda, and — (interruption) no, I’m not kidding. Jacob Tapper just reported it. Now, are we gonna help the Egyptians wipe out the Christians? Wouldn’t you say that we are? I mean the Coptic Christians are being wiped out, but it wasn’t just Obama that supported that. The conservative intelligentsia thought it was an outbreak of democracy. Now they’ve done a 180 on that, but they forgot that they supported it in the first place. Now they’re criticizing it.
Lord’s Resistance Army objectives. I have them here. “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people.” Now, again Lord’s Resistance Army is who Obama sent troops to help nations wipe out. The objectives of the Lord’s Resistance Army, what they’re trying to accomplish with their military action in these countries is the following:
“To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people; to fight for the immediate restoration of the competitive multiparty democracy in Uganda; to see an end to gross violation of human rights and dignity of Ugandans; to ensure the restoration of peace and security in Uganda, to ensure unity, sovereignty, and economic prosperity beneficial to all Ugandans, and to bring to an end the repressive policy of deliberate marginalization of groups of people who may not agree with the LRA ideology.”
Those are the objectives of the group that we are fighting, or who are being fought and we are joining in the effort to remove them from the battlefield.
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Is that right? The Lord’s Resistance Army is being accused of really bad stuff? Child kidnapping, torture, murder, that kind of stuff? Well, we just found out about this today. We’re gonna do, of course, our due diligence research on it. But nevertheless we got a hundred troops being sent over there to fight these guys — and they claim to be Christians.
Limbough is proud of the last paragraph, listing it on his “pearls of wisdom” page. It is almost too stupid to warrant analysis, but it illustrates in extreme form mainstream Republican views.
(a) The reflexive nature of Republican’s opposition to Obama. Limbough opposes Obama’s opposition to the Lord’s Resistance Army — without bothering to look up who they are.
(b) The almost blasphemous Christianity of the Right. The Lord’s Resistance Army claim to be Christians — and they’re killing Moslems — so he supports them. Without learning anything more about them. No matter what their actual deeds, which are evil.
(c) Embracing ignorance; exulting in it. As the Party tells us in 1984, Ignorance is Strength. Limbough confidently rebukes Obama while knowing almost nothing about the Lord’s Resistance Army. This is a key aspect of Republican thinking, as seen in the embrace of faux economics, creationism, exaggerating the size of government waste and fraud, and misunderstanding the climate science debate (not that the Earth is warming, but over the causes and future magnitude).
For More Information
Articles about the LRA:
- Slideshow about the LRA, Washington Post, 14 October 2011
- “Profile: Uganda’s LRA rebels“, BBC, 6 February 2004
- International Criminal Court Warrant of Arrest for Joseph Kony issued on 8 July 2005
- Invisible Children — advocacy group and documentary about LRA’s child soldiers
- Sudan: The Lost Boys: Child Soldiers and Unaccompanied Boys in Southern Sudan (New York: HRW, 1994)
- Children of Sudan: Slaves, Street Children, and Child Soldiers (New York: HRW, 1995)
- The Scars of Death: Children Abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda (New York: HRW, 1997)
A heart-rending post on the FM website: The Real Revolution in Military Affairs (it’s not what you think), 14 November 2005 — Summary:
One of the most important and least discussed changes in the nature of warfare is who does the fighting. Women and children acting as soldiers are not unknown in the past, but never with such a large and increasing role. Their participation changes the very nature of war, with effects today we can only guess at.
His position is ludicrous. The Republicans don’t even need to make efforts to bash Obama anymore, their followers swallow this drudge wholescale. In the link below, you’ll find an article I published on the LRA in 2008. The first page or two (page 59 of the PDF) are a very condensed survey of the situation and the remainder of the text is an overview of the security paradox in the region. Thought it could help…
“The Pillars and Kernel of Independence of National Human Rights Institutions: A Comparative Analysis of Canada, Ghana and South. Africa Human Rights“, INQUIRY & INSIGHT (U OF Waterloo’s Graduate Journal of Political Science ), 2008 (pp 1-24) — Large PDF.
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FM reply: Thank you for posting this!
Its nothing new, the kneejerk reaction to excuse or dismiss atrocities perpetrated by Christians.
Take a look at how they reacted to the Oslo shootings. Most simply tried to divert the conversation back to how evil Muslims are, while some particularly disgusting individuals like Glenn Beck and Pam Geller rationalized the atrocities by comparing the victims to the Hitler Youth.
Geller is also a Bosnian genocide denier who has defended Slobodan Milosevic and General Mladic.
Beck, by the way, earlier this year pimped for Ivory Coast dictator Laurent Gbagbo as French-led UN forces put an end to his illegitimate rule and . Why, because Gbagbo claimed to be Christian. Ditto how Pat Robertson stuck up for Liberian dictator Charles Taylor as a ‘good Baptist’ despite his involvement in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents through his support of the RUF.
Hmmm… I think Rush Limbaugh just made statements that could be taken as providing material and moral support to a terrorist organization.
Watch the skies Rush, and try to stay out of the open.
We have a “best of thread” winner!
Bless me Father. I did not start a battle, bomb a clinic, or bully effeminate boys. Mea culpa.
There was another totalitarian christian regime that declared “Gott Mit Uns” and recruited children to defend the homeland, back in the 20th century. They had support from the highest levels of the catholic church – as Christopher Hitchens likes to point out, the only high member of that government who was excommunicated was Goebbels – for marrying a protestant…
What I see in Limbaugh and many of the US right wing is the traditional fusion of the totalitarian and the sectarian. Religion serves as an excuse for totalitarian leaders to go to war, and additional fuel to fan the flames, while the totalitarian leadership repays its holy-man supporters by increasing their domain under the sheltering sword-arm of the conqueror.
It also has always struck me that the methods of religious indoctrination and statist indoctrination are basically the same: if you can get people to believe there’s a magic man in the sky who doesn’t want you to do this or that and who wants you to hate that or the other, then you’ve been pre-selected for victimization by the state as well – you’ve already shown that you’re a sucker for a tall tale and if you’re dumb enough to believe in the magic man you’re going to believe that Hans Blix was wrong and the Iraqis really did have WMD. Or any of the other ridiculous belief structures that we find in the “political true believer” It’s not a coincidence that political true believers and religious true believers are selected out of the same pool.
“many of the US right wing is the traditional fusion of the totalitarian and the sectarian”
Saudi Arabia is another — more successful, more extreme — version of this. It’s a common and often successful forms of social organization.
“It used to be simple; good one hand; evil on the other. There was a struggle. we had a game; and yes, we made it up. Then you came along, the scientists, the geniuses. You’re in your heads. You’re half-hearted. You believe in nothing! There was a time when people sold their souls to me! Well these days i know, you think you don’t need Mister Frost. But, where is your enthusiasm? There’s no passion! There’s no life!”
— Mister Frost (1990 film)
This may be a bit off-topic, but more than anything this makes me curious about the LRA. I mean what do we really know about them, and about the true nature of civil strife in Uganda? The official line is that the LRA “has no apparent purpose or aim” other than terrorizing innocent people for the sheer sake of it, and has been able to sustain a capable and resilient fighting force through the use of brute coercion alone.
Based on what we know of human nature, do these two assertions seem particularly likely, or is there possibly more to the story than what we’re hearing? I know I’ve read in a couple of articles that the Ugandan government has also committed atrocities. People don’t typically commit atrocities over nothing, so… what are these people really fighting over?
I don’t want to hijack the Limbaugh-bashing, but I honestly don’t know much about the Uganda situation and I’m honestly curious.
Your comment is certainly appropriate! See the links at the end for more information about the situation in Uganda and the LRA. Also, the links at the end of the relevant Wikipedia entries go to a wide range of useful sources.
I haven’t scanned though all of the wikipedia references yet, but the links at the end of this post don’t seem to be getting at the deeper story I’m looking for. The BBC article, for instance, makes no mention of ethnic divides in Uganda– are there really no relevant ethnic divides in this post-colonial African nation?
Also, it states that “many church and traditional leaders believe that only talking can halt the LRA’s murderous campaign”. Why? If Kony is a madman without a cause, the clearly there can be nothing to talk about.
The Wikipedia page for the LRA insurgency clearlly stetes that the original base of the LRA was with the Acholi, and in the Acholiland region.
Hey Fabius, I’ve got a day job, OK? I was hoping someone else had done their homework and could share for the benefit of the group. These “deeper narrative” things, when they do exist lurking somewhere beneath the surface, often turn out to be pretty complicated and pretty hard to tease out. But thank you for reminding me to read carefully. :-)
Also, the Acholi are only one ethnic group, right? So have they just been atrocitying themselves the whole time?
My point was that the ethnic nature of this was easily found. Use google and I’m sure you’ll find the detailed material you seek.
In reply to your question, yes — violent criminal bands often prey upon their own people in addition to outsiders. Look in our inner cities for examples. They often prefer to prey on outsiders, but the locals are right there — and other ethnic groups tend to have their own gangs that will resist penetration into their turf.
Let’s keep things simple…
John also says in the previous verse 6… “Whoever sins has neither seen Him nor known Him. ” (1 John 3 v 6 NKJV) …pretty much whether they say they are ‘Christian’ or not.
Jesus also gave us an ultra simple guide… “Therefore by their fruits you will know them.” (Matthew 7 v 20 NKJV)
Is it okay to kill? I would say yes; try to attack my wife or daughter at two in the morning as you raid my home and see what happens. And beware of quoting “Thou shalt not kill.” from the Ten Commandments… the Hebrew of that commandment is actually “You shall not murder.” as in Exodus 20 v 13 New King James, Amplified and New International Versions of the Bible… and murder as we know is a whole lot different than kill. Hence the Apostle Paul’s staunch advocacy of the death penalty as deterrent for society. (Romans 13 v 4)
So are the LRA defending their families from those that would butcher them or are they themselves rampaging and committing the very acts that the Apostle John says makes them “of the devil”? Without knowing enough personally on this conflict or being there on the ground I can’t see from this distance, but one day the true Judge will certainly not acquit the guilty, whatever side they are on.
Thanks, Dave
Yes. The point is not whether we approve or disapprove of LRA. It is that we must not trust in Rush to decide for us.
Wow. Just…wow. I thought religiots were ill-educated, but come on! Limbaugh didn’t know about the atrocities comiited by the LRA? And the guy wants to be president? Although since it’s a christian doing it it makes it ok then…. Oh, and Dave, the LRA use child soldiers, often ‘recruiting’ them by killing their family before abducting them. Kony himself is a murdering rapist. Although he may get off if we use the bible to try him rather than actual laws and human decency.