ABSTRACT
We live in dark times where the rhetoric of fear, terror and evil has reached a new level. From apocalyptic talk, Messianic calls for salvation and eschatological cries for the doomsday of our planet by religious ultra-right and fundamentalist Christians, to the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘axis of evil’; the neoconservatives of the Bush administration aided by the Christian right and a docile media have carefully crafted a reactionary capitalist neoconservative administration centred around a rising authoritarianism and militarism. At the same time, they also positioned the United States in the midst of a self-constructed (while at the same time destructive) political and ideological Dark Age – a catastrophic legacy that is going to take tremendous effort to reverse and deconstruct. Public servants leave the affairs of the polis in the ‘hands of God’ as evidenced in former President Bush’s initial rationale for the pre-emptive war against Iraq and Sarah Palin’s use of God as a justification for the war in Iraq: “our leaders – our national leaders – are sending [the troops] out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan”, she asserted at the Wasilla Assembly of God in June of 2008. In addition, the assault on secularism with ‘faith-based’ social services seriously challenges the separation of church and state, the debate on evolution vs. ‘intelligent design’ still wages, alongside debate on school prayer, abortion, divorce and same-sex marriage. These are hot social issues and they have been used by reactionaries as a moral justification to invoke the ‘supernatural’ that now acquires new power over politics.1
