These are truly insane times.

Aside from the odd grumblings about being a “Christian nation,” here in Britain we are mostly divorced from strong religious themes in our politics. Not so in the US, and I’m not talking about Prayer in Schools here either.

Something big is brewing in America, and it’s not all good. It’s not just the usual war hawk talk from the rank and file Rambo crowd like John McCain, Lindsey Graham and new baby hawks like Senator Tom Cotton. We understand them and their desire to act on behalf of the military industrial complex to sell more Apaches, planes, bombs, boats and missiles. Men such as these can be found everywhere throughout history. They love and want war, and always will.

That’s not it though. There is something else. There exists a rather ugly anti-Arab, or more specifically – anti-Islam wave which is being pushed along, gradually building up into a Zeitgeist in US right-wing political and ‘Christian’ discourse. Presently, this is threatening to go mainstream in America. This is partly due to 15 years of the West’s war against Arabs, and a classically conditioned Pavlovian western anxiety surrounding Muslims. This is not just traditional bigotry, or even racism. It is both disturbing – and frightening, not unlike similar Nazi rhetoric which ushered in Germany’s modern dark age. The same patterns are now being mirrored in certain side-shows within the US political circus.

IMAGE: ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS!

This is exactly how Hitler gathered steam in the early days of the Third Reich – by employing an overtly jingoistic, and even genocidal, racist party line – in order to invigorate his hard core supporters whom he knew would form the phalanx of his foot soldiers later on. In this kind of jagged political environment, facts do not matter at all, but FEAR is everything. If a politician or a street agitator can instil fear into the crowd, then he, or she, knows that power is well within their grasp.

To super charge the political narrative, and rally the remaining foot soldiers who don’t necessarily understand politics too well but are still eager to follow, a leader must evoke fundamentalist religious, mythological, or occult-based belief systems. To make this ideological jump, nogoosestep is required. Here, fellow travelers Adolph Hitler, Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler were able to quietly coordinate a masterful mix, establishing a popular and potent cocktail of reactionary politics and derivative occult and mythological lore and corresponding symbology.

The soil for this kind of convergence has never been more fertile in the US as it is today. Since the early 1980’s, when the Republican Party discovered how important the Evangelical and Christian Zionist right-wing movements were in providing a strong political base, ‘End of Times’ mythology has steadily propagated throughout the United States. With that, a collection of bizarre, yet well-organized movements and sub-movements have evolved, and in each instance, these have provided universal backing to US wars and interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere, seeing these as ‘Holy Wars’ – in a Clash of Civilisations – rather than geopolitical maneuvers. As writerDaniel Spaulding explains,

“The United States has long been the home of a wide assortment of bizarre and eccentric sects and cults, most being harmless, or at least lacking the ability to do any serious harm outside of their immediate proximity without large-scale followings nor serious political access. But there are always exceptions, and one of the more prominent and influential ones is the highly politicised and well-funded Dispensationalist movement, a vocal and well-represented faction among fundamentalist Protestants. Not only do Dispensationalists have a large scale following, but they also manage to wield considerable influence in Washington, especially on US foreign policy.”

Within this contrived ‘End Times’ meets the Crusader, or Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’ dialectic, Arabs and Muslims are almost universally characterized as terrorists and generalised as a universal threat which “must be dealt with”. Given enough time, these same preachers will be eventually craft a similar ‘End Times’ narrative around Russia, or China (some already have).

Throughout the usual paranoid rhetoric (from the usual suspects) on this subject, no specific mention is made as to how exactly the millions of Arabs and ‘potential’ radical Islamic terrorists – should be “dealt with”. So say the hawks and the zealots. The only thing missing from this 21st century remix of Nuremberg’s Greatest Hits is talk of a “final solution” – even though this is what is clearly being inferred by certain politicians and American talk radio hosts who relentlessly pander to their highly lucrative, but helplessly terrified audiences. Some right-wing American pundits have even come out openly advocating a nuclear final solution to this ‘problem’.

To a lesser degree, and only on paper (so far anyway), Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann represents a mixture of these. Ever since her exit from politics last year, Tea Party favorite Bachmann has since been flirting with media regarding a possible 2016 Presidential run, although many believe she is already a spent force. Now she is urging more pastors around the country to speak from their pulpits about the coming “end of times”, which Bachmann insists is just around the corner. She believes that America’s ‘Christian believers’ are now in competition with Muslims, who themselves are already speedily preparing their own ‘end times’ pathway, in what she describes as, “the coming of their twelfth imam.”

Daniel Spaulding adds, “Indeed, the late American intellectual Gore Vidal whimsically observed that the practical result of this Dispensationalist theology was a “military buildup that can never, ever cease until we have done battle for the Lord”.

Not by coincidence, the Dispensationalist theological narrative also happens to feed directly into the State of Israel’s own geopolitical and territorial expansion goals and objectives. As a mantra for geographical and cultural expansion, modern Zionism is not so different from the “Glory of Rome”, 19th century America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’, Britain’s Empire on which “the sun never sets”, or Nazi Germany’s “Lebensraum” (living space). Israel desires and is actively pursuing its own Lebensraum too, which is called the Greater Israel Project (see their map here).

This is where the American Christian and evangelical right-wing, along with the Israeli Zionist lobby crossover with America’s Republican and Tea Party wings, and the glue which keeps it all together is money – lots and lots of money – for anyone willing to get up in public and sell this bizarre, albeit antiquated, pre-Medieval doctrine of the ‘Tribe of Israel’, the ‘Israelites‘ or ‘God’s chosen people’. According to this new doctrine, any threat to go off script, in other words, any threat to the Jewish State of Israel – is a threat to ‘destiny’ as prescribed by the End Times religious movement. You could go even further into depth and dig into the Anti-Christ and Jesus returning etc, but we’ll hit pause there. Some Islamic branches are also pushing a similar End Times narrative (including ISIS). Notice also how this plugs directly into the current fictional narrative (invented by the very same parties) that “Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map”. And there you have it – a potent religious justification for a preemptive military strike against Iran, as the centre piece for World War III.

Preachers and snake oil salesmen are one thing, but heads of state are another. When God speaks to political leaders these days, it seems that all God wants to talk about is war. On this count, both the US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that, ‘God told me to bomb and occupy Iraq.’ We should all understand the dangers of mixing religion with geopolitics by now.

Even though US President Barack Obama is on the way out with only a year and half to go in office before he retires to a predictable life of opening libraries, foundations, speeches and travel around the globe brokering peace deals – Bachmann and her fellow ‘Christian Soldiers’ (onward!) are convinced that Obama is reciting the Koran in the Oval Office and secretly organising ISIS training seminars over the border in Mexico. The big question is: what will they do when Obama finally leaves office? Will they blame him for all of America and the world’s ills for the next 8 years (exactly as the Democrats have done for the last 6 years, same show, different channel)?

Her recent remarks only reinforce what we already suspected: that Obama is the least of worries…. In an article in the Christian Post, entitled Michele Bachmann Says Jesus’ Second Coming is ‘Imminent;’ Obama’s Nuclear Negotiations With Iran Are ‘Pro Islamic Jihad’, author Samual Smith acknowledges that: