#
George Bush, The "Promise Keepers," and The Principle 
of Messianic Leadership 

S.R. Shearer, Religion in Politics - 
http://www.endtimesnetwork.com/crt_nws.html

RELIGION IN POLITICS
Permission to make copies is hereby granted.[www.isrp.org]

October 31, 2001

PREFACE

On the 13th of November, 2001, Counterpunch Magazine published 
an article by Douglas Valentine entitled, "Phoenix And The 
Anatomy Of Terror." In 1969 and 1970 I became peripherally 
involved in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam as an intelligence 
officer (a captain) attached to the 525th Intelligence Group. Some 
of you who are familiar with the war (or who were there) have 
probably heard of this unit. At any rate, once or twice a month I 
traveled to Vung Tau near the South China Sea to brief Phoenix 
officers concerning intelligence threats they would be facing in the 
districts and provinces they had been assigned to. All this to say 
that - while I cannot speak directly to matters concerning Phoenix 
(I am not permitted to) - I can pretty much vouch on a personal 
basis for what Valentine has to say.  

The author as an intelligence officer at the Phoenix training 
center in Vung Tau, South Vietnam - 1969. He is holding a 
Romanian AKM (which was distinguished from the Chinese AK-47 
by its unique pistol grip).  

Valentine, who has written extensively on the Phoenix program, 
says that the Bush Administration has begun to set up a "counter-
terrorist" organization similar to the Phoenix program that operated 
in Vietnam. It will operate as an integral part of Governor Tom 
Ridge's "Office of Homeland Security" (OHS). If that is true, than 
God help us all.  

Valentine says that while the OHS appeared immediately after the 
tragic events of 11 September, "like a rabbit pulled from a 
magician's star-spangled hat," it's important to understand that 
it has been at least four years in the making. Based on studies and 
predictions that a catastrophic terror attack was inevitable, the 
U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (co-
chaired by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman) had 
proposed an OHS-type entity patterned after Phoenix in January 
of 2001.  

The Phoenix Program originated out of the turmoil and confusion of 
the Vietnam War. Valentine says that the CIA believed that in order 
to win the war, it had to destroy the Viet Cong's political and 
administrative organization and root out its supporters throughout 
the country - kind of like the way the "War on Terror" is doing now 
to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The CIA based this belief on the 
assumption that opposing ideological factions were battling for the 
loyalty of the "complacent masses," and that the VC were winning 
the war for the hearts and minds of the "masses" through the use 
of propaganda and "selective terror," meaning the cold-blooded 
murder and mutilation of government officials.  

In response, according to Valentine, the CIA created its own 
counter-terror program - Phoenix. As part of this effort, the 
CIA began constructing a massive "gulag archipelago" of secret 
interrogation centers throughout South Vietnam's 44 provinces. 
Four regional centers were also built, and an existing National 
Interrogation Center (NIC) was modernized in Saigon. I visited 
the NIC on "intelligence matters" on many different occasions 
when I was in Saigon.  

Phoenix was run essentially by a cadre of "secret police" advised 
by the CIA and American military intelligence officers. Informants 
were recruited in every district, village, and hamlet in Vietnam. 
On the basis of an accusation made by a single anonymous informant, 
a VC suspect or sympathizer could be arrested and detained 
indefinitely. They were held until they confessed (often under 
torture); and then they were sent to Stalinist internal security 
tribunals (like the ones Bush is proposing) for "further disposition."  

This is exactly what the OHS is proposing to set up in this country, 
and America has a lot of experience in such matters; the CIA has 
been operating Phoenix-like programs throughout its system of 
"client states" for years now, so operating one now in the United 
States would be a cinch - we reap what we sow eventually. This is 
called "blowback." Valentine says that like the Phoenix program in 
Vietnam, the OHS will establish field offices in the 50 states and 
all of America's major cities. In order to achieve its elusive goal 
of "internal security," the OHS, like Phoenix, will need to extend 
its informants nets throughout the country. Inevitably, every town 
will probably be required to form an OHS Committee which will be 
comprised of citizens that the OHS has deemed politically 
suitable. The job of these committees will be to process reports 
by "concerned citizens" (i.e., informants) about the activities 
of "suspected citizens." Perhaps once a week these reports will 
be forwarded to the OHS Committee at the county level. The country 
committee will review the reports and send the most urgent ones to 
the state committee. At each level, the reports will be filtered 
through an ideological filter.  

What makes such a system especially dangerous is that Attorney 
General John Ashcroft has vowed to "arrest and detain any 
suspected terrorist who has violated the law," and has further 
promised "airtight surveillance" of them - but has yet to define 
what a "suspected terrorist" is. This is what happened in Vietnam 
too. There was never any consensus about the definition of a VC 
sympathizer; at best, it was tacitly understood by the ideologues, 
and the security forces under their control, that a person was 
either "for us" or "against us." Moreover, it wasn't enough to 
be just "for us" in a passive sense; one had to be actively 
"against them."  

So the definition of a terrorist suspect is deliberately left open, 
paving the way for political repression. The anti-terror legislation 
passed by Congress and signed by Bush allows for secret searches 
of the homes of people who meet the nebulous criteria of "suspected 
terrorist." 

So now, as you begin reading the following article, read it with 
all this in mind - and bear in mind that the people we are talking 
about in the article - the "WILLING POPULATION" that the article 
references, will most likely be those people [mainly PROMISE 
KEEPERS-like Christians (more about this in the article)] who 
will be sitting on the OHS committees throughout the country 
- people who will be passing on YOUR loyalty - so that now you 
begin to understand what the Lord meant when He said:  

"But take heed to yourselves: for they shall deliver you up to 
councils; and ... ye shall be beaten: and ye shall be brought 
before rulers and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them." 
(Mark 13:9)  

[We urge you to read Dene McGriff's article on the PROMISE KEEPERS 
in conjunction with this article.]  

CHAPTER I

THE LONGING FOR MESSIANIC LEADERSHIP

INTRODUCTION

Max Mell, a contemporary poet, has said that underneath the thin 
"egalitarianism" of today's American culture and all of its shallow, 
perfunctory pandering to the "worth of the common man" lies a 
great longing for that which is messianic; for a savior - a kind 
of Resitiutor Orbis who will emerge and rescue mankind from the 
chaos and confusion of this present evil world; and this is 
especially true among Christians, many of whom, sadly, hold the 
concepts of what we today call "democracy" in UTTER contempt. 
To their mind, messianic leadership (by which they mean, 
"charismatic" leadership) - not democracy - is the ideal. To such 
people, the messy and disordered condition of "politics as usual" - 
with all its sordid, back room deal-making and compromises - is a 
disgusting and vulgar thing, something that has been made all the 
more loathsome in recent years by people like Bill and Hillary 
Clinton and their coterie of radical feminists, militant homosexuals, 
and effete multicultu! ralists.  

MESSIANISM IS VERY WIDESPREAD

Mell thinks that it would be a great mistake to believe that such 
thinking is nothing more than a silly "redneck" kind of aberration 
that haunts only the fringe elements of American culture. He 
believes that the longing for such a "messiah- king" rests on a solid 
bedrock of Western tradition and is very widespread in the culture 
at large. It's a yearning that the forces of modernity can hide and 
gloss over, but one which they have utterly failed to stamp out. 
It is too deeply embedded in the Western psyche to be readily rooted 
out - and so much so that British writers Norris J. Lacy and 
Geoffrey Ashe can say that the longing for such a "messiah-king" 
has been "... a persistently imagined and hoped for political goal 
of countless numbers of people down through the centuries" - a kind 
of hunger for a messianic leader who, as Carolly Erickson, a 
professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, writes, 
"... has the ability to dwell in the circle of the miraculous."

Indeed, IT IS PRECISELY THIS KIND OF "MESSIAH-KING" (and 
the concomitant idealized figure of "manhood" that inevitably 
accompanies such a concept - the kind out from which such 
ancient mythical heroes as Lancelot, Tristan, Parsifal, and 
Roland were fashioned) THAT MODERN-DAY CHRISTIAN GROUPS SUCH 
AS THE "PROMISE KEEPERS" HAVE MADE SUCH A PHANTASM OUT OF.  

This kind of thinking - the kind that Max Mell, Norris Lacy, 
Geoffrey Ashe and Carolly Erickson describe, the kind that 
generates "messiah-kings" - seems to present itself on a regular 
(if not cyclical) basis in the history of Western Civilization, 
producing in its wake the Barbarossas, the Napoleons, and the 
Hitlers of Western Christendom. It's a phenomenon that inevitably 
bubbles to the surface in times of great peril when it seems that 
only "decisive" leadership can carry the day - and it is helped 
along when it is has been preceded by a time of cultural dissonance, 
demoralization, and disappointment; for example, the cultural and 
economic turmoil and confusion that accompanied the socialist 
governments of the Weimar Republic that antedated Hitler's rise 
to power in Germany, and the so- called "Reign of Terror" that 
preceded Napoleon's seizure of power in France in the last decade 
of the Eighteenth Century.  

/CONT/

---