The Devil's Manifesto

 

THE DEVIL'S MANIFESTO

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Sacred history is seemingly impertinent ever since God was assassinated by free thinkers, yet in fact it remains germane. The heroic escapades of David, for example, which included deceit, robbery, mayhem and the murder of the men, women and children of entire villages, in the name of the terrifying tribal deity of the so-called hibirus (‘outlaws’), are celebrated to this very day with terrible consequences. Yea, despite the preaching of peace and love, war and hatred continues apace under the bloody rubric of the Terrorist Almighty.

Although we have chosen the Chosen Ones as our historical example, the Jews certainly are not to blame for human nature simply because they happened to inscribe one of the earliest inspiring records of its development, a process not as evolutionary as progressives presume given the penchant of conservatives to embrace regression to barbarism. Warmongers everywhere have relished the reading of the same sacred testaments of one bloody war after another for centuries on end, and more and more blood is duly shed. We know very well that exposing young children to violent scenes propend them to violence for the rest of their lives; the same may be said of the violent history of the human race. Religion would regulate the exercise of the absolute power it worships, but in the final analysis its adored subject still represents unmitigated violence and promiscuous sex. Now religious texts are yet again offered as pretexts for a holocaust that would return humankind to its obscure origin by drastically reducing the population to the Chosen Ones, who would of course live far from the seed-mixing, whoring cities. Beware, the time is nigh: For the sake of peace we might burn the sacred texts of old-time religion, bury the holy men along with the spiritual battle axes they grind, and consign ourselves to a global collective governed by social scientists. Alas, the metaphysic of social science is tainted by the physic of brutish ancestors who fashioned God Almighty in their own image. The natural law of cause and effect replaced the magic of divine law, inserting valid inferences between premise and conclusion; but whatever the logic or lack thereof might be, it is a tool for doing whatever one would do in the first place: One would rule forever without impedance if only one could, and to that end human individuals, in the self-conscious name of man-kind, strove to be, in accord with their natural virtue or brutal manliness, divinely ordained arbiters over nature, hence kings over their kind to boot.

Religion is the organized worship of Power per se while politics regulates the distribution of its spoils – the incensed smoke goes to the gods; the fat, liver and kidneys are withheld by the priestly cooks; the leaner cuts go to the warriors; and the scraps are charitably handed out to the weaker set, the hangers on. Hence religion and politics are joined at the hip in both church and state – in doing away with either, church or state shall be not be rid of religion nor politics. Notwithstanding the tribute individuals necessarily pay to society for the security of the power of numbers, each and every individual would reign supreme, would ideally be the one and only Potentate. Only a reign of terror can crush the masses into humility for long and deliver the self-righteous allies of the Terrorist Almighty from their anarchy: “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; those crushed in spirit he delivers.” Uneasy peace may then prevail given an adequate economy and sufficient exercise of police power, at least until past horrors are forgotten.

Yea, the terrors of violence are more or less ardently desired to break the monotony of the current monopoly on violence; but the Devil, who lives eons, is as bored with war as with peace, at least according to Bernard Shaw’s amiable Devil in Man and Superman:

“I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander, and a thousand times wearied of hell, as you are wearied now, you will no longer imagine that every swing from heaven to hell is an emancipation, every swing from hell to heaven an evolution. Where you now see reform, progress, fulfilling of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion. You will discover the profound saying of my friend Koheleth, that there is nothing new under the sun. Vanitas vanitatum….”

Yea, at the lawless bottom of being, where chaos or impregnated nothing gives rise to everything, the barbarian wants death or liberty from law; which is to say the same thing, for nothing can live absent law. The sin therefore is in the disobedience; indeed, as the pious who enjoy living the so-called good death know, sin is freedom. But let us not think that the hypostasis or underground of the ruling order is rational: David rolled aside the Rock; the glimpse of hellish chaos below moved him to replace the keystone lest all hell broke loose. To hate the rationalized norm or ground-norm of our kind’s folkway is groundless hatred, the kind of hatred that dooms a people to hell on earth and hereafter. Groundless hatred eventually brought the temple to ruin and scattered the Jewish nation throughout the world, where it was roundly chastised by the Almighty Terrorist for crucifying the Jewish Son of God and King of the Jews, Jesus the Christ.

Jews served Gentiles as the Terrorist Almighty’s meek witnesses, scribes, money changers, brokers, and, most significantly, as despised scapegoats. The Hebrew scribes of old recorded their people’s history well. The People of the Book, namely their kin the Christians and the Muslims, who despised Jews and therefore themselves most of all, were on the same page. Collective guilt for the human race's natural economic interest, including the territorial imperative invoked by legendary Moses and other heroes of patriarchal primate hordes, was projected onto the Jew, that he might be roundly blamed for the human race's greed and arrant nationalism. But one pogrom after another did not rid the Western world of its Jews; their stereotypical presence was required to represent everything Gentiles hated themselves for. Something more had to be done, wherefore the Jewish Question resounded in Europe, most loudly in Germany: "What should be done with the Jews?" The wrong question was put, really, because barbaric Europe had been Christianized and Christians were in effect frustrated Jews although they would rather be Greek if not Teutonic or Nordic. That is to say that Occidental Christians and atheists alike had cultural roots in Oriental Judaism. The Jewish Question was answered with an enormous holocaust, a god-awful horror surpassing all previous Christian crusades against Jews, Muslims; and Christian heretics as well – for instance the two million Cathars and other heretics murdered at the behest of Pope Innocent III as precedent to the terrifying Inquisition led by the literate Inquisitor, Pope Benedict XII.

Another Jewish state was finally whetted, after the Second World War, on the legendary Rock of Ages in Zion by Jewish terrorists, i.e. freedom fighters – the late Jewish Revolt was against empire as usual, the imperialists being British emulators of the Roman, but then again Israel needs empire to persist. And presently, as Jewish bombs and tanks supplied by Judeo-Christian Americans crush terrorists, i.e. freedom fighters, and their homes into bloody rubble, the old-time patriotic patriarchic religion of militant Judaism stands charged by its enemies of resembling the worst enemy the Jews ever had besides themselves, the Nazis of the fatherland, who were led by their respective Fuehrer or native folk father. But the political survival of the Jewish state still depends, like every Jewish state before it, on the almighty graces of a world superpower, in this case the neo-Roman Empire of the United States of America.

The state religion of the United States of America, sworn to by oaths offered to its terrifying war-god in high administrative office, political assembly and court, is Judeo-Christian Protestantism. According to its most diabolical critic, Protestantism is largely feel-good secularism disguised by a semblance of deism; of course the Almighty Terrorist provides succor and lucre for the wars that forged the super-powerful nation into the most arrogant or self-righteous political state the world has witnessed to date. Its neoconservative fundamentalists, frustrated Jews of the millenarian dispensation, who would kindly save the Jews for Jesus or provide them with a final holocaust consigning them to eternal hellfire, took possession of the “federal” state government after the turn of the millennium; with the advice and consent of the moronic moral majority; they proceeded to wage a pre-emptive world war on global terrorism, that the one-god’s country might shock and awe the world’s populace into docile consumer ‘democracy’ whether the world likes its quasi-fascistic brand of democracy or not – corporate fascism is the national socialist perfection of neoliberal capitalism.

Israel took its almighty sponsor’s world war on terrorism to heart and hastily followed suit, but not to save the world; rather, to save its own superficies. The modern secular nation of Israel was founded upon a belligerent response to belligerent nationalism; it was founded by "terrorists," some of whom, by virtue of a brilliant propaganda campaign, became renowned "freedom fighters" and respected political leaders despite their traditional crimes against humanity – such is hate-based love, that all is fair in love and war. Israel’s late Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, one of the founding terrorists of his salvation state, a man whose crimes against anti-Jewish humanity are greatly appreciated in Israel, declared that Israel's terrifying war on terrorism is necessary to "save the Jewish race." Now anthropologists and biologists declare that there is no such race as a Jewish race, or even a Jewish nose for that matter. Israel is neither a religious nor a racial state. But the proverbial wandering Jews must have their own Final Solution, their own state; they must have somewhere to go, for to kill them all was deemed inappropriate by the victors. Although Judaism has a strong influence on state policy, Israel is a purportedly a secular state. Jewish culture is an "ethnocentric" culture without a unique racial ethnos, for there is nothing unique about the Jewish Revolts: the essence of individual existence is revolt tempered by resistance. The staunchest conservative has no more love for governmental authority than the anarchist, for each and every one of us would be the sole archon if only we could. The Messiah came not in peace but with a sword designed to decapitate kings and to sever not only empire but the hierarchal relations of the traditional nuclear family itself. Patriarchal patriotism finds its terrified consensus in wars led by the Terrorist Almighty. In the interim periods, the peace at home is uneasy. The juvenile delinquents must be greased up and sent off to war lest they kill off the elders and establish a more democratic dictatorship.  Let us not kid ourselves about our catholic Greek reason: the hypostasis of Logos is irrational. We are mystics all, left to our faith in myths in ultimate matters. So the organic order tends to disorder, death, and dissolution. It is said that humankind needs violence to improve its moral fiber, and that hate is prerequisite to love, hence shall the war of all against all, of I against We and We against Them, continue unto the Final Hour at the Iron Gate.

The Jew, the Muslim, and the Christian are cultural artifacts; their roles vary, but behind the religious shields are frightened atheists who use religious grounds to stage their secular struggles. The deliberate hypocrisy is bad enough, but the ignorance of those who are unaware of their hypocrisy, of those who cannot see the ambiguity from their side of the wall, is even worse. They have symbolic rocks in their heads and fight over holy rubble. Palestinians and Jews were Semitic cousins to begin with, and today most self-styled Jews –only those hailing from Judah were originally called Jews – are not Semitic. Another tragic aspect from the perspective of comparative religion: Muslims are frustrated Jews - bigoted Christians hate Muslims accordingly. Impartial professors have praised Islam as the most logical or pure form of monotheism on record to date. Islam's monotheism would not make a distinction between secular and spiritual law, but now it faces its Reformation phase where some distinction must be made in order for the religion to survive, in name only - Allah would most likely be confined to Heaven while Muslims embrace modern secularism in between prayers.

We are dutifully informed that until all willingly love one deity, whether that god be spiritual or secular or both, that until we are willing to voluntarily obey his dictates, unity must be imposed by terror from the top down. As Thomas Hobbes put in Leviathan, referring to the supposedly reasonable laws of nature opposed by natural passion:“For the Lawes of Nature (as Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy and in summe. doing to other, as wee would be done to,), of themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like. And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”

Wherefore an unimpeachable magistrate or final arbiter was wanted, an Uncommanded Commander or Commander-in-Chief, an Anarch with supreme power to organize terror against the terrorism of insurgent souls. One might rightly say that might was right in the beginning in order for right to make right in the end. Unfortunately or not, depending on your perspective, from above or below, heroes are mortal and heroes and kings may be murdered; those who live by the sword are more likely to die by it; unwanted kings must be disposed of - even gods were killed in the good old days. The mountain tops and heavens were populated by gods as terrifying and abusive and self-contradictory as the ruthless warriors had been below. And one god crushed the others and absorbed them all - He ate their flesh and ground their bones into their blood and drank it. He is absolutely free and omnipotent. He has no leader or law above him: He is the Supreme Anarchist or Almighty Terrorist. He has no need to think, for thought is defensive: He is the Original Brute. He is irresponsible - not responsible to anyone: He is the Arbitrary Arbiter. He creates beings to abuse them and to kill them, and expects them to be grateful and to praise him. He is the Almighty Abusive Father who murders even innocent babies and who is immune from prosecution there for. If we construe His representatives' words as His words, He is Self-Contradiction Personified. As for the human world, He would act with "maximum flexibility" and "unilaterally" against all "rogue nations," and “take the war on terrorism to them” whether the nations of the world like it or not, for all those who ain’t with him are ‘agin him and have hell to pay for it: He is the Superpower, the Ultimate Rogue.

Anyone offended by the foregoing representations may accept our apology in two senses of the word ‘apology,’ for the Terrorist Almighty reflects our con-fusion; on the one hand we are truly sorry, yet on the other hand we are not sorrowful, for our apologia is defensive. In fact we praise rather than blame the god who crushes us, and from fear we claim his love; yes, love, for why would he otherwise bother with mere mortals? Satan the true monotheist loved God alone hence was cast down for refusing to love mankind at large. The almighty one-god has two faces: he is the individual’s self-idolizing vanity mirror. We confess that he is a convenient idol. He is the god of hypocrisy. He is the god of convenience and the god of the status quo. He is the god of double-talk and double-speak. And he is the god of blasphemy, for his adulators use the power of god’s defining gift to man, his reason, to praise ignorance; hence one the other hand he is the god of ignorance and stupidity, the godhead of morons or fools (morae).

Now the news of god’s death was premature, for he attends his own funeral and shall live as long as his creator. Therefore, as we have said at the outset of this instant manifesto, his sacred text remains germane albeit dated. Since the Absolute Power worshipped by Religion is distributed in particular by Politics, we take for example the Almighty Terrorist’s professedly born-again servant, United States President George W. Bush, who by virtue of his grooming has unwittingly become the world’s foremost fool and scapegoat, more than adequately representing the foolhardiness of his electors. Mr. Bush has been called a Fascist and a Nazi; yet he is no Mussolini nor is he a Hitler; still, some of his policies do remind us of the origins of American neoconservatism, in the New Conservatism of Germany as German conservatives regressed, misinterpreting Machiavelli and Hobbes, to conservation of the so called real politics of neobarbarism: that might makes right, that the Terrorist Almighty favors the winner, hence to the victor belongs the spoils best won by shocking and awesome, pre-emptive blitzkriegs, a device employed by Frederick the Great to attack and save Austrians from their regime.

German New Conservative thinkers such as Carl Schmidt, the doctor of jurisprudence and scholar of totalitarianism who penned the justification for Hitler’s indefinite emergency suspension of the constitution, and who defined politics as the process of finding out who your enemy is so you can get rid of him, espoused the necessity of lying to get anything done in a democracy given its factions. Incidentally, anti-Semitism is not a sine qua non of Fascism or Nazism; Jews have been discriminately murdered by other warmongers – barbaric Christian Crusaders killed far more Jews in the name of the Judeo-Christian god of love on their way to the Holy Land than Semitic Muslims when they got there: such is the groundless hatred of self-destructive hate-based love that it would extinguish its own race. Carl Schmidt was mentor to Leo Strauss, who made his way to America and passed the torch absent its anti-Jewish overtone on to Paul Wolfowitz, the bland bureaucratic architect of the doctrine for the pre-emptive blitzkrieg on Iraq who nearly wet his pants and fainted when an insurgency rocket landed in his Baghdad hotel a few floors below. Mr. Wolfowitz avoided the draft via Cornell, an internship at the Bureau of Budget, and on to the University of Chicago and Leo Strauss, who supervised his doctoral thesis; and Mr. Wolfowitz attended Yale was well before becoming the frustrated, faceless bureaucratic who would write the notorious 46-page.pamphlet, ‘Defense Planning Guidance,’ that repudiated the Desert Storm model followed by George H.W. Bush, repudiating the democratic ideals set forth in the Four Freedoms, advocating instead of the non-arrogant pluralism in vogue a post-Cold War plan for world domination to prevent the re-emergence of a world-powerful rival. “Power” was equated not with God but with “oil” – no “hostile” power would be allowed to dominate important world resources; the rightful owner of same is irrelevant. The objective would no longer be to “deter” or “contain” hostility, but to impose a “new order” that would make it impossible for any other country to “generate global power” for any reason whatsoever. “Even aspiring to a larger regional role or global role” would be intolerable in others. Most of all, the concept of “collective security” instantiated as the United Nations must be disposed of:

“First the United States must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a great role or purpose or more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas we must account sufficiently for the interest of the advanced industrial nations, to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from aspiring to a large regional or global role.”

Hail Caesar! Who needs a god in heaven when the Terrorist Almighty is in the Oval Office? The President brought Mr. Cheney aboard in 2001; he in turn engaged Mr. Rumsfeld, who in turn put Mr. Wolfowitz in charge of justifying the Administration’s mad policy of provocation all over the world.

Now this devilish manifestation – all those who are not for the divine might-is-right” plan is the Terrorist Almighty’s archenemy – is not the appropriate place to delve too deeply into the Anglo-American-Saxon proclivities and fascistic tendencies of the President’s court lest we dig our own grave; nor shall we dwell on his family’s role in the foundation of the military-industrial-oil complex, tragically symbolized by the Twin Towers. Yet our anti-hero may with impunity say that our hero is the guilty progeny of a vicious power clique that fostered crimes against humanity in the Middle East and in Latin America. Entire villages of poor natives were liquidated under the old diabolical "Christian" principle that, since the infidels of evil empires and axes of evil and will burn in hell, it is better to send them there now before they infect other people with their communist doctrines. Jews are silent about those pogroms because the United States gives them money and weapons to kill Muslims. Activist Catholics who wanted the poor to inherit some Earth here and now were raped and murdered while the right-wing Opus Dei looked the other way if not nodding approval or cooperating behind the veil of secrecy. Furthermore, members of the elite United States clique fostered and condoned state-sponsored terrorism, dealt drugs and guns, lied under oath, handed out pardons, made oil deals, lined their pockets, and bilked billions out of millions; but all is well because international terrorism is quite legitimate where there is no international law. Praise the Terrorist Almighty!

Moreover, since the President took his high office personally, and portrayed the United States itself as a swaggering, self-righteous person, a few more personal attacks on his integrity and that of the government of the United States are called for, especially since he crowned himself as subject only to the guidance of that invisible Father who is higher than his father, the very Father who is the overpowering subject of our present monologue; to wit, the Almighty Terrorist who would save the world from terrorism – it is no wonder that Germany was so alarmed by Mr. Bush’s inflammatory, either-or rhetoric, since history has said Nazi Germany’s great mistake was to conceive of itself as an individual person out to save the world for its kind.

During his first presidential campaign, Mr. Bush identified Jesus the Christ, Son of the Father, as his “political” hero. But while he was governor of Texas, he would not give a born-again Christian, a murderer whose horrific crimes were nearly unspeakable, another thirty days of life. Thirty days is all he could give her or anyone else; but no, that was against the will of the people who elected him, a will that would not matter, however, when it was ‘agin him. Reverend Robertson said Governor Bush would "have no mercy if he executes that poor woman"; and in fact he did not have any mercy on that poor women, and god's minister went on to vigorously campaign for him. The death-penalty, war-mongering presidential candidate pandered to wealthy right-wing interests, to racists and bigots, and won the election after contradicting his state's rights ideology, running to the federal courts for relief. The heir of this awful dynasty justified his hypocrisy with the Reformation Hat Trick: he took off his religious hat and put on his political hat when in political office - he publicly declared that Christian principles are not the law of political office wherein one must obey the will of the people. And his hand-picked servants swore the hypocritical oath, to put aside their principles and obey the general will of what is in large part an atheistic, unprincipled mass. Backed up by this Great Nation of Ours, the Swaggering Leader of World Civilization, the Greatest Superpower since the Roman Empire, proceeded to bomb the world into submission – the fearful mass behind the big guns are glad of that, and praise him to high heaven.

Hail Caesar! To call the Kaiser a fool is treason to mankind, for every self-righteous man would be king or kaiser of his cave if not his castle or palace. A Chinese leader called the new American Caesar "extremely unwise," yet this terrorist almighty is hardly stupid; he only appears to be dull-witted, wherefore he is mistaken for the anti-Christ. The overwhelmingly irrational mass was devoted to the almighty arbiter’s cause: who needs a god when the president is in his White House? What else could fearful people do when the towers fell down? Run and hide, or look back and be turned into pillars of salt, weeping for the military and civilian recipients of the Purple Heart, or seek retribution against a rogue scapegoat? The fallen angel who governs this world knows via his own arrogance that the President of the United States was mighty arrogant with the very arrogance that brought the predicament upon his great nation. Therefore he must have "maximum flexibility" to act "unilaterally" and to strike "pre-emptively."

May the Terrorist Almighty have mercy. The Terrorist Almighty is not well known for his fairness, but in all fairness we should not condemn the President whose crude intentions paved the road to Hell, for the president in his oval office and especially back at the ranch suffers from the hypocrisy of us all, the hypocrisy we project upon our idols in heaven and our heroes on Earth. The President is our own hypocrisy made most obvious. The sins of the great man must be overlooked, for his sins are our own: Forgive us heavenly father for the sins of our earthly fathers, and may we as fathers not repeat our father’s mistakes. What can we do, then, to resolve the apparent conflict between our real political office and our ideal spiritual office? Luther considered this vexatious problem in the context of the war against Muslims – he viewed the Turks as the iron rod of God:

“What I would do is keep the callings and offices distinct and apart, so that everyone can see what he is called, and fulfills the duties of his office faithfully and with the heart, in service of God... For Paul will not suffer it that in the Church, where all should be Christians, one assume another's office (Romans 12:4, 1 Corinthians 12:15 & 14:40), but exhorts every member to his own work, so that no disorder arise, but everything be done in an orderly way. How much less, then, is the disorder to be tolerated that arises when a Christian leaves his office and takes upon him a temporal office...?”

The holy fathers observed that Jesus would not let a sword be drawn against Empire for his cause, for his Father, giving the Word, could very well crush the Empire at will. Romans considered the Christians as anti-social or sociopathic individualists because they would not bow to the political god and wage war on its behalf. But the sword of Jesus was handed over to the Christened prince of this world, who, in the name of the Terrorist Almighty, recruited Christians to set the world aflame and bathe it in blood. Luther’s solution according to the division of labor suggested by Paul might have brought the world to a more harmonious order given an absolute separation of church and state. And a separation of pacifists from militants would be convenient that militants might limit their harms to sandy arenas, engaging in mock battles for the bloody amusement of civilians; that might thrill those pacifists whose pacifism is overcompensation for their violent urges. Furthermore, it has been alleged by liberal intellectuals that atheistic leaders have worked far less injury to humankind than the religious – an impartial study of that scholarly allegation would be useful. As it were, Luther’s division of labor tends to serve the inimical status quo although the Catholics were undone – Luther’s medieval ethic precluded revolution and pre-emptive war, no matter how tyrannical princes might be, although, in the case of Catholic princes, he promised to look the other way. As for the peasants who flew the revolutionary rainbow banner signifying the Old Testament Covenant, Luther, their erstwhile hero, urged the princes to put them to the sword, and the well armed armies had done just that, slaughtering tens of thousands most efficiently. The princes apparently proceeded with the holocaust prior to the receipt and publication of Luther’s threatening letter, which was allegedly intended to frighten the peasants into putting down their pitchforks and staves.

No, we do not believe that a separation of church and state is possible except in name only. It is foolish to ban the posting of religious law in political temples; the zealous magistrate may memorize the ecclesiastical commandments, secrete copies in his robes or save them on his Blackberry and covertly impose Providence’s divine judgment accordingly. A priest might love his church yet be a covert atheist, and even be canonized as a saint if he is careful with his words and deeds.

Again, the want of power is the first cause for the organization of numerous individuals into both artificial institutions, first of all, that the fundamental human expressions of that power, in violence and sex, be duly regulated by the power elite; wherefore the violent ordering of humankind into terrified or anxious civilizations, and, if the logical progression holds, finally into the global order of Totalitaria, which will no doubt collapse under its own weight and return humankind to the Fire. A totalitarian world state is for some orderly thinkers a utopia, a glad new beginning, and for others it is a dystopia, the miserable end. The Terrorist Almighty, responsible for both, is both Archon and Anarchist.  We are confronted by our ambiguity everywhere. As Herman Melville mentioned in Pierre, or The Ambiguities, sometimes the restatement of a problem is taken to be its solution simply because there is no solution. Yet we keep asking, “What can be done?” We do not make history, it makes us, therefore works are of no avail, nothing can be done but to have faith in the Almighty Terrorist and accept the consequences.

yXy