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This is the first in a series of posts inspired by David Brooks' comments that no-one is publicizing the brutal nature of Saddam's totalitarian regime.
1 posted on 01/25/2003 8:43:48 AM PST by copycat
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To: copycat
Thanks for posting this. I have seen almost nothing about the ideology of his regime. It's like not discussing Nazi philosophy in a biography of Hitler.

I bet not one American in a thousand could tell you anything about the ideology of the Baath party.
2 posted on 01/25/2003 8:49:24 AM PST by Restorer (TANSTAAFL)
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To: copycat
The article is fairly long and can be read here.

Excerpts to follow...

3 posted on 01/25/2003 8:51:02 AM PST by copycat (Ridicule Hillary! to someone you know TODAY!!)
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To: copycat
Good article ... just like Stalin could not be stalin without the marxist-leninist ideology that supported his evil ways, so too Saddam requires an ideology to support modern dictatorship and his totalitarian rule. It sounds like it is neither fascism nor communism precisely, but a third and very Arab brand of similar thought to nazi/communist ideology.

4 posted on 01/25/2003 8:51:23 AM PST by WOSG
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To: copycat
Did David Brooks appear on CNN last nite,,there was a handsome man, an intellectual type, discussing this last nite. His last comment after talking about Saddam's unpublicized ideology was that the peace protesters who were taking the "high ground morally" didn't seem to understand who Saddam was and what he was. He thought this was the major reason for a war and that the case had not been brought out publicly in a way that people really understood. Sort of like Hitler said everything he intended to do and what he was for years before the Holocaust and noone seemed to notice.
7 posted on 01/25/2003 9:06:25 AM PST by cajungirl
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To: copycat
Why do I keep hearing a duck say "Aflaq"?...
12 posted on 01/25/2003 9:18:10 AM PST by null and void (Will Micromachine/do Nanotech for food...)
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To: copycat; null and void
Michel Aflaq's Sorbonne graduation picture.


16 posted on 01/25/2003 9:33:11 AM PST by AF68
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To: copycat; Travis McGee; Alamo-Girl; rightwing2; backhoe; kattracks





17 posted on 01/25/2003 9:34:37 AM PST by Paul Ross (From the State Looking Forward to Global Warming!)
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To: copycat
This article is an illustration of political religion that is pagan in nature. Marxism is a religion. National Socialism is a religion. Idolatry, conceit, vanity, esoteric dogma cloaked in seemingly secular politics.

Hitler's idolatry was the idea of a master race. His mass murder was human sacrifice to pagan Teutonic idols. Much like the societal practice of abortion is ritual mass murder upon the altars dedicated to idolatrous vanities, a collective human sacrifice to pagan idols.

This is why we will see the Religious Left oppose war with Iraq. They are all comrades of the Left and of the same congregation. Note the religious fervor displayed.

Hollywood Leftist actors are the priests and priestesses. Television and movies as a propaganda tool helps create visual phantasms (or as Thomas Hobbes called them, 'phantastical images') of the brain.

There are three ways people are influenced according to the school of behavioral psychology - - visual (sight), auditory (sound), kinesthetic (emotion). The kinesthetic or 'feeling' is also based on olfactory and tactile sense, much like Pavlov's salivating dogs. Visual images and sound portrayed can be used to anchor emotional and/or conditioned responses desired by those that present them, which in the case of television, is the Leftist television media, actors who create phantastical images in film, and Leftist politicians who pander to symbolism over substance (like Rush always says about them).

Symbolism over substance is an idolatry, a pagan religion by it's nature. Note the relation between the traditional Leftist groups and those protesting US military actions (even among those who consider or claim themselves to be Judaic and/or Christian).

Consider this from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan:

Part III. Of a Christian Commonwealth.
Chap. xxxviii. Of Eternal Life, Hell, Salvation, and Redemption.

[12] And first, for the tormentors, we have their nature and properties exactly and properly delivered by the names of the Enemy (or Satan), the Accuser (or Diabolus), the Destroyer (or Abaddon). Which significant names (Satan, Devil, Abaddon) set not forth to us any individual person, as proper names do, but only an office or quality, and are therefore appellatives, which ought not to have been left untranslated (as they are in the Latin and modern Bibles), because thereby they seem to be the proper names of demons, and men are the more easily seduced to believe the doctrine of devils, which at that time was the religion of the Gentiles, and contrary to that of Moses, and of Christ.

[13] And because by the Enemy, the Accuser, and Destroyer, is meant the enemy of them that shall be in the kingdom of God, therefore if the kingdom of God after the resurrection be upon the earth (as in the former Chapter I have shewn by Scripture it seems to be), the Enemy and his kingdom must be on earth also. For so also was it in the time before the Jews had deposed God. For God's kingdom was in Israel, and the nations round about were the kingdoms of the Enemy; and consequently, by Satan is meant any earthly enemy of the Church.

Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlv. Of Demonology and other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles.

[10] Another relic of Gentilism is the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. And this is the reason why St. Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing": not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing; but that the thing which they honored or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. And the worship of these with divine honour is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God. For God being King of the Jews, and His lieutenant being first Moses, and afterward the high priest, if the people had been permitted to worship and pray to images (which are representations of their own fancies), they had had no further dependence on the true God, of whom there can be no similitude; nor on His prime ministers, Moses and the high priests; but every man had governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter eversion of the Commonwealth, and their own destruction for want of union. And therefore the first law of God was: they should not take for gods, alienos deos, that is, the gods of other nations, but that only true God, who vouchsafed to commune with Moses, and by him to give them laws and directions for their peace, and for their salvation from their enemies. And the second was that they should not make to themselves any image to worship, of their own invention. For it is the same deposing of a king to submit to another king, whether he be set up by a neighbour nation or by ourselves.

[14] An image, in the most strict signification of the word, is the resemblance of something visible: in which sense the fantastical forms, apparitions, or seemings of visible bodies to the sight, are only images; such as are the show of a man or other thing in the water, by reflection or refraction; or of the sun or stars by direct vision in the air; which are nothing real in the things seen, nor in the place where they seem to be; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object, but changeable, by the variation of the organs of sight, or by glasses; and are present oftentimes in our imagination, and in our dreams, when the object is absent; or changed into other colours, and shapes, as things that depend only upon the fancy. And these are the images which are originally and most properly called ideas and idols, and derived from the language of the Grecians, with whom the word eido signifieth to see. They are also called phantasms, which is in the same language, apparitions. And from these images it is that one of the faculties of man's nature is called the imagination. And from hence it is manifest that there neither is, nor can be, any image made of a thing invisible.

[15] It is also evident that there can be no image of a thing infinite: for all the images and phantasms that are made by the impression of things visible are figured. But figure is quantity every way determined, and therefore there can be no image of God, nor of the soul of man, nor of spirits; but only of bodies visible, that is, bodies that have light in themselves, or are by such enlightened.

[16] And whereas a man can fancy shapes he never saw, making up a figure out of the parts of divers creatures, as the poets make their centaurs, chimeras and other monsters never seen, so can he also give matter to those shapes, and make them in wood, clay or metal. And these are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker. But in these idols, as they are originally in the brain, and as they are painted, carved moulded or molten in matter, there is a similitude of one to the other, for which the material body made by art may be said to be the image of the fantastical idol made by nature.

Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness

Besides these sovereign powers, divine and human, of which I have hitherto discoursed, there is mention in Scripture of another power, namely, that of "the rulers of the darkness of this world," [Ephesians, 6. 12] "the kingdom of Satan," [Matthew, 12. 26] and "the principality of Beelzebub over demons," [Ibid., 9. 34] that is to say, over phantasms that appear in the air: for which cause Satan is also called "the prince of the power of the air";[Ephesians, 2. 2] and, because he ruleth in the darkness of this world, "the prince of this world":[John, 16. 11] and in consequence hereunto, they who are under his dominion, in opposition to the faithful, who are the "children of the light," are called the "children of darkness." For seeing Beelzebub is prince of phantasms, inhabitants of his dominion of air and darkness, the children of darkness, and these demons, phantasms, or spirits of illusion, signify allegorically the same thing. This considered, the kingdom of darkness, as it is set forth in these and other places of the Scripture, is nothing else but a confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by dark and erroneous doctrines, to extinguish in them the light, both of nature and of the gospel; and so to disprepare them for the kingdom of God to come.


20 posted on 01/25/2003 10:17:51 AM PST by Sir Francis Dashwood (LET'S ROLL!)
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To: copycat
Very interesting. Thanks for posting this.

I knew that Saddam was not a regular old Islamic fanatic, and I knew that he wasn't a classic Marxist - although he has features of both - but I wasn't sure how he could be described overall. I must admit that I didn't realize that the Baathist ideology was so purely Hitlerian in its emphasis on the "Master Race." Unfortunately, it's remarkable how well this dovetails with the Islamic lust for conquest that's always been active in the Middle East, combined with the left-over bits of extreme Marxist statist ideology that are still floating about in the world.

I hope Brooks gets the word out, because I think it's something most of us - well, most Americans, at least - do not understand very well.
27 posted on 01/25/2003 11:47:32 AM PST by livius
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To: copycat
There's always someone around to put lipstick on one of these pigs...
28 posted on 01/25/2003 12:01:50 PM PST by HumanaeVitae
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