As I point out in Fooled Again, that sort of ferocious cunning has, throughout the centuries, marked paranoid crusades of every kind. Certainly we see it in Bush/Cheney’s movement, which includes radical theocrats, neocon extremists, dedicated neo-Confederates, and other types who tend to see themselves as victims and their struggle, therefore, as defensive. In their eyes, the very people whom they’re trying to destroy are ruthless and relentless, full of hate and fury, while they themselves are innocent, outnumbered, ‘fighting back.’ In short, Bush/Cheney’s movement is projective, lividly imputing their own darkest impulses to everybody else.
Such projectivity, I argue, drove the Crusaders of the Middle Ages, and the Western efforts to annihilate the ‘savages’ on the American frontiers. Nazism also was essentially projective, as Hitler and his men consistently imputed their own wrath and vengefulness and lust for power to ‘world Jewry’-against which they were fighting, they believed, in self-defense. We see the same mentality in the Islamist, Christianist and ultra-Zionist movements; and, overwhelmingly, among the Bush Republicans, whose program, I believe, is ultimately pathological. The Bushevik is fatally obsessed with wiping out the ‘terrorist’ within himself-and, no less, the homosexual within. How many of those ranting homophobes have turned out to be cruisers in the dark? Bush/Cheney’s G.O.P. is, above all, the Party of the Closet; and therefore suicidally engaged in trying to straighten out, or murder, all those other ‘perverts’ the world over.
See also: Miller’s 2005 Harper’s article None Dare Call it Stolen.
(Thanks Gavin!)