The Politics of Fear and the Crash of Newt Gingrich, the Wicked Wizard of Oz

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

Here is the latest news:  Gingrich, the wicked wizard of Oz, crashes in Iowa.  During the first half of December, 2011, the two opposites, the progressivist Gingrich, and the libertarian, Ron Paul, reversed positions in Iowa, with Paul out-polling Gingrich by 23% to 14%.  Two weeks ago, Gingrich out-polled Paul in Iowa by 27% to 18%.  Paul now has a 3-point lead over Romney, who remains in 2nd place.  The also-rans increased their percentages at Gingrich’s expense, but Ron Paul increased more than anyone else going into the first primary two weeks from now at the beginning of January. 

Perhaps none of the top three contenders in the Republican primary should properly be classified as conservatives, but they represent the spread of Republican paradigms.  Does this mean that we still await a “clear choice, not an echo,” as Ronald Reagan put it when he campaigned in 1968, 1976 and 1980?  The only “real conservative”, Michelle Bachman, lost three points in the latest Iowa poll to remain at 4th place, now only slightly ahead of Governor Rick Perry, both at 10%.  Perry gained a little and now competes with Bachman as the only “real conservative” who might have a chance in the presidential election next November.

The dirty laundry about Gingrich will sink his chances from here on out, because he has supported extremist positions from every angle on every issue, starting when he headed his own Progressive Policy Institute in the 1980s before he became a pragmatist in order to take over Congress in 1994 with his “contract on America”.

What is Gingrich’s position on freedom of speech and on minorities, especially concerning Muslims?  No-one yet has explored his early background on this issue, but perhaps one should check it out.  As explained in my various writings now for fifteen years in both English and Arabic, no-one has outdone him in Islamophobic politiking.  The following is from my new book, due out in 2012, Islam: A Testament, which was actually written four years ago in 2007 and has been available at Amazon under a different title since January 2010.

“In politics the two most powerful motivators are fear and religion.  This is especially true in America and the Muslim world where religion is a powerful force and therefore can be harnessed in the pursuit of power for whatever purpose.

“We are now in the middle of an almost unique example of this truism.  Muslims are not the only ones who exploit religion for political ends.  American extremists, both political and religious, are exploiting religion by demonizing Islam as the necessary first and decisive step in a perceived war of self-defense against universal evil.

“A principal weapon in what has been termed the Fourth World War is the orchestration of words or symbols, known as mimes, in mimetic warfare.  This kind of warfare attacks the mind of the victim subliminally in ways that shape thought without the victim knowing that one’s thinking has been reshaped.

“On September 1, 2007, presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, sent out a letter to his supporters pegging his new campaign on a single theme that he hoped would be a sure-fire road to electoral victory in a time of great national peril.  The theme is simple.  He declared, ‘The transcendent issue of the 21st century is the struggle against radical Islamic extremism’.

“Another presidential hopeful, who decided to skip the 2008 presidential contest as a lost cause, was Newt Gingrich, who engineered the so-called Gingrich Revolution in 1994 by taking over both houses of Congress for the Republicans.  Shortly thereafter he laid the groundwork for a new war against evil by calling for a war against Islamic totalitarianism.  On February 8, 1995, at a conference of military and intelligence officers on developing global strategy, Gingrich announced, ‘I have yet to see a coherent strategy for fighting Islamic totalitarianism’. 

“In the American lexicon developed in the war against Communist global conquest, the world is full of harmless tyrants who seek only their own power at home and therefore can be co-opted to serve American purposes.  Such tyranny is different from totalitarianism, which by definition seeks control of the human mind not only as a means to consolidate its own power but primarily as the ultimate end of its own destiny.

“Whether by design or not, the use of this emotive word, ‘totalitarianism,’ became an instrument of thought control and escalated the battle against terrorism to the ideological level of grand strategy, because totalitarianism was the major global threat to Western civilization for most of the 20th century.

“By the mere turn of a phrase, this seminal thinker of the NeoCon movement transformed Islam from a religion that occasionally has been distorted to justify both private and state-sponsored terrorism into a generic monster that must be fought wherever it raises its ugly head, because ‘Islamic totalitarianism’ by definition threatens the survival of the Free World.  This simple change in terminology served to short-circuit thought so that operational doctrine and specific military plans no longer need to be based on knowledge.  The thinking has already been done and encapsulated in the new language, where a false symbolism becomes an unchallenged reality.  And by a process of a self-fulfilling prophecy, the potential danger becomes real and thereby triggers a spiraling confrontation of action and reaction with the zero-sum result of universal chaos.”