French Crusades and American Patriots

My beautiful country shows promise of rising up against the extremist warriors of the religious right (whom they just elected into office) and their paymasters. The American people voted with their rage against injustice, hardship and the grand Equivocator, Obama. But now they see who got elected. The new junior Congressmen would: make miscarriages subject to criminal prosecution, allow state officials to abolish programs (education, welfare, conservation) without any procedural requirements, sell off utilities to the highest bidders--turn our country into post-glasnost Russia. Policy wonks are amazed. I am not. I have been studying the extreme right for awhile, research for a novel I'm writing. That right wing army whose latest incarnation is the Tea Party has roots in millennialism, survivalism, religious fundamentalism and fascinating revisionist readings of the Bible.  And they echo the Albigensian crusades, in the southwest of France.

That, after all, was a millennial age too, caught up in a proliferation of cults. Our version is equally militant and equally Biblical. It believes that

America has a covenant with the Lord. If she remains faithful to its edicts, her crops shall be plentiful, her people well fed, prolific and happy, her children obedient to the voice of their parents. But now she has faltered in her obligations and her cities lie corrupt, her waters and air are befouled and wantonness, crime and dissolution follow her people everywhere. As Satan and his allies are about to overwhelm the land, enter stage right the hero, Bible and Constitution in hand, to beat them back into the shadows.¹

Reenactment of the persecution of the Cathares

I wrote in an earlier post (Liberté en vélo) about the French crusades against the dissident Cathares, a religious group perhaps rooted in the early Gnostics, that became popular in the Languedoc in the 12th and 13th centuries. (The region is the Arriege, see my piece http://hubpages.com/hub/Another-South-of-France-The-Arriege) The war against their heretical beliefs, waged by Pope Innocent III, turned into a territorial conquest that crushed the Languedoc culture. During the brutal siege of Béziers in 1209, soldiers turned to the papal legate Arnauld Amalric, not knowing which were the heretics to be slaughtered. His response was:

Nece eos omnes. Deus suos agnoset.

Kill them all. For the Lord knoweth them that are His.

Tens of thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand people were slaughtered.

Since then some US Marines, Green Berets, and Christian patriots have adopted that motto:

"Kill them all and let God sort them out!"

These words, against a skull and cross-bones, appear on bumper stickers, t-shirts, Nazi paraphernalia, the trinkets of the American religious warrior. Better the earth be destroyed in its entirety than duty to Race, God and Constitution be compromised, declared the Aryan World Congress. The day of judgment is not far off, the task urgent.

Beasts of 12th c. Languedoc (Vals)

America, wake up. Some of these people are now members of Congress.

1Aho, James A. The Politics of Righteousness, p. 3