[Vision2020] The Moscow Taliban

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:

I've submitted the essay below to the Sandpoint Reader, and alert 
Visionaries will remember an earlier version of this piece.  Thought you 
would be interested in the revision with the August "history" conference in 
mind.  Now disguised as a "Trinity Festival."  I hope that we can organize 
a counter-festival of our own.

THE MOSCOW TALIBAN: CHILLING PARALLELS BETWEEN CHRISTIAN AND MUSLIM 
FUNDAMENTALISTS (Revised)

by Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Idaho

There are some chilling parallels between Christian and Islamic 
fundamentalists.  Both divide the world between believers and unbelievers, 
and by deciding for themselves who is saved and who is damned, they think 
that they can play God with our lives.

Both have also declared war on the secular culture of liberal democracy, 
the most peaceful and prosperous means of social organization ever devised 
by humankind.  They both reject the separation of church and state and 
would set up governments based on their own views of divine laws.

         Of greatest concern, however, is the fundamentalist view of the 
violent end of the world.  A common scenario is a great war in the Middle 
East in which the armies of God destroy the armies of Satan.  Radical 
Muslims of course identify Israel and the US as the forces of evil, but 
Christian fundamentalists see Islam as the ultimate enemy.  The horrifying 
implication is that the Jews, Muslims, and Christians of the Middle East 
will be the primary victims of this holocaust.

         Some conservative Christians make yet another division: an ethnic 
one that declares that one culture is superior to all others.  Michael 
Hill, founder of the League of the South, proposes that an independent 
neo-Confederacy of fifteen states would have the duty to protect the values 
of Anglo-Celtic culture from black Americans, who are "a compliant and 
deadly underclass."  A key word for the League is "hierarchy," the 
God-given right for superiors (read "white males") to rule over inferiors.

         Since 1998, the League of the South has had close ties with the 
Sons of Confederate Veterans, who in 2000 elected Kirk Lyons to its 
national executive board. An outspoken racist, Lyons was married by 
neo-Nazi Richard Butler in 1990, when Butler still had his compound in 
Hayden Lake. Lyons has led an amazingly unsuccessful legal campaign to have 
Southern whites defined as a "protected class."

         The League and the Sons of Confederate Veterans organize public 
protests with the Council of Conservative Citizens whose website decries 
"negroes, queers and other retrograde species of humanity." (Try replacing 
the "Cs" in their acronym with "Ks"!)  One League leader said that we "need 
a new type of Klan."

Moscow pastor Doug Wilson and Steve Wilkins of Monroe, Louisiana wrote a 
booklet entitled Southern Slavery as It Was in which they describe the 
antebellum south as the most harmonious multiracial society in history. Two 
University of Idaho history professors took time from their busy schedules 
to refute this piece paragraph by paragraph.  It was later discovered that 
20 percent of the essay was lifted from Robert Fogel's and Stanley 
Engerman's "Time on the Cross."

Wilson still stands by the booklet's thesis, but he has withdrawn it from 
circulation.  The problem, however, is that there is remaining stock in 
neo-Confederate book stores and at Wilson's 154 Christian schools across 
the nation.  In December the principal of one of those schools in Carey, 
North Carolina was forced to remove the booklet because of local protests.

Both Wilson and Wilkins deny that they are racists or neo-Confederates, but 
Wilkins is a founding director of the League of the South. The League's 
website uses small Confederate flags as hot buttons for information about 
the board members. Even though a visitor said that he saw a Confederate 
flag displayed in Wilson's office, he now claims that neo-Confederates 
should "burn the flag and wear the ashes." I would love to see Wilkins and 
Wilson do this when they meet for a conference on the American Revolution 
in Moscow on August 8-10, 2005.

If Wilson has no sympathies with neo-Confederates, why is he associating 
with Wilkins, displaying the Confederate flag at his Moscow school's 
functions, celebrating Robert E. Lee's birthday at this school, speaking at 
the Southern Heritage Conference, and writing for Chronicles, a journal 
whose editors boast that they are all members of the League of the South?

Christian nationalist George Grant, who believes in the death penalty for 
gays and lesbians, has joined Wilson and Wilkins at earlier Moscow 
conferences. Grant and Wilkins are promoting a novel entitled "Heiland," 
whose hero leads a violent overthrow of a "godless" federal government. 
"Heiland" has been compared to the "Turner Diaries," which inspired the 
bombing of the Oklahoma Federal Building.

Another parallel between Christian and Islamic fundamentalism is a desire 
to make religious laws the laws of the land. In his regular column in 
Wilson's "Credenda Agenda" (vol. 3: nos. 9, 11), Greg Dickison, member of 
Wilson's Christ Church and a Moscow public defender, states that "if we 
could have it our way," then there would be capital punishment for 
"kidnapping, sorcery, bestiality, adultery, homosexuality, and cursing 
one's parents." Dickison also quotes biblical passages (without 
qualification) that support slavery as "ordained and regulated by God," 
death for apostasy (Deut. 13.6-9), and cutting off a woman's hand for 
touching a strange man's genitals (Deut. 25.11,12). Behold, the Moscow Taliban!

I have obtained my information about the neo-Confederate movement from the 
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has declared the League of the 
South as a hate group. Wilson and his associates belittle the SPLC's 
achievements, one of which was supporting the suit that lead to the 
dismantling of Butler's Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake. We are now 
faced with yet another national embarrassment in Northern Idaho, and many 
Moscowans are already planning protests for the August conference.

I have fought religious fundamentalism all of my adult life, primarily 
because I believe that it is one of the most destructive forces in the 
world. These views do not deserve our respect nor tolerance, but call for 
our strongest condemnation. Come join us in Moscow in August to demonstrate 
once again that "Idaho is too great for hate."

         Nick Gier taught philosophy and religion at the University of 
Idaho for 31 years.  The quotations from neo-Confederates were taken from 
Intelligence Report (Summer, 2000), pp. 29, 14.  The title "Moscow Taliban" 
was inspired by Mark Potok's article "Taliban on the Palouse?" in 
Intelligence Report (Summer, 2004).
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