Then yesterday, a guy called Mark wrote to me, pointing out an even uglier statement by Spengler, on May 8, in an online forum Spengler leads:
The hidden premise of Islam is that Israel is chosen; that is why it [Islam] had to invent a "final revelation" to replace Hebrew Scripture, substitute Ishmael for Isaac, etc. etc. The nations desire Eternal Life, of which they first heard from the Jews, and covet God's promise to the Jews, who never can "unchoose" themselves, because no-one ever will believe them. The Arabs are a dying culture and Islam is a dying religion, and the only sensible thing to do is keep death at a distance.
So: more war, more barbed wire, more killing, please! [emphasis mine]
Who is this murderous person? Wikipedia informs that Spengler has not been forthcoming about his religion, ethnicity or identity. My new friend Mark told me that he thinks Spengler also writes under the pseudonym "Shushon." Here are Mark's first couple of emails to me [and I will freely interpolate my comments within his, in brackets]:
I'd like to draw your attention to an article in the current issue of First Things, a monthly journal of "religion, culture and public life" [edited by neoconservative Father Richard John Neuhaus]. The article is entitled "Zionism for Christians" and is written by "David Shushon". I put the author's name within quotation marks because I think it's a transparent pseudonym, almost certainly for the anonymous internet gadfly "Spengler." First Things once previously published an article by Spengler under his Spengler pseudonym ("Christian, Muslim, Jew" - October 2007), and anyone familiar with his style and thought will recognize "Zionism for Christians" as his work.
[In a rapid hunt of the 2 pieces, I find that both quote extensively from Franz Rosenzweig, including his statement that Christians and Jews are "laborers at the same task," and both speak of anti-semitism as a form of neopaganism, i.e., not Christian. This guy Mark is making sense to me.]
The idea of this most recent article is to persuade Christians that support for the state of Israel is theologically mandated by their faith. What does "support for the state of Israel" mean, from the Spengler perspective? Perhaps the best way to summarize that phrase from Spengler's point of view is to quote a recent comment he made on his forum--the kind of comment he avoids in the urbane pages of First Things. [And here Mark quotes the "barbed wire" comment from above]
Obviously, such comments are difficult to make under a true name in mainstream media, so Spengler has been making them pseudonymously. For more polite audiences he has now found a forum at First Things, where he couches his ideology in pseudo-theological terms.
The bottom line is that Spengler is seeking to convince Christians that support for the Greater Israel agenda that you decry is hardwired into Christian theology. He is also probably trying to bolster the flagging Jewish support for this ideology.
First Things touts the article in these terms: "The issue features, as well, David Shushon’s “Zionism for Christians.” That’s this month’s free article, available even to non-subscribers–but, then, why are there any non-subscribers, when you could read in the print version Shushon’s fascinating essay, which begins: 'Israel always matters. Biblical scholars have devoted endless pages to ancient Israel as a religious idea, and pundits have penned endless newspaper columns about modern Israel as a geopolitical entity. The deeper implications, however, have received less attention than they deserve in recent years, overshadowed by the exigencies of Middle Eastern politics. Indeed, real questions remain: What does the sheer existence of the modern state of Israel mean for theology–particularly for Christian theology? And what does that theology mean for the continuing existence of Israel?'"
What, in effect, Spengler is attempting is to persuade the Catholic Church--or, at least and less grandiosely, influential intellectuals and opinion shapers within it--to sanction a specific form of nationalism: Zionism. The practical benefit Spengler sees would be an increase of support for a radically Zionist Israel within influential Catholic circles, and the Catholic Church remains the largest and most influential single Christian grouping in the West.
Spengler's attempt rests upon a fundamentalistic reading of the Bible, specifically of the Abraham and Exodus stories. While one might expect the Catholic Church to be immune from such a fundamentalist appeal, that is not the case. Catholic scriptural theology has been deeply infected with fundamentalist readings since the Reformation--essentially, they were put on the defensive by the Reformers and are unsure how to distance themselves from fundamentalism without seeming to renounce scriptural authority. I speak on a popular level--the official statements of the Church do struggle to effect this distancing, but very cautiously and not entirely coherently, for fear of the "modernists" among them. So, Spengler's appeal could well be considerable among the "conservative" Christians (including Catholics) especially in America.
By the way, as you may know, in Jewish mysticism the "shushon/shushan flower" seems to be a symbol for Zion - six points/petals to the flower. [Didn't know that. By the way, Switchboard lists nobody with the last name of Shushon in the U.S., suggesting that it is a madeup name] So, for those in the know, the pseudonym Shushon may be a code for Zionist.
[I asked Mark what's wrong with Spengler, whoever he is, using pseudonyms.]
First Things has given Spengler/Shushon a forum to try to recruit Catholics to the Zionist cause. Spengler/Shushon presents Zionism in a theological way, whereas Spengler's real interests are very practical. He conceals what may be entailed for those who are deluded into believing that support of the state of Israel is a matter of fundamental theology for Catholics: once on board with that concept, they may (if Spengler has his way) be called upon to support "more war, more barbed wire, more killing, please!" (Reminds me of the bar scene in Fawlty Towers.) After all, if support of the Zionist cause is written into the Creed, so to speak, there's no backing away from the implications: the end will justify the means at that point. For that reason, I think Neuhaus owes it to his readers to reveal who the author Shushon is, so they can be aware that his agenda is not academic theology but power politics.
[Weiss again: I think the sale of Zionism to evangelical Christians gets at one of my big problems with Zionism. Because Israel has depended from the start on the west and Zionists generally believe as an article of faith that gentiles won't protect Jews when it comes right down to it, Zionism's advocates have often tried to market Zionism as being in the west's best interest, and at times that claim feels like so much snake oil. During the Cold War it made realist sense, to some, to overlook the landgrabs. Since then it's been problematic. The whole idea of "Islamofascism" clearly helped--the claim that the U.S. and Israel are in the same war (a claim that Trita Parsi has said was dreamed up by Israelis in the '90s). But this idea hasn't worked out very well in Iraq, not in the blue states anyway, and meantime the American Jewish interest in Zionism has weakened: young Jews don't feel they have to flee to Tel Aviv, not when they're marrying privileged gentile peers.
[I raised the snake-oil issue with Mark.]
It's precisely the snake-oil aspect of what he's peddling--his effort to couch his product in terms that will appeal to the intellectual pretensions of the Christian chattering classes--that needs to be addressed. You don't have to be a Christian to have grave doubts as to the compatibility of "more war, more barbed wire, more killing, please!" with what are generally supposed to be the tenets of Christian faith, nor for that matter do you have to be Jewish to have the same reservations regarding the compatibility of what he's saying with the best in the very diverse Jewish tradition.
An important post for anyone who still assigns weight to 'First Things.' I gave up on Asia Times several years ago, mainly because of the neocon pugnaciousness of Spengler, who I assumed was acting as vicarious amanuensis for the website owner. Same reason I gave up on pedantic, prolific Richard Neuhaus: apologias for neocon wars ain't Christian; the Good (converted) Father can line up rhetorical angels on the head of his pin till they are tumbling off the edges, but that doesn't make Iraq a just war under Catholic doctrine. Neuhaus should be obedient to Rome and the clearly expressed intent of the recent Popes; he isn't, his defense of unjust war (which becomes a defense of murder)is a disgrace to any thinking Catholic. What a disappointment from the (then-Lutheran) author of 'The Naked Public Square.'
(A nice rebuttal of his "Christian militarism" thesis can be read here:)
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/paul-w1.html
Rosenzweig's a complicated figure, and it's an eccentric chink in Spengler's churlish armor that he remains so devoted to him. From Wikipedia:
"Rosenzweig, while critical of Jewish scholar Martin Buber's early work, became close friends with him upon their actually meeting. This friendship lasted despite their differences of political opinion: Buber was a Zionist, while Rosenzweig was a strong defender of the German-Jewish heritage and felt that a return to Israel would embroil the Jews into a worldly history they should eschew (this position was given a tragic tone by the death of Rosenzweig's wife in a concentration camp long after he himself had perished of disease)."
...
"Rosenzweig's final attempt (he was dying from ALS) to communicate his thought, via the laborious typewriter-alphabet method, consisted in the partial sentence: "And now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep, the point of all points for which there—". The writing was interrupted by his doctor, with whom he had a short discussion using the same method. When the doctor left, Rosenzweig did not wish to continue with the writing, and he died in the night, the sentence left unfinished."