 here at the noon block on a given Thursday. We're talking about history. History is here to help. I'd like to add, you know, in the context of what's going on in Congress this week, history can only help if you want it to help. If you want to reject it and ignore it, it can't help very much, but that's not us. Here we have Peter Hoffenberg, history in UH, and Jane Rosenfeld, UCLA, a career at UCLA, and we're going to talk about some of her writings recently and her thinking and the title of our show is Religion and Terrorism, A Strange Connection. You know, it seems less strange all the time, Gene. Welcome to the show, Peter and Gene. Thank you very much. Good to see you. Thank you for having us. So Peter, why don't you, you know, give a better introduction of Gene so we really know who she really is. Who she really is. All right. Well, she's the beloved grandmother. No, okay. We won't do that. We won't do the Yiddish line. No, I think for the audience and for ourselves, Gene is a scholar of many things, but I asked her to join us today because of particularly her interest in thinking about issues such as nationalism, terrorism, and fascism, which have been tossed around all the time. She brings to bear a very detailed, scholarly approach to those as religions. I hope I'm not misrepresenting your work, Gene, but as a historian of religion, that historian of political ideologies, a protege of David Rappaport, one of the most important scholars on terrorism. I would very much like to hear Gene's understanding of religion in and of itself, so how we use that term, and how that term can be applicable to help us understand this immense mischievous, which is just overwhelming so much of the world. She's published a book, published articles, she's a very active member of our Jewish community. So I hope that does you justice, Gene. I mean, can't really do you justice, but at least gives folks a sense. Well, we are very interested in what you have to say about the topic of religion and terrorism, that's the style of our show, but also on the article you wrote, which I saw called fascism as action through time, or how it can happen here, concluding it can, yes, it can happen here, which you wrote in 2017, three years ago. That's a very, very interesting article context of what's going on. So I guess when I think of religion and terrorism, I think that religion is somehow incorporated internally and externally in Trumpism. Is that a part of your thinking on this? Well, I work with a group of wonderful interdisciplinary scholars and have for many years who study these unusual, new, and sometimes very short lived religions that fascism is not short lived. And our definition of religion is quite different from what you hear in the public square. Our definition of religion is whatever people consider their ultimate concern, that's from theologian paul tillic. And what it means is what people are determined to live by and die for. Okay, how would you differentiate that say from a an ideology or philosophy, because those terms could also be applied to fascism? Oftentimes what we consider religious is spoken of as ideology. If you're kind of aware of listening to news programs, how much the news media avoids the word religion? And so do the civil authorities, because there are laws regarding religion that protect people who act out of religious motivation. And they would prefer not to have those laws apply in many cases when there are court cases involved. So we see America as largely identified as a Christian country. And Christianity is a faith. It deals with belief. It deals with prayer. It deals with God. But those, that's a very limited view of religion. So we like to expand it into the realm of ideology. And there isn't a fine line between the two. And there's not a fine line between political ideology and religion either. Because just to give you one example, Mussolini is regarded as the person who introduced fascism to the world. That's not really true. It was existed before, but nobody had really identified it as such. Ten years after he gained power, he wrote a manifesto with his Minister of Education Giovanni Gentile. And he said, you know, when I started out, I really didn't have a vision or an ideology. He said, but this is what fascism is. And he defined it as a religion as spiritual primarily, as moral and spiritual. And it was a dogma that he produced. So he sees it in religious terms. And he was the progenitor, so to speak. How close is that to Nazism? It's quite close. Nazism is a German form of fascism. Each society has its own form of fascism. We have ours, too. It emerged after the Civil War. And that was in the Ku Klux Klan. And then it reemerged in the national Ku Klux Klan around 1920. And it was disseminated outside of the South throughout the entire country. And these militia groups and other groups we see today that we regard as domestic terrorists now, there are many of them that owe a great deal to that Ku Klux Klan because even after it fell apart, it continued in the different states. So the ideology or religion of the Ku Klux Klan has persisted and it has now emerged again. Well, it sounds like the current ideology of the insurrectionists, if you will, is that Trump is a religious icon. They take their instructions from him. They believe he's right no matter what he says. And they will follow him anywhere. Is that a religion? Can you classify that as an ideology or religion? Can you classify it as fascism? Not in itself, no, Jay. But I do classify it as charismatic leadership. And that's very important. I used to like the word charismatic. Yeah. You know, charismatic means grace in the Bible. It's a lovely word. But charismatic leadership, the idea was developed by Max Weber. And it's been very, very productive as a theory. And what it does is that at the center of fascism is the figure of the leader. That's pretty definitive of fascism, to have a charismatic leader. He's a showman. He's an actor. He's a performer. And he demands complete loyalty. He has to be a bit of a magician. He has to convince his followers that he can work magic, that all his promises will be fulfilled. And specifically, when you look at Trump, that he's always a winner. He can never be a loser. And the people, the idea of the people is appropriated by the leader. He is the representative. He is the embodiment. He's not the representative. Our traditional leaders are representatives of us. But a charismatic, fascist leader is the embodiment of the people. So what he does, and all power accrues to him, he does for the people. Therefore, loyalty to him is disloyalty to him is sedition. And he is kind of a deity. Yes. He has a kind of deity. I mean, I think it's existed long before we ever thought about fascism. I mean, this is a flaw in the humanity, isn't it? Well, definitely when you see a charismatic leader who is as negative as Trump or Hitler or Mussolini or Putin, you want to think of it as a flaw in humanity. But think of Buddha. Think of Jesus. Think of Muhammad. We owe a lot to charismatic leadership. What it does, what it means, it's in contra distinction to the usual traditional and bureaucratic leaderships that we are used to. The pathway to the presidency is a bureaucratic pathway. And typically, fascist leaders will take that legal bureaucratic pathway as Hitler did for six years and as Mussolini did. And then they will achieve it with basically not a majority, but for other reasons. They will achieve it legally. And then they will suddenly reveal as this type of leadership, which is opposed or in contra distinction to the values and the institutions of the country they now are in charge of. So you're saying that this pathway, and I recall, I think it was Paxton that you wrote about in that article, had half a dozen steps along the way from where you go through various changes in the community. And then you get to be a despot at the end. And it gets to be fascism. But it sounds like you could identify a number of societies in history that have followed the same pathway. This is nothing new. These rules have existed for a long time, am I right? Partly. There's nothing new under the sun. Human beings engage in patterned group behavior. And it's replicated throughout history, but it's never identical. You have to be able to recognize it. People employ different symbols and symbolic expressions and ideas of sacrality and deity. But the pattern is the same. And what Paxton has done, Robert Paxton, who's a very recognized scholar of fascism, is he has devised five stages. They're extremely general. And I tried to make them much more specific to America today, which is what you have to do. In order to identify a phenomenon, you have to know the basic fundamental pattern which Paxton has identified. And then in order to elaborate it and describe it and learn about it, you have to see how that very general framework works in specifics in your own society. And bring that to bear. And I think the latter part of the article I have several points that I brought out, and I aligned them with Paxton's general stages. I told you it reminds me of Ann Applebaum's article comparing what we have today with what was going on in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. And the big question there, at least a part of that article, was how does a normal person deal with this? When one observes that we are on that path, what do we do? Because sometimes we would be able to see that it's not a good path. And what will we do to be able to deal with it? I see Peter shaking his head. He's got some ideas. I know he does. No, I'm listening. So, Gene, did you finish what you wanted to say? This is Gene's show. I guess I would only add, I am in agreement with Gene, most things. A couple of things I would add is when we talk about fascism, I would very much differentiate between fascism with a little app as a religious belief and fascism with a capital app as a state. Because I think one of the phenomenons of successful fascism, and in this case, Trump is only partially successful, is while saying you are anti-modern in fact to infiltrate and use the state. And I think you've seen that in this case with McConnell, probably even as much as not more than with Trump. So I would agree with the sense of a religion, but I would think that a capital app is a church. It has its institutions, its structures, its leadership. I also think that the Applebaum position reveals one of the flaws that we really all have, which is even if we find what's going on despicable, we have to really try to understand how and why these people feel sets a sense of betrayal. One of the critical and really crucial political missteps was Mrs. Clinton calling these people deplorable. That only accentuates their sense of resentment. And I think Applebaum misses the vote. Applebaum doesn't understand that the people she surrounds herself with and has surround herself with have been the victors of neoliberalism after 1945. And a lot of these folks are victims of neoliberalism. And so I'm wary of suggesting like Applebaum that somehow we only need to blame Republican senators who aren't doing anything about it. I think we're perhaps, that's the tip of the iceberg. We're kind of missing essential iceberg. And that's why I'm a little wary about throwing around the term fascism. I mean, I think I see a lot of populism here. I agree entirely with Gene's point about charismatic leadership. Charismatic leadership can be Martin Luther King Jr. So it's a matter of, and populism can be Martin Luther King Jr. So to me, these divisions have been in this country ever since Hamilton and Jefferson. They are part of our DNA. Gene, let me go back to the question of what is what is the right thinking person? Not necessarily a history professor or a philosopher or a scholar. A right thinking person do when that person finds that there is a fascism, however you define it as a negative community experience is growing in his or her midst. What does that person do? Well, I consider myself a pretty ordinary person. And the first thing I did when I suspected it is I went to someone who knows more than I did, my mentor. And I said, do you know anything about fascism that I can study? And then I began to study. And then I began to link it to what I was already doing, which was following, I guess you would call them insurrectionist underground groups in the 1990s that brought us Oklahoma City. And I think that as I went along and I saw more of this, I linked it up to the nativist idea of nativist and apocalyptic and millennial movements that I had sort of specialized in. I began to see the relationships. And then I thought, when I saw Trump coming up, rising up, I thought, wow, this looks like Triumph of the Will, that movie that Lenny Reef and Stall made about Hitler's party rally. And before he came to power, and you see Trump coming down the Golden Staircase, he's coming down from heaven. You see him coming out of his airplane. And you see in Triumph of the Will, you see the opening scenes of Hitler descending from the clouds in his airplane. And that was back in the 1930s when airplanes weren't that usual. But they deliberately, their showmen, their performers, they deliberately do this to appeal to the emotion. It's an appeal to the emotions. And to rally support that is more committed than ordinary support. So what does the ordinary person do? First, go to someone who you think can explain it to you. Timothy Snyder wrote his book on tyranny in order to inform us, basically. And then see what you can understand about it and continue to try to understand it. But most importantly, to teach it, I actually did develop a course in which I introduced it. And I had college students come to me afterwards and say, gee, nobody's ever told us about this before. Because after World War II, people wanted to forget. It was so traumatic. They wanted to forget. We should never forget. Some people are forgetting what happened on January 6, and that was three weeks ago. But I'm interested in what you think happened on January 6. In terms of the confluence of all of these threats we've been talking about here, what was really going on, as opposed to, say, a year or two or three earlier? What happened in this country as was revealed conceptually on January 6? It was revealed. It came on the radar big time. It's been brewing since the 1970s. And that would take a very long time to explain. Nevertheless, what happened on January 6 is you saw a lot of people doing what's called an enactment. You know about the enactors of history. We have enactors in small towns throughout the United States. First, you notice these people were in costume. Secondly, they were very, very manifest with their symbols and their flags and their t-shirts. And they were enacting mythology. Their mythology, which we refer to as conspiracy theories, is the key to understanding your mindset and understanding them, not as deplorables or as domestic terrorists or as brainwashed cultists, but rather truly understanding them as human beings that we can relate to, because we have our mythologies too. We all have our mythologies, but they were in opposition. Again, they're following a leader who's in opposition to our institutions, in opposition to our traditions, and specifically has focused on dividing us. And radical dualism, division into good and evil, is essential. It's apocalyptic to motivating people to come and, quote, save the country. They want to save America. So in their minds, they were saving America. What kind of America? The kind of America that David Lane, in the 1990s, proposed in his 14 words, which are now adopted by the alt-right. And that is, we must secure the existence for our people, the existence of our people, and a future for white children. So who are our people in the predicate? You have white children, the white people, and their history. That's the only America they know. Generally white Christians. White Christians. Yeah, that reminds me of something played on the Super Bowl by Bruce Springsteen, or Jeep, the automobile manufacturer. The difficulty though, I think, like a difficulty in a modern democracy, is everything that Gene has absolutely pinpointed about the people we don't like. We could make the same analysis of the left or progressives as a religion as well. So to me, what we have is a moral problem. Because the sense of who is one of the most American terrorists? John Brown. Now the way that she described John Brown, you could describe the abolitionist movement, including Brown as a Trumpist figure. He was willing to sacrifice himself, right? The irony of people like Trump is they're not really willing in the end to sacrifice themselves. And that's where the Jesus metaphor falls through. But what interests me is absolutely what you described. A religion, a sense of race, a sense of mythology, a sense of enactment, which is often Calvary in one way or another, right? I'm willing to sacrifice myself, all the Christianity. But what do we do if those characteristics are actually on our side as well? After all, people died in John Brown's procedure of Harper's Ferry. Kansas was bloody before or Brown and his sons murdered folks in Kansas who they disagreed with. So what do we do? I mean, the notion of commercializing politics, t-shirts, names on mugs, propaganda goes at least back to the abolitionist movement. You could say the abolitionist movement was the first western movement to do what you described, including making freed slaves, charismatic leaders. So what do we do when the moral divide is so great? The structures are very similar. I mean, we have our all, Jay and I talked, I agree with the 1970s. And one of the recent I believe in the 1970s is we're still fighting the Vietnam War. And the folks who seized the capital, where people thought generally we should have won that war, where we were sold out. So I don't know, how do we have a moral revolution in which what you described is the most powerful mythology and the most powerful enactment. Let me throw another idea in here. You talk about the Vietnam War. Trump had a bone spur. He doesn't know anything about the Vietnam War. He went to the University of Pennsylvania. I think he got in because his father had a twist there. I don't think he did well. He's very reluctant to release his grade point average or his grades. I don't think he's well educated. We know he doesn't read much, doesn't like to take notes. And yet at this project, he seems to be pretty good at this project being the showman and the and consolidating power and affecting the minds and hearts of hundreds of millions of well, many tens of millions of people. He's pretty good. Now we're talking about some pretty conceptual things, historical things, philosophical things. Do you think that Trump follows this? What enables him to do the remarkable things that he has done? He's done remarkable things. What has enabled him to bring half the country under his banner and make them go, you know, ransacked the capital? That's quite an achievement. If you look at from their point of view, what is he smart? What is it? What kind of talent does he have that he could do this? Is there a parallel between him and Mussolini and Hitler and Putin? What makes Trump so successful? I'm going to go first, Gene, and then I'll go. Well, that's a very good question. And I guess we would say that if you have a high IQ, you are academically able to negotiate a university education. But that is about a sliver of human intelligence. And there are very gifted people who fall outside of that sliver, including these unusual charismatic personalities. And you see, for example, David Koresh was associated by the FBI with a retarded person. He was dyslexic. He wasn't educated. He was from the lower class. But he certainly exercised charismatic leadership. So there are always individuals born and raised under certain circumstances. And if you want to know more about Trump, read Mary Trump's book that developed this personality. And we see them in history. Hitler was not well educated. And Mussolini wasn't particularly well educated. So let's set that aside. Set that aside. That's kind of an Ivy League perspective. We don't need that. Okay. So let me answer your question. Do you want to weigh in on that? Yeah, I would definitely like to weigh in on that. And again, like with Gene, complementary to hers, you asked, how was he able to succeed basically? Okay. So I think we have to, as an Ivy League academic, I apologize, we got to get back to what you mean by success. Let's let's remember that he lost two consecutive popular votes. All right, let's please let's always remember that Mrs. Clinton and Biden both overwhelmingly, as far as those ballots that were counted, and I would wager my Mickey Mantle mint baseball card that there were many for Biden and Mrs. Clinton that were not counted rather than vice versa. The corruption mostly seems to be on the other side, not the Democratic side. So what is success? Well, success is not his intelligence, but his political manager's intelligence to know which states he can get the electoral college based primarily upon grievance. This is how I believe very much in Hofstadter's view of the kind of grievance that drives American politics. Now grievance can also drive progressivism, right? I find slavery abhorrent. Okay. But in this case, it's a grievance which is a minority grievance. I mean, what we have, unfortunately, is a democratic society in which the minority is ruling. Most Americans agree with abortion of some sort. Americans overwhelmingly agree with gun control, 70%. So success is not his brilliance, but really his political manager's brilliance to see how the political system can be manipulated. You don't need an Ivy League education. What you do need though are people who understand politics. What's interesting is like the people of Fox News understood politics until January 6th. Now, the second point I'd like to make, and I know I'm beating the dead horse, but I don't really think it's a dead horse, is the question of race. Trump has been a race baiter. I don't know if you guys remember the five innocent young men who were charged with the Central Park murder. Of course they were acquitted, but you might not have seen the press conferences where he promised to pay money to people who found the suspects and immediately said the suspects should be executed. I will wager my Babe Ruth mint card that if it had been reversed, if a Black woman had been attacked and there were five white guys, you would not find Trump. So Trump's brilliance is seeing that Americans, particularly white Americans, just cannot get over this sense that they are being replaced. All of the information that Gene suggests about the 1970s, that's part of what's fueling it. The great replacement theory, which is now over 100 years old. Trump is a race baiter. He's a race baiter. That is, if he's so smart, either by academic training or just native smarts, and if he can do such admirable work in politics, how come he can't do anything in COVID? He has been really essentially useless in COVID. He's never put his hands on it. He is not a manager. He is what probably the founding parents worried about the most. He's a Democratic despot, and they couldn't quite figure out with the Constitution really how to avoid that. In a typical American way, we always have some kind of way to address a problem afterwards, because if we address the problem. If we could show the founding fathers the video in this impeachment trial, they would have been able to find a way. I feel certain they would have found a way to improve the Constitution. All right, well, let's reverse it. But let me ask you. It looked a hell of a lot like the Boston Tea Party, Jay. It looked like the Boston Tea Party. Why is this compartmentalized knowledge so dangerous? Because the priority is wrong. You can take a despot of fascist, if you will, and he will enhance his own power, but he will not operate for the benefit of the community. Is that part of fascism? Well, Trump particularly, in my view, has never been able to do any real work, set a goal and meet it. He does not have the temperament to do that. And you recall the famous dictum that that Roosevelt may have been a second rate intelligence, but he was a first rate temperament. And Trump does not have the temperament to achieve a goal. If you've ever seen him, especially after his hospitalization, he was as hyper as they come. You should be on riddle. But that's just a joke. I don't know it personally, but the fact is that if you look at everything that's been achieved in his administration, he's delegated everything. He will go to Mitch McConnell and he will say, I want a tax bill. He won't touch it himself. He won't go to Congress. He won't do the hard work. Or he says he wants something done with the military. He'll go to one of his generals. He knows who to tap on the shoulder to get the work done. Mary Trump has an interesting scene in her book where she goes. She's helping him. He asked her to do a project for him with him. And she goes in there and he never talks about the project. And she says, all the time I was ever in his office, I've seen him on the telephone talking to people, but I really don't see anything that he does. He doesn't work. I remember that. One last point, you guys, for us to address is the title of the show. The center of our discussion theoretically, religion and terrorism, a strange connection. What do you mean by that, Jean? Let's assume that we take a very broad view of what religion means, but how does that get to terrorism? And are we observing that now? Well, the word strange is important here because what we're looking at really is not religion in general, but the strange aspects of religion. In other words, there's a huge controversy going on in America today between scholars and people who consider themselves cult experts. They're not scholars. They present themselves as scholars, but they're not scholars. And drive scholars to distraction because everything you see, if a new group appears like Jonestown, Omishin Rikyo, Solar Temple, whatever, CSA, the first word you get about these people is they're bizarre. They're strange. That's my meat. That's where I go. To decode what they're about, and there's always a logic to it. It may be a very emotional logic. It may be a very strange logic, but it is presented as a religious imperative. And that's important because one of the most well-known people in the field of the study of religion, Houston Smith, who died a few years ago. He was the guy who did the LSD experiments with Timothy Leary. He said at the latter part of his life that he really believed that religion was the most impactful factor in human history. And this was in his lecture on jihadism. And he may be right because people become so committed to it. So the strange connection between religion and terrorism is when you get into a part of religion that includes the end of the world and what happens after that. You have to destroy the world in order to recreate it because it has declined so badly that it cannot be repaired. And people are in utter despair. So what lifts them out of despair is a belief when somebody comes along and says, I understand this. This is what's going on. The end of the world is coming soon. We have a role to play as the hand of God, and we are going to rebuild the world, a better world, for our community as we define it. That's what makes it dangerous. Has that ever worked? It has changed. What? Has that ever worked? Well, what do you mean by it works? Again, what Gene described is Lincoln and Sherman marching through the south. The battle of him of the republic. You can't get much more religious or Christian than that. And the argument was that violence was necessary to destroy tyranny. And reconstruction would have been the building of the new world. So did it work? Well, it worked up until a bullet at Forrest Theater. We've got to come back because there's so much in what Gene said, which is so helpful. And the great scholar, she says things that raise really important questions. Yes, it may be millenialism, but what is driving these people is also a sense of martyrdom. And not all religions like Judaism does not believe in martyrdom. So we have a kind of Christ complex going on. And at least as a European historian, I would say this at least goes back to Calvinism, where you had an obligation not to obey, but an obligation to disobey. So I think I hope Gene can come back. There's a lot. There's terrorism as expressions of religion or understood in a religious way. But there are also religions in which the potential for terrorism is built into their religious understanding. That's slightly different. I mean, religions that believe in martyrdom, in which weapons are easily accessible, is a very dangerous. I mean, it's one of the reasons that at least one person is called these folks, the American Taliban. I remember a commander. The religion you're referring to in America specifically, and we don't have time to go into it now, but everyone should know about it. It's called Christian identity. Yes. It's a basic heresy. Yes. No, let's let's let's chat about this. And I think that goes back to another fatal flaw of the founding parents, which was not just to allow weapons, but to allow for religion to be a segregated concept, which gets the kind of protection that other behavior does not. And that's a that's a deep existentialist issue. The UN is guilty of that. People study genocide are guilty of that. The founder is a constitutional guilty of that. Right. Why is my religion and my religious institution more important than my body? And why is it better than a Christian woman, but not a woman? And that's going to open up a whole lot. But I find that as the existential crisis, that somehow religion is carved out as a separate sphere that gets separate protection from other human behavior. And it may be, as Gene said, that the professor is correct. Whether or not we like it, the concept of religion has been so reified. It's surrounded in gold. You can't you can't touch it. And so like all societies, we have a real problem with atheism. Most modern societies really cannot understand atheism. All right. So that should open up enough for next week. Let me just ask one more thing. Gene and Peter, you know, guys are academics. And you think of these things and study these things and write these things. All the time. All the time. And you're trying to make sense of, you know, you're testing these ideas as against the reality around us. It can't be disconnected. So you have to test these concepts and see what they mean today to you. But it strikes me that the things you've been studying, reading, talking, writing about are now. Okay. We are living in history. Yes. And the history is has the possibility of affecting us more than anything that we've ever seen in our lifetimes before. That must change your perception, Gene. You're you're you're living in the history you're thinking about. And it couldn't have a profound effect on your personal life. Want to talk about it for one minute? Yes, I'm very attracted to the idea of religion and ideology and violence because I was born during World War II. And my father went to the South Pacific. And I remember that time and I remember after that time and how impactful I actually remember listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the radio. And of course, when I was a young person, just at a very vulnerable age, the Vietnam War came along and impacted my generation. I don't think we ever ever resolved that issue. It's still with us today as Peter brought out a lot of the extreme right ideology of Stephen Bannon. The fourth turning revolves around what happened in the 60s and they want to produce something counter distinctive to that. So yes, and I'm very, very impacted by what's going on today. But the need to understand it is paramount. And that's what led me to it, not just that I had prepared in a field history of religions, which is not very well known. And in nativist millennialism that applied to that was applicable to what was going on today and has been very a very productive framework for understanding what's going on around us. Thank you, Gene. Thank you, Peter. You want to respond to that. And do that. I want to thank Gene and ask her to come back. She's very busy. I'd like her to come back. And if we could talk a little bit about the Christian identity and how that might be connected, especially in a global world, you know, Norway and Hungary, there may be certainly the link between Christianity and identity remains very strong in Europe. We could talk about that. And I think it might be if we could get a few other people to talk about this question of the unresolved Vietnam War, not necessarily from a military point of view, but it seems to me there were still dealing with many of those issues. Well, we'll talk about it later. There's a lot. Thank you, Peter. Thank you very much. And Gene Rosenfeld, thank you so much for joining us today. Very interesting discussion, one which we can have again. And I suggest it will be more and more relevant as we go forward. Everybody be safe. Take care. Get your vaccines.