The Hollywood Liberal

PRINCE OF WAR:

Billy Graham’s Crusade

For a Wholly Christian Empire

An Unauthorized Biography

Of William Franklin Graham, Jr.

By

Cecil Bothwell

Brave Ulysses Books

Review by
Michael O’McCarthy

“Oh White God From Heaven, welcome to our shores and home…”

Thus we are told Columbus and mates were greeted upon landing by the various and unsuspecting peoples who lived and thrived there.

Thus, was the first evangelical named. Thus, he promptly began to fashion the means of the genocide to come. This chronicle of the exploitation and subversion of the human spirit by the Christian men of the cloth inflicted its torturous, hypocrisy upon the misnamed America and the world for the last 600 years.

Cecil Bothwell’s spare and well documented, unauthorized biography of William Franklin Graham, The Prince of War, captures Graham’s rise from his family’s anti-Semitic, quick dealing legacy in the south of Charlotte, North Carolina to become the Crown Prince of Protestantism. His position as Christian patron has been to the masses and Presidents alike; to the post-colonial destitute of the 3^rd world; reaping both the privileges and patronage of the Oval Office. Billy Graham is friends and advisors to Senators, Generals, right wing businessmen, yellow journalism’s giants and Commanders in Chief. Perhaps no other preacher broke through the barrier of church and state as did Graham, all too often in service to what President Dwight Eisenhower, one of his fondest worshippers, would come to call, “the military industrial complex.”

The truth is: Billy Graham never saw an American war he did not love!

Bothwell’s is not an academic treatise. What Bothwell’s book does is to tear away the chiseled-chin, white matinee idol glamorous mask of Graham and reveal a man who catered to the worst fears of America. From that of the black race seeking its freedom and its due to the much touted, little effective thirst of Communism for the soul of white folks and their servants of color at home and abroad.

Further Bothwell does a service to all of us tired of the self-righteous condemnations of these Holy Roller messengers from Charlton Heston sets. Tired of the never-ending broadcasting pabulum sent at us in behalf of these liars of faith and their patrons in high corporate and government office.

These savior-proxy hypocrites of a white Christ are caught often enough with their pants down with the whores they fuck and condemn male and female alike. Heard too often spouting their pious and non-ending promises of “pie in the sky when you die” as long as one gives their life, soul and tithes to Christ today. Shouting hallelujah from their multi-million dollar cathedrals in honor of they Lord Thy God they preach the lessons of Christ who loved the poor, all the while the poorest among us are homeless, laying dead and dying in the gutters and weeds. These embezzler’s purses are filled with the dollars and dimes from the gullible and from out of which they pay for their overly bountiful fruits of the Earth. These spiritual-capitalist pied pipers pray seriously for only a few things other than their own longevity: that is your money and your idolatry.

There are two Christ’s of this world. The first is the child Christ who in nursery rhyme and Sunday school calls “come all ye little children,” and whose giving spirit is as white as driven snow. Then comes the adult Christ who came, they now tell us, not to bring peace unto this earth but carrying a mighty swift and terrible sword. For the record Graham’s child’s Christ was over when at the infamous Bob Jones University, a citadel of right wing, racist, sexist Christian conservatism, Graham and friends threw rocks at kid’s cars as the came through campus playing stupid pranks with fireworks.

“We gave it to them good. Breaking all of their windows and showering them with broken glass.”

This narrow, mean mindedness of Graham would evidence itself in the later years in the company of the alcoholic traitor and would be thief of the US Constitution, Richard Milhous Nixon. Paranoiac, mean and spiteful, Nixon often sunk to the lowest of common denominator when scapegoating a people for the ills of failed imperialism. Like the Nazi hierarchy of his recent past, Nixon, his fascist shadow Kissinger and his Oberfuhrer Haldeman often lapsed into reviling the Jew for their troubles.

Bothwell once again tears away the beatific mask of Graham in documenting how Graham participated in those demeaning, scurrilous rants against the Ever Present Nameless Jew whose fault it was that capitalism was under assault from within. On more than one occasion, Bothwell documents those enjoinders of Graham with Nixon. One in particular is that from a redacted ninety-minute tirade worthy of Hitler. As Bothwell notes from the archival research Graham is recorded as saying of the Jews:

“This stranglehold has got to be broken or this country’s doing down the drain,”

Bothwell rips through Graham’s Madison Avenue PR attempt to position him as a regretful pal of Nixon just going alone with an obviously upset buddy; putting up with his letting off steam.

“I learned that the conversation had lasted an hour and a half, had rarely strayed from the denunciation of Jews and had sometimes been led by graham,” writes Bothwell q. (p10)Then we have this schizoid pronunciation of love for the state of Israel by Graham. And what follows is nothing but a bizarre irony in the new love affair of convenience by the Christian fundamentalists who believe in the Tribulation and Rapture.This is wherein Jesus will return to earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel’s occupation of the rest of its “Biblical lands” (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the Antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. Then the Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to earth.

What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all “true believers” (i.e., those who believe what THEY believe), will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow.

This is the whole cloth of these religious witches who prey upon the ignorance and fear of the common person. They feed this toxic brew to salve the pain of their exploitation by their bosses and political leaders. It is their infectious medicine for the ills of this planet’s most vulnerable species.

But in the end it is not the philosophic that worries: One of the assets of being the color called white in America is that you are privy to the insanity that makes up the racist mind of these Euro-Americans.

In the club locker rooms, the ball field bleachers, pool halls, intimate one-on-ones between father-in-law and prospective groom, in the corporate offices the denunciation of peoples of color, like the masculine form of gossip about “bitches” and “cunts,” is where one learns how seriously this culture is dominated by the myth of while male hierarchy and its pathetic insecurity. What comes with that package is the reference to “niggers, spics, wops, kikes and slopeheads.” What is result of this racial superiority leads not only to discrimination, but the underlying rationale for most of the US’s wars.

It is an all too human to err. But when you have God on your side, when you speak for the Lord Thy God, you give racism a Holy carte blanche. Likening to the noxious spiel of the Bin Ladens of this world is that when you play high priest to the ruler you insure his racism is carried out with God’s blessing. And that just what Graham did for Johnson and more so Nixon.

When Graham urged Eisenhower to invade Vietnam he became a military advisor; when he urged Nixon to bomb the dikes in North Vietnam, a barbarous act that would have killed a million people and destroyed the entire agricultural base of the nation, he was guilty of conspiracy to commit war crimes.

As Bothwell notes, The German high commissioner in occupied Holland, Seyss-Inquart, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg for breaching dikes in Holland during WWII.

Graham is in good company with George W. Bush. Both are partial to the commission of war crimes in the name of their Lord. Perhaps when Bush is indicted for his crimes against humanity Graham will be alive to offer him spiritual solace and visit with him in his cell, or walk with him on the way to the gallows.

Brave Ulysses BooksPO Box 1877Asheville, NC 289802