so that Christians of one nation could wreak death and destruction upon Christians of another nation with the full blessings of Almighty God.
“A ‘God’ that takes sides,” Montvert had snickered, “is on nobody’s side.” Delormel had removed him from class for the obligatory ten minute stroll up and down the hallway, a workout designed to “clear the brain.”
The French Revolution, Monsieur Delormel insisted, was “an outrage masterminded by Jewish financiers, Freemasons, degenerate philosophers and other irreligious libertines.” This characterization, popular among Catholics, the titled and reactionaries, was nowhere to be found in the instruction manual Montvert had been issued -- nor in any history work he had since perused. He had found it amusing that, in reading assigned works by the chief “degenerate” French philosophers, Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, he and his fellow students had been encouraged to parse and emulate their elegant literary style but enjoined from embracing their “amoral teachings.”
“Imagine a student being told, ‘Write like Hemingway but take care not to espouse his leftist values….’ “Montvert was fond of saying.
The reign of terror that followed the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 was summarily blasted as a “grotesque act of barbarism against Christian values.” Yes, many innocent heads rolled during the two–year frenzy. But Monsieur Delormel could not bring himself to regard the insurrection as a cathartic spasm against centuries of misery and oppression or as the impetus that would help rid France, for the first time in history, of the yoke of feudalism, a dissolute clergy and a callous absolute monarchy.
The assassination, in his bathtub, of Jean-Paul Marat, a populist physician, lawyer, journalist and legislator in 1793, was flippantly dismissed as the “extirpation of a Jewish scoundrel by a brave Catholic young woman [Charlotte Corday].” Marat was not Jewish -- his parents were from Sardinia -- but Montvert’s teacher had a quirky sense of humor that did not prevent him from creating myth where none existed.
Plant doubt among the uninformed and you can make them believe anything.
In contrast, the beheading of two royal idlers who bankrupted France while they wined, dined, gambled, gathered in prayer, made war and cheered their dogs on helpless foxes, Monsieur Delormel insisted, was murder. Nor would he entertain the notion that revolution, as Montvert perilously argued, is a process, not an incident. Many people tend to judge the French Revolution as a single event rather than a trend whose seeds were sown centuries earlier. The burgeoning concepts of human rights, equality, suffrage and the abolition of monarchy had actually taken root one hundred years before the storming of the Bastille.
Precocious, inquisitive and innately skeptical, Montvert survived and outgrew Monsieur Delormel’s sinister brand of encoding. It wasn’t until his own son came home one day from school crying, “the teacher said that Jews murdered Jesus,” that he knew that chauvinism and encoding are alive and well, a new generation of freethinkers notwithstanding.
A student of history and, if he can help it, a history maker, Father Hubert François de Ravaillac is a model Knight. When not discharging his apostolic duties or struggling with his conflicted sexuality with a daily auto-erotic regimen of self-whipping, he studies the newly updated secret Knights of Malta curriculum, Recruitment and Training of an Auxiliary Army of God.” Filled with rapture at the thought that he is destined to play a unique role in God’s magnificent scenario, he savors and commits to memory the following gems:
… The war for Christ is a territorial war. The “territory” is the human mind. The more completely captured in its raw state, the sooner it can be led to embrace our sacred doctrines and, in turn, programmed to help spread it. Once the mind has been breached, the “political animal” is defeated; God triumphs and the Church can recapture the leadership and hegemony it once exercised in shaping the World in the Catholic tradition.
… In order to obtain optimal results, Christ’s Soldiers must be among the most devout and obedient Catholics. They must be highly motivated. They must clearly understand the solemn nature and grave consequences of their obligation, and they must steadfastly justify their actions if unmasked or challenged. Sworn to secrecy, under no less a penalty than excommunication and spiritual death, they must be willing to suffer the vicissitudes and discomforts associated with our Holy Struggle, our war against infidels, and they must endure the animosity their mission will engender until we rise victorious.
… Well established citizens -- doctors, attorneys, business tycoons, teachers, journalists, and community leaders, all God-fearing, pious, church-going Catholics, shall be considered prime candidates for recruitment.
… When their participation in what inevitably will appear to be a covert operation is revealed to them they must be eager to proceed and infiltrate their social and professional circles.
… They will in turn receive instruction in techniques of persuasion and control of target individuals and groups. Awareness of and dedication to our noble struggle will be reinforced by –-
Keeping the recruits highly motivated and inspired;
Encouraging the support of segments of society for an insurrection against heresy and for the overthrow and reconstruction of our current system of governance;
Impressing upon them that defeat will result in the adulteration and death of true Christianity, and in persecution;
Campaigning against avant-garde clergy, especially those who preach Liberation Theology, support the ordination of women to the priesthood, advocate the repeal of celibacy and endorse abortion, stem cell research and same-sex unions.
… Conscription will be carried out with due diligence in private consultations with recruiters who do not initially reveal their true identity. Recruits will then be informed that they are already inside the movement and that a change of heart is futile and carries severe penalties.
… Once trained, this legion of Christian soldiers will be charged with infiltrating unions, student groups, peasant organizations, school districts and regional legislative bodies.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
If the verbiage gives off a strange odor of sulfur it’s because it brazenly and tackily plagiarizes a clandestine and rather crude CIA training manual, Psychological Operations in Counterinsurgency Warfare, which was distributed in Nicaragua in the 80s by attaching clusters to balloons and floating them down into the countryside. Drafted in Spanish, the 90-page manual advised U.S.-backed Contra rebels to “kidnap and neutralize selected Nicaraguan government officials,” a directive interpreted by Contra leaders to include assassination. It also suggested blackmailing Nicaraguan citizens into joining the rebel cause.
On February 5, 1984, the House Intelligence Committee concluded that production of the manual by the CIA violated a 1982 law that forbids U.S. personnel from taking part in the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. Printed in Honduras, about 2,000 copies were distributed in 1983 to guerrillas of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, the largest CIA-funded rebel force. Those attached to balloons were part of a 3,000-booklet edition cheaply printed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Predictably, the House Intelligence Committee’s ruling did not thwart future U.S. political, military and economic forays in Central America or, for that matter, elsewhere around the globe, all spearheaded by the CIA, which American author, Trevor Paglen, characterizes as
“an agency designed to operate outside
