Kicking the ones who won't kick back

http://rightcoast.typepad.com/rightcoast/2007/12/a-lovely-fascis.html

'To be fair, I am not saying Pullman is some sort of neo-Nazi. I think his invocation of fascist themes and memes is probably unconscious. It is just that similar jobs tend to call forth similar tools. The European fascists generally and the Nazis in particular very much wanted to cut off the influence and ultimately destroy the Judeo-Christian God and the Church in particular. They had political reasons for wanting this, but also ideological and (weirdly) religious reasons. Not all of the Nazis were devotes of the occult, but many of them were, and the ones who were not very much understood the importance and power of building a fascist mythos which could motivate and inspire people. To put together their ideology, the Nazis pulled out of the great cesspool of European ideas a lot of nasty things that would have been much better left alone, but among them was the idea that Christianity, which they saw as nothing more than a kind of Judaism, severed people from their inner Nature spirit, their pagan, let's run through the woods naked sort of thing. When Pullman has the Church taking children to camps to sever them from their daemons -- their animal- embodied-soul-mates that every whole person in his alternative universe has -- he is just parroting in kid lit form the old canard you could have picked up in a hundred disreputable places in Bavaria or Vienna in the 1930's.'

Anti-Christian and more specifically anti-Catholic diatribes are all the rage. I'm not sure why, given that only something like 7% of English people actually go to church. Do the words 'kicking a man when he's down' have resonance here? Why don't we have anti-Moslem diatribes? Could it be that those would be met with extreme violence and mayhem and are therefore truly risky? I love our brave intellectuals and journalists. There is so much to respect and honour in them.