WWRD
From The Nation:
Jesus of Nazareth was born in 5 BCE (or so) and crucified around 30 CE. The first few texts that make up the New Testament were written beginning around 50 CE in Koine Greek. The book was redacted into its final form in the mid–fourth century but not translated into English until 1380. In other words, the stories in the Bible on Jesus are not the result of any contemporaneous reporting but rather, quite literally, the stuff of myth.
The same cannot be said of Ronald Reagan. We have, for instance, contemporaneous reports that Reagan apparently was a pathological liar. He bragged of liberating concentration camps in Germany although he spent all of World War II in Hollywood. He invented “a verbal message” from the pope in support of his Central America policies and lied about that too. He insisted, in 1985, that the leader of South Africa’s vicious apartheid regime, P.W. Botha, had “eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country.” Pants on fire…
We also know from contemporaneous reports that Reagan approved of genocide when committed by professed anticommunists. For instance, he thought Guatemalan strongman Gen. Ríos Montt was a dedicated democrat who was receiving “a bum rap” from human rights critics. In fact, according to that nation’s official nine-volume Historical Clarification Commission report, issued in 1999, Montt’s “genocide” resulted in the murder of approximately 200,000 people, mainly Mayan Indians, during his dictatorial reign of terror. The report singled out the Reagan administration for supporting the “criminal counterinsurgency” that undertook these murders. One could go on with such examples almost indefinitely. When Salvadoran death squads were murdering 200 people a week, and Vice President Bush flew an emergency mission to San Salvador to try to get things to calm down a little, Reagan nevertheless absolved the murderers of responsibility. Instead, he blamed “guerrilla forces” who likely committed “these violent acts” to “bring down the government,” lamenting that “the right wing will be blamed for it.”
I am actually a fan of Jesus, the Jewish carpenter and preacher—at least as he has been portrayed by myth and by history—and so I would not dare insult his memory by comparing him to that mendacious genocide-enabler Ronald Reagan. But many Republicans do. When Republican candidates are asked in debates to name their heroes or their favorite philosophers, it is often a tossup between Jesus and Reagan. Lately questioners have had to eliminate the two from allowable answers because otherwise every answer would automatically be the same.
