Isms

Disappearance of Men

“Is not ours an age of mislived lives, of unmanned men? Why?… Because Jesus Christ has disappeared. Wherever the people are true Christians, there are men to be found in large numbers, but everywhere and always, if Christianity wilts, the men wilt. Look closely, they are no longer men but shadows of men. Thus, what do you hear on all sides today? The world is dwindling away, for lack of men; the nations are perishing for scarcity of men, for the rareness of men…

“I believe: there are no men where there is no character; there is no character where there are no principles, doctrines, stands taken; there are no stands taken, no doctrines, no principles, where there is no religious faith and, consequently, no religion of society. Do what you will: only from God you will get men.” (Cardinal Louis-Edouard Pie, Bishop of Poitiers, Homily for Christmas 1871)

We are living in the age of wilted men. Men today are bereft of faith and reason, virtue and character, honor and dignity. Men are empty vessels because the enemy has emptied them of the Catholic Faith. Progressivism has cultivated limp daffodils where once were virile men. It has replaced man with a curious species whose voice has been reduced to whimpers and sobs, a character more fitted to caricature than living and fighting against a world surrendering to Satan.

The heroic Bishop of Poitiers, Card. Pie, said that we have “unmanned men” because Jesus Christ has disappeared. Christ has disappeared because He has been shown the door in our society and the Conciliar Church, the wicked institution that claims Catholicity but is instead the diabolical deception resulting from the evils of Vatican II and the progressivist assault preceding it.

C.S. Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man in 1943 during the slaughter of the Second War against Western Civilization. In the chapter, ‘Men without Chests,’ he presciently wrote this, still pertinent today:

“And all the time – such is the tragi-comedy of our situation – we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

With this brilliant text, C.S. Lewis met his peer Card. Pie.

In his work Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Prof. Plinio de Correa Oliveira said, “In times of great crisis there are two types of men: those who are overwhelmed by the crisis and those who rise up to resist the trend of events and so change the course of History.”

Our times call for manned men, men with chests, and those who rise to resist events to change the course of History. The Church needs men, the revitalized Church Militant on the move to resist and fight the enemies in the world. Instead, that revolutionary Conciliar Church promotes the Church Groveling, men overwhelmed by crisis, men who promote the crisis. It is a “church” of darkness, a “church” of unmanned men. We need the army of Church Militant to rise against the enemy’s occupation of our Church and society.

But before we return to this matter, let’s look at how we have descended to such a state where men are no longer men.

Feminism vs. patriarchal society

In the 1962 pamphlet What’s Become of Father? Catholic scholar John O’Brien reports that the “problem” of the father and his role was troublesome even then. We mistakenly think of the ‘50s and ‘60s nostalgically as “good” times for the Church, the family and men. He is wrong. The assault against all three was already in full swing.

O’Brien wrote: “Time was when father was the revered head of the household, to whom the children turned for guidance in all important decisions; he was respected for his wisdom and experience, and loved for his devotion to his family. No event in the home was complete without his presence.” Such a vaunted position in the natural order of the family drove the fringe element of feminism into a ravening rage.

These harridans screamed in the streets, sharpening their tongues and knives, then went after men with a vengeance. They hated the “patriarchal” society. They vowed to destroy it. With millions of dollars pumped into academic programs called “Women’s Studies” in the nation’s colleges and universities, feminists rose to dominance. These “studies” were funded in great measure by the Rockefeller Foundation.

With the rise of feminism and women in the workplace, many women lost their natural loving instincts. Consequently, the family fell into disarray, morals declined and birth rates plummeted.” O’Brien suggests this is the case because, even in 1962, “the child’s chief, if not his only parent, is the mother, while the father is relegated to the position of a mere breadwinner.” Since then the father has ceased even to be the breadwinner and has become merely an inconsequential oaf, as countless advertising spots remind us.

Already in the early 1960s, commentators remarked on the father’s haplessness. Dr. O’Brien cites research affirming how modern culture set the woman up as a beautiful powerhouse of sex appeal and dynamic capability, relegating the male to a position of ridicule as an awkward and hapless galoot.

Reflecting the feminist vision of the male, the popular soap operas of that time pictured men as “simple-minded, easily-bamboozled and fairly expendable oafs.” In the halcyon days of television sit coms in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, the trend toward oafishness began with Dick van Dyke’s character of Rob Petrie in The Dick van Dyke Show.

As society continued its unabated descent into filth and despair, more “fathers” appeared on the television horizon. Some fathers were still portrayed as adequate, The Andy Griffith Show and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father being two examples of note. But families were changing significantly with wives as co-breadwinners, usually in high powered jobs, like Claire Huxtable in The Cosby Show, where she was an attorney and he, Cliff Huxtable, a pediatrician working from the basement in his home.

The descent of the father continued with Home Improvement, showcasing Tim Allen as a ridiculous handy man wannabee who ran an unsuccessful cable network show. Allen was saved continually by his wife. If it were not for her, the show implied, Taylor and his three sons would be living in filth, reeking of perpetual body odor, wearing cardboard boxes for shoes and garbage bags as clothes.

In Home Improvement the mother’s true role as her husband’s helpmate and “sun of the family” has become a caricature. Men are seen as pigs that need women to clean them up and boss them around. That reinforces the twisted feminized view.

Anyone who watches sit coms today can see that this early tendency to present men as big boys and fools has continued and exacerbated without restraints.

There is no doubt that the great majority of modern men have been hermetically sealed in the baggie of feminism. Nearly all are too timid and fretful to break free to demand their natural authority as men and as heads of households.

Abandoning comforts and entering the battle

For the Church, true men are vital for her restoration. Sadly, even traditional Catholic men have been too inculturated by the filth of Progressivism. Men have become weak and ineffectual.

We must remember the words of Job, (7.i), “the life of man upon earth is a warfare.” We are seduced by comfort and consumption, beset by economic woes and the vagaries of antichrists in politics.

This is not the hour to abandon the Mystical Body of Christ to its enemies and run off to some solitary forest to avoid personal inconveniences. This is the hour to enter the battle with increased vigor, to re-conquer every inch of soil the enemies took and rebuild in that place the same sacred institution more militant, pure and glorious than ever, so that the Church will be ready to face, under the protection of Our Lady, all other possible enemies until the end times.

St. Bernard roused the men of his time to enlist in the Second Crusade with stirring words: “All you who hear me, make haste to calm the wrath of Heaven! Leave off imploring His goodness with futile lamentations or mortifying yourself with disciplines, but rather take up your invincible shields. The clamor of arms, the dangers, difficulties and fatigues of war, these are the penances that God imposes on you.”

We should pay heed to them in our continuing crusade to storm the captured citadel and free the imprisoned Truth. We Catholics can still be the great men needed for our times. We must go into the world, in all domains, to battle for Holy Church and her dignity. We must recapture that which has been taken, defend those assaulted, and restore to God His rights.

What a horrible thing it would be if we, as Catholic men, dropped our arms and fled the battlefield. Then, to end with the words of the heroic Card. Pie, “What a disappointment for mothers to realize that the male they gave birth to is not a man, and will never deserve to be called a man!” We are Catholic men or we are nothing.

http://www.traditioninaction.org/Cultural/B010cpMen.htm


Trials and Tribulations: Catholics Persevere in China

In all things we suffer tribulation: but are not distressed. We are straitened: but are not destitute.
We suffer persecution: but are not forsaken. We are cast down: but we perish not.
Always bearing about in our body the mortification of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our bodies.
For we who live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake: that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh. (2Cor:4:8-11)

Sixty-five years of Chinese communist rule should be mourned, not celebrated. Contrary to the media-fueled image of Mao as a gentle philosopher and great freedom fighter, he was actually a degenerate mass murderer who ruthlessly suppressed all human rights. In their remarkable biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday revealed that Mao grew up not as an oppressed hard working peasant dedicated to fighting injustice, but as a loafer who took a job as a Communist International Soviet agent to receive “a comfortable berth as a subsidized professional revolutionary.”

Mao enthusiastically adopted Lenin’s most violent terrorist techniques because he was a vile bloodthirsty thug. From 1920 to 1976 Mao murdered more people than Hitler and Stalin combined – 70-million Chinese. The “Great Famine” (1958-1961) in which 40-million perished was a direct result of Mao’s farm collectivization policies. To eliminate tens of millions of imagined enemies he ordered the “Great Leap Forward” (1958) and the “Cultural Revolution” (1966-1968) which he privately referred to as the “Great Purge.”

Mao attempted to control every form of social intercourse. Merely having a dinner party, use of humor or sarcasm could be – and were – deemed criminal activities that warranted the death penalty. And he was proud of these policies: Mao told his fellow gangsters at the 1958 party conference that they should welcome, not fear, party policies that cause people to die.

Mao ruthlessly suppressed centuries-old Catholic missions. His persecution of Catholics began long before he took over the government in 1949. In the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, Mao’s Red armies roamed through Chinese provinces torturing and murdering scores of priests and nuns. In 1947, for instance, eighteen Cistercian monks at Yang Kia Ping were jailed and their monastery was looted. All died from endless interrogations, beatings, and brainwashing.

The Red Chinese were not content with suppressing the Church. They dumped Catholics into re-education camps and used harsh psychological measures that included physical and mental torture to convert them to Marxism. If the education treatments failed, it was hoped that recalcitrant pupils would go mad or commit suicide.

In recent decades, the Communists continued to persecute China’s 5-million Catholics. After the 1989 anti-government demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, there were crackdowns on the underground Church. “House Churches” were destroyed and priests were arrested. Also, Catholic women were forced to have abortions or were sterilized to comply with China’s “one-child policy.”

In May 2007, Pope Benedict XVI released a letter to the Catholics of China which dealt with the relationship between Church and State. The pontiff reaffirmed there was only one Church which included both the unofficial underground one and the government-recognized Patriotic Catholic Church. He respectfully called for religious freedom and constructive dialogue to overcome disagreements.

The pope’s pleas appear to have fallen on deaf ears. Priests and bishops are still imprisoned and the faithful continue to be physically abused by government officials.

In May 2008, on the feast of Our Lady, Help of Christians, Pope Benedict held a worldwide day of prayer for the Church in China. However, Chinese Catholic pilgrims, who travelled to Mary Helper of Christians Shrine near Shanghai to participate in the day of prayer, were denied access to the consecrated grounds by the police.

America’s elitist intellectual and political classes have a distorted view of today’s China. Contrary to their revisionist claims, China’s people still lack basic freedoms and their state-run economic system is built on the graves of millions of victims of Mao’s depravity.

http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2009/sixty-years-of-maoism.html

See More photos: On the road, the Catholic Church in China by Lu Nan


Exsurge Domine

Exsurge, Domine, nolite tardare, hereditatem tuam destruitur.
Come, O Lord, do not delay for your inheritance is being destroyed.

A link to Wolves In Sheep’s Clothing In The Catholic Church Since The Apostle’s Time by Fr. Peter Carota


Arise, O Lord, and judge your own cause. Remember your reproaches to those who are filled with foolishness all through the day. Listen to our prayers, for foxes have arisen seeking to destroy the vineyard whose winepress you alone have trod. When you were about to ascend to your Father, you committed the care, rule, and administration of the vineyard, an image of the triumphant church, to Peter, as the head and your vicar and his successors. The wild boar from the forest seeks to destroy it and every wild beast feeds upon it.

Rise, Peter, and fulfill this pastoral office divinely entrusted to you as mentioned above.

Give heed to the cause of the holy Roman Church, mother of all churches and teacher of the faith, whom you by the order of God, have consecrated by your blood. Against the Roman Church, you warned, lying teachers are rising, introducing ruinous sects, and drawing upon themselves speedy doom. Their tongues are fire, a restless evil, full of deadly poison. They have bitter zeal, contention in their hearts, and boast and lie against the truth…

For although you have said that there must be heresies to test the faithful, still they must be destroyed at their very birth by your intercession and help, so they do not grow or wax strong like your wolves. Finally, let the whole church of the saints and the rest of the universal church arise. Some, putting aside her true interpretation of Sacred Scripture, are blinded in mind by the father of lies. Wise in their own eyes, according to the ancient practice of heretics, they interpret these same Scriptures otherwise than the Holy Spirit demands, inspired only by their own sense of ambition, and for the sake of popular acclaim, as the Apostle declares. In fact, they twist and adulterate the Scriptures. As a result, according to Jerome, “It is no longer the Gospel of Christ, but a man’s, or what is worse, the devil’s.”

Let all this holy Church of God, I say, arise, and with the blessed apostles intercede with almighty God to purge the errors of His sheep, to banish all heresies from the lands of the faithful, and be pleased to maintain the peace and unity of His holy Church.

Pope Leo X
Condemning The Errors Of Martin Luther
Bull issued June 15, 1520


“And a Great Sign Appeared in Heaven” …The Miracle of the Sun

hydrogen blast

“We are at the end of a tradition and a civilization which believed we could preserve Christianity without Christ, religion without a creed, meditation without sacrifice, family life without moral responsibility, sex without purity and economics without ethics. We have completed our experiment of living without God…” – Archbishop Fulton Sheen (1933)

..with the atom. It says to man: “God made me. He put atomic fission in the universe. That is how the sun lights the world. The great power which the Omnipotence has locked within my heart was made to serve you for peaceful purposes: to light your cities, to drive your motors, to ease the burdens of men. But instead, like Prometheus, you have stolen this fire from heaven and used it for the first time to destroy noncombatants. You did not first use electricity to kill a man, but you first used atomic fission to annihilate cities. For that reason, I shall turn against you, make you fear what you should love, make millions of hearts shrink in terror from your enemies, doing to you what you have done to them, and turn humanity into a victim of Frankenstein, cowering in bomb shelters from the very monsters you have created.”

It is not that God has abandoned the world, but that the world has abandoned God and cast its lot with nature divorced from Nature’s God. Man throughout history has always become wicked when, turning his back on God, he identified himself with nature. The new name for nature is Science. Science rightly understood means reading the Wisdom of God in Nature, which God made. Science wrongly understood means reading the proofs of the Book of Nature while denying that the Book ever had an Author. Nature or Science is a servant of man under God; but divorced from God, Nature or Science is a tyrant, and the atom bomb is the symbol of that tyranny.

Since man trembles before Nature without God, the only hope for mankind must be found in nature itself. It is as if God in His Mercy, when man turned his head away from the heavens, still left hope for him in the very nature toward which he now lowers his eyes. There is Hope and a great Hope, too.

The Hope is ultimately in God, but people are so far away from God they cannot immediately make the leap. We have to start with the world as it is. The Divine seems far away. The start back to God must begin with nature. But is there anything unspoiled and unshattered in all nature with which we can start the way back? There is one thing, which Wordsworth called our “tainted nature’s solitary boast.” That hope is in The Woman. She is not a goddess, she is not divine, she is entitled to no adoration. But she came out of our physical and cosmic nature so holy and good that when God came to this earth He chose her to be His Mother and the Woman of the world.

It is particularly interesting that the theology of the Russians, before they were overwhelmed by the cold heart of the anti-God, taught that when the world rejected the Heavenly Father, He sent His Divine Son, Jesus Christ to illumine the world. Then they went on to predict that, when the world would reject Our Lord as it has done today, on that Dark Night the light of His Mother would arise to illumine the darkness and lead the world to peace. The beautiful revelation of Our Blessed Mother at Fatima in Portugal from April to October, 1917, was another proof of the Russian thesis that, when the world would fight against the Savior, He would send His Mother to save us. And her greatest Revelation took place in the very month the Bolshevik Revolution began.

What was said on those occasions is too well known to be repeated. Our present concern is with the Dance of the Sun which took place on October 13, 1917. Those who love the Mother of Our Lord need no further evidence of this event. Since those who unfortunately do not know either would take proof only from those who reject both Our Lord and His Mother, I offer this description of the phenomenon by the atheist editor of the anarchist Portuguese newspaper O Seculo, who was one among the 70,000 who witnessed the incident that day.

It was “a spectacle unique and incredible. . . . One can see the immense crowd turn toward the sun which reveals itself free of the clouds in full noon. The great star of day makes one think of a silver plaque, and it is possible to look straight at it without the least discomfort. . . . The astonished eyes of the people, full of terror, with heads uncovered, gaze into the blue of the sky. The sun has trembled, and has made some brusque movements, unprecedented, and outside of all cosmic laws. According to the typical expressions of the peasants ‘the sun danced.’ The sun turned around on itself like a wheel of fireworks, and it fell almost to the point of burning the earth with its rays … It remains for those competent to pronounce on the danse macabre of the sun, which today at Fatima has made Hosannas burst from the breasts of the faithful and has naturally impressed even freethinkers and other persons not at all interested in religious matter.”

Another atheistic and antireligious sheet, O Ordem, wrote: “The sun is sometimes surrounded with crimson flames, at other times aureoled with yellow and at still others, red; it seemed to revolve with a very rapid movement of rotation, apparently detaching itself from the sky, and approached the earth while radiating strong heat.”

Why should Almighty God have chosen to verify the 1917 message of Our Lady about the end of World War I, about the beginning of World War II in 1939 if men did not repent, through nature’s one indispensable light and heat? We may only conjecture.

There are three possible ways of interpreting the Miracle of the Sun. The first is to regard it as a warning of the atomic bomb, which, like a falling sun, would darken the world. It conceivably might be a portent of the day when man, Prometheus-like, would snatch fire from the heavens and then rain it down as death on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

On the other hand, it could be seen as a sign of hope, namely, that the Woman who came out of nature is mightier than the forces of nature. The atomic bomb explodes through fission, or one atom rending and tearing another atom. But atomic fission is the way the sun lights the world. God put atomic fission in the universe; otherwise we would not have discovered it.

At Fatima, the fact that Mary could take this great center and seat of atomic power and make it her plaything, the fact that she could swing the sun “like a trinket at her wrist,” is a proof that God has given her power over it, not for death, but for light and life and hope. As Scripture foretold: “And now, in heaven, a great sign appeared; a woman clothed with the sun.” (Rev. 12:1)

There is a third way of viewing the Miracle of the Sun and that is to regard it as a miniature and a cameo of what may yet happen to the world, namely, some sudden cataclysm or catastrophe which would make the world shake in horror as the 70,000 shook at Fatima that day. This catastrophe would be a precocious or uncontrolled explosion of an atomic bomb which would literally shake the earth. This is not beyond the realm of possibility. Einstein and Lindbergh in their scientific writings have mentioned it as a danger. But better than either testimony is the address the Holy Father gave at the opening session of the Pontifical Academy of Science on February 21, 1943 two years before the first atomic bomb was dropped.

Since atoms are extremely small it was not thought seriously that they might also acquire practical importance. Today, instead, such a question has taken an unexpected form following the results of artificial radioactivity. It was, in fact, established that in the disintegration, which the atom of uranium undergoes when bombarded by neutrons, two or three neutrons are freed, each launching itself – one being able to meet and smash another uranium atom. From special calculation it has been ascertained that in such a way (neutron bombardment causing a breakdown in the uranium atom) in one cubic meter of oxide power of uranium, in less than one one-hundredth of a second, there develops enough energy to elevate more than sixteen miles a weight of a billion tons: a sum of energy which could substitute for many years the action of all the great power plants of the world.

Above all, therefore, it should be of utmost importance that the energy originated by such a machine should not be let loose to explode but a way found to control such power with suitable chemical means. Otherwise there could result, not only in a single place but also for our entire planet, a dangerous catastrophe.

On October 13, 1917, believers and unbelievers prostrated themselves upon the ground during the Miracle of the Sun, most of them pleading to God for Mercy and Forgiveness. That whirling sun, which spun like a giant wheel and thrust itself to the earth as if it would burn it with its rays, may have been the harbinger of a world spectacle that will draw millions to their knees in a rebirth of faith. And as Mary revealed herself in that first Miracle of the Sun, so may we look forward to another revelation of her power when the world has its next rehearsal for the Dies Irae.

Devotion to Our Lady of Fatima is actually a petition to a Woman to save man from nature made destructive through the rebellious intellect of man. At other moments in history, she was a Mediatrix of Her Divine Son for man; but here she is a Mediatrix for nature. She seizes the original atomic power which is the sun and proves it is hers to use for peace. And yet it is not apart from man that she would save him from nature, as it was not apart from her free consent that God would save humanity from sin. Man must cooperate through penance.

At La Salette, Our Lady asked for penance. At Lourdes, three times the Blessed Mother said: “Penance, penance, penance.” At Fatima, the same penitential antiphon is struck time and time again. The atom will not destroy man, if man will not destroy himself. An atom in revolt is only a symbol of man in revolt. But humanity in repentance will purchase a nature in complete control.

Like the threatened destruction of Nineveh, the threat of another World War is conditional. The Blessed Mother revealed at Fatima in 1917 that World War I would end in another year. If men repented, she said, a great era of peace and prosperity would come to the world. But if not, another World War, worse than the first, would begin in the reign of the next Pontiff (Pius XI).

The Civil War in Spain in 1936 was thus looked upon by Heaven as the curtain raiser and the prologue of World War II. This war would be the means by which “God will punish the world for its crimes by means of war, of hunger, and of persecution of the Church and the Holy Father.

“To prevent this I come to ask the consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart and the Communion of Reparation on the first Saturdays. Russia will be converted, and there will be peace. If my requests are not granted, Russia will scatter her errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have to suffer much, and various nations will be annihilated.”

There then comes a missing paragraph, which the Church has not yet given to the world. It probably refers to these times. Then, as if to indicate that it will be a Time of Trouble, comes the concluding paragraph: “In the end My Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and it will be converted and a certain period of peace will be granted to the world.”

Repentance, prayer, sacrifice – these are conditions of peace, for they are the means by which man is remade. Fatima throws a new light on Russia, for it makes a distinction between Russia and the Soviets. It is not the Russian people that must be conquered in war; they have already suffered enough since 1917. It is Communism that must be crushed.

This can be done by a Revolution from within. It is well to remember that Russia has not one, but two atomic bombs. Her second bomb is the pent-up sufferings of her people under the yoke of slavery, and when that explodes it will be with a force a thousand times greater than that which comes from the fission of an atom! We need a revolution, too, as well as Russia. Our revolution must be from within our hearts, that is, by the remaking of our lives. As we proceed with our Revolution, the Revolution in Russia will grow apace.

O Mary, we have exiled Your Divine Son from our lives, our councils, our education and families! Come with the light of the sun as the symbol of His Power! Heal our wars, our dark unrest; cool the cannon’s lips so hot with war! Take our minds off the atom and our souls out of the muck of nature! Give us rebirth in Your Divine Son, us, the poor children of the earth grown old with age! “Advance Woman, in Thy Assault upon Omnipotence!” Shame us all into enlisting as Your warriors of peace and love!

Extract from:
The World’s First Love
By FULTON J. SHEEN
McGraw-Hill (1952)


The Evolution of the “Errors of Russia”

A full generation before Vatican II, the techniques this so‑called “pastoral” council recommended for updating the Church had already been perfected by Communists working in the Church in China. There it was shown how the dialoguing “study club” could be gradually transformed into the “parish council” which would take over the direction of the parish and eventually the entire diocese.

The following article was written by Mrs. Hertz some years before the alleged “fall of Communism” was heralded by the heroes of Glasnost and Perestroika. As Mrs. Hertz explains, Marx’ philosophy has always hinged on the fomentation of constant change and evolution. Today, Communism is not so much “dead” as it is evolving into its next stage. The following retrospective look at Communism as it manifested itself during the Cold War, therefore, is quite revealing, since the rapid downward spiral of our world and our Church into Godless chaos is a direct consequence of the triumph of atheism, the bedrock of Communism. Indeed, the “errors of Russia” have now spread throughout the entire world—the Orthodox schism has not diminished in the least and atheistic Communism thrives out in the open in the world’s most populated nation and, everywhere else, has morphed itself “doctrinally” and “philosophically” into the very soul of the New World Order. Mrs. Hertz’ article, then, is perhaps more timely today than it was when it was written some 25 years ago.

How do you get a cat to eat hot pepper? This question, a classic in Marxist training manuals, opens an exercise in revolutionary technique. The answer, to which the student is led by logic and common experience, explains how Communism has been able to take over a third of the world without serious opposition.

How does one get a cat to eat pepper, a condiment as unpalatable to him as Marxist doctrine is to healthy human nature? The first answer to present itself says the primer, is obvious: Force open the cat’s jaws and cram the pepper in.

Wrong, the student is told, because the cat’s willing cooperation is lacking. The second answer – to conceal the pepper in a tasty fish – is equally inadequate, because as soon as the cat detects the pepper he simply regurgitates it.

The correct answer: Sprinkle the pepper all over the cat’s mat. When he lies on it the pepper will cling to his fur and sting, so that he will soon be licking himself to get it off. This method assures perfect assimilation because (1) the cat is actually ingesting (2) entirely on his own initiative, (3) and a completely conditioned initiative at that, (4) pepper, which he hates.

Pius XI in effect described this cat‑and‑pepper ploy in his encyclical Divini Redemptorist, promulgated on the feast of St. Joseph, 1937: “The Communist takes advantage of the present world‑ wide economic crisis,” which he foments “to draw into the sphere of his influence even those sections of the populace which on principle reject all forms of materialism and terrorism . . . The preachers of Communism are also proficient in exploiting racial antagonism and political divisions .

It wields “a propaganda so truly diabolical that the world has perhaps never witnessed its like before. It is directed from one common center. It is shrewdly adapted to the varying conditions of diverse peoples. It has at its disposal vast financial resources, gigantic organizations, international congresses and countless trained workers. It makes use of pamphlets and reviews of cinema, theatre and radio, of schools and universities” – a list to which must now be added television and our very churches. “Little by little it penetrates into all classes of the people and even reaches the better‑minded groups of the community with the result that few are aware of the poison which increasingly pervades their minds and hearts.”

Thus works the mystery of iniquity in our time, sprinkling its pepper everywhere. By its own admission it employs a simple technique of temptation which the devil first used on Eve at the outset of the Revolution in Eden. He teaches his followers the same kind of spiritual judo, whereby opponents are led to use their own virtues and strength against themselves, just as the poor cat is drawn to eat pepper through his very distaste for it.

Fallen irretrievably from grace, Satan has only natural means at his disposal to effect super-natural destruction, but he uses these with transcendent craft. Although even in cases of possession he cannot act directly on the human will, he can solicit it in countless ways from the outside, courting its cooperation through its desire for good.

“I have gone round about the earth, and walked through it,” says he in the book of Job (2:2) exposing the source of his know‑how. His superior intelligence understands our earthly nature far better than we do, and he turns it against us with great skill. The richer our nature, the more he has to work with. Despite all her preternatural gifts, he captured Eve’s consent by appealing to her natural desires for what is “good to eat, and fair to the eyes and delightful to behold” (Gen. 3:6), later tempting the Son of Man in the same three ways in the desert, through what ascetical theology calls the concupiscence of the flesh, the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life. By weakening the will and disrupting the judgment, original sin has rendered our good appetites dangerous for us.

Well did St. Paul warn us that our battle here was not against mere flesh and blood, but against “the spirits of wickedness in the high places” (Eph. 6:12), for throughout the ages Satan has taught his own techniques to his disciples. The Gospels reveal how, after his failure with our Lord in the desert, Satan inspired the Jews to continue the subversion he had begun. Inciting our Lord to revolution in the form of refusing Caesar’s taxes, they began adroitly by appealing to His integrity and love of justice: “Master, we know that thou art a true speaker, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou does not regard the person of men.” (Matt. 22:16).

Later, in the Acts of the Apostles, we see how judaizers carried the battle into the Church, for a time even subverting our first Pope. In the last century descendants of these Jews who rejected Christ – Marx, Engels, Heine, Lenin, Trotsky and their countless helpers then and now – have forged an instrument whereby every potential member of Christ’s kingdom can be tempted as was its Head. Popularly known as Communism, it actually constitutes a global temptation seeking to engulf the whole world in Satan’s revolution against God. Through the avenues of the three concupiscences the full force of our fallen nature can now be channeled and hurled against all mankind at once.

Communism may be properly called a Jewish heresy, for by its formal denial of an after life and the supernatural order, its crass materialism and blind faith in temporal Messianism, it is essentially a highly developed form of Saducceeism. The Gospels record conversions to Christianity among the Pharisees, but never from the Sadducees. Their heresy, now launched wholesale upon the world, would seem to be unto death.

“It exceeds in amplitude and violence anything yet experienced in the preceding persecutions launched against the Church,” said Pius XI. “Entire peoples find themselves in danger of falling back into a barbarism worse than that which oppressed the greater part of the world at the coming of the Redeemer.”

“How is it possible,” asks this Pope, “that such a system, long since rejected scientifically and now proved erroneous by experience, could spread so rapidly in all parts of the world?”

“The explanation,” he tells us, “lies in the fact that too few of us have been able to grasp the nature of Communism.”

Then too, as Fr. François Dufay points out in Etoile contre la Croix, we judge Communism much too leniently for the simple reason that communists are so much better than their doctrine. Recognizing in them qualities and virtues derived from natural law which remain in all of us despite the Fall, we attribute these to Communism. The reverse is true with Christians, who always look bad when judged against Christianity, a doctrine so sublime it can never be lived up to completely. Looking at Christians, we think Christianity defective; looking at communists, we find Communism not so bad.

“Brethren,” pleads St. Paul, “do not become children in mind, but in malice be children and in mind mature!” (I Cor. 14:20). There’s nothing Christian about being stupid. “Be wise as serpents,” commanded our Lord (Matt. 10:16).

Communism has been tragically underestimated by those who will not make the mental effort to understand it. For most, a communist is little more than an obnoxious organizer set on annoying us with strikes. Those who accept Pius XI’s word for it that it is “intrinsically perverse,” as often as not see it merely as some force which is out to deprive them of their hard‑earned property, even as they lick up its pepperiest propaganda.

In sober truth Communism provides a comprehensive explanation of all reality, geared to satisfy the most penetrating intellect. The proof is evident, it has won over some of the finest minds in the Church. No mere ideology, and least of all a political platform, Communism is a whole philosophy, a theology, a mystique. It has its Thomas Aquinases, its St. Pauls, its St. Johns of the Cross. For its “Redeemer” it proposes humanity itself! As our Lord predicted, it will be “many” who “will come in my name saying, I am the Christ… and they will lead many astray.” (Matt. 24:5).

Its historical development furthermore reveals a specifically anti‑Trinitarian, apocalyptic character which is even now coming to full term . Tempting man totally through the three concupiscences for food, glory and power as Satan did our Lord, it assaults in turn the three human faculties which constitute the divine Trinitarian image in the human soul, the intellect, the mind or “memory”, and the will. This interior trinity, by whose interchanges man lives as a human being, is analogous to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in the Godhead.

Communism confronts us therefore with a “trinity” of its own: Marx, Lenin and Mao.

I. Marx

Accepted generally as the Father of Communism, Karl Marx plays the role of creator and source from which the whole movement flows. A theorist who took little active part in revolutionary events, he laid the main lines of a direct and deadly temptation aimed primarily at the intellect. To this faculty, which specifically reflects God the Father in man and is designed to feed on truth, Marx would offer stones for food. He proposed the satanic error called dialectic materialism, whose inexorable laws were to regulate all philosophy, sociology and economics.

To read Marx is to hear Satan’s boast in Isaias: “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will sit in the mountain of the covenant, in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the height of the clouds, I will be like the Most High!” (Is. 14:13‑14). He will explain everything.

As a temptation offered specifically to the intellect, dialectic materialism necessarily opposes the theological virtue of faith – without which no one may please God (Heb. 11:6). Pretending to enlighten man’s thinking, it will plunge him into darkness, for to accept its tenets is direct denial of God, inasmuch as these hold that human history is produced by blind forces existing in matter, and not by the direction of Divine Providence. In other words, matter created itself, eventually evolving to the point where it began to think, and became man. The Marxist definition of man – borrowed, incidentally, from Benjamin Franklin, whom Marx greatly admired – is an animal which thinks.

The reader is begged to bear patiently with the next few paragraphs, which may not make easy reading, but they are essential in explaining Communism as the end product of a long chain of false philosophies:

1. Marx’ notion of materialism as “dynamic” was actually an adaptation of the German philosopher Feuerbach’s “metaphysical” materialism, wherein Marx replaced God by science as revealer of the universe. With Marx, man no longer receives moral directives from a force outside the world, but from science, which arises from the world itself, and whose origin, nature and direction it gradually explains.

This means there can be no morality outside matter, and inasmuch as matter is obviously in constant flux, human acts can only vary along with it. Man need no longer get in tune with an arbitrary God and His commandments, but must align his actions to developing matter in a perpetual aggiornamento or “situation ethics.”

2. Marx’ dialectics were derived from Hegel, for whom a “world‑soul” engendered matter. By simply reversing the process, Marx postulated that matter in fact engendered spirit – incidentally also engendering Fr. Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere” and other related nonsense now basic reading in Moscow. It is true that Hegel identified reason and “idea,” thought and being, but with him the universal principle was still spiritual. Not so with Marx, for whom matter generates the idea.

Hegel furthermore taught that “idea” moves in three (now well‑publicized) sequences: thesis, anti‑thesis and synthesis, which Marx adopted into his system, but for him “idea” is always just matter.

3. Matter moving through these three sequences is dialectic materialism, the struggle matter goes through which produces spirit – and history. Materialism and dialectics are the two poles of the global heresy, with which the world is now so well peppered that Pope Paul VI, Bishop of Rome, has spoken even of the Church as “evolving.”

On dialectics hangs change, the constantly shifting relations of things in themselves and with others. For instance, an apple can be a bud, a flower, a green apple, a ripe apple, or rotten and distributing its seeds to make more apples. The apple is constantly “becoming.” When this principle, which occurs in matter, is applied to all nature and being, we have constant transition and movement, appearances and disappearances, in all orders of reality. Nothing can be definite or absolute, which means ultimately that nothing can be sacred, because it won’t stand still long enough!

For the Marxist this universal flux is governed by four so‑called “laws”:

1. Autodynamism, or constant, self‑generated change, whether in apples or men.

2. Inter‑dependence, whereby these changes act on one another, but with no closed cycles, because the movement is open‑ended, as in the apple which liberates its seeds. This produces the ascending spiral by which matter proceeds in time, constituting “progress.” (For the Marxist any change is always upward and for the better. )

3. Contradiction. Everything in itself contains its contrary, a principle of affirmation as well as negation: Life engenders death; death, life. The apple rots that new apples may come. This battle of contraries insures development.

4. Finally, there occurs in the process an explosive “leap”, whereby quantitative changes become qualitative, in the same way that oxygen and hydrogen together produce water, qualitatively different from is two constituents. The change is sudden, but long in preparation. Essentially this is the analogy Darwin and Lysenko applied falsely to biology.

A classic example offered is that of water being changed into vapor, or ice, depending on the quantity of heat present. The tendency of water to remain as it is—thesis. Its tendency to vaporize (or freeze)—anti‑thesis. These two contradictory internal forces render its equilibrium precarious, and it is made more precarious by temperature changes. Arrived at the rupture point where water boils (or freezes), a sudden “leap” occurs, and vapor (or ice)—synthesis.

All this may be true enough on the purely material plane, but when we apply these laws to higher forms, the error is monstrous. If matter is in fact first in the order of reality, then human thought becomes simply the result of qualitative changes in matter. As soon as the material brain evolved, matter began thinking, for according to Engels, the brain is “the organ which produces thought.” He would not deny that spirit exists, but that’s only matter understanding itself. The evolution we hear so much about is therefore only the history of the dialogue matter has been carrying on with itself throughout the ages, slowly rising from one stage to the next by means of sudden resolutions of its conflicts. Human intelligence is merely a threshold, the cosmos as we know it merely the stage matter has reached for the present.

Applying the four “laws” to human society spells disaster. Autodynamism accounts for the automatic progress of humanity from slavery to servitude to feudalism to bourgeoisie to capitalism and on to the socialism whereby the antithetical “proletariat” is now being produced. (This view of history is powerfully depicted in mosaics at the University of Mexico and the works of the Mexican communist artist Diego Rivera.)

Social phenomena are also inter‑dependent, economic conditions acting on social conditions and producing certain kinds of politics, religion, art, music, etc., each factor being both cause and effect. Contradiction comes into play because according to Marx social structures rest on the economic. Believing that economics depend entirely on the means of production being ever perfected by technology, Marx envisaged the “class struggle” as an inevitable disequilibrium between these new means and the social structures always left over from the preceding stage. Capitalism is doomed, not by its sins, but because its growing means of production pit a huge collective work force against privately held property. Those who possess the means of production are therefore “exploiters” of the “exploited” workers.

We must note here that in Communism, work occupies the place of love in Christ’s kingdom. Christianity teaches that man’s proper act is union with God, but for the communist it is work – not personal work, but the collective work which is the very essence of humanity generating itself. (Marx never speaks of persons, but only of individuals in the “masses”.) It is work, furthermore, which confers ultimate value on things, whereas for the Christian, value is estimated according to its usefulness in helping him get to God. Marxism is not concerned with utility at all in fixing values.

Sociologically speaking, the qualitative “leap” is: revolution, generated by the innate tensions which produce the next stage of society. Although Marxists will espouse “reforms” for tactical reasons, they hold that society as such cannot be reformed. It can only erupt into its next stage.

Unfortunately not all this reasoning is false. In “dialectic” for instance, the classical philosopher easily recognizes the hallowed concepts of “act” and “potency.” What makes Marxism heretical is its wholesale rejection of any and all transcendental factors, with its mechanical application of material analogies, true enough in their place, to higher planes of being. Dialectic, which accurately describes the painful tensions in a human being seeking his proper end, is merely a new word for a very old idea now being misapplied.

As Marx sees it, identity and the principle of contradiction in the classical sense are wholly eliminated. Where everything is in flux, any number of postulates can be “true.” There is only one absolute truth in Marxism, and that is that everything is relative. One would say a thing can’t both be and not be, but Marxism says yes: in that being is forever resolving its own contradictions by becoming. It never “is” anything.

Given such a doctrine, what laws can stand? What vows can bind? Even to study it seriously is to deform the intelligence created for truth. To put it in practice leads us to the works of Lenin

II. Lenin

In accordance with his own teaching, Marx expected world progress through revolution to take place automatically. At most one only had to cooperate with the forces at work in matter. When Marx died, Nicolai Lenin, the man destined to play “Son” to Marx the Father in the blasphemous trinity, was only thirteen years old, but soon he would implement on the moral plane what Marx had laid out on the speculative. A keen intellectual, Lenin was also a man of action, who saw immediately that the dictatorship of the proletariat could never be established without help. Although he continued preaching Marx’ false theory, he had no scruples about acting counter to it in practice. In him Communism was made visible to the world and dwelt amongst us. Following him is the destruction of the theological virtue of hope, for through him and in him Communism pretends to give us here and now the substance of the things a Christian must hope for in the world to come. He offers “glory now”, directing the temptation to the human faculty we call “memory” in the theological sense, leading to despair.

A student of the military scientist Karl von Clausewitz, he had been particularly impressed by the latter’s dictum that, “War does not necessarily result from invasion, but from the defense which the invaded puts up against the invader,” like the cat against the pepper. Brilliantly transposing Clausewitz’ strategical theories from the strictly military plane to the revolutionary scene, he developed advanced techniques for leading whole nations to devour themselves in their frenzy to eliminate the evils infecting them. Systematically arousing hatred wherever it was to be found, he learned to aggravate it by ruthlessly pitting every possible “anti‑thesis” against its “thesis” in order to achieve the desired “synthesis” by the leap of revolution. The demonic forces he unleashed produced a chain reaction which resulted in terror and enslavement for millions.

With Lenin, hating became a science. His satanic inspiration can hardly be doubted. He is the very “brightness of his father’s glory,” the “image of his substance.”

He envisaged world revolution in three stages, now only too well known. In opposition to Trotsky, who envisioned simultaneous revolution in all countries at once, Lenin insisted on first establishing the dictatorship in one country in order to provide a solid base of operation from which worldwide revolution could then be directed. This turned out to be Russia, as our Lady came to tell us at the time.

Marcel Clement in Le Communisme Face à Dieu, says he regarded the Russian regime “as the master brain of an immense nervous system spread throughout the world and working everywhere under detailed orders at agitation and communist propaganda.” Eventually “diplomatic representation in every country, through diplomatic immunity, afforded a practically invulnerable center for transmitting instructions to each country. Around this center, the ideological, financial and police units, the use of the revolutionary elite and the proletarian masses, became a simple matter of organization. In a few years the network of world revolutionary organization was extended with extraordinary efficiency over the whole world.” This “cold war” outside the borders of Russia constituted the second stage of the Revolution. Its third stage, establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat over all humanity, is now imminent.

Son Lenin, more astute than Father Marx, was well aware that mere workers could not be depended on to carry out such a program, that little could be expected of these sheep beyond organizing labor unions clamoring for better pay and working conditions. He saw the necessity for carefully choosing and training highly disciplined professional revolutionaries who would be totally consecrated to the cause, and who would in fact function in the satanic state very much as do the religious orders in the Church.

For this purpose was formed the Communist “Party,” which is no party at all in the accepted political sense. Its primary duty is implementing the directives of the international body in accordance with the national problems of each particular nation. Its second duty is adult education on a massive scale, by means of any media to hand, whereby a whole country can be psychologically prepared to take part in the coming revolution. Whereas workers are to be as many and as visible as possible, party members are strictly limited in number, periodically “purged,” and work consistently behind fronts.

So much for the over‑all strategy. Its zigzag tactics as perfected by Lenin are quintessential chutzpah.

The dialectics begin with vocabulary. Intending to substitute in men’s minds a view of reality radically different from the one God has revealed in nature and in the Church, communists as often as possible use the same words we do. They speak of democracy, nationality, liberty, morality, peace, the state, etc., but for them these words have totally different and sometimes entirely opposite meanings. Thus they are able to express their true thought publicly all the while their opponents interpret the words according to the generally accepted sense. By the time the true sense appears, the doctrine has been ingested.

For instance, Lenin defined dictatorship as power limited by no law, resting on force alone. After it became a bad word under Hitler and Mussolini, communists began speaking of “popular democracy,” meaning dictatorship. In like manner, the word “human” which for a Christian necessarily embodies the notion of person, for a Marxist actually means non‑person, or even anti‑person, because for him a man is only individualized matter that thinks. The orthodox definition of “peace” is the tranquillity of order, but in communist lingo peace is merely the freedom to carry on the dialectical conflict. In other words, peace is actually war, the establishment of permanent, self‑perpetuating revolution. Nor is “science” human knowledge, the handmaid of revelation, but simply materialism, for the communist has no God, and science explains everything as matter explaining itself.

There is actually no common language between Communism and Christianity, but by pretending there is, Communism can plead for “dialogue.” So indispensable is dialogue to its offensive, that wherever it meets with real resistance, it is suspended temporarily so that it may be resumed safely later, for without this “service of the word” no conflict could be whipped up and exacerbated.

As St. James warned, “The tongue is a fire, the very world of iniquity. The tongue is placed among our members, defiling the whole body and setting on fire the course of our life, being itself set on fire by hell” (3:6). It is a matter of record that the Christians in China who were least corrupted by Communism were those to whom dialogue was repugnant. Taught by the devil who first used it on Eve, Marxists are trained to begin with orthodox interpretations of their doctrines. Dialogue once innocently begun leads to dialectic, dialectic to division, and division to death.

Never attacking religion on its own dogmatic ground, Communism sets out to destroy it as Cain did Abel, by inviting believers “into the field,” non‑religious ground where the battle is already lost. Proceeding almost exclusively on the moral, practical plane, Marxism first lures its victims to acts of which they have become doubtful, for instance, contraception. Once practiced, these are accepted, and eventually promoted.

Dialogue is rigged to produce dilemma from which the only escape always appears to be the Marxist solution. (Discussion of world population problems is a favorite introduction to the “necessity” of contraception.) By refusing dialogue at the outset as we would any other temptation, we refuse dilemma and all its consequences. The timid take refuge in the enemy’s ambiguous propositions to salve their consciences, being encouraged to accept Marxist theses in Christian dress which are later interpreted and executed in the full Marxist sense.

Post‑Vatican II developments are sufficient example of this master tactic whereby the dialectical struggle has been introduced into the Church herself. The only power on earth superior to Communism, she is being tempted at all levels to set her pace to the world, for she presents an insuperable obstacle to the Revolution.

The communist never lies or contradicts himself, because for him there is no absolute right or wrong. His Party, midwife of the Revolution, uses any means to accelerate delivery, espousing even reactionary causes if this will aggravate conflict. Lenin laid down as principle that “one must learn to work legally within the most reactionary organization.” Within these groups revolutionaries, always a minority, transmit party orders in the guise of their own personal opinions, harnessing as many non‑communists as possible to the work of the Revolution without their suspecting it.

Never openly preaching Communism, party members are adept at manipulating “peace” offensives, defending “motherhood” and “democracy,” encouraging “patriotism,” so as to neutralize and dismantle any real opposition. All the while, management is pitted against labor to produce the deadly wage vs. price cycle which will wreck the economy and destroy money itself through inflation. Conservatives are hurled against liberals, haves against have‑nots, black against white. In the women’s lib movement even the sexes are turned against each other to produce crisis in the family, basic cell of natural society. In the Church agents are found in traditionalist ranks as they are among the purveyors of the New Religion, promoting discord from both sides. This kind of super‑opportunism at work supporting all sides is incomprehensible to those who can’t see that the basic strategy never varies.

“The dictatorship of the proletariat,” said Lenin, “is a relentless battle, both bloody and unbloody, violent and peaceful, military and economic, pedagogical and administrative, against the forces and traditions of the old world.”

Marcel Clement, on whom this article has drawn heavily, calls Leninism “the methodical exteriorization of all conflicts, based on organized deception and incitement to envy and hatred. Christianity is the acceptance of the Cross, the light of Truth, the pardon of injuries. We are in a way at the eve of the great option. It’s the destiny of the world which is at stake.”

Communism, dedicated to such “exteriorization of conflict,” can never be reconciled with the Faith, which is founded precisely on interiorization of conflict as exemplified by Christ on the Cross, of whom the Psalmist had prophesied, “I bear in my bosom all the accusations of the nations!” (Ps. 88:51).

III. Mao

A full generation before Vatican II, the techniques this so‑called “pastoral” council recommended for updating the Church had already been perfected by Communists working in the Church in China. There it was shown how the dialoguing “study club” could be gradually transformed into the “parish council” which would take over the direction of the parish and eventually the entire diocese. Religious activities were systematically used as pretexts for disguised Marxist indoctrination or ecumenical meetings where real Catholics driven farther and farther “out into the field” were always outnumbered and finally excluded. This need not surprise us, for it was in China, with Mao Tse‑Tung, that Communism attained its Pentecost.

Chairman Mao plays the part of “Spirit” to Marx the Father and Lenin the Son in the satanic trinity. Proceeding from both, perfecting the thought of the one and the revolutionary strategy of the other, Mao’s cultural revolution means to achieve the satanic “sanctification” of the world by finishing touches from “the finger of the Father’s right hand.” There is an eminent congruity in that Mao rose, not from the world’s masculine west, but from its feminine east – woman being the ectype of the Holy Ghost according to the Fathers of the Church. And the Chinese have long been known as “the Jews of the orient.”

As we might expect, he addresses himself to the third power of the soul, the will. His specific temptation will therefore be against the permanent theological virtue of charity. By him humanity is to be led, not only to unbelief, or to despair, but to the consummate formal denial of God’s love which constitutes the unforgivable sin against the Holy Ghost.

Christian imperatives all reduce to one: Thou shalt love – first God, then one’s neighbor for His sake. As we have seen, being vowed to dialectical struggle, the Marxist’s imperative is actually: Thou shalt hate – and deliberately pits neighbor against neighbor. It is true the Christian also hates. He hates sin, but he loves persons. The Marxist also loves, but only humanity, and a kind of mystical, perfected humanity at that, existing only in the future. He hates persons in their actual state. The real “now generation” are the Christians, for they love now as well as in the future.

To effect radical reversal of Christian love, Mao brings to perfection the theories derived from Clausewitz by Lenin and later by Stalin. Developer of the concept of total war, Clausewitz had been guided by the principle that war is merely an extension of politics. He considered warfare as human activity rather than mere confrontation of physical forces, with victory not necessarily the result of greater numbers or physical strength. He taught that the enemy must therefore be weakened not only physically, but above all morally. Also he noted that the fight need not always be fought to a finish, but simply used as a way of bringing one’s adversary to the conference table.

As we saw, Lenin, reversing the thought of Clausewitz, saw politics as the extension of war. For him, peace was simply more and better war, but he didn’t neglect bloody terrorism when it suited his purpose. Compared to Mao, Lenin’s methods seem very crude, for when it comes to pervasive, indirect but relentless aggression, the oriental is matchless. With Mao Communism came into possession of refined psychological instruments so deadly accurate that the battle against God can now be carried not only into the heart of society, but into the human soul itself.

It is frightening to study in detail the campaign organized with such force and accuracy against the pagan Chinese, but especially against the Church. Although the Chinese Christians constituted hardly one percent of the total population, it is revealing that they received the lion’s share of attention from the Communist propaganda organs. Wherever she is found, the Church alone provides the opposition her enemy really fears.

Whereas Marx the Father attacked the juridical order by political revolution, and Lenin sapped the economic order by social revolution, Mao’s vast revolution against all existing culture is designed to liquidate the whole interior spiritual order of the human soul in order to reconstruct it on Marxist lines.

Gauging Marx’ superficiality even better than had Lenin, Mao contended that the most their methods could produce was a sort of consumer‑man conditioned to aspire merely to ever greater creature comforts – a prognostication only too willingly confirmed by both Plus XI and Pius XII

Mao’s truly pentecostal view of revolutionary man was that of a completely new creature, so free that he was liberated even of his entire past, his total human heritage. He saw that mere destruction of private property (on which personal human dignity is objectively based) could never of itself eradicate past culture from human consciousness. All of human memory would have to be blotted out in a new “baptism of the spirit” – of Chairman Mao.

Understanding the power of obsession, he advocates a total change of surroundings before addressing the intellect. Slogans, ideas, posters, radio, songs, dance, theatre, movies, study clubs, schools, demonstrations, lectures, meetings, all become tools for the systematic destruction of the past.

By its very nature behaviorist, Communism has always believed that man will automatically change if his environment can be changed, but Mao has refined such crudity. For him “class” and the class struggle are not found outside man, but inside him, and that is where he looks for it. He has developed what amounts to a whole program ordered to the production of the diabolic virtues, through a diametric reversal of the evangelical counsels.

In the name of “poverty” all the trappings of the past, whether Shakespeare or classical Chinese drama, miniskirts, Mah Jong, are forbidden to 700,000,000 people. Austerity is demanded of all in a land where students must work like coolies and coolies must become students. A Chinese Communist must be denuded of everything. His only possessions are the thought and will of those who command him, for his “obedience” must be total, expected in the internal forum of his conscience as well as in the external, governing not only his acts, but his most intimate thoughts, in private as in public. Nor is “chastity” overlooked, for young Maoists are expected to defer marriage until the age of thirty if they marry at all, in deference to the exigencies of the Revolution. Man’s noblest instincts have been harnessed: As one militant explained, “Several generations will have to be sacrificed before Communism triumphs. These generations are ours: Neither I nor my son, nor even my grandson will see this victory. That doesn’t matter, we are nothing; our job is to prepare a better future for those who will succeed us.”

(It might be asked here, “But what of the Jew Marcuse and the sexual revolution?” These seem contrary at first glance, but they are actually mirror images of Mao and his spiritual regime, achieving the same ends by reverse methods, playing Molinos to his Jansen. By one or the other means whole populations can and are being rendered hostile to their established government and to themselves in the diabolic pentecost whose corrupting fire and flame are even now seeking to consecrate the whole world to the “man of sin.”)

Needless to say, behind all the paraphernalia for destroying man’s past there lurks only the satanic desire to obliterate his religion, which Communism has always maintained is of his own manufacture, a form of thumb‑sucking which makes him dependent on illusion and alienates him from himself. Marx called religion “man’s self‑consciousness before he has found himself – or when he has lost himself,” a “super‑structure” in society designed to console the exploited in the class struggle, an “opiate for the people.”

For Mao religion isn’t even that, but merely a relic of the past. “No more martyrs” is now official policy. Christians are never convicted on religious grounds, but only for impeding the Revolution.

Conclusion

In the name of Marx, Communism denies God the Father, who created heaven and earth out of nothing and who personally directs its every event, whose eye is on the sparrow, and without whose consent not a hair falls from our heads. Communism says it was matter, and not God’s Word, which became man. In the name of Lenin is denied this very Word, God the Son who said, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” and outside whom there is nothing that was made. In the name of Mao it denies God the Holy Ghost, of whom the Son promised, “He will teach you all things” (John 14:26).

Aping the divine Persons in the Most Blessed Trinity, these three satanic personifications act in the Party as one throughout the world. There is still much work for them to do, for integral, perfected Communism exists nowhere yet, not even in China or Russia, which at best are still in the socialist stage. In so‑called communist countries, the government merely governs, all the while favoring the Party, which is the only direct agent of the communization which goes on internally over a long period of years. It keeps the dialectic ferment active in many “outmoded” structures which are allowed to persist until the new ones can be forged. This is happening now within the Catholic Church, which is being subjected to the same dialectics as other social categories. Like other holdovers, it will be allowed to subsist for a time, but transformed, its dogmatic content replaced by Marxism, its apostolate by Leninism and its interior life of grace by Maoism.

When Mao died on September 8, 1976, he joined Marx and Lenin definitively in their niche in history. The Satanic “trinity” is now complete. Despite any specious “revisionism” to the contrary, it is set from now on to spread error throughout the world with unimaginable coherence – as our Lady warned would happen if mankind does not fall to its knees.

What is the defense against this creeping horror?

Once we have thoroughly understood its tactics, the only possible defense is the one proposed by Pius XI: “No one . . . may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever!” no matter how innocent this may appear. He warned how communists, “without receding an inch from their subversive principles, invite Catholics to collaborate with them in the realm of so‑called humanitarianism and charity; and at times even make proposals that are in perfect harmony with the Christian spirit and the doctrine of the Church.”

In the face of this warning, the “pastoral” Vatican II laid down in its declaration on Christian Education: “Cooperation is the order of the day.” In its decree on the Missions: Catholics “should cooperate in a brotherly spirit with other Christians, with non‑Christians, and with members of international organizations” with a view to “building up of the earthly city” – in the Lord! In the decree on the Church in the Modern World: “It is very much to be desired that Catholics, in order to fulfill their role properly in the international community, will seek to cooperate actively and in a positive manner both with their separated brethren who together with them profess the Gospel of charity, and with all men thirsting for true peace,” communists in no way excluded. The Council refused a petition to condemn Communism.

The choice lies before all, for the temptation is now global indeed: Apostasy or death? Not a question of saving human life, but of saving the Faith. “Every other enterprise,” said Pius XI, “however attractive or helpful, must yield before the vital need of protecting the very foundation of the Faith and of Christian civilization.”

Fr. Dufay, who witnessed the battle at close quarters in China, says to lose no time in preparing the Church of the Catacombs: “Take as principle that normal exterior life – liturgy, teaching, apostolate – should continue as far as possible. But, at the same time, prepare Christians to preserve their essential religious life in the absence of priests, worship and Sacraments . . . Prepare memory aids on the dogmas of necessary means, marriage without clergy, perfect contrition, assistance to the dying, Baptism, child education, etc., and place these leaflets in safe places…

“It would be good if trustworthy priests of high caliber were to set themselves to living the life of the people. They need profound dogmatic and spiritual formation, especially on the theology of the Church, the meaning and value of persecution and suffering, and should be steeped in the remembrance of the great saints and martyrs of the past. Thus armed, the Christian faith will use its bad times for growth in charity,” making the most of the service Communism will render it by purifying and detaching it from all that is not God here below. And again, “Actually it’s solitaries who must be found and trained, in other words, Christians capable of living their faith all alone, amid the strongest pressures, the most painful happenings and the most forbidding of deserts.”

The Counter‑revolution began in Eden with the Revolution itself, for there on the spot God told the serpent, “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed” (Gen. 3:15). Centuries later, when the battle was approaching a climax in Russia in 1917, this “woman” appeared on earth at Fatima to warn that “the errors of Russia” would overflow the whole world unless supernatural means were marshalled against them.

Of necessity the “errors of Russia” can be overcome only by supernatural force, because there are no natural means superior to them. Given the impairment of nature by original sin, there are no natural means which are even proportioned to these “errors”. Certainly no material weapons can destroy Communism’s battlements, let alone shoot down its ideas. No political position can withstand it. No mere strategy can outwit it that is not rooted in grace.

The defeat of Communism will be effected by prayer and penance, in the name of Him who before His Passion said, “In the world you will have affliction. But take courage, I have overcome the world!” (John 16:33). It is not the dictatorship of the proletariat which is “inevitable,” but the triumph of the Church!

http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/archive-communism_hertz.htm


ABCs and 123s

“Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.”
― Benjamin Franklin

According to a recent survey, the average college student’s idea of Tyrannosaurus rex is modeled on Barney the purple dinosaur. Accurate portrayals in movies and textbooks make no difference: students continue to believe T. rex stood upright instead of pitched forward like the real thing.

Once people get ideas in their heads it takes very little to keep them there, and the problem applies to Catholicism no less than paleontology. A veteran professor of history [John Rao] at a Catholic university [St. John’s, Staten Island, New York] notes that  despite their terror concerning grades in my courses, almost all of my students completely ignore the pro-Catholic, record-straight-setting information I give them, and recite the dominant errors and mantras aimed against the Faith on tests. As far as I can determine, this is in no way due to deeply-rooted conviction on their part. Rather, it merely indicates the power of the propaganda fed them from practically every social channel since early youth. They simply cannot expel the erroneous and hostile words from their heads. [For more, see comment below]

So how do we drive the historical and philosophical equivalent of fluffy purple dinosaurs out of discussions relating to the Faith when information doesn’t penetrate, discussion doesn’t help, pleading doesn’t work, and nothing we say seems to make any difference? What’s needed, it seems, is shock and awe, or at least their closest literary equivalent: paradox, aphorism, and other forms of pointed statement or questioning that disrupt settled expectations and stick in the mind where they can continue to do their work.

Among their other benefits, such verbal devices could provide snappy responses to anti-Catholic talking points. The assumptions of public discussion presume liberal secularism. They are part of a comprehensive outlook on man, society, the world, and reality itself that most people don’t exactly believe but don’t know how to escape. The result is that Catholics get tongue-tied, or give up points they shouldn’t, because they’ve already accepted their opponents’ basic principles and don’t know how to avoid one objectionable consequence after another. We need the verbal equivalent of jiu-jitsu to turn the assumptions and discussion around. Paradox, aphorism, and pointed inquiry seem to fit the bill.

G. K. Chesterton was a master of the strategy as applied to everyday public discussion, and I think that’s at least half the secret of his popularity. Nicolás Gómez Dávila was another great Catholic aphorist, although one who worked at a less popular level. And at a higher level still, thinkers like Pascal and Simone Weil said things suitable to shock almost anyone out of his torpor.

In an age of memes, tweets, and spin the tradition of aphorisms that transfix and transform seems to have vanished. It’s not at home in a world that rejects boldness and truth in favor of focus groups and what seems likely to sell to this demographic or that. The anonymous English scholar who blogs as Deogolwulf has composed some good aphorisms that debunk the errors of secular progressivism. He doesn’t present himself as Catholic, though, and his recent compositions are all in German, so the rest of us need to step up as well.

A good paradox or aphorism requires imaginative and literary talents, and few of us can match Chesterton in that regard, let alone some of the others I’ve mentioned. Still, as GKC himself said, “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” So with that in mind, and to do what little I can to help get things started, I’ll list some snappy questions I included in my book The Tyranny of Liberalism, and append some items a friend gleaned here and there on the internet. Others can and should add their own.

Given where they appeared, mine have to do with secular liberalism, the movement that has given us Benedict’s “dictatorship of relativism.” So they don’t cover everything we must deal with, but may nonetheless be useful against a major fortress of anti-Catholicism:

■If liberalism is tolerant, why all the propaganda and reeducation programs?
■If it’s based on consent, why the emphasis on judges, experts, bureaucrats, and theorists?
■If it’s skeptical and empirical, why the demand for radical transformation of all social arrangements everywhere?
■If liberalism unleashes creativity and emphasizes the individual, why does it make everyone and everything the same?
■If it lets people choose their values, how can it prescribe their opinions of other people’s values?
■If choosing my values is good, why does it become bad if I choose cultural cohesion and somewhat traditional sex roles?
■How can “diversity” (respecting differences) and “inclusiveness” (eliminating the effect of differences) be the same?
■What can freedom in private life amount to if government insists on the reeducation of children and radical reform of family life?
■Equal celebration of cultures means that particular cultural standards must be driven out of social life, since otherwise one culture will dominate others. How is that different from the abolition of culture?
■What’s the difference between saying someone has to treat beliefs about God and morality as equally worthy, and saying he has to treat his own beliefs as personal tastes and thus not beliefs about God and morality at all?

A friend has gathered other aphorisms and pointed comments from the web. Again, they’re mostly political, but that can be hard to avoid at a time when secularism makes all things political:

■What gives us freedom of spirit without self-control is disastrous. (Goethe)
■Liberalism bases human dignity not on having a human essence, but on having an active will.
■When liberty is worshipped as an end in itself, it results in the vulgarizing inclination merely to do what one likes.
■The leftist is fashion-sensitive precisely because fashion provides the stimulating novelty that alone dulls the pain and boredom of life in a Godless, meaningless universe.
■In the absence of virtue the soul gorges on imitations of virtue such as liberalism.
■Liberal society—forever trying to turn anomalies into the norm.
■License is no friend to the poor.
■The real dichotomy is not between democracy and other types of government, but between an authority based on the will, and an authority based on something transcending the will.
■The Great Lie is none other than the promise made by the serpent in Genesis 3:22—the promise that by joining the cosmic revolution against God and His order man could become a god unto himself, defining reality itself by will alone.
■As a lie accrues power, it seeks to obliterate any vestige of the truth that could expose it.
■It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. (Upton Sinclair)
■Modern Man is ashamed of innocence and prides himself on understanding evil, while the Christian is ashamed of his knowledge of evil and seeks understanding of Good.
■The faithful believer experiences a deep and abiding inner assurance that cannot be transferred to another person and is thus quite baffling to those without it.
■A coincidence is an event in which God chooses to remain anonymous.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/using-the-aphorism-to-challenge-liberalism


The Bad Good

good bad

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? ― George Orwell, 1984

Others have already pointed out the absurdity that gay marriage is becoming a right in places where plastic bags and large sodas are becoming against the law. This sort of next wave civil rights step is only an expansion of freedom if you aren’t paying attention.

All the arguments over the differences between civil unions and marriage are largely meaningless. Once gay marriage is recognized, then marriage becomes nothing more than a civil union. The real casualty is the destruction of the word “marriage”, but the left is adept as destroying language and replacing meaningful words with meaningless words.

There was no word in Newspeak for freedom. We can look forward to an English language in which there is no word for marriage. And what does freedom mean anyway in a country where most things are banned, but we are constantly throwing holidays to celebrate how free we are?

But if marriage is no longer refers to a natural social institution, but now means a civil union recognized by the state, then why stop at two? Gay rights advocates insist that there is some magic difference between polygamy and gay marriage. There isn’t any difference except the number. And if we’re not going to be bound by any antiquated notion that marriage is an organic institution between man and woman, then why should we be bound by mere number?

True marriage equality would completely open up the concept. But it’s not actually equality that we’re talking about. It’s someone’s idea of the social good. And the social good is served by gay marriage, but not by polygamy.

The question is whose social good is it?

Equality and justice are words that the left uses to cloud the question of who advocates the causes and who benefits from them. Who decides that the cause of justice and equality is served by limiting marriage to two gay men, rather than four gay men, three bisexual men, two women and a giraffe?

The rhetoric of equality asserts a just cause while overlooking the social good. Rights are demanded. The demand is absolute and the logic for it remains left behind in a desk drawer on the wrong side of the table. Instead there are calls for empathy. “If you only knew a gay couple.” Hysterical condemnations. “I’m pretty sure you’re the devil”, one recent email to me began. And a whole lot of vague promises about the good things that will follow once we’re all paying for it.

We aren’t truly moving toward anarchy or some libertarian order, but a calculated form of repression in which shrill demands substitute for legal guidelines and those who scream the loudest get the most rights.

The new freedoms are largely random and chaotic. Donate enough money to the right people while helping out the left and a special addition to the marriage split-level house will be carved out for you. Why? Because there will be a lot of yelling. Naturally. And if the polygamists yell loudly enough and donate enough money, they’ll get their own marriage expansion as well because that is how things work now.

There is no longer a fixed notion of rights. The trappings of equality and angry causes are hollow. The legal doctrine on which courts make their decisions are targets in search of arrows, emotions hunting around for precedents to wrap them in. These decisions are not rational, but rather rationalizations. Their only anchor is a new role for government in protecting any group that is officially marginalized.

The old Bill of Rights extended rights irrespective of group membership. The new one wipes out universal rights and replaces them with particular privileges. Entire amendments may sink beneath the waves, but a few groups get comfortable deck chairs on the Titanic.

Why is one group protected rather than another? Why do gay activists get a government-bonded right, complete with Federal enforcement, while polygamy is outlawed? The only answers are rationalizations. With morality sinking fast and few common values that the people in charge will accept, there is no longer a common value system to rely on.

Progressive morality is constantly being reshaped in tune to the whims of the left. It can’t be relied upon, because it isn’t there. The only thing fixed about it is the need to fight for the oppressed, which not coincidentally at all is also the shaky civil rights era legal doctrine on which the whole modern house of cards rests.

Since the nature of oppression and the identification of oppressed groups is open for debate, the legal doctrine means nothing. Every Democratic presidential candidate was against gay marriage in 2008 and for it now. What changed? Nothing, except the money changing hands and sitcoms about gay couples. And the latter is what it comes down to. Instead of church and state, we are stuck with sitcom and state where the existence of a television comedy is a reflection of national values.

And what happens when one of the burgeoning shows about polygamous marriages becomes a big hit? Then we’ll have no choice but to ratify polygamous marriage equality because that’s the new national values system and the television ratings prove that everyone is clearly down with it.

Once fixed rights made way for identity politics, we traded legal guarantees of freedom for government oversight of a confusing caste system in which some people have more rights than others based on the amount of rights they claim not to have, but everyone has fewer rights than they did before because rights are now arbitrary and the arbitrators work for the government.

Identity politics made rights competitive. The only way to win is to play. And the only way to play is to claim oppression. And if you don’t do a good job of it, good luck getting a good spot in the diversity quotas for college, business and government. But it has also made rights meaningless.

The new slogan is that gun control should be enacted because the former Congresswoman Giffords “deserves a vote”. Giffords already has a vote. So do millions of gun owners. That’s how it works. But votes are no longer weighed equally. The oppressed, even by a random shooting spree, get more votes than others, so long as their oppression is officially recognized and endorsed. The Giffords Vote is supposed to not only trump millions of actual votes, but also the Second Amendment.

And why not? Gay marriage lost in multiple referendums, but those results were set aside by Federal judges for being oppressive. The same thing happened with illegal aliens. Now everyone is evolving on those issues. After all, no one wants to be the bad mean oppressor. And so the actual votes are trumped by the vote of the oppressed and actual rights make way for special privileges.

The grants of new rights are oppressive because there are no longer any fixed boundaries of rights. Instead gay rights compels wedding photographers, cake shops and even churches to cater to gay weddings regardless of their own moral values. Religious freedom, which is in the Constitution, has to take a seat at the back of the bus to the new rights, which aren’t.

There is no system for keeping rights from colliding with or overrunning one another. The only  governing legal mandate is preventing oppression and that means government arbitrators deciding who is screaming, “Help, help, I’m being repressed!” the loudest and with the most sincerity.

A system in which the authorities grant rights based on who can best make the case to them that their rights have been taken away is a bad idea. It’s an especially bad idea in a system like ours which is rapidly sliding in a direction in which the authorities are the sole arbiters of who should have any rights at all. If your oppressed status depends on your oppressors determining whether you are truly oppressed, then the only people who will have rights are those people whose rights the oppressors have not taken away by certifying them as oppressed.

It would be a dreadful simplification to call this lunatic state of affairs Orwellian or even Machiavellian. It makes even Kafka’s worlds seem positively stodgy by comparison. It is a trial where the only people to be found not guilty are those who already been convicted. It’s a system that favors the people who claim to be dispossessed by the system. It is an absurd self-negation that exists as a mathematical impossibility and a living satire.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-bad-good.html


The Natural Order of Things

 All men are equal because they are creatures of God, endowed with body and soul, and redeemed by Jesus Christ. Thus, by the dignity common to all, they have an equal right to everything that is proper to the human condition: life, health, work, religion, family, intellectual development, and so on. A just Christian economic and social organization thus rests upon a fundamental feature of true equality.

“But, besides this essential equality, there are among men accidental inequalities placed by God: of virtue, intelligence, health, capacity of labor, and many others. Every organic and living economic and social structure has to be in harmony with the natural order of things.

This natural inequality must therefore be reflected in it. This reflection consists in this: that as long as all have what is just and deserved, those well endowed by nature can, by their honest labor and their economy, acquire more.

“Equality and inequality thus compensate and complement one another, discharging diverse but harmonious roles in the ordering of a just and Christian society.

“This rule constitutes, moreover, one of the most admirable characteristics of universal order. All of God’s creatures have what befits them according to their own nature, and in this they are treated according to the same norm. But, beyond this the Lord gives very much to some, much to others, and to yet others, finally, only what is adequate.

These inequalities form an immense hierarchy, in which each degree is like a musical note that forms part of an immense symphony to chant the divine glory. A totally egalitarian society and economy would, therefore, be anti-natural.

“Seen in this light, inequalities represent a condition of general good order, and thus redound to the advantage of the whole social body, that is, of the great as well as of the small.

“This hierarchical scale is in the plans of Providence as a means to promote the spiritual and material progress of mankind by the incentive given to the better and most capable. Egalitarianism brings with it inertia, stagnation, and, therefore, decadence, because everything inasmuch as it is alive, if it does not progress, deteriorates and dies.

“The parable of the talents is thus explained (Matt. 25: 14-30).    For to every one that hath shall be given, and he shall abound: but from him that hath not, that also which he seemeth to have shall be taken away.

http://nobility.org/2011/06/16/by-nature-all-men-are-in-one-sense-equal-but-in-another-they-are-unequal/


The Progressivist War Against the Family

Samuel S. Leibowitz was a criminal lawyer for 21 years, and a judge for 16 years in the Brooklyn criminal court system. In the 1950’s, the crimes of juveniles had reached a critical stage, and Leibowitz began to criticize the “solutions” of the welfare state in dealing with the crisis. They were ignoring the cause of the crimes, and only treating the effects of juvenile offenses: “making teen-age curfews and more playgrounds, punishing parents for their teenager’s crimes, getting more social workers, setting up a federal delinquency bureau, establishing psychiatric committees to research the adolescent psyche.”

The Judge ascertained that the Western country with the lowest rate of juvenile crime was Italy. Intrigued, he resolved to ferret out the reason for this first-hand, so he traveled there and spent weeks in various Italian cities, talking with police commissioners, school superintendents, mayors, etc. And he found the answer: the youth in Italy respected authority, which began in the home. A fortiori, it began with respecting the father’s authority. Even in the poorest families, the father was respected by the wife and children as its head. He formulated this finding into the words, stating: “Nine words that can stop juvenile delinquency: Put father back at the head of the family.” Now, let us fast-forward to the 21st century.

The progressivist Hierarchy and clergy of New Church not only do not recognize the simple truth discovered by the Judge, but with their easy-annulment policy, have for all purposes declared war against the family itself. Indeed, by 2002 the Bishops were granting 50,000 marriage annulments annually.

This vicious onslaught against the Sacrament of Marriage and the spiritual and social need for stable families is nothing less than diabolical. It has been said that the French Revolution of 1789 ushered in more revolutions. It left Europeans with a tendency to anarchism or – to use an expression of Fromkin – following Nietzsche, in a mood to “smash things”.

It can be said that the Revolution of Vatican II, is also a consequence of the French Revolution, still worse than that of 1789. It has smashed everything of the once sacred Catholic past. Once the Nietzschian fist smashes a family, it is never the same, it’s impossible. Once broken, it’s very nature has been changed.

Deirdre and her husband, a gifted medical doctor, were married for 28 years with three children. He applied for, and received, an annulment from the Metropolitan Tribunal of the Archdiocese of Boston. These Bishops pretended with “a moral certainty” that there was never a marriage to begin with because at the time of the marriage, there was “lack of due discretion” on the part of the husband.

Making a simple analysis of the Tribunal’s decision, here is how the wife reports the sentence of the Tribunal:
“In September of 1965, this man, 31-years-old, of above average intelligence, non-psychotic, non-coerced, from a normal family background, suffered from some disorder that either made him unable to understand what marriage entailed or unable to fulfill its obligations. This disorder apparently continued undetected for 38 years and unknowingly prevented them from ever experiencing a true marriage even though they became parents and raised three children, and he was a successful physician as well.”

Because Deirdre’s husband married again soon after the annulment, she asked this final question:
“Let us grant for a moment that [the Tribunal was] correct. Why then let a person of such defective judgment remarry eight weeks later in the Catholic Church?

One could hardly be called sarcastic today if he accused today’s Hierarchy of believing the martyrdom of St. Thomas More, who died because he refused to grant the King an improper annulment, had no meaning, that it was nothing but futile act of ostentatious pageantry. However, as if the annulment scandal is not bad enough, add to it the fact that a parish priest of today “can expect that about 97% to 99% of his newlyweds will be using unnatural methods of birth control.”

The English philosopher Edmund Burke once said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Judge Leibowitz began his investigation of juvenile crime because he realized it was the effects of crime that were being treated, not the cause. He was a good man who did something.

Can we say that our Catholic Hierarchy is made of good men doing nothing? I think it is more than that. They are leaders of souls who are doing untold evil at every level because they have adopted a cesspool-caldron of progressivist ideas, with which they direct the faithful. One evidence we can see that our Shepherds have turned into wolves is the permissions they have granted for countless annulments or, better saying, Catholic divorces.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, says the maxim. Rousseau’s philosophy echoed this when he said, “The sole duty of man is to follow in everything the inclination of his heart.” The leaders of New Church must certainly agree with Rousseau. Their hearts are turned toward accomplishing their progressivist agenda.

http://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/k008rpAgainstFamily-Arnold.html


Dictatorship Imminent

soma

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” Aldous Huxley

A remarkable portrait of our contemporary world appeared two months ago with the  daunting title :  “Decline, Decay, Denial, Delusion and Despair”,  but the content is surely true to life. Starting from a street scene to be found no doubt all over the eastern United States, the author concludes that within 15 years an Orwellian dictatorship will descend upon his country as the unwanted effect of wanted causes. But the USA is not typical of the whole world ? The whole world is buying into the American way of life. “Let the buyer beware”!

This autumn in the streets of Wildwood, New Jersey, the author observed pavements encumbered with a host of heavily overweight men and women under 50 years of age rolling around town on government-subsidized mobility scooters to visit one fast-food joint after another in order to gorge on sugar-laden goodies which would give their latest model scooters more work than ever. His amusing name for them ? – “The weight-challenged disabled on their powered mobility enhancement vehicles.” Such is the flight from reality of “political correctness” and its language.

The author seeks causes for this tragic-comic effect : how can the American people that once saved 12% of their income have been persuaded to frighten the obesity statistics off the end of the charts with a debt-laden, sugar-sodden way of life, with no more savings for themselves and with an unbearable burden of debt being bequeathed to their children and grand-children ? Of course there is a lack of self-control on their part, he says, but there must be something more sinister, some mind behind such a mindless scene. He says the mass of citizens are being manipulated by an invisible government that has mastered the modern techniques of mass manipulation.

He quotes a pioneer of these masters from the 1920’s, Edward Bernays: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the masses is an important element in democratic society… Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society… Whether in politics, business, social conduct or ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.” They are “the true ruling power of the country,” and they “pull the wires which control the public mind.” For what purpose ? For their own wealth and power.

It is they who have organized today’s financial and economic crisis for their own benefit. They have “wrecked the world economy… shifted their worthless debt onto the backs of taxpayers and unborn generations, thrown senior citizens and savers under the bus by stealing $400 billion per year of interest from them, and enriched themselves with bubble-level profits and bonus payments.” And when the plug has to be pulled on this unsustainable way of life, then our invisible masters have prepared for us a 1984 “dictatorship of tears” with militarized police with millions of bullets, surveillance cameras and drones everywhere, imprisonment without charges and so on and so on. Yet, says the author, it is the citizens’ own fault who have preferred ignorance to truth, sickness to health, media lies to critical thinking, security to liberty.

There is only one thing lacking to this admirable analysis: could our governing elite have run so wild, or our masses have turned so dumb, if either had retained the least sense of a God who judges us all at death, according to Ten Commandments ? Of course not. Catholics, wake up !

Kyrie eleison.   Bishop Richard Williamson

 


Materialism, Calvinism and The Greed of The West

Well the Season of Greed and Avarice is upon us.

Why has the celebration of the birth of Christ been adulterated to such an extent that we act as if we are deserving of so much more on His Birthday than he had?

Christ “so loved poverty that He chose for His mother not a rich and powerful queen, but a poor and humble Virgin.  He willed to be born, not in a palace, but in a bleak stable, the manger of which, covered with a little straw, was His only couch.” – The Sinner’s Guide, Venerable Louis of Granada.

Where did it all go wrong?  The West’s wealth and love of money is unprecedented historically.   We are told that capitalism is the best  economic system but what happens when capitalism is devoid of morality and a sense of responsibility to our children and our future?

Personal greed and corporate greed have transformed capitalism.   Corporate America panders to our base nature.   It seeks out the latest, coolest, hippest and ultimately the lowest elements of our culture,  repackages them, and seduces our senses, our children, and our pocketbooks.

The “hipsters” behind the scenes of what’s cool push the envelope on every front.  They turn their decadent, sex-obsessed minds on our children and assume them to be of like ilk.  They assume the average male is a vulgar, adolescent, frat-boy, who delights in toilet-humor, sex jokes and freaky stunts.  They imagine the average female to be a shop-a-holic, vain, sex-kitten, who longs to throw off the confining chains of parents, husband and or children.  The imagined male and female become reality when they are fed constant rebellion, entertainment, and not only sex, but “taboo” sex.

We exalt in arising at 4:30 a.m. on the biggest shopping day of the year to acquire, accumulate and acquiesce to this culture.  The corporations that exploit Christmas also exploit our thirst for human respect.  After all, if we opt out of the spending and gift-giving mania, we are uncharitable scrooges and our friends and family may think we have become religious fanatics.  When we could use the season to counter the culture’s notion of Christ, we instead capitulate.

Why this obsession with the temporal?  Where has our sense of the holy and eternal gone?  Hillaire Belloc said of John Calvin and Calvinism, “In denying the efficacy of good deeds and of the human will, and abnegations, in leaving on one side as useless all the doctrine and tradition of Holy Poverty, Calvin opened the door to the domination of the mind by money.  St Thomas had said it centuries before–that if men abandoned the idea of God as the supreme good they would tend to replace Him…[with]…material wealth” as the supreme good.”   -Hillaire Belloc, The Crisis of Civilization.

If Calvin was right and our good deeds have no effect on our salvation, and, furthermore that we are predestined by the Divine Will to such an extent that man’s free will is nullified, then one can see how man could easily be consumed by temporal matters, and conversely ignore matters of the eternal.  Why be so  foolish as to forego the world’s glitter and glamour if there is no eternal consequence to partaking in it?

“Man cannot freely rise to God and the contemplation of His beauty while he is breathless in pursuit of riches.  A heart filled with material and earthly pleasures can never know spiritual and divine joys.  No it is impossible to unite what is false with what is true; what is spiritual with what is carnal; what is temporal with what is eternal; they can never dwell together in one heart.”   -The Sinner’s  Guide, Venerable Louis of Granada.

Likewise man cannot truly appreciate the gravity of Christ’s birth when we engage in the world’s notion of Christmas which amounts to idolatry and worship of the golden calf.  God requires good deeds of His people and our actions will have consequences.  We must not partake in the corruption of Christ’s birthday.

“Riches are acquired only at the expense of pain and labor; they are preserved only by care and anxiety; and they are never lost without bitter vexation and grief.  But worse than this, they are rarely accumulated without offence against God…”.  -The Sinner’s  Guide, Venerable Louis of Granada.

http://www.realclearreligion.com/materialism_calvinism_the_g.html


Pilgrims, Socialism and Thanksgiving

The Pilgrim trip was funded by a group of investors who were hoping to get a return on their money. The Pilgrims were therefore contractually bound to the investor’s plan. That plan stated that the Pilgrims were to hold all things in common and equally share from the proceeds of their labor (socialism).

The early settlers of Jamestown were under the same kind of contract. I heard a great lecture from John Rolfe (okay, it was actually someone dressed up as John Rolfe) who explained it this way:

Basically, when one works hard all day and another simply strolls the grounds and puffs on his pipe, and yet they both get the same amount of food for dinner, eventually the one who works hard decides that tomorrow he will do his own strolling and puffing.

Because of this, the Jamestown settlers were starving. It was only when they apportioned private property and ate the fruit of their own labor that the colony began to thrive.

This was the same story in Plymouth not too many years later. Their leader, William Bradford, wrote of how they had to abandon the investor’s plan in order to survive, for when work and non-work both get the same reward, eventually no one will work.

Isn’t it interesting how we often times fail to learn the lessons from the past.

Socialism experiments continue today, with the same kind of results. They never really succeed.

Why do we continue to try them? For several reasons.

One, the state has a vested interest in this happening. It is the big winner in socialism. It garners great power. So, when the state grows to the point that it can force the people to increasingly give up their rights to private property and fool the others to think that they will be better off sharing equally from the corn crib, guess where the power shifts…to the officials of the state.

Two, we misunderstand the nature of man. We have bought the Maslow lie that man is basically good. If he is good, then he will obviously love to work hard and go to years and years of medical school and specialized training so that he can work 14 hour days and get one ear of corn out of the crib while his friend follows his heart to stroll and puff. And because we are all such inherently good people, after dinner we will sit around the campfire and sing kum bay ya.

Third, we misunderstand the nature of work. We believe there is something cruel and oppressive about work and so we want someone (the state) to come up with a way to allow us not to work, yet circumvent the consequences of non-work. Or, we believe that the solution to someone not working is to give them another ear of corn.

However, the reality is this:

–The state may think that socialism will satisfy its lust for power, but, in the end, it will eventually collapse under a mountain of debt or a corn crib filled with IOUs. As Margaret Thatcher once said, “socialism works until you run out of other people’s money.” Eventually, the colony begins to starve.

–Man will not enjoy working his tail off so that someone else who is not working can reap the fruit of his labor. James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers that they were establishing a government that had balances of powers because men were NOT angels.

–Work is not oppressive and cruel, but it is exactly what the poor need…not only to be able to produce their own corn, but because we were made by the Original Worker to work. We are happier and healthier when we do.

The Scriptures connect the dots for us regarding work and laziness. Here are a few: Proverbs 10:4, “Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth.” Proverbs 14:23, “All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.”

In other words, we reap what we sow.

In socialism, we try to reverse those consequences. Reward the lazy, punish the diligent.

You sow, I reap.

That eventually fails.

One solution is found in 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “if anyone will not work, neither shall he eat”. This is a statement that many would view as cruel, but it is actually compassionate…for both the man himself and for the colony as a whole. Hunger is a great motivator to work and therefore produce.

When the Pilgrims returned to a biblical view and threw off the yoke of socialistic bindings, they began to prosper. And when they prospered, they held a day of Thanksgiving.

It saddens me that our nation is slipping so quickly back into this yoke. Though we have the lessons from our past and the lessons from failed experiments all around us, we seem to be asleep or in a fog.

Maybe around your Thanksgiving table this year, you can recount the lessons learned to your children so that they will not be doomed to repeat the failures of the past. Put on a Pilgrim hat or your John Rolfe outfit and tell them the story with great gusto as I heard it in Jamestown.

http://deltackett.com/2010/10/29/pilgrims-socialism-and-thanksgiving/


Ann Barnhardt: On Loaves, Fishes, Math and Marxist Tyranny

There is a boy here that hath five barley loaves and two fishes. But what are these among so many?
Then Jesus said: Make the men sit down. Now, there was much grass in the place. The men therefore sat down, in number about five thousand.
And Jesus took the loaves: and when he had given thanks, he distributed to them that were set down. In like manner also of the fishes, as much as they would.
And when they were filled, he said to his disciples: gather up the fragments that remain, lest they be lost.
They gathered up therefore and filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley loaves which remained over and above to them that had eaten.
Now those men, when they had seen what a miracle Jesus had done, said: This is of a truth the prophet that is to come into the world. – Jn:6: 9-14 

A very good question regarding something I said in part 7 of the economic presentation, beginning at 16:15:

How do you reconcile your statement that anything regarding charity to the poor not grounded in mathematics is satanic in light of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes?

An excellent question. And I have an excellent answer.

First, the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes is contained in all four gospels: Matthew 14, Mark 6, Luke 9, and John 6. John is very specific in terms of the source quantities, stating that Jesus fed 5000 people with five loaves of bread and two fishes. As people took from the baskets the quantity inside the baskets never diminished. This was a miracle, plain and simple.

A fun aside for any physics buffs is to debate whether or not God observed the law of Conservation of Mass in this miracle. Did He synthesize entirely new mass in order to continually replenish the baskets, or did he “harvest” mass from elsewhere in the universe? OR did he transform energy into matter per Einstein’s theory of Relativity?

Miracles are actions that God takes that break the natural law in order to make manifest His power and love. Miracles are God’s way of reminding us that He is God, that the universe and everything in it is His, and that WE ARE NOT GOD and would do well to never, ever, ever forget it.

And that is PRECISELY the point. The Marxist-totalitarian milieu is making the claim that it too can “miraculously” break the natural laws of physics and mathematics and provide infinite quantites of physical goods and service commodities. In short, the state is claiming that it is God’s equal, that it can “feed the multitudes” with no respect to the natural law just as Christ did, and that it is thus to be worshiped as “god”.

Now mind you, the oligarchs know full well that they cannot deliver on these promises any more than they could actually feed 5000 people with five loaves and two fishes. They have no intention of delivering, and could not care any less about the people they are claiming to “help” with their promised “charity”. Their only intention is to use the lie of the promise of a miraculous distribution of goods and services in order attract and engender loyalty and worship from the masses, and then to seize total power when the masses are starving and cannot escape.

What is so sickening is that the Bishops and Cardinals of the Church are so thoroughly Marxist today due to the Communist-homosexualist infiltration begun after WWII, so breathtakingly stupid and contra-educated, and so heretical that they worship the state as “god” and view themselves as partners with satan in his lying promises of infinite amounts of free stuff from the government-god, and will do ANYTHING to maintain their earthly power, social status and their billion-dollar bond portfolios.

Only God is God. Only God can suspend the natural laws of mathematics and physics.

The State is not God. The State has no supernatural power whatsoever and is thus completely constrained by the laws of mathematics and physics. When the State claims otherwise, when the State claims and promises that it too can multiply the loaves and the fishes (if the masses will only bow down and worship the State first, of course), it is satanic and must be resisted and fought with every fiber of one’s being.

God always performs the miracle first, then invites us to worship Him, and delivers heaven.

Satan, through the State, demands the worship first, promising miracles as a reward for the worship, and then delivers nothing but hell.

http://barnhardt.biz/


Father Forgive Them

The Waldorf Astoria, New York October 18, 2012

In our time more than ever before, the chief strength of the wicked lies in the cowardice and weakness of good men… All the strength of Satan’s reign is due to the easy-going weakness of Catholics. Oh! If I might ask the Divine Redeemer, as the prophet Zachary did in spirit: What are those wounds in the midst of Thy hands? The answer would not be doubtful: With these was I wounded in the house of them that loved Me. I was wounded by My friends, who did nothing to defend Me, and who, on every occasion, made themselves the accomplices of My adversaries. ~Pope St. Pius X, Discourse at the Beatification of St. Joan of Arc, Dec. 13, 1908

Although he again lost Protestant voters to his GOP opponent, Obama held onto his advantages among Catholic and Jewish voters. He won 70 percent of the Jewish vote, down from 78 percent in 2008, and he won Catholic voters 50 percent to 47 percent. Romney carried Protestant voters by a 13-point margin, 56 percent to 43 percent. (Source: Politico)


At the Crossroads

No people will tamely surrender their liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the contrary, when people are universally ignorant, and debauched in their manners, they will sink under their own weight without the aid of foreign invaders.  -Samuel Adams

Red or blue, have or have not, we all meet today at the crossroads of state and freedom. These roads have not been, and will never be congruent. Will they now tear America apart as they diverge into the horizon? We must take this time to understand and wisely discern which of our prospective leaders accept our natural freedom to prosper and which will legislate our servitude.

One camp peddles an alluring vision that clutches at our need, the other a noble and ageless ideal that fades like a dream under derelict custodians, while it is asserted that traditional principles are but shades and shadows. The truth is that this “alluring vision” is revealed as a political nosferatu, and the purported ghosts of old are as alive as every citizen who believes that the spirit of freedom is the beating heart of the American constitutional republic.

First, let’s look the state, or more specifically, the socialist state.

In 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville described the enduring traits of the socialist bête noir that has again awakened in our time to feed on our faltering republic.

He asked his fellow French citizens 162 years ago, “I must know, the National Assembly must know, all of France must know — is the February Revolution a socialist revolution or is it not?” He continues, “It is not my intention to examine here the different systems which can all be categorized as socialist. I want only to attempt to uncover those characteristics which are common to all of them and to see if the February Revolution can be said to have exhibited those traits.”

Now, the first characteristic of all socialist ideologies is, I believe, an incessant, vigorous, and extreme appeal to the material passions of man. Thus, some have said, “… man must be paid, not according to his merit, but according to his need,” while, finally, they have told us here that the object of the February Revolution — of socialism — is to procure unlimited wealth for all.

A second trait, always present, is an attack, either direct or indirect, on the principle of private property. From the first socialist who said, fifty years ago, that “property is the origin of all the ills of the world” to the socialist who spoke from this podium and who, less charitable than the first, passing from property to the property-holder, exclaimed that “property is theft,” all socialists — all, I insist — attack, either in a direct or indirect manner, private property.

A third and final trait — one which, in my eyes, best describes socialists of all schools and shades — is a profound opposition to personal liberty and a scorn for individual reason, a complete contempt for the individual. They unceasingly attempt to mutilate, to curtail, to obstruct personal freedom in any and all ways. They hold that not only must the State act as the director of society, but further, it must be master of each man, and not only master, but keeper and trainer. For fear of allowing him to err, the State must place itself forever by his side, above him, around him, better to guide him, to maintain him — in a word, to confine him. They call, in fact, for the forfeiture, to a greater or lesser degree, of human liberty, to the point where, were I to attempt to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it is simply a new system of serfdom.

There is nothing in the Revolution which forces the State to substitute itself in the place of the individual’s foresight and caution, in the place of the market, of individual integrity. There is nothing in it which authorizes the State to meddle in the affairs of industry or to impose its rules on it, to tyrannize over the individual in order to better govern him, or, as it is insolently claimed, to “save him from himself.”

We must now ask ourselves the same questions and make the same observations regarding the American Revolution. Was it ever supposed to be the socialist one now looming over us?

For the observant, it is clear that our government is now defined by these same attributes — wealth for all, state ownership and regulation of business (aka “state capitalism”), scorn for individual liberty and property — the fruits of our labor, particularly for those deemed “rich” — in a bureaucratic nanny-state where czar after czar is lined up to save us from ourselves through authoritarian and unconstitutional regulation.

Despite many historical examples and current news of failed socialist states, this generation of “progressive” elite believe that they are finally the chosen ones who will invoke the success of their cause, oblivious that they are chasing a will o’ the wisp that has lured them (and America) deep into a quagmire of economic decay, cultural dissolution, and possibly to their stated plan for liquidating those Americans who bitterly cling to the ideals in the U.S. Constitution.

And now the answer, the crux of freedom — the individual.

In her illuminating book, The Discovery of Freedom, Rose Wilder Lane writes, “The American Revolution had no leader.  Hundreds of thousands of men and women who lived and died unknown to anyone but their neighbors, and now are completely forgotten, began the third attempt to create conditions in which human beings can use their natural freedom.

This fact is the hope of the world. For only unknown individuals can create and maintain conditions in which men can act freely, conditions in which human energy can operate to improve the human world. Only an individual who recognizes that his self-controlling responsibility is a condition of human life, and fully accepts the responsibility of a creator of the human world, can protect human rights in the infinite complexity of men’s relationships with each other. Only this individual protection of all men’s rights can keep their natural freedom operating on this earth.

Living men and women create the human world. Every man is responsible for the stupidity, the cruelty, the injustice, the wrongs of which he complains. Let him take the beam from his own eye. Have I never been stupid, have I never committed a cruelty, an injustice, a wrong against another person?

If we can understand and live this idea, the pack of charlatan saviors who have led us astray will fade in influence, to be replaced not by more authorities, experts, or elites, but by citizens who will step forward, do their duty, and then be strong enough to surrender power’s corrupting addiction. It is these we must choose.

Tocqueville’s Critique of Socialism (1848)

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/at_the_crossroad.html


The Stench of Appeasement

“Appeasement is throwing someone else to the crocodiles in the hopes of being eaten last.”
Winston Churchill

Suppose there were a worldwide movement which openly proclaimed its goal of taking over in your country and every country with the purpose of imposing its system on every human being on earth. Also suppose that this movement had carried out murders and terrorist attacks in your own country, that members of this group promoted violence while gaining political influence. Suppose also that is was highly unfashionable and politically incorrect to speak out against them.

I am not speaking of Islam here, but of Communism. The current wave of censorship and denial toward Islam is not a new development. It is rather a very old one. Islamophobia, like Red-Baiting, is a political term that serves the function of cutting off any discussion of the subject. It precludes any listing of the facts or debates on the issue, by declaring it to be off-limits. To raise the issue is to expose yourself as a bad person whose ideas are unacceptable for public distribution.

When George Orwell was struggling to find a publisher for Animal Farm, he was repeatedly turned down on the grounds that the book would offend the Soviet Union. One publisher wrote to Orwell that he had been dissuaded from publishing the book by an important official in the Ministry of Information (an agency that would become the Ministry of Truth in his novel, 1984) who had told him that publishing such a book would be ill-advised at this time. That official was, incidentally, a Soviet spy.

The publisher went on to say that the book might be acceptable if it applied generally to dictators, but not specifically to the USSR. Finally the publisher added, “It would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.”

Change around a few names and this is exactly the rejection letters that courageous books critical of Islam have received. It’s fine to make general criticisms of religious fanaticism, so long as those criticisms are universally applied, and do not offend those touchy people who religious fanaticism occasionally expresses itself in dangerous ways.

In a generally deleted preface to Animal Farm, Orwell wrote, “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact.”

There are quite a few sensational facts and news items that are kept out or minimized in our own media because it would not do to mention them. There are rarely any government officials dictating this censorship, certainly in the United States there are no legal codes that make it mandatory, but this censorship is voluntary. It consists of people censoring themselves, of publications censoring people out of fear of violence, of publishers who feel that this is an ill-advised time to stir up tensions and of a larger body of liberal thinkers who feel that we should sympathize with Islam and ignore any of its violent and supremacist activities.

“At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable,” Orwell wrote in his Animal Farm preface titled, Freedom of the Press.

“Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill… throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference… So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld.”

So too we still have freedom of the speech. We are encouraged to attack our own government, though not the liberal wings of it, but it is still a safer thing to do, so long as the prestige of Islam is not involved. Only when Islam is offended, does the principle of free speech come apart.

It was always safe to attack Bush, but an attack, even on Bin Laden, was considered tacky at best. And an attack on more “moderate” figures, like Tariq Ramadan, was borderline unprintable. While it was ridiculously easy to publish an essay depicting Bush as a war-crazed chimp invading Iraq for oil, Haliburton and Christian fundamentalism, the cultural elites insisted that doing so was an act of great political courage. Meanwhile publishing an essay critical of Islamic figures was next to impossible and dangerously perilous. And those same elites treated it as a despicable abuse of freedom of speech.

The poisonous vein here goes deeper. With the rise of the Bolsheviks there was a vigorous debate over whether or not to recognize the Soviet Union. Two administrations, Wilson and Hoover, chose not to do so. Their reasoning was fairly straightforward and is best expressed in the words of Bainbridge Colby, the Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson.

Colby was a liberal who had co-founded Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and befriended Mark Twain, nevertheless he laid out a clear rationale for extending no diplomatic recognition to the Bolshevik terrorists. “We cannot recognize, hold official relations with or give friendly reception to the agents of a government which is determined and bound to conspire against our institutions, whose diplomats will be agitators of dangerous revolt, whose spokesmen say they sign agreements with no intention of keeping them.”

That policy persisted under two administrations, including that of President Hoover, who had personal experience with the Soviet Union during the Russian relief effort which bailed out the Communists at a crucial time. It was the FDR Administration which was stuffed full of Communists that abrogated it. FDR became the first American president to directly communicate with a Soviet leader and in his first year of office he invited the Soviet Foreign Minister to Washington D.C. and recognized the Soviet Union.

To achieve that recognition, the Soviet Union pledged not to promote or harbor any groups with the aim of “the overthrow or the preparation for the overthrow of, or bringing about by force of, a change in the political or social order of the whole or any part of the United States, its territories or possessions.” This agreement was never honored in any way, shape or form.

Colby went on defending his policy until his death in 1950 as the right thing to do. And the pace of events only proved him right. The USSR used diplomatic recognition to extract aid, plant saboteurs and conduct espionage. It kept agreements only for so long as they suited it.

The pro-recognition lobby backed of diplomats, businessmen and politicians exploiting argued that only engagement would reform the Soviet Union. That same argument was still being made during the Reagan Administration which was berated for its warmongering obstructionism every time it refused to give in to Soviet demands.

We are back to that same debate today between engaging our enemies or accepting their hostility as a fact. The modern diplomatic corps is full of advocates of engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood, with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. There isn’t anyone they won’t engage with so long as they hate the United States and seek to destroy it.

Four years of Obama has shown once again that engagement does not work. Not only doesn’t it work, it actually emboldens the enemy and allows the enemy to infiltrate deep within our societies and to corrupt our institutions. That very engagement leads to censorship in the name of friendship. It leads to news articles and books that cannot be printed because they might sabotage the chances for peace.

The hope for peace is the greatest force of censorship there is. Once engagement is passed off as a fairy that you must believe in lest she will die, then censorship becomes absolutely mandatory to keep peace alive. If a book critical of Communism might offend the USSR then it is best not to print it or to water it down. If Muslims riot over cartoons of Mohammed, then it is a civic duty not to print them in the name of peace and understanding.

When we marvel at the Dhimmism in modern cultural life, at the extent to which Islamic viewpoints are presented unchallenged as the establishment devotes its fullest efforts to inveighing against any opposing views, this too has its red precedents.

“The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding,” Orwell wrote. “On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicised with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency.”

Modern day examples of this surround us on all sides and as a doctor of totalitarianism, Orwell aptly diagnosed the corruption of the elites and their descent into totalitarian expediency.

“If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth… It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.

“The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals arc visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency.”

That principle is now the primary one on the left. This totalitarian cowardice that Orwell inveighed against has been elevated to an unchallenged moral standard. Animal Farm is widely reprinted, but without Orwell’s  preface. Like 1984, a book whose composition effectively killed him, it has been treated according to the original plan of that publisher, stripping away most acknowledgements that it is a vicious satire of Soviet Communism, rather than a generic commentary on tyranny.

Orwell’s preface, so rarely published, concludes with his motivation for writing it, “It is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect.”

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/49927


Three Deadliest Words in the World: It’s a Girl

“It’s a girl” has become a three-word death sentence to hundreds of millions of unborn babies across the globe. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls are missing in the world today because of female gendercide. Killed, aborted and abandoned—these are the brutal realities of the actual “war on women.”

The worst offenders are India and China—countries where ancient cultural traditions, dictating a preference for male offspring, join with pro-abortion government policies. It’s a deadly combination that allows for the deliberate extermination of girls. However, no country is immune, including the United States. Recently, a disturbing story and photograph went viral.

A woman, very visibly pregnant with twins, decided to have an abortion because they were girls. Keep in mind that gender is determined via ultrasound near the 20th week of pregnancy, meaning this mother was well into her second trimester when she had her babies aborted. Also, this summer, the investigative pro-life group, Live Action, released a series of videos called Protect Our Girls, which exposed Planned Parenthood’s disturbing practice of actually doing gender-based abortions. They claim to be “nonjudgmental,” essentially stating they don’t question the reasons why a mother wishes to end the life of her unborn child. I can’t think of anything more judgmental than sentencing a baby girl to death simply because she’s female.

And I can’t think of any other act that is motivated by more ruthless discrimination. Pro-abortion activists like Planned Parenthood are accusing pro-life individuals and candidates of participating in a “war on women.” What utter hypocrisy. All the while they’re searching out and killing unborn babies only because they’re female. There’s no graver war on women than this.

Sadly, Planned Parenthood isn’t alone. There are many who refuse to acknowledge this travesty taking place across the globe, or worse yet, they participate in it. However, I’m privileged to know someone who’s made it her mission to combat this ignorance and crime against humanity. She’s bringing it to the forefront in a way that it can be addressed educationally, morally and actionably—she is Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers.

Reggie is part of the production team for an eye-opening film releasing this month. It’s a Girl  is a powerful documentary that takes this international issue and makes it personal. Shot on location in India and China, you meet girls and women who’ve been impacted by this brutal practice. The film tells the stories of abandoned and trafficked girls, of women who suffer extreme dowry-related violence, of brave mothers fighting to save their daughters’ lives and of other mothers who would kill for a son. These faces, and the millions of others like them, are the reason female gendercide can’t be ignored any longer. It must be addressed and ultimately it must be ended.

Abortion for the purposes of sex-selection is a horrific testimony of where the so-called “pro-choice” mentality of the abortion industry inevitably leads. When pregnancy becomes a “choice” rather than a child, there’s no limitation to why a woman can decide to end her unborn baby’s life.

http://www.lifenews.com/2012/09/07/three-deadliest-words-in-the-world-its-a-girl/


The Aging New Left

“They are the most disagreeable of people…Their insincerity? Can you not feel a sense of disgust at the arrogant presumption of superiority of these people? Superiority of intellect! Then, when it comes to practice, down they fall with a wallop not only to the level of ordinary human beings but to a level which is even far below the average.” -Winston Churchill

In the 1960s, the left experienced a resurgence, financed mostly by Moscow through a variety of front groups, and focused on American college campuses. Ever-so-intellectual, they dubbed themselves the New Left, suggesting that they had taken a quantum leap beyond the monolithic bureaucracy of Stalin, and even transcending the moral incentives of Mao. They identified with the dashing, romantic Cuban revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Oddly, somewhere along the way, they missed the fact that these people were mass murderers who made Hitler look like an amateur.

The neo-Marxist philosophy they concocted had no specific goals, other than full adoption of Third World Anti-colonialism, and destroying the existing capitalist state. It was taken on faith that socialist institutions would naturally be created by the freed proletariat, with no previous planning, as if by miracle or magic. Saul Alinsky was one of the New Left’s prophets, and had numerous followers in Academia, such as Cloward and Piven at Columbia, where Barack Obama claims to have been a student. In any case, this is the milieu the current occupant of the White House was raised in, and what he clearly still believes today.

The Left has always been a haven for misfits, ne’er-do-wells, and people with a myriad of psychological disorders. Boozers and dopers like Barry Soetoro found a place where they didn’t feel out of step with the rest of the world — it was the rest of the world that was out of step with them. They could don the mantle of a Revolutionary and immediately become 10 feet tall, bullet-proof, and invincible. Looking at the makeup of the current administration, especially in it’s upper echelon, the policies and legislation they have produced makes it eminently clear that many of these people have never gotten beyond this ideology.

For reasons that are not clear, far too many conservatives adamantly refuse to admit that Barack Hussein Obama is, by his own admissions and open associations, a New Left Marxist. His destruction of the economy, his looting of the Treasury and redistribution of trillions to his backers in the international banking community; his nationalizing of health care, the financial markets and the auto industry; his ratcheting up of more regulations, especially environmental ones, aimed at shutting down our ability to produce energy; his total lack of effort to bring down unemployment are not the result of incompetence. On the contrary. From a New Left point of view, this has been the intention all along: do the greatest harm to the capitalist state in the shortest period of time, and they’ve been very successful.

In addition, they have taken great strides toward undermining the Constitution, and laying the statutory groundwork for transferring virtually unlimited power to the executive branch, making Congress an irrelevant footnote to history. They have ignored the courts, lowest to highest, selectively enforced the laws that are supposed to be applied equally, refused to prosecute blatant violations when it didn’t suit their political agenda, and have been allowed to get away with it. Even Eric Holder’s contempt of Congress is being allowed to get brushed aside as a “distraction.”

And lest we forget, Barack Obama promised his buddy Vladimir Putin that “After my election, I have more flexibility”. He will be in a position to have Leon Panetta over at the Defense Department, unilaterally destroy our nuclear arsenal.

Half of the Cabinet and their second and third rank appointees, and the president and much of his staff and “czars” should be under indictment, There has never been such rampant, unbridled, unabashed corruption in the history of American government. As the Ministry of Propaganda, aka, the “mainstream” media likes to say, “unprecedented, historic!” And nearly as guilty are the Rinos who daily turn into the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys, allowing our country to be dismantled and turned into an impoverished, Third World has-been dictatorship, right before our eyes.

We, the People, by all real indicators, should win the November elections in a historic landslide of epic proportions. If we do, we have a long, hard road ahead of us, repealing and repairing the damage done by the looters, the misfits, and the lunatics who have been controlling the Democrat party and Washington for the past 50 years. But it must be done, for we are teetering on a dangerous brink, and if we go over, there’s no way back.

In the meantime, remember this truth and apply it: The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/48916


A Fabian Socialist Dream Come True

The gradual revolution of the Fabian Socialists is quickly becoming a reality in America.

The Fabian Society began in England in 1887 by a very small group of elitist socialist that sought to reform society gradually into one of socialism instead of through violent revolution. At first their purpose was to be an alternative in Britain for the more dominate Marxist Social-Democratic Federation, but their true goal was to accomplish socialism through a very gradual process using the voting booth and representative democracy as their instrument of change. In fact, one of their symbols is a Turtle with the motto: “When I Strike, I Strike Hard”. Another symbol is the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing and the Globe on an Anvil being hammered into the Fabian model.

The Fabian Plan for gradual Socialist Revolution was as definitive as it possibly could be, to say it has been a conspiracy is simplistic in the extreme. It instituted a widespread educational program for its leadership and its minions, as time progressed, it opened schools, such as the London School of Economics, and the New School of Social Research.

One stroke of genius was that instead of advocating a Socialist State, they assisted in the implementation of the Welfare State which is merely a few steps away from a purely Socialistic State. It was, of course, implemented gradually, and played upon the weaknesses of human nature to gain popularity. Unlike the usual Socialist points of views, the Fabians didn’t advocate complete State ownership of businesses, industry, agriculture or land, instead they sought to involve the State into very specific areas of importance such as electric power production, transportation, precious metals and of course, credit. The remaining balance of economic systems would be left to the private sector however; it would be highly regulated by the State and operated according to the wishes of the State.

If you look at Britain, you will see that they accomplished their goals with ease and while American has been more difficult, the goals are the same and they have made enormous advances toward those goals. Much of their accomplishments have been realized without using that dreaded word: Socialism. They have brought the Fabian Dream to America through an extremely brilliant system that has been openly accepted by the voters of this country without the hint of suspicion on their part that they were voting a Socialistic system into place.

Now, make no mistake about it, Fabian Socialists are Statist, they are absolutely authoritarian in their philosophy. Their long-term goal has always been a Socialistic Dictatorship with full-imposition of a very legalistic society where the individual is simply a part of the collective. An example of this can be found in the writings of one of the founders of the Fabian Society, George Bernard Shaw speaking of the Socialist Utopia, he said: “Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not the character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.”

Of course, all of this would be in the best interest of society as a whole and the whole made up simply of parts, individuals merely cogs in the machine of social justice. This idea of social justice is the biggest selling point and perhaps the easiest to peddle to the people. Programs of social reform, incremental at first, allowed for the tempering of the people; allowing for them to grow accustom to the intervention of the State in the affairs of the individual. Of course, such reforms are never an end unto themselves only stepping-stones to a greater Socialist construct of society.

Regarding the great strides made toward these goals, Max Beer stated with confidence: “There was no reason for Socialists to wait for revolution. The realization of socialism had begun the moment when the State became accessible to social reform ideas.” Indeed, the revolution was already half realized at the moment when the State stepped over the threshold of progressive social construction and intervention into the private lives of the people.

The first step in any Socialist plan is the reform of capitalism, when the capitalist system is sufficiently neutralized the rest comes relatively easy. The first step to an efficient plan of capitalist neutralization is control over the money supply and for that a central bank is required along with a fiat monetary system, in this country that was initiated with the advent of the Federal Reserve. Later, of course must come effective controls over major infrastructure and services, all accomplished through the New Deal. The New Deal accomplished substantial feats toward the Fabian Socialist construct with numerous price controls, quotas, subsidies, inspections, regulations, licenses, fees, penalties and massive government interventions into what was formerly private enterprise. Although you would never hear politicians of either political party to admit to support the ideals of socialism, they nevertheless not only support such measures, but also promote them.

We have recently seen a greater push toward socialism, though few realize it. The government is assuming more and more responsibility for and authority over the economy, all under the guise of protecting the people from potentially unscrupulous free marketeers. We are being moved yet another step closer to the dream-society of the Fabians. Of course, these are simply steps, essential parts to a much broader agenda, one that is authoritarian in nature and execution, even the centrally planned economy is a mere step, not the end product. It is all carefully crafted, manufactured to ensure the most popular support possible for “people-friendly” solutions while instituting a fraudulent system of central control over the unsuspecting public. The system has been marketed to the public, one specific component at a time, each component essential to the completion of the whole and that is the brilliance of this gradual imposition of Fabian Socialism in this country.

The greatest bulwark against tyranny in America has always been the system of private ownership and free enterprise, it is the cornerstone of our system of government and without it our freedoms and liberty are in jeopardy. Central economic planning is, in a very basic sense, the keystone to Fabian Socialism, for in order for it to succeed, central State planning and control must replace the system of free enterprise. While it was not necessary for the State to actually own or directly control all the elements in the economy it is enough for the State to have the right to assert itself in any area that it deems necessary. The Fabians called it “the democratization of economic power”, in other words socialized and centralized control over economic direction within the country.

In 1942, Stuart Chase, in his book “The Road We Are Traveling” spelled out the system of planning the Fabians had in mind; the interesting thing is to look at that plan in comparison to now in America.

1. Strong, centralized government.

2. Powerful Executive at the expense of Congress and the Judicial.

3. Government controlled banking, credit and securities exchange.

4. Government control over employment.

5. Unemployment insurance, old age pensions.

6. Universal medical care, food and housing programs.

7. Access to unlimited government borrowing.

8. A managed monetary system.

9. Government control over foreign trade.

10. Government control over natural energy sources, transportation and agricultural production.

11. Government regulation of labor.

12. Youth camps devoted to health discipline, community service and ideological teaching consistent with those of the authorities.

13. Heavy progressive taxation.

It should be evident that while Socialist no longer use the name that the plan is Socialism at its heart. The Fabian Socialist Revolution began in earnest in this country in 1933 with the imposition of the Welfare State and has been steadily progressing since. Those who are promoting this system, whether in the Republican Party or Democratic Party, are nothing less than Traitors, guilty of a type of high treason that deserves the most punitive penalty for such treachery.  I suspect that you will quickly find both of their positions are not only similar, but propose in essence and detail the Fabian Socialist construct. The system that these marauders are imposing upon us will ultimately alter our system of government beyond recognition.

It is all accomplished with the utmost respectability of course, they would not dream of such an imposition without popular support and they will make sure that they have popular support.

In 1933, they proposed that private enterprise had failed leaving the jobless to starve, hope to fade and that the State must step in to save the country and protect the people from the dangers associated with the inherent problems of free enterprise. Today, the call is very similar, the State must step in to protect the people. The Corporate State is, in the minds of Fabians, the ultimate protector of the common man, the provider of security on all fronts, but it requires our complete compliance and the relinquishment of our liberty in exchange. The State is to ultimately be the only one allowed wealth, the problem is that wealth is the people’s wealth confiscated in exchange for their hard labor. It is, in essence, a plan for a modern feudal society of peonage and the people are the peons.

This is the stained-glass window from the Beatrice Webb House in Surrey, England, former headquarters of the Fabian Society. It was designed by George Bernard Shaw and depicts Sidney Webb and Shaw striking the Earth with hammers to “REMOULD IT NEARER TO THE HEART’S DESIRE,” a line from Omar Khayyam. Note the wolf in sheep’s clothing in the Fabian crest above the globe.

George Bernard Shaw -Irish playwright, member of the Fabian Society and a co-founder of the London School of Economics

Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence?

“You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you cant justify your existence, if youre not pulling your weight in the social boat, if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it cant be of very much use to yourself.”

http://www.nolanchart.com/article4425.html


Collectivism: A False Utopia

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.  – Alexis de Tocqueville

Tyranny thrives by feeding on human necessity. It examines what sustains us, what we hope for, what we desire, what we love, and uses those needs as leverage against us. If you want safety, they will take it away and barter it back to you at a steep price. If you want success or respect, then you must bow to the existing arbitrary pecking order and play the game nicely. If you want to raise a family, then you must accept the state as a part-time parent. If you want kinship, then you must settle for a thin veneer of empty pleasantries and insincere associations. If you want independence, then you are simply labeled as a threat and done away with altogether. Autocratic rulers are first and foremost salesmen; they convince us that life itself has a “cost”, that we are born indebted, and all bills must be made payable to the establishment. First and foremost, we are sold on the idea that in all of this, we are ultimately alone…

It is within these manipulated concepts of cost and isolation that we discover the foundation of all totalitarian cultures: Collectivism.

Collectivism is not a space age invention or a product of the abstract musings of Marxists, though many seem to think that their version of a hive society is “new” and certainly better than anything ever attempted in the past. No, collectivism is a psychological prison derived from a beneficial instinct as old as humanity itself; the instinct to connect with others, to share experiences and knowledge, to build and create together. It is an instinct as essential to our survival as breathing. Collectivism uses this instinct as a weapon. It is a corrupted and poisoned harnessing of our intuitive nature. It is an inadequate and cancerous substitute for something which normally invigorates and supports healthy culture: true community.

In this age, our ideas of what constitutes “community” have been tainted and confused with the propaganda of collectivists. Our instincts tell us that the world we have been presented is hollow, while our controlled environment tells us that the world is just as it should be (or the best we’re going to get, anyway). How then, are we to tell the difference between natural community, and destabilizing and destructive collectivism? Let’s examine some of the root conflicts between these two social systems, as well as the philosophical shortcomings of collectivism itself…

Common Aspects Of Collectivism

Looking back at the single minded and highly dominating collectivist experiments of the past, it is easy to see the common threads between them. Certain methods are always present. Certain actions are always taken. Certain beliefs are always adopted. Here are just a few…

The Blank Slate: In order for the state to elevate itself in importance above the individual, it must first promote the idea that the individual does not exist, that your uniqueness or inherent character are only a byproduct of your environment. There are many methods to propagating this mindset. Junk science and establishment psychological theorists often treat the human mind as a mere bundle of chemicals and synapses. Emotions are pigeonholed as “hormonal reactions”. Conscience and even attachment a result of “conditioning” (i.e. H.F. Harlow’s ridiculous rhesus monkey experiments).

Existentialism attacks individualism from the philosophical end; suggesting that all actions and reactions are random results of a purely chaotic universe, while at the same time peddling moral relativism and apathy. If all is based on environment and chance, and there is no purpose or meaning to life, then why care about anything?

Religious organizations that choose to abuse their positions of trust also feed collectivism by standing in the way of personal awareness, or even making it taboo to value the individual over the collective (though people tend to wrongly blame the concept of religion itself, rather than the corrupt men who sometimes misuse it).

Each one of these tactics is a tool in the arsenal of collectivists meant to degrade our social admiration for individual thought. Of course, if one actually studies beyond mainstream sources for information (as we have in numerous articles) on the many biological mysteries of the human mind, the numerous inconsistencies of clinical psychiatry, the irrational assumptions of existentialism, that person would find that the blank slate assertion is filled with so many holes it is laughable. However, as long as groups of men strive for power over others, the attacks on individualism will continue. As desperate as elitists have been through the years to build an environment devoid of independent thought, they have met only with failure. Perhaps you just can’t remove from all people those values which are inborn and intuitive, no matter how monstrous the world is around us.

Centralization Instead Of Cooperation: Cooperation in society is often spontaneous and dependent on a number of underlying factors working together at the right place, and at the right time. It takes a noble endeavor and even more noble leadership indeed to inspire the masses to step onto the same path towards the same direction. This is why legitimate large scale cooperation is so venerated in the annals of history; such events are truly rare and miraculous. Tyrants and elitists have no endeavors that rank as “noble”. They serve only their own interests. So, instead of trying to encourage cooperation they won’t receive, they centralize various systems by coercion. If you can’t convince the public to abandon their own paths for yours, then forcefully remove all paths until the people have only one choice left.

Economic centralization is very indicative of this maneuver. While we in the Liberty Movement see a whole spectrum of possible options for markets and trade, many other people see only what is right in front of them; the same crooked fiat money system controlled by the same gaggle of fraudulent central bankers. A large portion of our populace has been convinced that there is only one way to participate in the economy, and thus they act collectively, and blindly.

Another obvious example is the false left/right political system. While there are as many political views as there are people, most tend to affiliate themselves with one of two; Republican or Democrat. Even if you were to believe that the two major parties are honestly opposed, you have still allowed the establishment to narrow your choices down to two. Add the fact that both major parties actually support nearly the same exact policies and goals, and now your choices have been narrowed to one. Millions of people jump on this one bandwagon every four years, thinking that they are cooperating voluntarily, when they have instead been centralized, and collectivized.

Constant Fear, Constant Threats: Fear and survival are powerful motivators. Without ample self awareness and strength of character, these base instincts can overwhelm rationality and conscience. Every collectivist feudalist system ever devised has used a “common enemy” or an iron hand, to quell dissent in the citizenry and to forcefully unify them not under the auspices of an honest cause, but a terror so profound as to drive them to malleable despair.

When life and death hang in the balance everyday, and people have no time to relax, they can in fact go literally mad. All logic flies out the window, panic ensues, and the masses turn to whoever is ready to offer them a way to sanity; “sanity” meaning “comfort”. After a period of constant danger and distress, even fascism can feel comfortable for a while. Collectivist systems are always clashing with the bubbling tides of individual freedom. Because of this, they must continuously qualify their usefulness. There must always be an imminent threat over the horizon, otherwise, the strangling regulations of the state serve no purpose.

Individualism Equated With “Selfishness”: One of the inevitable conditions of collectivism is the demonization of free thought. In a collective, every person becomes a cog in a great machine. The majority begins to see itself not as a group of individuals acting together, but as a single unit with a single purpose. Any person who chooses to step outside of the box and point out a different view becomes a danger to the whole. A machine cannot function if all the parts are not working in harmony. Disagreement in a collectivist system is not considered a civic duty; it is considered a crime that places everyone else at risk. As a dissenter, you are not a person, but a malfunction that must be dealt with.

It is easy to tell when your nation is turning towards collectivism; you only have to gauge how often you are accused of “selfishness” every time you question the needs of the state over the needs of the individual. This argument arises incessantly in countries on the verge of a despotic shift. Interestingly, it is selfishness that tends to drive collectivists, not individualists. As we discussed earlier, collectivists act out of base fear, and a personal desire to survive regardless of the expense. They may disguise it as duty, or “universal love”, but at bottom, they are driven by pure self-interested. They are willing to sacrifice anything, including their own souls, to hang onto what little they have. They are especially willing to sacrifice what YOU have, to maintain THEIR standard of living, or to see their personal world view enacted. Is there anything more self-centered than a man prepared to destroy the livelihood and freedoms of others just to feel temporarily secure?

Promises Of A Fantastic Future: “Innovation” and “progress” are alluring dreams, dreams which can easily be realized in a free society made up of intelligent individuals thinking in ways which go against the norm. The more unique insights present in a culture, the more likely it is to surpass itself and succeed. Strangely though, it always seems to be collectivists who throw around visions of high tech trains, floating cities, and sustainability as benefits to relinquishing certain freedoms. The insinuation is that if people set aside their individualism, their society becomes stronger, and more productive, like worker bees who only strive for one thing; the perfect hive.

Now, this has never been proven to be an advantage of collectivism. One could say given the evidence that a society flourishes less and contributes less the more centralized it becomes. Constructing immaculate castles, pyramids, magnetic highways, or space stations on the moon, does not necessarily make a culture great. It doesn’t even make a culture interesting. What is far more interesting is a society that seeks to enrich the lives of common men, rather than fabricating edifices and launching technologies while using people up as fuel for the collectivist fire. At any rate, I cannot think of a single extreme centralized system that actually delivered on the grand promises it made when in its initial stages of power. Whether this is because their pledges were impossible to fulfill, or because they never intended to fulfill them in the first place, is hard to say…

Common Aspects Of Community

Now that we have explored the intricacies of collectivism, let’s take a look at what it is designed to destroy. What makes real community? What are its benefits and its weaknesses? How does it begin? How does it end? Why is it such a threat to collectivists? Here are a few answers…

Real Purpose: Communities develop in light of meaningful exchange. Their purpose is natural and common. Their goals are not fixed, but evolve as the community progresses. The beneficiaries are the citizenry, sometimes even those who do not directly participate, rather than a select minority of elites. Because the actions of communities are decentralized, and based on a sense of honor and integrity instead of egomania, they tend to appear direction-less, while at the same time making vast and concrete achievements. Communities work best when purpose and destiny are self determined.

Voluntary Participation: There is no need to force people to participate in a system that operates on honesty, conscience, and individual will. In fact, many people today long for a system like this. When men and women apply their energies to something they believe in, instead of something they are manipulated into following, the results can be spectacular. Progress becomes second nature, an afterthought, instead of an unhealthy obsession.

Legitimate Respect: The purpose of a true community is not to keep tabs on the personal lives of its participants, nor to mold their notions. The rights of the individual are respected above all else. Again, the more varied the insights of a population, the stronger it becomes. For a community to attempt to stifle the viewpoints of its citizens would be to commit suicide. There is strength in numbers, but even greater strength in variety. Individualism takes effort, time, and dedication. A society made up of people who have made this journey cannot help but esteem each other.

Flexibility Leads To Stability: A wise man adopts that which works, and throws out that which fails. He does not dismiss methods out of hand, nor does he hang onto methods that disappoint simply because he cannot let go. He educates himself through experience. Adaptability, flexibility, agility in thought and in policy creates solid ground for a society to build. Communities survive by being able to admit when a mistake has been made, and by being open to new options. Rigid systems, like collectivist systems, cannot function unless the people conform to the establishment, and its deficiencies. Communities function best when the establishment conforms to the people, and the truth.

Mutual Aid: Collectivist systems are notorious for promoting the idea that “we are all one”, however, they usually end up becoming the most anti-social and uncaring cultures to grace the planet. You cannot centralize or enforce charity because then it is no longer charity, but slavery. Citizens of communities, on the other hand, actually seek to help each other, not because they expect immediate returns, or because it’s “good for the state”, but because they value an atmosphere of benevolence. The generosity of community helps individuals detach from dependence on government, or bureaucracy. The less dependence on centralized authority, the stronger and safer everyone becomes.

Mutual Defense: While collectivism sacrifices its participants for some undefined “greater good”, communities defend one another, knowing that if the fate of one’s neighbor is ignored, the fate of oneself may also be ignored by others. No one is “expendable” in a community. EVERYONE is expendable in a collective.

Building Community In A Modern World

The task of constructing meaningful community today is daunting, but crucial. In an increasingly centralized and desensitized world, the only recourse of the honorable is to decentralize, and to reintroduce the model of independence once again. This starts with self sufficient communities and solid principles. It starts with unabashed and unwavering pride in the values of sovereignty and liberty. It starts with a relentless pursuit of balance, and truth. It starts with an incredible amount of hard work.

The trappings of collectivism sometimes seem insurmountable. The mindless devotion of our friends and family to a system that harms them can cause us to lose hope, and to lose focus. We must remember how collectivism operates; by removing the power of choice from the equation. If we return that power, then many people who we may have once deemed “lost causes” might awaken as well. By exposing the masses to another option, a better option, we undo years of lies, and lengths of chain. If there was ever a perfect moment to begin this battle, now is the time; while Americans are still searching for solutions, and not too fearful to pursue them once they are found.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-america-needs-community-not-collectivism


The New Eugenics

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.  –G. K. Chesterton 1909

Each year in America  fewer and fewer disabled infants are born. The reason is eugenic abortion. Doctors and their patients use prenatal technology to screen unborn children for disabilities, then they use that information to abort a high percentage of them. Without much scrutiny or debate, a eugenics designed to weed out the disabled has become commonplace.

Not wishing to publicize a practice most doctors prefer to keep secret, the medical community releases only sketchy information on the frequency of eugenic abortion against the disabled. But to the extent that the numbers are known, they indicate that the vast majority of unborn children prenatally diagnosed as disabled are killed.

Medical researchers estimate that 80% or more of babies now prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. (They estimate that since 1989, 70% of Down-syndrome fetuses have been aborted.) A high percentage of fetuses with cystic fibrosis are aborted, as evident in Kaiser Permanente’s admission to the New York Times that 95 percent of its patients in Northern California choose abortion after they find out through prenatal screening that their fetus will have the disease.

The frequent use of eugenic abortion can also be measured in dwindling populations with certain disabilities. Since the 1960s, the number of Americans with spina bifida has markedly declined. This dropping trend line corresponds to the rise of prenatal screening. Owing to prenatal technology and eugenic abortion, some rare conditions, such as the genetic disorder Tay-Sachs, are even vanishing in America, according to doctors.

“There really isn’t any entity that is charged with monitoring what has been happening,” says Andrew Imparato, head of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), “A lot of people prefer that that data not be collected. But we’re seeing just the tip of the iceberg. This is a new eugenics, and I don’t know where it is going to end.”

“I think of it as commercial  eugenics,” says Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the International Center for Technology Assessment. “Whenever anybody thinks of eugenics, they think of Adolf Hitler. This is a commercial eugenics. But the result is the same, an intolerance for those who don’t fit the norm. It is less open and more subtle. Try to get any numbers on reproductive issues. Try to get actual numbers on sex-selection abortions. They are always difficult to get. If you are involved in that commerce, do you really want people to go: So you aborted how many disabled children? That’s the last piece of information people want out there.”

Indeed, intellectual arguments in favor of eugenic abortion often generate great public outcry. Princeton professor Peter Singer drew fire for saying, “It does not seem quite wise to increase any further draining of limited resources by increasing the number of children with impairments.” Bob Edwards, the embryologist who created the first test-tube baby through in vitro fertilization, has also drawn protests for predicting that “soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.”

But these comments, far from being unthinkable, reflect unspoken mainstream attitudes and practice. Only through political gaffes (and occasional news stories) is eugenic abortion ever mentioned, such as the time in 2003 when a blundering Hillary Clinton objected to a ban on partial-birth abortion because it didn’t contain an exemption for late-term abortions aimed at the disabled. Women should not be “forced” to carry a “child with severe abnormalities,” she said.

In an interview with TAS, Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania recalled his 2003 exchange with Hillary Clinton on the Senate floor in which she endorsed eugenic abortion. “It was pretty revealing. She was saying there had to be an exemption for disabled children being aborted as opposed to healthy children being aborted,” he says. “When she realized what she was advocating for, she had to put in the general niceties. But I don’t think you can read her comments and come to any other conclusion than that the children with disabilities should have less constitutional protection than children who are healthy.”

He added that “the principal reason the Democrats defended the partial-birth abortion procedure was for pregnancies that have ‘gone awry,’ which is not about something bad happening to the life of the mother but about their finding out the child is not in the condition that they expected, that it was somehow less than wanted and what they had hoped for.”

What Hillary Clinton blurted out is spoken more softly, though no less coldly, in the privacy of doctors’ offices. Charles Strom, medical director of Quest Diagnostics, which specializes in prenatal screening, told the New York Times last year that “People are going to the doctor and saying, ‘I don’t want to have a handicapped child, what can you do for me?'” This attitude is shared by doctors who now view disabled infants and children as puzzling accidents that somehow slipped through the system. University of Chicago professor Leon Kass, in his book Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, writes that “at my own university, a physician making rounds with medical students stood over the bed of an intelligent, otherwise normal ten-year-old boy with spina bifida. ‘Were he to have been conceived today,’ the physician casually informed his entourage, ‘he would have been aborted.'”

The impulse behind prenatal screening in the 1970s was eugenic. After the Roe v. Wade decision, which pumped energy into the eugenics movement, doctors scrambled to advance prenatal technology in response to consumer demand, mainly from parents who didn’t want the burdens of raising children with Down syndrome. Now prenatal screening can identify hundreds of conditions. This has made it possible for doctors to abort children not only with chronic disabilities but common disabilities and minor ones. Among the aborted are children screened for deafness, blindness, dwarfism, cleft palates, and defective limbs.

In some cases the aborted children aren’t disabled at all but are mere carriers of a disease or stand a chance of getting one later in life. Prenatal screening has made it possible to abort children on guesses and probabilities. A doctor speaking to the New York Times cited a defect for a eugenic abortion that was at once minor and speculative: a women suffering from a condition that gave her an extra finger asked doctors to abort two of her children on the grounds that they had a 50-50 chance of inheriting that condition.

The law and its indulgence of every conceivable form of litigation has also advanced the new eugenics against the disabled. Working under “liability alerts” from their companies, doctors feel pressure to provide extensive prenatal screening for every disability, lest parents or even disabled children hit them with “wrongful birth” and “wrongful life” suits. In a wrongful birth suit, parents can sue doctors for not informing them of their child’s disability and seek compensation from them for all the costs, financial and otherwise, stemming from a life they would have aborted had they received that prenatal information. Wrongful life suits are brought by children (through their parents) against doctors for all the “damages” they’ve suffered from being born. (Most states recognize wrongful birth suits, but for many states, California and New Jersey among the exceptions, wrongful life suits are still too ridiculous to entertain.)

In 2003, Ob-Gyn Savita Khosla of Hackensack, New Jersey, agreed to pay $1.2 million to a couple and child after she failed to flag Fragile X syndrome, a form of mental retardation caused by a defective gene on the X chromosome. The mother felt entitled to sue Khosla because she indicated on a questionnaire that her sibling was mentally retarded and autistic, and hence Khosla should have known to perform prenatal screening for Fragile X so that she could abort the boy. Khosla settled, giving $475,000 to the parents and $750,000 to the child they wished that they had aborted.

Had the case gone to court, Khosla would have probably lost the suit. New Jersey has been notoriously welcoming to wrongful birth suits ever since the Roe v. Wade decision, after which New Jersey’s Supreme Court announced that it would not “immunize from liability those in the medical field providing inadequate guidance to persons who would choose to exercise their constitutional right to abort fetuses which, if born, would suffer from genetic defects.”

According to the publication Medical Malpractice Law & Strategy, “court rulings across the country are showing that the increased use of genetic testing has substantially exposed physicians’ liability for failure to counsel patients about hereditary disorders.” The publication revealed that many wrongful birth cases “are settled confidentially.” And it predicted that doctors who don’t give their patients the information with which to consider the eugenic option against disabled children will face more lawsuits as prenatal screening becomes the norm. “The human genome has been completely mapped,” it quotes Stephen Winnick, a lawyer who handled one of the first wrongful birth cases. “It’s almost inevitable that there will be an increase in these cases.”

The combination of doctors seeking to avoid lawsuits and parents seeking burden-free children means that once prenatal screening identifies a problem in a child the temptation to eugenic abortion becomes unstoppable. In an atmosphere of expected eugenics, even queasy, vaguely pro-life parents gravitate towards aborting a disabled child. These parents get pressure from doctors who, without even bothering to ask, automatically provide abortion options to them once the prenatal screening has diagnosed a disability (one parent, in a 1999 study, complained of a doctor showing her a video depicting the rigors of raising an afflicted child as a way of convincing her to choose abortion), and they feel pressure from society at large which having accepted eugenic abortion looks askance at parents with disabled children.

The right to abort a disabled child, in other words, is approaching the status of a duty to abort a disabled child. Parents who abort their disabled children won’t be asked to justify their decision. Rather, it is the parents with disabled children who must justify themselves to a society that tacitly asks: Why did you bring into the world a child you knew was disabled or might become disabled?

Andrew Kimbrell points out that many parents are given the complicated information prenatal screening yields with little to no guidance from doctors. “We’re leaving parents with complete confusion. Numerous parents are told by doctors, ‘We think there is some fault on the 50th chromosome of your child.’ A number of polls have shown that people don’t understand those odds.”

“There is enormous confusion out there and nobody is out there to help them,” he says. “This is a huge tangle. And it leads people to abort out of confusion: ‘I guess I better abort, because I don’t know. It sounds really bad and I don’t know what the percentages mean.'”

The New Eugenics isn’t slowing down but speeding up. Not content to wait to see if a child is fit for life, doctors are exploring the more proactive eugenics of germline genetic engineering (which tries to create desirable traits in an embryo) and Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), which is used to select the most desirable embryos after extensive genetic testing has been done before they are implanted in mothers’ wombs.

“The next stage is to actually start tinkering genetically with these embryos to create advantages such as height,” says Kimbrell. PGD is a “gateway technology” that will advance the new eugenics to the point “where children are literally selected and eventually designed according to a parent’s desires and fears,” he says. (Meanwhile, doctors are simultaneously reporting that children born through in vitro fertilization are experiencing higher rates of birth defects than the average population, suggesting that for every problem scientists try to solve through dubious means they create multiple new ones.)

Many countries have banned PGD. But American fertility clinics are offering it. Two-thirds of fertility clinics using PGD in the world are in the U.S., says Kimbrell. “Reproductive technology is an unregulated Wild West scenario where people can do pretty much anything they want and how they want it,” he says.

Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, coined the term eugenics in the 1880s. Sparking off his cousin’s theory of evolution, he proposed improving the human race through eugenics, arguing that “what nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.” As eugenics passes through each of its stages — from sterilizing the enfeebled at the beginning of the 20th century to aborting the disabled at the end of it and the beginning of the 21st — man is indeed playing God but without any of his providence or care.

Andrew Imparato of AAPD wonders how progressives got to this point. The new eugenics aimed at the disabled unborn tell the disabled who are alive, “disability is a fate worse than death,” he says. “What kind of message does this send to people living with spina bifida and other disabilities? It is not a progressive value to think that a disabled person is better off dead.”

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles5/NeumayrNewEugenics.php


Back In The USSR -Perspectives Of A Russian Immigrant 2

Too many people think that freedom, opportunity and a variety of choices are ever-present features of life in the U.S. — that fundamental transformation of America will not affect accustomed standards.

When we lived in the U.S.S.R., locked away from the world, kept from traveling abroad and surrounded by government-controlled sources of information, we couldn’t imagine what kind of life people had on the outside. Simple things, like tomatoes in stores in winter, seemed improbable.

When we immigrated to the U.S., I realized that most of what we were taught about capitalism was false. I was surprised how uninformed and downright clueless Americans were regarding communist ideology and history.

The platitudes of communist propaganda that were all around me in the Soviet Union were accepted as something new and wonderful by well-meaning people in the U.S. While Soviet citizens were excluded from the external world by their government, liberal/progressives in the “free world” were insulated from reality.

In the 1930s, when communists were starving the Russian people with regulations on farmers, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty reported, “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.” For his stories, Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize.

Through the late 1950s, liberal newspapers in America ignored stories about work prison camps in the Soviet Union. But more than 20 million people accused of opposition to centralized government perished.

In 1956, Soviets brutally suppressed a revolt against the Soviet-imposed socialist government in Hungary. More than 2,500 Hungarians were killed. In 1968, Czechoslovakia lived through a similar uprising and suppression.

From late 1960s, Soviet dissidents raised their voices against the oppressive, inhumane rule of the communist government in the U.S.S.R. Dissidents were imprisoned, condemned to psychiatric facilities and expelled from work. Their families were persecuted.

Meantime, enjoying the freedoms of the U.S., Weather Underground radicals were calling forces to unite for “the destruction of U.S. imperialism and achieve … world communism.” By 1980, the centrally planned economy of the U.S.S.R. was in shambles. By American standards the population lived below poverty level.

It’s stunning for an immigrant from a socialist country to hear in the speeches of Democratic Party leaders platitudes taught in socialist countries. Even more stunning is how they resonate with people born in the free world.

At the end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th calls for “equality,” “fairness,” “sacrifices for collective good” and “social justice” aroused communist revolutionaries in Russia and ushered in the U.S.S.R. They demonized and obliterated any religion that interfered with government authority. They erased individualism and entrepreneurship from society. Animosity among ethnic groups was insidiously cultivated.

In the U.S., fascism and socialism are classified at the opposite ends of the political spectrum; in reality, these two ideologies have a lot in common.

Fascism is “a political philosophy, movement or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition” (Merriam Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary).

That definition of fascism can easily be applied to the socialism I experienced. The only difference is that to organize communities of fateful followers, German fascists used an ideal of racial purity, and communists used class warfare. Fascists confiscated properties of non-Aryans, and communists confiscated all private properties.

Free market capitalism, which created a large, prosperous middle class in America, and government-centered ideologies have nothing in common.

For more than 100 years, old and tired socialist propaganda brought out the worst in societies: envy, hate, intolerance and disrespect for human life, just as these traits have increased in the last four years in the U.S.

The U.S. is not 19th century tsarist Russia, but it is being transformed into something far different from the “land of the free.” The softer-styled European welfare societies are falling apart, leaving future generations broke. Is there a chance Barack Obama’s vision of centralized government, surrounded by a web of sclerotic bureaucracies, will create a fair society?

The same reader who commented on my July article continued: “Or is the grim description of life in the former Soviet Union meant to paint Obama and his party as communists/socialists/fellow travelers bent on destroying America and all it stands for?”

Yes, that’s exactly what I mean — and Obama’s rhetoric, actions and results confirm this point.

http://news.investors.com/article/623179/201208221847/democrats-talk-like-communist-revolutionaries.htm


Back In The USSR -Perspectives Of A Russian Immigrant

In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I was taught to believe individual pursuits are selfish and sacrificing for the collective good is noble.

In kindergarten we sang songs about Lenin, the leader of the Socialist Revolution. In school we learned about the beautiful socialist system, where everybody is equal and everything is fair; about ugly capitalism, where people are exploited and treat each other like wolves in the wilderness.

Life in the USSR modeled the socialist ideal. God-based religion was suppressed and replaced with cultlike adoration for political figures.

The government-assigned salary of the proletariat (blue-collar worker) was 30%-50% higher than any professional. Without incentive to improve their life, professionals drank themselves to oblivion. They — engineers, lawyers, doctors, teachers — earned a government-determined salary that barely covered the necessities, mainly food.

Raising children was a hardship. It took four to six adults (parents and grandparents) to support a child. The usual size of the postwar family was one or two children. Every woman had the right to have an abortion and most of them did, often without anesthesia.

There is a comparative historical reality that plays out the consequences of two competing ideologies: life in the USSR and in America.

When the march to the worker’s paradise — the Socialist Revolution — began in 1917, many people emigrated from Russia to the U.S.

In the USSR, economic equality was achieved by redistributing wealth, ensuring that everyone remained poor, with the exception of those doing the redistributing. Only the ruling class of communist leaders had access to special stores, medicine and accommodations that could compare to those in the West.

The rest of the citizenry had to deal with permanent shortages of food and other necessities, and had access to free but inferior, unsanitary and low-tech medical care. The egalitarian utopia of equality, achieved by the sacrifice of individual self-interest for the collective good, led to corruption, black markets, anger and envy.

Government-controlled health care destroyed human dignity.

Chairman Nikita Khrushchev released facts about Stalin and his purges. People learned of the horrific purge of more than 20 million citizens, murdered as enemies of the state.

Those who left Russia found a different set of values in America: freedom of religion, speech, individual pursuits, the right to private property and free enterprise. The majority of those immigrants achieved a better life for themselves and their children in this capitalist land.

These opportunities let the average immigrant live a better life than many elites in the Soviet Communist Party. The freedom to pursue personal self-interest led to prosperity. Prosperity generated charity, benefiting the collective good.

The descendants of those immigrants are now supporting policies that move America away from the values that gave so many immigrants the chance of a better life. Policies such as nationalized medicine, high tax rates and government intrusion into free enterprise are being sold to us under the socialistic motto of collective salvation.

Socialism has bankrupted and failed every society, while capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.

There is no perfect society. There are no perfect people. Critics say that greed is the driving force of capitalism. My answer is that envy is the driving force of socialism. Change to socialism is not an improvement on the imperfections of the current system.

The slogans of “fairness and equality” sound better than the slogans of capitalism. But unlike at the beginning of the 20th century, when these slogans and ideas were yet to be tested, we have accumulated history and reality.

Today we can define the better system not by slogans, but by looking at the accumulated facts. We can compare which ideology leads to the most oppression and which brings the most opportunity.

When I came to America in 1980 and experienced life in this country, I thought it was fortunate that those living in the USSR did not know how unfortunate they were.

Now, I realize how unfortunate it is that many Americans do not understand how fortunate they are. They vote to give government more and more power without understanding the consequences.

http://news.investors.com/article/623179/201208221847/democrats-talk-like-communist-revolutionaries.htm


Hen. Han, Hon

The politically correct idea of equality seems to know no bounds. Sweden has just introduced a new gender-neutral pronoun — hen. In the Swedish language, he is han and she is hon. Now it seems Sweden’s educational establishment is set upon using the nation’s preschools national curriculum to abolish gender distinction among children. The schools have even gone so far as to employ “gender police” to assist teaching staff in identifying language and behavior patterns in children that might reinforce old stereotypes that need to be “corrected.” Old stereotypes can be understood as those models influenced by Christian civilization.

The word hen was first introduced by Swedish linguists in the mid-60s but was curiously added to the online version of Sweden’s National Encyclopedia on the very gender-specific International Women’s Day on March 8, 2012. At one public preschool called Egalia in Stockholm, staff now avoids using words such as him or her and address students as friends or hens instead of boys and girls.

Another preschool has gone so far as to eliminate recess from its curriculum because, as one teacher put it, when children are free to play “stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion and the seed to bullying.”

Every detail of children’s interactions gets micromanaged by “concerned” adults, who end up placing children in a quandary over the development of their sex by how they form friendships, what games they play and the words used in the songs they sing.

This odd behavior was largely inspired by Sweden’s first gender-neutral children’s book written by Jesper Lundqvist, Kivi and Monsterdog. It seems Lundqvist desired to write a children’s story where characters are not identified with any sex and do not conform to a traditional gender-based story line. He (or perhaps hen) was in fact trying to avoid giving his characters roles that children tend to emulate.

The manner in which they do this is by designating as stereotypes those roles based on nature and Western culture. Most people understand stereotyping as a widely held, but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person. While this conjures a negative connotation of the word, those pushing a liberal agenda like Sweden’s school system are able to obliterate the natural distinctions inherent to each sex all in the name of “gender equality” and avoiding stereotyping.

Conveniently this contorted application of Lundqvist’s strange book fits perfectly into the global homosexual agenda by blurring the necessary and natural distinctions between men and women. Sweden is now advocating androgyny among its youngest citizens. When students play house in school, they are encouraged to include daddy, daddy, child; mommy, mommy, child; or any other modern unnatural combination to refer to family.

Not everyone has embraced this radical equality with enthusiasm however. Many critics affirm that it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children. Columnist and former equality expert Elise Claeson, from the Swedish Confederation of Professions stated “that young children can become confused by the suggestion that there is a third, in-between gender at a time when their brains and bodies are developing. Adults should not interrupt a child’s discovery of their gender and sexuality, argues Claeson.” She is quoted in the Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, that “gender ideologues have managed to change the curriculum to establish that schools should actively counter gender roles.”

If Sweden’s school system were really practicing equality, they would put their children on equal footing as themselves and respect the child’s opinion as equal to their own. By teaching them anything at all, they place themselves as superior, and thus, they teach inequality by example. Why would they encourage children to say daddy, daddy, child regarding family if they did not have an ideological agenda? If  Sweden’s preschools were consistent with this warped notion of equality, children would be taught to say hen, hen, hen. Perhaps gender equality has simply run amok.

http://www.tfp.org/tfp-home/news-commentary/gender-equality-run-amok.html