1984 Is a Ground-Hog Year

The Age of Perpetual Global War

The Afghanistan war is now entering its tenth year. It is the longest war in one theatre of conflict in American history. Meanwhile US military remain stationed in Germany, the UK, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan and in a number of other countries around the world.

Meanwhile, the continental US itself increasingly comes under the regimen of war.  Because of the war (on terror) US citizens are effectively strip searched by their government every time they board an aircraft.  Who knows when it will extend to trains, ships, sporting arenas and concert halls, but we would be foolish to exclude it as unlikely?  Citizens largely comply with this draconian extension of government power and control over the people.  The conditions of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four have started to come into reality: perpetual war, justifying ever increasing control over the lives of citizens. 

The United States has been at war somewhere on the globe for virtually every one of the last fifty years--and counting.  We expect that historians in the future will nominate this period as one of the darker times in the history of the West.  Having turned away from the light of the Gospel and the first Christendom, Europe placed its hope in autonomous human reason and the outcome was perpetual war.  Whereas historians have nominated certain periods in Europe as, for example, the Thirty Years War, or the Hundred Years War, it is likely they will nominate our current age as something like the Age of Perpetual Global War. 

In 1963, speaking of the US war in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson said:

We fight this war because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can decide its own future.  And only in such a world will a future be safe.  We are in Vietnam because we have a promise to keep.  Since 1945 every American president has offered support to the people of South Vietnam.  Over many years we have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence.

As long as the United States holds to the pernicious idolatry that it has a duty to make the world "safe" by ensuring that every country can decide for itself its own future, it will be perpetually at war.  The  United States as the Saviour and Redeemer of mankind.  This wretched idolatry will destroy the US, along with many other nations, unless and until the United States of America repents of it.

There is only one Saviour and Redeemer of the world: the Lord Jesus Christ.  To Him has been given all authority in the heavens and upon the earth.  He does not share power.  The peoples and the nations will either bow to kiss His feet, or in the end they will be broken.  Has not the Living God said to the Son: "sit at my right hand until I make Thine enemies a footstool for Thy feet" (Acts 2: 34-35)? So far, the United States, together with the post-Christian West, grimly holds to its messianic pretensions, lifting up its banner and sword in the name of Man.  In so doing, it makes itself an enemy of, and rebel against, the Son of God.  If it does not repent, it will be broken.

And we along with it, for the idolatries of the United States are also ours.  We, along with them, have lifted up a banner of arrogance, vaunting the name of Man, daring to speak of human rights, without first learning at the feet of the Son of Man, the Lord of all mankind.  We have set ourselves up as His equal, or His superior.  How we kindle the wrath of the Almighty!

Edmund Burke once said, "When people begin to define their rights it is a sure symptom of an ill-conducted state."  Ill-conducted indeed.  And mankind is paying for it, in blood--in the Age of Perpetual Global War.  Welcome to the wonderful world of autonomous reason and the Rights of Man.