A Bridge Too Far

No, Not Sanders, Not Ever

He is not a liberal, he’s the end of liberalism.

By David Brooks
Opinion Columnist
NY Times


A few months ago, I wrote a column saying I would vote for Elizabeth Warren over Donald Trump. I may not agree with some of her policies, but culture is more important than politics. She does not spread moral rot the way Trump does.

Now I have to decide if I’d support Bernie Sanders over Trump.

We all start from personal experience. I covered the Soviet Union in its final decrepit years. The Soviet and allied regimes had already slaughtered 20 million people through things like mass executions and intentional famines. Those regimes were slave states. They enslaved whole peoples and took away the right to say what they wanted, live where they wanted and harvest the fruits of their labor.

And yet every day we find more old quotes from Sanders apologizing for this sort of slave regime, whether in the Soviet Union, Cuba or Nicaragua. He excused the Nicaraguan communists when they took away the civil liberties of their citizens. He’s still making excuses for Castro.

To sympathize with these revolutions in the 1920s was acceptable, given their original high ideals. To do so after the Hitler-Stalin pact, or in the 1950s, is appalling. To do so in the 1980s is morally unfathomable.

"Pity is Treason"

The Jacobins and Their Influence Upon the West

The term Jacobin refers to an extreme political radical.  The Jacobins were part of a political club in Paris, established in 1789.  They were both ruthless and radical.  They took over the French Revolution and were responsible for the Reign of Terror where hundreds of thousands of people were killed, many via execution.

The Jacobins have been imitated by many  in following centuries.  Philosopher John Gray provides a brief description and summary:

The Jacobins form the clearest link between medieval millenarians and twentieth-century revolutionary movements.  The French reign of terror was more than an 'aristocide' of the privileged classes.  As would be the case later in Bolshevik Russia, the largest numbers of casualties by far were common people. . . . Around a third of the population perished in the region, where the methods of repression used by the revolutionary forces included burning crops, razing villages and mass drowning. 

The human cost of the French Revolution runs into hundreds of thousands of lives.  Producing leaders such as Maximilien Robespierre, who as a member of the Committee for Public Safety orchestrated the execution of around 20,000 enemies of the Revolution in Paris and was himself guillotined in 1794, the Jacobins acted on the maxim--formulated by Robespierre himself in a speech to the National Assembly--"Pity is treason."  [John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism (London: Penguin/Random House UK, 2018),  p.78.]

Alexis de Tocqueville points out that the Jacobins and the French Revolution became a new kind of religion.  Like Islamism, "it inundated the earth with soldiers, apostles and martyrs".  Gray adds that the Jacobins adopted their own secular forms of worship; they offered a glorious future life in an imaginary earthly paradise. 

In the twentieth century they were followed and imitated by Fascism and Communism. 

The modernist world sowed to the wind.  It inherited the whirlwind.  We are still living with the consequences.  It is not too far a stretch to see the Christchurch mass-murderer as a latter day Jacobin in action.  Robespierre's curse is still  bearing its poisoned fruit: "pity is treason". 

"A Determined Quest For the Warm Hand of God"

‘Men Have Forgotten God’

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 Templeton Address


By Aleksandr  Solzhenitsyn
Reprinted in National Review Online

[This is a longer-then-usual piece.  However, Solzhenitsyn remains such a dominant figure of the Twentieth Century, the antithesis of Stalin and Lenin--and of all atheistic regimes that have been and will be--that his work demands our ongoing attention.]

Remembering Solzhenitsyn’s profound speech on the centenary of his birth.

Editor’s Note: This article, which originally ran in the July 22, 1983, issue of National Review, is adapted from the address Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave on the occasion of his acceptance, in London on May 10, 1983, of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. In announcing the 1983 award, the Templeton Foundation described Mr. Solzhenitsyn as “a pioneer in the renaissance of religion in atheist nations.” Mr. Solzhenitsyn ’s introductory remarks were made at the awards ceremony at Buckingham Palace, with Prince Philip presiding. The address proper was delivered later the same day at the London Guildhall. Today, December 11, 2018, is the 100th anniversary of Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s birth.

I. The Response

Your Royal Highness: Permit me to express my appreciation to you for taking part in this ceremony. Your participation lends special dignity to these proceedings.

This is the first time that the Templeton Prize has been awarded to an Orthodox Christian. With gratitude that our share in the religious life of the world has now been accorded notice, I remain acutely conscious of my personal unworthiness to receive this award as I look back upon the venerable line of outstanding Orthodox churchmen and of Orthodox thinkers from Aleksey Khomyakov to Sergei Bulgakov. And I am very much aware that Eastern Slavic Orthodoxy, which, during the 65 years of Communist rule, has been subjected to persecution even fiercer and more extensive than that of early Christian times, has had—and still has today—many hands worthier than mine to accept it. Beginning with Vladimir Bogoyavlensky, metropolitan of Kiev, shot by the Communists before the walls of the Kievo-Pechersky Monastery at the dawn of the Lenin era, the list would extend to the intrepid priest Gleb Yakunin, who is enduring torments today, under Andropov: Forcibly deprived of all outward symbols of his priesthood, and even of the right to have the Gospels, Father Yakunin has for months at a time been held in a freezing stone cubicle, without bed, clothes, or food.

In this persecution-filled age, it is appropriate that my own very first memory should be of Chekists in pointed caps entering St. Panteleimon’s Church in Kislovodsk, interrupting the service, and crashing their way into the sanctuary in order to loot. And later, when I started going to school in Rostov-on-Don — passing on my way a kilometer-long compound of the Cheka-GPU and a glittering sign of the League of Militant Atheists — schoolchildren egged on by Komsomol members taunted me for accompanying my mother to the last remaining church in town and tore the cross from around my neck.

Orthodox churches were stripped of their valuables in 1922 at the instigation of Lenin and Trotsky. In subsequent years, including both the Stalin and the Khrushchev periods, tens of thousands of churches were torn down or desecrated, leaving behind a disfigured wasteland that bore no resemblance to Russia such as it had stood for centuries. Entire districts and cities of half a million inhabitants were left without a single church. Our people were condemned to live in this dark and mute wilderness for decades, groping their way to God and keeping to this course by trial and error. The grip of oppression that we have lived under, and continue to live under, has been so great that religion, instead of leading to a free blossoming of the spirit, has been manifested in asserting the faith on the brink of destruction, or else on the seductive frontiers of Marxist rhetoric, where so many souls have come to grief.

The statement of the Templeton Foundation shows an understanding of how the Orthodox spiritual tradition has maintained its vitality in our land despite the forcible promotion of atheism. If even a fraction of those words should find their way to my motherland past the jamming devices, this will bolster the spirits of our believers, assuring them that they have not been forgotten, and that their steadfastness inspires courage even here.

The centralized atheism before whose armed might the whole world trembles still hates and fears this unarmed faith as much today as it did 60 years ago. Yes! All the savage persecutions loosed upon our people by a murderous state atheism, coupled with the corroding effect of its lies, and an avalanche of stultifying propaganda — all of these together have proven weaker than the thousand-year-old faith of our nation. This faith has not been destroyed; it remains the most sublime, the most cherished gift to which our lives and consciousness can attain.

II. The Templeton Address

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened."

Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

V. I. Lenin--Frenzied and Ruthless

Lest We Forget

The Ukraine suffered two terrible famines in the first half of the twentieth century.  Both of them were the product of incompetent tyranny inflicted upon the Ukraine by the Soviet Communist regime.  The first occurred in 1922-3 and was "managed" by Vladimir Lenin.  The second occurred in 1932-3 and was a deliberate tool used to break down the Ukrainian people.  The second famine was "managed" by Stalin.

Lenin overtly and deliberately used the early famine as an opportunity to strike down Ukrainian Christianity.  He argued (and directed) that the famine provided a unique opportunity to seize church property and pass it on to Party members.  The Church was framed as being responsible in large measure for the famine, thereby justifying the extortion.

Lenin wrote to his underling, Molotov who had control of the Ukraine:

Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie in the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition.  Now and only now, the vast majority of peasants will either be on our side, or at lest will not be in a position to support to any decisive degrees this handful of [reactionary] clergy and reactionary urban petty bourgeoisie, who are willing and able to attempt to oppose this Soviet decree with a policy of force. 

No pastoral concern for the starving.  No attempt to relieve the famine.  No marshalling of as many resources as possible to ease the suffering.  Only the adamant conviction that the suffering provided an opportunity to oppress those who may offer some resistance to the omnipotent power of the Soviet State.

Here lies in full display the "end game" of leftist ideology.   Here lies an actual historical example of the ideology of Sauron the Great.  Tolkien's literary creation of Middle Earth's most terrible scourge has its actual, historical manifestation in tyrants like Lenin and Stalin.  Sauron is not an unhistorical figure; when Tolkien was creating him, he was wittingly or unwittingly drawing upon actual recent history.

Evil Incarnate and Personified

One's Own Facts

In the nineteen thirties famine raged in the Ukraine.  It was entirely caused by Stalin.  He insisted that Ukrainian officials deliver up a certain volume of food.  When they failed to do so, he sent enforcers into the prime grain growing areas.  Their job was to find out where the farmers (kulaks) were hiding food.  Any grain or edible material found was removed by force; offenders were punished, even executed on the spot.  Those left, starved.

Famine swept through the Ukraine.  People began to eat other human beings.  Eventually, even Stalin had to concede that his brutality was counter productive.  He then embarked on a ruthless cover up of his crimes against his own people.  He demanded that public records of births and deaths be altered to create a picture of population increase in Ukraine.  In fact millions upon millions had died.

In 1937 the Soviet government ran a census to measure the population.  But the results had to be kept secret because of the "deeper truth" known to Stalin and his cohorts--millions had died due to Stalin's ruthless incompetence.  Somehow the census had to cover this up.

"Made in China 2025"

Free Trade With China is an Oxymoron

Trump's looming trade war with China begs an interesting question: is it possible for a Communist government to enter into a meaningful and genuine free trade agreement?  It's arguable that no communist government, such as China, can meaningfully participate in free trade when the economy is at the command and control of the state.

This is the argument being pushed now by the Trump administration and it is one which demands careful thought.  Much of the Chinese economy represents command and control: the price of money is set by the state; mass production of favoured goods is heavily subsidised by the state; the state controls the demand for goods and services; and the state substantially controls the labour market.  When a non-statist government enters into a free trade agreement with a communist state, the price signals of goods and services are inevitably distorted and of little use.  There is nothing "fair" about them.  They are certainly not "free".  Therefore, free trade with a communist state (or a strongly fabian socialist state) is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms from the outset.

Western nations by-and-large understand that state subsidies and state picked "winners" are an immediate contradiction against free trade.  However, the recent push by Western nations to enter into global and regional multi-national talks in an attempt to secure global free trade agreements is both short sighted and contradictory.  When it involves agreements with communist command-and-control economies it is even more the case. 

President Donald Trump announced on June 15 that he would go ahead with the proposed tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods, doubling down on his promise to level the playing field and defend against improper intellectual property theft by China.

China retaliated hours later by announcing its own 25-percent tariffs on $50 billion worth of U.S. products. The implementation timeline largely mirrors the United States,’ with tariffs focusing on agricultural imports.  The Trump administration vowed that the United States would pursue additional tariffs once China retaliates in kind.  The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) described the goods subject to the 25 percent tariffs as “Chinese imports containing industrially significant technologies, including those related to China’s ‘Made in China 2025’ industrial policy.”

The new tariffs will be implemented in two stages. The first list contains 818 products worth $34 billion which will go into effect on July 6, with another round of goods worth $16 billion to be implemented after a period of public consultation. . . . [Epoch Times]

The "Made in China 2025" policy is a deliberate attempt by the Chinese Communist state to become technologically self-sufficient.

Puzzling--Yet Understandable

Why Western Intellectuals Love Stalin

One of the more puzzling phenomenon of Western Europe in the twentieth century has been the way intellectuals doted on Stalin.  Many still do.  A good contemporary example of the trope in our day is found in Jeremy Corbyn and the present Labour Party in the United Kingdom.  The question is begged as to why this might be.

The historian, Tony Judt endeavours to explain:

Western intellectual enthusiasm for Communism tended to peak not in time of "goulash Communism" or "Socialism with a human face", but rather at the moments of the regime's worst cruelties: 1935-39 and 1944-56.  Writers, professors, artists, teachers and journalists frequently admired Stalin not in spite of his faults, but because of them.  It was when he was murdering people on an industrial scale, when the show trials were displaying Soviet Communism at its mot theatrically macabre, that men and women beyond Stalin's grasp were most seduced by the man and his cult.  It was the absurdly large gap separating rhetoric from reality that made it so irresistible to men and women of goodwill in search of a Cause.  [Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Vintage Books, 2010), p. 216.] 

So, here is the problem: how can it be that men and women of Western Europe and Great Britain could could not just overlook the barbarism and cruelty of Stalin's regime, but glory in it?

Karl Marx--A Horseman of the Apocalypse

Titan of Terror

The left-wing acolytes who say Karl Marx can't be blamed for the millions slaughtered in his name are deluded - bloodshed was at the heart of his philosophy.

Karl Marx, founder of communism, was born in Germany 200 years ago today.  His ideology was used by mass killers like Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong.  Fans claim he's not responsible but his name is synonymous with death.  Millions were killed by communist leaders across the world last century

By Dominic Sandbrook
Daily Mail

Two hundred years ago today, the most controversial thinker of the modern age was born in the German city of Trier.

When, on May 5, 1818, Heinrich and Henriette Marx welcomed their little boy into the world, they could never have imagined the utopian hopes and blood-soaked horrors that would become associated with his name.

Two centuries later, the very words 'Karl Marx' still carry an unmistakable charge. No modern intellectual, no economist or philosopher can match the combustible power of the rabbi's grandson who fled into poverty-stricken exile in leafy North London.

Most of the regimes based on Marx's ideas may have crumbled, yet his name remains synonymous with violent revolution, idealistic utopianism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.   It conjures up images of chanting crowds and glowering statues, collective farms and prison camps, tanks in Red Square and red flags over the Kremlin.

To his critics, Marx was a fanatic whose ideas inspired some of the cruellest regimes in history, from Stalin's Siberian gulags to the killing fields of Cambodia.  Yet, to his admirers — who include the current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who recently called him a 'great economist', and the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, who has named Das Kapital as his favourite book — he remains a visionary prophet whose ideas will, one day, lead mankind to a classless utopia.

The Gangster State

The Urki  Eventually Take Control


In 1956 the Soviet Union's tanks rolled into Hungary.  It was the beginning of the end for Western communism (although hard to perceive so early on).  What the invasion, the shootings, and the executions demonstrated for all to see was that Communism in the Soviet Union could continue to stumble onwards only through the power which grows out of the barrel of a gun.  The Eastern European communist states kept the faith because of the gun barrels pressed firmly to their temples.

It was a radical moment of self-realization.  Then came the unseemly spectacle of Khrushchev banging his removed shoe on the bench at the UN General Assembly.  His erratic misdirections and re-directions continued with the missile crisis in Cuba in 1963.  Supreme dictators were putting on a poor show.

Back home, statist socialism was also wearing thin.

. . . Khrushchev's more ambitious reforms failed to produce the promised food surpluses (another reason why his colleagues were to dump him in October 1964)  The cultivation of hitherto "virgin" lands in Kazakhstan and southern Siberia was especially disastrous: half a million tons of topsoil washed away each year from land that was wholly unsuited to forced grain planting, and what harvest there was frequently arrived infested with weeds.  In a tragic-comic blend of centralized planning and local corruption, Communist bosses in Kyrgyzstan urged collective farmers to meet official farm delivery quotas by buying up supplies in local shops.  There were food riots in provincial cities . . . . By January 1964, following the disastrous 1963 harvest, the USSR was reduced to importing grain from the West.  [Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Vintage Books, 2010), p.423. Emphasis, ours.]

It's at this point that we need to make the point once more that wherever statist socialism has been applied the only growth industries have been rampant corruption and crime.  What Venezuela is going through today is normal for statist socialism wherever it has been applied. 

But, ironically, in some parts of the USSR, food production was prospering splendidly:

A Morally Perverse Myopia

Western Progressives Continue to Romanticise Communism

Liam Hehir
Stuff

Fifty years after his death, Che Guevera, the Butcher of la Cabana, remains a romantic icon of radical chic.

 Ever seen an ordinary young person in a T-shirt bearing the visage of Benito Mussolini? Ever dined at a restaurant bedecked with Third Reich propaganda? Ever listened to a new recording of the Horst Wessel song by a popular contemporary folk singer?

It would be unthinkable for the National Party leader to quote Alfred Rosenberg, ideological architect of National Socialism. No prime minister would ever declare a sympathetic treatment of Reinhard Heydrich to be his or her favourite movie. No credible political figure would argue that the problem with fascism is that it has never been tried properly.

Yet on the centenary of The October Revolution – the coup d'etat that saw the creation of the Soviet Union – communism retains a grasp on the imaginations of Western progressives.

I went out to dinner in Wellington recently.

Those Who Do Not Learn From the Past Condemned To Repeat It

Idealising Communism 

Tom Switzer
Centre for Independent Studies

Next week marks the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution. November 7, 1917 was not just one of the most influential events of all time, it ushered in the most terrifying period in human history. In the matter of scale, the Russian revolutionaries and their later successors in China and elsewhere achieved a record of far more deaths than either world war. According to the London-based project to create a Museum of Communist Terror, 15-18 million people died in World War One; 40-80 million died in World War Two; and 80-100 million died under communist regimes.

Yet 100 years later, many young people in the West are ignorant of the ideology that inspired Lenin, Trotsky and millions of their worldwide followers. According to YouGov surveys, only 55% of American millennials think communism was, and still is, a problem. A third of young people believe US president George W. Bush murdered more people than Soviet dictator Josef Stalin did. And about 70 per cent of young British people have never heard of Mao Tse-Tung, the communist revolutionary whose regime murdered tens of millions of Chinese.

The British Labour Opposition’s treasury spokesman, John McDonnell, identifies with the Marxist cause — even once waving Mao’s Little Red Book in parliament.

Useful Idiots

It Was Taken For Granted

Author, Doris Lessing who died a few years ago in 2013, at the age of 94 was a celebrated lady-of-letters.  Like many of the "intelligentsia" in Britain, Lessing went through a stage in her early professional life--in her twenties, early thirties--when she joined the Communist Party in the UK.   

Towards the end of her life, she wrote (in Volume 2 of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade) how she rationalised this allegiance at the time.

I decided to join the Communist Party.  And this at a time when my "doubts" had become something like a steady, private torment.  Separate manifestation of the horror that the Soviet Union had become were discussed, briefly, in lowered voices--the equivalent of looking over one's shoulder to see if anyone could hear.  I do not remember one serious, sit-down, in-dept discussion about the implications of what we were hearing.  Rather, sudden burstings into tears: "Oh, it's so horrible."  Sudden storms of accusation: "It's just anti-Soviet propaganda, anyway."  Marital quarrels, even divorces . . . .

The first and main fact, the "mind-set" of those times, was that it was taken for granted capitalism was doomed, was on its way out.

The Past and Future of Socialism

The Soviet Union 25 Years On

‘A Story of Crushing Tyranny and Oceans of Blood’

Prof Richard M. Ebeling
Breitbart News


December 24, 2016 marked the 25th anniversary of the formal end of the Soviet Union as a political entity on the map of the world. A quarter of a century ago, the curtain was lowered on the 75-year experiment in “building socialism” in the country where it all began following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, led by Vladimir Lenin in November 1917.

Some historians have estimated that as many as 200 million people worldwide may have died as part of the 20th century dream of creating a collectivist “paradise on earth.” The attempt to establish a comprehensive socialist system in many parts of the world over the last 100 years has been one of the cruelest and most brutal episodes in human history. Making a new “better world” was taken to mean the extermination, liquidation, and mass murder of all those who the socialist revolutionary leaders declared to be “class enemies,” including the families and even the children of “enemies of the people.”

The Bloody Road to Making a New Socialist Man

The evil of the Soviet system is that it was cruelty for a purpose. It has been calculated by Russian and Western historians who had limited access to the secret archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB (the Soviet secret police) in the 1990s that as many as 68 million innocent, unarmed men, women, and children may have been killed in Soviet Russia alone over those nearly 75 years of communist rule in the Soviet Union.

From Russia, Without Love

Much of a Muchness

All totalitarian regimes can best be characterized as being in a state of war against their own people.  To be sure, totalitarian regimes do not always begin that way.  They commence with a great hope, or a grand principle only to find that governing is complex, and the more intrusive rules, regulations, laws, and edicts become, the more complex it turns out to be.  

In this regard we often think of Tolkien's conception of the Ruling Ring--

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and the darkness bind them

We reflect further on how Frodo offered the Ring to Galadriel, saying, "You are wise and fearless and fair, Lady Galadriel.  I will give you the One Ring, if you ask for it.  It is too great a matter for me."  Galadriel admitted that she had long yearned to have such power.

And now at last it comes.  You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen.  And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night!  Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain!  Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning!  Stronger than the foundations of the earth.  All shall love me and despair!

When Hugo Chavez took control (was set up as a kind of king--the caudillo) over Venezuela.  He was widely loved.  Within half a generation that country is now reduced to despair.  The pattern always plays out.  A false saviour, set to put things right, morphs into a tyrant crushing the lifeblood out of subjects.  The regime ends up being at war against its people.

Angelo Codevilla provides the following description of the Soviet Union--which was not aberrant, but typical of all such.

Book Review: "Intended For Evil"

Unbroken Inside Cambodia’s Socialist Killing Fields

The question is not, ‘How could Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime be so evil?’ but, ‘Why are we all not more like the Khmer Rouge?’

Gracy Olmstead
The Federalist

“Intended For Evil” isn’t your typical biography or memoir. It is something different—a work of narrative nonfiction that seeks to convey both the historical and theological import of one man’s life. It’s the story of Radha Manickam, and his journey through the horror and death of the Khmer Rouge prison camps in the late 1970s.

Les Sillars, a journalism professor at Patrick Henry College, spent over a year interviewing Manickam and detailing his account. The resulting work of narrative nonfiction is reminiscent of Laura Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken” in scope and character—it’s a chilling story of suffering and survival—but it’s a shorter work, and focuses more closely on the protagonist’s Christian faith. Radha’s journey through Cambodia’s killing fields was guided by his belief in God, and his assurance that God had a plan for his life.

Don't Cry for Me, Venezuela

No Toilet Paper or Repentance

The Atlantic has published a lengthy article on what is going down in Venezuela.  The country is on its knees: it is figuratively bleeding from self-inflicted gunshot wounds.  But it's half a world away.  Why should we care?  

In a general sense, we Christians care because this entire world belongs to the Lord, the Messiah Who has bought it all with His redemptive sacrifice and proved it by His resurrection from the dead.  When we Christians speak of Christ the King, we do not speak figuratively.  He literally is King of all kings.

Amongst many things, it pleases our King to illustrate vividly for all who care to look what happens when petty rebels take over a country and seek to rule by sin's wisdom.  Such a country always enters into a self-inflicted judgement.  Venezuela has become a proverb, a warning to all Unbelief and rebellion against the King of the whole earth: "if you walk in rebellion and Unbelief, you will eat its bitter fruit."

The people of Venezuela decided a couple of decades ago to elect a Strong Man, one Hugo Chavez.  Hugo promised much, but all of it involved theft.

Mass Murder and the Totalitarian Embrace

Why Atheism Has Produced Mass Murder

The celebs amongst the secular atheist crowd are known for drawing long bows between the monsters of the twentieth century (Mao Tse Tung, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the Nazis) and religion.  The intent is to portray as many as possible of the monsters as having religious belief of one kind or another.  After all, the object is to prosecute a Donald Trumpian type of argument whereby religion is evil, evil, evil and does all kinds of evil things.

The bow gets pretty long, but you have to admire a trier.  Did not Stalin train in a Russian Orthodox seminary?  Did not Hitler reflect in certain ways his Catholic upbringing?  Sure, it's hard to find a religious connection in the case of Mao Tse Tung.  But Pol Pot--well, Cambodia was a French colony, so we should assume the Jesuits had some influence over PP.

But one thing we can be definitive about, we are told, is that the atheism they all shared in common to one degree or another was in no way connected with their mass murders of multitudes of human beings.  As David Berlinski writes:

Repeated Folly

Men Rising Above Their God-Ordained Station

Myanmar, or Burma, has drawn the attention of the world's media in recent days with a largely free election and a staggering majority for Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy.  This has occurred under military rule--a rule which has persisted in Myanmar for over fifty years.  It remains to be seen where it will all lead.  We hope it leads to a much greater good for that country.

Burma was a former British colony; its economy was largely shattered as a result of the Japanese invasion in 1943 and the resulting land war throughout the country.  Eventually Japan was defeated and driven out by the Allies.

The leader of the Burmese army at the time, Ne Win seized power from the post-war elected civilian government, and the resulting military regime was welcomed by the populace.  Emma Larkin [Finding George Orwell in Burma (New York: The Penguin Group, 2011)] describes what developed from there:

In the Final Analysis . . .

Only Two Ideologies

"I don't approve of mixing ideologies," Ivanov continued.  "There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles.  One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units.  The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community--which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb.  The first conception could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second, vivisection morality.

Humbugs and dilettantes has always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible.  

--Ivanov, Rubashov's interrogator.  Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon--"The Second Hearing"

Making Sport For Neighbours

Left Wing, Right Wing, and Industrialised Inhumanity

Mr Bennett once sarcastically remarked that the raison d'etre of the Bennett household was to make sport for its neighbours, so the Bennetts, in turn, could laugh at them.  It was a wickedly clever line parodying respectable society in Georgian England.    Similar observations could be made in our day about our "masters" the political classes, and their fawning, downstairs attendants--the media.

Let's face it.  The media long ago ceased to be the bastion of liberty and the ever vigilant constructive critic of politicians and government.  However much the modern clutch of media personnel may deny it, however they may mock and laugh at the antics of those upstairs, in reality they need those pollies for their jobs.  They depend upon them.  The political classes and the media are our modern version of the Bennetts and their neighbours. 

Every so often little tizzies break out in the neighbourhood.  It makes sport for the rest of us.