Neville Chamberlain and the Naïve Media

We believe what we want to believe, and the media is little different. Jonathan Rosenbloom described how the press and the BBC fawned over their gullible Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his politics:

• That included self-imposed censorship on the information reaching the British public. After the Anschluss [the German forced merger with Austria in 1938], British papers carried no pictures of the hundreds shot in the first days after the Nazi takeover, of the tens of thousands arrested and sent to concentration camps, or the Nazi soldiers forcing Jewish doctors, lawyers, and professors to scrub the streets and clean toilets on their hands and knees. When reporters asked Neville Chamberlain about such matters, he snapped at them for believing “Jewish-Communist propaganda.” (Jewish World Review)

Instead, today we are called “Islamophobes” if we raise any question about the Islamic agenda for world domination and the subjugation of all others. However, in both cases, the evidence is unmistakably before us. Rosenbloom wrote that Chamberlain probably never read Mein Kampf, but he certainly should have:

• Hitler laid out in startling fashion both his future plans for the Jews and for German conquest.

We find the same battle plan laid out in detail in the Koran and the Hadiths (the sayings of Mohammad), but yet the Western media continues to refer to Islam as a “religion of peace” and that the Islamic terrorists aren’t real Muslims, despite their unequivocal declarations to the contrary.

Chamberlain and the press clung to a hope, albeit unsupported by any evidence:

• Chamberlain…”could never bring himself to believe that [Hitler and Mussolini] wanted to go to war. Clinging to the security of his ignorance, he created a peace-loving image of them that defied reality.” For a decade, the English and French did nothing in response to fascist aggression in Abyssinia, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and precious little even in the wake of the German invasion of Poland. France and England thereby encouraged Hitler to believe they were too weak to prevail.

However, we are giving Islam even greater encouragement. We invite radical Islamic groups to our White House, employ them in our Homeland security, sponsor pro-Islamic propaganda, bellow out that  “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam,” and list Evangelicals and Catholics as terrorist groups. We have never seen a red carpet unfurled so elaborately. We should not be surprised when our carpet is trodden under.

Atheistic Communism and Genocide

As the West continues to move in a more totalitarian direction – bigger government, control, spying on its citizens, political correctness as the membership card, social group-think - I think that it would do us well to examine the possible implications of such a move. Ironically, these moves are justified in the name of creating a more progressive society.

This also had been the claim of atheistic communist regimes. However, genocide reached unprecedented levels under these regimes. Wikipedia claims:

• Mass killings occurred under some Communist regimes during the twentieth century with an estimated death toll numbering between 85 and 100 million.

The human toll has been unbelievably high. While Western civilization is very ready to remember the fascist Third Reich – they will not call them what they had called themselves (“National Socialists”) – they are very ready to downplay the communist atrocities. However, I think that it is important to revisit these and to ask “why.”

Many historians have tried to explain the almost uniform horrors that had been committed by atheistic communism. According to Rudolph Joseph Rummel, the communist genocides were a product of absolute power and Marxism.

• "Of all religions, secular and otherwise," Rummel positions Marxism as "by far the bloodiest – bloodier than the Catholic Inquisition, the various Catholic crusades, and the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants. In practice, Marxism has meant bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and murderous forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and fraudulent show trials, outright mass murder and genocide." He writes that in practice the Marxists saw the construction of their utopia as "a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality – and, as in a real war, noncombatants would unfortunately get caught in the battle. There would be necessary enemy casualties: the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, 'wreckers', intellectuals, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, the rich and landlords. As in a war, millions might die, but these deaths would be justified by the end, as in the defeat of Hitler in World War II. To the ruling Marxists, the goal of a communist utopia was enough to justify all the deaths."

What we believe determines how we behave. The cognitive/belief conditions in the West seem to be ripe for these kinds of atrocities. There is the necessary identification of the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” those who need to be eliminated from any public influence – the “religious bigots,” the “homophobes,” the Wall Street” folks, anyone who is opposing the dawning of the new age, a sexually free, guiltless society.

Just recently, the military – they had placed Catholics and Evangelicals on their list of terrorist organizations along with Al Qaeda – threatened Christians with court marshal if they tried to proselytize.

It is common today to regard the Stalinist purges as merely the product of Stalin’s alleged mental illness and not the ideas of atheistic communism. However, the evidence tends to argue that he was merely following in Marxist-Leninist footsteps:

• Robert Conquest stressed that Stalin's purges were not contrary to the principles of Leninism, but rather a natural consequence of the system established by Vladimir Lenin, who personally ordered the killing of local groups of class enemy hostages. Alexander Yakovlev, architect of perestroika and glasnost and later head of the Presidential Commission for the Victims of Political Repression, elaborates on this point, stating that "The truth is that in punitive operations Stalin did not think up anything that was not there under Lenin: executions, hostage taking, concentration camps, and all the rest." Historian Robert Gellately concurs, saying: "To put it another way, Stalin initiated very little that Lenin had not already introduced or previewed." Said Lenin to his colleagues in the Bolshevik government: "If we are not ready to shoot a saboteur and White Guardist, what sort of revolution is that?"

According to this world view, the “bad guys” stand against progress and the common good. In his book, The End of Faith, Sam Harris writes that “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.” “Kill people?” His obvious contempt for Christianity makes us wonder whether he has us in mind, as many atheists in the past have had and have gladly acted upon their contempt. However, it is safe to say that we are not the only “bad guys”:

• In The Lost Literature of Socialism, literary historian George G. Watson saw socialism as conservative, a reaction against liberalism and an attempt to return to antiquity and hierarchy. He states that the writings of Friedrich Engels and others show that "the Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism, which in advanced nations was already giving place to capitalism, must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire nations would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age, and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history."

Judging from the extreme and inflammatory language coming from our U.S. administration and those closely associated, it seems that they have a very clear idea of the identity of the regressive “bad guys.” We are the “homophobes,” the “hate-mongers,” the “bigots” – those who are prejudicially denying others their “human rights.” We are the enemy, and we know, only too well, the fate of the “enemies” of national socialism and atheistic communism. Who will be “fit…for the [next] dung-heap of history?" A warning to the revolutionary: The revolution also has a venerable history of turning against its own!

Confessions of a Recovering Anglophile

I believe that Winston Churchill played the greatest role in the 20^th century. Almost single-handedly, he opposed Hitler. Chills still go up and down my spine when I see movies about how he and the nation he was leading bravely resisted the National Socialist onslaught. I am still profoundly moved as I watch documentaries of how common British boats-men raced to Dunkirk to save their stranded British army from certain destruction, allowing them to fight another day.

I am equally moved when I read about the 30 year quest of William Wilberforce to lead his nation in abolishing the slave trade and how he won the right for missionaries to be sent into the British colonies to counteract the effect of the exploitation of the traders.

However, I am a recovering Anglophile. Two articles in the latest Salvo Magazine will help to explain my evolution:

• Some elementary schools in Britain have taken sex ed to a new level by showing students as young as eight a DVD called Living and Growing. Computer-generated images show a man and woman having sex in a variety of positions, while the narrator describes explicitly what’s happening. The DVD also give information about masturbation and orgasms (with an animated sequence depicting ejaculation). (Salvo, Summer 2012, 33)

I don’t wish to pick on the UK. The entire secular West is doing-it! However, Britain is playing the role of our Big Brother – our role model – leading the way. It reminds me of a movie in which sweaty youth jumped out of their clothing ASAP to jump into the ocean. However, in this case, the West is shedding its spiritual clothing – Christianity – to jump into the sexualized unknown. But in the case of the youth, they subsequently and happily retrieved their clothing after their swim. However, in the case of the West, Britain is rejecting its spiritual clothing entirely and is now parading naked.

The next article also demonstrates how secularism has usurped the role of “parent” and “spiritual guide”:

• In Britain, news broke that girls as young as 13 were given contraceptive implants or injections at their schools as part of a government effort to decrease teenage pregnancy rates. Parental consent was apparently not required, and many parents were upset. One columnist summed it up like this: “School nurses aren’t allowed to apply even a sticking plaster (band-aid) to children in case they have a dangerous allergic reaction, but pumping school-girls full of hormones so they can get at it like brood mares is just dandy” (33)

Why the hypocrisy? Secularism not only wants to bypass parents, it also wants to bypass its Christian roots. Even more, it has buried its clothing as it rushes headlong into the ocean.

I may remain an Anglophile, but my love will not be for what Britain has become, but for what it had been.

The Matrix, “Bad Guys” and the Creation of a Utopia

Utopian visions of a better world entail a distinction between the “good guys” and the “bad guys.” If you get rid of the “bad guys,” you’ll only have the “good guys” left, and then you’ll be able to build your utopian world. For the eugenicist, it was a matter of getting rid of the inferior human specimens. For the National Socialists, it was a matter of either getting rid of the non-Aryans or at least enslaving them. For the Communists, getting rid of the rich vermin – the selfish bourgeoisie – would usher in the workman’s paradise.

William Deresiewicz, an essayist writing for The New York Times, seems to line up with the latter group. For him, the “bad guys” are the Wall Street capitalists– the contemptible “1 percent”:

• A 2010 study found that 4 percent of a sample of corporate managers met a clinical threshold for being labeled psychopaths, compared with 1 percent for the population at large. 

Why are these corporate managers four times as likely to be “psychopaths” than the general population? Deresiewicz believes that they have been perverted by an inherently evil capitalistic system:

• To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones…Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.

It seems that his logic is pushing him to conclude that if we change the economic basis of the system, we won’t have so many evil, psychopathic people. He also suggests that the psychopathy is far more prevalent than their four percent suggests. It also widely manifests as contempt of the poor:

• The lie [of the rich] goes on. The poor are lazy, stupid and evil. The rich are brilliant, courageous and good. They shower their beneficence upon the rest of us.

However, it is Deresiewicz who is engaging in negative stereotyping. While he claims that the rich have designated the poor as the “bad guys,” Deresiewicz is doing the same thing. However, in his case, it is the rich who are the “bad guys.” To make his case, he references a study that has determined that “upper-class” people are more unethical than others:

• Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

These observations are nothing new. It has long been noted that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” However, power comes in many forms – economic power, political power, influential power (think media elites, celebrities, and university professors), or success. It seems that when people reach the top of their field, social constraints are weakened. Concern about the opinions of others is neutralized by success and adulation. After all, we have arrived, and this proves that we are superior people, above the standards of the common man!

I think that it was the unlikely Henry Kissinger who stated that power was the greatest aphrodisiac. Power weakens the conscience and intoxicates the head. It is not just a matter of the financial escapades of the powerful and successful. It is also their sexual and moral misconduct.

Wall Street doesn’t have a monopoly on power and immorality. Power can seriously corrupt any who touch it. However, Deresiewicz mistakenly interprets the results of the studies solely in terms of the rich. Consequently, they – the capitalists - are his “bad guys!”

Instead, we are all “bad guys,” and until we realize this, we will continue to divide the world into the “good” and the “bad,” demonizing those who are different than us.

In Jesus’ day, the religious leadership regarded the uneducated – they didn’t know the law – as the “bad guys.” However, according to Jesus, we are all “bad guys” who hate the truth, especially the truth about ourselves:

• “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God." (John 3:19-21)

We will not come to this self-knowledge on our own. It’s just too painful. Instead, it is easier to blame the other guy. After all, it is his fault! Consequently, whenever we divide the world into the “good guys” and the “bad,” we are always among the “good.” How convenient and also illuminating!

We are so self deceived, that we have no business judging others. Consequently, Jesus counseled:

• “How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.” (Matthew 7:4-5)

How does a blind man enable himself to see? First, we have to recognize that we are blind – that our lives consist of a self-imposed matrix of a multitude of intertwined lies – lies which we have come to depend upon as much as we do our pleasures. However, we will not be able to perceive the matrix without pain to shatter its lens and the Lord to provide a new lens. Jesus puts it this way:

• "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." (Matthew 11:28-30

His “rest” and healing depend upon recognizing that we too are the “bad guy” and trusting Him for His forgiveness and deliverance.

The Repressive State and its Religion

 

Repressive, totalitarian regimes are never satisfied with merely controlling the political process. They also seek to control the mind and indoctrinate the youth. Hughes and Mann wrote about the goals of National Socialism:

• From the beginning the Nazis were determined to subvert German youth to their own aims…By the end of 1933 all other youth organizations had been either banned or subsumed into the Hitler Youth…In 1939, two executive orders…made “youth service” compulsory…The Nazis monopolized every free hour and parents dared not object lest they were seen to be troublemakers. Youngsters, living more and more with their comrades, were gradually being weaned away from their families. (Inside Hitler’s Germany, 50-54)

Secular Western nations are quickly following in the steps of National Socialism and its totalitarian cousin – Communism – by indoctrinating children. Even as early as 1973, Dr. W. P. Shofstall, the state superintendent for public schools in Arizona commented that, “The atheists have, for all practical purposes, taken over public education in this country.” The results have been obvious:

• On November 17, 1980, the Supreme Court struck down a Kentucky law that required the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. The Court said that the Ten Commandments were “plainly religious…and may induce children to read, meditate upon, and perhaps to venerate and to obey the commandments.” (Erwin Lutzer, The Rebirth of America, 82.

Meanwhile, the Court has raised no qualms about the children venerating pornography or another religion – militant secular humanism:

• Secular Humanism would like us to believe that they are broadminded, pluralistic and neutral in moral matters. They are opposed to censorship, sectarianism and intolerance. The media has done a successful job of getting the American people to believe that it is he so-called right wing religious fanatics who are seeking to “impose morality on society”…Secular Humanism is imposing its own morality on the American public. It does so through the media, the schools and the courts. There is a clear intent to keep Christian thinking out of the mainstream. (83)

• As columnist George Will put it so ably, “And it is, by now, a scandal beyond irony that thanks to the energetic litigation of the ‘civil liberties’ fanatics, pornographers enjoy expansive first amendment protection while first graders in a nativity play are said to violate the First Amendment values.” (84)

However, this insipient totalitarianism doesn't just apply to education. James Schall, S.J. describes it is as a full frontal attack:

•  We have been taught to think that “democracy” is automatically “the best regime,” the only alternative to any totalitarian state power. Though it has been coming for some time, within these past couple of weeks, we are seeing clearly that the desire, force, and will to subsume all subsidiary social institutions, especially religion and family, under the control of the state is also endemic in current democratic societies.

Although the Secular West is not seeking to build an empire based upon racial ideals, it is trying to impose its own utopian values – multi-culturalism, moral relativism, humanism, naturalism, sexual-permissiveness - under the guise of neutrality. Interestingly, Secularism, National Socialism and Communism have all attempted to achieve their goals through the neutralization of parental and Christian influences.

Although we don’t have to contend with the Hitler youth, we do have public education which has become increasingly secularized to the point that the Bible is now verboten! Private schools are only an option for those districts that have a voucher system or for those parents who can fork out the big bucks. Consequently, the public system has been awarded a virtual monopoly over the minds of the youth.

Some decades ago, prayer and moral absolutes were rejected and “values clarification” exercises quickly filled the vacuum. These conveyed to the youth that there is no correct moral answer. Consequently, there can be no correct or even incorrect behavior, as long as it didn’t interfere with the schools’ interests. Instead, morality became just a matter of clarifying the subjective and arbitrary reasons that govern our meaningless choices.

In Canada, parents have just sustained an additional blow:

• In the past week we have witnessed the Supreme Court of Canada dismiss the appeal of a Quebec family for permission to exempt their child from that province’s controversial ethics and religious culture course, which critics say is “relativistic,” and teaches that all religious are equally valid. And we have heard a spokesperson for the Alberta education minister state that under the province’s new Education Act even homeschooling parents will no longer be allowed to teach their children traditional Christian sexual ethics. Without the right to educate our children as we choose according to the values we choose, what do we have left? State-imposed orthodoxy. Totalitarianism. These two developments come amidst the ongoing efforts of the Ontario government to impose their “equity” program, “diversity” curriculum, and transparently ideological “anti-bullying” bill on all schools – whether Catholic or public. Already the largest school board in the province has said that parents will not be permitted to exempt their children from parts of the curriculum they deem unacceptable.

This raises an important question that is seldom discussed by our secular establishment. Who should have the primary responsibility for the education of their children? To put it another way – why should parents be denied the right to veto and exempt their children from certain subjects? And why should certain morally objectionable materials be imposed upon private schools and the private and intimate relationship that parents enjoys with their children? What is the compelling national interest, if there is one?

Interestingly, Reich Youth Leader, Baldur von Schirach had expressed more reverence for the authority of the family than do many of our secular institutions:

• The Hitler Youth leader, however, should consider it his duty not only to maintain the best relations with the parents of the youngsters entrusted to him, but also to allow them every possible insight into the work of the organization. [In contrast, our schools are often secretive about the nature of their moral teachings.] He must be ready to answer questions put to him by the parents of his young charges and should try to become the confidant of the family…Every youth movement needs the spiritual cooperation of the parental home…The parental home is in an ever better position to give unqualified recognition to the service of the Hitler Youth, since this service supports the authority of the parents and does not impair it. (Nazi Culture, 296-97)

Ironically, our evolved secular institutions seem unconcerned about the “authority of the parents.” However, both the Hitler Youth [HY] and the secularists win our children by honoring them as “adults.” HY taught the youth the use of weapons, insisting that their youth were vital to their national defense. Similarly, the secularists insist that our children have the same rights as adults. Consequently, they should now report their parents for spanking them. (The communists also manipulated the youth against their parents, encouraging them to report any anti-communist talk or activity.)

While the HY used weaponry, the secularists have used an even more powerful weapon – sex – to convince the youth that their parents are backward and repressive and that the secularists will treat them with more dignity. They have been increasingly insistent that children have a right and even a duty to themselves to explore their sexuality.

No society will last long which turns the youth against their parents, those who truly love them and would sacrifice to protect them. The wise King Solomon realized this, so that when two women came before him – each claiming a certain newborn to be her own – he ordered that the newborn be cut in two, one half for each claimant. This propelled the real mother to cry out:

• "Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don't kill him!" But the other said, "Neither I nor you shall have him. Cut him in two!" (1 Kings 3:26)

Our secular institutions are like the second woman. They must have their way despite the mountains of evidence demonstrating that society is faltering under their watch. How odd it is that “even home-schooling parents will no longer be allowed to teach their children traditional Christian sexual ethics” even in the face of unacceptably high levels of out-of-wedlock births, abortions, venereal diseases, and the many resulting social ills.

In the mid-eighties, D. James Kennedy wrote about this irony, claiming that his own Westminster Academy, which had been operating for nine years at that time, had never had an illegitimate birth:

• While the rest of America is marching forward with 600,000 unwanted births among high school students…by innumerable hundreds of thousands of abortions…by epidemic drug use…alcoholism…suicide….while we are marching forward into that brave new world, the Christian schools are teaching people about the moral standards of God…who can read far better than the students coming out of the public schools and are academically superior to them. (126)

What compelling reason does secularism have for its intolerance of home-schooling and Christian education? We tend to think that the proof is in the tasting – the results. However, secularism has proven that their ideology trumps the evidence. Why then is secularism committed to a uniformity in belief and religion – moral relativism, humanism, naturalism - even when this uniformity, this State religion, conflicts with the natural interests of the family and our First Amendment rights?

This brings us back to the question – Who should have the primary say over the education of children? The wise Solomon believed that it should be the biological mother, the one who was willing to surrender the child for his own well-being. Secularism repeatedly casts its vote in favor of State uniformity. But why? Does the secularist/atheist have compelling evidence to justify wrenching the child away from parental authority? Can the secularist/atheist demonstrate that society and its children have clearly benefited from secular indoctrination since the sixties?

All indicators would say, “No” – the highly elevated crime rate, drug rate, abortion rate, divorce rate, venereal disease rate…  What then is the justification for continuing this repressive, totalitarian, religious experiment?