THE DEADLY CONSTRICTION OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH

When reason fails to argue in your favor, there is always coercion. In The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech, liberal democrat, Kirsten Powers, writes about the Left's methods:

• The illiberal left yearns for a world sanitized of information that offends them. So why not just tune out the views they don’t like? They can’t. They are authoritarians at heart; they know what Americans should think and what information they should consume. So they launch petitions to have particular views censored from newspapers. They try to get columnists fired for expressing the wrong views. The illiberal left has maniacally maneuvered to delegitimize the Fox News Channel, unable to abide the existence of one news network critical of the president. High- ranking White House officials were the face of this effort, telling anyone who would listen that Fox News was “not really a news station” and not “legitimate.” These top government officials were joined in their illiberal campaign by the progressive nonprofit Media Matters for America (MMFA), which enjoys the support of some of the Democratic Party’s top donors. 12 At one point, Media Matters’ CEO David Brock told Politico that the organization’s ninety- person staff and $10 million annual budget was dedicated to the purpose of waging “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” 13 against Fox News. A leaked MMFA memo for liberal donors detailed a strategy to destroy Fox that included plans to assemble opposition research on Fox News employees.

• The illiberal left hunts down heretics, dissidents, and run- of- the mill dissenters to not only silence them, but make examples of them for the rest of society. Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is cast as racism, misogyny, bigotry, phobia... Those who oppose same- sex marriage don’t have rational, traditional views about marriage that deserve respect or debate; they are bigots and homophobes. When conservatives opposed the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” it wasn’t due to a differing philosophy about the role of government. No, they were waging a “War on Women.”

Why does Powers term them "illiberal?"

• The illiberal left, on the other hand, believes that people who express ideological, philosophical, or political views that don’t line up with their preferences should be completely silenced. Instead of using persuasion and rhetoric to make a positive case for their causes and views, they work to delegitimize the person making the argument through character assassination, demonization, and dehumanizing tactics. These are the self- appointed overlords— activists, university administrators, journalists, and politicians— who have determined what views are acceptable to express. So, shut up— or else.

Sadly, these Leftists aren't a fringe element. According to Powers, they have great latitude to shape young, idealistic, but naive minds:

• On campuses there are speech codes, so- called “free speech zones,” and a host of “anti- discrimination” policies that discriminate against people who dissent from lefty groupthink. Christian and conservative groups have been denied official university status by student government organizations for holding views not in line with liberal dogma.

We might think that the universities and media have a vested interest in upholding the freedom of speech for all. However, myopically, they are convinced that, by depriving a voice to some, their voice will remain unbridled. 

This is what the proletariat masses, who met Lenin upon his return to Russia in 1917 with enthusiastic cries of "Power to the people; Power to the Soviets" thought. They had been promised that they would be in control and not the Tzars. However, Lenin had other ideas:

• One of the first moves of Lenin’s government was to ban all opposition press. When asked about freedom of speech Lenin answered: “Freedom of speech?! We are not going to commit suicide.” (Russiapedia) 

Powers is certainly not alone in her analysis:

• “This tainting and ostracism of sinners is the secret power of the leftist faith,” wrote David Horowitz in Progressives, Volume II of The Black Book of the American Left. “It is what keeps the faithful in line.” It is “part of a ritual that has become familiar over generations of the left, in which dissidents are excommunicated and consigned to various Siberias for their political deviance. It is a phenomenon normal to religious cults, where purity of heart is maintained through avoiding contact with the unclean.” 

The reaction to Powers’ book by her fellow liberal leftists was predictable. Breitbart reports:

• Powers, a lifelong liberal and supporter of gay marriage, has suffered an avalanche of abuse from her side. She’s called a “bigot,” “homophobe,” “f-ckface,” and more. It is a classic Leftist tactic – take something the person did or said, lie about it, make it into a huge deal, and use it to discredit them. It is also a Leftist tradition to bury any independent thinkers on their side the moment they express disagreement.

How is it that the Left is able to get away with libel? There is little accountability from the media and the universities. Either these institutions are thug-sympathizers or they are afraid to stand up against the thugs. At best, they compromise their integrity and fail the public trust.

The Consequence of Ideas: Materialism

 

We live and die according to our ideas and beliefs. Materialism – the belief that man is no more than a sophisticated bio-chemical machine – imposes costs. Historian Robert Royal, along with many others, has written about these costs:

• The materialist view of the person – combined with the notion that humans, as material beings, can be reshaped into the New Man of the Communist dream merely by a change of their social conditions, a view still widespread today – is a falsehood that inevitably leads to awful consequences… By most credible estimates, Communist countries killed about a hundred million people in the twentieth century. (The God that did not Fail, 247)

Although atheist-Communist apologists want to ascribe these horrors to the alleged insanity of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, the evidence shows that they were merely being faithful to their materialistic vision of humanity. If we are no more than animals or machines, we can be used and manipulated as such in order to achieve their “utopian” dream.

Materialism places a sword in the hands of the oppressor. This worldview mitigates the horrors of genocide and all forms of coercion. After all, machines that fail to perform their prescribed roles are thrown on the junk-heap.

Evolution has also bequeathed this materialistic sword to society. If man is just another animal, he can be treated as such. Even the evolutionist, Karl Giberson, admits to the power of this idea to shape human society:

• “[Evolutionist] Ernst Haeckel nudged the racism of the Third Reich along its malignant road by suggesting that …”You must draw [a line] between the most highly developed civilized people on the one hand and the crudest primitive people on the other and unite the latter with animals.”(Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution,76)

• “How shocking it is today to acknowledge that virtually every educated person in the Western culture at the time …shared Haeckel’s ideas. Countless atrocities around the globe were rationalized by the belief that superior races were improving the planet by exterminating defective elements…there can be little doubt that such viewpoints muted voices that would otherwise have been raised in protest.”

• “The Holocaust would have happened with or without Charles Darwin. There can be no doubt however, that the Nazi campaign against the Jews was assisted via rhetoric and rationalization with arguments from social Darwinism. (79)”

The idea that we a just another member of the animal kingdom can lead to some troubling suggestions:

• Back in 2006, award winning Univ. of Texas evolutionary ecologist, Dr Eric R. Pianka, publicly stated that the use of an airborne Ebola was necessary to kill off 90 percent of the world’s population, that war and famine wasn’t sufficient to get the job done. 

Sadly, Planka is not alone in this assessment of the relative value of human beings. Perhaps even more troubling, if we are just another animal, there is no good reason not to exercise population control. Then, who will live and who will die? Well, it depends on who you know and how valuable you are to society! You better strive to be well-liked!

Income Inequality: An Evil?

There has been a lot in print lately about correcting income inequality, as if it’s an established human right for everyone to have identical incomes. However, before we conclude that there is something righteous about establishing income equality, let’s first re-examine a few things, namely Marxism – the proactive attempt to attain this goal and, with it, a “worker’s paradise.”

Marxism has been tried, and it has never produced any semblance of any kind of paradise. Instead, in each place where Marxism has created its “paradise,” it has required walls, threats, work camps, murder and Gulags to convince its populace that they were living in a virtual paradise, despite their strenuous attempts to flee it! One Soviet Christian, Alexandr Ogordinokov, wrote about the “paradise” to which he had been sent:

• Concentration camps are scattered over the vast expanse of Russia, behind tall fences of barbed wire and high-voltage cables…you are buried in the tomb-like twilight of solitary punishment cells; the oppressive silence of faceless days turns time itself into an instrument of torture…Hunger gnaws at your belly, and cold numbs your flesh and desperation courses through your blood. (Marvin Olasky, Prodigal Press, xxiii)

This description could describe any communist death camp, whether in Cuba, Cambodia, China, or Vietnam. But why? Is there something endemic to income equality that produces horrors? Perhaps – Here are some possibilities:

1.      Income equality requires massive government control to ensure that income is equal – something that requires repression and coercion.

2.      Income equality has never been identified by any of the major world religions as a human right or even a goal. Although the Bible places a lot of emphasis on caring for the poor – a responsibility that many churches gladly undertake – there is no biblical mandate to establish income equality. Instead, all major religions are reluctant to undermine individual initiative in this manner.

3.      If income equality cannot be demonstrated as a right – and it clearly undermines initiative and creates a destructive sense of entitlement – it then becomes difficult to rationally justify it. Therefore, if reason fails to justify income equality, then coercion becomes inevitable with its Gulags and barbed-wire fences.

4.      Moral relativism – and this has been so closely associated with progressive Marxism – also undermines rationality and therefore must rely upon coercion. If all morals are simply relative to the person or culture, there is no objective moral truth or moral good upon which to base income equality. Therefore, such a program is inherently incoherent and indefensible.

5.      Christianity also tries to address the problem of human suffering. However, it identifies sin as the problem – an analysis that goes far deeper and more universally than the Marxist economic analysis. Consequently, the ideal of income equality to produce a better world represents a different, competing, and anti-Christian hope for a better world. Such a hope does not issue forth from the major world religions but from progressive atheism.

6.      In order to promote such a hope, unsupported by reason or history, the “progressives” must defensively damn every other hope as evil and regressive. Therefore, in order to implement their hope for a better world, they must suppress or remove alternative thinking. Here are just several examples of this contempt and intolerance endemic to an insupportable hope:

·         Karl Marx: "In simple truth, I harbour hate 'gainst all the Gods." His dissertation stated that we should "recognize as the highest divinity, the human self-consciousness itself!"

·         Nikolai Lenin: "Every religious idea, every idea of god, even every flirtation with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness."

·         Nikita Khrushchev: "We, Communists ... are atheists ... Public education, the dissemination of scientific knowledge, and the study of the laws of nature, leave no place for belief in God ... We consider that belief in God contradicts our Communist outlook." "We remain the atheists that we have always been; we are doing all we can to liberate those people who are still under the spell of this religious opiate."

For them, capitalism is an evil, an impediment to the attainment of income equality. It therefore must be eliminated.

But is capitalism really an evil? As a farmer, I decided that I had enough tomatoes to sell on the roadside to make a little extra money. Was this an evil? Actually, by providing more tomatoes to the market, my tomato stand would tend to lower the overall price and contribute additional wealth to the community. Nothing evil about that! I didn’t take any food out of anyone’s mouth. Instead, I contributed food.

If I had even more tomatoes to sell to justify hiring a picker, would this have been evil? Certainly, the hired help and his family wouldn’t have thought so, and I can’t think of anyone else who would have objected, apart from a Marxist.

This is not to say that capitalism cannot be used for evil. Any institution can be! The UN and even Congress have been used for evil, but I wouldn’t suggest that we therefore dismantle them! Nor am I advocating for unbridled capitalism. Every institution requires its checks and balances. All are inherently corruptible!

This brings us back to the question of evil and a realistic hope in the face of this evil. The reason that our best-conceived institutions turn evil is because we are evil and require a Savior. Our Bible presents us with the only adequate hope to address the evil:

• We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.  God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor. 5:20-21)

We are what We Think: The Case of Communism/Atheism

If we are what we think, then our mental diet is critical. Increasingly, we are finding that a steady porn-diet exerts a powerful influence. One commentator writes:

• Among males, exposure to pornography is associated with addictive behaviors traced to the release of chemicals in the brain, stimulating arousal and excitement. In the larger context, pornography is also associated with an exaggerated masculinity, negative attitudes toward women, and relational breakdowns due to unrealistic sexual expectations.

Serial killers have had notoriously poor mental diets. Ted Bundy’s diet was fed by massive doses of hard-porn. Before his execution, he commented about the effects of his “education”:

• Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self. (Christian Research Journal, Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32)

In contrast to this, Western culture has become broadly anti-intellectual. Feelings and experiences, not thinking, are given the place of honor in social gatherings. However, what we believe determines what we do. Even our experiences, as important as they might be, require some form of mental interpretation before they are able to provide guidance.

Once we fail to appreciate the power of ideas and convictions, we fail to understand the flow of human history. According to Wikipedia, University of Oklahoma political scientist Allen D. Hertzke writes that:

• “The collapse of the religious impulse among the educated classes in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, he [historian Paul Johnson] argues, left a vacuum that was filled by politicians wielding power under the banner of totalitarian ideologies – whether 'blood and soil' Fascism or atheistic Communism. Thus the attempt to live without God made idols of politics and produced the century's 'gangster statesmen' – Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot – whose 'unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind' unleashed unimaginable horrors.”

The influence of our beliefs is incontestable:

• Daniel Goldhagen argues that 20th century Communist regimes "have killed more people than any other regime type." Other scholars in the fields of Communist studies and genocide studies, such as Steven Rosefielde, Benjamin Valentino, and R.J. Rummel, have come to similar conclusions. Rosefielde states that it is possible the "Red Holocaust" killed more non-combatants than "Ha Shoah" and "Japan's Asian holocaust" combined, and "was at least as heinous, given the singularity of Hitler's genocide.

Estimates of how many Communism has exterminated usually center around 100 – 150 million non-combatants. How could something that had such an idealistic façade, something that had attracted so many intelligent and idealistic people, have produced such horrors? The Russian writer and Nobel laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, offered the following explanation:

• “Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old 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 spend 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.'” (Conservapedia)

Without the belief in God, restraint is removed in favor of promoting our agendas. Can we equate communism with atheism? Vox Day claims that this equation is undeniable:

• “Apparently it was just an amazing coincidence that every Communist of historical note publicly declared his atheism … .there have been twenty-eight countries in world history that can be confirmed to have been ruled by regimes with avowed atheists at the helm … These twenty-eight historical regimes have been ruled by eighty-nine atheists, of whom more than half have engaged in democidal acts of the sort committed by Stalin and Mao …

• The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists, three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war, and individual crime in the entire twentieth century combined.

• The historical record of collective atheism is thus 182,716 times worse on an annual basis than Christianity’s worst and most infamous misdeed, the Spanish Inquisition. It is not only Stalin and Mao who were so murderously inclined, they were merely the worst of the whole Hell-bound lot.

• Is a 58 percent chance that an atheist leader will murder a noticeable percentage of the population over which he rules sufficient evidence that atheism does, in fact, provide a systematic influence to do bad things? If that is not deemed to be conclusive, how about the fact that the average atheist crime against humanity is 18.3 million percent worse than the very worst depredation committed by Christians, even though atheists have had less than one-twentieth the number of opportunities with which to commit them. If one considers the statistically significant size of the historical atheist set and contrasts it with the fact that not one in a thousand religious leaders have committed similarly large-scale atrocities, it is impossible to conclude otherwise, even if we do not yet understand exactly why this should be the case. Once might be an accident, even twice could be coincidence, but fifty-two incidents in ninety years reeks of causation!” (Conservapedia)

Is it really so difficult to explain? Employing Machiavellian logic – the ends justify whatever means - the atheists believed that any form of terror was permissible if it advanced their communist revolution:

• "Violence in itself is not evil. It depends on what its purpose is. In the hands of Socialists, it is a progressive force." Boris N. Ponomarev - Communist Party Secretary.

• "The energy and mass nature of terror must be encouraged." V.I. Lenin.

• "The capitalists will supply us with the materials and the technology which we lack. They will restore our defense industry, which we need for our future victorious attacks upon our suppliers." V.I.Lenin. 

• "The struggle between world proletariat and bourgeoisie will continue until the final victory of Communism on a world scale." F. Rhyzhenko "peaceful Coexistence and the Class Struggle", Pravda, 22 August, 1973.

• "Marxist-Leninists decisively reject the assertions of certain bourgeois theoreticians who consider nuclear missile war unjust from any point of view." General Major A.S. Milovidov and Dr Ye A. Zhdanov, in 'Questions of Philosophy', a Soviet Journal, 1980.

• "... on the Communist side, nuclear war will be lawful and just ... the natural right and sacred duty of progressive mankind to destroy imperialism . . . It will resolve not just specific limited interests but a crucial historical problem, one that affects the fate of all mankind." Colonel B.A. Byely in Marxism-Leninism on War and Army.

These troubling statements are perfectly understandable from the perspective of The Heart, Mind and Soul of COMMUNISM by Dr. Schwarz:

• “The Communists have always been perfectly frank on this subject. Beginning with the Communist Manifesto, which says, ‘We openly declare that our ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions,’ the identical sentiment has been repeated ad-nauseam in all the writings of the Communist hierarchy and in official pronouncements of the Comintern and the Cominform. They categorically reject any suggestion that the transition from Capitalism to Socialism can be by the peaceful pathway of reform. One of the principal epithets of abuse in a somewhat extensive vocabulary is the word "reformist," a term of ridicule and contempt. Scientific law [in the socialist concept of science] has written that the change-over must be both revolutionary and violent. This is determined both from their philosophy of dialectical materialism and from a fake evaluation of the economic forces in society. To use a Marxian analogy: ‘Force is the midwife to deliver the socialist order from the womb of a decadent Capitalism’ ... Lenin, the founder of Bolshevism, and thus of Fascism, substituted the idea that the revolution was to result from the scientific planning and execution of the party, which was the class-conscious vanguard of the Proletariat. He replaced the idea of spontaneity with the idea of planned conspiracy. Every party member became a disciplined conspirator dedicated to the goal of the overthrow of the government by force and violence.”

Our beliefs are like a horse’s bridle, guiding us to the left of the right. Why was the Apostle Paul a man of peace? Why didn’t he rail against his oppressors and seek revenge? He didn’t have to resort to unethical means, because he knew his Savior:

• That [serving Christ] is why I am suffering [persecution] as I am. Yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day. (2 Tim. 1:12)

He knew that if he was to be deprived of everything, even life, he was deprived of absolutely nothing. Instead, he remained confident:

• We also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in his presence. (2 Cor. 4:13-14)

Without such knowledge, we would become desperate and resort to any means to provide for and avenge ourselves. However, our Lord has assured us:

• "But a time is coming, and has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me. I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." (John 16:32-33)

Jesus taught us that, in order to have peace, we need to know and believe certain truths. Without such knowledge, we will not be able to continue in peace.