Ontario School Policy is Clear: Only Conservatives May Be Bullied

In today's National Post, Mark Steyn mocks the totalitarians who are pretending to be caring and kind as they shut down dissent.

Canada’s GSA is the Gay-Straight Alliance. The GSA is all over the GTA (the Gayer Toronto Area), but in a few remote upcountry redoubts north of Timmins intolerant knuckle-dragging fundamentalist school boards declined to get with the beat. So the Ontario Government has determined to afflict them with the “Accepting Schools Act.”

“Accepting?” One would regard the very name of this bill as an exquisite parody of the way statist strong-arming masquerades as limp-wristed passivity were it not for the fact that the province’s Catholic schools, reluctant to accept government-mandated GSAs, are proposing instead that they should be called “Respecting Differences” groups. Good grief, this is the best a bigoted theocrat can come up with?

Bullying is as old as the schoolhouse. Dr Thomas Arnold, one of the great reforming headmasters of 19th century England, is captured in the most famous novel ever written about bullying, Tom Brown’s Schooldays in what, by all accounts, is an accurate summation of his approach to the matter: “‘You see, I do not know anything of the case officially, and if I take any notice of it at all, I must publicly expel the boy. I don’t wish to do that, for I think there is some good in him. There’s nothing for it but a good sound thrashing.’ He paused to shake hands with the master … ‘Remember,’ added the Doctor, emphasizing the words, ‘a good sound thrashing before the whole house.’ ”

These days, a Thrashing Schools Act mandating Thrashing Out Differences groups across the province would be the biggest windfall for Chief Commissar Barbara Hall and her Ontario “Human Rights” Commission since the transsexual labiaplasty case went belly up. Teachers are not permitted, in any meaningful sense, to deal with the problem of bullying. And, when you can’t deal with a problem, the easiest option is to institutionalize it. Thus, today is the Day of Pink, “the international day against bullying, discrimination, homophobia and transphobia.” Don’t know how big it is in Yemen or Waziristan, but the Minister of Education for the Northwest Territories is on board, and the Ontario MPP Peggy Nash has issued her own video greeting for the day, just like the Queen’s Christmas message: “Today’s the day we can unite in celebrating diversity and in raising awareness …”

So it’s just like every other bloody boring day in the Ontario school system then?

Meanwhile, Cable 14 in Hamilton, Ont., has been Tweeting up a storm: “National Day of Pink/Anti-Bullying Day is tomorrow. What will you be wearing?” Er, I don’t think I have a lot of choice on that front, do I? “For schools holding Anti-Bullying events in April, you still have time to order shirts at a discount.”

That’s great news! Nothing says “celebrate diversity” like forcing everyone to dress exactly the same, like a bunch of Maoists who threw their workers’ garb in the washer but forgot to take the red flag out. If you’re thinking, “Hang on. Day of Pink? Didn’t we just have that?” No, that was Pink Shirt Day, the last Wednesday in February. This is Day of Pink, second Wednesday in April. Like the King streetcar, there’ll be another one along in a minute, enthusiastically sponsored by Scotiabank, Royal Bank, ViaRail and all the other corporate bigwigs.

If anyone is naive enough actually to think that this bureaucratically-imposed exercise in groupthink actually is about what it claims to be about (i.e. bullied homosexual kids), then you also probably believe that Obama is highly committed to reducing the number of abortions by raising taxes and expanding the welfare state.

Bullying is a problem, but it is one largely created by the left-wing refusal to discipline bullies and it has little to do with homosexuality.

According to the Toronto District School Board’s own survey, the most common type of bullying is for “body image” — the reason given by 27% of high school students, 38% of Grades 7 and 8, and yea, back through the generations. Yet there are no proposals for mandatory Fat-Svelte Alliances, or Homely-Smokin’ Alliances. The second biggest reason in Toronto schools is “cultural or racial background.” “Cultural,” eh? Yet there seems no urge to install Infidel-Believer Alliances in Valley Park Middle School’s celebrated mosqueteria, although they could probably fit it in the back behind the menstruating girls. So the pressure for GSAs in every school would seem to be a solution entirely unrelated to the problem. Indeed, it would seem to be a gay hijacking of the issue. Queer Eye For The Fat Chick: “But enough about you, let’s talk about me.”

What about if you’re the last non-sexualized tween schoolgirl in Ontario? You’re still into ponies and unicorns and have no great interest in the opposite sex except when nice Prince William visits to cut the ribbon at the new Transgendered Studies Department. What if the other girls are beginning to mock you for wanting to see Anne Of Green Gables instead of Anne Does Avonlea? Is there any room for the sexual-developmentally challenged in the GSAs?

Why, of course! GSAs are officially welcoming of gays, straights, and even those freaky weirdy types who aren’t yet into sexual identity but could use a helpful nudge in the right direction. “Advisors Say GSA Also For Straight Students,” as the headline to a poignant story in yesterday’s edition of the Pembroke Academy newspaper in New Hampshire puts it. The school-approved GSA began five years ago with an ambitious platform of exciting gay activities. “They had plans for group events, like bake sales and car washes, but they never came to pass,” explained Ms Yackanin, the social studies teacher who served as the GSA’s first advisor.

From a lack of gay bake sales and gay car washes, the GSA has now advanced to a lack of gays. “The students just stopped coming,” said Mrs McCrum, the new Spanish teacher who took over the GSA at the start of this school year. This is the homophobic reality of our education system: a school gay group that has everything it needs except gays.

Homosexuality is not the point. Bullied homosexual kids is not the point. The point is to change your attitude and mine to sexual promiscuity and the sexual revolution as part of the Ne0-Marxist attempt to undermine the family and leave the State as the only entity capable of solving social problems, which thus gives it unlimited power.

Did you really think it was about bullied kids? There is only one group that is being bullied here and that is conservatives who resist the attempt to corrupt kids by promoting sexual license.

What I Can't Believe

I believe in God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. But there are a lot of things in which I simply cannot bring myself to believe.

I wonder at the credulousness of people today. As literacy and critical thinking skills decline due to "progressive education" it seems to me that most people are more gullible and less inclined to reject that which is incoherent and implausible. There is more of a herd mentality and the most astonishing things are taken for granted by the "in crowd" of new class knowledge professionals that form the core of the modern bureaucratic state.

Here are some things relating to Marxism that I find silly, dumb, unworthy of serious intellectual consideration by thinking people and, yet, which many people apparently endorse with a straight face. It is just about impossible to take seriously anyone who believes, or acts as if he believes, in the things on this list.

1. The myth of primitive communism.
2. The "iron laws of history."
3. Marx's failed predictions about the collapse of capitalism.
4. The labor theory of value.
5. The Marxist concept of ideology.
6. The withering away of the state.
7. The oppressiveness of the traditional family.
8. The coming classless society.
9. That the state is evil.
10. That private property is morally wrong.
11. That private property protects the rich more than it protects the poor.
12. The ideal of income equality.
13. The existence of rigidly fixed classes.
14. The human nature of socialism.
15. The benign intentions of socialist agitators.
16. That communism has never really been tried yet.
17. That the state can be trusted as the overwhelmingly dominant power center in society.
18. That capitalism is an immoral system.
19. That religion keeps people down and prevents progress.
20. that the Party can be trusted to act in our best interests.
21. The perfectibility of man.
22. The humane nature of socialism.
23. The moral imperative of rewarding sloth.
24. That the welfare state is good for poor people in good health.
25. That there is enough money in the world for government to use to replace the family.

My two questions to any actual Marxists who might happen to read this list are:

(1) Which of the items on this list would you care to defend and how on earth would you do it?

(2) If we can't believe in the items on this list, what is left of Marxism and other forms of socialism? Why not adopt a free market, limited government, liberal political economy?

I'm just wondering - seriously.

Occupy Wall Street as an Heretical, Medieval Cult

If you check out the coverage of Occupy Wall Street from conservative sites like Big Government, America Spectator and The Weekly Standard, instead of relying strictly on the mainstream media, it becomes clear that there are three main groups of people involved in the uprising:

1. There are relatively ordinary people, especially idealistic young people, with cell phones, high student debts and often no job. They have been taught in university that capitalism is evil, socialism is benign and communism badly misunderstood. They don't have a clue what really is wrong or how to fix it. They are the focus of the mainstream media, however, because they seem like a group that a large number of independent voters can relate to.

2. There are street people, petty criminals, mentally disturbed people and sexual predators mixed in among the others and causing havoc. Here is a "rap-sheet" for OWS, a compilation of stories about various crimes committed or alledged against people involved in the anti-capitalist movement. No wonder the latest poll shows the growing unpopularity of OWS; its approval rating is not down to 30%.

3. There are ideologically aware, left-wing agitators who range from the Communist Party, the Democratic Socialists of America to union organizers, environmentalists, and anarchists. Here are their signs from the Occupy Oakland general strike march. See here, for example, and here, or just google "Democratic Socialists of America + Occupy". They are using the naive "dupes" for their own ideological purposes.

Absolutely nothing new has been said by the OWS movement. It is important to realize that it is just rehashing the same old anti-capitalist rhetoric the kids learned in university classes from tenured, aging hippies like Bill Ayers who have been predicting the imminent collapse of capitalism - any day now - since the 1840s.

If anything coherent is behind OWS it is Marxism in its most day-dreamy, extreme, religious form. Marxism is actually nothing new in Western culture. It is another expression of millenarian cults that have risen up periodically with a radical message that society is corrupt and the end of the present order is near since the 13th century.

Norman Cohn's book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, is not about Marxism. But it is essential for understanding Marxism. (I scored a copy of the 3rd edition for $4.00 at the Trinity College booksale a couple of weeks ago, thus enabling me to remove it from my Amazon cart.) Originally published in 1957, this remains the only book on its subject: "the tradition of revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism, as it developed in western Europe between the 11th and 16th centuries." (p. 9)

Chapter 6 deals with "The Emperor Frederick as Messiah" and discusses the emergence of the heretical thought of Joachim of Fiore, which was a forerunner of Marxism. Cohn writes:

In the course of the 13th century yet another kind of eschatology appeared alongside the eschatologies derived from the Book of Revelation and the Sibylline Oracles - alongside them at first, but soon blending with them. The inventor of the new prophetic system, which was to be the most influential one known to Europe until the appearance of Marxism, was Joachim of Fiore (1145-1202). Ater many years spent in brooding over the Scriptures this Caliabrian abbot and hermit received, some time between 1190 and 1195, an inspiration which seemed to reveal in them a concealed meaning of unique predictive value. (p. 108)

Joachim forecast a new interpretation of history as consisting of three stages: the age of the Father (or Law), the age of the Son (or Gospel), and the age of the Spirit, which "would be to its predecessors as broad daylight compared with starlight and dawn, as high summer compared with winter and spring." (p. 108) Whereas the first age had been the age of fear and the second of faith and filial submission, the third would be an age of joy and freedom when all men would know God directly. The world would be a vast monastery in which all men would contemplate God mystically and ecstatically.

Cohn points out that the long-term influence of Joachim's vision can be traced right down to the present day, most clearly in the 19th century 'philosophies of history' of Schelling, Ficte, Lessing and Hegel, as well as in Auguste Compte's ideas and the Marxist scheme of primitive communism, class society and a final communism "which is to be the realm of freedom and in which the state will have withered away." (p. 109) Cohn also points out that the idea of the "Third Reich," first coined in 1923 by publicist Moeller van den Bruck, would not have had the emotional resonance it had in the European mind if it had not been for this "phantasy of a third and most glorious dispensation" which had "entered into the common stock of European social mythology." (p. 109)

Marxism stands in a long tradition of millenarian movements that range from the "children's crusades" to the Taborites to Thomas Muntzer and the millenarian cults in the English revolution like the Levelers and the Diggers. (I'm leaving out far more than I'm mentioning.) As such, Marxism is, for all its scientific pretensions, essentially an irrational, mystical, millenarian cult. It is eschatology for those who have lost their orthodox, Christian faith.

Occupy Wall Street is thus a dream come true for historians and anthropologists who want to study an actual contemporary example of one of these social movements in the form of living, breathing, 'true believers' rather than in dusty historical records.

In the 13th century the mainstream Church followed Thomas Aquinas in his orientation to Augustinian orthodoxy and rational (Aristotelian) science rather than Joachim and his mystical anarchism. The Church has been on the side of science and reason ever since, whereas Marxism stands in the tradition of the irrational, mystical, cultic, free-spirited, perfectionism and millenarianism stretching back centuries.

In the final analysis, it is not possible to reason with those who believe they have received a Divine revelation not accessible to most ordinary people and who believe they are on the cutting edge of history, which is about to be transformed into the kingdom of God. Like the Iranian mullahs and Adolf Hitler, the Marxists believe that no act of violence is unthinkable when the result is going to be the kingdom of God on earth!

Christianity, on the other hand, teaches that Divine revelation coheres with natural law and reason and therefore can be debated, discussed and understood by all who wish to engage in study and dialogue. Marxism, by way of contrast, like all heretical cults, requires the sacrifice of the intellect, the acceptance of secret revelation and irrational belief in the goodness of man, the imminence of the millennium and the need for purifying, revolutionary violence as the doorway to utopia.

It is little wonder that people who believe such things had to be suppressed by force by the public authorities in previous centuries and it is likely that free and rational societies will need to defend themselves against the forces of lawless disorder again in the future. We would do well to heed the warning from the OWS Oakland sign: "We came unarmed, this time."

Will a culture sunk deep into postmodern relativism, sexual promiscuity, hedonistic materialism, uncontrolled public debt and declining educational standards be able to muster the strength to resist the anarchistic cultists? And will it be able to do so without falling into tyrannical dictatorship? Do we have it in us to overcome another Nazi death cult without losing democracy?

These are the questions that should preoccupy all of us today.

A Review of "The Communist Hypothesis" by Alain Badiou

For those of you who live a sheltered life, I have news for you: there really are real, live Communists alive and kicking today. Yes, real, live, actual "let's start the revolution, take over the government and the media, and then kill all the capitalists" type Communists. While it may be true that most people consider Communism to be passe, the supposedly dead corpse roams the earth refusing to die like a zombie out of a horror movie.

In fact, it is dangerous to think that the idea of Communism is dead when it has just gone partially underground inside the universities of the West and in the minds of many union activists, communist party activists, plus various people in many left-wing organizations including feminist and environmentalist organizations.

A vague version of the basic idea of communism continues to lurk in the minds of many people today, including those who have accepted the failure of actual communist states in the 20th century. The basic idea is that, in a just society, income ought to be basically equal and so everyone deserves to be supported by the government whether they work or not and taxing the rich is justified - in fact morally mandated - as the means to this end. It is a grave mistake to think that this basic idea of communism no longer powers action in our world just because the Soviet Union has collapsed. It is particularly dangerous to think this can be accomplished without violence and economic collapse.

It is the idea of communism that forms the subject of Alain Badiou's book: The Communist Hypothesis. Badiou is a French intellectual, writer and university professor who occupies a position on the political spectrum to the left of the Communist Party of France. A lot of people probably wouldn't even believe that there is anything to the left of the Communist Party of France! But there is and it is called Maoism. Badiou's book is even published in a small, red, hardback format reminiscent of Mao's Little Red Book.

In the middle of the 20th century Communism was in crisis. the crisis was caused by Nikita Khrushchev, who gave his famous "secret speech" to the Twentieth Party Congress on February 25, 1956 in which he exposed and denounced the purges of Stalin and purportedly inaugurated a "less repressive era" in the Soviet Union. This turned what had been a moral crisis into a public relations or propaganda crisis and led to a number of responses in world communism.

First, most of the Communist Parties in the West divided into Stalinist and non-Stalinist factions. The non-Stalinists claimed that what happened under Stalin in the USSR was not "true Communism" and tried to maintain some critical distance from the Soviet Union thereafter.

Second, some Communists underwent an intense struggle of conscience which ended with their conversion to liberalism and capitalism such as Whittaker Chambers.

Third, some of those previously sympathetic to the USSR in the West responded by becoming social democrats or democratic socialism. They attempted to distinguish between socialism and communism and tried to maintain an appreciation for Marx while viewing the Soviet experiment as the betrayal of Marx. Communists were thus Marxist-Leninists, while the non-communists were Marxian socialists. They often called themselves "Neo-Marxists" to stress the difference.

Fourth, there was the rise of the New Left in America in the early 1960s. They were more influenced by the "critical theory" of the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxism than they were by communism per se. They attempted to re-formulate Marxism in a new age by focusing on oppressed minorities, Third world people struggling for liberation, women, and students instead of the proletariat. Their goal was to overthrow the cultural institutions that resist Communism: the Church, the Family, the Military and Big Business. Their method was through the infiltration of the universities, the entertainment industry and the mass media.

Fifth, there was a strong movement in France to embrace the Maoist cultural revolution and this movement had American branches in the more radical student groups of the 60s such as the Black Panthers and the Students for a Democratic Society. Many of these people went to Vietnam and proclaimed their support for the Chinese-supported North Vietnamese regime including Jane Fonda and others.

Badiou's book is a manifestation of the fifth response to the revelation of Stalin's crimes. It professes to be a different kind of Marxism from the Soviet model. It is similar in important ways to the fourth, cultural Marxist approach of the New Left, and the third approach of Neo-Marxism. It goes beyond economics to culture and it tries to be non-Stalinist. But it is different from these two approaches - which are designed for consumption in the still somewhat anti-Communist West - by its frank and open embrace of revolutionary violence.

Badiou proclaims his everlasting fealty to the movements symbolized by two dates: the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Student Revolutions of May 1968. Each is treated in its own chapter in this book and both are viewed as precursors to the Chinese Cultural Revolution in which over 30 million people were murdered between 1966 and 1976. What makes it possible to view the the 1871 and 1968 movements in a romanticized (and sanitized) light is that, unlike the Russian Revolution, these movements never gained power. Both advocated the kind of direct democracy and egalitarian approach to decision-making that we see in the contemporary Occupy Wall Street protests, which was possible since they never became responsible for the government of millions of citizens over a long period of time.

What makes Mao's cultural revolution superior for Badiou to the Marxist-Leninist revolution in Russia and to the Stalinism it produced is two-fold:

First, it is significant that Mao launched his cultural revolution from within what Badiou refers to as "the party state," which is his label for the corruption of the pure idea of communism represented by Stalinism. The "party state" is one in which the communist revolution results in a new state power, controlled by the party, which fails to live up to the ideals of localism, direct democracy, people power and freedom. Since Mao is using workers from outside the party to battle against the "bourgeois elements" within the party, his murderous rampage is totally different from Stalin's!

Second, Mao's cultural revolution was not merely about military or economic power, but about culture: how people think. What Chairman Mao implicitly recognized was the falsity of Marx's contention that economics drives culture and that once economic structures are changed by the Revolution human nature will change as well. Oddly, Mao is partially agreeing with Pope John Paul II that culture precedes economics and is the real driving force in history. In a way he even agreed with the Pope that religion is the source and basis for culture by promoting a vicious and dogmatic atheism. But it is telling that the Pope's campaign to bring down Communism in Poland was non-violent whereas Mao's cultural revolution in China caused tens of millions of murders.

What Badiou simply refuses to recognize is the inner contradiction in the idea of communism, which is that you can't get equality without destroying liberty.

By refusing to recognize the need for a state to control predatory human behaviour by coercion he tries to make it possible to dismisses all the violent, murderous communist regimes in the 20th century as not really communist. Yet, he at the same time recognizes the need for revolutionary violence to bring communism to power. And, worse, he proposes to solve the problem of human nature not changing as soon as economic structures are changed by still further violence!

As the Red Guards and workers rampaged around lawlessly murdering people for incorrect thought we see what politically incorrectness really is all about. As people are sent to re-education camps to be "taught" (forced) to think correctly we come to understand that all forms of Marxism, socialism and communism can only get so far in re-making the world without resorting to murder and coercion. As we look at the cultural revolution we see the contradiction of communism in action.

To put it succinctly, the inner contradiction of communism is that it claims to be able to build a better world by redistributing wealth but it cannot achieve this goal except by creating a hell on earth by murder. Economics is not fundamental to human society, religion and the culture shaped by religion are. And, eventually, communism must attack these mainsprings of human society and in so doing it attacks the dignity and rights of the human person created in the image of God and thus becomes anti-humanistic.

You can't produce a humane society by anti-humanism.

Badiou's book is blind to the inner contradictions of communism, but it is a valuable read because nobody can come away from having read it and think that any of the usual excuses for communist "excesses" have the slightest shred of credibility. Badiou knows that revolutionary violence is necessary in order for communism to be implemented. He even quotes (without criticism) Mao's speculation that 20 or 30 cultural revolutions might be necessary before the idea of communism really takes hold in the human heart. Badiou is honest - and that is fatal for any true communist.

Remember When They Said the Tea Party was Weird?

Check out this interview of a Maoist and a Marxist at Occupy Philadelphia from Michelle Malkin's blog.

The Maoist thinks the figures of people killed by Communist regimes in the 20th century are "made up." The Marxist thinks we just can't know what happened. How very convenient; I wonder if he is a 9/11 Truther too.



It is interesting that Nancy Pelosi, Debbie Wasserman-Shultz and other leading Democrats up to and including the president are rushing to embrace Occupy Wall Street. I agree with George Will who said he hoped the movement lasts and that the Democrats continue to cuddle up to it. It will make electing Republicans so much easier in November 2012.

Clearly, the OWS movement is bringing out every weirdo in town to join in an orgy of self-pity by aggrieved self-proclaimed victims. That is the way Democrats build "coalitions" out of victim groups. But somehow I just don't think these victims will generate much sympathy from independent voters in the middle of a recession. And I can't see Mitt Romney shaking in his boots at having to go up against Barack Obama and his pal "Rainbow Boy."

Mind you, I could be wrong. Maybe gender-confused Maoists and hippie Marxists straight out of central casting will turn out to be the Democrats' secret weapon.

The Global Warming Scare is on the Verge of Joining the Y2K Scare on the Scrapheap of History

The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece by Robert Bryce entitled "Five Truths About Climate Change." The truths are:

1) The carbon taxers/limiters have lost. Carbon-dioxide emissions have been the environmental issue of the past decade. . . . Copenhagen became the epicenter of a world-wide media frenzy as some 5,000 journalists, along with some 100 world leaders and scores of celebrities, descended on the Danish capital to witness what was billed as the best opportunity to impose a global tax or limit on carbon dioxide.

The result? Nothing, aside from promises by various countries to get serious—really serious—about carbon emissions sometime soon.

Here's a reality check: During the same decade that Mr. Gore and the IPCC dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.

2) Regardless of whether it's getting hotter or colder—or both—we are going to need to produce a lot more energy in order to remain productive and comfortable.

3) The carbon-dioxide issue is not about the United States anymore. Sure, the U.S. is the world's second-largest energy consumer. But over the past decade, carbon-dioxide emissions in the U.S. fell by 1.7%. And according to the International Energy Agency, the U.S. is now cutting carbon emissions faster than Europe, even though the European Union has instituted an elaborate carbon-trading/pricing scheme. Why? The U.S. is producing vast quantities of cheap natural gas from shale, which is displacing higher-carbon coal.

Meanwhile, China's emissions jumped by 123% over the past decade and now exceed those of the U.S. by more than two billion tons per year. Africa's carbon-dioxide emissions jumped by 30%, Asia's by 44%, and the Middle East's by a whopping 57%. Put another way, over the past decade, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions—about 6.1 billion tons per year—could have gone to zero and yet global emissions still would have gone up.

4) We have to get better—and we are—at turning energy into useful power. In 1882, Thomas Edison's first central power station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan converted less than 3% of the heat energy of the coal being burned into electricity. Today's best natural-gas-fired turbines have thermal efficiencies of 60%.

5) The science is not settled, not by a long shot.

The whole global warming scare has always been about a massive transfer of wealth from first world consumers to third world governments and the moving force behind it has been Communists and Socialists who have transformed themselves into Eco-warriors as a way of obtaining results that could not be obtained in the traditional method of revolutionary action.

It is easily predictable that when the prospects of the global warming scare being a useful tool to accomplish the massive transfer of wealth envisaged through a global tax on financial transactions, then the whole scare will just die out like the Y2K one did after the turn of the century. It was never about science; it has been about politics all along.

Marxism has failed and true Marxists only occasionally show their true colors. In the US even socialism is discredited and such a vote-loser that socialist politicians must play semantic games to hide their true intentions. The environmentalist movement, with its apocalyptic rhetoric and scare tactics, has replaced the class warfare - revolutionary rhetoric.

In both cases the aim is essentially destructive: tear down existing economic structures in the Utopian hope that something better will emerge. For the past several decades Marxism has been hovering on the brink of nihilism and for all practical intents and purposes the distinction between Marxism, radical environmentalism and anarchism has become a distinction without difference.

One of the degenerate forms of 20th century Marxism is the Frankfurt School and its 'Critical Theory.' Whereas formerly socialists denounced capitalism for producing poverty, Critical Theory denounces it for producing abundance, which they label "consumerism" and claim is incompatible with high culture. But the commitment of Critical Theory to high culture is tenuous at best. Critical Theory lumps in Enlightenment rationalism, "positivist" science, logic itself and natural law and calls them totalitarian.

And one can see their point: if there is such a thing as objective truth (be it moral, scientific or logical) then the all-important, exalted, autonomous individual must bow to that fact and acknowledge it. In their romantic striving to get free of the "despotism of logic and mathematics" they stamp their feet and declare their independence of such wicked and inconvenient truths.

Lesek Kolakowski, in his magisterial history of Marxism entitled, Main Currents of Marxism (3 vols.), says something interesting in Part III: Breakdown, Chapter X "The Fankfurt School and 'Critical Theory'" that is extremely relevant to the whole global warming hoax (although he never even mentions global warming in his book). He writes:

The Dialectic of Enlightenment contains all the elements of Marcuse's later attack on modern philosophy, which allegedly favours totalitarianism by maintaining a positivist 'neutralism' in regard to the world of values and by insisting that human knowledge should be controlled by facts. . . the truth of science is subordinated to the criteria of any interest whatsoever; this simply means that anything is right which suits the interests with which the scientist identifies himself." (pp. 1088-9, my bolding)

The sentence in bold print in particular jumped out at me and I wrote in margin "eg. Global Warming." This is obviously the source of the attitude displayed in Climategate and in the sloppy, ideologically driven work of the IPCC. Science has been corrupted by people who have imbibed a corrupt, degenerate, postmodern worldview and whose twisted form of Marxism (they would likely call it 'social justice') justifies them in their manipulation of the data to accomplish what they consider to be a good end.

Kolakowski also says:

Their 'critical theory' is in fact not so much a theory as a general statement that theory is of great importance, which few would deny, and a plea for a critical attitude toward existing society, which we are invited to 'transcend' in thought. This injunction, however, makes no sense as long as they cannot tell us in what direction the existing order is to be transcended. (p. 1090)

Those insiders who know how to read the coded language know that the goal is revolution, but the vagueness allows naive idealists to read in whatever they cherish. The Obama campaign with its vacuous "hope and change" slogan was a prime example of this approach.

Marxism is already intellectually and morally bankrupt and is in the process of becoming an historical curiosity like phrenology or alchemy. Yet its hold on degenerate Western universities remains strong. Increasingly it takes on the trappings and feel of a death cult, as can be seen in the increasingly violent rhetoric of Michael Moore, for example.

Despite, the intellectual bankruptcy of Marxism, however, there will be more dangerous nonsense in the years ahead before the universities can be reformed in accordance with the classical, Western, intellectual tradition embodied in the metaphysics of the Great Tradition. We may soon look back on the 'good old days' when all we had to worry about was global warming alarmism.

Technology is Fun!

One of the depressing aspects of being a Marxist is having to hate (and secretly fear) the technological progress and success of capitalistic society.

When I was going through my leftist phase (I never was a full-blown Marxist, just an inconsistent fellow traveler), I used to revel in moralistic disapproval of new gadgets and gizmos that make life easier and more comfortable. Like many leftists who self-righteously take the bus to work and look down on us car drivers with a scorn that easily rivals that of the Pharisee of Luke 18, I used to think that if only we could curb the use of fossil fuels, stop buying consumer goods and services and slow down economic activity we would be morally superior, even though poorer and less healthy. I have now given up that silly superstition.

So just to flaunt my new-found freedom to enjoy the fruits of science, I thought I'd point you to this cute little ad for the new iPhone 4S. I have the iPhone 4 but this looks seriously useful and handy.



Will I get one? Well, probably eventually. But I don't believe in going in debt for luxuries like this. Enjoy all good things in moderation and all that sort of thing.

But Christmas is coming . . . and yes, family you could take that as a hint!

Secular Politics Infiltrating the Church: Hell's Scheme to Bring Down Evangelicalism

From the discussion surrounding the unfortunate cancellation of George W. Bush's speech at a Tyndale event, it has become clear that many Tyndale students are in danger of being led astray into false doctrine by those for whom secular politics, rather than the Gospel, are the most important thing.

Between the time of Augustine and the French Revolution, politics in the West was developed within a basically Christian worldview. The Enlightenment and the revolutionary movements that emerged out of it constituted the rise of a new paganism. In part they were a return to pre-Christian paganism but they also constituted a new, distinctively post-Christian form of paganism. Insofar as these intellectual movements denied cardinal Christian doctrines and defined themselves over against Christianity, they are technically heresies. So the 19-20th centuries are the age of political heresies.

The most influential of these political heresies is Marxism. Marxism is best thought of as a Christian heresy in which key Christian doctrines are inverted like some sort of "Satanic Bible." For example, the idea of an eschatological kingdom of God in which heaven comes to earth is part of Marxism, but it happens through human effort according to the "iron laws" of history instead of happening through the great Divine intervention in history that the New Testament calls the Return of Christ.

Marxism views human nature as plastic and malleable and therefore denies the Biblical doctrine of original sin. Rejecting the Genesis accounts of Adam's fall and Paul's theological interpretation of the meaning of that event in Romans, Marxism views evil in the world as arising from inadequate social arrangements. Instead of seeing sin as inherent in us, it sees sin as inherent in social structures of oppression. This view of the problem also changes the nature of the solution. Instead of seeing individual salvation - redemption through the blood of Christ - as the solution, Marxism views social revolution and the common ownership of material goods as the solution.

Marxism is atheistic; it denies the existence of God and blames faith in God for the passivity of the masses who are slow to rise up in revolution at the urging of Marxist agitators. Religion, said Marx, is the opiate of the people.

Marxism urges the breaking of all of the Ten Commandments as part of its system. It urges us to covet our neighbour's goods and to rise up in a redistributive revolution to steal from the rich and give to the less rich. It worships material wealth and substitutes material wealth for God, thus breaking the first two commandments. Marxism despises the family and tradition and wants to see the family dissolved so that nothing remains except the individual and the all-Powerful State. (Even though Marx advocated the abolition of the State the depth of his sincerity can be gauged by the fact that in practice he wanted to use the State to abolish the State!)

By now you might be asking what this revolutionary, atheistic, anti-Christian system of thought could possibly have to do with Tyndale. Well, over the past century or more, Marxist ideas and Marxist apologists have gradually been worming their way into the heart of Christian institutions, churches, colleges and seminaries in order to corrupt pure doctrine and replace Christian thinking with Marxist thinking.

In the 19th century the German influence on North American Protestant theology was pronounced and it included higher criticism, evolution, idealism and socialism of various sorts. The resulting Social Gospel movement secularized Christianity by turning it from a religion that focuses on heaven and hell, sin and salvation, and Christ and the Bible into a religion that focuses on this life only, socialist politics and Marx and politics. The churches became social service agencies, theology was reduced to a vague humanism centered on tolerance and inclusion, pastors became social workers or community organizers and the enemy became big business, capitalism and the rich. The Bible is full of myths, the resurrection never happened, miracles are rejected and the real message of Jesus was simply "Love your neighbour." Since we are all good people there must not be any hell or judgment and salvation means adjusting the living conditions in this world so that there is equality of income.

In reaction to this horrifying perversion of the pure Gospel of Jesus Christ, Christians who wanted to remain connected to the orthodox tradition of the Church took their stand on Scripture and continued to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ who died for our sins and rose again. They were called the Fundamentalists and they were hated, ostracized, mocked, despised and feared by the Social Gospel heretics. Fundamentalism flourished between the last decades of the 19th century and World War II.

After World War II, some Fundamentalist leaders decided to try to break out of their ghetto and re-engage the wider culture. They wanted to get involved in higher education, intellectual debate and socio-political affairs. But they wanted to do so without giving up their orthodox, biblical, fundamentalist theology.

It was at this time that institutions such as The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the National Association of Evangelicals, Christianity Today and Fuller Theological Seminary were founded. Leaders such as Billy Graham, Harold Ockenga, Bill Bright, John R. W. Stott, J. I. Packer, Carl F. H. Henry and Harold Lindsell were prominent.

Over the next 50 years Evangelicalism grew and flourished. Many seminaries, publishing companies, liberal arts colleges and mission agencies were founded and grew rapidly. Evangelical churches grew quickly while liberal Protestant ones emptied out. Evangelicals helped elect the first Evangelical president, Jimmy Carter, and when he disappointed with his liberal policies, they helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. Leaders like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell became politically influential as Evangelicals began to join with Catholics to resist the increasingly aggressive secularism being pushed from the Left, exemplified in the demonic practice of abortion.

In some ways, Evangelicalism became a victim of its own success. Its rapid growth in numbers meant that much of the movement was a mile wide and an inch deep. Apologetics was always a big part of Evangelicalism because evangelism was at the center of Evangelical concern. But as Evangelicalism became bigger and more successful, it began to seem to be mainstream. The despised Fundamentalists of yesteryear now had the biggest, newest churches in town and went to nice colleges to become professionals and live an upper middle-class lifestyle.

In this situation, false prophet arose who played on the guilt felt by Evangelicals who were materially well off (or whose parents were) and used this as an opening to insinuate Marxist ideas into the thinking of younger Evangelicals. Like all heresies, Marxism uses a germ of truth as bait. Jesus does call us to love our neighbours and God is concerned for the poor. These two biblical truths, however, do not justify violent revolution, income redistribution by government coercion and class warfare. But they provide an opening for Marxist ideas.

One of the main ways Marxism attempts to beguile Evangelicals is through its critique of capitalism. If they can convince you that capitalism is the problem (rather than sin) then you will be open to focusing your attention on fighting capitalism rather than preaching the Gospel. That is good for Marxism, since its goal is to overthrow the capitalist order, and it distracts Christians from preaching the Gospel.

Once the Marxists have convinced a group of Christians that capitalism is the enemy, they can work to encourage you to become ever more envious and covetous. But the brilliance of their strategy is revealed at this point: they don't get you to covet and envy for yourself, but rather, you do so on behalf of the oppressed poor! That seems unselfish and noble.

Next, the strategy is to get you to slowly but surely forget about evangelism and focus all your attention on "social justice ministry." This is a process in which you gradually get used to neglecting the well-being of the souls of the people you are reaching out to and concentrating on their material well-being in this life only. It begins by an innocent-looking theological move in which you are asked to accept the idea that mission includes both social service and evangelism as co-equal parts of the mission. But in practice one always is more prominent than the other and you will soon be told that to make evangelism the most important is unloving and unjust. Before long, evangelism drops out of sight altogether in many cases and Evangelical mission has been turned into a new, updated version of the Social Gospel.

One thing to remember is that practice precedes theory. The theological changes come later. First, we change the actual, on-the-ground way of doing mission that only later do we revise our theology to go along with the new way of doing it.

By the time the actual theological changes are made, it is almost too late because the whole meaning of Christian mission will have already been secualrized and theology grows out of mission.

Marxism is corrupting Evangelicalism today on many levels and in many ways. Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear must be alert and understand the times.

Why Anti-capitalism is Irrational and Harmful

At this stage in history there should not be anybody left who opposes capitalism, or, to use the term I think is more precise: free enterprise.

The 20th century has seen one socialist experiment after another fail. A few small, countries with vibrant capitalist sectors such as Sweden have managed to make the welfare state last a long time without going broke, but now social democratic Europe teeters on the brink of economic collapse. The more the US tries to imitate Europe, the closer it moves to collapse as well. The roll call of utter failure is long and depressing: the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia, much of Africa and South America, etc. Only market economics work in the modern world.

Yet Christians often are found among the out-dated, romantic, Utopian forces that oppose free enterprise and this is a scandal. It makes Christianity look anti-intellectual and anti-scientific. It also make us look like ideologues whose professed concern for the poor is less than totally sincere.

Here are three reasons why anti-capitalism is irrational and harmful:

1. Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other social force, system or institution in history. The invention of Capitalism in Europe was as significant as step forward as the invention of agriculture in the distant past. Middle class people people today live better than European royalty did a few centuries ago - when 90% of the population was at subsistence level or below.

Marxism has glorious, stirring rhetoric; Capitalism has measurable, observable results. The invention of Capitalism has allowed nations to create wealth by trade, entrepreneurship and innovation. One essential condition for economic success is limited government and it is no accident that Capitalism emerged only in countries where the absolute power and scope of government was kept in check. All forms of Statism including Fascism, Communism, Socialism and the Liberal Welfare State would roll back this check on big government and remove the conditions under which Capitalism works.

2. Capitalism is the only economic system that allows for individual liberty, which is essential to human flourishing. All statist economic systems produce populations of perpetual adolescents who never learn to stand on their own two feet and take personal responsibility for supporting themselves. (Just look at the recent extension of adolescence in our society to the period lasting from puberty to the late twenties.) Capitalism is compatible with personal liberty and personal responsibility because it punishes bad moral choice and rewards good ones. It allows for multiple fresh starts in life.

If a person works hard, avoids drugs and drunkenness, get married and stays married, this person will not be in poverty and will rise to the level of his or her abilities in the world. But whether a person is rich or poor, it is possible under Capitalism to be independent and fully equal before the law with others. This is to recognize the moral nature of the universe and to come to terms with it, which is an essential task of human life.

3. Capitalism is compatible with Christianity. Notice, I do not say it is Christianity nor that it is always accompanied by Christianity. Rather, Christianity makes Capitalism possible and Capitalism itself does not threaten Christianity. All forms of statism involve the all-powerful State attempting to take the place of God and are thus implicitly alternative religions to the worship of the One, True God.

A country that is highly influenced by Christianity in the form of a large church or churches will have the advantage of a strong social force preaching self-restraint and moral living. Only a society in which the majority of the population choose virtue over vice and voluntarily restrain their lusts will be able to preserve political liberty. Without the virtue that everywhere accompanies the spread of Christianity, chaos will cause people to look to the Dictator, the Police State, the Nanny State or some form of statist control in order to make life bearable. In such cases, Capitalism cannot work. Capitalism and political liberalism in general, cannot work in a non-Christian country for long without collapsing into some for of statism.

On the other hand, Capitalism creates liberty for the individuals Christianity is trying to convert to the Faith and in a capitalist society there is sufficient mobility and freedom for individuals to become Christians and function differently on the basis of their faith.

Capitalism implicitly recognizes the truth of two major Christian doctrines: original sin and the need to serve the neighbour. Capitalism is often said to be built on greed, but that is simply a slander. Capitalism involves producing goods or services your neighbour needs, wants and is willing to pay for. If you don't serve the neighbour, you starve. And Capitalism recognizes that people are naturally acquisitive and greedy because of sin and structures economic exchange in such a way that channels this negative energy into socially useful and productive endeavors. If you live next to a greedy, millionaire, would you rather that he channeled his energy into systematic looting and robbery or into building a construction business or a store? If you answered the former, you might be a socialist.

Anti-Capitalism, then, is irrational and harmful to society. The problem with modern Western nations like Canada, America and the nations of Europe is not that we have too much Capitalism; it is that we do not have enough of it. Most of Capitalism's bad press derives from people thinking that distortions of it are the real thing. What Obama is doing with "green energy" or the auto industry is not capitalism but cronyism and statism. What they do in China is more like Mercantilism than Capitalism despite the use of the term "State Capitalism."

Capitalism does require the rule of law. There must be laws enforced by the State which create a level playing field by, for example, limiting monopolies, making bankruptcy possible and enforcing a minimal level of health and safety regulations. The goal is equality of opportunity. But the tendency of the State in modern society is to try to create equality of outcome, which requires government intervention on a scale that is incompatible with individual liberty.

Human inequality of abilities and character is a permanent feature of life in a fallen world. Therefore some will become rich and others remain poor, while the majority will be in the middle. We should care for the poor with charity and accept that equality of income is impossible without a coercive assault on individual liberty that will cause more problems than it solves.

If this life were the end of human existence and if there were no future life - no heaven and hell or Day of Judgment - then human inequality would be tragic. But for the Christian, this life is important but not all we have to hope for. Therefore, personal liberty exercised through moral choice is a necessary aspect of fulfilling our human purpose on this earth. This world is a preparation for the next life and any economic system that depresses individual choice in favor of a vision of social justice as income redistribution and equality of outcome is inimical to religion. In trying to bring heaven to earth, it fails to let us be prepared for the real heaven. As every serious Christian theologian in the history of theology has recognized, relative wealth and poverty (above the level of subsistence) is of secondary importance to character, religious commitment and worship.

This is a hard saying for materialistic, atheistic, socialists. But it shows what a gulf exists between Christianity and all forms of statism. It really is a worldview divide that cannot be bridged except by conversion in one direction or the other.

Looters and Other Irrational People

Like a lot of people (if you can believe the Amazon.com rankings) I read Atlas Shrugged last summer. I had heard a lot about Rand and read a bit about her philosophy. Obviously, I don't buy her philosophy (Objectivism); it seems to be some sort of weird, naive, "benevolent Nietzscheanism." And she is, of course, an atheist. She appears to take Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and his idea that each one pursuing his own enlightened self-interest being good for all to an extreme. People acting in their own self-interest without the moral restraint that comes from religion has never worked so far in history, however, and even Adam Smith would not have believed such a fairy tale.

But there is something to be gained from reading the novel and that is insight into what is going on all around us today. Rand paints an exaggerated picture of what big government, statist, socialism combined with crony capitalism looks like. She creates one dimensional characters who speak in cliches and express the same political beliefs many people espouse today, only in an extreme manner. I suspect that readers who encountered the book prior to 2008 would tend to find it over-wrought and unrealistic, while those who, like me, read it during the age of Obama find it frightening because its extremism is too close to the reality we are currently experiencing to be comfortable.

When you listen to the words of people like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Ed Shultz, Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton and Paul Krugman, you feel like they are spouting lines from the book. When Obama trots out his standard issue, first-year university student, Marxist class warfare rhetoric it feels like the 19th century never ended. When they call duly elected members of congress "terrorists" and "hostage takers" for wanting to balance the budget and keep the country from going bankrupt, you have to wonder if they ever said a sincere word in their lives.

The liberals who control the Democratic Party are just "looters," to use Rand's term. They don't seem to care about the future or about the constitution or about national security. All they care about is spreading around more goodies for their friends and bribing voters with borrowed money. Even though the US government currently borrows 43 cents out of every dollar it spends, they want to increase spending and tax "the rich." How long can this go on before the country collapses? In Rand's dystopia, the United States is in the middle of a long, agonizingly slow, train wreck.

They are justly called looters because they don't think about producing, only about redistributing. They don't think in terms of saving, only spending. They are not into delayed gratification. They are, in the end, irrational because they are destroying the goose that laid the golden egg.

I read Terry Eagleton's defense of Marxism a while ago and what really struck me was the candid admission that Marxism is entirely parasitic upon capitalism. He admitted that Marxism is bad at creating wealth and can only succeed in an advanced capitalist society that already has created surplus wealth. Marxism can then redistribute this wealth.

Two things struck me when I read this. First, he is admitting that the whole movement of Third World socialism, which has tried to sell socialism to underdeveloped poor countries is a total and complete fraud. For most of the twentieth century, idealogues have captured one poor, third world country after another and imposed a dictatorship on it instead of allowing it to grow rich and develop through capitalism - and this is done in the name of social justice with the blessing of many Christians! Second, if Marxism cannot produce wealth what happens after all the wealth produced prior to the revolution is used up? It would seem that what happens next is what we saw with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia today is a sick, broken, dysfunctional country with a declining population, a declining life expectancy and a lowered standard of living. It is flirting with dictatorship, which may be the only way to maintain law and order as conditions worsen.

Europe is going the way of the Soviet Union and it would be premature to suppose that China will avoid the same fate unless it reject Communism. Only in the US does the will exist among a large portion of the population to fight back against the looters. The US is not quite ready yet to go quietly into that good night. In the US the will to live free still exists in defiance of the looters, the socialists, the big government liberals, the liberal media and the liberal Christian, "social justice" agitators.

Will the US be able to resist the Marxist disease that has felled most of the West and so many victim countries around the world? The providence of God is inscrutable but we should pray that it does for all our sakes.

Rowan Williams: Marxist Subversive

Rowan Williams' recent intervention in partisan politics on behalf of the Left has prompted journalists to do a little digging on his past political views as background for understanding his present views. A story in the Telegraph by Jason Lewis and Jonathan Wynne-Jones (HT Virtue Online) gives interesting background on Rowan Williams' radical, neo-Marxist past:

When he launched a stinging attack on the Coalition government over policies "for which no one voted", the Archbishop of Canterbury put himself squarely in the centre of a political storm.

Critics accused him of political bias, claiming it was a throwback to the days when his predecessors regularly clashed with past Conservative administrations.

But perhaps they should not be too surprised, as it can be revealed that the Archbishop has a long-standing left-wing political past.

The young Rowan Williams was once labelled 'a subversive' by a senior MI5 officer over his involvement with a group of Marxist, Trotskyite and socialist campaigners.

The secret briefing papers were seen by then Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher and circulated to MPs.

Last week Dr Williams, who describes himself as a "lapsed" Labour party member held private talks with Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition, in the wake of his New Statemsman article which attacked the coalition.

The future head of the Church of England first came to the attention of the Security Service when he helped found a left-wing Christian group during his student days at Oxford University.

He wrote the original manifesto for the Jubilee Group, claiming capitalism was in its death-throes and 'threatens to inflict even greater violence on manking (sic) than it has done before'.

Rubbing shoulders with left-wing politicians such as Tony Benn and the late Eric Heffer, he wrote: 'We must make our stand with the oppressed'.

The Jubilee Group was identified as a "problem" neo-Marxist organisation in confidential intelligence documents drawn up by MI5 officer Charles Elwell.

This is interesting as it shows that his left-wing bias is deep-seated and long-standing. His main beef with New Labor seems to be that it was not left-wing enough. The article goes on to give some of the most illuminating quotes from documents authored by the "red" Williams.

Dr Williams was a leading member of the radical Jubilee Group's executive committee during the 1970s and 1980s alongside Mr Heffer, Mr Benn and Communist priest Rev Alan Ecclestone.

The archbishop, an Oxford graduate, was ordained a priest in 1977 but spent almost all of his clerical career until he was consecrated a bishop in 1991 as a lecturer at Cambridge and Oxford universities.

In 1974, he had co-written a manifesto for the group with his friend John Saward, now a Catholic priest, in the Horse and Jockey pub on Woodstock Road, Oxford. They claimed: "We are "subversive contemplatives". We are not shallow activists."

Their manifesto railed against "the ruthless pursuit of private gain" and the "idolatry of profit" adding: "We cannot...feign neutrality, or remain uncritical, in the face of a society based upon the ruthless pursuit of private gain and unlimited consumption."

It concluded: "We do not run away from history. We know what the present crisis of capitalism demands of us...we are in the death-throes of late capitalism, which threatens to inflict even greater violence on mankind than it has done before, we must make our stand with the oppressed, with the movement for liberation throughout the world."

According Rev Dr Ken Leech, the group's founder member, the manifesto was never formally adopted. He said: "It reflected our thinking at the time, but the view was it was too much of a rant. It was a fascinating document, but rather triumphalist, and we rejected it."

He added: "At the time we had never heard of Rowan Williams. He was introduced to us by John Saward. But he became very involved, regularly attended meetings, running our literature committee, giving lectures and writing pamphlets."

Together they edited a series of essays "Catholic and Radical" for the group, and the Rev Dr Leech is still in regular touch with the Archbishop who hosted a 70th birthday party for him at Lambeth Palace last year.

He added: "I would not want to commit Rowan to the language of 1974...but it does really show the heart of the theological focus of the man and this has not changed."

- - - snip - - -

During this period Dr Williams was arrested for "singing Psalms" at a CND demonstration outside RAF Lakenheath, a nuclear weapons base in Suffolk, and questioned Baroness Thatcher's references to her religious convictions to back her political views.

In a speech at Edinburgh University in 1989 he talked of "the alarming religiosity of Ronald Reagan (then US President) and Margaret Thatcher."

So he is anti-capitalist and anti-American and he worked for unilateral Western nuclear disarmament at a time when Soviet expansionism was at its height and the Soviets dreamed of conquering Western Europe. He also criticized Thatcher and Reagan for being too religious, which is code for being orthodox, rather than liberal. When politicians are left-wing politically and liberal theologically, they can be as religious as they like and Marxists never criticize them for it.

I don't know what you would call a person with such views but some would call him a traitor to his country and to the West. Maybe one couldn't quite go that far, but I think it puts his left-wing, anti-biblical and anti-traditionl views on sexuality in a very interesting light. There are many non-Marxists who have, nonetheless, fallen for the cultural Marxist line, but there are very few Marxists who have not adopted the cultural Marxist line as a matter of course.

The goal of cultural Marxism is the infiltration of Western institutions, including the Church, and the gradual destruction of the philosophical, ethical and theological bases of Western culture. This will inevitably lead to the erosion and collapse of the family as the main bastion of resistance to the total state, which is necessary to implement socialism and destroy capitalism.

It seems to me that the crying need of our age is for Christians to understand and oppose cultural Marxism and to understand the revolutionary implications of the sexual revolution.

The promotion of anarchy, as in the recent riots in Vancouver after the Stanley Cup finals and the G-7 meetings in Toronto, is the Marxist method of putting strain on civil society and pushing toward a breakdown of order that will provoke an authoritarian backlash. This backlash will be useful to the Marxists in one of two ways: it might be seized by them and become a vehicle for the revolution or, alternatively, if they cannot get control of it then they will hypocritically criticize it as fascist and pose as the forces of liberation.

In any case, Marxism is Marxism. It is heretical and dangerous to a free society. Unfortunately, churches like the Anglican Communion are infested with Marxists to the very highest levels. One of the benefits of schism may well be to isolate the Marxists in their own dying institutions until they die out instead of allowing them to control the entire communion.

Evangelical churches need to be on the look-out for heresy and need to understand the various forms Marxism takes. This is a subject that should be discussed and debated far more than it is among conservative Christians of all denominations. We can be grateful for newspaper articles like this one, which bring to light the sources of the left-wing bias exhibited at the very top of the Church of England.

Yoder and the Evangelical Left

Mark Tooley has a good review of Peter Leithart's Defending Constantine at the American Spectator. He writes of John Howard Yoder's influence on the Evangelical Left:

Much of the Evangelical Left, so influential on Christian college campuses and increasingly prominent in Washington, D.C., relies on neo-Anabaptist beliefs. Sojourners activist Jim Wallis, who last week launched a crusade against "cuts" in the 2012 federal budget, adheres partly to this tradition. These neo-Anabaptists demand total pacifism and reject the military. Unlike traditional Anabaptists, they are not separatists, and many exuberantly advocate Big Government control over medical care, food, energy, and virtually all of life. The godfather of sorts for these disjointed neo-Anabaptists was the late Mennonite theologian and Notre Dame professor John Howard Yoder. He joined most Anabaptists in assuming that Christianity was massively corrupted by 4th century Roman Emperor Constantine's embrace of Christianity. The resulting Christendom created over 1,600 years of wars and oppression ostensibly in the name of Christ.

Read the whole review here.

It strikes me as right that Tooley, who is such a keen observer of all things having to do with theological liberalism, should identify John Howard Yoder as the "godfather" of the Evangelical Left. This is precisely why I was drawn to him in the 90's and also precisely why I now find his theology to be pretty much useless, except when it is dangerous.

Someone asked me just this morning how I became so conservative (politically and theologically) and I am never sure if I fully understand it all yet myself. But one major flash of insight came when I realized that the cultural Marxists - who are so powerfully influential today in academic and cultural elite circles - hate the traditional family, traditional sexual ethics and the sanctity of human life as much as they hate capitalism. That ended my ability to posit moral equivalence between the Left and the Right. Compared to the Right, the Left is far more evil. They simply are not equivalent.

I mention this because Tooley's paragraph above makes clear that Yoder's influence was to train a generation of younger Evangelicals to hate and despise their own cultural heritage - to reject as violent, colonial, patriarchal and racist the legacy of Western Christendom over the past 1500 years. By doing so, Yoder helped create a void into which cultural Marxism could move. Marxism Has been in the process of colonizing the ecclesiastical structures of a dying Christian faith in the West for over a century now. As faith in Jesus Christ declines, Marxism offers a modern, this-worldly substitute complete with eschatology, guilt, martyrdom, holy books, a prophetic stance and much more.

This is part of the explanation (which of course is far more complex than this one little point) for why the Evangelical became "Left" politically and economically. And it explains why those who first embrace economic Marxist theories are so susceptible on all the other "culture war" issues: sanctity of life, traditional marriage, sexual morality etc. There is a connection between rejecting one's cultural traditions, embracing the sexual revolution and using Marxism to criticize capitalism. These three moves fit together and reinforce one another.

But maybe it all starts with a loss of confidence in one's tradition, one's culture and one's heritage. If so, the influence of Yoder has been massive - and tragic.

Defending Free Speech Against the Hard Left and Islam

Geert Wilders is fighting for freedom in Europe and there are two fronts: one is political Islam and the other is the hard Left. He is not a far right or fascist; he is one of the few true liberals left in politics in Europe.

He has an opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled: "European Free Speech Under Attack" and this is how it begins:

""The lights are going out all over Europe," British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey famously remarked on the eve of World War I. I am reminded of those words whenever I read about Europeans being dragged into court for so-called hate-speech crimes.

Recently, Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard, president of the International Free Press Society, had to stand trial in Copenhagen because he had criticized Islam. Mr. Hedegaard was acquitted, but only on the technicality that he had not known that his words, expressed in a private conversation, were being taped. Last week in Vienna, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, an Austrian human-rights activist, was fined €480 for calling the Islamic prophet Muhammad a pedophile because he had consummated his marriage to a nine-year old girl. Meanwhile, my own trial in Amsterdam is dragging on, consuming valuable time that I would rather spend in parliament representing my million-and-a-half voters.

How can all this be possible in supposedly liberal Europe? The Dutch penal code states that anyone who either "publicly, verbally or in writing or image, deliberately expresses himself in any way that incites hatred against a group or people" or "in any way that insults a group of people because of their race, their religion or belief, their hetero- or homosexual inclination or their physical, psychological or mental handicap, will be punished."

Early in 2008, a number of leftist and Islamic organizations took me to court, claiming that by expressing my views on Islam I had deliberately "insulted" and "incited hatred" against Muslims. I argued then, as I will again in my forthcoming book, that Islam is primarily a totalitarian ideology aiming for world domination."

This opinion of his - that Islam is a totalitarian political system disguised as a religion - is certainly an extreme opinion. But it is a reasonable point of view with a lot of actual evidence in its favor. It is not based on fantasy but on horrible violent acts and the historical record. What ought to upset every freedom-loving person is that both Islam and the hard Left both want to shut him down, silence him and prevent an open debate.

Every time the supposed "religion of peace" reacts to some provocation like the burning of a Koran or the publication of a cartoon by murdering, burning and raping, it simply adds support to Wilders' point. And every time he is hauled into court by left wing elitists or receives death threats from outraged Muslims he is proven to be right.

The world thought that the Fall of the Berlin Wall was the end of totalitarianism in Europe. How naive those who thought that look now. Wilders writes:

"My trial is a political trial. It is tragic that after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, political trials in Europe were not cast onto the ash heap of history. Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has previously referred to the European Union as the "EUSSR." One of his arguments is that in the EU, as in the former USSR, there is no freedom of speech."

Just as the Greeks were conquered militarily by Rome and yet conquered Rome in language, culture and ideas, so the ideas of Marxism are slowly but surely taking over Western Europe and pushing the ideals of liberty to the curb. The secularist, ruling elites hate Christianity so much that even Communism and Islam - the two greatest threats to European culture in history - do not scare them. Their blind, irrational hatred of reason, science, freedom and the Christianity that created these cultural goods drive them to destroy Europe's freedom in the name of Secularism, Scientism and Socialism.

In the 1930s, two left-wing groups, the Marxists and the Nazis, fought each other but united against the liberal Weimar Republic. Both the International Socialist (the Communists) and the National Socialists (the Nazis) wanted power. But the both hated liberalism and Christianity so much that they united against liberal democracy. History has a way of repeating itself until we learn from it.

Geert Wilders is not right about everything. I disagree with him on some issues. But he is a hero and he is courageous. Those who would kill or silence him reveal themselves to be enemies of mankind in so doing.

Read it all here.

Marx versus Amos: Two Incompatible Visions of Justice

Christopher Benson asks: "Who is Afraid of Karl Marx?" All sane people who desire justice and peace should fear the ideas of the Romantic Sophist who has inspired a horrible ideology that has led to more deaths and oppression in one century than any other set of ideas one can mention.

Benson has started up a blog discussion of Terry Eagleton's new book Why Marx Was Right, on which I have been commenting in recent posts. Benson quotes me as an example of a Christian who opposes Marx and he quotes Merold Westphal as one who argues in favor of Marx's ideas. Benson claims that I represent the majority viewpoint, a claim I find imprecise and misleading.

While it is true that most Americans (and a smaller majority of Canadians) likely oppose Marxism, the "Ruling Elite" is heavily skewed toward a pro-Marxist stance and their influence is much greater than that of the "Great Unwashed." And many Christians who ought to oppose Marxism have picked up many of his ideas without quite realizing the provenance of those ideas.

Benson quotes Westpahl as saying:

"There is something profoundly biblical in Marx’s critique of modern society. Or, to speak more generally, the hermeneutics of suspicion in the hands of modern atheists is not only a secular theology of original sin; it is also a secular version of the prophetic message. Those who profess to take biblical authority seriously can ignore (or refute) it at their peril.

Some may want to respond: “But we have Amos, so why do we need Marx?” The question is fair and deserves not one but two answers. First, we need Marx as well as Amos, perhaps Marx as a commentary on Amos, because Marx is about us in a way that Amos is not."

I have run into this point of view very frequently both among simple, ordinary people, who have swallowed a certain line and among educated, scholars, who really ought to know better. Some peddle this line knowing it is false as pure propaganda for ideological reasons. I have little to say to them except: "For shame!" But many people parrot this line sincerely thinking it is true and that Marx is just a modern version of Amos. It is those people I wish to address in this post.

Simply put, my thesis is that the ideas of Marx
and those found in Amos are utterly incompatible.
Amos is right, Marx is wrong, and the more you side with
Amos the more of Marx's ideas you will need to give up.

A blog post can only provide an outline of an argument; a book is badly needed on this topic. However, here is a beginning of a rough outline of an argument.

1. Amos is addressing the rich, the rulers, and the society as a whole, while Marx addresses the working class, that is, the poor.

Amos calls on the rich to do do two things: (1) enforce the law - that is justice and (2) share their resources - that is charity. Amos is a conservative insofar as he believes that the law of Moses is sufficient and just needs to be implemented. He looks to the past for his ideals; for Amos the future is not the eschatological Utopia envisioned by Marx but rather the dark and foreboding Day of the LORD. (5:18-20) It is the responsibility of the rich to be charitable and it is the responsibility of the Judges to dispense justice equally to the rich and to the poor. Equality before the law, rather than equality of income is the ideal for Amos. It is the LORD who will bring judgment upon Israel.

Marx, however, addresses not the rich but the workers and he tells them that the law is simply a tool of the oppressors to keep them down and that charity is a joke. He urges them to rise up an revolt against the rulers, overthrow the government, expropriate property, raise taxes and then redistribute the wealth according the principle of "from each according to his ability - to each according to his need." Since someone has to decide who needs what and who can afford what, those who jump on the revolutionary bandwagon relatively early have an advantage in applying for those coveted positions in the new order. Marx preaches that workers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains and entices them with visions of a new world in which unicorns bring lollipops from over the rainbow. Once the dictatorship of the proletariat gets power, what could possibly go wrong?

"Proclaim to the strongholds in Ashdod
and to the strongholds in the land of Egypt,
and say, 'Assemble yourselves on the mountains of Samaria,
and see the great tumults within her,
and the oppressed in her midst.'
'They do not know how to do right,' declares the LORD.
those who store up violence and robbery in their strongholds."
(Amos 3:9-10)

2. Amos calls for the rule of law, which in his context would include property rights rooted in the 8th Commandment, while Marx calls for revolution against the established order, which he views as being based on property rights.

Amos has a high view of the law and sees it as objective, impersonal and knowable. Amos calls Israel back to Torah and assumes that the Law contains the answers to the injustices and economic problems Israel faces. Amos knows that property rights are the chief bulwark of the lower classes against those who would exploit them and he knows that the proper understanding and enforcement of the law is the best hope for the poor.

Marx, on the other hand, sees the law through the lens of class warfare and assumes that it reflects class interest and selfishness. It is a social construct that can easily be dismantled and remade with few negative consequences. For Marx, property rights must be turned into myths that can be discarded and it this hurts the lower classes more than it hurts the wealthy, well, you can't make an omelet with breaking a few eggs.

"Hate evil and love good,
and establish justice (misphat) in the gate;
It may be that the LORD, the God of hosts
will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph."
(Amos 5:15)

3. Amos discerns a spiritual root of a materialistic problem, while Marx sees religion as part of the problem.

For Amos, there is a natural and direct connection between sexual sin (2:7), hard-heartedness leading to a neglect of charity (4:1) and idolatry (5:25-27). Why? These are all violations of the covenant and the breaking of specific laws in the Law of Moses. To break the law is to rebel against the LORD, the God of the Fathers who delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt. All sins against the neighbor (Commandments 5-10) are rooted in sins against God (Commandments 1-4) as the very structure of the Ten Commandments shows us. Idolatry leads to greed and covetousness and then on to stealing and all the other sins against the neighbor.

For Marx, on the other hand, religion is merely the tool of the oppressors, the opiate of the people, a substitute for class warfare and revolution. To tell poor people not to covet the wealth of the rich is anathema to Marx; it is counter-revolutionary - reactionary. He would view Amos' refusal to call for revolution as a typically religious attempt to make the world safe for the status quo which benefits the wealthy and the powerful. He would view Amos' call for charity as too little too late. He would view Amos' concern about sexual sin as irrelevant and bourgeois.

For Amos, morality is embedded in religion and apart from religion there is no basis for justice or compassion. For Marx, morality is independent of religion and the need of the poor is all the basis for justice that is needed. For Amos, justice means obedience to the law, but for Marx the law, like religion, stands in the way of the impatient, insistent on taking what is due to the poor without fancy metaphysical or religious justifications. Need justifies all.

Amos is a prophet of true, purified religion; Marx is the prophet of post-Christian Naturalism.

"I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
I will not look upon them.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
(Amos 5:21-24)

Final Thoughts:
I have not been able to do a careful exegetical word study of the terms justice (mishpat) and righteousness (tsedaqah). However, I would submit that the proper meanings of these terms is different from the social ideal of equality of income attained by coerced redistribution of wealth preached by Marxism. It is easy for good-hearted Christian people to read into the text what they think sounds compassionate and fair.

The idea that everyone ought to have what they want and no one should be rich at the expense of the poor is a beguiling concept that sounds absolutely wonderful until you actually try to put it into practice in a fallen world. In this case, a system that takes our fallen natures into account and recognizes the selfishness that characterizes all of us is preferable to a system that redefines sin as income disparity and claims to be able to change human nature and eliminate sin by means of an economic and political system. In this case, aiming lower get higher results, while aiming too high causes a fall into the abyss.

The Spider's Web of Deceit That Paralyzes the Spirit

In Richard Reinsch's excellent article on Whittaker Chambers "Still Witnessing: The Enduring Relevance of Whittaker Chambers" he highlights this paragraph from Chambers' autobiography Witness, p. 83.

"What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind—the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul and its birthright in that mystery on which mere knowledge falters and shatters at every step. If I had rejected only Communism, I would have rejected only one political expression of the modern mind, the most logical because the most brutal in enforcing the myth of man’s material perfectibility."

Chambers' is exposing the spiritual roots of the rebellion called "Modernity," which go deeper than the rational, historical, philosophical or political roots.

Today is Whittaker Chambers' Birthday

Aaron Gardner at Redstate has a post on Whittaker Chambers consisting of some excerpts from an essay by Richard Reinsch on Chambers entitled "Still Witnessing: The Enduring Relevance of Whittaker Chambers."

For those who may not be familiar with Chambers' significance, here is the abstract of the Reinsch article:

Whittaker Chambers is best known today as the veteran Soviet spy who became, in William F. Buckley Jr.’s words, “the most important American defector from Communism” when he testified against members of his underground Communist cell in the 1930s. Yet Chambers did more than reject Communism: He revealed a key problem with modern liberalism. In his now-classic autobiography Witness, he argued that Communism ought to be rejected in the name of something other than 20th-century modern liberalism by showing how the two grew out of a common ideology that places unbounded confidence in state power. As he remarked, New Deal acolytes had no principled reason for opposing unlimited state intrusion into the social, economic, and political realms. Herein lies the source of Chambers’ ongoing relevance: While Communism stands discredited, many still accept its fundamental conceit that man makes his own reality and that the government is the solution to all our ills.

Here is a key passage from this essay. It expresses concisely why the sophistry of a Terry Eagleton must be resisted and rejected. Marxism fancies itself to be radical but it is not. It is modern through and through and in being modern it is a rejection of the Christianity that shaped the West prior to the rise of Modernity:

Chambers’ enduring relevance abides in his diagnosis of a West “sick to death” from the philosophical and religious choices it had made in the modern era. Man had too easily concluded that he creates his reality through his own mind and consent. In the 20th century, the horrific consequences for the human person, for liberty, and for civilization itself were the piles of dead bodies sacrificed by the terror regimes in pursuit of a liberationist politics that ended in man organizing the world against man.

The West itself, Chambers feared, was listless at the moment when it most needed strength. Chambers argued that the West’s weakness grew out of its tacit adoption of many of the philosophical errors on which Communism rested. A larger Western conversion, Chambers boldly urged, similar in many respects to his personal conversion would have to be made if Communism and its philosophical underpinnings were to be defeated. The West would have to emerge from its deep-seated materialism, its confusion over the nature of the person and his dignity, and its detached understanding of the free society’s conservative origins. This could happen, Chambers observed, only if the West reengaged the truth about God and man.

Chambers’ diagnosis troubles us today because of the West’s retention of so many of the ideas that shaped Communism. We still remain distant, if not cut off, from the intellectual and religious sources that shaped the West from its beginning. The contemporary West still asserts that reality should be understood through empirical reason alone, that man is merely a highly evolved creature; or, alternatively, it states that liberty is only a useful fiction because history, science, economics, and the state are the real movers carrying man forward.

This diagnosis is exactly the same as that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and John Paul II. The Modern misunderstanding of the nature of God has ruined its concept of man and is the root of all the disasters of the Twentieth century.

Eagleton on Marxist Revolution

In chapter 8 Eagleton considers the following objection to Marxism:

"Marxists are advocates of violent political action. They reject a sensible course of moderate, piecemeal reform and opt instead for the bloodstained chaos of revolution. A small band of insurrectionists will rise up, overthrow the state and impose its will on the majority. This is one of several senses in which Marxism and democracy are at daggers drawn. Because they despise morality as mere ideology, Marxists are not especially troubled by the mayhem their policies would unleash on the population. The end justifies the means however many lives may be lost in the process."

Eagleton's response to this objection basically comes down to this: "Look, it doesn't have to come down to this: we can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way." He argues that some reforms have involved violence while some revolutions have been bloodless so therefore there is no hard and fast distinction between the two. Real change is difficult and sometimes involves violence he claims complacently.

Eagleton claims that "one of the most urgent goals of the international socialist movement has been peace." (185) Without trying to be humorous, he says apparently with a straight face that one of the first acts of the Bolsheviks was to abolish the death penalty! (190) The Marxists, you see, are peace-loving, gentle souls who merely want to work for social justice. They gently urge a transfer of wealth from the pockets of the "rich" to the "people" and are always shocked and dismayed to encounter reactionary resistance. Imagine that! If wars are necessary, it is only because of Capitalist "encirclement" and "savage" reactionary violence. A Marxist is a man who sticks his hand into your pocket and is shocked - shocked I tell you! - when you punch him in the nose. In his mind, the Marxist was not robbing you, he was redistributing the wealth and for you not to cooperate is your condemnation. It is the Marxist's intentions you must consider, you see.

It always comes back to the politics of good intentions trumping all. Having admitted that both Stalin and Mao were "mass murderers on an almost unimaginable scale" (184), Eagleton dismisses the relevance of this fact with a wave of the hand: "Yet very few Marxists today . . . would seek to defend these horrific crimes." (184) Of what relevance is this? The point is that few of the Marxists who cheered the rise of Lenin and Stalin would have approved of such crimes and yet their implementation of or approval of Marxist ideas led to those crimes. And in the case of Mao, having seen what Marxism wrought in Russia, he tried to implement it anyway in China. Who cares if Marxists then thought mass murder would result or if Marxists today are glad it did? What could be less relevant to the question of whether we should support Marxism today? Marxism must be judged morally by its effects, not its good intentions.

Capitalism is much maligned by Marxists because it does not announce its intention to make all people equal and happy. Capitalism does not do so because it knows that this is an impossible dream that only justifies violence and misery. This is not a flaw in Capitalism, but rather its greatest strength. By assessing human nature realistically and not trying to change it fundamentally it is enabled to ask the question of how to design a system that mitigates the weaknesses of human nature and prevents the worst of suffering. By seeking to work with, rather than fundamentally transform, human nature, Capitalism has created a system that has lifted more people out of grinding poverty than any other system in the history of the world so far. It does far more good with its modest intentions than Marxism does with its romantic ideals.

For Marxism, what makes a revolution is that it produces men and women who feel and behave differently from their grandparents. (181) A revolution, as Eagleton defines it, changes human nature. This is precisely what makes Marxism so anti-humanistic and dangerous. It seeks to change human nature and the difficulty (impossibility actually) of this goal frustrates would be reformers, leads to revolution and then frustrates even the revolutionary thus eliciting more and more drastic and violent policies in a vain quest to reach the impossible goal Marxism sets for itself.

The rhetorical approach reminds one of Obama's: two extremes are presented (pacifists and sociopaths) and then Marxist violence is justified because it avoids both extremes. This rhetorical ploy has the effect of making one seem moderate - if the audience does not think too long and hard about it. The truth is that the real choice is between violent coercion which is aimed at restraining the worst excesses of human greed and the violent coercion which has no less of an aim than the total transformation of human nature and the elimination of greed. Put like that, Marxist violence stands exposed as Utopian, extremist and unrealistic. Aiming too high makes for disaster.

Conservatism is not the opposite extreme of Marxism. If the goal of Marxism is to achieve a revolution in which human nature is fundamentally transformed, the goal of Conservatism is not to keep everything exactly the same as it is. To attribute this motive to Conservatism is a Marxist debating ploy and it is dishonest. Rather, Conservatism stands for gradual, managed, incremental, steady change. Neither change nor stability are absolute; we all know that change will come. But will it be bloody convulsions or social evolution? Will it be the Anglo-American kind of slow evolution of parliamentary traditions and the gradual emergence of democracy or will it be the French and Russian descent into chaos and madness in the wild-eyed belief that something better will emerge on the other side?