Christians Defending Bat Flu Tyranny and Oppression are Deluded and Deceived

The last Anglican priests that I spoke to in person were those of my own parish in March of last year, the day before the bishop’s order shutting down the diocese went into effect.   Since then, I have spoken to one of the priests by phone once, and communicated with the others through e-mail.   Oh, I could have seen them in person again, had I started attending services when the parish partially re-opened last summer.   That would have meant a compromise of conviction however.   I will not darken my parish door again as long as I am told to register in advance to do so, to impede my breathing in that hot, stuffy, building for the hour and a half that I am there by covering my nose and mouth with a stupid diaper that has reminded me of nothing so much as a the Mark of the Beast since it was first introduced, and to “socially distance” while there.   As far as I am concerned telling people to pre-register to book a place in Church because only a limited few will be admitted constitutes turning people away from the Ministry of Jesus Christ in Word and Sacrament and is an act of blasphemy crying out to heaven for vengeance.   To be fair to my parish – and the entire Anglican Church of Canada – I did not include the practice of Communion in one kind in the above list of deal-breakers, since I think they are using pre-intinction as a means of distributing the Sacrament in both kinds and thus are not in technical violation of the Thirtieth Article of Religion (and the basic principles of the English Reformation).   I watch their services on Youtube but I refuse to regard this as “participating in an online service” or anything more than watching a broadcast of somebody else performing a service.   This is because I have taken to heart Aleksandr Soltzhenitsyn’s instructions on the day of his arrest in 1974 to those oppressed by Communist tyranny.   Those instructions were to “live not by lies”.   When the government refuses to respect the constitution’s limits on its powers and claims for itself the right to completely suspend our basic freedoms of assembly, association, religion, and, increasingly, speech, in its self-delusion that a respiratory virus can be stopped by government action, subjects the entire population to the absolute rule of medical technocrats, and goes out of its way to demonstrate its contempt for religion, classifying Churches and synagogues and mosques as “non-essential” while liquor and cannabis stores and abortion clinics are classified as “essential”, it comes disgustingly close to the Soviet-style Communist tyranny that Soltzhenitsyn suffered under and about which he warned the West.   While it is true that rights and freedoms are not absolute, as our governments have been saying in response to challenges to their actions, this is not at all at issue.   It deflects from the fact that they have been acting like their authority to limit our rights and freedoms is absolute – this is what “nothing is off the table” means – and this is the essence of totalitarian tyranny.

 

My purpose here is not to knock the clergy of my parish.   I have explained why I haven’t seen any of them in person since last March to lead in to the fact that apart from them, the last Anglican clergyman that I had spoken to in person, earlier the same month, was the Right Reverend Donald Phillips.    Donald Phillips was consecrated Bishop of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land in 2000, the year after I had left what is now Providence University College in Otterburne and moved to Winnipeg.   He served the diocese in this capacity until his retirement upon the consecration of his successor, the current incumbent, the Right Reverend Geoffrey Woodcroft, in November 2018.   When I was confirmed in the Anglican Church as an adult, he was the bishop to do it.

  

It was at the Centennial Concert Hall that I ran into him and his wife Nancy about a week or so prior to the lockdown.  2020 was the 250^th year since the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven.   As part of its celebration of this anniversary, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra performed all five of his Piano Concertos and his Choral Fantasy over the course of the two evenings of the 6^th and 7^th of March.   The performances, conducted by WSO Music Director Daniel Raiskin, featured Russian pianist Alexei Volodin.   The vocals were provided by the University of Manitoba Singers and the Canadian Mennonite University Chorus.    The 2019/2020 season was the first time in several years where I had opted to buy tickets for only a handful of concerts rather than the “Ultimate Classics” package that comes with one performance each for all the shows in both of the Masterworks series.   I lost my usual seat doing it this way, but was able to take in both of evenings of “Back to Beethoven” as the Piano Concerto marathon was called.    These were the last WSO performances that I attended.   They are likely to be the last WSO performances that I shall ever hear because the lake of fire will freeze into a solid block of ice before I ever pay concert admission to watch a livestreamed performance and am certainly not going to be bullied into taking an experimental new kind of vaccine that took less than a year to develop about which the long term side effects cannot possibly be known just to regain as “privileges” the rights that were stolen from me by power-mad paranoid hypochondriacs shortly after the concerts I have just described.

 

I have seldom attended a symphony, opera, or anything else at the Centennial Concert Hall without encountering at least one, and usually several, people whom I know, and this was no exception.   Indeed, I was seated right next to one old acquaintance for the Friday evening performance.   It was also in the Friday evening performance – some people went to both concerts, others showed up only for the one or the other – that I ran into Don and Nancy.  They were seated in the row behind me, a few seats down – very close to where my subscription seat had been, actually.  I chatted with them briefly in the intermission and after the concert.   Did any of us suspect at the time that shortly thereafter the diocese would be essentially closed and everyone forced into social isolation for over a year by public health orders?

 

All of the above is a very long introduction to the real purpose of this essay.   On the 9^th of last month the diocesan newspaper, the Rupert’s Land News, posted an article to its website by the bishop emeritus, entitled “Christians Protesting COVID-19 Health Orders are Misguided and Missing the Greater Call”.     This article also appeared on the website of the Winnipeg Free Press on May 12^th.   If it was not already obvious that I am of a very different opinion, the fact that the Winnipeg Free Press carried the article should confirm it.    It is almost a matter of principle for me to disagree with whatever they publish, especially on matters of religion.   I read it, nevertheless, for while I have disagreed with our previous bishop on other issues in the past, I have always found what he has to say, whether as a homilist or in the Rupert’s Land News, very interesting.   

 

Towards the end of his article, he raised the following hypothetical objections to his article:

 

Some might call into question the whole nature of what I am saying.  Should a Christian publicly challenge the actions of other Christians?   Is that not being judgmental?

 

His answer was “Not when the integrity of the proclamation of the Gospel is at stake”.  

 

Very well then.   Since nothing in recent memory has threatened the integrity of the proclamation of the Gospel more than the quisling behaviour of the Church leaders who collaborated with totalitarianism in the Third Reich and behind the Iron Curtain,  I claim our retired bishop’s justification for his remarks as my own for my rebuttal.

 

He begins by saying that one of the pastors with whom he disagrees – he does not mention any names but it was Tobias Tissen of the Church of God Restoration, just outside Steinbach – had been quoted as having said “We have no authority, scripturally-based and based on Christian convictions, to limit anyone from coming to hear the word of God.   We have no authority to tell people you can’t come to church.  That’s in God’s jurisdiction.”

 

Retired Bishop Don answers this by saying “the New Testament presents quite a different picture of the responsibility of the Church for itself”.

 

He proceeds to justify this statement by making reference, first to the bestowing of the “keys of the kingdom” in St. Matthew’s Gospel, and second to the Pauline epistles in which the Apostle “constantly confronts and admonishes churches to teach, direct, and sometimes even discipline their members so as not to hinder or distort the mission of the Gospel in the world and Christ’s command to his Church".

 

This is an interestingly novel way of interpreting these passages.   Yes, the “keys of the kingdom”, regardless of whether they are understood as having been given to St. Peter and his successors alone, all of the Apostles and their successors collectively, or the entire assembly of Christian disciples (the Church) collectively, have traditionally been understood to include the authority  to exclude from the fellowship of the Church.   In most Christian communions the technical term for the exercise of this authority is excommunication.    Some more radical sects use the word “shunning” with the same basic meaning but often with additional connotations of a more complete social ostracism.     This is not where the novelty lies.   What is novel in this interpretation is the suggestion that this authority can be legitimately exercised other than as corrective discipline in cases where someone refuses to repent of open sin or is found to be teaching serious doctrinal error.   Had our retired bishop not intended to suggest this it would have made no sense to bring the keys up in this context.   It is rather surprising, therefore, that he tries to bolster the suggestion with an appeal to St. Paul.   In his first epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul instructs them to excommunicate a man who has been committing “such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles”, meaning a type that was condemned and considered extremely shameful by the rather tolerant pagan culture of the time, an assessment to which  all the extent classical literature pertaining to the myth of Oedipus indeed, bears testimony.   In his second epistle to the Corinthians, however, he told them that the punishment had been sufficient and to forgive and comfort the man, who presumably had since repented.    The picture this paints of excommunicative authority is of a means of corrective discipline, to be applied as a last resort in extreme circumstances, and lifted as soon as repentance makes possible.   This hardly supports the idea that the keys can or should be used to bar people from the Ministries of Word and Sacrament, not as an act of corrective discipline, but as an instrument of public health policy.

 

 

Novelty is not a quality that is valued very highly when it comes to the interpretation of Scripture and doctrine in the Anglican tradition which has long appealed to the Vincentian canon as the gold standard litmus test of catholicity and orthodoxy.    In addition to the novelty of the Right Reverend Phillips’ interpretation of the keys, however, there is another problem in its conflict with Scriptural teaching on a multitude of other issues.

 

One example of this is the Scriptures’ teachings with regards to civil obedience.   If the pastors protesting the bat flu restrictions are at fault their error is in practicing Thoreau/Gandhi/King style civil disobedience, for which there is no Scriptural justification.   Civil obedience is commanded of Christians by St. Paul in the thirteenth chapter of his epistle to the Romans.   There are, however, clear exceptions.   The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament illustrates these.   If the civil authorities require the worship of a false god, believers in the True and Living God are not to obey, as the example of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who refused to bow to the golden image of Nebuchadnezzar and were thrown into the fiery furnace demonstrates.   If the civil authorities forbid the worship of the True God, believers are not to obey, as the example of Daniel himself in the incident that led to his being cast to the lions shows.   While the latter is the most obviously relevant of the two, I would argue that the first also applies here, in that the kind of trust and obedience the public health orders have been asking of us is the kind that properly belongs to God alone, making an idol out of medical science (George Bernard Shaw said, almost a hundred years ago, that we have not lost faith, we have merely transferred it from God to the General Medical Council, and never has the truth of this been more apparent than at present).   The Lord Himself summed it all up in the twelfth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel when He said “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”.  While a general civil obedience is rendering unto Caesar (the civil authority) that which is Caesar’s, obeying when they forbid the worship of the True God or require the worship of a false one, is to render unto Caesar that which is God’s, and that is forbidden of Christians by the Highest Authority.

 

Another example is the Scriptures’ teachings with regards to sickness.     In the Old Testament, the Israelites were told to separate those with leprosy, a far worse disease than the one that is frightening so many today, from the general community, to which they would not be readmitted until such a time as a priest had examined them and found them to have recovered.     There is not a hint anywhere in the Old Testament, that banning all healthy Israelites from the Tabernacle or Temple, let alone confining them to their own dwellings and forbidding them any social interaction with their extended kin, friends, and neighbours, would be an appropriate or acceptable manner of preventing the spread of contagious disease.   This is not surprising as it is an experimental new form of hyper-quarantine, first implemented in totalitarian countries like Red China, which the epidemiologists of what used to be the free world initially, although sadly mistakenly, thought they would never be able to get away with here.   The Old Testament isolation requirements for lepers, of course, had the effect of heaping further suffering upon those already inflicted.   Thus, when Jesus Christ arrived to fulfil the Messianic promise of a New and better Covenant, one of the most prominent signs announcing His identity as the Promised Redeemer was that He allowed the lepers to come near Him and healed them, even, in one notable instance, using tactile contact as the means of healing.   He healed all who came to Him with any affliction and instructed His Apostles to do the same.   The book of Acts records them doing precisely this.   The Jacobean instructions in what is widely believed to be the first book of the New Testament to have been written are “Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”   Rather a far cry from “Is there a nasty cough going around?  Let everyone stay away from the church, lock themselves in their houses, and never see anyone else without wearing a mask”.

 

Given what we have seen in the previous paragraph, is it surprising that in the two millennia of Christian history, which have seen plagues far worse than the bat flu ravage Christian countries and at times all of Christendom, never did the leaders of the Church see their duty, mission, and call in terms of shutting all the local churches down and denying the faithful access to the Word and Sacrament.   Rather they saw it as their duty to keep the churches open, so that in times of great physical peril – much greater than today – access to the source of spiritual health, more important than physical health, was not cut off and hope, therefore, was kept alive, as well as to minister to the physical needs of the sick and dying, even at the risk of their own health and lives.   When cholera hit Canada in 1832 and 1834, for example, John Strachan, who would become the first Bishop of Toronto in 1839 but was at the time the rector of the parish of St. James, refused to flee the city but remained to fulfil his priestly duties, visit the hospitals, minister to the sick and dying, and bury the dead.

 

Previous generations of Church leaders did not see keeping the churches open in times of far worse plagues than this comparatively moderate one as hindering or distorting “the mission of the Gospel in the world, and Christ’s command to the church.”

 

Our former diocesan chief shepherd asks the question “And what is that Gospel?” to which he provides an answer “It is the supreme command of Jesus Christ ‘to love one another as I (Jesus) have loved you’”.

 

This is a very enlightening answer.   Not enlightening in terms of the question asked.   In that regards it is just plain wrong.   It is enlightening in that it reveals much about the source of confusion here.

 

The Gospel is not the command to love one another.   The Gospel is not a commandment of any sort.   It is a message.   As its very name tells us, whether euangelion in Greek, or Gospel – contracted from the Old English “godspel” (“god” = “good” + “spel = “news”) it is Good News.   It is spoken in the indicative mood, not the imperative.   In the ministry of John the Baptist and in Jesus’ own early preaching ministry, when the Gospel was preached only to national Israel and the events around which the Gospel narratives of SS Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are centred had not yet taken place, that Good News was that the “Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”, i.e., the Messianic promises are being fulfilled before your very eyes.   After the Great Commission to take the Gospel to all the nations of the world, the Ascension, the descent of the Holy Ghost on Pentecost to empower the Church, and the preaching of the Gospel to the Gentiles, the Gospel in its mature and universal form was concisely stated by St. Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians.   It is that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and was seen by witnesses.

 

That this, and not the New Commandment, is the Gospel cannot be stressed enough.   The New Commandment is not “News” of any sort, Good or otherwise.   That we are commanded to love one another was hardly something unheard of prior to the Incarnation.   When Jesus said the Greatest Commandment was to love God and the second was to “love thy neighbour as thyself” He was quoting commandments already familiar from the Old Testament.   Nor was His statement that the whole of the Law was summed up in these a new revelation.   Indeed, while most often the Gospels place the two greatest commandments in His own mouth, in one notable instance He turned the question back on a lawyer who had been interrogating Him and got the answer He wanted (Luke 10:25-28) demonstrating that the idea was nor original with Him.   The similar “Golden Rule”, which appears in His Sermon on the Mount, is common to the ethical systems of almost all religions, and was notably stated, albeit in its negative “do not” form rather than the positive form Jesus used, by Rabbi Hillel, who died when Jesus was about twelve or thirteen (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat a, passage 6), and who said of it “that is the entire Torah, and the rest is interpretation”.     There is a kind of theology that sees in the command to love one another the essence of the Christian kerygma and treats everything asserted about Jesus Christ in the ancient Creeds as accidental trappings that can be discarded.  This theology, and note that I am not suggesting that the Right Reverend Phillips holds this theology, merely that his unfortunate wording here expresses a thought that belongs to this theology rather than orthodox Christianity, is nonsense.   If that were true there would have been no need for Christianity.   While there is a difference between the New Commandment and all these earlier commandments to love each other, that difference depends entirely upon the facts of the Gospel as stated by St. Paul.  Apart from that Gospel, the message of Christ’s death and Resurrection, the New Commandment is meaningless.   It is the Gospel that tells us what “as I have loved you” means.   Christ gave the New Commandment on the evening of His betrayal, to His disciples whom He had already told of His upcoming death and Resurrection, but like so many other things He said in St. John’s Gospel, it was these events themselves that made it comprehensible.

 

Isn’t it interesting that the example the New Commandment tells us to follow is that of One Who gave up His life for others?   Isn’t it also interesting that the New Testament repeatedly describes this act as one of “redemption”.   Today, the verb “redeem” and the noun “redemption” are often used in a sense that retains some of their connotations from New Testament usage but omits their original basic meaning.   To redeem meant to purchase someone out of slavery and set him free.   The New Testament writers use these words of the death of Christ to depict that act as one of purchasing freedom for mankind from slavery to sin.   Therefore, the New Commandment tells us that we are to love one another in the same way as He Who gave up His life to restore us to freedom.

 

This is interesting because the Right Reverend Phillips’ interpretation of the New Commandment which he confused with the Gospel itself is that we are to love others by doing the reverse of what Christ did – giving up our freedom for them.

 

Now he does go on to support his argument with evidence from St. Paul:

 

In 1 Corinthians chapter 9, Paul outlines the many ways in which he sacrifices his own self, his rights and privileges, his freedom in Christ, in order to effectively witness to the love of Christ.  “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some,” he said (1 Corinthians 9.22)

 

For the Christian disciple, the effective demonstration and proclamation of the love of God for all people must take precedence over any personal demand or freedom.

 

St. Paul wrote his epistles to the Corinthian Church at a time when some had cast aspersions on his authority as an Apostle.   A principle theme of both letters was to answer his detractors and establish confidence in this authority.   This is what the Apostle is obviously concerned with through most of the ninth chapter of 1 Corinthians.   In the first verse he gives his Apostolic credentials, in the second he declares that if he is not an Apostle to others he certainly is to the Corinthians for they are the seal of his Apostleship.   He then goes on to talk about all the privileges and freedoms which he has as much as any of the other Apostles but which he refrains from for the sake of the work.   The main point in all of this is that he, as a spiritual minister, is entitled to pecuniary support from them, but has refrained from claiming his right to the same.   This is spelled out quite plainly in verses seven to fifteen

 

I wonder what St. Paul himself would have thought if someone from the Corinthian Church had written back to him and said that two thousand years in the future, someone would take his words about giving up the financial support to which he was entitled, so as to more effectively carry out the ministry of preaching the Gospel to which he was called and which he is bound by necessity to preach, as evidence that the entire Church should shut down, close its doors, and bar people from coming to hear said Gospel preached.   I suspect he would be livid.   I doubt very much that he would be any more impressed by the same application being made of his words later in the chapter, about meeting every type of person to whom he is sent in their own walk of life so as to more effectively share the Gospel with them.

 

His Retired Grace then refers to another quotation from a different pastor – again unnamed, but this time it was Heinrich Hildebrand of the Church of God in Aylmer, Upper Canada.  Hildebrand had said “We are here to fight for God, we are here to defend the vulnerable.”

 

I could have told you what the bishop’s response to this would have been without having read it myself.  However, here he is in his own words:

 

Surely the vulnerable we need to be worried about are those being exposed to the COVID-19 virus by persons not following the public health orders.   Surely it is those languishing on ventilators in ICUs in hospitals across our country who are the most vulnerable!

 

I guess it all depends upon how we answer the question “vulnerable to what?”   Even if, however, the answer is “the bat flu”, the Right Reverend Phillips’ thinking appears to be rather muddled on the subject.   Those most vulnerable to the virus are not those who are exposed to it but those with complicating factors such as age, obesity, a compromised immune system, and other chronic conditions that make this virus more than just the non-lethal respiratory annoyance it is to the vast majority who contract it.   When such people, the actual most vulnerable, have come into contact with the virus it has seldom been because of “persons not following the public health orders”.   That is a lie, invented by arrogant politicians and public health officials such as those of our own province, in order to create a scapegoat for the failure of their own policies.  The fact of the matter is that the worst and most lethal outbreaks have taken place in nursing homes where the virus spread got in and spread without any health order violations in spite of such places have been locked down quicker and stricter than anywhere else.

 

The bat flu, however, is not the only answer to the question “vulnerable to what?”    Suppose that we supply “the public health orders themselves” as the answer to that question.   We then get a very different picture of who the most vulnerable are.

 

Yes, public health orders hurt people.   The kind of public health orders that have been enacted to slow or prevent the spread of the bat flu are especially harmful.   This has been acknowledged by the World Health Organization, and even by our provincial chief public health officer.   Take the mental health crisis for example.   The Canadian Mental Health Association reported last December about how the “second wave of the pandemic has intensified feelings of stress and anxiety, causing alarming levels of despair, suicidal thoughts and hopelessness in the Canadian population.”   It would have been more accurate for them to attribute this to the “second wave of lockdowns”.    Viruses don’t have this effect.   Mendacious media scaremongering might contribute to it, but overall this is exactly the sort of thing one would expect to see among people who have had all their social and community events cancelled for a year, have been forbidden any social interaction with their friends, and have been told their businesses or jobs are non-essential and must shut down.   Public health orders are the primary cause of this problem.   People are not meant to live this way, it goes against the social nature that God gave us, and when you force people to live in these conditions there will be disastrous consequences.

 

Since our bishop emeritus made use of the superlative degree of comparison in his own remarks about those vulnerable to the bat flu, I think it is fair game for me to do the same in my remarks about those vulnerable to the public health orders.   Yes, some people are more vulnerable to the ill-effects of public health orders than others.   Somebody who is single and lives alone will be more adversely affected by an order forbidding get-togethers with all except his own household than somebody who has a happy domestic life.   Somebody who is in an abusive and unhappy relationship will be worse off because of a stay-at-home order than somebody who is happily married.   Those who are independently wealthy, whose jobs can be done from home, and whose businesses are in no danger of being declared “non-essential” will not have the kind of hardships that lockdowns impose on those about whom none of these things can be said.    Since the beginning of the bat flu scare the people who have been most likely to shoot their mouths off about how this never-before-tried experimental universal quarantine is “necessary” to fight a virus milder than most of those that caused pandemics in the last century, to lecture the rest of us about how unquestioning obedience to these orders is the loving thing to do and how expressing concern about economic devastation and the rapid evaporation of civil rights and liberties and their constitutional protections is somehow “selfish”, have been the people on the “least affected” side of each of these spectrums for whom the lockdowns have been mostly an inconvenience.

 

I will close with an observation that is related to the previous paragraph but is not specifically in response to our former bishop’s article.  I note the irony that the clergymen who have been the most vocal in support of the public health orders have been the ones who preach the most about “social justice”.  Indeed, I cannot think of a single dissenter from among their ranks.   The dark irony of this is not just found in the fact that the public health orders, shutting down restaurant dining rooms and indoor public places like libraries and limiting homeless shelter capacities were put into effect before winter ended last year and again just before winter started having absolutely brutal consequences for the very poorest members of our society, while everyone who keeps droning on about “social justice” was glad to be ordered to stay home in their own warm bed.   It can also be found in the fact that the economic result of the public health orders and the lockdown experiment has been to greatly enrich the multi-billionaires of the social media tech companies, internet delivery services, and the hopelessly corrupt pharmaceutical industry while bankrupting and driving out of business all the little guys, whose entire life’s work, and often the life’s work of their parents and grandparents before them has been wiped out through no fault of their own, but by the arrogance of some health bureaucrat who arbitrarily ruled their livelihood to be “non-essential”.   This is accomplishing an economic transition to societies in which small, individually or family owned farms and businesses are unfeasible, and everyone must either sell their labour to some giant, multinational, corporation to survive, or live off of a government allowance.   This is what Hilaire Belloc called “the Servile State” 109 years ago.   At the time, the expression “social justice” was still in its infancy and to those who believed in it in its original sense, the Servile State depicted by Belloc was pretty much the opposite of what they called and strove for, the worst possible of worlds.   Today’s “social justice” clergy have been calling for “universal basic income”, citing the pandemic and the “necessary” public health response to it as demonstrating the need for this measure, the most immediate effect of which would be to greatly accelerate the transition to the Servile State.    Of course what they mean by “social justice” includes such things as Critical Race Theory, the inalienable right of biological males to participate in female sports, and every other notion of this type that left-wing academics have dreamed up and their students have uncritically accepted and regurgitated under the delusion that by doing so they are thinking for themselves, but precious little to do with anything that the expression meant a century ago.   Should any of them be interested in the original version, I recommend to them the essay by that grand old Canadian economist, political scientist, wit, and Anglican layman, Stephen Leacock entitled “The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice”.   I wonder what Leacock would have had to say about people who consider it to be an expression of Christian love to wish government control, greater and more intrusive than any extended or even dreamed of by the totalitarian regimes of his own day – he died in 1944 when Stalin and Hitler were both still in power - on their neighbours?

 

 

The True Church is not Electronic

In 1987, Augsburg Publishing House, the publishing arm of the American Lutheran Church which the following year would join with Fortress Press, the publisher of the Lutheran Church in America as part of the merger of the Lutheran bodies into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, published a book entitled Television and Religion: The Shaping of Faith, Values and Culture.   The release of such a book could hardly have been more timely – it went to print just as the various scandals surrounding Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were breaking.   The author of the book was the Reverend William F. Fore, who was the acknowledged expert at the time on the matter of religious broadcasting.    For the next couple of years he was a guest on pretty much every major radio and television talk show discussing the scandal and his book.  Rev. Fore, who passed away last July, was a minister of the United Methodist Church, and served as the Executive Director of the Communications Department of the National Council of Churches in Christ for a quarter of a century, retiring from this position shortly after his aforementioned book came out.   The fifth and sixth chapters of the book address the message and audience respectively of what he called “the electronic church”.    He had already been sounding the alarm about this “electronic church” for over a decade.

 

Indeed, in August of 1978 Fore gave an address by that very title – “The Electronic Church” – to a meeting of the Seventh Day Adventist Broadcasters Council in Oxnard, California, which was published in that denomination’s Ministry Magazine in its January, 1979 issue.   In that address he noted some interesting statistics.   Gallup had just conducted a survey of the religious views of both the “churched” and the “unchurched” in the United States.   “Surprisingly”, Fore commented, “religious beliefs and practices have undergone remarkably little change during the past 25 years.”   What made these findings surprising was that while beliefs in doctrines like the deity of Jesus Christ and practices such as daily prayer did not appear to be declining among Americans, even among the “unchurched”, the self-evaluated importance of organized religion in their lives was.   Fore suggested that the incongruity between these two things could be, at least partly, explained by the growth of religious broadcasting and that this was cause for concern.   He said:

 

What worries me is whether this electronic church is in fact pulling people away from the local church.  Is it substituting an anonymous (and therefore undemanding) commitment for the kind of person-to-person involvement and group commitment that is the essence of the local church?

 

As we shall shortly see, this was a legitimate concern and there is far more cause for alarm on this front today than there was back then.   First, it needs to be noted that there was another, far more obvious, reason why steady belief in such basic Christian truths as the deity of Jesus Christ might coincide with a decline in confidence in organized religion – and a decline in church attendance, for when Fore was speaking and writing about the danger of “the electronic church” we were already several decades into a period of drastic decline in church attendance, one which began shortly after the Second World War and which continues to this day.  

 

That reason was simply this – that in this same period of time, a great many of the churches had stopped preaching and teaching the basic Christian truths.   For everyone who could still truthfully recite everything in the Apostles’ Creed from “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth” to “The Forgiveness of sins; The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting. Amen”, churches whose ministers taught that Jesus was God’s Son only in the sense that He exemplified the way in which we are all children of God and that He rose again from the dead only in the sense that He lived on in the memory of His disciples, and who similarly explained away everything else in the Creed so as to make its opening “I believe” into an “I don’t believe”, were rapidly losing their appeal.   Nor did they have much of an appeal to anybody else.  Anybody out there who actually wanted to hear a lecture every week about racial and gender equity, recycling and reducing our carbon footprint, and other such trendy codswallop had plenty of opportunity to do so that did not involve getting up early on Sunday morning.   Others have certainly noticed the contribution of this factor to the decline in church attendance and affiliation.   Here in the Dominion of Canada, where the decline had been much larger than in the United States, two Anglican priests, George R. Eves, Two Religions: One Church (1998) and Marney Patterson, Suicide – The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada (1999), attempted, to little avail, at least with regards to the upper echelons of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, to warn the Anglican Church of Canada that this kind of liberalism was killing the church.   Others, such as the eminent Canadian sociologist of religion Reginald W. Bibby, have addressed this factor in a more detached manner.    Now, the United Methodist Church and the NCCC were both noted bastions of liberalism.   The late Dr. Thomas C. Oden had been well within the mainstream of the United Methodist Church  prior to his journey back from theological liberalism and political radicalism to “paleo-orthodoxy” through a study of the great theologians of the Christian tradition beginning with the Church Fathers prompted by a challenge from his Drew University colleague, Will Herberg, who had had to make a similar return to the roots of his own Jewish tradition in the Talmud and Midrash after his own break with his early radicalism.  The National Council of Churches in Christ is the American organized expression of ecumenism which, as Joseph Pearce has recently observed, “appears to be the willingness to dilute or delete doctrine in pursuit of a perceived unity among disparate groups of believers (irrespective of what they actually believe)” and thus the opposite of what it originally meant when applied in the early centuries to the General Councils that defined orthodoxy and excluded heresy for the entire church throughout the “whole inhabited world”.    My point in bringing this up is not to cast aspersions on the personal orthodoxy of the late William F. Fore but to show that for someone in his position, unless he wished to make waves, he had strong personal reasons to turn a blind eye to the connection between liberalism and declining church attendance and to tie the latter to religious broadcasters who, whatever else they might be legitimately accused of -  aggressive and dishonest fundraising, the sacrilege of reducing religion to popular entertainment, etc. – were seldom if ever liberals.

 

All of that having been said, Fore’s concern that for many people “the electronic church” was taking the place of local churches was a legitimate and valid one.   In his address to the Seventh Day Adventists in 1978 he said the following:

 

Radio and TV – especially TV – tend to produce a substitute for reality that eventually can begin to take the place of reality itself.

 

He illustrated this point by referring to an article in Broadcasting Magazine that described a television program entitled “Summer Camp” that purported to give kids the “summer camp” experience “without leaving home”, a particularly poignant example as it is difficult to conceive of an experience further removed from that of watching television than summer camp or a greater exercise in missing the point than trying to translate that experience into the television medium.   He went on to say:

 

My point is that exposure to the media tends to separate us from the world of reality, creating for us, in fact, a new reality…The situation, I predict, is going to get worse.

 

Before we take a look at just how true that prediction has become, let us consider the contrast he drew between the local and the electronic church.   He said:

 

[The purveyors of the electronic church] are building huge audiences that bring them fame, wealth, and power, but which in doing so substitute a phantom, a non-people, an electronic church, for the church of real people, with real needs and real gospel to share in the midst of their real lives.

 

It is no accident that the local church, the koinonia or community of believers, is such a central part of our Christian faith and life.  This is where we find Christ; this is where we confess our sins and find forgiveness and regeneration; this is where we act out our faith and where we shore up one another when we slide back in the faith.

 

The years since 1978 and now have seen an explosion in the development of electronic communications technology.   Personal computers and cellular phones have become more compact and affordable and therefore ubiquitous and, indeed, have now merged into smart phones that place the internet, which itself has evolved rapidly and exponentially in this period, at one’s fingertips wherever one happens to be.   The “electronic church” has evolved along with these media and in 2021 the “online church” – services viewed over the internet either while they are occurring through livestream or later if, as is usually the case, recordings of the stream remain available – has become a much larger part of it than the services broadcast on radio and television forty years ago.   Indeed, for almost a year now, the “online church” has been the only “church” available throughout most of the world as governments everywhere have used the pretext of the spread of a coronavirus notable more for its novelty than its severity to throw off the shackles of constitutional restraints and protected rights and liberties and conduct an insane social experiment in which they forbade in-person social interaction in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to contain the spread of the virus.   The leaders of the churches have, for the most part, opted to obey man rather than God and support this vile experiment by closing their doors and making services available to their parishioners only via the internet.   Thus, for the last year, the “electronic church” has more fully and completely replaced the real church, than Rev. Fore would have imagined possible in his worst nightmares back in the eighties.  

 

What is most troubling about this, apart from the whole submitting to godless totalitarianism aspect of it, is that whereas forty years ago, church leaders whether orthodox or liberal, would have largely shared Fore’s concern that for many people the “electronic church” was becoming a substitute for actual churches in which real people meet and worship and fellowship together and would have agreed with him that this was not a good thing, today, the church leaders who are saying “Amen” to the government officials who insist that we must sacrifice the mental and social wellbeing of all members of our communities, and the economic wellbeing of all except the most wealthy, in order to prevent people who are already at the end of their natural lifespans from dying a natural death a very short time earlier than would otherwise be the case, are now developing theological arguments for why the “electronic church” is a real church after all.    While the idea of a spiritual fellowship existing between all believers in different places is neither new nor unsound – this is a part of the meaning of “the communion of the saints” in the Creed – it is a different matter entirely to treat the act of praying and singing along, from your own home, while you watch a service that is taking place elsewhere through your computer screen, as if you and those actually participating in the service were somehow together in some virtual “place” that the internet has generated.   Doing the latter is far closer to living in the kind of artificial “reality” from which in the movies a “red pill” is required in order to escape than it is to the orthodox doctrine of the “communion of the saints”.

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Russia a year after the Bolsheviks, a murderous gang of criminal revolutionaries, fanatically devoted to building what they believed would be an ideal society based upon collective ownership, materialism, science, and atheism regardless of whatever cost in human lives and suffering had to be paid in order to bring this about, seized control of that country, murdered the Tsar and the rest of the royal family, and began its long, but mercifully unsuccessful, war of extirpation against the Russian Orthodox Church.   His mother raised him, as best she could, in the Orthodox faith, while the Bolshevik state did its worst to indoctrinate him in its ideology.   Ultimately, after Solzhenistyn was arrested while serving in the Red Army in World War II for criticism of Stalin, and sentenced by a secret tribunal of the NKVD to the work camps administered by GULAG, his Orthodox rearing won out, and in his writings he became a fierce critic of the oppression of the Soviet system.   While his writings were initially well-received in his home country while Khrushchev was repudiating the legacy of Stalin, when he turned his pen against the Communist system and underlying ideology as a whole, he became persona non grata, and soon his writings had to be published by samizdat in Russian, or smuggled out and published in translation in the West where they helped remove the blinders from the eyes of many who still thought of the Soviet experiment in romantic, idealistic, terms.   Eventually, the Soviet regime tired of him and on the twelfth of February, 1974, he was arrested again and sent into exile.

 

On the day of his arrest he released a notable essay, advising that in the face of a violent, oppressive, totalitarian ideology such as that which then ruled in Russia, the least that people could do was refuse to participate in the lies by which the totalitarian ideology of the state covered its violence.

 

“And this is the way”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “to break out of the imaginary encirclement of our inertness, the easiest way for us and the most devastating for the lies.   For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist”.

 

The title of Solzhenitsyn’s essay, “Live not by Lies”, was borrowed last year by Rod Dreher, for a book advising Christians about how to live in the face of a new soft totalitarianism.   While Dreher admirably strained out many of the totalitarian gnats of “woke” ideology, he swallowed in its entirety the camel of masks and lockdowns and public health orders.

 

We can and must do better than that.

 

Sadly, I expect that very few of our church leaders will be willing to show the same faith and obedience to God rather than man as Pastor James Coates of GraceLife Church in Edmonton, Alberta, who was arrested by the RCMP last week for holding regular church services and remains in police custody as of the time of this writing, or Pastor Tim Stephens of Fairview Baptist Church in Calgary, who held a service last weekend in solidarity with Pastor Coates.   While Coates’ arrest demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that I have been right in everything I have been saying since last March about how these public health orders are the latest manifestation of the anti-Christian, anti-freedom, atheistic and materialistic, spirit of Communist oppression and are utterly out of place in a Commonwealth Realm in which the basic rights and freedoms these orders treat as inconsequential are supposed to be the guaranteed Common Law property of citizens as Her Majesty's free subjects, this is not really my point here.   If most Christian leaders can’t find the balls to do what Pastors Coates and Stephens have done, a rather predictable consequence of the widespread ordination of women due to a previous generation’s departure from the clear teachings of the Scriptures and church tradition on that subject, then the least they can do, to borrow Solzhenitsyn’s language, is to refuse to participate in the lies covering up the totalitarian violence and oppression of the lockdown measures.   Specifically, they can reject the lie that the “electronic church” of today is somehow different and better than the “electronic church” of forty years ago, because it is online rather than on television.   This lie rests upon the underlying notion that the internet is an actual space where people can really meet and actively participate in something together rather than the mere passive viewing which is all that the voyeurism of television makes available.   I am inclined to say that this notion, too, is a lie, although it contains the element of truth that the internet has an interactional element that was not there in television.   Along with that element of truth, however, it contains the assumption that this is an improvement rather than something that moves us closer to the dystopia of the Matrix.   That assumption, I would say, is at the very least, highly dubious. 

 

Lighting Candles and Cursing Darkness

The expression “it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness” is often said to be an ancient Chinese proverb.   Many even attribute it to China’s greatest philosopher, the legendary sixth century BC sage and government advisor/official Kong Fuzi himself.   There is not much in the way of evidence to support these claims.   The earliest known use of the saying goes back only to the early twentieth century AD, during which century it spread like wildfire due to its popularity among liberal Democrat American presidents and their wives.   Although Roosevelt and Kennedy predated the period in which liberal Democrats became enamoured of all things Chinese provided they were no older than the Cultural Revolution it is probably stretching credibility to the breaking point to suggest that they had some special insight into the Confucian origins of an adage that continues to elude the best scholars in the field. 

 

In actuality, it is difficult to imagine such a saying originating in the wisdom literature of any ancient civilization when it so clearly bears the manufacturing stamp of twentieth century, Western, liberalism on it.   As a comparative value judgement it is a truism and an insipid, banal, and trite one at that.   It implies that we are under some sort of moral requirement to make an either/or choice between lighting a candle and cursing the darkness, thus demanding the question why one cannot do both, to which question, of course, there is no answer.  

 

Today is a good day to be contemplating these matters.

 

It is the second day of the second month.   On the liturgical calendar it is a Feast Day, the official designation of which in the Book of Common Prayer is “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple Commonly Called the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin”.   This is because it is forty days after Christmas.   The Mosaic Law required in the twelfth chapter of the book of Leviticus that after a woman gave birth to a male child she would undergo a forty day purification period after which she would present the child in the tabernacle – later the Temple – to which she would bring a lamb for a burnt offering and a pigeon or turtledove for a sin offering, or, if this was beyond her means, two turtledoves or pigeons for both offerings.   The fulfilment of these requirements is recorded in the second chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke – it is specified that the second option for the offering was taken – which is the occasion upon which Simeon and Anna prophesy over the Holy Infant.   The informal designation of this Feast is Candlemas.  (1)  This title alludes to the ancient custom of the blessing of the candles which traditionally occurs on this day.   The candles, representing Christ as the Light of the World, are presented in Church in ceremonial reenactment of the presenting of Christ in the Temple, and are blessed.

 

In how many parishes will this be occurring this year?

 

Not very many.

 

The Hungarian Jewish writer Arthur Koestler is most remembered for his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon.   In the novel, his protagonist, Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, is taken away by the secret police of the revolutionary regime he helped create in the middle of the night, and imprisoned.   He is given a number of hearings, not for the purpose of determining guilt or innocence but obtaining his confession.  Ultimately, he gives the confession and is executed.   Although the story and its characters are fictional they represent real events that had just taken place in the Soviet Union.  After Joseph Stalin had become dictator he had secured his control over the Communist Party and his absolute rule over the Soviet Union by ruthlessly eliminating his rivals within the party.   One of the more conspicuous elements of the Purge were the show trials, held in Moscow from 1936 to 1938, in which Trotskyists and other Old Bolsheviks who dissented to Stalin’s rule were made to publicly confess to various crimes before they were put to death.

 

It was Koestler’s girlfriend at the time, Daphne Hardy who later went on to become a sculptor, who gave the book its title.  She was also the one who translated it from his German manuscript and arranged for its publication in London, while Koestler was fleeing the Nazis in a highly adventurous manner.   The title was inspired by the fourteenth verse of the fifth chapter of Job although it has little to do with what Eliphaz the Temanite was haranguing Job about.   It refers to the contrast between the reality (darkness) and the illusion (noon) of Communism as experienced by true believers – such as Rubashov within the novel, and Koestler its author (2) – who are brought to the realization that the ideal paradise they believed they were creating was actually an extremely oppressive tyranny.

 

It seems that no matter how many times the darkness of Communism is revealed for what it is – when a Malcolm Muggeridge tells the world about the Terror Famine in the Ukraine, when an Arthur Koestler paints a literary picture of the Show Trials, when an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn brings the GULAG to light – there will be those who blindly look to Communism as a source of light.

 

Today, our governments have taken away our most basic rights and liberties.   They have forbidden us from gathering together socially, assembling as religious communities to worship, and in some jurisdictions, even to leave our homes without their explicit permission and a justification they consider valid.   They have forbidden large portions of the population from running their own businesses or earning their own livings for extended periods of time, and basically told us all that we must look to government rather than to our businesses and jobs for our means of support.   They have conditioned us to expect security guards to be the first and last people we see everywhere we go, to be under constant surveillance, and to be stopped by enforcement agents at any time and made to give an account of why we are out and what we are doing.   They have encouraged us to snitch on our friends and neighbours every time we see or suspect them of violating any of an ever growing list of infractions.   Protests against these lockdowns are broken up by police and the protestors fined and/or arrested.   We are told by the media, speaking with a monolithic voice much like the press in the Soviet Union, that all of this is humanitarian and necessary for the greater good.   Everything about this, right down to the “science” invoked as justification for it all, resembles nothing so much as the dark tyranny the Bolsheviks imposed upon Russia a century ago.

 

These lockdowns are the reason that Churches will not be meeting to bless the candles today.   The politicians and health bureaucrats have declared that Church services are “non-essential” and, even though it is clearly Satan’s opinion that the politicians and health bureaucrats are speaking, the Church leaders have decided to obey man rather than God.

 

Which brings us back to where we started.   The nonsense that it is “better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”.

 

Unless the Churches start cursing the darkness that is Communism – including the Communism that wears the mask of public health orders to slow the spread of bat flu – instead of kissing its butt they will never be able to light candles again.

 

(1)   An old tradition says that fair weather on Candlemas indicates that winter will be long.   In North America, this has led to the day acquiring the secular name of “Groundhog Day” after the creature assigned the task of checking the weather.   The legend accompanying this name is more specific than the tradition from the Old World and the specifics are rather amusing.   The groundhog or woodchuck – a really big squirrel who lives in a hole in the ground rather than in a tree – comes out of hibernation on Candlemas to check the weather.   If he sees his shadow – which will only happen in fair weather – it means there will be six more weeks of winter.   If he does not – it will be an early spring.   The joke of this is that the vernal equinox in this part of the world is always more than six weeks after Candlemas.    It falls between the nineteenth and twenty-first of March – this year on the twentieth.   Thus, a mere six more weeks of winter after the second of February would constitute an early spring.   The outcome, in other words, is the same whether the groundhog sees his shadow or not.   Very amusing – almost as much as Harold Ramis’ 1993 comedy film Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.

(2)   Nine years after Darkness at Noon came out, Richard Crossman’s anthology of ex-communists-turned-anti-communists The God That Failed was published.   Koestler was one of the contributors.

The Convergence of Capitalism and Communism

In the eighteenth century, the harnessing of steam power, the rapid invention of labour-saving tools, and other related factors, came together in what historians call the Industrial Revolution, to give birth to the system of mechanized production in the modern factory. In the following century, this system and its theoretical advocacy in the writings of liberal economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, would both be dubbed capitalism by their critics. Those critics, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Robert Owen and Karl Marx, argued that capitalism led to an increasing and unjust gap between the richest and the poorest. They blamed this on the private ownership of the factories and mines and other means of industrial production and proposed that this be replaced with some form of communal ownership. Their models for communal ownership vastly differed from one another, but the general proposal of replacing private with public ownership in a modern, industrialized, economy was given the name socialism. When overtly allied with the forces of revolutionary destruction that had been attacking the Crowns and Churches of Christendom since the Puritan rebellion of the 1640s, as was the case with Marxism, it was called communism.

Many people have the idea that capitalism and communism are polar opposites and the mortal foes of each other. This was the prevailing view during the Cold War in which both the United States and the Soviet Union pointed to their belief that their own system was the best as a motivating factor in the conflict. The fall of the Soviet Union was seen as the ultimate victory for capitalism. So was the fact that the remaining large communist power, Red China, avoided a similar collapse and even thrived in the post-Cold War era, by incorporating elements of the market economy. Others, however, saw all of this in a different light. If China had incorporated elements of capitalism, most of the proposals Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had made in The Communist Manifesto for moving a capitalist society towards communism had long ago been adopted by the Western powers, including the United States. Dr. Tomislav Sunic summed up the alternative interpretation of the end of the Cold War when he wrote “Some European authors observed that communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West.” (Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, 2007, p. 34)

There were those who were prescient enough to see that capitalism and communism were heading towards a convergence rather than a conflict even before the Cold War began. In 1941, for example, James Burnham, who had resigned the previous year from the Trostkyite Socialist Workers Party, published a book entitled The Managerial Revolution, in which he maintained that capitalism was not a sustainable, permanent condition, nor was it likely to be replaced by socialism proper, but that it was undergoing a social revolution that would transform it into a managerial society, that is, a society governed by a new class of technocratic “managers.” Burnham further maintained that the same thing was going on around the world. The socialist countries were moving in the same direction as the capitalist countries. The new managerial class would include both corporate executives and state bureaucrats, with the distinction between the two becoming blurry even in nominally capitalist countries. Their cohesion as a class and their power would both be derived from their possession of the technical knowledge pertinent to the management of large corporate entities. George Orwell, who wrote a well-known critique of Burnham’s theory in 1945, also incorporated large elements of it into his dystopic novel 1984. The totalitarian system in the novel was widely interpreted as a depiction of the kind of society that existed in the Soviet Union at the time Orwell was writing, and to an extent this is true, although that better describes Animal Farm. In 1984 the totalitarian society is located in the then future of what was the capitalist world at the time of Orwell’s writing. It was one of three, more-or-less identical, superstates, governed by totalitarian managers. This was the future Burnham predicted, depicted in its most negative light.

Even before Burnham, however, Hilaire Belloc had predicted the convergence of capitalism and what he called collectivism, which was socialism or communism. Belloc, the son of a French father and an English mother, was a well-known writer of poetry, biography, history and social criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. Today he is most often remembered for his collaboration with G. K. Chesterton. Both men were devout, traditionalist, Roman Catholics, Belloc by upbringing and Chesterton by conversion, and together they promoted an alternative to capitalism that was called distributism. The gist of it was that capital property – the means of production – should be privately owned as in capitalism, but spread out among many private owners rather than concentrated in the hands of a few. Like their social criticism in general, the idea drew heavily from the 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum which spoke out for the rights of the working class, while attacking socialism and defending private property.

The most important book Belloc wrote articulating distributism was The Servile State, which was first published in 1912. In this book, he describes capitalism as an unsustainable system that had overthrown the more stable order of Medieval, feudal, Christendom and which was evolving, not into its collectivist rival, but into “the servile state.” The “servile state” would be a new order that would include aspects of both capitalism and collectivism, although in reality it would essentially be a new form of slavery. It would be a system in which the majority of the population would be proletarian wage slaves, providing the labour for the factories of the capitalists when needed, and maintained by the state when not. The only alternative to this future, Belloc argued, was distributism, because collectivism would merely lead to the same future by an alternate path.

Belloc’s book enjoyed a resurgence in popularity among post-World War II conservatives who saw in it a prediction of the welfare state that had been put in place to combat the Depression just prior to the war. This was not a wrong interpretation of the book, since many of the specifics Belloc gave of what he expected the servile state to look like do indeed match up with the programs of the welfare state. It might have been premature to declare the predictions of the book to be fulfilled already back then, however, when we consider what we are facing in 2020. Remember that Belloc saw the “servile state” as the destination of both capitalism and collectivism (socialism/communism) and as a form of societal servitude similar to slavery which sounds very much like what we call “totalitarianism” today.

Earlier this year, almost every government in the world, imposed measures upon their populations which mimicked the conditions that had existed in the Soviet Union when it was at its worst. They shut down the Churches, they closed all businesses that they deemed to be “non-essential”, forbade people to meet in groups larger than ten, five, or even in some jurisdictions, two, and imposed all sorts of other restrictions as well. They justified all of this by saying that it was necessary to fight the spread of a new virus and the harsh respiratory disease that it can produce. This justification was always nonsense. This writer was among those who recognized this right from the beginning. We knew all along that this virus is asymptomatic among a large number of those who contract it, that most of those who do experience symptoms experience mild to moderate flu like symptoms and require no hospitalization, and that the harsh form of pneumonia that it can produce is fatal mostly among people who are both very old and have multiple complicating health problems. What the situation called for, was a special effort to protect those most at risk, not an insanely draconian effort to protect everyone by imposing a universal quarantine. The governments that went to that extreme, did so on the recommendations of the World Health Organization that was itself passing on recommendations coming from the last communist superpower, which is the country where the pandemic originated, Red China. Based on recommendations that came ultimately from Red China, we recreated the totalitarian conditions of the Soviet Union. We began policing people more strictly over absurd statutes about how far apart they must be than over actual, mala in se, crimes. We treated our basic freedoms of assembly, association and religion as if they meant nothing in the face of disease and were merely privileges that belong to the state to bestow and withhold as it sees best.

What did the capitalist corporations do while all this was going on?

They jumped on board the totalitarian train, that’s what they did. Instead of telling the governments to shove their restrictions up their backsides and sending their high-payed corporate lawyers to challenge the constitutionality of these regulations in court, they complied with every rule and restriction, knowing that these would harm small businesses far more than it would them, and became active propagandists for the “new normal.” They encouraged the transition to a cashless market, long the favourite of totalitarians of every stripe. They stuck messages telling us to “stay home” on billboards and in their commercials. Companies whose business pertains to the flow of information, such as corporate media and the big tech companies, suppressed dissent to the lockdown and the spread of information that would support that dissent.
The capitalists supported the imposition of communism!

We are now in the midst of the second wave of communism, this year, and true to form, the second wave is proving to be worse than the first. There was almost universal outrage over what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis. The anti-white, anti-cop, hate group, Black Lives Matter and the blackshirt thugs of Antifa took advantage of that fact to turn the incident into the casus belli for a race war. It began with the usual race riots of the sort that have been going on in the United States since the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A protest in Minneapolis turned into a spree of vandalism, arson, looting, and violence, and the same sort of thing began happening in other cities around the United States, and then spread into Canada, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Then they kicked it up a notch. Politicians, civil servants, police officers, and every white person in sight, were expected to genuflect before the leaders of Black Lives Matter. Everybody in the public spotlight, especially those in offices of civil authority, in was expected to acknowledge that their country was guilty, both in the past and now, of “systemic racism” against blacks. “Systemic racism” is a concept of Critical Race Theory, itself an expression of Cultural Marxism. There was the demand to “defund” or “abolish” the police. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: “Attacks on the police is an old communist tactic to eliminate law enforcement. The Bolsheviks successfully unleashed widespread attacks on the police leading up to the October Revolution.”


Then came the vandalism of statues and monuments – some of individuals who had owned slaves in the past, others of people who just happened to be prominent white historical figures, and even some ridiculously absurd cases people like Mahatma Gandhi – and the demand that all such monuments be removed and that streets and buildings named after these people be renamed. This attempt at erasing history, brings to mind the French Revolution, which similarly attempted to restart history afresh with “Year One.” The French Revolution, which itself took as its model Cromwell’s earlier rebellion in England, became the model for all subsequent communist revolutions. In Cambodia in 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over and declared it to be “Year Zero.” Read the history of the French Revolution and the Khmer Rouge while you are still able to do so. The former led to the “Reign of Terror” and the latter to the “Killing Fields.” This is not a pattern any sane group wishes to imitate.

Where are the corporate capitalists in this?

Again we find them, and again, especially the corporate media and the big tech companies, siding with the anti-white, race warriors. The corporate media has been telling everybody that the riots are just “peaceful protests” and that Black Lives Matter are just activists. They are also, of course, the ones who deliberately created the entire false narrative about institutional racism in the police force through their dishonest handling of the facts. Big tech has been suppressing dissent to this narrative, even more than it suppressed dissent to the COVID-19 narrative.

Capitalism and communism have converged into one, with the traits of the latter being the dominant ones.

Hilaire Belloc would not have been surprised.

Government Hubris

Last December, at the annual pre-Christmas open house at the Manitoba legislature, I shook Premier Brian Pallister’s hand, congratulated him on his re-election, and told him to keep up the good work. Today, I wish I could take all of that back. Pallister is the leader of the Progressive Conservative party of Manitoba. I voted Progressive Conservative in the last provincial election, and have voted Progressive Conservative in every provincial election since I was old enough to vote. I do not think that I will be voting for them again for as long as Pallister leads the party. Indeed, I am contemplating actively and aggressively campaigning against their re-election. It is not that I think any other party would govern better. I do not. It is not that I wish to see Wab Kinew become premier of Manitoba. The very thought of that happening turns my stomach. I regard Kinew and the socialist party that he leads with greater disgust and contempt than anything that ever fell to the ground from the backside of a horse. It is rather that in my opinion the way Pallister has been talking and behaving over the last three weeks demands punishment. I am getting really, really, sick and tired of the arrogant, drunk-with-power, threatening tone of Brian Pallister and of his chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin

Pallister ought to have listened to Her Majesty’s marvelous speech on Sunday and learned from her how to speak to the public in a time of crisis. Indeed, all of our provincial premiers and the Dominion premier should have done so. That, of course, assumes that they have the capacity to learn. This is a very big assumption indeed. Our Sovereign is a lady of class and breeding, whereas our politicians, at the risk of unfairly insulting livestock, all give the impression of having been raised in a barn. I have many times written about the distinction between authority and power. Here we have that distinction perfectly illustrated. The Queen in her address to the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth spoke with authority. Brian Pallister and Brent Roussin, who never open their mouths without bossing us around, slapping further restrictions down on us, and threatening us, only understand power.

Brian Pallister declared a provincial state-of-emergency at a much earlier stage of the COVID-19 outbreak than his counterparts in most other provinces. This occurred on Friday, March 20th, at which point in time Manitoba had seventeen confirmed cases of the virus, all of whom were people who had contracted the virus while travelling out of province. In declaring the state of emergency Pallister and Roussin limited gatherings to fifty people, required businesses to impose an one to two metre gap between patrons, limited the number of people theatres and dining facilities could seat, and closed all bingo and gaming, as well as gyms and other “wellness centres.” Roussin threatened everyone who did not obey these rules with fines up to fifty thousand dollars – five hundred thousand for corporations – and six months in prison. Pallister, in a truly odious press interview, in which he acknowledged but brushed off concerns that these measures were draconian, encouraged Manitobans to spy and snitch on each other.

Since then, the number of confirmed cases in the province has climbed slowly. It is only very recently at the beginning of April, that Roussin announced that the early stages of transmission within the community, as opposed to bringing it in from the outside, had been detected. At that time there were one hundred and twenty seven confirmed cases. It was before that, however, that he and Pallister had begun tightening the existing restrictions and imposing new ones. Indeed, that very day a two week order for all businesses and services that the provincial government deemed “non-essential” to close came into effect. The order had come down a couple of days earlier. Even prior to that, the government had decreased the number of people allowed to gather to ten. This took place about the time that the first death from COVID-19 in the province occurred – there have been two as of the time of this writing. The first death was of an elderly woman who had been in Intensive Care since the first phase of the provincial shut down. Her death would not have been prevented had Pallister and Roussin imposed the ten person limit on March 20th. Her death would not have been prevented had “non-essential” businesses been ordered to close on March 20th. Tightening the restrictions was not a rational act, but rather a sign that the exercise of absolute power had gone to the chief public health official’s head.

By the first day of this week the confirmed cases in Manitoba had risen to two hundred and three. On Monday, one additional case brought the number to two hundred and four. Eleven people have been hospitalized, seven of whom are in Intensive Care. The very same day, Roussin’s tone jumped to a whole new level of arrogant, totalitarian, bossiness. Issuing threats of police enforcement, this Grinch-like creature stole Easter and the Passover from Christians and Jews. Having already closed the Churches and synagogues, he now ordered the faithful not to have “family dinners and get togethers.” “Everyone needs to adhere to the public health orders” he said “and that includes faith-based organizations.” Which is simply another way of saying that he thinks that his commandments overrule those of God.

That doctors, in the sense of physicians, think they are God has long been a stereotype and, like most stereotypes, contains a great deal of truth. For this reason, it is dangerous to give them any sort of civil authority. It goes to their heads a lot quicker than it does other people.

To those, like this writer, who grew up reading novels by George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Anthony Burgess, and others warning us against totalitarianism, as well as the non-fictional accounts by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest of the very real totalitarianism behind the Iron Curtain, it is hugely offensive that today, Her Majesty’s free subjects in this province of Manitoba, in the Dominion of Canada, cannot go to the grocery store without being forced by authoritarian goons to wait, six feet apart, in a line outside the store until they are told to enter. Once inside the store, their every move is policed by the store Gestapo, until they enter a similar line at the checkout. These conditions belong in Communist countries like the former Soviet Union, not in a Commonwealth realm.

Dr. Roussin’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is furthermore a huge violation of medical ethics. The fact that everyone else is doing it in no way excuses him. What principle of medical ethics could be more fundamental than primum non nocere, which principle is enshrined in the vow to abstain from harm in the famous oath attributed to Hippocrates of Kos? (1) Yet every conceivable form of harm – psychological, spiritual, ethical, social, civil, and physical, including death itself - is the inevitable result of a lengthy, enforced, universal shut down of society.

The tighter the restrictions become, the more rules are imposed upon us, the longer we are kept from our friends and family and Churches, and forced to violate our nature as Aristotle’s “social animal”, the greater the harm caused by the anti-COVID measures will be. There will be this significant difference, however, between the deaths from COVID-19 complications that these measures might be preventing and the deaths from domestic violence, suicide, and murder that these measures will cause if maintained for too long. Nobody, except perhaps the government of Red China, could be legitimately blamed for the former. The blood of the latter will be upon the hands and heart and soul of Dr. Brent Roussin and Premier Brian Pallister forever.

(1) The principle, in the familiar wording, comes, interestingly enough, from another work of Hippocrates entitled Of the Epidemics. In the Oath, of course, it is turned into a vow: ἐπὶ δηλήσει δὲ καὶ ἀδικίῃ εἴρξειν