The Antidote to False Religion

 

Everywhere we look in Western Civilization people are being forced to affirm the false doctrines of false religions and to bend their knees to idols.   A couple of years ago, in the insanity that ensued after George Floyd died in police custody, the genuflection was even literal.   Today there are several dogmas which if one does not uncritically accept them all, questions them, or argues against them one will find himself deplatformed, defenestrated, and the way things are going perhaps eventually decapitated.   Here are a few such dogmas:

 

I.                   The world’s climate is changing, the change will be for the worse rather than the better, it is all man’s fault and to atone for his misdoing man needs to accept a radical transformation of society and economy that will greatly lower his standard of living, eliminate most if not all of his personal freedom, and drastically reduce the size of his population.

II.                The traditional category of sex which divided people into male and female on the basis of biological differences is, despite its appearance of being essential to human reproduction, a false one, invented by those with power solely for the purpose of oppressing others.   The proper category is gender, which is what you think or feel that you are.   This may correspond to the sex you would have been assigned under the old system, or it may correspond to the other sex, or it may be something different altogether because it is all about you and your feelings and so there are in infinite number of possibilities.  Nobody else is allowed to in any way challenge your self-chosen gender and if somebody calls you by the wrong pronouns or the name your parents gave you before you chose a new one to fit your gender identity that person has committed the worst crime in the history of the world and should be completely and utterly de-personed and removed from society forever.

III.             Race is also a false category invented by white men to oppress all other people.   When white people speak of race or otherwise employ this category they should be told that they are being racist and that race does not exist.   They are not allowed to think of themselves as a race or a distinct group within mankind except if they think of themselves as distinctively evil which they are required to do.   Other groups can speak of race and think of themselves as races and are encouraged to do so.   White people aren’t allowed to call this racist and preach colour-blindness to these other groups.   White people are supposed to practice colour-blindness, except when they are required to  acknowledge their own wickedness and the virtuous racial self-awareness of other people.

IV.             If a new viral respiratory disease is circulating, even if poses no significant danger to anyone outside the group that is most vulnerable to all respiratory disease, it is alright for governments to suspend everyone’s basic freedoms of movement, association, assembly and religion, order them into isolation, shut down their businesses, and basically act as if there were no constitutional limits on their powers, in an effort to curb the spread of the virus.   It is alright for the government and the media to deceive the public and spread panic in order to get people to comply, but if anyone contradicts the official line that person is spreading dangerous “misinformation” and “disinformation” and needs to be silenced.

V.                The way to prevent mass shootings and other gun crimes, overwhelmingly committed with guns that are not legally owned and registered but rather stolen or smuggled, is to pass more gun legislation and take guns away from people who are overwhelmingly law-abiding.

VI.             The most important and valuable way in which  the people who in the old dispensation were called women but whom in the new are called birthing persons and can be of any gender can contribute to society is not by bearing and raising children as mothers but by seeking self-fulfillment in careers outside the home.   That many of them think and choose otherwise in no way contributes to the wage gap between what used to be erroneously called the sexes.   The only acceptable ways of explaining this gap are patriarchy, male chauvinism, and sexism.

VII.          When somebody commits a crime, unless it is a “hate” crime or the perpetrator happens to be white, Christian, male, cisgender, heterosexual or all of the above, it is not he who has failed society and owes society a debt the amount and manner of payment of which are to be determined by a court of law, but society that has failed him and owes it to him to rehabilitate him, no matter how long it takes, even if it takes the remainder of his natural life.

VIII.       While tobacco and alcohol, which for centuries in the case of the former and from time immemorial in the case of the latter, have been comforts enjoyed by people from all walks and stations of life even those who have had little to nothing else beyond the essentials of subsistence, have to be driven out of polite society and cancelled because they can have harmful effects on people’s health, marijuana should be enjoyed by all and a “safe” supply of cocaine, heroin and other opiates, methamphetamine and other hard narcotics along with a place and paraphernalia to use to them should be supplied by the government.

IX.             Masked thugs who go to lectures given by speakers with non-approved ideas and shout them down, disrupt the event, or intimidate its hosts into cancelling, and vandals who damage or destroy statues and monuments or who deface valuable art in order to make some sort of statement that nobody gets but themselves about the environment are all legitimately employing their “freedom of expression”, but if someone says something either in a lecture in person or online which disagrees with any of the tenets of the new progressive religion this is “hate speech” rather than “free speech” and he must be silenced.   Anybody who attempts to prevent the thugs and vandals from exercising their “freedom of expression” is a terrorist and should be treated as such.

X.                The primary purpose of schools should not be to teach children such basic skills as reading, writing, and mathematics, much less to teach them anything about history other than how many bad –isms and –phobias the leaders of their country were guilty of in the past.   Rather the primary purpose of schools is to encourage children, as early as possible, to choose a gender identity other than what would be their sex in the old, obsolete, way of looking at things, to expose them to every conceivable form of sexual behaviour as early as possible, and to instill in them anti-white prejudice or self-loathing if they happen to be white, along with Christophobia, cisphobia, heterophobia and misandry.   Teachers have a duty to do these things and should not be accountable to parents.

XI.             “My body my choice” is only valid in reference to when a birthing person, vide supra VI, wants to terminate his/her pregnancy, even though doing so means terminating the life of his/her unborn child.  The right of a birthing person to an abortion is absolute and not subject to limitations, unlike the rights of all people to life, liberty, and property.   “My body my choice” is not valid when medical experts tell the government we all need to be injected with man-made substances that have never before been used and for which there are no long-term studies because they were rushed to market in under a year.

XII.          Although the relative cost of commodities is determined by such factors as supply and demand – if there are a lot of apples and few bananas, this will make apples less expensive and bananas more so – this does not apply to the means of exchange, money.   Therefore government can print and spend as much money as it wants, this will not cause the price of anything else to go up.   If the prices of commodities such as food go up, this is because of greedy vendors, not the government.   Indeed, it is because of all the greedy businessmen who would prefer that only a few people be able to afford to buy their products rather than many or all people that government needs to keep doling out money so that people can buy things.   Although this does not cause the prices of things to go up, even if it did it would still be the right thing to do, despite the fact that rising commodity prices and devaluation of currency by the unit would harm the most the people that such government spending is supposed to be helping, those with the least purchasing power in society.

 

 

In Western Civilization, which is the name given in Modern times to what has become of what used be Christendom in the days since liberalism began to wax and Christianity began to wane there, these are the main tenets of the new religion that progressives have sought to establish in the place of Christianity.   That this is a fair characterization is evident from the way those who raise valid questions about the first tenet are treated.    If you point out that climate has constantly been changing throughout history, that human beings thrive better in warmer climates than colder, that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather is to vegetable life what oxygen is to animal life, that despite irresponsible journalists’ efforts to portray every weather disaster that takes place as a “worst ever” moment recent decades have not experienced the most volatile weather on record nor have they been either the hottest or the coldest, and a host of other similar arguments you will likely be met with the accusation that you are a climate or a science “denier”.   This very accusation demonstrates that to your accuser the idea of man-made, apocalyptic, climate change is not a hypothesis that begins with observations, is supported by evidence gathered through experiments and test,  and rests upon such evidence while being open to being overthrown by other evidence, i.e., science, but an article of faith which we have a moral obligation to accept.

 

Now I am not opposed to articles of faith.   On the contrary, I think that for communities of faith such as the Christian Church, these are essential.   The articles discussed above, however, are not a statement of faith to which a community of faith akin to the Church asks its members to confess, but a set of beliefs to which progressives demand adherence from all members of every civil society in the West.   This is not a new phenomenon.   Progressivism began as an attack on Christian kings, the Christian Church, and the throne-altar alliance in Christendom and ever since the same progressives who scream “separation of Church and State” against the old order of Christendom have sought to wed the State anew to a different religion.   In early sixteenth century England this was the heretical form of Calvinist Christianity known as Puritanism.   Subsequent generations of progressives have pretended that their substitute religions were not religions at all but secular ideologies.   Communism is one obvious example of this.   The set of propositions that American liberals and neoconservatives claim define what it means to be an American, a citizen of the first country to have a separation of Church and State clause in its constitution, is another.

 

Now, while Americanism is in many respects less evil than Communism, the popular idea that the new false religion that we have been discussing is a rebranding and reworking of Communism is mistaken.      Communism and Communists contributed to its development, for sure.  Many of the dogmas of this new false religion were spreading through the academic world decades before they spilled out into popular culture, and the Marxists who outside the old Communist bloc had more influence in academe than anywhere else undoubtedly contributed to this.    Nevertheless, the new false religion of woke progressivism is more accurately described as a reworking of Americanism than it is of Communism.   It developed in the Western countries that aligned with the United States during the Cold War rather than in the former Communist bloc which has proven to be relatively immune to it.    While acknowledging that Cold War agents of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc had infiltrated the West and were working to undermine it from within – Joseph McCarthy was right about this – and that academic Marxists disappointed with the Soviet experiment  and the failure of the World Wars to produce Marx’s general revolution had begun revising their ideology in a more cultural and social rather than economic direction as early as the 1930s, the development of the new false religion is more directly a consequence of a) post-World War II American policy with regards to the rebuilding of Europe that tied assistance in rebuilding to indoctrination in American liberalism with the aim of preventing a resurgence of fascism, b) the United States’ having become the leading power in Western Civilization at the very moment that American liberalism was beginning to transform itself into an unhealthy obsession with racial and sexual grievance politics, and c) the concurrent emergency of mass communications technology as a medium for the spread of news and culture, newly manufactured for mass consumption in the United States.   Indeed, the central tenet of the universal propositional nationalism aspect of Americanism, i.e., that anyone anywhere in the world is potentially an American if he subscribes to the propositions that define America, is the seed from which the rotten plant of woke progressivism springs.   Implicit within the notion is the idea that someone who was born in the United States, to American parents, whose ancestors going back to the American Revolution were all Americans, but who does not believe all the American propositions is not himself an American or at any rate is less of an American, than a new immigrant or even someone somewhere else in the world who does subscribe to all the propositions.   All that is necessary for this to become woke progressivism is for the propositions to be changed from the classical liberal ones acceptable to “conservative” Americans to the sort of nonsense contained in the twelve articles enumerated at the beginning of this essay and for the emphasis to be shifted to the implicit idea (“you do not really belong if you do not agree that…”) rather than the explicit one (“you belong if you agree that…”).   While some might point out that in many places in Europe as well as in the UK and here in Canada this new false religion of woke progressivism has seemingly gone further and become more powerful than in the United States this does not rebut the fact that it is essentially a reworked Americanism but speaks rather of the weakness and ineffectiveness of the resistance to woke progressivism. Note that here in the Dominion of Canada, the most aggressive promotion of woke progressivism in recent years has come from the currently governing Liberal Party and especially its present leadership.  Ever since Confederation the Liberal Party has been the party that sought to make Canada more like the United States economically, culturally and politically.    The weakness of the resistance to its aggressive promotion of woke progressivism can be partially attributed to the fact that the only party in Parliament other than the Lower Canadian separatists that is not a party that takes part of the Liberal platform and pushes it further and faster than the Liberals themselves do, the Conservatives, have in recent decades been controlled by neoconservatives who share to a large degree the Liberals’ masturbatory attitude towards America and are consequently Liberal lite.     The Liberal Party is a textbook example illustrating the old maxim “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.   The woke Liberals such as the current Prime Minister are constantly preaching the virtues of “diversity” to us even as in the name of that “diversity” they seek to impose a stringent and narrow uniformity of thought upon us.   As the great Canadian Tory historian W. L. Morton once observed, however, the ancient principle of allegiance to a reigning monarch upon which our Fathers of Confederation had wisely built our national unity already allowed for racial and ethnic diversity without the sort of pressure to conform that exists in an American-style compact society.    An updated version of this observation could be that a monarchical allegiance society, allows for racial and ethnic diversity without imposing such as a dogma of faith that everyone is required to believe the way Liberal dogmatic multiculturalism does, and so the older principle allows for a greater diversity, or a more diverse sort of diversity that includes diversity of thought, than does the Liberal cult of diversity.    

 

While I do not wish to belabor this point too much further I will observe that last week began with the entire United States with a few noble exceptions joining in the worship of a false idol.   American “conservatives” and liberals alike paid homage to someone they call “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” although he, like his father, was given the name Michael King at birth and he obtained his doctorate through serial plagiarism.   Everything else about the man was as phony as a $3 bill as well. He was ordained a minister of the Baptist Church even though he did not believe in the essential tenets of faith either of that Church or Christianity in general.   He was launched to fame as a crusader against segregation the year after the American Supreme Court had already dealt Jim Crow a death blow.   He talked a good talk about evaluating people on the basis of the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin in his “I have a Dream” speech, the only thing about him his “conservative” worshippers choose to remember, but the Civil Rights Act which he promoted and the passing of which was his biggest achievement laid the foundation for affirmative action, the racial shakedown industry, and every other sort of anything-but-colour-blind progressive race politics.   Similarly, he cultivated an image of himself as someone who practiced the kind of non-violent civil disobedience preacher by Thoreau, Gandhi, and the like, but there was a great deal of coordination between his talks and marches and sit-ins and the actions of those whose preferred methodology was looting, riots, and burning cities down.

 

We have looked at several of the tenets of the false religion that woke progressives seek to make the new established faith of the West.   We have also briefly looked at how this false religion evolved out of the earlier false religion of Americanism.   The title of this essay, however, is “The Antidote to False Religion”.  It is time that we turn our attention that.

 

The antidote to false religion is true religion.    The True and Living God satisfies the longing for the divine in the human heart in a way that none of man’s inventions, made with his own hands, can do.   The salvation man is in need of is spiritual salvation from sin, which has been given to us freely in Jesus Christ.   The salvation through political activism, legislation, and regulation that progressivism seeks is a poor substitute.  Unlike in the world of finance, where “bad money drives out good” as the law named for Sir Thomas Gresham states, in religion light drives out darkness, as it does in the literal sense.  Consider the ancient world.    St. Paul in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans describes the darkness of moral depravity into which the nations of the world had descended by turning away from the Creator into idolatry.   Much ancient discussion as witnessed in the writings of Herodotus and Aristotle focused on the question of happiness, how a man attains it, and how he can be rightly judged by others to have attained it.   The answer was not to be found in the pagan religions and the writings of Plato and the tragedies of Euripides, testify to a growing dissatisfaction with gods who were merely more powerful human beings with all the moral failings of mortals and, indeed, often more.   Calls had begun to arise for reforms of the pagan religion.   Into this darkness, St. John attests, the Word, Who became flesh and dwelt among us, shone as the Light of Men, satisfying the hunger and thirst attested to in the writings of the philosophers in a way that paganism, no matter how reformed, never could.   The darkness of today’s false religion was able to creep back in because over the course of the past several centuries, Western man was lured into once again putting his faith in the creations of his own hands, now called science and technology, through the promise of wealth and power.   Initially, the new idols seemed to impressively deliver on their promises but now they are starting to fail as all such false gods eventually do.   Man now stands at a crossroads.   The Light of Jesus Christ is still there calling him back.   Or he can plunge himself further into the darkness of the new false religion. 

 

There is a difference between the false religion of today and the false religion(s) of the ancient world.   Ancient paganism was pre-Christian, the idolatry in which men indulged before God sent His Only-Begotten Son into the world.   Concerning this idolatry St. Paul, speaking to the philosophers at Mars Hill, said “And the times of this ignorance, God winked at; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent”.    The false religion of today is sometimes called post-Christian, that is to say, the idolatry into which men sink after they abandon the true faith of Jesus Christ.   A more Scriptural term for this might be Anti-Christ. 

 

It has often been said that someone who has turned his back on Christ is far harder to reach than someone who has not yet heard of Him for the first time.   This seems to be true and the difficulty may be greater when it comes to nations and an entire civilization rather than just individuals.   However this may be, the true religion has not changed and we must call those who have abandoned it back.

 

We started this essay by looking at several articles of the new false religion being dogmatically imposed upon us.  Twelve of these were given and this number was chosen for a reason.  Since the earliest centuries of Christianity, the true faith has been confessed in a statement we call the Creed from the Latin word for “believe”.   There are two basic forms of the Creed, the Apostles’ and the Nicene.  (1)  Ancient tradition says that the twelve Apostles themselves composed the Creed, each contributing an article.   Whether or not that is the case, the Creed consists of twelve articles, one for each of the Apostles.   The Nicene Creed, or more accurately the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, composed and revised at the two first Ecumenical Councils of the fourth century, is the most universal form being accepted by all the ancient Churches.   While this is a longer form of the Creed, it too contains twelve articles which mostly correspond to those of the Apostles’ (Article III of the Nicene Creed contains matter not found in the Apostles’, Article IV of the Nicene includes everything in both Articles III and IV of the Apostles’, the Descent into Hell is included with the Resurrection in the Apostles’ otherwise the Articles of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan are longer or fuller versions of the corresponding Articles in the Apostles’).

 

I intend, the Lord willing, to give each of these articles an essay-length exposition this year.  The text of both forms of the Creed will be commented on, with the essays following the order of the Articles of the Apostles’ Creed, covering Article III of the Nicene Creed under Article II.   I have not yet decided whether to do this over the next couple of months or whether to spread it over the year covering one Article a month.   Either way, the purpose of the series will be to remind people of the true faith so as to call them back from the false one.

 

Here are the twelve Articles of the Apostles’ Creed:

 

I.                    I believe in God, the Father almighty,
    maker of heaven and earth;

II.                And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord;

III.             who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
    born of the Virgin Mary,

IV.             suffered under Pontius Pilate,
    was crucified, dead, and buried.

V.                He descended into hell.
    The third day he rose again from the dead.

VI.             He ascended into heaven,
    and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father almighty.

VII.          From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

VIII.       I believe in the Holy Ghost,

IX.              the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints,

X.                the forgiveness of sins,

XI.             the resurrection of the body,

XII.           and the life everlasting. Amen.

 

(1)   The Athanasian Creed is not, properly speaking, a Creed, but is more like a commentary on the Apostles’ Creed.   This can be seen in the fact that whereas the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are both in the first person, expressions of what I or we, believe, the Athanasian is in the third person, a declaration of what must be believed.

The Chinese Dilemma and its Solution

 If you have been following the news at all for the last couple of weeks – a practice I would advise against, as “the news” consists almost entirely of brain-rotting disinformation peddled by the corrupt corporations and even more corrupt government bureaucracies that control all but a fraction of a percentage of the main media organs – you are likely aware that the travel itinerary of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker in the lower house of the congress of the American republic has generated a bit of a brouhaha.   Included in that itinerary was a trip to the Republic of China on the island of Formosa.   When the People’s Republic of China on the Asian mainland learned about this they raised a stink about it and began issuing all sorts of warnings, threats and ultimatums, telling the American republic that they would be “playing with fire” if the trip were not cancelled, and even talking about shooting her plane down.   By doing so they accomplished something that few others have been able to do, especially in the last decade or so.  They brought the Democrats and the Republicans in the American republic together and united them on an issue.   Both took the position that the Chinese government must not be allowed to bully American officials and tell them where they can and cannot go.     I had rather expected her to pull a Captain Airhead or a Joe Whatshisname and come down with a sudden case of the bat flu but on the evening of Tuesday 2 September she arrived in Taipei.

 

While I have nothing but loathing for Communism and Communists, I admit that I can see the point of the brutal Chinese despots on this matter.  I don’t care for the fact that for most of the year Nancy Pelosi is across the 49^th Parallel from the Dominion of Canada and would prefer her to be much further away on the other side of the world.    There is little I can do about that, alas, but it makes it easier to understand what must have been going through Xi Jingping’s head when he learned that soon there would be nothing but a 110 mile strait separating him from this creature.    I assume that apart from the whole “nobody tells us what to do” attitude of the Americans, the reason for the bipartisan consensus of indignation towards the People’s Republic’s threats was that Democrats and Republicans alike did not want her trip and thus their time free of her to be cut short.

 

Since China and not Pelosi is my subject here, the only thing I will say about the person who looks and acts like she is auditioning for the role of a female or transgender Skeletor in a cheesy woke remake of the Masters of the Universe in which the protagonist He-Man would likely be dressed in his twin-sister She-Ra’s outfit and calling himself She-Man and who managed through trading that many see as just a tad suspicious to amass a fortune of about $120 million dollars in her career of almost forty years as a politician is to note that back in May she was excommunicated by the Church of Rome’s Archbishop in San Francisco over her using her elected position to support a special privilege for her own sex, the gruesome and unconscionable special privilege of having the legal right to murder unborn children.   I mention this only because the Archbishop in question, Salvatore Cordileone, deserves commendation for his courage, rare in this day and age, by contrast with the clownishness of the current Pretender to St. Peter’s throne in Rome who ignored the excommunication and administered the Sacrament to her anyway, if it can still be called a Sacrament coming from the hand of a man better suited to be a contortionist than a prelate judging from the performance he recently put on here in Canada, in which he bent over backwards to stick his head, pointy mitre and all, up his own rear end, by issuing a groveling “apology” for his Church’s past humanitarian and missionary educational outreach endeavours. 

 

This whole controversy has undoubtedly been confusing to those who are only slightly familiar – or not at all – with the situation in East Asia.   This is not like some bizarre scenario where Mexico objects to the point of threatening military action to an official from France visiting the United States.  It is not even like Russia objecting to Western politicians visiting the Ukraine at some point prior to the current war, although this is a little closer.   The island of Formosa, although it has been claimed politically, in whole or in part, by various empires over the last millennium, has ethnically and culturally long been part of China.   Ceded to the Japanese Empire late in the nineteenth century, after Japan’s defeat in World War II it returned to Chinese governance, specifically that of the Republic of China then based on the mainland.   At the same time, however, the Chinese Civil War, which had been officially on hold for World War II, restarted and in 1949 the Chinese Communists led by Mao Tse-Tung had driven the Nationalist government led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek out of the mainland.   The Nationalists, and the Republic of China which they governed, retreated to Formosa which has been governed by the Republic ever since.   The Communists have remained in control of mainland China, governing their People’s Republic from Beijing.   Now, obviously there has been a de facto political separation of Formosa from mainland China ever since 1949.  However, unlike the situation with the Ukraine after the Soviet Union collapsed and she declared her independence from Russia in 1991, the independence has not been formally recognized by both sides.  Indeed, it has not been recognized by either.   The People’s Republic of China claims Formosa to belong to China and itself to be the sole legitimate government of all of China.   The Republic of China agrees with the People’s Republic of China that the island and the mainland are one country.   She, however, although this rhetoric has been toned down in recent decades, has insisted since 1949 that she, rather than the Communists in Beijing, is the legitimate government of all of China.    

 

Therefore, when the People’s Republic of China says that she does not want Nancy Pelosi going to Formosa, her objection is to the American politician going to what she regards neither as another country nor a territory in conventional secession whose independence she refuses to recognize, but to part of the country over which she claims to be the sole legitimate government.   Leaving aside for the moment the question of the truth or falsity of her claim to legitimacy, her objection to Pelosi’s visit would be simply hot air if she was the only party that regarded Formosa as part of China.   The matter is complicated greatly by the fact that the government of the Republic of China on Formosa agrees with her and so does the third party to this dispute.

 

That third party is the United States.   The United States has, ever since she decided in the Nixon administration to take advantage of the split in the Communist world between Moscow and Beijing by opening up diplomatic and trade relations to Red China, taken a “One China” policy in which she agrees with Beijing and Taipei where they agree – that there is only one China and Formosa is part of it – while remaining ambiguous on the rather stickier point on which they disagree.   Due to her taking this position and opening up relations with Red China, the United States dishonourably withdrew her previous recognition of the Republic of China, but she tried to make it up to the latter by promising to supply them with enough arms to deter the Communists from attacking.   Thus, her “One China” policy contradicts both that of the People’s Republic and that of the Republic of China in that her commitment is, above all else, to preserving the status quo.

 

This is understandable, perhaps, in that the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for creating that status quo in the first place.

 

The Communist takeover of mainland China began with the overthrow of the Chinese monarchy and the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911.   This led to several years of turmoil as attempts were made to fill the power vacuum left by the abolition of the legitimate government.   The second president of the Republic attempted unsuccessfully to seize the monarchical power for himself, then the country was torn apart as military factions headed by warlords took control of the various regions of the large empire.   Then Sun Yat-Sen, the leader of the 1911 Revolution who had been briefly the first president of the Republic, formed the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, which fought against the warlords to re-unite the country.   These efforts ultimately succeeded in 1926, by which time the Kuomintang was headed by Sun Yat-Sen’s successor, Chiang Kai-Shek.   The success war short-lived however.   Sun Yat-Sen had made a foolish and naïve decision to co-operate with the Chinese Communist Party, backed by the Bolsheviks in Russia.   As was the case with Kerensky in Russia in 1917, this provided the Communists with an opening they were able to exploit to seize power for themselves.  As a consequence his successor was soon embroiled in a Civil War against Mao’s Communists.

 

The Chinese Civil War began about a little over a decade before the Second World War started and had that latter conflict not broken out it might have ended differently.   World War II forced the Nationalists and the Communists in China to put their conflict on hold, for the most part, to fight against their common enemy in the Japanese Empire.   This, however, placed China in alliance with the other countries fighting against Japan and the Axis.   More specifically it placed her in alliance with the Soviet Union and the United States.   Due to this alliance, when the hostilities in the Chinese Civil War resumed after World War II, the balance had already shifted to the Communists.

 

That an alliance with the Soviet Union, the sponsors of Mao’s Communists, would tip the scales in the Chinese internal conflict to the latter, hardly needs explanation.   That an alliance with the United States would have the same effect will sound strange to those used to looking at the United States and the Soviet Union through the interpretive lens of the Cold War in which they are portrayed not just as hostile powers in an ordinary conflict but as polar opposites representing capitalism and communism.   It is nevertheless the case.   World War II began in the second of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four terms as American president.   FDR was so horrible that only a few years after his death the Americans passed the twenty-second amendment to their constitution limiting a president to two terms.    Had they not revolted against their legitimate Sovereign in the eighteenth century, they would have had no need to create the office of president and would never have had to impose a term limit on it to prevent another rotten politician from clinging to elected power as long as FDR did.   One of the things that made FDR so bad was his attitude towards Communism in general, and Stalin in particular.   Later, in the Cold War era, liberals talked and acted pro-Soviet for a number of reasons.  Sometimes they were actually Soviet agents.  Most often it was simply a case of their liberalism being that of the squishy sentimentality that Robert Frost so appropriately captured when he defined a liberal as “a man too open-minded to take his own side in a quarrel”, the quarrel at the time being with the Soviets.   FDR, however, was the kind of liberal who saw the Communists as fellow progressives, sharing the same ideals and working towards the same ends as American liberals, who were just a little misguided about the means.   The first year of his first term as president, he sent the first American ambassador to Stalin’s Soviet Union, right at the time the Holodomor – the artificially induced famine that killed millions in the Ukraine – was going on.   He recalled that ambassador when he sent back truthful reports of just how awful the USSR was, and in his place sent Joseph E. Davies, who arrived just in time for the Great Purge, i.e., the show trials through which Stalin eliminated his rivals, and sent back to FDR just what he wanted to hear, glowing reports about how wonderful Stalin and Communism and the USSR were, complete with an account of the Great Purge that depicted the victims as guilty and justice as having been served.   FDR would later personally request that the Warner Brothers turn Davies’ pro-Stalin memoir Mission to Moscow into a pro-Stalin propaganda film, with which request, much to the discredit of the company that gave us Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester and Tweety, they complied.    Had this been all, FDR would merely have gone down as the biggest moron in history.   Unfortunately, however, his attitude towards Communism and Stalin also manifested itself in his World War II policies, and in his meetings with Churchill and Stalin from the first at Tehran (1943) to the last at Yalta (1945), convinced that he had some kind of power of persuasion over Stalin – see Robert Nisbet’s Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship (1988) - he made concession after concession to the Soviet dictator that ensured that after the war about a third of the world would end up under Communist tyranny.   Unfortunately Churchill, who understood Communism much better than FDR, had been scraping to the American president since even before Pearl Harbour – see Robert Shogan’s Hard Bargain: How FDR Twisted Churchill’s Arm, Evaded the Law, and Changed the Role of the American Presidency (1995), an account of how FDR swindled Churchill with the destroyers in 1940 – and so was in no position to do anything about it.

 

While Eastern Europe – including Poland, to protect which from the Nazis who had agreed with the Soviets to divide her between themselves, was the original reason for the war in the first place – is the most discussed of Soviet territorial gains due to World War II, the USSR also took over several regions in Asia that had been controlled by Japan.    This included a number of regions to the north of China that had, for much of the past millennium, been part of the Chinese Empire and which were of strategic importance to the Soviets in their designs to help Mao’s Communists take over China.  Mongolia, which had declared its independence from China when the last dynasty was overthrown, had been taken over by Soviet-allied Communists in the early 1920s, and while the Soviets had refrained from recognizing Mongolian independence in this early period, at the end of World War II during which they had repelled the Japanese invasion of Mongolia and used Mongolia as a base from which to launch their own attack on Japan, which FDR had “persuaded” Stalin to do at Yalta, they convinced China to recognize the independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic.  This was part of a treaty the Soviets signed with China in August 1945, the terms of which Nationalist China abided with – recognizing Mongolian independence following a plebiscite in October that had obviously been rigged by the Communists – but which the Soviets were covertly violating before the ink was even dry on it.  Bordering Mongolia was Manchuria, the region that had been home to the last ruling dynasty of China.   This had been taken over by the Japanese Empire in 1932 and on the day the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the Soviets, armed with weapons provided by the United States, invaded and took it from Japan.   When the Soviets withdrew from Manchuria the following year, nominally turning it over to the Republic of China, it was actually Mao’s army that took control of the region and turned it into a base to attack the Nationalists.

 

By this time FDR was dead and the remainder of his fourth term as president was being filled by Harry S. Truman.   That Truman was little better than FDR when it came to Communism, he would later demonstrate in his refusal to let General MacArthur win the Korean War.   At the time in question, however, the last half of the 1940s, the problem was not so much the American president but the Communists and Communist sympathizers who had become entrenched in the American Department of State with the previous president’s blessing.   Also problematic was another American World War II general with a decidedly different attitude towards Communism than that of the Pacific commander.   General George C. Marshall, whom FDR had made Chief of Staff of the US Army, was sent to China as a special envoy late in 1945 tasked with trying to resolve the Chinese Civil War.  The only solution that he was capable of thinking of was that the Nationalists needed to accept the Communists who were actively waging revolutionary war against them into a coalition government.   This was an obvious recipe for total Communist takeover.  Marshall threatened to withhold American financial assistance to China if the Nationalists refused to cooperate.   As it happened, the Communists were not interested in such a coalition either but, when Marshall’s mission ended in failure, he returned to the United States blaming the failure on Chiang Kai-Shek.  When, soon after, he was appointed Secretary of State by Truman, he used the position to fight against American assistance to the Chinese Nationalists.   Indeed, through the entire period that he served as special envoy to China and American Secretary of State and even earlier during World War II, Marshall worked to prepare public opinion to accept a Communist takeover of China by whitewashing Mao and his forces, claiming that they were merely “agrarian reformers” rather than Soviet style Bolsheviks.   Marshall died in 1959, one year into the “Great Leap Forward”, the Maoist version of a Stalinist five-year plan that generated a famine that killed more people in China than the Holodomor had done in the Ukraine.   It would have been interesting, had he lived to the end of the “Great Leap Forward”, to see whether he would have finally admitted just how much of a fool he had been about Mao in the 1940s.   He was hardly the only one, however.   His deputy and successor as Secretary of State, Dean Acheson was just as bad or worse, writing a thousand page White Paper at the time Mao was driving the Nationalists off the mainland, justifying the Truman administration’s policies towards the Republic of China and arguing that had they done anything differently it would not have prevented the Communist takeover, a laughable obscenity considering that what they had done was insist that the Republic of China clasp the viper of revolutionary Communism to its breast.  Aiding and abetting Marshall and Acheson in this, were the dolts working for the Institute of Pacific Relations, an international think tank funded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, that published the academically acclaimed journals Pacific Affairs and Far Eastern Survey that had become heavily infested with Communists and Communist sympathizers, a great many of whom also served in the State Department and other bureaucratic and diplomatic offices in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.   This was the basis of the charges of Communist infiltration made against the State Department by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.   Although the newsmedia and academic institutions made his name synonymous with witch-hunting over this, William F. Buckley Jr. and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr made a convincing case as early as 1954 in McCarthy and his Enemies that there were witches indeed to be found in the State Department, cackling around their cauldron as if they were acting out the first scene of the fourth Act of Macbeth.   The mid-1990s public release of the files of the Venona Project, along with the opening of the Soviet archives after the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War, established the point beyond a reasonable doubt, although the progressive nitwits in the media and academe, including or especially all those who accepted without question the unsubstantiated claims of Hilary Clinton that her failure to win a third term in the White House in 2016 was due to interference by the current Russian government, are unlikely to acknowledge this any time soon.  For the whole sordid tale of the IPR, which shared board members, staff, and a building with Amerasia the journal caught with almost 2000 classified documents stolen from the OSS and other American and British military intelligence agencies after it had rather stupidly published one in 1945, and the FDR-Truman policies that helped the Communists take over so much of Asia, see John T. Flynn While You Slept: Our Tragedy in Asia and Who Made It (1951).

 

It is easier to understand how the American leadership of the 1930s and 1940s could have been so naive at best and collaborative at worst towards Communism if we grasp that in a sense FDR was right about the relationship between American liberalism and Communism.   The two are cousins of a sort.   Both are the children of the Modern Age, and the philosophical spirit of that Age which spirit can be summed up in the idea that human beings need to abandon tradition, time-proven established institutions, religion and the like and pursue maximum freedom and equality through reason and science, movement towards which goal is what is meant by the word “progress” in its political-philosophical sense.   American liberalism is the direct descendent of the earliest manifestation of this spirit in the sixteenth-seventeenth century English movement that began as Calvinist Puritanism and secularized into Whiggery.   Communism is descended, through Karl Marx as interpreted by V. I. Lenin, from the Jacobin movement responsible for the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror (the revolutionary movement with which Marx aligned himself and for which he wrote began as a faction of the Jacobins).   Jacobinism, like American liberalism, was descended from Puritanism-Whiggery, but through the intermediary of continental philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau.    So FDR was right that American liberalism and Communism have the same goal – a society in which freedom and equality are both maximized – but with different ideas about the means to achieve it.   Where he was wrong was in thinking that this was a worthy goal.   It is not.     Progress is not desirable but evil.  The end of the Modern Age is based upon a contradiction.   Freedom and equality, in their purest forms, are utterly incompatible with each other.   Freedom is compatible with justice but not with equality.   Freedom and justice were considered to be goods in the pre-Modern tradition, that is to say, desirable ends that were what they were as part of the transcendent order.   Freedom and equality are considered to be values in the Modern Age.  Equality is a perversion of justice.   It is to justice what a $3 bill is to real currency.   When idealists make equality their goal rather than justice – and when modifiers such as “social”, “racial”, “sexual” are added to the word “justice” it is actually equality that is meant – they think they are working towards a better society, but are actually making it worse.   Gresham’s Law states that bad money drives out good. Similarly, equality, the counterfeit of justice, drives out justice – and freedom along with it.  The ancients understood this – it is the point, or one of the points at least, of the myth of Procrustes, the giant with the “one size fits all” policy regarding beds, whom Theseus encountered on his way to Athens.   Just as Modern thought errs in thinking that freedom and equality are compatible, so it errs in thinking of pre-Modern thought and tradition as something to be dismissed and discarded except in that it can be interpreted, ala the Whig Interpretation of History, as leading to the Modern Age and its goals.   See Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s writings, especially Liberty or Equality (1952) and The Menace of the Herd (1943) for a fuller explanation of the incompatibility of equality and freedom.  For an illustration look to the French Revolution and all the Communist Revolutions that took their inspiration from the French.   While the Jacobins who founded the first French Republic, the Bolsheviks, the Maoists, the Khmer Rouge, etc. all saw themselves as “liberators” and claimed “liberty” or “freedom” as an ideal as much as the Americans do – the motto of the French Revolution, remember, was “liberty, equality, fraternity” - the French Republic and all the People’s Republics were terror states, life within which could hardly be described as freedom.   That the American Revolution did not immediately produce a similar state is due to a number of reasons, the foremost being that while the leaders of the Revolution were liberals with the same contradictory program of freedom and equality as the Jacobins and Bolsheviks, the Revolution they led was a secession movement rather than the seizing of a central state and furthermore, a secession movement on the part of a coalition of political entities which, once secession was achieved, initially established a much weaker central government than what it eventually grew into because they wished to preserve their own powers in the new federation, and thus the liberals were not able at first to impose their agenda like a Procrustean bed on all Americans from the top down, which meant that much of the freedom of the pre-Revolution tradition was able to survive.

 

While nobody in their right mind wants to see the inhabitants of Formosa fall under the totalitarian rule of Beijing – the recent example of what happened to the inhabitants of Hong Kong when it was transferred to the People’s Republic should suffice to convince anyone not yet persuaded that life under Red Chinese rule is not desirable – it is a mistake to look to the United States to preserve their freedom.   It is not just that American liberalism is cousin to Communism and that the United States failed to prevent the Communist takeover of mainland China and arguably abetted it.   It is America’s self-contradictory policy with regards to China.   By agreeing with both Beijing and Taipei that there is only “One China” including both the mainland and Formosa, they take a position that keeps them from supporting Formosan independence qua independence and requires them to support one of the governments as the sole legitimate government of all of China.   They cannot support the government in Taipei as the legitimate government of all of China and retain their relations and trade with the Peoples’ Republic.   Therefore, they logically have to support the People’s Republic as the legitimate government.   So far their commitment to keep Formosa from falling into Communist hands has prevented them from doing so in an unambiguous manner.   This does not seem to be a sustainable position in the long run however.   The current incident that is the occasion of this essay demonstrates that among other things.

 

I will conclude by saying that in my view neither the Republic of China in Formosa nor the People’s Republic of China on the mainland is legitimate.   My views lean towards Jacobitism rather than Jacobinism, albeit Dr. Johnson’s brand of Jacobitism in which loyalty is to the current reigning house, and accordingly I regard no republic as legitimate.   I therefore take a legitimist position with regards to China.   The legitimate heir of one of the ancient dynasties – I will leave it to the Chinese to determine which one – should be found, and restored to his throne over all of China, and both the Republic and the People’s Republic ought to be dissolved into the restored Chinese monarchy.   That is the proper resolution to the situation.   Since the Americans are not likely to get on board with it any time this side of the Second Coming, when they will have to repent of their republicanism and democracy and bow the knee to the King of Kings if they don’t want to share the fate of the first Whig, the devil, the Chinese will just have to do it themselves.

Russia, The Royal Martyrs, and Revolutionary Modernity

Russia has been much in the news lately as left-wing wackos have been trying to paint US President Donald Trump’s attempts to get along with Russian President Vladimir Putin and allow the two countries to peacefully co-exist as some sort of treason. In my childhood, Russia was still in the grips of the murderous, totalitarian, ideological, regime bent on global conquest that had seized power in the fall of 1917. How well I remember that at that time, the same people who are crying “the Russians are coming” today, labelled anyone who warned about the Communist Kremlin’s evil designs a “McCarthyite.” The term alluded to Joseph McCarthy, the American Senator from Wisconsin in the 1950s who warned about Communist infiltration of the State Department. “McCarthyite”, as the left used the term, was more or less synonymous with “witch hunter”, although McCarthy has been mostly vindicated by the facts of history. (1) For the left, Russia could do no wrong as long as the Bolsheviks were in power, but once the Soviet regime collapsed, she can do no right. What an absurd and insane way of looking at things.

We have just reached the hundredth anniversary of one of the first in the very long list of monstrous crimes that can be charged to the Bolshevik account. On July 17, 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife Empress Alexandra, and their children the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the Tsesarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, as well as their household servants and the court physician, were shot, stabbed, and clubbed to death in Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where they had been moved shortly before the murders. They had been prisoners for over a year, at first a mild house arrest under Keresnky’s Provisional Government, then a much harsher imprisonment following the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks’ rise to power.

The murder of the Romanovs had been foreshadowed by the beheadings of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette on January 21st and October 16th respectively in 1793, and before that by the beheading of Charles I on January 30th, 1649. There are a number of parallels between these murders. The victims, in each case, included the legitimate Royal Sovereign of the country in which the revolution was being perpetrated. He was also, in each case, the Royal Protector of a Church which claimed descent from the early, undivided, Apostolic Church and which was under attack by the revolutionaries. Charles I was the Protector of the Church of England which was under attack by the Puritan Calvinists. Louis XVI was Protector of the Roman Catholic Church in France which was a target of the Revolutionaries who were disciples of the rationalist Rousseau. Nicholas II was Protector of the Russian Orthodox Church against the atheistic, Marxist, Bolsheviks. In England and France, the revolutionaries tried to give a façade of legality to the murders by holding show trials in which the kings were condemned by kangaroo courts. In Russia, the Bolsheviks didn’t bother with this, they simply declared the Tsar to be guilty of crimes against the Russian people and had him shot. In each case the royal murders failed to satisfy the bloodlust of the revolutionaries, but rather merely whetted their appetite for the mass murders that were to come. (2)

There is a sense in which all three crimes were committed by the same perpetrators. While the term “left” did not develop its political connotations until the French Revolution, when it was applied to the enemies of the Crown, aristocracy, and Church because of where they stood in relation to the speaker in the French assembly, the Puritans were definitely historical antecedents of the French Revolutionaries, just as the Bolsheviks were their ideological descendants. The Puritans, like the Anabaptists of continental Europe, were the “left-wing” of the Reformation, those who thought the Magisterial Reformers had not gone far enough. They were also the first classical liberals, or, as liberals were called at the time, Whigs. In their thinking, and especially the secularized version of it offered in the writings of John Locke, the foundation was laid for the much more radical thought of Rousseau, which inspired the French Revolutionaries, and in turn laid the foundation for Marx, the father of Communism. In this lineage can be seen one explanation for the fact that “left-wing extremism” is a far less commonly heard expression than “right-wing extremism.” The latter expression is, of course, never used in good faith. It is employed by the left, to smear those who hold views that the left has decided are to be considered to be outside the pale of acceptable discourse, by association with the regime that governed Germany from 1933 to 1945, of which regime “right wing extremism” has connotations despite the fact that it was a revolutionary rather than a reactionary regime, that despised the old order of “throne and altar” that “right wing” was historically and traditionally associated with, and even called itself “socialist.” The reason “left-wing extremism” has not caught on is that it is redundant. The essence of the left, its very nature, is the relentless desire for the complete overthrow of all time-honoured institutions, traditions, and order. From royalty, nobility and the Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the middle classes and private property and enterprise in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, to marriage, the family, the nation and even the biological realities of race and sex in the twentieth and twenty-first, the left has moved on from one target to another, seeking only to destroy in its hatred and rage, with its ultimate targets being the Good, the True, and the Beautiful and indeed, God Himself, for, as Dr. Johnson observed centuries ago, the first Whig was the devil. The left is extremism, and extremism is the left.


In the Restoration, the Anglican Church at the 1660 Convocations of the provinces of York and Canterbury, canonized Charles I as a saint and martyr. Similarly, eighteen years ago the Russian Orthodox Church canonized its royal martyrs, all of the murdered Romanovs, as passion bearers. In both cases the honour was far more worthily bestowed than is the “cheap martyrdom” that contemporary evangelicals award to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, let alone the spurious pseudo-sainthood conveyed by the same upon Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi. While their faith was not the sole reason that Charles I and Nicholas II and his family were put to death, it was part of the reason, and in murdering them, their revolutionary enemies sought to kill that which they symbolically represented – the old order of Christendom, with its alliance of throne and altar, church and state. Bonhoeffer, while a clergyman – albeit one who should have been defrocked for his heretical theology which bordered upon atheism at the very end of his life – was executed for taking part in a political conspiracy. The Roman Catholic Church has never canonized Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, perhaps because its canonization process is more elaborate and requires more than mere martyrdom. It is not likely ever to do so as long as the usurper Jorge Bergoglio has his claws all over St. Peter’s vacant throne.

I wouldn’t hold my breathe waiting for Rome to develop enough sense to kick Jorge to the curb, bring back Benedict, and canonize Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Whatever Rome does or does not do, however, we can and ought to honour and remember them, alongside our Anglican Royal Martyr Charles, and the Imperial Family of Russia, and the sacred witness they bear to the truth of the old order, against the bloody, violent, and revolutionary hatred of the progressive left.

(1) For a thorough substantiation of this claim see M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, (New York: Random House, 2007). See also Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, (New York: Free Press, 1999). McCarthy’s famous crusade against Communism began four years into the Cold War, which followed immediately after a lengthy period, which began with the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, in which the American government was incredibly pro-Communist. One of FDR’s first acts as President was to recognize the Bolshevik regime in Russia, to which he sent an ambassador, William C. Bullitt Jr., whom he recalled when Bullitt refused to whitewash the Stalin regime which, just prior to his arrival, had committed the Holodomor (the man-made famine that starved over ten million Ukrainians). In Bullitt’s place he sent Joseph E. Davies, who painted the Stalin regime with roses, even as it was conducting the infamous show trials known as the “Great Purge” under his nose. In 1943 FDR ordered Davies’ odious, pro-Soviet memoir, Mission to Moscow, made into a pro-Stalin propaganda film. While some might argue that FDR was forced into this relationship with Stalin by the necessities of WWII – an argument that would be true in the case of Sir Winston Churchill who knew Bolshevism for what it was and had been speaking against it for decades – FDR was, in fact, a naïve, egotist with a messiah complex, who saw himself and Stalin as brothers in progress, the leaders of two nations founded on modern ideological principles. The records of the Tehran Conference demonstrate how much closer in spirit to Stalin than to Churchill, FDR really was, making it less surprising that the outcome of FDR’s wartime negotiations with Stalin included the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe up to the eastern half of Germany, including Poland, for whose sake Britain and France had gone to war with Hitler in the first place after Hitler and Stalin had made a pact to invade and divide her between themselves. Needless to say, Roosevelt’s administration was overrun with Soviet agents and Communist sympathizers, such as Harry Dexter White. When the Cold War began, shortly after WWII ended, a number of highly placed Soviet spies, such as Alger Hiss, were exposed through the defections of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, and attempts were made in most branches of the American government to remove Soviet agents and other security risks, but the State Department resisted these attempts. Enter Joseph McCarthy, who in early 1950 gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he declared the State Department to be “infested with Communists” and waved a paper which he claimed contained the names of a large number of individuals within the Department known to the Secretary to be members of the Communist Party. The US Senate appointed a subcommittee, headed by the hostile Millard Tydings, to investigate McCarthy’s charges. When the Republicans gained control of the Senate after the 1952 Congressional election, McCarthy himself was named chair of the Senate Permanent Investigations Committee. In 1954, William F. Buckley Jr and L. Brent Bozell went person by person, through the list of those McCarthy had either named before the Tydings Committee or investigated with his own, demonstrating that whether or not they could be shown to be “card-carrying members of the Communist Party” they represented real security risks. McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning, (Chicago: Henry Regnery). Indeed, the majority of those about whom McCarthy raised concerns were later investigated, found to indeed be security risks, and removed from sensitive positions in the State Department. After the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, information from two newly available sources, the Soviet archives, and the declassified-as-of-1995 Venona Project (a counterespionage project that intercepted coded messages between the Soviets and their spies in the West) firmly established the guilt of many individuals such as Hiss, whose innocence the liberal left had loudly maintained for decades, and showed that indeed, the Communist Party USA had been acting as subversive arm of the Soviet Union, and that Soviet penetration of the American government in this era was far more extensive than McCarthy had suggested. See John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1999).

(2) As revolutionary modernity developed from the fanatical Calvinism of the Puritans to the rationalistic democratic egalitarianism of the Jacobins to the dialectic materialism of the Marxist-Leninist Bolsheviks the scale of the atrocities committed by its regimes increased, exponentially so in the final stage with Communism murdering over one hundred million people in the twentieth century. Those who, unlike David in 1 Samuel 24 and 26, are willing to lay their hands on the Lord’s anointed and commit the crime of regicide, will have no greater regard for the lives of those of lesser rank.