SACRAMENTAL LIVING | Economy
Militarism
These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them. Revelation 17:14
Lions and tigers, wolves and foxes, hyenas and snakes - the Lamb shall overcome them!... The Lamb conquered and conquers and shall conquer all the kings and rulers of the world with their bestial natures, their armies and their mercenaries, their glorifiers and their followers.... The Lamb conquers, and only the Lamb.
St. Nikolai Velimirovic
Prologue from Ohrid
St. Genevieve called upon the people to fast and to pray to God and then the calamity will be averted. Many men and women responded to the call of this saint.... Genevieve herself fasted the most and prayed most ardently to God. After a short while the enemy turned away from Paris without any visible reason and departed for another place. That which the sword of many sinners cannot do, the prayer of the righteous person can.
St. Nikolai Velimirovic
Prologue from Ohrid
“...I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?”
“It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,” was the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. “Look here.”
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom [Ignorance], unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious [manipulative] purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”
The bell struck twelve...
Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol, Ignorance and Want
Failing! Failing is Babylon the Great
From earliest civilizations, including Babylon, humanity has engaged in militarism for formation of one “empire” after another in a long bloody march of the likes of such as Nimrod, Alexander, Napolean, Cromwell, Egyptian pharaohs, Asian emperors, Roman caesars, Carolingians, Merovingians, Ottomans, Hapsburgs, and Prussians, down to contemporary revolutionaries, the dictators and ruling elitist oligarchs with their flag waving and hollow crys for “liberty”.
Currently, under the guise of "patriotism" and "democracy", US military aggression “leads” the world, pursued on behalf of “globalism” for the benefit of multinational corporate elites. Such militarism is complicated by unprecedented influence over American society and government officials by pro-Israel lobbying from AIPAC and nearly 80 (maybe more) Jewish-American organizations. This undue influence, which gives utmost “favored nation” status and unprecedented aid to Israel (billions of borrowed $ on which billions of $ in ‘interest’ must be paid by American citizens), is the root of contemporary Arab terrorist aggression against the United States, and can even take precedence over other lobbying efforts by corporate special interests. Not since John F. Kennedy has a president had the courage to stand up to “Israel” or its lobby. Those who have stood up, have been swiftly moved against and their political service disrupted or destroyed.
Supporting overt militarism are undercover operants (“spooks”) who are known to use “psy ops” to “manufacture” consent, internationally through CIA fomenting of miltants for regime change or “false flag” operations for which the Israeli Mossad is infamous. Such psy ops have even been perpetrated domestically on Americans through FBI COINTELPRO intended to smear outgroups. International espionage escalated when Western “allies” (including Russia) uncovered heretofore unheard of tactics upon defeat of Nazis in WWII, after which the West turned it's military focus on Russia, lest Russia use the newfound tactics against the West and gain the upper hand. America's espionage has sometimes even been funded by ‘front group’ foundations and entailed enlisting organized criminal elements, such as the mafia and drug cartels, which are known to traffic not only in drugs, but also weapons, media, pornography, prostitution, and sex slaves. Existence of a Jewish mafia confirms that such organized crime is not solely an Italian or Western European phenomenon.
Inspirations for James Bond
By the 60s, espionage was commonly accepted
in American pop culture as normal foreign “policy”
Jewish involvement in American media as the “people in between” has also contributed to manufacturing consent, further complicating the unholy power struggle by contemporary ruling oligarchs. In the quest for “power” and influence by the Jewish ruling elite and intelligentsia, it is notable that a false western “multi-culturalism” is concocted as weapon against the Western European ruling elite, while upholding Jewish apartheid in the state of Israel. This situation is perhaps poetic justice since the historic, invading barbarians (from which many if not most important Western European ruling elites descend, or whose “philosophy” is upheld by those privileged to be “in” their camp) distorted Christianity in Western Europe from spiritual medicine into religious moralism, similar to modern Judaism, and utilized the Church of Rome for pursuit of their own power and control.
Ancient Faith knows no moralistic imperative, so it cannot be shamed by the moral relativism with which the minority Jewish ruling elite and intellingentsia assault dominant Western European culture. These posit the Jewish community as pure sacrificial lamb minority amidst a majority goyim which is propagandized as “immoral” and genetically predisposed in hatred against “Israel”. To complete this scheme, Jewish elite and intelligentsia then hide their agenda of wresting power away from that Western European majority ruling elite with cries of anti-semitism at first sign of slightest criticism.
Ancient Faith embodies true multiculturalism that celebrates diversity of human ancestry in unity of recreated humanity, mankind transfigured into the Body of Christ, the Church. Such unity in diversity is something that can never be achieved by secular pluralistic modern culture manipulated by elitist overlords, because the goal of secular multiculturalism is elitist materialistic superiority (“power” and “control”), not human spiritual solidarity in communion with God. This Divine communion is not in opposition to any portion of humanity, but to a common immaterial enemy, the evil one and father of lies, by whose temptation humanity was deceived into separating from Divine communion, thereby bringing death into the material Creation.
Ancestry is not something over which anyone has “control”, and ultimately is not that with which a human is created to identify. Ethnicity does have a role to play in introducing human groups to Ancient Faith, since all humanity is rooted in ethnicity. Most all ethnic groups have an ancestral relationship to Christianity, undistorted by barbarian invasion of Western European Christendom, but ethnicity is not a cultural end in itself, only initiation to the Body of Christ where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.
Humanity experiences “identity crisis” when it forms its identity primarily around ethnicity, culture (including language and religion), fame or fortune (material things), which leads to all manner of injustice and inhumanity against outgroups. The struggle of Ancient Faith for Divine communion can find meaning and purpose in suffering, but does not make suffering the moral high ground for one ethnic group in order to manipulate the “goyim”, the whole rest of humanity. Real human identity resides in being created in Divine Image and Likeness, and the realization of need for daily reCreation in Divine Likeness which is continually distorted by human sensuality resulting from separation from the Source of All Life, whereby “passions” are used by the evil one and hater of mankind to enslave human being in a false model of life to the detriment of the human person.
As the Lord Jesus Christ sends forth his disciples to the Jewish diaspora, he says he is sending them out as sheep amidst wolves, and exhorts them to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. When it comes to barbarian distorted Western European “christian” culture and assault on it by the duplicitous double standard of Jewish ruling elites and intellingentsia, modern day followers of Ancient Faith must act as Apostles to resist the influence of both Jewish and Western European false cultures and their “moral imperatives” upon which the modern false model of life is constructed.
Through the Path of Salvation, the Ascetic Ideal of a “new” testament to covenant with the God of Abraham, Ancient Faith operates from a much different basis (than that of scribes, Pharisees, or others), from the Foundation of Christian Morals not from sophistry, solipsism and external legalistic manipulation of Mosaic Law or anything else. Rather than looking outward to military force to settle a score (real or “manufactured”), or to playing the victim (using victimization to gain the upper hand as persecutor; “eye for eye”, “tit for tat”), followers of Ancient Faith look inward for spiritual healing as spiritual warriors from the standpoint of human solidarity against a common enemy (the evil one, the father of lies). In so doing, they enter into transfiguration, becoming supernatural victors regardless of sufferings inherant in outward “natural” circumstance. Without so much as firing rifle or thrusting sword, followers of Ancient Faith on the Path of Salvation then become the real, creative force for preservation of human society and All Creation.
For alternative to Militarism, see About LGS, Culture, Case Study, More Info, Sacramental Living, and Simple Gospel Life.
True Torah Jews Against Zionism
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
Reviewed by Kevin MacDonald
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is a courageous, ground breaking effort. The authors are experts in the field of foreign policy, and they provide exhaustive detail on a wide range of topics....
The first chapter, on the United States as the “Great Benefactor” of Israel, shows that Israel is in a class by itself in terms of receiving aid, not only in how much it receives but in how it receives it and in the lack of accountability for how it is spent. For example, Israel is the only country to receive all of its aid at the beginning of the fiscal year, so that it is able to earn extra interest ($660 million as of 2004) even as the U.S. government must pay interest on the money it provides Israel ($50 million–$60 million per year). Lax enforcement of U.S. tax law results in Jewish donations to the settler movement being tax deductible, and, since there is no accountability for how U.S. aid is spent, it can be used to support policies like the settler movement that the government officially opposes.
Mearsheimer and Walt emphasize the “increasingly unconditional nature” of U.S. military aid (p. 37) despite the fact that Israel has often taken actions that the U.S. government opposes (refusing to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, annexing conquered land, building settlements in conquered territories, selling U.S. technology to China, spying on the United States, and using U.S. weapons like cluster bombs in ways that violate U.S. law). Since Eisenhower [1960], the United States has used only larger carrots, not sticks, to try to influence Israeli behavior, often with little or nothing to show for it....
Mearsheimer and Walt do a masterful job exposing the new “combating terrorism” rationale for the U.S.–Israel alliance:
(1) Palestinian terrorism is not at all directed against the United States but against Israel because of its policies; it has no known links to al Qaeda.
(2) Terrorism is a legitimate tool used by those without other options. It is often used in state creation, and indeed, prominent Israeli leaders (Begin, Shamir) were themselves terrorists during Israel’s formative years.
(3) Most importantly, “the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it has long been so supportive of Israel” (p. 64). Exhibit A is Osama bin Laden himself. Mearsheimer and Walt provide an excellent account showing that bin Laden “has been deeply sympathetic to the Palestinian cause ever since he was a young man and that he has long been angry at the United States for backing Israel so strongly” (p. 66).
(4) The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in the region is not a real strategic threat to the United States. This is particularly important given that a rationale for the invasion of Iraq and the impending invasion of Iran is their possession of such weapons: “If the United States could live with a nuclear Soviet Union or a nuclear China . . . and if it can tolerate a nuclear Pakistan and embrace a nuclear India, then it could live (however reluctantly) with a nuclear Iran as well” (p. 73). Moreover, the U.S. relationship with Israel makes it harder, not easier, to deal with these threats.
(5) Israel is not the loyal ally it is often made out to be. Mearsheimer and Walt provide a long list of cases where Israel has openly flouted U.S. interests, ranging from the Lavon affair of 1954 (a false flag operation in which Israeli agents blew up U.S. offices in Egypt in order to provoke a U.S.–Egypt crisis), to espionage, to selling weapons and technology to countries like China viewed as adversaries of the United States....
Mearsheimer and Walt do a good job of discrediting the importance of the oil lobby and the Christian Zionists in influencing U.S. policy. The Christian Zionists, although certainly useful to the lobby, have far less impact than other parts of the lobby. The oil lobby has only a “modest” influence. Its interests often conflict with those of the Israel lobby, mainly because the oil industry wants friendly Arab regimes that will not threaten to disrupt oil supplies, as during the 1973 oil embargo. As the authors note, “if Arab petrodollars or energy companies were driving American policy, one would expect to see the United States distancing itself from Israel and working overtime to get the Palestinians a state of their own” (p. 143). Indeed, when Gulf Oil was found aiding Arab causes in 1975, it was publicly condemned by Jewish organizations and it ended up issuing an abject apology in the New York Times: “You may be certain it will not happen again.” The recent Iran sanctions program also contravenes the interests of U.S. oil companies wanting to do business with Iran. Tellingly, Dick Cheney opposed sanctions as head of Halliburton, but has been a strong advocate of sanctions since becoming vice-president....
Another noteworthy section is the detailed presentation on the role of the Israel lobby in the origins of the Iraq war. “We argue that the war was motivated at least in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure” (p. 231). They note that “some Israeli leaders” actually favored a war with Iran but were mollified by assurances that war with Iran would come later. The originators of the plan for the war with Iraq were Jewish-American neoconservatives “who conceived the idea and were principally responsible for pushing it forward in the wake of September 11” (p. 234). Israel then chimed in to do its part, chiefly by providing false intelligence and by having its leaders join the public chorus in America in favor of the war....
[A]s Albert Lindemann notes [A. S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank) 1894–1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 279], throughout their history Jews have behaved “individually and collectively, as active agents, as modern, responsible, and flawed human beings, not merely as passive martyrs or as uncomprehending objects of impersonal forces.” In my view, the main outbreaks of anti-Semitism in European history have had strong overtones of resource competition and have always been exacerbated by Jewish characteristics, particularly their separateness and their aggressive behavior toward non-Jews. Indeed, the typical Jewish pattern in traditional societies was to act as a middleman minority on behalf of an exploitative alien ruling elite. Rather than passive victims, Jews have often behaved quite aggressively toward the people they have lived among. For example, Jews have aggressively pursued their interests in America not just via the Israel lobby but by successfully advocating an open borders immigration policy, promoting U.S. involvement in World War II, altering the privileged position of Christianity in the public square, and successfully promoting many of the influential movements of the political and cultural left. In the twentieth century, the Jewish role in the slaughter of 20 million Soviet citizens under Bolshevism was well known and was an important component of negative perceptions of Jews prior to World War II.
Mearsheimer and Walt provide a long list of examples of Israeli aggressiveness toward its neighbors and the Palestinians: Israel is an expansionist state whose leaders were not satisfied with the original partition of 1948—a time when Jews comprised 35 percent of the population of Palestine and controlled 7 percent of the land. Israelis “continued to impose terrible violence and discrimination against the Palestinians for decades” after the founding of the state, including ethnic cleansing after the 1967 war and, according to Israeli historian Benny Morris, an occupation based on “brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation” (p. 100).
Mearsheimer and Walt spend a great deal of time recounting other acts of Israeli aggression, such as the horrors of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the wanton destruction wrought by the bombing of Lebanon in the summer of 2006. They also show how Israel has aggressively promoted regime change throughout the region, using the power of the United States harnessed by the Israel lobby. But they ignore a consistent pattern of aggressive Jewish behavior in pursuit of their perceived interests that has been a theme of Jewish history and an important ingredient of historical anti-Semitism....
Jews, as a wealthy group with a long history of developing successful activist organizations, have created over 80 national organizations devoted to pro-Israel activism, as well as a great many others for which such activism is at least part of their character. Although Jewish organizations certainly have other causes, promoting Israel by promoting “the alignment of America’s and Israel’s strategic and moral values” (p. 119) is the most important communal focus of American Jews....
Mearsheimer and Walt show that the activism of American Jews is often orchestrated by Israel, as in 1967 when the Israeli ambassador was instructed to “create a public atmosphere that will constitute pressure on the [Johnson] administration . . . without it being explicitly clear that we are behind this public campaign” (p. 122; quote from historian Tom Segev). The result was a massive outpouring of letters urging the administration to back Israel. This example also illustrates that appeals to Jews to aid Israel are often highly emotional, conjuring images of a society under siege: “Portraying Israel as beleaguered and vulnerable and issuing dire warnings about continued or growing anti-Semitism helps maintain a high level of concern among potential supporters and helps ensure these organizations’ continued existence” (p. 128)....
The problem, according to Mearsheimer and Walt, is not that Jews are loyal to Israel. As noted, that’s normal and accepted for a wide range of Americans in multicultural America. The problem is that Jewish activists are engaged in a largely fallacious effort to portray their policy preferences as good for America as a whole. In doing this, they often seem unaware that their own ingroup attitudes may shape their perceptions....
Mearsheimer and Walt do an admirable job in documenting how the [Israel] lobby controls public discourse on Israel.... In August 2003... the writer Ian Buruma wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine titled “How to Talk About Israel.” He made the obvious point that it is sometimes difficult to talk “critically and dispassionately” about Israel in the United States and pointed out that “even legitimate criticism of Israel, or of Zionism, is often quickly denounced as anti-Semitism by various watchdogs.” In response, Bret Stephens, then the editor of the Jerusalem Post, and now a columnist and editorial board member for the Wall Street Journal, published a vitriolic open letter in the Post that began by asking Buruma, “Are you a Jew?” Two paragraphs later, Stephens declared, “What matters to me is that you say, ‘I am a Jew.’” Why did this matter? Because in Stephen’s view, “One must be at least a Jew to tell the goyim how they may or may not talk about Israel.” The message of this remarkable letter was, in short, that non-Jews should talk about this subject only in ways that Jews deem acceptable. (p. 174) ...The good news is that “even William Kristol seems to have recognized that calling critics of Israel or the lobby anti-Semites is losing its capacity to silence others, writing... that ‘the mainstream Jewish organizations have played the “anti-Semitism” card so often that it has been devalued’” (pp. 195–96)....
Mearsheimer and Walt try to see Israel as a normal state capable of making rational decisions, but the extremists are in charge and have been so at least since the 1967 War. Any attempt to make a meaningful withdrawal from the West Bank and Jerusalem and to allow a viable Palestinian state would produce a civil war among Israelis and likely provoke a strong response by the lobby on the side of the nonaccommodationists. The fate of the Oslo peace process, the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin [who tried to pursue peace], and the support by the lobby of the most radical elements within Israel certainly argue that there is little chance of a successful move in this direction. As throughout Jewish history, it is the most committed members who determine the direction of the entire group. This is doubtless true of most groups, but it is especially the case with Jews where there is a long history of fanaticism. I am reminded of Christiane Amanpour’s depiction of Jewish fanatics in her excellent TV documentary, God’s Jewish Warriors. These West Bank settlers and Jewish activists are massively ethnocentric, and, unlike the propaganda put out by the lobby, they are not at all democratic. They live in a completely Jewish world where their every thought and perception is colored by their Jewish identity. Theirs is an apartheid world separated by high concrete walls from their Palestinian neighbors, where even tiny settlements are necessarily protected by the Israeli army. And at a time when Americans are constantly being encouraged by Jewish organizations like the ADL to be ever more tolerant of all kinds of diversity, these people are anything but tolerant. Calls for expropriation and expulsion of the Palestinians are commonplace among them. Israel has created a classic Middle Eastern segmented society in which different groups live in an ingroup/outgroup world, completely isolated from each other. Such people may not be representative of the Jewish community either in Israel or in America. But their numbers are large, and they have created “facts on the ground” that make any kind of reasonable settlement impossible. Mearsheimer and Walt do a good job of showing how the lobby has moved to the right along with Israeli politics, and they do a good job of showing how the more moderate American Jews have been excluded from having any influence. But I don’t really think that they come to grips with the fanaticism of those who are shaping the directions of Israeli policy and their supporters in the lobby. One can talk about U.S. interests or Israeli interests all one wants, but this is a fight to the finish....
Mearsheimer and Walt devote an entire chapter to the “dwindling moral case” for Israel.... At the heart of this critique is a rather glaring double standard: “Imagine the outcry that would arise here if a U.S. cabinet official spoke of the benefits of a policy that had reduced the birthrates of African Americans and Hispanics, thereby preserving a white majority” (p. 89). Or, one might suggest, imagine the outcry that would greet a similar comment on immigration policy to the effect that the United States ought to remain a nation of people of European descent. Indeed, those most outraged by such policies would be prominent American Jewish organizations like the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. These organizations are major forces promoting Israel as a state serving the interests of the Jewish people while at the same time producing and encouraging anti-majoritarian political and ideological movements in the United States. Thus these Jewish organizations turn a blind eye to apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Israel while being staunch defenders of the rights of minorities in the United States. The common denominator here, of course, is not a universalistic moral principle but what is in the interests of Jews....
One of the things that struck me in reading Jewish history was a pattern, stretching back to the ancient world, in which Jews consistently created rationalizations and apologia [propaganda] intended to present themselves in a positive light and their enemies in a negative light. There was a great deal of evidence that at least some of this involved self-deception. A great many commentators have noticed this pattern, but one of the most accurate and succinct is John Murray Cuddihy’s comment that Jewish apologists developed a theory of their own history: ... emphasizing Gentile persecution as the root cause of Jewish “degradation.” This ideology ... was shared in one form or another, by all the ideologists of nineteenth-century Jewry: Reform Jews and Zionists, assimilationists and socialists, Bundists and Communists—all became virtuosos of ethnic suffering.... The point is that these Diaspora groups were uninterested in actual history; they were apologists, ideologists, prefabricating a past in order to answer embarrassing questions, to outfit a new identity, and to ground a claim to equal treatment in the modern world. Social psychologists have long known that powerful commitment to an ingroup results in a variety of cognitive distortions, especially glorifying the ingroup and pathologizing the outgroup. So we can’t expect a real dialogue or objective analysis here. The deeply committed Jews who form the backbone of the organized Jewish community in America are simply unable to see Israel as morally flawed and a massive strategic burden to the United States.
If indeed a majority of Americans and their leaders realize that Israel is fundamentally an expression of the deep wellsprings of Jewish ethnocentrism and that American support for Israel is not at all in the national interest and has resulted in enormous costs and suffering, the predicted reaction is that committed Jews will retreat into a psychological world where once again they will see themselves as victims of irrational hatred.... The whole lachrymose history of Jews as a persecuted but morally superior light unto the nations stretching from the Pharaoh to the Crusaders to the Tsar, to Hitler to Ahmadinejad will once again be summoned to confer a sense of psychological affirmation. Only this time, with Israel already a formidable nuclear power, the stakes are raised for the entire planet.
This retreat into a psychological world of ethnic pride and pathologizing their opponents was not an option for the Protestant intellectual and cultural elite displaced by the rise of the culture of critique. Their commitment to individualism and their fragile sense of peoplehood and ethnic identification made them vulnerable to charges of moral failings. It was a vulnerability that was well recognized by Jewish activists: For example, in the debate over the 1924 immigration restriction law, Israel Zangwill noted that, “You must make a fight against this bill; tell them they are destroying American ideals. Most fortifications are of cardboard, and if you press against them, they give way.”
But arguments that the Israel lobby is destroying American ideals will fall on deaf ears among Jewish activists. Instead of producing a lack of confidence and a sense of guilt, the result of America turning against the Israel lobby will be the erection of a parallel universe of rationalization and self-deception among the most strongly identified segments of the Jewish community—the backbone of the organized Jewish community.
Turning against the lobby would also produce a political crisis in the United States. Another very clear message of Mearsheimer and Walt is that American political culture is utterly corrupt. The vast majority of American politicians have been only too willing to conform to the wishes of the lobby, and often compete to go beyond what the lobby desires. The good news, perhaps, is that a political crisis over Jewish influence is exactly what the United States needs.
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