George McGovern: RIP

I much prefer real liberals like McGovern over modern corporate statists such as Reid, Romney, Obama,  Boehner, and the Clintons.

George McGovern was a Christian gentleman. His chief fault was a sincerely held, but erroneous, theology that conflated the gospel mandate to care for the poor with the foolish utopian schemes of the welfare state.

He was a real liberal in the same sense that Robert Taft was a real conservative; and both had more in common with each other than either has with the current leaders of our two ruling parties.

On account of foreign policy.

McGovern was speaking against intervention in Vietnam as the Kennedy administration sent thousands of combat troops there and backed a CIA led coup in which South Vietnamese President Diem was killed. Taft opposed involvement in Korea, and NATO - part of the reason the muscleheads running the GOP sabotaged their 1952 convention so that Taft was pushed out in favor of Ike.

Our ongoing foreign interventions - about which neither candidate in tonight's debate will have the slightest qualm - are not consistent with either "liberal" or "conservative" policy.

They fit nicely with fascism, though.

John Calvin and the perils of Theocracy

John Calvin turned 500 years old this year.

As a Pentecostal, I obtained special access to heaven to attend a gala birthday bash in his honor.

Organizer Martin Bucer wanted to surprise John at home, but the guest list was too large for John’s 10,000 square foot mansion to accommodate. Instead, Michael Servetus invited John over to his place (15,000 square feet) - ostensibly for a barbeque – a ruse that worked beautifully. A great time was had by all, and John acknowledged the irony of being invited to a “barbeque” at Michael’s house, even while raising a toast to his good friend.

Upon returning to Earth, I pondered Calvin’s impact in the world.

My first thought was the horrendous burning of Servetus.

This brilliant but stubborn man, having escaped from Catholics (who would have executed him), ventured into Geneva - a thriving theocracy whose leading citizen - Calvin - had warned him not to come, on pain of death.

True to his word, Calvin (who had been annoyed by several unsolicited letters from Servetus) was the leading witness for the prosecution, and Servetus was burnt as a heretic.

This appalling episode is merely the most famous of several in which Christians were executed by other Christians in the name of orthodoxy.

Church history is replete with examples of the perils of a theocracy. Both Catholics and Protestants used state power to tyrannize dissenters and non-conformists.

Servetus's crime was dissent from the doctrine of the Trinity. This gives me extra pause, since I am also non-Trinitarian.

The outrage against Servetus notwithstanding, John Calvin is largely responsible for the separation of civil government from church government in our country. Separation of church and state wasn’t conceived by Progressives concerned about government enforced social mores, but by Calvinists (who had been on the receving end of more persecution than they had doled out) desiring to protect the Church from a meddling state.

Christians in colonial America wanted no part of a theocracy dominated by any religious sect, or a theocracy where the state is god.

Accordingly, it was through the efforts of anti-Federalists – mostly Calvinist in their theology - that the Bill of Rights was included in our Constitution.

The god of statism is currently the greatest threat to our liberty. Progressive socialism advances with slogans fitting a religious revival: "change you can believe in."

"Yes we [i.e. government] can."

Progressives (the old, but new, trendy label preferred by militant collectivists) spread fear of a fundamentalist takeover of the government even as said government ensures the transfer of all the nation's wealth to itself through debt monetization.

Similarly, the Progressives of the 1930's used Nazism and Fascism as bugaboos, while their idol, Stalin, secretly worked with Hitler to plunge the world into unprecedented chaos.

To be sure, religious tyrants have oppressed far too many humans throughout history.

But unrestrained states, of the kind that Obama and his progressive cohorts seek, have murdered or enslaved hundreds of millions - in the last century alone.

We are in peril of becoming serfs in a theocracy where there is one god, the State, whose prophet is Obama.

Progressive democracy is tyranny

World War II began seventy years ago yesterday, with the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht. Two weeks later the Red Army entered Poland from the east, per a secret protocol between Hitler and Stalin.



World War II was Socialism's gift to the world. History's two most prominent socialists exemplified what bipartisanship can accomplish.




The War is thought of as a struggle between freedom and tyranny. Actually, the Nationalist Socialists and the Internationalist Socialists put aside their differences to ensure hegemony of some form of Progressive Socialism in eastern Europe.



Hitler deserves all the contempt history has heaped on him, but Stalin hasn't received his due as Der Fuehrer's equal in terms of suffering imposed upon humanity. This is partly due to the large number of Stalin apologists among western intellecual elitists in the 1930's and 1940's - such as New York Times reporter Walter Duranty and The Nation magazine.

Communists and Nazis obfuscated the issue of statism vs. liberty by plunging the world into a bloodbath where the heresies were provincialism and racism on one side, and atheism and imperialism on the other.

Provincialism and Racism lost - two happy outcomes of the War.

Unfortunately, Imperialism and Atheism were victorious, and perhaps 100 million people were subsequently murdered by imperialistic, atheistic states.

Fascism survived the war, too, because it can adapt itself to internationalist and progressive causes such as global warming and massive printing of fiat money.

"Progressive" is the preferred term for modern fascism, because government schools still teach that "fascism" is evil.

Students are conditioned to think only within dichotomous paradigms: Democrat vs. Republican; Conservative vs. Liberal; Left vs. Right. Therefore the average citizen doesn't contemplate whether the government ought to continue to expand (on constitutional grounds), whether proffered solutions may be worse than the problems they purport to solve, or the future effect when $trillions in new debt is monetized.

Rather, students are taught that we are a democracy, in which the salient issues are: 1.) which party governs the ever expanding state, and 2.) which party's ethics (such as they are) are superior.

Government schools don't facilitate thought as to whether the state should continue to expand.



They are, after all, GOVERNMENT schools.

Hence, with a populace ignorant of American history, and of the Constitution, government growth continues under the guise of "democracy."

Politicians of every stripe - liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican - tout the virtues of "Democracy."

"Democracy:" the talking point that is seldom derided as a "talking point."

Democracy: "Two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner." An apt description (yes, I'm aware of the petty scuffle over the quote's origin).

Democracy: What the French Revolution was all about. An obtuse king was overthrown by the people.

"The people" - euphemism for "a mob."

Pathetic as Louis XVI was, he was a pillar of virtue next to Robespierre.

In eighteenth century France, Democracy led to the guillotine, regicide, and finally....Napolean.