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L: A Novel History is an easy and stimulating read for anyone who is interested in politics and the condition of government oppression prevailing now in almost every country in the West and its sphere of influence.

You may be astonished at how closely the story – though set in another country at another time – reflects what is happening now in America.      

Terrible crimes are committed. But criminals are not punished – only those are arrested and tried who dare to express opinions not sanctioned by the regime, or are critical of it.

From mid-December 1987, for the duration of the regime there were no criminal trials held except for “political crimes” (which were often televised). Theft and burglary were no longer considered possible, as all goods were held in common. This meant that those best able to defend what they gained possession of by whatever means, kept it.

As no one, except a political criminal, could be accused of having done something wrong, since guilt was collective, the vocabulary of the courts had to change. If the old police arrested a lone youth for a violent attack, and brought him before the court, they could not say that they had seen him mug, assault, rape or murder his victim; they could only say that he was “involved in a mugging situation”, “an assault situation”, “a rape situation”, “a murder situation”. This turn of phrase hinted that he was not an individual responsible for deciding to do a certain deed and carrying it out, but only one of a group – two people at least – who had been present when something had happened. The victim was as much “involved in the situation” as the attacker. The nature of the incident was “social”, its diagnosis “anti-social behaviour”, its remedy lay in more group participation, the method of  remedy was counselling.

Judges and magistrates were abolished in January 1988. All political trials, as well as all “enquiries” − the name given to civil and “old crime” trials − were heard by a jury. The highest court of appeal was the Council. Top Party officials had direct access to the Council for an “enquiry”. Both prosecuting and defending counsel were appointed by the state. For all important trials they were chosen from among the few dozen members of the League of Leftwing Lawyers. This, the League asserted, helped to guarantee “genuinely unbiased judgment”.

What judges were expected to do was “manifest heart”. The important thing in what had once been called a criminal case was to “arrive at an understanding of the quality of the man” they were judging. If the pursuit of his own ends were perceived to be more important to him than “co-operation with the community”, he was “suffering from a condition of false consciousness” and must be sent to a psychiatric hospital for as long as it took to cure him. Many − the incurable − never returned. Defendants quickly learned to claim motives of the politically-moral kind that the BBC had been drumming into its listeners for years: “I wanted to help the young / old / handicapped”; “I heard this person make a racist / sexist / ageist / faithist remark”, and so on. It was a variation  of the “righteous indignation” ennoblement of violent deeds, held as the highest principle of justice by the state itself. Whether the explanation was accepted or not depended mainly on the political status of the defendant. If he was a “special reservist” of the New Police, he would be acquitted. If he was an official of a trade union, he stood a good chance of acquittal. If he was a member of the Party, he was almost certain to be revealed as a benefactor of society.

In a civil case the rule was that wherever the litigants derived from different classes, the “underdog” had the “right to justice”. …

*

L insists:

The issue of race is the most important moral issue confronting us.

*

Early in his reign, L emptied the lunatic asylums and hospitals of mental cases, even before he emptied the prisons of criminals condemned in “the last era”. Henceforth the only madness − or crime – was opposition to, dissent from, criticism of communism and the regime: or so it was officially. In actuality many of the former inmates were returned to the wards and cells.

In televised and broadcast speeches delivered by various of the Ministers but written by L, it was frequently explained that madness was simply the clear manifestation of alienation, for which capitalism was responsible. Now that capitalism was abolished, and society was “being treated” and “undergoing therapy”, “true madness”, which is false consciousness, would disappear. And that state of “heightened awareness” which used to be called madness could be turned to creative purposes, for it was no longer needed as a “device of escape” from “the unbearable world of the male-dominated authoritarian family”. Self-healing from alienation and false consciousness was easy enough. One had only to “give oneself wholly to the power and the glory of the new order, become part of it without any reservation, without the least atom of the old self being held back: to choose it because there was no other way to free oneself from the torturing blinding crippling responsibility of choice.” The “victims had become the masters.” The cause of the old mental maladjustments had been cured by the revolution. And L announced the appointment of erstwhile patients to positions of authority in the “mental hospital” prisons, in schools, civil administration and the law-courts, which “proved his faith” in their “essential sanity”.

*

L wrote in one of the permitted newspapers:

In this country the masses do not choose opulence for themselves in a world of poverty. A man with a social conscience wants the happiness of knowing that he consumes no more than his neighbour consumes. This is moral beauty. If its appearance upsets a visitor from the cruellest nation on earth, a nation of capitalists, exploiters, imperialists and racists, then we shall make no apology for our preference for a log fire over central heating, for a little bread over a superfluity of luxury provisions. As socialists we shall continue to comprehensivize our schools. To take all land into public ownership. To employ every man and woman. Our aim must be to house them all, clothe them all, feed them all, teach them, heal them, organize their leisure. None shall be underprivileged, all shall be made equal. The underprivileged must be freed from all oppression, the oppression of being less lucky, less successful, less energetic or healthy than others. Positive discrimination will liberate women, youth, blacks. Especially the immigrants from those parts of the world which we exploited, raped, robbed and pillaged, who have come to share with us our greater good fortune must be liberated from their oppression. The first duty of the state is redistribution. There is no question of one man earning a reward greater than another. All must be balanced. If one man has a clean job, he must get less money than one who has a dirty job. The state must equalize with due regard not merely to externals but to inner feelings. There must be no prizes for one man to win who was better endowed by the accident of nature with stronger limbs or some fortuitous talent. No one can take credit for anything he does, and no one is to blame for anything he does. As Professor L teaches us, neither achievement nor guilt are individual. Society achieves, society is guilty. …. No man can decide his needs for himself. What he feels are wants and to indulge them is selfish, anti-social. But what others diagnose as his needs, those are his needs. And as his needs are shared with others, the problem of supply is a community problem. …. The state alone must be the source of the satisfaction of all needs. The state must give all, and command all. Nobody must suffer the pangs of doubt as to whether what he is doing is right or wrong. Everyone will have the pleasure of knowing that he is being used. That what he does is what he must do. That therefore he is necessary, and has purpose. And he will be saved too from any temptation to disobedience which could destroy his happiness. For what the state bestows, the state can withhold. He will belong to the state and the state to him, he will be attached to the state as a babe to its mother’s breast. Until the state gives him everything he is not free of purposelessness, he remains alienated, he longs for community and cannot find it. When the state gives him all he has, he will be ready for the last and final stage on earth, the stage of history for which all history has been preparing. He will not rebel. His need to rebel will be gone. But the state has first to conquer the rebel in him. And that it will do. For what the state gives, the state can take away. The state must put them in houses, bring them to school, tempt them with pensions, lure them with kindness. When all have been received inside the shelter of the state, and they know that there is nothing else outside the state, then they will be redeemable. What a harvest will then be promised of men and women for the New Age, the Third Millennium and beyond. But the process of redemption will not be as easy as the gathering-in. They have yet to learn that beyond their material needs there are others, which they have first to discover and then to understand and then to satisfy before they are fit for the absolute community of the human spirit wherein no individual shall have an existence outside of the community, and each will joyfully give up his life at any moment for the preservation of the Greater Life of Universal Man. ….

And –

L wrote in the weekly journal REALITY UPDATE:

There is a reactionary tendency among the working-classes, especially women, and even among blacks who have not yet organized around their own oppression, to try to maintain an anti-social and outdated institution, the Family, one of the chief sources of oppression to women and the young, as a centre of moral indoctrination and the kind of selfish inward-looking support-system which mitigates against the liberation of the community as a whole. The family is a reactionary institution, and only a reactionary will defend it. A radical involved in the struggle will be committed to opposing it as a major hindrance to liberation.

Children could be taken from foster-parents and is [soon after that]  from adoptive and even natural parents, by social workers (who had a statutory right of entry into every home), on the grounds that they were too happy!

But no one should  spend any part of their waking hours alone:

If someone kept to himself to write a book or compose a piece of music he was accused of  “extreme selfishness”.

And where did he get that musical instrument, that pen, that paper ? Did he formally apply for it? For how many hours of use? And who gave him permission to shut that door and take sole possession of that space?

*

There had never been such feast-days for spite. In the first week of the Red Republic three people died in the streets of London as a result of being assaulted by an L-ite “RI” (Righteous Indignation) group. No charges were brought against these “avengers of the people”, as the RED TIMES described them, and this immunity was a green light to other avengers. Over a hundred thousand people were “executed” by RI mobs in the fifteen months of the interregnum.

*

Read it if you love liberty. It will not disappoint you.

Jillian Becker    October 14, 2021

The earthly Devil and his ideological mate.

See how lovingly they gaze into each other’s eyes.

They both personify the two evils we exist to oppose: RELIGION AND LEFTISM.

The Pope and Pelosi

The naked human.

That’s the Great Idea of Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive President of the World Economic Forum, would-be Architect of the future of humankind which he describes as the Great Reset.

The richest people on earth fly their private jets up, up, to Davos on its alp. There among the clouds they dream together of how beautiful it will be when no one except themselves owns anything.

It is a dream of global totalitarian Communism with them and their heirs in power over everyone else forever.

They promise the rest of us:

“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.”

“And if you dare not to be happy, we will exterminate you. Resistance is futile.”

You will be assigned food, drink, clothes, bed, transport, schooling, job, duties, leisure, sex sessions (diverse, inclusive, and equitable), health care, vacation, friends, entertainment, opinions, values, death.

Of what type, they will decide. By means of algorithms.

In my prescient book L: A Novel History (first published 2005, new edition 2012), I describe what happens when a totalitarian Communist regime – led by the eponymous hero L – that has come to power in England in the 1980s, brings about, as it must, the day when there is nothing for people to own or to eat.

Here are some passages from it:

To help us learn what many citizens must have felt at that moment when civil life broke down, we have this recollection by a tobacconist and newsagent, a Mr Bruce Waughs, a staunch Conservative by his own account, who had run his own small shop in Brixton until the revolution, and then carried on working in it when it was expropriated like all other businesses big and small, as a licensed distributor of the RED TIMES. It tells what is surely a most surprising anecdote.

My wife Stella appeared at the door, and she just stood there, looking at me with her eyes wide open and saying nothing, like someone who had just seen something happen that could not happen. I said, “What is it?” And she said, “There’s nothing! Nothing to eat. Everything’s just stopped.” It took some time for me to get the story out of her. When I did it took me even longer to grasp what it meant. Then I walked out of the shop, shut the door behind me, and was about to lock it, when Stella said, “What are you doing that for? Who are you going to lock it against?” And then it really came home to me. Well, I pushed the door open again and left it gaping wide, and I took her hand – something I hadn’t done for years − and we started walking along the street. And suddenly I felt − terribly, terribly happy. I can’t explain it. I can only say that I had never felt so happy in my whole life, not even when I was a child. And at that moment I looked at Stella, and she looked at me, and we began to laugh, and we couldn’t stop, we walked along the street laughing and laughing, and then we joined hands and began to dance, skipping round, like children, and if anybody had asked us what we were laughing at we couldn’t for the life of us have told them, not then. And all at once we weren’t alone, not alone in the street and not alone in our happiness, there were others, several others, many others, and then hundreds of others, the streets were full, and everyone was laughing, and dancing, we had seen nothing like it since the day we stood outside Buckingham Palace in July 1981 and cheered the Prince of Wales and his bride. And that was the same month our shop had been broken into and our stock looted by a mob in a riot, and Stella had cried. And I think the royal wedding had been a tonic for us, and Stella felt much better afterwards. But now what were we celebrating? The moment when we knew we might starve? It was only afterwards I could put a name to that feeling. Freedom. Somehow, in the twinkling of an eye, we had been set free. Free of what, you might say, when we were living under a tyranny, and had no notion of how we were going to go on living at all. Exactly. It was irrational. But somehow it happened. It wasn’t just having no more living to earn, no more mortgage to pay, no more bills, no more saving and budgeting, no more being told how much better Stella’s brother was doing with his furniture stores and garages than I was with my corner shop – all those sorts of worries had been lifted one by one when the revolution came eight months before, and other worries had come to replace them, heavier too, by far. Worries about the grandchildren and were they getting enough to eat, and about Stella’s mother who not only had her teeth taken away but even her wheelchair so that she just stayed indoors and we had to carry her from the bed to the chair and back again, and generally worries about whether life would ever again be comfortable and pleasant – as it had been when we had only the mortgage and things like that to worry about. And so what kind of happiness was this, what kind of freedom was it? I can tell you now – it was freedom from hope! Stella and I and all those other people made a strange discovery that day. We discovered that when you truly despair − there’s nothing to do but laugh.

It is perfectly true that on that day many people danced in the street. The New Police, mounted and on foot, descended on crowds wherever they found them, and broke them apart and sent them home. They rode or marched up, thinking that these must be the beginnings of the first genuine and justified demonstrations against a government since the 1930s, after all these years, even before the revolution, of groups playing at protest, playing at suffering, playing at reaction to pretended oppression and pretended deprivation. And the New Police were themselves so surprised at the carnival mood they found in borough after borough, that they were caught by the television cameras smiling, chatting to people in a friendly way, as they asked rather than ordered them to get off the streets. …

Bruce Waughs, the man who had laughed the day civilization stopped, was to write, in after years, this evaluation of L’s “precious gift of anarchy and dissolution”:

I soon enough found that this was not “freedom” after all. It was the extremest form of slavery – slavery of your entire being to the labour of keeping alive, supplying the simplest and most fundamental needs of life, exhausting the body and soul to keep body and soul together, in constant fear of starvation, dread of your fellow man, and a desperate urge to seize and devour whatever you can, by whatever means. For a hunk of meat you would happily kill any man or woman who stood in your way. We descended lower than savages. We became beasts.

*

Citizens’ lives had been getting increasingly difficult for some time before the day of hunger arrived.

At first the Winsomes had rejoiced in the revolution. It was what they had hoped for, worked for, and, as long as they could, voted for. “I don’t mind not owning my own house if nobody else does,” Ted Winsome had written cheerfully in his Revolution Issue of the NEW WORKER* (which came out six weeks after Republic Day, as his paper, like most others, had been ordered to suspend publication until all newspapers that were to continue had been nationalized, and permits granted to their editors). Had not his wife, in her capacity as Housing Committee chairperson on Islington Borough Council set an example, by compulsorily purchasing more private houses for local government ownership than anyone before or after her (until the revolution made purchase unnecessary)? He was proud that she had been an active pioneer, one of the avant-garde of the socialist revolution.

However, he was less pleased when three families were quartered in his house. And then another was sent by the Chief Social Worker (a sort of district commandant) when his own children, delighted to drop out of school, had left home to join a WSP [Workers Socialist Party] group and vent righteous indignation on landlords, capitalists, individualists, racists and speculators. All of his fellow lodgers were, in his view, “problem-families” – drunken, noisy, filthy, careless, inconsiderate and rude. (“That,” said the Gauleiter, “is why they were chased out of their last lodgings by angry co-residents on a former Council estate.” She had thought the Winsomes would be “more tolerant”.) Before he could hand over his stereophonic record-player to the local community centre – as he assured those he complained to that he had fully intended to do – one of the problem-children broke it, threw his classical records away, and also deliberately smashed his high-speed Japanese camera. His furniture was soon broken too. Precious antiques which he had restored with his own hands in hours of patient labour, were treated like fruit-boxes, to be stood on, and spilt on, and thrown about. When cups and glasses were smashed, it was he who had to replace them if he was to have anything to eat or drink out of; which meant recourse to the black market, against which he had so often fulminated in his editorials in the NEW WORKER. He started hiding things away in his room, taking special care to keep his carpentry and joinery tools from the hands of those who would not understand how he had cared for them, valued them, kept them sharp, adapted some of them to his particular needs. One of the problem-fathers accused him of “hoarding private property”, and threatened to go to the New Police with the complaint, or call in “some RI people” [Righteous Indignation – a violent Antifa-type group].

He confided to a woman journalist at his office how he had begun to suspect that “when a thing belongs to everybody, it belongs to nobody”. And he even went so far as to suggest that “as people only vandalize things they don’t own themselves, there is something to be said for private ownership after all”.

*

All industry failed after a few months of central communist management.

The bewildering fact was that the first country in the world to have become industrialized, the very home of the Industrial Revolution, the country which had once led the world in manufacturing industry, the erstwhile hub of the greatest empire in history, had become one of the poorest states in the world; a people surrounded not by wild tracts of unused land, with isolated constructions which signify the first frantic efforts to build mills, factories and mines in undeveloped countries, but by the decaying ruins of industrial might, of mills and mines and factories fallen into disuse and decay, rusting machinery, the vast wreckage of a once great industrial civilization, dilapidated monuments of human ingenuity and at the same time to human idiocy; acres of towns and cities deserted, tumbling into rubble, and all this devastation brought about not by war, not by any external enemy, but by a faction among the people treacherous out of intellectual blindness, guilty of a shallow moralistic idealism and economic folly; of a desire to be good, and a failure to be intelligent.

For it was those who had freedom and decried it, pretending they were oppressed; those who had material plenty and despised it, pretending they were poor; those who thus secreted a worm in their own hearts, and so at the heart of civilization – envy: the amazing unforeseen and unforeseeable envy, by the free and comfortable,  of the unfree and wretched of the earth: it was these self-deceiving, would-be lovers of mankind, the Ted and Marjorie Winsomes, the affluent children who squatted in the communes and protested against freedom calling it “repressive tolerance”, and those they elected, who were caught in the trap of their own lies, and brought an end to liberty in the name of liberation; an end to plenty in the name of humanitarianism; and an end to the impersonality of the law before which all were  equal, and the impersonality of the market in which all were equal, and created legal discrimination and class elitism, in the name of equality.

Jillian Becker   October 12, 2021

“Islamophobia” means irrational fear of Islam.

There is nothing irrational about fear of Islam. Its terrorists terrify us.

Abigail R. Esman writes (in part) at The Investigative Project on Terrorism:

Even after over 50 Islamist terror attacks in Europe and America since 9/11; and even in the face of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, a resurgent al-Qaida, and dozens of ISIS fighters about to be released from European prisons, we live with a global media that frequently appears more comfortable condemning counterterror policy and strategy than with criticizing the terrorists themselves.

In other words, they have bought fully into the notion, oft-promoted by Islamist groups, that any criticism of radical Islamist ideology – including even satirical cartoons – is to be reviled as “Islamophobia”.  It’s a notion that translates into a near-hatred of the United States; and if criticism of Islamism is “Islamophobia”, then what we are seeing can only be described as putting forth a form of “Ameriphobia” in its place.

That subversive rag the New York Times says that after 9/11, Muslim women chose to “lean into their Muslim identity”. Abigail Esman comments:

This statement is disturbing. Why is this the “identity” they choose? Why not their American identity? Their careers? Their womanhood? Why not their chance to represent Muslim women who are not covered [do not wear a hijab or burqa], who oppose the patriarchal honor-based systems of conservative Islam, or who work to counteract the violent ideologies of Islamist extremists?

More disturbing: why are these women – the ones who have chosen to identify as Muslim first, and not American, the ones who exalt the principles and values of Islamism and not the Enlightenment –  the “leaders” that the media choose to celebrate?

We quote from our own post When hate is a virtue, November 29, 2017:

If you are liberal in the true meaning of the word – a lover of freedom for everyone; if you are tolerant and broad-minded; if you believe that all persons should be equal before the law; if you believe that individuals should not be judged according to the ethnic group they “belong” to; if you believe that it is of no concern to you how one adult satisfies his or her sexual desires with another willing adult (or adults) in private; if you believe that no one should have his (“he” being the generic masculine for the human species) life taken from him unless he has taken a life; if you believe that torture is wrong;  that slavery is wrong; that depriving a person of his hands and feet as a punishment for theft is wrong; if you believe that no one should be held fast in a hole up to her chest (“her” chest because women are most commonly subjected to this) and have stones thrown at her head until she dies; if you believe in a benign god or if you do not believe that any god exists; it  is not only right and good that you hate the ideology (or religion or cult) of Islam with its sharia laws, it is a moral imperative that it be hated.  

A decent person must hate Islam. Islam cannot be liked by decent people. If a person does not hate Islam, he is not a decent person.

It does not mean that individual Muslims deserve to be hated or subjected to harsh treatment of any kind, verbal, physical, or legal. Most Muslims are born into the cult, and have great difficulty leaving it if they want to, because Islamic law, sharia, prescribes death for those who do. Non-Muslims who convert to Islam deserve contempt but not persecution.

Because …

Islam is supremacist, totalitarian, homophobic, misogynist, murderous, and savagely cruel. 

No one who hasn’t been in a coma for the last twenty years needs proof of it. Who has not been informed that Islam’s jihad is against all non-Muslims, and that wherever Islam rules it oppresses non-Muslims? Who has not seen the photos of men being thrown off rooftops to their deaths because they have been accused of homosexuality?  Who does not know that Islam insists on the subjugation of women to the absolute authority of men? Who genuinely doubts that for the last few decades most acts of terrorism everywhere in the world have been perpetrated by Muslims? Who has not seen at least some of the snuff films put out by ISIS of rows of men having their heads sawn off, caged prisoners being set on fire, human heads on poles along the sides of streets, uncovered mass graves of suffocated women and children, people in  tanks being drowned? And of kids – boys under twelve years old – trained by ISIS to decapitate men? And of women being stoned to death? And of hands being chopped off in a public place watched by a crowd including children? Who hasn’t heard of children being used as bombs?

And who hasn’t heard Western government spokesmen saying over and over again, a thousand times, that all this “has nothing to do with Islam” ?

Yet in Europe and Britain, those who hate – or are even merely suspected of hating – Islam, are punished by the law. British police spend so much time hunting down and charging people suspected of expressing hatred of Islam, they have no time, money or personnel left to pursue criminals. All West European governments are stupidly ready to let Muslims take power, in the name of democracy, which of course the Muslims are only too happy to exploit. When democratic process has brought them to power, they will impose their tyranny. Democracy will end because it can only work for a virtuous people, since “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin said. It’s a regrettable but incontrovertible fact that people who are virtuous can also be abysmally stupid.

In all West European countries, ever more rigorous surveillance of people’s internet communications is urged by governments so they can be arrested, tried, and imprisoned if they tweet or post criticism of the abominable ideology. (We are still free to criticize Islam in the United States, but in almost no other Western country.) They are accused of “Islamophobia”  – an irrational fear of Islam. But it is entirely rational to fear Islam. Making non-Muslims afraid of it is a prescribed religious duty, called jihad. Jihad is holy war against all non-Muslims.

If you are not a Muslim, you are not innocent according to Islamic teaching. Children, even new-born babies, are guilty and deserve severe punishment. If you are not a Muslim, you are a sinner by definition, you offend the Muslim god, and your punishment should be death. Or you can be enslaved. Or you can pay to be allowed to live. Your death can be brought about by any means, however violent, however painful, however cruel. You can be blown into pieces by a bomb. You can be put in a cage and burnt to death. You can be crucified. You can be stoned. You can be drowned. You can be buried alive.  You can have your head sawn off.

Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx believed that people of certain races they considered inferior should be exterminated; Muhammad believed that all people except Muslims should be exterminated.

To condemn all three idealists for advocating mass murder, and in the case of Hitler and Muhammad carrying out mass murder, is obviously the right thing to do.

If for holding that opinion, and saying so, we provoke Muslims and their apologists into calling us “Islamophobic”, then so be it; that is what we are and what everyone should be.

The Catholic Church has lost its own plot.

Paul Joseph Watson justly accuses that very stupid and very nasty Lefty, Pope Francis, of “doing the work of the Devil”, with many examples of how he’s doing it.

We applaud Paul Joseph Watson’s attacks-by-video against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places – to quote Christian scripture (Ephesians 6:12) – even when we don’t agree with him that (as he implies here) there is some form of Christianity which does not deepen the darkness of this world.

Liberty was not a fad.

Nor were honor, courage, and competence.

But their enduring value is being questioned, somewhat surprisingly by a writer at American Greatness.

American Greatness is a very good website. Articles by such erudite thinkers as Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Conrad Black are often posted there. Opinion is conservative – though what conservatism is and should be in these troubled times is earnestly debated.

Recently, in an article titled Living in Another Time and Place, Max Morton expressed the view that conservative values must change to fit the times.

He writes:

The current batch of generals and national security bureaucrats are neither competent nor honorable, certainly not courageous, and America would be better off without the lot of them. Amazingly, shouting “Have you no shame?” in the halls of Congress doesn’t make them want to resign their prized sinecures.

How did we get to the point where the worst among us are now leading us? It is because we, as a nation, failed to hold our elected officials accountable for the state of our government and its institutions.

We assumed (Morton thinks)that our military’s generals and civilian leaders were honorable. But they are not. “We don’t live in that world anymore,” he writes.

Our understanding is that America is a constitutional republic, founded in democratic principles, with a representative government by and for the people. We have been told—or have at some point assumed—that our bureaucratic officials work for the good of the nation and are accountable to the people via our elected representatives. We were led to believe that our originally designed system of checks and balances was a guard against the tyranny that tempts human kind. All of this was true . . . at some point. In other words, this was once a valid American construct.

But he surely cannot mean that something was true only for a time and then stopped being true; he means, and goes on to explain, that a system can work for a time and then not work as it had done.

Pedro Gonzalez, a frequent contributor to American Greatness, wrote in his essay Middle America’s Road to Power: “A fundamental problem with conservatism is that it reflexively seeks to conserve institutions that either don’t exist anymore, or which have been perverted to become hostile to the right.” Gonzalez’s words are the perfect description of the problem of an obsolete construct.

Traditional America is mired in an obsolete construct due to our failure to observe certain substantial changes in our political and cultural environment.  Processing these types of changes is difficult for most people.

Inevitable changes? Impossible to reverse or reform? Changes we must accept? And that’s difficult for most of us (though not for him)?

As examples of such changes he cites the villainy of the FBI and the Department of Justice. The FBI, once trusted to enforce the law, has been caught “framing Trump officials, lying under oath to Congress, falsifying FISA warrants, and generally acting like a corrupt secret police outfit”. And the DOJ, “responsible for oversight of the FBI”, let it all happen and did nothing. And “Trump supporters,” he observes, “couldn’t process the fact that something so foundational to their belief system (the integrity of federal law enforcement) had so significantly changed.”

“Process” it? Or accept that it must be so?

Must we accept that the FBI from now on will be corrupt, and the DOJ will allow, approve of, connive at its corruption?

Many in conservative and traditional America are still arguing and debating “the facts” thinking the other side will listen or care about them and that, this time, they’re going to change minds. Some, still yearning for the old bipartisanship, can’t see that in the construct of present-day America, classical liberalism is dead.

To deal with the dilemmas we now face, we must transport ourselves out of our obsolete construct and into the reality of the moment. We must see the world for what it truly is. We must know both our enemy and ourselves, where we are and where we are going.

We can no longer complain that the other side is not playing by a rulebook they discarded long ago, but to which we still irrationally cling. Instead, we should determine what we stand for, what we want our future to look like, and plot a course to that future understanding, anticipating the resistance we will face along that path. Our road to victory starts when we can see that truth, join with our fellow like-minded citizens and face forward towards the imminent struggle ahead.

“They” discarded the old rulebook, so we must discard it too, conserving nothing? And put what in its place?

Struggle how? Not with integrity? Not with honor, courage, competence? (Surely not with deception, dishonor, cowardice, incompetence?)

Under what system if not one of accountability, with checks and balances to guard against tyranny?

To what goal if not liberty?

If there are better values, what are they? If there can be new kinds of institutions to enforce the law, describe them.

If there can be a better system than that laid down by the Constitution of the United States, what is it?

Detective work into the past can be great fun for those who have a calling for it, and if they write up their investigations entertainingly in a book, readers can find it fun too. Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity ^* is a book of that sort. The authors convey their excitement as they describe their discoveries and set out their case, which is that the Flavian emperors Vespasian and his son Titus, far from being persecutors of Christians, were their patrons, and – astonishingly – the very progenitors of their religion.

With quotations mainly from Acts of the Apostles, Matthew, and the Epistles, James S. Vallant and Warren Fahy demonstrate how consistently the New Testament praises Rome’s imperial government, its citizens and soldiers. And they are right – the New Testament does show the Romans in the best possible light. It exhorts subjects of the emperor to pay their taxes, and slaves to obey their masters and take a beating without complaint. This, the authors say, shows that Christianity was an officially sanctioned product of the imperial power itself.

But a holy book for Christians did not need the authorship or authorization of the emperors to be a testament to the moral excellence of the Romans. The Christians had a strong incentive to flatter them, and to show by every means they could think of that they were distinct from the Jews. The Romans in Rome thought of them as a Jewish sect, followers of one “Chrestus” who rose in rebellion in the imperial city itself and were crushed by Nero. In Judea, rebels who rose en masse against Roman rule were punished by Vespasian and Titus with enslavement, torture, crucifixion, and dispersion. So the Christians understandably thought it essential that they be recognized by their overlords not only as utterly different from the Jews, but even more than that, as the Jews’ worst enemy. They had to abominate the Jews, anathematize them. Jesus had to be separated from them; to be known as a savior for all mankind except the Jews. To that end, they exculpated the Romans who crucified him, and made the Jews bear the blame instead.

Vallant and Flahy don’t depend only on the New Testament for evidence that Christianity “sprang from 1^st Century Flavian propaganda”. They also also cite proofs they found in “coins, iconography, architecture, history, politics”, and from “the personal relationships of the Flavians” – meaning that a few of the emperors’ relations were Christians. They quote historical texts, including a couple of passages from Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus, the Flavians’ official (Jewish-turned-Roman) historian, to prove that Jesus was an historic figure, a living wonder in his own time. They admit, however, that one of the passages is generally considered by scholars to be a forgery. In the other, they rely on a few words which have seemed to most exegetes – and to me – an obvious interpolation, probably by Christians desperately wanting to establish objective proof of Jesus’s existence and importance in his time. Such proof has not been found by anybody, because what didn’t happen cannot be proved to have happened. None of the ancient texts they quote does the job. Piling them up doesn’t do it either. The aggregate of many rumors is still not a fact.

Their excuse for introducing inauthentic and questionable material as evidence of their claims is that many a disputed item, if taken “at face-value”, supports their theory. Their accumulation of proofs is crowned, they say, by a particular coin, excitingly discovered after a long search. They believe it provides conclusive confirmation of their thesis:

“This is it. It is a coin issued in the millions by the Flavian Emperor Titus, the son of Vespasian who conquered Jerusalem and sacked the Temple just as Jesus had prophesied. The symbol it bears, a dolphin wrapped round an anchor, is the very symbol Christians used, they say, to symbolize Christ for the first three centuries before the Emperor Constantine replaced it with the symbol of the Cross.”

A picture of the Roman coin with the device on one side and the head of Titus on the other is shown beside a medallion decorated with a fish wrapped round an anchor and the Greek word for a fish, ixthys. The six letters are also the initials of the words, in Greek: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”. That was why a simple outline of a fish was “the most common symbol used by the earliest Christians”.

A fish, yes: but a fish wrapped round  an anchor? Was that a common symbol of the Christian faith? Why would it be? The authors show rings with the dolphin-and-anchor motif which they say are “Christian”. They declare it significant that a daughter of Vespasian, Domitilla, who became Christian and a saint, is buried in a catacomb where the design of two fishes and what may be an anchor is to be seen. In other catacombs where Christians are buried they found decorations with fishes and a trident, which they suggest is virtually the same thing as an anchor.

It is possible that some Christians used the device of a fish-and-anchor as a symbol of their faith, and it does bear a resemblance to the Flavian dolphin-and-anchor. But the dolphin is not a fish, and the Romans knew it. Vallant and Fahy mention that inconvenient fact, but sweep it aside since, they say, lots of those ancient primitive people thought a dolphin was a fish.

Another fact that spoils their case is that the Flavian dynasty began later than the first documents of Christianity were composed. The earliest of them, Paul’s letters, are dated by scholars from the middle of the sixth decade of the 1^st. century. The first of the Flavians, Vespasian, became emperor at the end of the seventh decade. The oldest of the Gospels, attributed to Mark, is generally believed to have appeared in 65 or 66 CE, though it could have been in the early 70s. The point is that Christianity was well launched before Vespasian was appointed Emperor by the Roman army under his command.

That happened while he was in Judea putting down the uprising of the Jews. The historian Josephus tried to convince Romans and Jews that Vespasian himself was the Messiah. He wrote that when Vespasian became emperor, the prophecy which had inspired the uprising, that someone from Judea would become “ruler of the world”, came true. The Jews had mistaken the prophecy to mean that the “ruler of the world” would be a Jew, but it really meant that he would be crowned emperor in Judea. Christians too could welcome the revelation, as their Christ had prophesied his second coming would be in the lifetime of those he was speaking to – and lo! here he was!

Josephus is acknowledged to be a good historian, though details in his books – figures in particular – are disputed. He surely did not believe that Vespasian was the Messiah, but he himself had been a leader of the uprising, so when the rebels were frightfully punished it was very much in his interest to convince the victors that he could be of use to them. His flattery succeeded. Vespasian did not object to it at all – he was intending to be made a god anyway (as Roman Emperors often were) – and he not only spared Josephus’s life, he appointed him state historian.

The authors try to make the dating of the Christian documents helpful to their argument by casting doubt on them, but unconvincingly. They have to concede that Paul was preaching Christianity years before Vespasian’s reign began – a fact which should rule out their claim that the Flavians were its inventors. But they stick to it, only going so far as to introduce, as an equally valid alternative theory, the idea that Paul could have been the agent of an earlier Roman government, for which they provide no name or dates. Do they mean Nero (54-68)? Or Claudius (41-54)? Neither of them is a plausible candidate.

But it was Paul, not Vespasian or Titus, who invented Christianity. He is a mysterious, even sinister figure, telling implausible stories about himself to his non-Jewish audiences (such as claiming membership of a tribe of Israel that did not exist in his time); admitting that he had been imprisoned for a sexual crime and blaming the law for it; changing his name at least once and probably twice. He might have been an agent of Rome for some purpose. He might have stolen someone else’s ideas. But what he produced is an amazing thing: the Christian religion. And he spread it with tenacious energy, though gathering too few converts in his lifetime to constitute much of a threat to the Romans, or to be of much use to them. It wasn’t until the 4^th. century that the imperial power came to own the religion that Paul had invented and by doing so had set the course of history.

*Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity by James S. Vallant & Warren Fahy, Crossroad Press, 2018

(By request of our Forum participant Yazmin)

Jillian Becker    September 27, 2021