It was the worst thing Americans could do: elect as their president a trained Marxist revolutionary.

How did it happen? We cannot believe Americans would have done this harm to themselves had the Fourth Estate done its duty. The Press, including the electronic media, deliberately withheld vital information about Barack Obama from the electorate. (Why? Did a majority of journalists choose to keep themselves ignorant, or were they – are they – on the side of America’s enemies?)

Paul Sperry, in this Investor’s Business Daily article, writes about Obama’s training as a Marxist revolutionary. He stresses the pernicious influence that the Communist Saul Alinsky (who was also Hillary Clinton’s mentor) had on the young Obama, through his book “Rules for Radicals”, and through the Alinsky movement, whose activism is self-described as “community organizing”.

Here’s part of what Sperry says:

Obama first learned Alinsky’s rules in the 1980s, when Alinskyite radicals with the Chicago-based Alinsky group Gamaliel Foundation recruited, hired, trained and paid him as a community organizer in South Side Chicago.

They also helped him get into Harvard Law School to “learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail,” as Obama put it in his memoir. A Gamaliel board member even wrote a letter of recommendation for him.

Obama took a break from his Harvard studies to travel to Los Angeles for eight days of intense training at Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation … In turn, he trained other community organizers in Alinsky agitation tactics. In 1988, he even wrote a chapter for the book “After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois,”  in which he lamented organizers’ “lack of power” in implementing change.

Decades later, power would no longer be an issue, as Obama infiltrated the highest echelons of the political establishment, thus fulfilling Alinsky’s vision of a new “vanguard” of coat-and-tie radicals sneaking behind enemy lines. He preached that changing the system “means working in the system” — while not acting or looking radical. “Start them easy,” he said in his book, “don’t scare them off.”

It worked like a charm for Obama. And during the presidential campaign, he hired one of his Gamaliel mentors, Mike Kruglik, to train young campaign workers in Alinsky tactics at “Camp Obama,” a school set up at Obama headquarters in Chicago. The tactics helped Obama capture the youth vote like no other president before him.

After the election, his other Gamaliel mentor, Jerry Kellman (who actually hired him and whose identity Obama disguised in his memoir), helped the Obama administration establish Organizing for America, which mobilizes young supporters to agitate for Obama’s legislative agenda using “Rules for Radicals” …

“Rules” is more than a manual. It’s a diary of Alinsky’s worldview, a dark, anti-capitalist one made all the more disturbing knowing that his protege sits in the Oval Office, where he’s systematically reorganizing our economy, one industry at a time. …

Alinsky was more than a socialist. He was a moral anarchist. …

Bitterly contemptuous of American materialism and individualism, Alinsky was a big fan of Lenin, whom he called a “pragmatist.” …

This privileged son was simply bored with the status quo and sought to smash it just to see it smashed, while masquerading his unprincipled pique as an altruistic crusade for the downtrodden. …

[Alinsky] wrote: “The organizer is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which man can reach … to play God.” He added: “Ego must be so all-pervading that the personality of the organizer is contagious.” …  The American individualist — the industrialist, the entrepreneur, the wealth creator — “is beginning to learn that he will either share part of his material wealth or lose all of it; that he will respect and learn to live with other political ideologies” — that is, neo-Marxism — “if he wants civilization to go on. If he does not share his bread, he dare not sleep, for his neighbor will kill him,” Alinsky warned.

In other words, sacrifice and pay your fair share for “social justice” (code for socialism) or face mass unrest and the anger of the mob. Anarchy. Chaos. Blood in the streets. …

Read it all.

We often quote Melanie Phillips, chiefly her columns in the Spectator, because we often think she is right. We also admire and are grateful for her courageous writing against – among other controversial subjects – the Islamic conquest of Europe, most notably in her book Londonistan.

In her new book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, and Power, she  expresses opinions on religion and science that we  do not agree with, though we find quite a lot of other ideas in it that we like.

She writes of “the climate of unreason”. Unfortunately, with this book she is contributing to it.

Here is what she writes about ‘Islamism’  – a concept invented by non-Muslims to avoid offending Muslims, or their own sense of fairness, or both, when they’re speaking critically of what Muslims do and believe:

I have used the word “Islamist” to denote those who wish to impose Islam upon unbelievers and to extinguish individual freedom and human rights among Muslims. There are, however, scholars who hold that Islam is an inherently coercive ideology and that therefore “Islamist” is a meaningless word that creates a false distinction. It is not my purpose here to enter that particular argument. I use the term “Islamist” not to make a theological point but to allow for the acknowledgment of those Muslims who support freedom and human rights and who threaten no one – and who are themselves principal victims of the jihad. I believe it is very important to acknowledge the existence of such Muslims who have a peaceable interpretation of their religion, just as its is very important not to sanitize and thus misrepresent the doctrines and history of Islam as a religion of conquest.”

While we welcome her plain assertion that Islam is a religion of conquest, we can only wonder who these Muslims can be who embrace the religion but not its ideology of conquest and forced submission, since that is what it is about and all that it is about.

She goes on:

The book explores the remarkable links and correspondences between left-wing “progressives” and Islamists, environmentalists and fascists, militant atheists and fanatical religious believers. All are united by the common desire to bring about through human agency the perfection of the world, an agenda which history teaches us leads invariably – and paradoxically – to tyranny, terror and crimes against humanity.

Again we are largely  in agreement with her, but are surprised by the inclusion of atheists in her list. “Militant” atheists, she says. Perhaps on the model of “Islamists” she could have constructed the word “atheism-ists” to distinguish them from those atheists “who support freedom and human rights and who threaten no one”.

Who are these militant atheists? Where are they placing their bombs? We know that there are atheist progressives, atheist fascists, and atheist environmentalists (just as there are atheist conservatives, atheist libertarians, atheists altruists), but we had not noticed that it is atheism they are trying to impose on the rest of the world. Collectivism, yes. Poverty, yes. World government, yes. But atheism – who says so, when and where, and above all, how? Her book, though it deals with some left-wing atheists whose political views we strongly disagree with, does not tell us.

On Thursday May 6, 2010, a general election will be held in Britain. It’s likely that the Conservative Party will win with a small majority.

It will make little difference who wins and who governs. None of the parties has a policy that can save Britain from its deepening economic crisis or from its future as a predominantly Muslim country under sharia law.

Here is an address I delivered at a conference of Conservatives in London in 2008. The figures were accurate then according to each country’s published statistics, and they haven’t changed significantly.

My prognosis for Britain and Europe is profoundly depressing. I wish it could be otherwise.

*

The people of Europe are dying out. In that sense it could be said that Europe is coming to an end. The continent is entering a new phase of its history and is already being called by a new name: Eurabia.

Here are the facts and figures:

The birth-rate by which a population is merely stabilized, not increased however slightly, is 2.1 births per woman.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some European figures:

Austria 1.3

Britain 1.77

Czech Republic 2

France 1.9

Germany 1.37

Greece 1.29

Italy 1.2

Ireland 1.87

Netherlands 1.73

Norway 1.81

Poland 2

Russia 1

Spain 1.1

Sweden 1.75

These are all declining populations. Some are declining more steeply than others. Russia’s population will be halved in 50 years, while Poland’s half-life will take a little longer.

It’s hard to imagine what if anything could halt the decline. A sudden explosion of births, with most women of child-bearing age having numerous children in the next couple of decades? Too late. A mass return of European descendants from the New World to the ancestral lands? Yes, but as unlikely to happen as a miracle.

What is actually happening to swell the numbers is an accelerating growth of the Muslim immigrant populations. In Britain today the average age of the non-Muslim population is 41, the average age of the Muslim population is 28. This order of difference is typical of all West European countries. In all of them, furthermore, the Muslim birth-rate is higher than the native birth-rate. It means they have not long to wait for their Muslim majorities. Europe is being Islamized, to become in all likelihood a Muslim-dominated continent by the end of the century [revised estimate – by the middle of the century]. We can now see – we can hardly miss seeing – the change in our cities. Though it seems to have come upon us suddenly, it has been growing for decades. It is about 20 years since the Islamic Foundation issued a declaration from Leicester that the Islamic movement is ‘an organized struggle to change the existing society into an Islamic society based on the Koran’.

Realistically we must confront the demise of our political power and reconcile ourselves to a loss of liberty, because, barring a miracle, Islam will not transform itself into a force for the protection of individual freedom. By no stretch of the imagination can Muslim law, sharia, be described as liberal.

Here are a few examples of it: Women must obey their husbands who should beat them if they do not. Women must cover their heads and figures in public. Thieves must have hands and feet cut off; adulterers are to be stoned to death; unmarried fornicators lashed with 100 stripes; homosexuals burnt, stoned, or dropped from a height; apostates killed. Criticism of the Prophet Mohammed is apostasy. Non-Muslims must convert to Islam, or be killed, or, if Christian or Jewish, may pay a tax called the jizya and so be suffered to live, not as citizens but as dhimmi, subjugated and abased persons forced to submit to numerous laws which mark and preserve their inferior status.

We could cling to a hope that sharia law will not be imposed on our grandchildren, or that if it is, it will be in some modified form. We may surmise that Muslims born and brought up here will be influenced by our values and modes of thought to the extent that they themselves come to prefer our common law to sharia. For this to happen they would have to be thoroughly secularized en masse. In such a development lies our best chance of remaining free. But how probable is it? We can only read the existing signs and they do not inspire optimism.

To some degree young Muslim men in Britain are already secularized. In English cities they can be as enthusiastic Saturday-night bingers and brawlers as their native English counterparts, the Islamic ban on drinking alcohol notwithstanding. But they are inclined to adhere to Islamic customs, as in marriage for example, expecting their wives to remain in a traditionally subservient role. Importantly, the imams still have power to influence the communities, and it is largely because Muslim communities have been established in geographical enclaves that their power remains strong.

Successive British governments have failed to integrate Muslim immigrants. They have preferred, in accordance with the ill-thought-out ideology of ‘multiculturalism’, to permit and even approve the establishment of ethnic enclaves. Yet these are ghettoes of a kind, and the policy itself is, in effect, segregationist, or what might be called apartheid-lite. It has meant that there are areas into which the police are reluctant to enter, so that ‘honour killings’, forced marriages, child marriages, wife beatings and burnings, separation according to gender in schools and offices, are often – no one knows how often – practised with impunity.

Then there are the madrassas. Some 700 [many more now in 2010 – JB] of these religious schools have been established in Britain, at least a few of them with tax-payers’ money. They teach fundamentalist doctrine, including the complete subjugation of women, and the waging of jihad, holy war.

We are often told that Islam means ‘peace’, but it does not. It means ‘submission’. We are told it is a ‘religion of peace’, but it was spread by the sword. Our experience of it in recent years has been traumatic. What Islam has shown us of itself is that it is murderous, destructive, cruel and terrifying, bringing death and agony to many places in the world, including New York, Madrid, and here to us in London.

Conquest of the rest of the world by Islam is ordained by its holy book, the Koran. There it is written that the highest duty of the ‘true believer’ is to wage war against infidel lands – such as ours – until they become part of the realm of Islam and their populations are converted. Every Muslim must participate in the war. Those who do not actively fight must assist those who do in whatever ways they can. Refusal is punishable by mutilation or death.

‘O you who believe! Fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find hardness in you’ (sura 9.123). ‘Those who fight Islam should be murdered or crucified or their hands and feet should be cut off on opposite sides’ (sura 5.33). ‘Let those who fight in the way of Allah, who sell this world’s life for the hereafter; and whoever fights in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, We shall grant him a mighty reward’ (sura 4.74).

This last injunction with its promise of reward fully authorizes suicide bombing. It is the standing order for such atrocities as those of 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London.

We have heard from imams and sheikhs that other injunctions abrogate these; or that we must not take them literally. But the important point for us is that there are Muslims who obey them literally. We can hardly avoid noticing, belatedly but plainly at last, that not only are we being colonized by Islam, but at the same time we are being subjected to jihad.

The violence can only get worse, the attacks more destructive, possibly obliterating millions. The President of the Islamic State of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claiming to be divinely inspired, is threatening to unleash nuclear war. He has the capability of producing nuclear warheads, and Western Europe, we are told, is within range of his missiles. The nuclear bomb is the greatest boon for furthering jihad that has come into Islam’s possession in all the fourteen hundred years of its history. Can we doubt that he will use it?

Jillian Becker    May 3, 2010

Books I recommend:

Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Regnery, Washington D.C., 2006)

Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (Doubleday, New York, 2006)

Oriana Fallaci, The Rage and the Pride (Rizzoli, New York, 2002), The Force of Reason (Rizzoli, New York, 2006)

Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Cranbury, New Jersey, 2005)

Melanie Phillips, Londonistan (Gibson Square, London, 2006)

The West has allowed terrorism to succeed.

It seems we are reluctant to fight back.

We citizens of the free world, heirs to the victorious struggles of courageous and principled forerunners, have for too long taken the freedom they won us for granted.

Freedom is never won forever. It has to be fought for over and over again.

Are we, the living generations, too  feeble, too cowardly, too comfortable, too distracted by trivia, to fight the battle when it becomes necessary to choose between freedom and submission to tyranny?

Are enough of us even aware that once again freedom is under severe and immediate threat?

The present threat, Islam, is at least as atrocious as those of the last century, Nazism and Communism. It is the same in being collectivist and tyrannical. It is different and more frightening to the imagination in that it comes out of the double darkness of a past age and a primitive mentality.

America has elected a leader who is highly sympathetic to it, and is doing everything he can to strengthen it.

Daniel Greenfield expresses an opinion which we heartily share in this article from which we take a large extract:

What is a free country? Is it a country that is free of being ruled by any other country, or is it a country of free people who are not afraid. The truth is that no country can be free, unless its people are free. Not freedom as embodied in legal documents or stirring anthems, which nearly every country has, but free in their minds. Unafraid to believe, to speak and to live.

Tyranny isn’t a man holding a gun to your head and telling you what to do. Tyranny is when you do what you’re told because you’re holding the gun to your own head. And then you have become a collaborator in your own oppression. It is possible to be enslaved without ever becoming a slave… for people to act like slaves without any chains being anywhere in sight.

No regime, no ideology and no power can maintain absolute physical control of all the people all of the time. To rule, they need to control not their bodies, but their minds and their souls. Tyranny wants loyalty but it will settle for fear. And fear, once internalized, destroys moral courage and replaces it with moral cowardice, eroding the strength of beliefs and ideas with the poisonous liquid of dread. The individual becomes an agent for the forces of tyranny, warning himself against any action that could get him into trouble. And then he is finally a slave.

In Stockholm Syndrome, hostages try to take control of their powerlessness by identifying with their captors. Under tyranny, entire populations can suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, paying devoted obeisance to the tyrants …

Recently, we rediscovered the simple fact that even on cable television, on a network where anything goes, one thing does not go: Depicting Mohammed, even in a bear suit. That same iron law has been unofficially passed in country after country, where operas, newspapers, books, television programs have been censored in order to avoid offending the people who might kill them, if they were not censored. …

And that is exactly the point. They don’t have to silence us, if we silence ourselves first. They don’t have to oppress us if we oppress ourselves first. They don’t have to demand our surrender and submission, if we surrender and submit first. Islam, we love it. Sharia law, we’ll gladly adopt it. Free speech, it has to have its limits. Women’s rights, we’ll have to walk a fine line. Freedom. Ha, what freedom. We’ve already traded that away for a nice set of multicultural bongos, a few curry shops, a glass of arrack and a leatherbound copy of the Koran.

A free country … is a country whose people uncompromisingly refuse to surrender their freedoms, in the face of tyranny, torture and death, in the face of armies, tanks, secret police and all the forces of the world arrayed against them. A country that compromises on its freedom is no longer free. It will know fear. It will know terror. It will be oppressed, and there will be no relief from that oppression, until they choose freedom over tyranny once again.

Fear is a reflex. Tyranny thrives on it, imbues it and feeds it. It kills randomly in order to spread that terror further to create populations who never know when their day will come; when the suicide bomber, the black van, the sword and the secret police will come for them. Men will fight and die for freedom on the battlefield, but the struggle to remain defiant in a society where everyone is afraid all the time is a much harder fight. Yet overcoming that reflex to find safety by surrendering and collaborating, by learning to love Big Brother and embracing his ideals, is what it takes to be a free citizen of a free nation. …

Freedom comes from standing up to evil, from confronting it and defying it – not from submitting to it and collaborating with it …

And what is the source of Islam’s power? Comedy Central [by censoring South Park – see our post Not bearing the unbearable, March 25, 2010] reminds us of that again. … No military victory. No superior technology. Not even sheer numbers, as there is still no First World country in which Muslims have officially become a majority. Their power comes from fear. From being prepared to murder anyone who disagrees with them until the mere threat alone, from a worthless source, is enough to badly panic a multibillion dollar corporation – the same corporation that would never take protests from Jews or Christians seriously caves when a single Muslim on a previously obscure website threatens a beheading. What is the difference? The difference is murder. Muslims murder people who offend them. And having gained a reputation for that, they are quickly parlaying it into practical political power.

A nation’s police, legal and military divisions are entirely useless if they cannot protect the exercise of such basic freedoms. Without it, they become nothing more than glorified social service centers that enforce the law only when it isn’t too dangerous for them, when it won’t offend the wrong people – the wrong people being those who kill on casual provocation. And such a country, though it may have documents to its name attesting its freedoms, and endless ranks of judiciary appointees and professors debating those freedoms– they mean nothing if the people cannot actually exercise those freedoms. …

Only by defying Islam, can we begin the process of taking back our freedoms. Only by speaking out, do our voices matter. Because they don’t have to silence us, if we silence ourselves first.

David Solway, whose insights often impress us, has today done us the honor of linking to one of our posts in a new article of his.

The article is at Front Page, titled Is the U.S. Too Big to Fail? Here’s a part of it (but read it all). The link to our post, Speaking of Secession, [April 7, 2010] comes with the words “parting of ways” in the third paragraph:

The Bridge Mix of social, political and economic programs—redistribution of wealth, a bloated bureaucracy, reduction of military power, amnesty for illegals, toleration of inimical communities, government takeover of the marketplace, ideology supplanting pragmatics—adopted by the American liberal-left and rapidly being put in place by the current administration are hurtling the nation toward its moment of truth when it will have to decide whether it survives as the United States of America or devolves into something that, until just a few years ago, would have been almost unimaginable.

Often what seems to be inconceivable is only the prelude to what may well become unavoidable. And in the case of America such a scenario is all too possible. For America has only three options looming before it in a rapidly foreclosing future. The best case scenario is that, assuming a concerned citizenry, the growing Tea Party movement, a return to strict budgetary rectitude and a revival of the wisdom of the Constitution and the Founders, the United States may weather the storm of social and political dismemberment it is presently undergoing and recover its essence as a constitutional republic. To accomplish this aim, however, the policies of the Obama administration must be resisted at every turn. What Henry David Thoreau wrote in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience in 1848 has a proleptic ring to it and is truer today than it ever was: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

On the other hand the calamity of disintegration, as happened to the Soviet Union not so long ago, is a deeply troubling likelihood. The drive toward secession or what is called “disunion” along red state/blue state lines appears to be acquiring strength by the day. It is in the air. The threat of dissolution cannot be wished away or conveniently ignored. Whether such a parting of ways can be achieved peaceably and rationally or would entail violence and bloodshed remains an open question. But what resembles a bitter marriage between cultural incompatibles, the statist Left and the conservative Right, who have nothing to say to one another and disagree on just about everything, makes an eventual divorce by no means unthinkable. The clash between a pervasive scavenger mentality of collective entitlement and the ancestral belief in the values of personal initiative and individual responsibility cannot, it increasingly appears, be resolved amicably.

The third possibility is that America under the stewardship of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party will become an impoverished, socialist, Muslim-friendly country, much like the United Kingdom today or Sweden tomorrow, with devastating consequences for the majority of its citizens. As David Horowitz remarks of the U.S., “its constitutional order is threatened by a political left whose values remain socialist and whose agendas are subversive.” Such is the fundamental transformation promised by the Democratic candidate five days before his election: the intent to legislate outcome at the expense of input, to ensure a syndicalist homogeneity of status among the population while installing a privileged managerial class in the seats of power, and ultimately to transform America’s most industrious entrepreneurial sector into over-taxed and over-regulated obsolescence. Where have we seen this before?

These, then, are the three alternatives between which America will have to choose: recovery, dissolution, socialism. Regarding the latter two, to cite Aeschylus …,  it’s “either way, ruin.” Clearly, the moment of decision is not far down the road. Even a one-term administration for Barack Obama and his cohorts may be sufficient to wreak irreparable damage; a two-term presidency would probably spell the end of the noble and unique American experiment in republican democracy. For there can be little question that Barack Obama and the Democratic ascendancy together form the single greatest disaster to befall the United States in the modern era. If the country does not right itself sooner rather than later, it will find itself broken down the middle or wake up one day to discover that it is now nothing more than another socialist or quasi-Marxist Republic, which is a republic in name only.

Thoreau is on the mark again. Deploring the effects of a “wordy” and ever-compliant Congress which had “not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and freedom” and which was devoid of “talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufactures,” he argues that without the “seasonable experience…of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.” And we remember, too, that the United States was a much smaller political entity in 1848 than it is in 2010.

Now is not the time to take refuge in the smug conviction of indestructibility. America is not too big to fail and it may well be too big not to fail. But one thing is undeniable. As it approaches the eleventh hour, its survival depends on a determined and informed citizen “army” of genuine patriots capable of restoring the practical ideal of limited government  …

Beyond a certain point it is hardly possible to discern degrees of evil or degrees of cruelty. And yet I think it may be said of Jehan Calvin, dictator of Geneva in the sixteenth century, that he was more appallingly cruel and more intensely, intrinsically, through-and-through evil than other great persecutors, dictators and mass murderers of history. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Torquemada are the very names of evil, so what was it about Calvin that can distinguish him as specially terrible in his own nature than even any of these?

He oppressed the subjects of his dictatorship unremittingly and mercilessly; but so, you say, did the others. Not content with killing his enemies, he prescribed extreme tortures for them while they survived to suffer them; and yes, so did the others. But – and here we come to the nub of the case – Calvin was different in that he (often, if not always) personally specified the torments for the particular victim. He gave thought to the minutiae of their sufferings. All the others, even Catholic Inquisitors like Torquemada, issued general orders for terrorizing, torturing, killing. Calvin gave a personal service, tailoring his cruelty to his individual prey.

And that’s not all that distinguishes him among human monsters. Consider this: he was squeamish. He could not stand the sight of blood. He was afraid of pain. He felt horror at the thought of physical suffering – so he made thinking about it into a spiritual exercise, to strengthen by self-inflicted agony, as a monk does with a hairshirt, his resolve to do what was hardest for him in the service of his God. He ordered the infliction of agony, then meditated on the process, imagining it as fully as he could. He nourished his spirit on visions of torture.

This he did in private. The spiritual discipline he forced himself to undergo did not impel him to the prison and the public square to witness the torments and killings that he prescribed. He never attended a racking, a flogging, a breaking on the wheel, a burning to death. That far in the service of his God he would not push himself.

This grooming of his soul by inflicting suffering on others, did not replace general orders of oppression. He gave those too. He instituted a totalitarian reign of terror. He was as convinced a collectivist as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the rest. He would allow “no liberty, no freedom of the will, for [a] man could only misuse such privileges. … [He, Calvin] must frighten him … until he unresistingly accepts his position in the pious and obedient herd, until he has merged in that herd all that is individual within him, so that the individual, the extraordinary, vanishes without leaving a trace.”

So wrote Stefan Zweig in his devastating dissection of Calvin and Calvinism, The Right to Heresy. He goes on:

“To achieve this draconian suppression of personality, to achieve this vandal expropriation of the individual in favour of the community, Calvin had a method all his own, the famous Church ‘discipline’. A harsher curb upon human impulses and desires has hardly been devised by and imposed upon man down to our own days [pre-Second World War]. From the first hour of his dictatorship, this brilliant organizer herded his flock … within a barbed-wire entanglement of … prohibitions, the so-called ‘Ordinances’; simultaneously creating a special department to supervise the working of terrorist morality … called the Consistory [which was] expressly instructed to keep watch upon the private life of every one in Geneva. … Private life could hardly be said to exist any longer … From moment to moment, by day and by night, there might come a knocking at the entry, and a number of ‘spiritual police’ announce a ‘visitation’ without the citizen concerned being able to offer resistance. Once a month, rich and poor, the powerful and the weak, had to submit to the questioning of these professional ‘police des moeurs’. “

The moral police poked into every corner, examined every part of every house, and even the bodies of those who lived in it. Their clothes and shoes, the hair on their heads, was inspected. Clothes must be dark and plain; hair must not be artificially curled.

“From the bedroom they passed on to the kitchen table, to ascertain whether the prescribed diet was not being exceeded by a soup or a course of meat, or whether sweets and jams were hidden away somewhere.”

They pried into bookshelves – only books approved by the Consistory were permitted.

“The servants were asked about the behaviour of their masters, and the children were cross-questioned as to the doings of their parents.”

Visitors to the city had their baggage examined. Every letter, in and out, was opened. Citizens could not write letters to anyone outside the city, and any Genevan permitted to travel abroad was watched in foreign lands by Calvin’s spies.

Spying became universal. Almost everyone, in fear of being thought heretical in the least degree, and to prove himself clean and upright, spied on everyone else.

“Whenever a State inaugurates a reign of terror, the poisonous plant of voluntary denunciation flourishes like a loathsome weed … otherwise decent folk are driven by fear to play the part of informer. … After some years, the Consistory was able to abolish official supervision, since all the citizens had become voluntary controllers.”

As far as he could, Calvin put an end to pleasure. Music – except for what Calvin deemed to be sacred – was forbidden. So was dancing, skating and sport. Theaters and all other public amusements including popular festivals, were prohibited. Wheeled carriages were not allowed. People had to walk to wherever they needed to go. Guests at family celebrations, even weddings and baptisms, were limited in number to twenty. (The names parents could give their children had to be from an approved list.) The red wine of the district could be drunk in small quantities, but no other alcohol. Innkeepers were not allowed to serve their guests until they had seen them saying their prayers, and had to spy on them throughout their stay and report on them to the authorities.

Punishments included imprisonment in irons, hanging, decapitation, burning to death.

“Everything was forbidden which might have relieved the grey monotony of existence; and forbidden, of course, was any trace of mental freedom in the matter of the printed or spoken word.”

“The first thought,” Stefan Zweig declares, “of any one of dictatorial temperament, is to suppress or gag opinions different from his own.”

One man who dared to argue with Calvin was a Spaniard named Miguel Servetus. A child of the Reformation, he innocently thought he could express his own boldly Protestant opinions. He thought Calvin was the very man to hear him expound his personal interpretations of Holy Writ. He could not have been more mistaken. For having the effrontery to send them to him, Calvin had the man thrown into prison. “For weeks … he was kept like a condemned murderer in a cold and damp cell, with irons on his hands and feet. His clothes hung in rags upon his freezing body; he was not provided with a change of linen. The most primitive demands of hygiene were disregarded. No one might tender him the slightest assistance.”

Finally, for daring to disagree with Calvin, Servetus was condemned to death by the dictator’s order. The death Calvin chose for him was “roasting with a slow fire”.

‘The prisoner was brought out of prison in his befouled rags. … His beard tangled, his visage dirty and wasted, his chains rattling, he tottered as he walked. … In front of the steps of the Town Hall, the officers of the law … thrust him to his knees. The doomed man’s teeth chattered with cold … In his extremity, he crawled on his knees nearer to the municipal authorities assembled on the steps, and implored that by their grace he might be decapitated before he was burned, ‘lest the agony should drive me to repudiate the convictions of a lifetime’. This boon was denied him. Relentlessly, ‘the procession moved on towards the place of execution. … The wood was piled round the stake to which the clanking chains had been nailed. The executioner bound the victim’s hands. … The chains attached to the stake were wound four or five times around it and around the poor wretch’s wasted body. Between this and the chains, the executioner’s assistants then inserted the book and the manuscript which Servetus had sent to Calvin under seal to ask Calvin’s fraternal opinion upon it. Finally, in scorn, there was pressed upon the martyr’s brow a crown of leaves impregnated with sulphur. … The executioner kindled the faggots and the murder began.

“When the flames rose around him, Servetus uttered so dreadful a cry that many of the onlookers turned their eyes away from the pitiful sight. Soon the smoke interposed a veil in front of the writhing body, but the yells of agony grew louder and louder, until at length came an imploring scream: ‘Jesus, Son of the everlasting God, have pity on me!’”

Needless to say, neither Jesus nor an everlasting God did anything to relieve the roasting man.

‘The struggle with death lasted half an hour. Then the flames abated, the smoke dispersed, and attached to the blackened stake there remained, above the glowing embers, a black, sickening, charred mass, a loathsome jelly, which had lost human semblance. …

“But where was Calvin in this fearful hour? … He was in his study, windows closed. … He who had really willed and commanded this ‘pious murder’, kept discreetly aloof. Next Sunday, however, clad in his black cassock, he entered the pulpit to boast of the deed before a silent congregation, declaring it to have been a great deed and a just one, although he had not dared to watch the pitiful spectacle.”

To this day, Jehan Calvin is regarded as a great Christian whose teaching continues to shape the lives of millions of citizens in the Western world through the Presbyterian and various “Reformed” churches. People are no longer burnt to death for disagreeing with the master. But dictatorship, in the name of similarly dogmatic collectivist faiths, is not absent from the modern world, not even from America now, in 2010. A much vaster community has fallen under an organizer of dictatorial temperament. His consistory has made it plain that they wish to control what you eat, how you live in your homes, and what you say. Children are being urged to impress the leader’s messages on their parents. The names of those who disagree with him are blackened, and the silencing of broadcast dissent is openly advocated.

What should be done about it? There are conservative voices maintaining that the way to resist incipient totalitarianism is to “return to Christian values”.

Our hope is that this reminder of how Christian values affected life in the past may serve not only as a cautionary tale against collectivism and dictatorship, but also as a rebuttal of the idea that Christianity can be a counterforce against them.

Jillian Becker   April 25, 2010

The vulgar, funny, satirical cartoon South Park brought the “prophet” Muhammad  into its 200th episode by having it said that he was hidden in a U-haul truck and then in a bear costume (out of which, however, emerged Santa Claus, according to Jon Stewart below – we didn’t see the episode).

Muslims took offense. At what exactly isn’t clear. A Muslim named Abu Talhah al Amrikee warned Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, by means of a video on the net that they could be punished with death like the film-maker Theo van Gogh.

So Comedy Central, the channel that shows South Park, censored the episode. They bleeped out all mention of Muhammad, and a final statement deploring intimidation.

That’s what Islam’s all about. That’s what Muslims do: take offense, intimidate, and kill people for making films and drawing cartoons of Muhammad, while also bombing, blowing up planes, flying planes into buildings, shooting unarmed soldiers, plotting mass murder in the New York subway, running over their daughters, beheading their wives, sending money to terrorist organizations to pay for suicide-bombing equipment, parking cars full of explosive outside nightclubs, etc.  And Western authorities feel dreadfully ashamed over offending Muslims, and try not to, and apologize, and pretend it’s not Muslims doing the bombing and shooting and all that.

Almost everyone’s scared of Muslims, as Muslims do their best to make us so. Though they pretend that it’s cruel of non-Muslims to fear them, to be what they call “Islamophobic”.

On Islam’s victory over South Park – an everyday story of the contemporary Western world – find excellent comment by Mark Steyn here, and Diana West here.

May 20 will be “Everybody Draw Muhammad” day. We will join in enthusiastically, and urge our readers to do the same.

Here’s Jon Stewart. We’ll overlook his silly remark about atheists.

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This article discusses the revelation made by Dick Morris that Bill Clinton himself, not his attorney general Janet Reno, was primarily responsible for the Waco massacre:

It looks like somebody is going to have to update the Waco Siege page on Wikipedia. Apparently the whitewashed history that former President Bill Clinton would like us to believe regarding the 1993 federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, is missing important details regarding his own personal involvement.

In response to Bill Clinton’s highly publicized linking of the Tea Party movement to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in an op-ed piece for the New York Times, former Clinton adviser Dick Morris disclosed on Monday that it was Clinton himself, and not Attorney General Janet Reno, as Americans have been led to believe for the past 17 years, who called the shots during the 1993 botched invasion that led to the death of seventy-six people.

Speaking on the Hannity program on the Fox News Network, Morris criticized Clinton for his Oklahoma City comments: “Let’s understand what was Timothy McVeigh’s motivation …he himself had said that it was the reaction to the Waco takeover. Bill Clinton orchestrated that takeover.”

Morris went on to say, “Clinton in fact was so ashamed about what he did in Waco that he was not going to appoint Janet Reno to a second four-year term. She told him in a meeting right before the inauguration day … ‘If you don’t appoint me I’m going to tell the truth about Waco.’ And that forced Clinton’s hand … It’s never been said (publicly) before.”

For years, Clinton has been criticized for his leadership of the federal government during the Waco crisis, but he has managed to escape personal responsibility for the tragedy. With Morris’s statements, it appears this may no longer be possible. It would seem that Clinton was far more intimately involved with the government response at Waco than previously reported. …

For Clinton to associate such a horrible act of violence with freedom loving [Tea Party] Americans, especially given the fact that he must be fully aware that it was his decisions that led to the Waco catastrophe which in turn inspired Timothy McVeigh, is remarkably shameless.