For, we must at all costs not allow ourselves to be caught up in a march of folly.
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| After fruitlessly beating against contrary winds, Paul's ship ran to the lee side of Crete, ending at Fair Havens. Rejecting Paul's advice at ship's counsel, the majority chose to run for Phoenix if a seemingly favourable wind arose. Only to be caught in a potentially deadly storm through following appealing but utterly unwise manipulative advice (HT) |
And, if you have not yet seen this animation of Plato's Parable of the cave, I invite you to watch, pondering how shadow-shows projected on the wall for our benefit can mislead us into an utterly warped view of our world:
Then, please ponder this outline analysis of how to come to a sounder, more balanced basis for our thinking and view of the world:
(I invite a slow, careful reading here on in context to elaborate this. That includes our overall geo-political view and its spiritual dimensions, given the warning in Romans 1.)
Now, let me turn to the matter that stirs me just now.
Iran.
And, geostrategic moves by the US President, Mr Barak Hussein Obama.
Now, over the past week or so, leaders and people of the Caribbean waxed enthusiastic about US President Obama's recent visit to Jamaica, which involved a one day Caricom Summit. However, while it is appropriate for us to recognise the historic significance of the first black president of the USA, we must not allow this to blind us to seriously questionable policy agendas he has pursued across these six years that he has been President.
Yes, seriously questionable.
We need some context, before addressing the main headlined point.
For instance, the pro homosexualism stance his administration has taken the lead on clearly threatens freedom of conscience and targets Christians, not only in the USA but in the wider world. The associated pushing of a counterfeit of marriage -- under false colours of "rights" -- as though it were not associated with inherently disordered and destructive behaviour undermines the very foundation of stable society. Deliberately so. (Cf this recent article, this one also, and the list of articles and links under the porn-perversion agenda in this blog's right hand column for more on this.)
That is not irrelevant, for we can rest assured that such agendas will be written into any aid packages coming from the US Government to our region. For, in its eyes, we are backward homophobes. Indeed, that is a patent part of the backdrop for the UWI move to fire professor Brendan Bain, an AIDS treatment pioneer in our region because he dared speak the truth in an expert testimony given to a court in Belize.
We must keep our eyes open and we must not be naive.
That is the context in which I draw our attention to a recent TV news interview of US Senator Tom Cotton (cf. YouTube here), who earlier served as a US Army officer in Iraq and now serves on the US Senate Intelligence Committee:
In essence, there is no agreement, proper, but it is quite clear that the US under this administration is leading the world in exceedingly dangerous concessions and sanction lifting . . . where sanctions pose the only brakes on the process short of military action (and where strong enough sanctions just might bring down the Mullahs). Within months on this track, Iran could openly have not only nuke weapons but the means to make more and more of them as it sees fit. Where, Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world, openly calls for the destruction of Israel and has built up its cats paws in Lebanon and Gaza for that purpose, and is engaging in extremely destabilising behaviour across the Middle East.
At the same time -- and not coincidentally, Russia has announced intent to go ahead with a long stalled deal to sell S300 sophisticated anti aircraft missiles to Iran.
Such would effectively take an Israeli air attack off the table, and would make a US Attack on nuke sites in Iran far more difficult and costly. (This effectively would force Israel to use cruise missiles and/or rely on ability to knock out the air defense network; which points to backing them into the corner of having to seriously consider going nuclear with Iran. We can rest assured that Israel will not sit idly by while Iran goes to open nuke power status and starts to exert blackmail and nuke backed terrorism.)
Arab regimes across the Persian Gulf and in the wider Middle East (traditional enemies of the Persians), predictably, will feel strong pressure to go nuclear themselves; probably in partnership with Pakistan. Especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt; neither of which is particularly stable in the long term.
All of this deeply compounds Israel's challenges, and points to a dangerous global escalation, a C21 nuke arms race associated with the predictable rise of nukes backed terrorism.
The likely outcomes at this stage are all bad, ranging from merely horrific to unimaginably awful and bloody beyond belief.
I know, I know, this sounds strange to our ears and cuts across our knee-jerk tendency to support The First Black President of the USA.
We need to look beyond the handsome face and the historic achievement that marks the death of American Racism as a potent force, and realise that Mr Obama has put his face up as a front for a very radical agenda. An agenda, regarding which, we need to fearlessly ask and seek answers to some pointed questions.
For instance: why would the Obama Administration act in so patently foolish a geostrategic fashion?
Because of its deep rooted Alinsky-ite, neo-Marxian ideology.
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| Prof Obama at the Chalk-board, teaching from Alinsky's Rules for Radicals framework for Community Organizers (~ activists trained to harness grievances to advance a radical, revolutionary solution based on subverting and discrediting existing centres of influence and power in the community, then becoming the new ones). The focus here is corporations, banks, utilities and money. |
Leading Scholar Bernard Lewis, in his epochal 1990 essay, The Roots of Muslim Rage, summed up the issue and its underlying post hoc fallacies of improper causal focus:
. . . The accusations are familiar. We of the West are accused of sexism, racism, and imperialism, institutionalized in patriarchy and slavery, tyranny and exploitation. To these charges, and to others as heinous, we have no option but to plead guilty -- not as Americans, nor yet as Westerners, but simply as human beings, as members of the human race. In none of these sins are we the only sinners, and in some of them we are very far from being the worst. The treatment of women in the Western world, and more generally in Christendom, has always been unequal and often oppressive, but even at its worst it was rather better than the rule of polygamy and concubinage that has otherwise been the almost universal lot of womankind on this planet . . . .A more balanced reading of global history would tell us that several age-long abuses trace to our common moral struggle and hardness of heart [--> which, has often been softened through the influence of the gospel; leading to reformation], multiplied by the corrupting influences of unaccountable power. Duly, multiplied by plain old fashioned folly. For reasons tracing to our being finite, fallible, morally fallen and too often ill willed, we are ever so prone to marches of folly.
In having practiced sexism, racism, and imperialism, the West was merely following the common practice of mankind through the millennia of recorded history. Where it is distinct from all other civilizations is in having recognized, named, and tried, not entirely without success, to remedy these historic diseases. And that is surely a matter for congratulation, not condemnation. We do not hold Western medical science in general, or Dr. Parkinson and Dr. Alzheimer in particular, responsible for the diseases they diagnosed and to which they gave their names.
Often, such lemming-like marches over the cliff of disaster are driven by the attitude long since exposed by the prophet Isaiah 2,700 years ago when it cropped up in ancient Israel:
Isa 5:18 Woe to those who draw iniquity with cords of falsehood,
who draw sin as with cart ropes,
19 who say: “Let him be quick,
let him speed his work
that we may see it;
let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw near,
and let it come, that we may know it!”
20 Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter!
21 Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes,
and shrewd in their own sight!
22 Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine,
and valiant men in mixing strong drink,
23 who acquit the guilty for a bribe,
and deprive the innocent of his right!
24 Therefore, as the tongue of fire devours the stubble,
and as dry grass sinks down in the flame,
so their root will be as rottenness,
and their blossom go up like dust;
for they have rejected the law of the Lord of hosts,
and have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.
25 Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against his people,
and he stretched out his hand against them and struck them,
and the mountains quaked;
and their corpses were as refuse
in the midst of the streets.
For all this his anger has not turned away,
and his hand is stretched out still.
26 He will raise a signal for nations far away,
and whistle for them from the ends of the earth;
and behold, quickly, speedily they come!
27 None is weary, none stumbles,
none slumbers or sleeps,
not a waistband is loose,
not a sandal strap broken;
28 their arrows are sharp,
all their bows bent,
their horses' hoofs seem like flint,
and their wheels like the whirlwind.
29 Their roaring is like a lion,
like young lions they roar;
they growl and seize their prey;
they carry it off, and none can rescue.
30 They will growl over it on that day,
like the growling of the sea.
And if one looks to the land,
behold, darkness and distress;
and the light is darkened by its clouds. [ESV]
And that is exactly what we face today.
There may be little that we can do in the face of a gathering global storm of unprecedented dimensions. But, we can prepare to take refuge, we can decline to join marches of folly, we can watch and pray. We can get busy about preparing ourselves for hard times and for our part in the enduring mission of the church in and from our region.
And we can stop being naive in the face of manipulators and their clever shadow shows intended to invert our thinking so we imagine good is bad and bad good, wisdom is foolish and folly wise, God is evil and the devillish and demonised good, and more.
It is time for us to stand even as spiritual and linked geostrategic tidal waves bear down on us:
It is time -- actually, we are very late as usual -- to prepare ourselves to be a global spiritual force to be reckoned with . . . especially across the 10/40 window from which so many of our ancestors came:
So, yet again in a Mordecai moment: why not now, why not here, why not us? END
PS: Discover the Networks has a summary of the Alinsky method that is well worth pondering:
In the Alinsky model, “organizing” is a euphemism for “revolution” -- a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America’s social and economic structure. The goal is to foment enough public discontent, moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted -- a revolution whose foot soldiers view the status quo as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation. Thus, the theory goes, the people will settle for nothing less than that status quo’s complete collapse -- to be followed by the erection of an entirely new system upon its ruins. Toward that end, they will be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand what types of societal “changes” are needed.
As Alinsky put it: “A reformation means that the masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won’t act for change but won’t strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution.”[1]
. . . . Alinsky’s revolution promised that by changing the structure of society’s institutions, it would rid the world of such vices as socio-pathology and criminality. Arguing that these vices were caused not by personal character flaws but rather by external societal influences, Alinsky's worldview was thoroughly steeped in the socialist left’s collectivist, class-based doctrine of economic determinism. “The radical’s affection for people is not lessened,” said Alinsky, “… when masses of them demonstrate a capacity for brutality, selfishness, hate, greed, avarice, and disloyalty. It is not the people who must be judged but the circumstances that made them that way.”[5] Chief among these circumstances, he said, were “the larcenous pressures of a materialistic society.”[6] . . . . Alinsky maintained that radicals, finding themselves “adrift in the stormy sea of capitalism,”[8] sought “to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization.”[9] “They hope for a future,” he said, “where the means of production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful.”[10] In short, they wanted socialism.That is what we are dealing with, and we need to ponder how those who lead factions steeped in subversion, manipulation, radicalisation and ruthless discrediting of the other will rule once they attain power. The answer is, of course, with the same cynically manipulative and destructive ruthlessness.
As Rules for Radicals advocates:
"A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage -- the political paradise of communism." p.10. [And let us note, Marxism has always been quite varied in form, so, the sort of cultural/institutional subversion strategy advocated by Alinsky is not sufficient to remove him from the general frame of thought, whatever differences he may have had with say the Moscow orthodoxy. If you think Alinsky is not neo-marxian (which should be instantly recognisable from his vocabulary, controlling ideas and arguments), kindly cf. my response here.] . . . .
"The first step in community organization is community disorganization. The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization. Present arrangements must be disorganized if they are to be displaced by new patterns.... All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new." p.116
[Key Rules:]
5.
"Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost
impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition,
which then reacts to your advantage." . . . .
13.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
[NB: Notice the evil counsel to find a way to attack the man, not the issue. The easiest way to do that, is to use the trifecta stratagem: distract, distort, demonise.] In conflict tactics there are certain rules that [should be regarded]
as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as
the target and 'frozen.'...
"...any target can
always say, 'Why do you center on me when there are others to blame
as well?' When your 'freeze the target,' you disregard these
[rational but distracting] arguments.... Then, as you zero in and
freeze your target and carry out your attack, all the 'others' come
out of the woodwork very soon. They become visible by their support
of the target...'
"One acts
decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on
one side and all the devils on the other."
A warning.
