Posted on 11/23/2001 12:21:27 AM PST by Askel5
Did I mention that the article was written years after the "end of the Cold War"? Take it easy--TTS
Was pretty amazing, no?, the way communism's epicenter transformed nearly overnight with little more than some shelling of the "White House" (Yelstin posing on a tank like Lenin in the Beautiful Square) and the "coup" against Gorbachev?
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Gorbachev – who knew so much about the future that the strategic collective had planned, that the no-for-profit entity established in the State of California under the name "Tamalpais Institute" was put in place ready for its name change to Gorbachev Foundation/USA a year later, on 10th April 1992 – seemed to have special knowledge about the provocation planned for August 1991. For he himself predicted it, in the court of an answer at that Paris press conference:
[This remark telling for (1) its expression of residual Soviet anxiety over the West's ability to rightly perceive the convergence strategy and the "break with the past" as strategic deception; (2) prediction of the dramatic event; and (3) …] … an affirmation of Moscow's success in altering the Western mentality so that it now openly accepted the Leninist view of the world ("putting international relations on … new rails"). It is axiomatic that a train traveling along a railway line can proceed in one direction only – the direction intended by the Leninist strategists, which is towards the abolition of nation–states and their incorporation into regional blocs en route to World Government [=dictatorship]. Gorbachev could have said "onto a new road" but chose instead to use the word "rails" – from which, of course, a train cannot turn off to the right or the left. In other words, the world had only one option -- to proceed along the "railway line" laid down by the Soviet strategy collective, of convergence between East and West on the Soviets' terms. Furthermore, this deeply Leninist statement contained a veiled threat, given that the alternative to the "only option" would be for the train to reverse along the railway line back to the Cold War, with the implication that ay such course would have prospectively disastrous consequences for humanity. The West, led by people like the blinkered Mr. Hurd, fell for this blackmail, thereby fulfilling part of Dmitri Manuilski's, notorious prediction in 1938 that …
Paraphrased and quoted from Soviet Analyst, Vo. 27, No. 5 |
It's funny how the *desire* to believe that Communism has collapsed completely overwhelms the continuous flow of facts that tell us the exact opposite. The Bible diagnosed this flaw in our ability to reason thousands of years ago: "The heart is deceitful beyond measure, who can understand it?"
The desire to believe is most certainly a handicap where faith is misplaced.
I think the coup de grace for the Calvinists, particularly, as well as the Enlightened generally, was the infecting of otherwise moral minds with Pragmatism.
Once a person can rationalize as "good" evil acts done for "good intents" or judge a person by his motive rather than his actions, it's basically game over where Objective Reality or natural moral law is concerned.
Those are the People who've Eaten from the Tree marked "Knowledge of Good and Evil". They are the ones who think to practice the alchemy of pragmatism and transform good into evil and evil into good, depending primarily on ephemeral Circumstance and wholly subjective Motive.
Bookmark
Just sent you a ping to this thread...turn out you're already here...I think I'm going to rename you FLASH!
=== you will finally be able to go through life with an objective (and therefore consistent) position on Israel :o)
That, I have already achieved. Remember, it is you who believe Israel is special in that all is fair where "God's will" is concerned.
You are right to sense a reluctance on my part to read the books in the first place. I'll tell you why that is.
My being accused of "hating" the Bush Dynasty dates almost exactly to the posting of a thread I excerpted from the Barbara Bush autobiography which was sitting in our firm breakroom one day. Honestly, the last thing I need is more ammunition for my arguments ... particularly that of a "personal" sort.
I'm fine sticking with public domain facts, the food for thought I've received from Jews (both pro-Israel and not-so-pro-Israel) and perfectly Reasonable (largely Thomist) logic where the recognizing and respecting of acts as essentially evil or essentially good is concerned.
There never was, is not and never will be such a thing as good or "humanitarian" research using artificially manufactured and purposefully-destroyed lives.
There will never be such a thing as committing "pre-emptive" evil acts in God's name so to bring about "God's will."
On occasion, Just War and the sanctity of life (particularly that of the innocent and helpless) obligate a person to commit evil by defending themselves or another to the death and/or seeking to slay an unjust aggressor. The only way in which justice and truth (and mercy) remain a part of this equation is to keep one's perspective on good and evil absolutely intact by recognizing always that infliction of death is an evil to be avoided at all costs. I see nothing wrong, in other words, with placing more emphasis on Father Abraham's haggling with God on behalf of the Good Men of Sodom than I do the instances of "kill them all, let God sort them out" express approvals to lay waste to entire settlements of men, women and children. How anyone with an appreciation of the Covenant made new do otherwise? Are we to read the Old Testament with the same understanding and insights of a man born a thousand years before Christ?
And would you have whipped out your sword to defend Christ in the Garden? I bet I would have. Even if I had somehow managed to think I understood what He was telling me at the Passover meal only hours before, it would have been the perfectly natural thing to do ... to defend with force a man I knew was innocent.
But God's will -- as evidenced by His healing the soldier's ear -- was that man should understand the willing nature of His self-sacrifice, the supreme turning of the other cheek, and learn that there is and should be room for forgiveness of those who, being ignorant, know not what they do.
It's a New Covenant thing. Those of the Old Covenant should have been expecting this all along. To my knowledge, many still are awaiting a Messiah to ride an ass into Jerusalem.
Lastly ... if you'll remember, Christ came to bring that New Covenant to his own -- the only who had an Old Covenant to make new. And He even went so far as to describe the Gentiles as dogs under the table worthy only of the scraps of the Children, perhaps, once the Gentile woman begged for same.
Any so-called Reprobate can beg like a dog and become one of God's Chosen. Remember that. It's the reason mercy---not vengeance or desire to re-form others in our own not-so-godly image, or rationalizations, with all due pragmatism, of the deals cut with the likes of Stalin, the bombing of Nagasaki or Dresden or the tit-for-tat "collateral damage" to innocents--must be the overriding element of any truly Just War.
=== Instead, we have an artificial UN/US/EU/Soviet/British Left-induced
Zion.
=== When Israel was founded, there was no legitimate, indigenous government in Palestine. That's one of the reasons a fight needed to take place there, to establish just that.
Listen to yourself.
I don't need to listen to myself, I wrote it. You can't have a power vacuum such as existed when the British administered Palestine. Sooner or later you are going to be faced with a war when an outside entity babysits a piece of property hotly contested by two indigenous entities. This dynamic is built right into creation. Are you so romantic that you can't even be objective about that?
Administered what?
=== Sooner or later you are going to be faced with a war when an outside entity babysits a piece of property hotly contested by two indigenous entities. This dynamic is built right into creation.
So ... where we are reserving for ourselves the "Security Services" and assurances (mostly financial) necessary to "babysit" the nations we're presently liberating (Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq all containing some pretty hostile indigenous entities), are you saying we're doomed to failure because -- as with our "babysitting" Israel -- the dynamic that shall (self)defeat us is "built right into creation"?
btw ... I gotta crash. Night, TTS
btw, the Soviet and the Arabs were on the wrong side of God's prophetic plan as well.
=== btw, the Soviet and the Arabs were on the wrong side of God's prophetic plan as well.
How can that be?
I am not one of those who believes in EITHER Faith OR Reason. In fact, I'm quite confident that anyone interested in rightly perceiving and humbly doing God's will must needs rely on BOTH at all times so to keep his chariot from careening to one side or the other.
At this point, utterly fantastic pronouncements on the Evil Ones such as yours above are every bit as intelligible to me as the ramblings of those who cannot fathom the "despicable act" for which Onan was put to death or who manage to rationalize somehow the Purposeful Exclusion of the Creator from the marriage bed as somehow pleasing to God in that they -- not He -- are the best judge of exactly When and How many of "God's blessings" they can afford.
God is not a fiend. Nor -- if his relenting on asking Abraham to sacrifice HIS own son -- does he expect us to be gods ourselves and able to put other men to the tests we devise in order to tell Chosen from UnChosen, Elect from Reprobate.
THE ONLY yardstick we have is whether men follow their consciences or not. The Incarnation is not only an event in Time to which those born before Christ had no access but also an event to which is not given all men to know anything about much less apprehend rightly (in the case of those whose faiths or lack of faith or circumstances preclude such apprehension).
Conscience -- God's law written in the heart of every human being -- rightly educated, formed and FOLLOWED, precludes any man from setting himself up as God (taking the Lord's name in vain) or rationalizing clearly immoral acts (such as murder, envy, theft, failure to honor one's parents or protect one's children from the Moment of Creation, etc.) and cannot possibly lead any just man to believe that Some are More Equal than others simply by virtue of their having been born in the right place at the right time.
I think it's a seriously grave error to believe one can tell those whom God has "chosen" to do evil so that His will might be accomplished. Primarily because we are locked in Time, have no real concept of the mystery of Free Will and the ability of God alone to know a man's heart, it would be rash in the extreme to pick and choose those evil traitors or those evil acts which God DETERMINED somehow would operate to fulfill His plans for human redemption.
Likewise, the same would apply for any Christian tempted to believe that Mary -- however spotless was her soul -- had no Choice in the matter of accepting God's will as proposed to her by Gabriel. Either hers is a triumph as handmaiden and humble servant of the Lord or she was just predestined by God to be a robot.
You cannot have it both ways.
It's at this point, sadly, our conversation ends for now where this line of argument is concerned. I have no wish to be embroiled labyrinthian arguments of selected Scripture that is simply irreconciliable with the Whole of revealed knowledge and -- further -- contrary to human reason. This is where we simply have to agree to disagree for now if we're to salvage for the time being the ability to discourse on incontrovertible facts, events and prognoses for the ongoing march of the revolution at home and abroad by "any means necessary" ... particularly the Triangulation of the People of the Book by atheists whose "some are more equal than others" bent ought to be an indication of how best they manage to play the Faithbased like pianos.
one word: bureaucracy
Things just don't change that much do they?
Richard Pipes is someone who I love to read.
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