November 2013

Consecrating Russia to Exorcise the West: 2

THE EDITOR

"If they heed My requests, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace. If not, she shall spread her errors throughout the world...."

Our Lady of Fatima

"We once lived in a totalitarian state that had two main features: totalising terror and a totalising lie. I hope that totalising terror is no longer possible in our country, but we have now entered a new era of a totalising lie."

Yuri Samodurov, pre-89 dissident

"Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying... because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie."

Masha Gessen, post-89 dissident

"All these wars have been based on lies."

Ron Paul, 6/9/13

 

The "wars" referenced by veteran US Senator Paul are of the military kind. The "fight" depicted by Ms Gessen, a lesbian activist, involves a cultural war for hearts and minds. And yet, as their admirably blunt statements reveal, these different conflicts have a common source; a thread that binds and betrays them. Speaking in November 2000 about Russia's emergence from the Soviet era, Mr Samodurov, former director of the Sakharov museum in Moscow, nailed the essence of that commonality: the "totalising lie."

Of course, East or West, no one holds a monopoly on lies. Not even satanic surrogates. Nonetheless, by systematising and institutionalising the ideology of atheistic materialism, Marx, Lenin and Stalin enabled Russia to "spread her errors throughout the world" to such an extent that by the early 1980s nearly one-third of the planet was enslaved by the Big Bolshevist Lie.

Today, aided and abetted by Darwinian naturalism, Marxist mendacity resounds not only through the remaining Communist nations, but also throughout the so-called "New World Order." Famously proclaimed by George Bush Snr as he embarked on that fearful (and fearfully ironic) project of the US governing class — to impose democracy and freedom by deadly force — this New Order has overturned the erstwhile Christian West which now, in many respects, mirrors the Russian tyranny it once deplored.

Masha Gessen, whose damning exposé of despotic President Putin we related last month, embodies this post-Soviet march of materialism. Blind to her own cultural embrace of the Marxist lie that shores up Putin's despised dictatorship, she fails to see that she has merely swapped Leninist brutalism for the Gramscian gradualism of the Frankfurt School; the enslaving gulag for enslavement to unbridled passions and diktat by democratic means. Empowered by the reductio ad absurdum of Gessen's relativistic creed — "Might makes Right" — this Orwellian dictatorship not only parades moral and social chaos at home as "freedom," it presents the devastation and misery of "endless war" abroad as "creative destruction" [see "Facets of Four World Wars," CO, Oct. 2010]. It is all of a piece.

In 2006, for instance, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice trumpeted the Israeli blitzkrieg of Lebanon as "the 'birth pangs' of a New Middle East" (read Zionist safe haven). Commenting on this declaration in light of the "Arab Sping," Lebanon's former Christian military commander-in-chief, Michel Aoun outlined the reality during an interview with Syrian state television (11/10/12):

So, the adopted policy that has struck the entire Mediterranean basin, from the Arab Maghreb to the Arabic Mashreq, was not spontaneous. Part of it was planned, and part was occasional as events developed.

As for what concerns Syria, I believe this is all planned. We live next door to Israel, and Israel... feels that Lebanon and Syria are obstacles blocking implementation of its policy. Israel, which declared itself a Jewish state, still suffers from a sizeable Arabic population inside it that it wants to drive to somewhere else, when the situation is better and permits that. As long as Syria and Lebanon are following this policy, it's normal that Israel would want to strike these regimes so they turn into chaos, just like those Arab countries that fought the battles of change, and those turned out to be battles of fire.

When someone topples a certain regime, it is a must that the coming leadership be better. However, we felt that the new governments have scored steps backwards, and not steps forward. ... we believe Syria is closest to absolute democracy from any other Arab state. There is the freedom of worship that is practiced in Syria, the freedom of choice of social lifestyle.

This is not something that the West notices, that there are still Arab countries that do not let the citizens choose their own lifestyle. So they impose their way of food, drink and dress. They ban the right to be different to others. Why don't they [Syrian opposition] have a dialogue with him [Bashar al-Assad] and wait for the presidential elections in 2014. ... This is the essence of democracy.

I feel today that the Syrian regime is the one defending democracy while the Western countries want to topple it by force and do not want to refer back to the Syrian people. This is the tragedy of the Middle Eastern countries that deal with these [Western] countries, which consider "human rights" as a marketing slogan and not a true principle according to which it behaves.

[Lebanon is in this crisis too, since] if the current regime in Syria changes and becomes an extremist one, we will be effected by this change due to the shared borders and relations that we have, especially if this new regime aspires for a "one-size-fits-all" solution in the Levant [Eastern Mediterranean], by applying this type of regime in all these countries.

The media have scant regard for this kind of commonsense commentary (from a leader of the country often held up as a model of co-existence between faiths and groups). A few token sentences, perhaps, to be instantly negated by party line propaganda that smothers the plain truth: that all the bloody "pangs," past, present and still to come, will continue on remorselessly until the actual "birth" of a New "one-size-fits all" Middle East. A pagan entity acceptable to a mélange of vested interests but especially to the ruthless and implacable Israel lobby (which traded cash for Congressional votes in favour of war with Syria, even as the Israeli media reported that President Obama had asked Prime Minister Netanyahu to intervene directly in lobbying American Jews to support an attack.)

Such are the life-and-death ramifications of the self-interested, secular worldview Masha Gessen shares with the War Party. Like her legendary compatriot Alexander Solzhenitsyn, she rejects the "terror." But unlike Solzhenitsyn she does not, by her own admission, reject the materialistic "lie" that feeds it. As a consequence, this modern Russian culture warrior perverts the very foundations of the freedom she claims to champion.

"Gay marriage is a lie," she stated at the Sydney Writer's festival on 19 May 2012. In fact, "gay marriage" is merely a perverse effect. The actual "lie" is its subjective cause: the moral relativism that makes marriage per se redundant. Pushing this nihilistic creed to its logical endpoint, she went on to explain that "Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we’re going to do with marriage when we get there. I don’t see why they [her three children] shouldn’t have five parents [which they do] legally. I don’t see why we should choose two of those parents and make them a sanctioned couple. It’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist."

One is tempted to reply that the only "no-brainer" here is Ms Gessen herself; a Russian dissident oblivious to the fact that her diabolic anti-marriage campaign is textbook Marx and Engels! And yet she is not only brainy but brave. What she lacks is the Christian faith and understanding which alone can set her free.

Having emerged from the gulag to study the history of the Russian revolution and all he had suffered in its name, Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, recognised the unholy Gramscian convergence: epitomised by lesbian Gessen marching in lockstep with the New Marxist-Lite World Order:

The events of the Russian revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principle trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: "Men have forgotten God."

Recently declassified Cabinet papers reveal that on the same day he delivered the above words during his 11 May 1983 Templeton Address at Guildhall, London, Solzhenitsyn met Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street. For one hour they swapped ideas on how to end the Soviet system and defend the West against its expansion. And once again, during an analysis that the prime minister described as "disturbing," the great man warned that only a rediscovery of the West's "spiritual firmness" could prevent disaster.

Like Ms Gessen and the liberal elite, however, even the "conservative" Mrs Thatcher was not really in sync with Solzhenitsyn. She, too, tilted at windmills as moral anarchy and family breakdown handed her opponents endless opportunities to hack away the Christian foundations upon which her cherished "freedom" was built and remained entirely dependent. On the pretext of reining in the degenerate fruits of the relativism they themselves personified, the neo-Marxists relentlessly codified their perverse and destructive desires in the law of the land under beguiling appeals to public "safety," "diversity" and "tolerance," all in utter disregard for human life and the common good.

True, "gay marriage" did not raise its tyrannical head during the Thatcher and Reagan years. But abortion-on-demand, based on even bigger lies, was rampant on their Cold War watch. Yet even the pro-life President Reagan, who surely understood Mother Teresa's insight — that mass extermination of life in the womb breeds inhumanity and despair which leads to nuclear war — was unable or unwilling to tackle this moral cause-and-effect rooted in the Godlessness identified by Solzhenitsyn.

Quite simply, the zealous resolve of a Catholic leader like 19th century Ecuadorian President Gabriel Garcia Moreno, who placed the return to God and restoration of "spiritual firmness" at the top of his presidential agenda at the cost of his life, was lacking. [CO, May & June/July 2008] And so, with the Church in ruins — disoriented and debilitated by a parasitic Counter-Church — the best the two latter-20th century Protestant allies could do was wring their hands about the baleful fruit of irreligion, and call Russia's military bluff. It was enough to see off the existential threat. But the spiritual and moral rot within deepened and worsened everywhere, spewing forth rootless, vulgar, violent peoples.

Equally nihilistic and selfish, the leaders of these hapless hordes are content to manage the relentless decay; forever peddling demoralisation, conflict and oppression as "progress." They are largely unaware that their suicidal mindset is steeped in the blood-red Marxism of the Bolshevist thinkers who, in 1923, set in train the soft-pink Marxism of today's destructive liberal-left hegemony. Designed to facilitate an unbloody Western cultural revolution to complement the Eastern terror, the purpose and principal targets of this stratagem were set forth by Georg Lukács, the dominant force among the intellectuals of Lenin's Institute of Marxism:

A strategy that will lead to the disintegration, to the total corruption and absolute erosion of the West, the so-called cultural revolution will be able to create the conditions for our principles to win. The great obstacle is Western civilisation in itself and the way of life that comes from it: morals coming from the Christian religion; family, which brings a link from the past and a guide to the future; cultural customs and manners of doing things that control the primary instincts of men; political and social organisations, like monarchies especially, that give warranty to freedom yet do not allow the absolute freedom that we want to give to the people. Of all these obstacles, the more important ones are God and the family.

This precise plan for the total destruction of Christian civilisation was inculcated in the West by the influential successor of Lenin's Institute, the so-called Frankfurt School of secular Jewish Marxists who fled to America when Hitler's anti-semitic purges began cranking up in the early 1930s. Eighty years later, their Western progeny, both the doctrinaire materialists and more plentiful "useful idiots," have achieved their stated anti-Christian goals to an astonishing degree. They now approximate Putin and the "black colonels": the latest incarnation of the Marxist despots who sustain and spread Russia's "totalising lie."

 

II. OBAMA AND THE "CULTURAL MARXISTS"

~ Dictatorship as Democracy ~

 

Among the many inadvertent political faux pas captured by the media in recent times, the private exchange between Presidents Sarkozy and Obama, picked up at a G20 summit in 2010, is among the most amusing — and telling. Unaware that their microphones were turned on, Sarkozy, a critic of Israeli Prime Minister "Bibi" Netanyahu’s determination to build Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, told Obama straight out, "I cannot bear Netanyahu, he's a liar." Obama fired back indignantly, "You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day."

Many Israeli voters would wholeheartedly concur with these sentiments about their unpopular PM. But it's the obliviousness of "Bibi's" presidential detractors that takes the biscuit: two serial liars whinging about a fellow serial liar, whose criminal complicity and self-serving they would easily match, if not surpass, in every aspect of private and political life.

The incident captured the self-delusion of our governing class — the manipulative, self-interested "Power Elite," as sociologist C. Wright Mills famously labelled them. At once shamelessly amoral, self-righteous, and lacking all self-awareness, Western leaders view themselves as paragons of virtue ruling free and just societies where equality, diversity and tolerance hold sway under human rights legislation that should, from their well-heeled vantage point, be the envy and objective of poor and oppressed peoples the world over. Masha Gessen's devastating portrait of President Putin would only confirm their self-satisfaction (especially after he bested them over Syria!). How they would gasp at the tyrannical doings of Vladimir; tut-tutting at his sins and psychological dysfunction detailed on every page. They would never pause for a single moment to consider the bulging beams in their own eyes: the similar demons that possess their souls and psyches. In all charity, therefore, let us do it for them; since nations, like fish, rot from the head down.

Rise of the sociopaths

It is a provocative comparison. After all, the Vladimir Putin described by Masha Gessen is, essentially, a vengeful mass murderer who fits the clinical description of a violent social psychopath. In Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us [1993], Canadian psychologist Robert D. Hare describes a psychopath as "a self-centred, callous, and remorseless person profoundly lacking in empathy and the ability to form warm emotional relationships with others, a person who functions without the restraints of conscience ... what is missing in this picture are the very qualities that allow human beings to live in social harmony."

Interestingly, a study within the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry [2005], showed that not only predisposing genetic factors but antisocial behaviour in young children, such as larrikinism and troublemaking, can be early indicators of psychopathic tendencies that need to be contained by strong behavioural programmes if they are not to develop into deeper-seated, untreatable disorders. In this regard, it is noteworthy that Putin has always revelled in his reputation as a childhood thug. A violent pattern that continued into his early KGB years, when the slightest provocation would provoke him to a street brawl, even if it risked his KGB career. Through it all, Gessen notes, "Putin has painted himself — and allowed himself to be painted by others — as a consistently rash, physically violent man with a barely containable temper." We might also add the extreme control-freakery which led to his demand for Berozovsky to surrender his TV station; his very narrow range of emotions; and the grandiose sense of self-importance evoked by his comment that "A single  intelligence officer could rule the fates of thousands of people." 

Of course, even in Russia the majority of sociopaths are not homicidal maniacs willing to eradicate vast numbers of fellow citizens to justify their ends. Rather, they are the sort of controlling, self-centred, deceitful individuals we often find around us, coldly exploiting and hurting others for their own gain and gratification. Whereas the ripple effect of Christian faith and practice on the wider society once limited the rise of such dangerous personalities, their number increased exponentially with the post-60s eradication of the Commandments as transcendent benchmarks of public morality and the common good. Always synonymous with politics, rampant self-interest is now a pathological symptom of the decadent black hole sucking all civilising Christian influence out of the public square. When even presumed Catholic "conservatives" (like Australia's new Prime Minister Tony Abbot) now depict the abnormal and deviant as tolerable, normal, or even laudable, we should not be surprised that extreme selfishness, mendacity and narcissism are no longer viewed as obstacles to high office by the general electorate.

One might excuse more discerning voters for failing to note the warning signs, since sociopaths can entertain, be brilliant and charming; near perfect mimicry of normal emotion, intelligence and responsibility concealing their highly disabled and irresponsible personalities [The Mask of Sanity, Hervey Cleckly, 1941]. The worry is that so many obvious phonies — whose every utterance screams "Self-serving Liar!" — are not only routinely elected but greeted with fervour and high expectation, as the post-Commandment masses search for false messiahs to deliver them from apparently intractable woes.

Britain has led the sociopathic charge. We have written at length about the unspeakable Tony Blair, a ham actor whose period in office began and ended with gross deception [cf. June/July 2008; Jan. 2007]. On day one he was forced to admit accepting a one million dollar party donation/bribe to reverse a promised ban on tobacco advertising. After an empty apology and manifestly disingenuous profession of honesty and integrity, his tenure predictably evolved as a toxic tissue of spin and lies that poisoned public life, ignited an unjust and devastating war, and finished with the most damaging lie of all: his blasphemous "conversion" to the Catholic faith. Both at home and abroad, a heavy price in blood and treasure was paid for his pathological mendacity and delusions of grandeur. However, the shameful stench of electoral complicity remains. Having accepted his initial shabby betrayal, voters acquiesced in the ensuing flood of fibs, repeatedly re-electing him, even after the WMD whopper.

If anything, the "puritanical" Gordon Brown, first as Chancellor and then as Blair's unelected successor, demonstrated even more pronounced pathologies. On several occasions columnist Richard Littlejohn ticked off his characteristics from a list of "commonly accepted traits of sociopathic behaviour":

Glibness and superficial charm; manipulative and cunning (Check)

Grandiose sense of self and entitlement (Check);

Pathological lying; absence of remorse, shame or guilt; callousness and lack of empathy (Check);

Refusal to accept blame; tendency to blame others even for acts they obviously committed (Check);

Authoritarian; secretive; paranoid; narcissism; grandiosity; an over-inflated belief in their own powers and abilities (Check);

Prone to rage and abuse; outraged by insignificant matters (Check);

Instead of friends, they have only victims and accomplices who tend to end up as victims (Check)".

The end always justifies the means; nothing must stand in their way. (Check, check) [Daily Mail, 2/5/10]

Such was the notoriety of this Chancellor, who ran the country into the ground before posing as the financial saviour of the world, that nobody seriously queried Littlejohn's damning assessment. In any event, Brown's manic contribution to the Blair-Brown "psychodrama" (as even the left wing press label New Labour's civil war), has now been underlined in the recent memoirs of his vicious spin doctor Damian McBride [Power Trip: A Decade of Politics, Plots and Spin, Biteback, 2013]. But it is not just Britain. Nearly all the above personality traits describe high ranking politicians on every continent: Italy's Berlusconi and Australia's former PM Kevin Rudd (a Brown/Blair hybrid) to name just a few more. Yet voters continue to elect the worst of them.

Brewing for decades, the complicity overflowed in 2008 with the global hysteria that greeted President Obama as a secular messiah. An egotistical dilettante trained in Marxist agitation who wrote his autobiography when he was a nobody, then created a cult of personality around himself while raising unprecedented amounts of money by legally dubious means, Obama embodies the great majority of traits on the Littlejohn list. He is, as we have often detailed, morally, intellectually, temperamentally and experientially unfit for any public office whatsoever, never mind leadership of the United States [cf. CO, June/July & Aug/Sept 2009; March & Oct. 2012].

Yet after four catastrophic years, not only was he re-elected, the majority of Catholics voted for him! Moreover, they did so in wanton disregard for his pre-election frontal attack on Catholic conscientious objection to funding free abortifacient contraception (mass murder in utero) through his ruinous Obamacare legislation. Nor did his repeated Stalinesque refusal to outlaw partial birth abortion (infanticide)concern these complicit CINOs. Their 2012 vote for the Culture of Death and Dictatorship, replicated by Catholic constituencies throughout the West, not least in Britain during the Blair years, is symptomatic of a death wish being acted out even by those who should know far better. This wholesale demoralisation of the grassroots mirrors a disordered hierarchy manifesting multiple sociopathic traits; leaders and lawmakers who make the old Tammany Hall criminals seem like paragons of virtue and mental health.

"Error" as demonic scourge

Now, as faithful Catholics we view current affairs through a supernatural lens; in terms of heaven and hell. So when we speak about the "madness" of the suicidal West, alluding thereby to such things as the "gay marriage" delirium of the executive lunatics running the asylum, we should understand that the pathologies facilitating the insanity are not only real but provoked by variants of the malign spirit that animated Marx — whose double-edged mission was to destroy the very "idea of God" in order to abolish all morals.

Whereas strong circumstantial evidence points to actual "possession" as the explanation for Marx himself [cf. "Lines of Convergence," CO, April 2010], the spirit of his "errors" adapted by Russia and spread Westward became manifest in lesser degrees of satanic presence.

In the case of Communist agitators (Lenin's "useful idiots") whose every waking hour was gifted to the Party, their dedication to the point of mania might be compared to demonic "obsession."

Prominent Marxist academic Ralph Milliband, father of the current British Labour leader "Red" Ed Milliband (a puppet of the militant Left), captured the fevered mindset. Before the burial plot of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, North London, Ralph confessed to making a lifelong vow. "I remember standing in front of the grave," he wrote, "fist clenched, and swearing my own private oath that I would be faithful to the workers' cause." And so he was: talking in abstractions with even more extreme comrades as millions died in horror; rationalising his hero's deathly ideology until he went to join him in 1994.

Not every Party member made a pilgrimage to Marx's grave. But the similar cultish fervour that gripped the souls of "useful idiots" who imbibed his wicked spirit enabled them to wreak havoc out of all proportion to their numbers, generating near preternatural levels of energy and perseverance. Whereas the disciples of Christ grew tired and lukewarm, Western anti-apostles of Marx always maintained their unearthly missionary zeal. While the Frankfurt School intellectuals scattered Marxian seeds with impunity on their unimpeded jaunt through the formative institutions of the West, the rank-and-file ploughed on relentlessly. Some, like Bella Dodd, a former official of the American Communist Party who returned to the Church, have revealed their personal recruitment of vast numbers of young men to join the Party and/or infiltrate Catholic seminaries and other bastions of Christian civilisation.

We are now reaping the whirlwind of this unholy sowing of Russian "errors" by the obsessive comrades: a spiritual scourge akin to demonic "infestation."

At the low end of demonic activity, this spirit of negativity has imbued entire populations, now consumed by fear, stress, anger, depression and mental disease. All compounded by destructive addictions and behaviours in desperate attempts to numb the emptiness, misery and pain. American statistics are indicative: suicide now surpasses car accidents as the nation's number one cause of "injury death"; one-third of employees suffer chronic debilitating stress; nearly 25% of women are taking anti-depressants; single parents have more than tripled as a share of households since 1960, and single mothers now account for one-quarter of all US households; approximately one out of every three children lives in a home without a father; in 2010 the average teen was taking 1.2 central nervous system drugs, treating conditions such as ADHD and depression; 20 million new STD infections are recorded every year, and one out of every four teen girls has at least one of them.

Fuelling these chronic symptoms of decay is the endemic inhumanity; a sure sign of the diabolic. The voracious spirits roaming, infesting and devouring the sophisticated West [1Peter 5:8] are not as ostentatious as their bloody progenitors who massacred impoverished Russians. Yet they have quietly conditioned two generations to disregard the daily surgical/medical/chemical cleansing of pre-born human lives, even as they champion "human rights" from the moral high ground of their safe ex utero existence. These hypocritical hearts and minds dehumanised by brutal Darwinian explanations of life are not only fodder for social engineers, they are suggestible to demonic influence, readily acquiescing in this "intimate violence that clothes itself in democracy," as Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia describes the legal fig leaf of abortion-on-demand.

A holocaust beyond genocide, in the US alone there is one surgical/medical abortion every 26 seconds. During the 1973-2011 period 54.5 million+ babies were surgically/medically aborted. Pharmacy experts estimate another 610 million+ chemically destroyed by abortifacients between 1965 and 2009. Little wonder that America also has the highest child abuse death rate in the developed world, while one in four girls is estimated to be sexually abused before reaching adulthood. In relative terms, smaller nations like Britain and Australia would approach those gruesome statistics, if not outstrip some of them.

However much the West likes to dress up and sanitise them as indicators of "liberty," these are police-state figures that reflect the sort of horrendous human suffering and mass death that occur after a Soviet "liberation." Like that final stage of Communist aggression, abortion is not intended to liberate women, it is a total war against humanity and human civilization. Or to put this democratic death warrant in Marxist propaganda terms: abortion-on-demand is "the final struggle for the victory of Communism" (read Russia's "errors") by cultural means.

The East-West comparison is bolstered by the abortion Cruelty Curve which does not differentiate between political systems. Always and everywhere, inevitably and inexorably, it climbs onwards and upwards. Hence China's estimated 336 million abortions over forty years has produced a steep rise in numbers of abandoned, kidnapped and stolen children, as well as those left to die of starvation and medical neglect in the infamous "Dying Rooms" of Chinese orphanages. Similarly desensitised by industrial-scale baby-killing, we find burgeoning inhumanity in our own backyards. A recent report captures the workaday horror in Britain:

The number of elderly people being abused has soared by more than a quarter in a year – and a third of the perpetrators never face justice. Almost 300 suspected cases were reported to local authorities every day last year, making a total of 105,000 – a huge 28 per cent increase on the 82,000 from 2011.

More than a quarter of the cases involved someone aged at least 85. Much of the abuse is carried out by home helps and staff in care homes – the very people entrusted to look after the elderly. It includes neglect, physical attacks, mental cruelty and financial manipulation. But the reported cases are believed to represent just the tip of the iceberg because experts say far more take place but are never discovered.

Caroline Abrahams, of Age UK, said: "These numbers are disturbing. ... they concern some of the most vulnerable people in our society, many of whom feel that they have no one to turn to for help. ... Our biggest fear is that there are still many cases that are not reported."

[...] This summer, we revealed that a record 910 care homes were issued with official warnings after the health watchdog uncovered ‘unacceptable’ standards of care for the most vulnerable. [Daily Mail, 5/10/13]

Voilà, "infestation" as dehumanisation. Universal and relentless, media depictions of this Christian void recently moved ninety-five-year-old American Evangelical leader Billy Graham to lament: "I watch the news daily, and my heart is burdened. When I hear despair in people's voices, when I see the turmoil on their faces, it tells me that hopelessness abounds. ... People go on a search for anything but God. Many people do not want to face the truth of the Gospel." [Newsmax, 6/10/13]

And so they are adrift without a moral compass in a rising sea of amorality; forever rationalising and tut-tutting as waves of extreme dysfunction lap around their necks. Emblematic was the recent report of a Belgian woman who requested to be euthanised following a sex-change operation:

Nancy Verhelst, 44, known in recent years as Nathan, cited ‘unbearable psychological suffering’ as the reason for her death wish. She had received hormone therapy in 2009, as well as a mastectomy and other surgeries, in her pursuit to transform from female to male. However, the surgery left Verhelst feeling dissatisfied, and she did not like the way she looked.

“I was ready to celebrate my new birth. But when I looked in the mirror, I was disgusted with myself,” she stated, according to reports. “I did not want to be … a monster.”

Cancer specialist Wim Distelmans carried out the legal injection this week. [Christian News, 4/10/13]

A societal microcosm of the endgame insanity we are living out, who is the real mentally disturbed party here: Nancy/"Nathan"; her mother (who said "Her death does not bother me. I feel no sorrow, no doubt or remorse"); Mr Distelmans ("This was a case that clearly met the conditions demanded by the law. Nathan underwent counselling for six months," he told reporters); or the Belgian electorate and their governors?

In fact, Nancy is the least culpable. Diagnosed with "gender identity disorder," she was sexually confused, then sexually abused. The true diagnosis is that her parents, the medical community, the courts, the legislators and the electorate — all those who conspired to make the homicidal horror possible — are infested with the diabolic disorder that was projected onto her; since
they hold that lopping off body parts to change one’s sex is perfectly normal.

This quintessentially satanic attempt to create a parallel Frankenstein Reality recalls the profound insight simply stated by a veteran exorcist. "A bird doesn't fly because it has wings," he once told Malachi Martin. "It has wings because it flies." And yet the transgender agenda marches on, vehemently insisting that physical modifications can annihilate "being" itself. In late 2011, egged on by two psychiatrists who warned that "children with gender identity disorder forced to postpone transitioning could face a higher risk of suicide," CNN reported that "The lesbian parents of an 11-year-old boy who is undergoing the process of becoming a girl last night defended the decision, claiming it was better for a child to have a sex change when young. Thomas Lobel, who now calls himself Tammy, is undergoing controversial hormone blocking treatment in Berkeley, California to stop him going through puberty as a boy." Again, Thomas/"Tammy" has been confused and abused by all and sundry projecting their mental disorders onto the hapless child.

It was inevitable. Once "gay" activists manipulated homosexuality out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973, wiping away a century of clinical evidence and experience in one subversive stroke ["The Myth of Homosexual Normalcy," CO, Feb. 2006], all boundaries surrounding associated mental disease were bound to disintegrate. Even the schools have moved on to normalising transgenderism (including cross-dressing and sex changes). In 2006, a cross-dressing man undergoing a sex-change operation was brought into a third-grade class in Newton, Massachusetts, to teach the children that there are now "different kinds of families." Doubtless, the Newton school officials who told a mother that her complaints to the principal were "inappropriate" would view the recent British approval of gender-based abortions as "appropriate." 

On 7 October, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer (previously a prominent human rights barrister), explained that the Crown Prosecution Service [CPS] failed to prosecute two doctors offering abortions based on gender because "... there may be circumstances, in which termination of pregnancy on grounds of fetal sex would be lawful…." On 9 October, asked to explain the CPS decision, supposedly "conservative" Attorney General Dominic Grieve  (who has praised Starmer's "sound instinct and humanity") refused to intervene, stating that doctors had a "great burden of responsibility" in assessing the mental health impact on women of refusing a gender-selective abortion. The CEO of the Christian Legal Centre drew the logical conclusion: "It appears there is now no limit on what constitutes a 'mental health risk' to the mother." Precisely. It is determined by whatever arbitrary definition is conjured up by the Power Elite. As she said: 

What if a woman wants a termination because she doesn't like the skin colour or eye colour of her child? Where do we draw the line? It was hard to imagine how things could get any worse after the CPS’ decision not to prosecute even though it had found enough evidence to do so. But Keir Starmer’s failure to call the CPS to account takes things to a new low.

The hellishness can only worsen. Its motivating spirit often explodes in fury wherever pro-lifers bear public witness, as if to draw back the veil of that "thinly disguised totalitarianism" of value-free "democracies" denounced by John Paul II. The complicity of supposed upholders of the law of the land on such occasions, whether the likes of Keir Starmer or the police, provide fleeting glimpses of what is to come. The assaulting and tear-gassing of men, women and children by French police early this year, during peaceful protest marches against same-sex marriage in Paris, springs to mind. More recently, on 12 October, during a 3,000-strong Melbourne pro-life march, the Aussie constabulary abandoned the Christian sheep to the wolves; standing idly by as 80 pro-aborts went berserk. An attendee provided this brief report:

We had been given permission by the city council to have a peaceful march up to our Parliament house in the state of Victoria, known as the annual "March for the Babies." But an army of pro-choice demonstrators tried to stop us from doing this. People were knocked to the ground, dragged, eggs (one whizzed past me!) and water bombs thrown at us. I saw an old gentleman on the ground, bleeding. I was pushed, but luckily for me, I did not fall. Police were there, but not one arrest was made. We are writing letters to the government and police now, complaining about their actions.

I made eye contact with one female protester saying to her, "I am glad you were born." She said back to me, "I wish you had been aborted." No offence taken, I am just saddened that there are people who think the destruction of living individuals is a good thing.

One hastens to add that our infinitely loving, wise and merciful God was not remiss in rewarding this public witness. Readers will take great heart from a wondrous comment posted on a pro-life site immediately after the shocking scenes [emphasis added]:

I came to this rally (March for the babies – Saturday 12th October 2013) and watched both sides with curiosity. I have to admit I was planning to join the ‘other side’ and I was pretty excited, it was to be my first ever rally. I got the shock of my life when I saw how ugly they were and I had to sit down to stop myself trembling. I am having triplets, cancelling my abortion on Monday morning. Thank you. My heart has been changed. – Melinda

Who would've guessed that final scoreline: pro-lifers 4 (triplets + mum), pro-aborts 0! Deo gratias! Truly, where sin abounds, grace abounds even more! [Rom. 5:20] Something we must always keep in mind as we bear witness before our irreligious neighbours: both the tiny violent minority and vast non-violent majority. Without Christ and the guidance of his Teaching Church, they can only tread water and blather about "rights," as if every man is an island; a moral law unto himself.

To these secularised hordes and their police protectors and governors, supernatural talk of demons nudging along their moral anarchy is too far-fetched to grasp — easily dismissed because invisible. Far less easy to wave away, however, are the strictly natural means utilised to soften them up for that negative preternatural influence. 

"Error" as propaganda

The asylum of inhumanity we inhabit did not construct itself. Nor did the lunatics in charge dream up the politically correct straightjacket that binds and chafes and increasingly terrorises their clueless inmates. In fact, the Brave New Edifice of "modernity" is the handiwork of atheistic masters of deceit and manipulation. For nearly a century they have waged open war against the West, yet in a manner almost as imperceptible as the invisible battle its earthbound citizens would deny. Described by Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB, as "the final struggle for the minds and hearts of the people," this propagandistic war of Communist World Aggression is surely what Our Lady had in mind when she said that "Russia would spread its errors throughout the world."

As we have noted, from the very outset Lenin set in train a parallel Communist plan to infiltrate and subvert the West by non-violent means. Cogitating and plotting in his jail cell, Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) famously expounded the same incremental approach: to win the world revolutionary war without a shot being fired. "If you beat your head against the wall," he wrote, "it is your head which breaks and not the wall." Thus, he sought cultural hegemony instead:

In Marxist philosophy, the term Cultural Hegemony describes the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of the society — the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores — so that their ruling-class Weltanschauung becomes the worldview that is imposed and accepted as the cultural norm; as the universally valid dominant ideology that justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class. [The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, Third Edition, 1999]

In order to bring this dry definition to toxic fruition, the Frankfurt School Marxists carried the Gramscian plan to America where they implanted a dominant anti-Christian ideology in the hearts and minds of those who rose to rule the West. A trenchant article by James Delingpole titled, "How the BBC fell for a Marxist plot to destroy civilisation from within," admirably summed up the epochal revolutionary influence of just one of the School's leaders, Herbert Marcuse, the intellectual guru of the 1960s counter-culture:

He deliberately set out to dismantle every last pillar of society — tradition, hierarchy, order — and key to victory would be a Leftist takeover of the language… his teachings formed the intellectual bedrock for ... that generation of long-haired students who now occupy senior positions in universities, in the judiciary, in government, in the civil service and, of course, at the BBC. […] Thanks to the sterling work done by his acolytes, Marcuse's most fervent desires — and Orwell's darkest predictions — are coming true. [The Mail on Sunday, 25/9/11]

Those Marcusian desires and Orwellian predictions converge most obviously and portentously in "the network of tendencies that are popularly referred to as 'political correctness'." Evangelical researcher Robin Phillips explains the cultural Marxist roots of that chilling phenomenon, so redolent of "Newspeak," "Double Think," "Big Brother," and "Thought Police":

Marcuse considered the traditional way of conceiving tolerance — permitting another person's viewpoint regardless of how one personally felt — to be "repressive tolerance." What was needed instead was what he termed "liberating tolerance." Significantly, liberating tolerance involved "intolerance against movements from the Right and tolerance and toleration of movements from the Left." Movements from the Left included various groups that Marcuse encouraged to self-identify as oppressed, including homosexuals, women, blacks and immigrants. Only groups such as these could be considered legitimate objects of tolerance.

Like his corrupting comrades beavering away in their various fields of expertise (economics, politics, ethics, music, art, architecture, film, etc.), Marcuse knew that nihilistic ideas, once set in motion within secularised nations, would snowball into consequential monsters without end. Having survived the "liberating tolerance" of abortion-on-demand, for example, children soon faced calls to abuse them on demand. Notwithstanding its failure thus far, the push to legalise pederasty is a sobering measure of the Marcusian slippery slope to hell that has resurfaced with attempts to further lower the age of consent in the wake of "gay marriage": itself a physical, metaphysical and legal fiction considered beyond the realms of democratic possibility/rationality just a few years ago.

Denouncing "bourgeois sexual hostility" in doctrinaire Marcusian terms, homosexual groups inevitably viewed paedophiles as just another persecuted minority in need of "liberating tolerance." In the socio-political blink of an eye, homo-paedophile alliances sprang up all over. The North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), whose motto is "sex before 8 before it’s too late," famously made common cause with US homosexual networks. But Germany led the way.

Andrew E. Harrod recently summarised the homo-pederast link and promotion of paedophilia within the German Green Party, which is currently the subject of a €200,000 public investigation by Göttingen University’s Franz Walter [Mercator.Net, 10/10/13]. As early as 1980, the Green movement had a national working group, "Gays, Pederasts and Transsexuals" (BAG SchwuP), which lobbied Federal politicians to abolish Section 176 of the criminal code banning sexual relations with children. "In terms of national politics, the Greens were the only hope for paedophiles," says Kurt Hartmann, a former member of BAG SchwuP. In 1985, a Greens convention in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia backed the legalisation of paedophilia. And the same year, Baden-Württemberg’s Green Party committee approved a position paper calling for the "abolition of all ‘protective ages’ for mutually consented sexual relations."

Harrod notes that past sympathisers remain prominent in a Party that has shared coalition government and held numerous cabinet posts. Its Marxist founder, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who received a 2013 prize for his contribution to democracy, described his own paedophile experiences in a 1975 autobiography. Jürgen Trittin, recent Green co-leader, backed the legalisation of paedophile relations in 1981. While in his contribution to a book published in 1988, its Party whip in the Bundestag, Volker Beck, a leading supporter of same-sex "marriage," discusses an "actual improvement of the legal situation of pedophiles" and rejects the "mythical image of children" having a "general incapacity for sexual self-determination."

Depite that grotesque history, the Greens have learned nothing. "Nobody must be disadvantaged or excluded as a result of his or her sexual identity," says their official policy document which calls for "a society where people have the opportunity to fashion their own lives, without being told what to do." Marcuse could not have said it better in 1968 — apart from adding his following dictatorial rider to the Greens' deceitful faux tolerance:

"[T]he restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established [Christian] universe of discourse and behaviour...."

Thus, by cleansing Christianity from public discourse, we have reached a point where "freedom of thought" is now defined as "rigid restriction" of thought; where to open the mind to transcendent truths is said "to enclose the mind." Even as Orwell's dystopian novel of black-is-white, war-is-peace totalitarianism was being read and hailed for its sobering prescience, Western academics were imbibing the very same Marcusian notions that gradually spewed forth the ideology of political correctness: an "artificial social construct" by which the worldview of the ruling class has been "imposed and accepted as the cultural norm." And make no mistake, legislating paedophilia is entirely possible within that Marxist Weltanschauung, the aim of which is the utter destruction of Christian marriage and the family — "the very bulwarks against barbarism and the sexual anarchy that brought previous civilisations crashing down."

While Frankfurt School members targeted intellectuals to that end, Soviet infiltrators and agents of influence attacked the hearts and heads of everyone else.

Political infiltration

The reality and extent of Soviet subversion of the American political establishment is overwhelming. Ongoing research continues to vindicate the whistleblowers of the late 1940s and 50s; notably Senator Joseph McCarthy, still despised and lampooned as a "reds under the bed" scaremonger. In Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government [2012], for example, authors M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein reveal that Soviet agents with ready access to the Oval Office were far more deeply entrenched and influential in matters of policy and foreign affairs than ever previously acknowledged.

Typically, Soviet spy Alger Hiss, always dismissed by journalists and biographers as a mere mid-level State Department staffer, played a dominant role at the momentous 1945 Yalta conference, which found President Roosevelt accommodating Stalin on virtually every critical post-war issue. Hiss had meetings with Roosevelt, dealt virtually as an equal with foreign ministers and spoke authoritatively for the American government on such crucial topics as the future of Germany and post-war policy in general. It was the Communist Hiss who placed the subject of post-war China on the table at Yalta. Together with his fellow conspirators strategically placed throughout the most important US governmental institutions, he resolutely pushed a policy that proved catastrophic for the anti-Communist regime of Chiang Kai-shek.

As well as the Foreign Service, powerful wartime agencies such as the U.S. Treasury, the Office of War Information and the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services were awash with traitors. At one point, the Treasury Department harboured at least a dozen Communist agents, including Harry Dexter White and Solomon Adler, who were clearly manipulating the non-Communist Treasury chief, Henry Morganthau, on topics ranging from China to slave labour to a plan to neuter a post-war, de-Nazified Germany so it could never challenge Soviet power in Europe. Among the Soviet agents and Communist party members in Roosevelt's New Deal bureaucracy were ardent Stalinist sympathizers, including two presidential confidants, Lauchlin Currie and Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's most trusted friend who for several years lived at the White House.

The authors also detail how the Truman Administration successfully blocked or sabotaged two investigations of Communist infiltration, including a New York grand jury’s probe of ex-Communist courier Elizabeth Bentley’s sworn charges in 1947  against some 40 people, many of whom had been –  or were still – working for the U.S. government. (Subsequent investigation has proved the accuracy of her testimony.) The result was that these deadly enemies of the United States walked away and the public was shielded from revelations that would have greatly deepened its understanding of the Red conspiracy in America. ["Infiltration, Intrigue and Communists," Human Events, 11/1/13]

All these findings are confirmed by the analysis of files and cables from the "Venona Project," the secret US counter-espionage effort finally declassified in the mid-1990s. In The Venona Secrets [2000], authors Romerstein and Breindel meticulously demonstrate Soviet penetration into the highest levels of the U.S. government and the administration of President Roosevelt. Their documentation of the wide extent of Soviet intelligence operations within the United States before and after WWII also implicates leading scientists, journalists, and others.

It is important to underline this shocking yet well-established history, since the media likes to bury it. Led as ever by the pro-Soviet New York Times, it is "invested with negative myths" about Senator McCarthy; preferring to misrepresent and caricature him in the process of ignoring the facts, and/or downplaying the extent and danger of Communist penetration in general; as if perestroika put the Alger Hiss (and Anthony Blunt) years behind us!

It goes without saying that President Obama feels the same way. In their third presidential debate on 22 October 2012, he ridiculed Mitt Romney for claiming that Russia remained a threat to the United States. "Governor Romney," he chortled, "... a few months ago when you were asked, what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia — not al-Qaida, you said Russia. And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years."

Romney replied: "Russia does continue to battle us in the U.N. time and time again. I have clear eyes on this. I’m not going to wear rose-coloured glasses when it comes to Russia or Mr. Putin, and I’m certainly not going to say to him, I’ll give you more flexibility after the election [as Obama had been caught promising Putin, via his puppet Dmitry Medvedev, when unwittingly speaking into a live microphone on 26 March 2012]." Elsewhere, during an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Romney added, "[W]ho is it that always stands up with the world's worst actors? It’s always Russia, typically with China alongside. And so in terms of a geopolitical foe, a nation that's on the Security Council that has the heft of the Security Council, and is of course a massive nuclear power, Russia is the geopolitical foe."

Putting aside American foreign policy as its own worst enemy, Romney is correct. Russia is still a major player. And we are very badly deceived if we assume that the Russians' habit of repeatedly rebuilding their espionage capability suddenly stopped post-89. Former British ambassador to Washington, Christopher Meyer, states: "I was told by a senior member of MI5 that when the personable, reforming Mikhail Gorbachev ruled Russia, and London's relations with Moscow were unusually warm, there was no let-up in Russian intelligence activity here. More than one source has told me that over the last ten years or so the Russian intelligence presence in London is almost as bad as in 1971." [Daily Mail 30/6/10]In 2010, MI5 itself warned that Russian spy operations in the United Kingdom are at Cold War levels. [Guardian, 29/6/10] "The Russians have been very active here and have been very ruthless," said Sir David Omand, former UK security and intelligence coordinator, referring to the Litvinenko case.

The nest of ten Russian "sleeper" agents who arrived in the US in 1999, infiltrated large consulting firms in New York, and were finally exposed and arrested in 2010 (the eleventh absconded) was also indicative of the deeper reality. [Globe and Mail, July 2012] More dangerous than first thought, the press preferred to mock their dilettantish behaviour. Yet "[Russian] efforts to suborn and subvert are deadly serious," insists Christopher Meyer.

He is right, of course. But espionage is one thing. The cultural attack is another. Any complacency in that regard is especially insulting and ludicrous given the regular warnings by high-ranking Soviet defectors. Their revelations put the consecration of Russia in urgent context. 

The four stages of "ideological subversion"

In 1970, Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB media/propaganda expert with Soviet news agency Novosti, defected to the United States. In subsequent interviews and lectures conducted in the 1980s, now available online, he explains with rare candour and clarity how Marxist ideology is deconstructing America and the West. Most significantly, despite the damage inflicted by espionage and the heavy political infiltration just reviewed, in a 1985 interview conducted by G. Edward Griffin, Bezmenov confirms that

[T]he main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. In my opinion and in the opinion of many defectors of my calibre, only about 15% of time, money and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process we call either "ideological subversion", or "active measures", or "psychological warfare."

What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality, of everything American. To such an extent that despite the abundance of information no-one is able to come to sensible conclusions, in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country. It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow.

This "ideological subversion" takes place in plain sight. Bezmenov describes the process as "legitimate, overt and open. You can see it with your own eyes. All you have to do, all the American mass media has to do is unplug their bananas from their ears, open up the eyes, and they can see. There’s no mystery."

He goes on to detail the distinct phases of the internal attack; effectively confirming all we have noted thus far about a moral decline so quick and catastrophic that it smacks of devilish helping hands, visible and invisible: 

It’s divided into four basic stages.

The first one being DEMORALISATION.

It takes 15 to 20 years to demoralise a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years it takes to indoctrinate one generation of students in the country of your enemy. Exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of American patriotism.

The results you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the 60s, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, education system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind. Even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black you still cannot change the basic perception and illogical behaviour. In other words, with these people, the process of demoralisation is complete and irreversible. To rid society of these people you need another 20, or 15 years, to educate a new generation of  patriotically-minded and commonsense people who would be acting in favour and in the interests of United States society.

He then underlines his point:

The demoralisation process in the United States is basically completed already. For the last 35 years. Actually it’s over-fulfilled... not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to lack of moral standards. As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralised is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information with authentic truth, with documents, with pictures, even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him a concentration camp he will refuse to believe it until he receives a kick in his fat bottom; when a military boot crushes his ____ then he will understand but not before that. That is the tragedy of demoralisation.

The next stage is DESTABILISATION.

This time the subverter does not care about your ideas and the pattern of your consumption. Whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby doesn’t matter anymore. This time, and it only takes two to five years to destabilise a nation, what matters is essentials: economy, foreign relations, defence systems. And you can see quite clearly that in some areas, in such sensitive areas as defence and economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in the United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it fourteen years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process would go that fast.

In perfect accord with Russian doctrine, this part of the process, said Bezmenov, would ultimately destabilise the US economy. (Thirty years on, more than one hundred million people in America, citizens and non-citizens, are on some sort of means-tested Federal welfare i.e. excluding those only benefiting from Social Security and/or Medicare. Fifty million are on food stamps.) Bezmenov continues:

The next stage of course is CRISIS. It may take only up to six weeks to bring a country to the verge of crisis. You can see it in Central America now [i.e. Nicaragua under the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas].

And after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure and economy you have the period of so-called NORMALISATION. It may last indefinitely…

Normalisation is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda. When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in ’68 Comrade Brezhnev said, "Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalised." This is what will happen in the United States if you allow all the schmucks to bring the country to crisis; to promise people all kinds of goodies and paradise on earth, to destabilise your economy, to eliminate the principle of free-market competition, and to put a Big Brother government in Washington DC, with benevolent dictators... who will promise loads of things, never mind if the promises are fulfilled or not.

We have noted the dictatorial effects of this final Orwellian phase where black is officially proclaimed white. The disturbing portents were again raised by Bishop Larry Silva in a recent "urgent" letter of 22 August 2013 to "All the Catholics of Hawaii," calling them to resist the "gay marriage" agenda:

If same-sex marriage becomes "norm"-alized, would parents be considered bigoted if they raised their daughters to be attracted to boys and their sons to be attracted to girls? Or must parents now be completely neutral in steering their children toward the choice of a mate?

Would people who firmly believe that God made us male and female, and that God has revealed that homosexual ACTS are sinful be allowed to hold such beliefs? Or would they have to be "reeducated" to think as "normal" people think? Would churches that refuse to celebrate same-sex marriage because of deeply held religious convictions be deprived of the freedom to live those convictions? Would Christians, Muslims, and others who believe that homosexual ACTS are contrary to God’s law (the law that governs those whom God himself has created in such wonder) be persecuted for holding on to those beliefs that have been so sacred to us for centuries? Will the religious freedom we treasure be only a paper freedom, while we will be told what we may or may not believe?

How rapidly civilisation unravels. Not only was the abomination of "gay marriage" unknown when Bezmenov defected in 1970, as one commentator notes: "abortion was not yet legal in the United States, and Americans, by and large, trusted their government, the comparative use of profanity in the media was rare, and there were over 250 corporations controlling 95% of the media instead of the five corporations which own the same percentage today. This media consolidation and the presence of prominent media plants... have gone a long way towards achieving these Russian goals." (Exemplified in their covering for Barack Obama while allowing him to dissemble, deceive, lie and conceal on a epic scale.) Bezmenov is scathing in his treatment of these "useful idiots" facilitating the propaganda:

Your Leftists in the United States, all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders, they are instrumental in the process of subversion, only to destabilise the nation. .....

The most demoralized individuals are the ones who orchestrated this mess. When people are mentally ill, or pathologically selfish, they try to infect everyone else with their illness. They do not try to get well. They do not recognize that they are ill. The inmates have been running the asylum for a long, long, time. The illness is the delusion that external factors caused their discomforts. The discomfort originates from within the person. They project it on others to see the enemy from within.

Confirming testimonies

Other defectors have amplified Bezmenov's testimony of continuing war by other means. Such as Colonel Stanislav Lunev who, in 1992, became the highest ranking Russian military officer to defect to the US. Lunev served as the top GRU (Russian military intelligence) agent in America in the 1980's and 1990's. His information was considered so explosive, and accurate, that the American intelligence agencies placed him in the FBI’s Witness Protection Program, where he remains to this day. In 1997 he wrote a book, Through the Eyes of the Enemy, in which he confirmed that Russia’s military, despite "losing the cold war," continues its war preparations which are designed to conquer the United States by stealth.

In similar vein, we have often referenced the warnings of another high-ranking KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, one of the most revealing and accurate sources on the subject of Russia's secret war on the US. In The Perestroika Deception, Golitsyn revealed the short-term strategic objective of the Russians to achieve a technological convergence with the West solely on Russian terms: mostly through a series of one-sided disarmament agreements and infiltration of key American governmental positions. His thesis was neatly summarised by US commentator Dave Hodges:

According to Golitsyn, after the United States military is eliminated as a strategic threat to Russia, the long-range strategic Russian plan is to pursue Lenin’s goal of replacing nation states with a collectivist model of regional governments as a stepping stone to global governance. Isn’t that exactly what we see with the European Union, the North American Union and the emerging African Union? In order to achieve their final goal, Golitsyn stated that Russia, after lulling America to sleep, will join with China in order to attack the United States from both the outside and inside. He detailed that

"In each of these the scissors strategy will play its part; probably, as the final stroke, the scissors blades will close. The element of apparent duality in Soviet and Chinese policies will disappear. The hitherto concealed coordination between them will become visible and predominant. The Soviets and the Chinese will be officially reconciled. Thus the scissors strategy will develop logically into the strategy of one clenched fist to provide the foundation and driving force of a world communist federation… before long, the communist strategists might be persuaded that the balance had swung irreversibly in their favor. In that event they might well decide on a Sino-Soviet 'reconciliation.' The scissors strategy would give way to the strategy of "one clenched fist." The enemies now are gathered from within. At that point, the shift in the political and military balance will be plain for all to see. This includes the compromising of key American politicians who will be used to further the communist takeover agenda." [The Common Sense Show, 22/9/13]

"Error" in the Oval Office?

When this Soviet history of systematic demoralisation of the general populace and rampant infiltration at the highest political levels is set alongside the Marxist history of the present incumbent of the White House, we may reasonably wonder if Barack Obama is the presidential fruit of those Russian "errors" exported via "ideological subversion" in fulfilment of the Fatima prophecy? Is Golitsyn's predicted "shift in the political balance" finally "plain for all to see" now that "the compromising of key American politicians to further the communist takeover agenda" has reached its high water mark? 

From the beginning of his initial presidential campaign, jubilant American Marxists were in no doubt. As recounted in "The Obama Transition" [CO, June-July, 2009] a supporter of the American Communist Party wrote a letter to the party newspaper hailing then Senator Obama's breakthrough in the Iowa caucuses. "Obama’s victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle," he wrote. "Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary ‘mole,’ not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through."

All that has transpired since 2009 supports the treacherous contention. Barack Obama's arrogant attitude and partisan pursuit of disastrous policies has created wholly unnecessary confrontations, divisions and crises. Already far advanced, the destabilisation of the country has truly made "a dialectical leap" to a "qualitatively new era of struggle" in just several years. Though still shielding him from blame, even Obama worshippers in the British "conservative" press are stupefied by the present chaos. Libertarian Max Hastings, who demonises Republican and Christian "extremists" for refusing to genuflect to his hero, believes that the recent government shutdown over the "debt ceiling" crisis, which Obama raises every upwards without attempting to tackle the unprecedented national debt he has rapidly accumulated, "shows that democratic freedoms when brutishly abused, can produce consequences almost as scary as those of tyranny. The United States of America looks frighteningly close to being ungovernable." [Daily Mail, 12/10/13]

Although regarded by many as among the most prolific liars ever to occupy the Oval Office, Obama had truthfully signalled this quantum leap to the ungovernable "crisis" stage of Bezmenov's 4-step process. "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming America," he declared just before the demoralised "sheeple" elected him. But we should not be surprised: either by the sweeping promise itself, or by his 180-degree turns on key issues like the national debt (1) and "gay marriage" (2) which have effected this transformative "change" now shockingly evident on so many fronts.

After all, our 2009 opus on Obama documented his lifelong formation by ideologues whose tyrannical plans for America he openly shared. Like the desire to live out the Marxist ideals of his parents, captured in the title of his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, his treacherous socio-political formation by a mélange of Marxist-Leninists, white terrorists and black racists, is a matter of public record. Hence his false promise of transparency and bipartisanship always masked the aggressive socialist administration he predictably ushered in: a presidency of confrontation, centralisation, secularisation and control. All fuelled by the ends-justifies-the-means methodology and class war rhetoric he imbibed from doctrinaire Marxists: like Saul Alinsky (whose disciples taught him how to incite conflict as a Community Organiser), and his surrogate father and mentor Frank Marshall Davis (a Communist Party member and former Soviet agent who was under FBI investigation for a total of 19 years).

Equally significant was the contribution of Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dorhn. Terrorists who dedicated their co-authored book Prairie Fire to Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Ayers once told an FBI informant that it was likely that about 50 million Americans will have to be re-educated in concentration camps located in the American Southwest, and that about 25 million would have to be eliminated (i.e. murdered). Dohrn helped to write a manifesto that had as its goal a revolution that would lead to "the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism." Clearly the kind of Soviet collaborators that Soviet defectors forewarned, this cheery couple funded Obama's impressive college education, and later launched his political career in the living room of their Chicago home.

In a sworn affidavit provided to Sheriff investigators of Maricopa County, Arizona, a US postal service veteran, Allen Hulton, maintains that the Ayers' repeatedly told him that they were financing the education of a promising young black foreign student at Harvard (which again calls the legitimacy of his entire presidency into question). Hulton also testified that he actually met Obama while at the Ayers' home and asked him what he was going to do with his Ivy League education, to which Obama politely answered: "I am going to become the President."

On that evidence, Dave Hodges concludes that "the communist terrorist, Bill Ayers, and his father, the former head of Con Edison, Tom Ayers, began grooming Obama to become America’s first communist President. Bill Ayers and President Obama’s relationship continues into the present time as it is on record that Ayers visited the White House in August of 2009."

Hodges recounts the testimony of Larry Gratwohl, a former FBI informant who, during 1969-70, infiltrated the "Weathermen Underground," the terroristic group dominated by the Ayers' which robbed, murdered and bombed on American soil. Appearing on Hodges' "Common Sense Show," Grathwohl revealed that "he testified in a court of law that Ayers and Dohrn had direct involvement in a terrorist plot which killed San Francisco police sergeant, Brian V. McDonnell, by a bomb made and planted by these Weathermen Underground terrorists." Dohrn eventually served seven months for her role in an armoured car robbery, perpetrated by a Weather Underground spin-off group, that resulted in the murders of two police officers and a security guard. This is why she is ineligible to become bar-certified as an attorney.

While Gratwohl was infiltrating the Weathermen Underground, Bill Ayers ordered him to blow up a Detroit police substation. Grathwohl pointed out that a nearby restaurant, where many blacks ate, would suffer many casualties. Ayers replied that some have to die for a revolution to proceed. This Stalinesque methodology extended even to the mass extermination of Americans. Gratwohl further testified:

I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which [sic] have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people. And they were dead serious. [American Thinker, October 2008]

Obama's communist affiliations continued well into his adulthood. Researcher Joel Gilbert discovered that he was active with a Weathermen Underground support group known as "The May 19th Communist Organization," in New York. But he had long confirmed his belief in bloody revolution to fellow Occidental College student John Drew, a wavering zealot whose girlfriend was the co-president of the Democratic Socialist Alliance, the Marxist student association on campus to which Obama belonged. Arguing late one evening about Marxism and politics, Dr Drew recalled Obama's "silly belief... that there was going to be an inevitable Communist revolution coming to the United States"; that a calculated build-up of economic stresses would bring down Capitalism and deliver the country into the hands of "a large group of workers, students, young people, those who were enlightened by Marxist/Socialist ideology [who] would end up running things." Obama was adamant it would happen. Drew, in the process of a spiritual awakening, disagreed and explained why.

Actually, on this point at least, Obama was correct. He only failed to realise that the takeover would not involve violent Soviet-style purges but, rather, Soviet subversion: of the sort that created the generation of Marxist academics who taught him at Occidental College, Columbia university, and Harvard (where he was enrolled in a Soviet studies program taught by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Adviser and New World Order globalist par excellence). And so the students of the 60s and subsequent generations corrupted by the intellectual, sexual, music and entertainment-media revolutions do, as Obama witlessly predicted,"run things": the entire Western world, in fact.

Not that it is difficult to oversee such a demoralised populace. As Yuri Bezmenov confirmed, the propagandists have done a comprehensive job without the need for a charismatic political front man. Bill Ayers himself rightly boasted: "We have absolute access to the community, the school, the neighborhood, the street, the classroom, the workplace, the shop, the farm." Even so, having walked in lockstep with Obama his entire adult life, Ayers must now chuckle at his deceitful assertion that "If we want change to come, we would do well not to look at the sites of power we have no access to; the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon." On the contrary, Soviet agents and Communist sympathisers have had lengthy periods of high level government "access." And now one of their own occupies the Oval Office itself, surrounded by the sons and daughters of other "well-to-do parents who desired Communism and lived out their dreams through their children’s revolutionary activities," as Dave Hodges puts it. David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Rahm Emanuel and Eric Holder, to name a few.

Obama admits to rarely making a move without consulting his close friend and shadow Jarrett. This is particularly interesting, notes Hodges, "in that her family and the Ayers family have been multi-generational friends which also included a marriage between the two families. Much of the Obama administration is a nest of well-established communists and this should serve to gravely concern every American citizen."

Dictatorship as democracy

Given America's pre-eminent role in world affairs it should gravely concern citizens everywhere. Especially in light of Obama's bolshie attitude towards the Church; even to denying Catholic conscientious objection to tax-funded contraception. The infanticidal president embodies Archbishop Chaput's warning that

The Enlightenment-derived worldview that gave rise to the great murder ideologies of the last century remains very much alive. Its language is softer, its intentions seem kinder, and its face is friendlier. But its underlying impulse hasn’t changed – i.e., the dream of building a society apart from God....

That project — life without Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ — as Solzhenitsyn warned and we are now witnessing, leads inexorably to Soviet-style "social justice" and the enforcement of politically correct ideas: whether in a court, a school, a prison, an institution, a mother's womb, an NHS hospital bed, or, as Obama and his mentors hoped, in "re-education" camps. Why? Because "The unity of the West is not an idea, but a historical reality, of which the sole foundation is Christ," as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in the months leading up to his arrest by the Gestapo in 1943. Thus, the bogus social gospel of antichrist beloved of Obama, Blair, Rudd, Cameron, et. al., can only raise a faux democratic facade that ultimately transitions to dictatorship, persecution, misery, and death. Archbishop Chaput elaborates:

Our societies in the West are Christian by birth, and their survival depends on the endurance of Christian values. Our core principles and political institutions are based, in large measure, on the morality of the Gospel and the Christian vision of man and government. We are talking here not only about Christian theology or religious ideas. We are talking about the moorings of our societies – representative government and the separation of powers; freedom of religion and conscience; and most importantly, the dignity of the human person.

Hence the onward march of our Brave New Godless World towards its shiny new version of the Gulag. Barring a miracle the burgeoning nightmare can only worsen and darken as it did in Russia, because the pre-requisite for a free and stable democracy is a virtuous people either formed by the Light of the World, or raised in His civilising shadow. Any populace deprived of that Christian faith, light and truth, and the virtues it instils and disseminates, is ripe for political manipulation, oppression and control.

The intolerance and tyranny can be imposed without the need for jackboots and camps. Our frenetic 24/7 bread-and-circus techno culture hardly needs whipping into line. As Robin Phillips states, the change brought about by the ideologies "forged by Marcuse and the other members of the Frankfurt School... are along the lines that Aldous Huxley articulated in his Foreword to Brave New World":

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

In a recent interview on the global sexual revolution, German sociologist Gabriele Kuby summarised the relevance of Huxley's 1931 classic, and the devilish speed at which the dehumanisation and love of servitude Huxley depicted has developed:

In Brave New World, people are produced in bottles; they are collectively conditioned to be “happy” by the media and psycho-pharmaceuticals; children entertain themselves with sex, like everybody else; and everything is controlled by “Ford (Our Lord).”

While Huxley had originally conceived of his utopia 600 years into the future, by 1949 he saw it happening within a century. At that time there was no artificial insemination, no prenatal selection, no surrogate mothers, no genetic manipulation, no “parent 1” and “parent 2.” But it took less than fifty years for all that “progress” to occur!

For Huxley, there was no reason why the new totalitarianism should resemble the old. He was aware that a dictator will give more sexual freedom — the more political and economic freedom is restricted. He knew that the real revolution happens “in the souls and bodies of people.” [Catholic World Report, 14/8/13]

With the hedonistic masses happily sated and distracted, Obama's old Harvard lecturer, New World Order zealot Zbigniew Brzezinski, describes the evolution of this "new totalitarianism":

The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. [Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, 1970]

As if preparing his future presidential student to rule over this police state surveillance grid, he accurately describes Obama's "charismatic" personality and his decisive exploitation and manipulation of the internet to win office in 2009:

In the technetronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason. [Ibid.]

The surveillance dragnet

Obama continues to use the electronic "social media" to emotive dictatorial effect. "Attack Watch," a Twitter account launched by the White House in 2011, urges citizens to report on nefarious anti-Obama activity: "Join Attack Wire – and help stop the attacks on the President before they start." Encroachments on individual liberty and abuse of power have skyrocketed under his presidency, having been handily set in train by his Republican predecessor after 9/11. They are too vast to explore in depth here. Michael O'Halloran gives the totalitarian gist:

It has emerged that Obama's administration has engaged in a massive nationwide spying campaign tapping into Americans' cell phone calls and Internet use; harassed conservative political organizations with IRS tax audits (leading some to speculate that the silencing of such groups by this coercion may have cost votes for Obama's electoral challenger, swinging the election in Obama's favour ); and seized the private telephone records of Associated Press reporters in an apparent harassing response to unfavorable media coverage. Obama responded to the latter scandal by assuring that the Justice Department would investigate the matter — but the Justice Department was the very one that perpetrated the scandal in the first place.   Joseph Stalin's show trials could hardly make for better self-caricaturing theater.

Apropos the "nationwide spying campaign," intelligence authorities are adamant that they are very closely regulated, have not contravened any laws and have foiled dozens of terrorist plots against American and its allies through their surveillance. This may well be true. But it's too late. A Western populace weary of lies and deception, not least the rightly cynical British whose governmental system was poisoned by the "Bliar" and his New Labour project, view the information gathering as disproportionate, and in the hands of their untrustworthy leaders a real and present danger to their freedoms.

They prefer to give the benefit of the doubt to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, the ex-CIA and former National Security Agency [NSA] contractor now hiding out in Russia, even if his leaking of classified information has probably aided terrorists and endangered lives. But who can blame them? Having one's private communications under constant daily scrutiny by Big Brother is perverse and intimidating. As one American group put it, "The First Amendment protects the freedom to associate and express political views as a group, but the NSA's mass, untargeted collection of American's phone records violates that right by giving the government a dramatically detailed picture of our associational ties."

The NSA intercepts and stores 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, texts, and other electronic communications (including audio, photo, and video records), equivalent to 130 million books, every 24 hours. For the perennially naive and complacent — those who believe their anonymity is assured by the sheer volume of data collected — there are two points to be made here:

Firstly, as noted by Congressman Peter King, Republican member of the House Committee on Intelligence, the NSA have "extraordinary technology." He says: "One of the big problems pre-9/11 was the idea that we had all this data even back then, but we just couldn't search it. ... Today we can do that much more effectively than we ever could before."

Secondly, those of us beyond American borders probably have more to worry about, since the focus of the Snoopers Charter (aka the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) that covers the data vacuuming described above, is on people outside the United States. We should also bear mind that part of what Snowden revealed in his NSA leaks was the close ties between federal agencies and the major internet companies who forked over access to this flood of data with mostly cursory legal processes. Yet even those complicit companies were stunned to discover that the NSA has been collecting "contact lists of email and instant message services from users worldwide [including those of supposedly exempt American citizens]... collected en masse, in hopes of letting the spy agency map out and discover relationships between various players" (see summary report on pp. 67-68). All the internet giants could do in response to this latest revelation was splutter and, like Yahoo, pledge to start encrypting its email connections. As if that measure could possibly deter the "extraordinary technology" and reach of a voracious intelligence agencies! Especially since their budgets and bureaucracies have been growing like Topsy since 9/11.

In 1998 ex-CIA Director George Tenet made known that the intelligence budget for that year was $26.7 billion. The figures were blacked out thereafter, until Freedom of Information requests finally eked out the truth. By 2010, in the post-9/11 world, the total intelligence budget (National and Military Intelligence Programs) had rocketed to $80.1 billion. That rate of increase in only 12 years was nearly double the rate of increase for the entire federal budget, and almost seven times the rate of inflation over the same period. And it gets worse. "There's a whole black [intelligence] budget, and we have no idea how big it is," says the Liberty Foundation. Nonetheless, on 21 July 2013 the Washington Post had a stab. "Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001," it reported, "[the intelligence] civilian and military workforce has grown by one-third, to about 33,000, according to the NSA. Its budget has roughly doubled, and the number of private companies it depends on has more than tripled, from 150 to close to 500, according to a 2010 Washington Post account."

This is President Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" warning on steroids! Already, the number of Americans with government security clearances is staggering:

Federal Employees: Confidential/Secret: 2,757,333; Top Secret: 791,200

Contractors: Confidential/Secret: 582,524; Top Secret: 483,263

Unknown: Confidential/Secret: 162,925; Top Secret: 135,506 [Source: Office of the Director of National Intelligence, The Wall Street Journal, quoted in Newsmax, August 2013]

The pattern is repeated everywhere. More and more jobsworths, of varying degrees of amorality, with access to our private lives. At home and abroad, the daily press is awash with jaw-dropping examples of the dangers posed to life and freedom by creating these bureaucratic armies of tinpot dictators. Yet their numbers will only grow and grow as the usual suspects in Washington pursue their "endless war" on terror.

True, the NSA provides examples of over 50 plots against the US and its allies that have been intercepted, or stopped or discovered via intelligence efforts. But at what disproportionate, and indeed ultimate cost to personal freedom? Constant reassurances that everything is legal and closely monitored and regulated by Congressional Intelligence Committees sound pretty hollow in light of a talk given to the Cato Institute last month by Republican Congressman Justin Amash. Despite going through the democratic motions, it seems that Congress gets the proverbial stiff arm from the executive branch and intelligence community. They have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves for evading transparency, even in classified sessions with members of Congress. One commentator reported that

According to Amash, the classified briefings are almost completely useless to Congressional participants. The briefings are too vague to be of value. When they take questions, they will only admit to something if you formulate a precise question that they can’t honestly deny. One colleague went to several briefings asking the same question in a slightly different way. Finally, he did it right and they confessed that they did indeed carry out the actions being asked about.

The bottom line is that an unaccountable President, no matter what his party, is a despot. And by blinding the "eyes" of Congress the executive branch has made itself unaccountable.

Obviously, this massive and ever more intrusive structure of surveillance and control is not foolproof. Some of the 2005 London Tube terrorists were known to the security services. More recently, Anzor Tsarnaev, the father of the Boston bombers, told the Wall Street Journal that he was present when the FBI interviewed his elder son Tamerlan in 2011. He says they told him:  "We know what [internet] sites you are on, we know where you are calling, we know everything about you. Everything." Two years later they shot him after he had acted. In fact, they had been tipped off by the Kremlin years before that Tamerlan was an "extremist." But after tracking him for five years they ruled him out as a threat, to Russian disgust.

The point is this: the wider the very imperfect surveillance/security net, the greater the potential for bad decisions to affect the innocent. Guarantees from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that "We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans" — the old "if you've done nothing wrong you've nothing to worry about" ruse — look as empty as the legal-oversight guarantee. Already, creepy functionaries are turning up out of the blue to search homes and interrogate citizens about what they have written online. Six joint terrorism task force agents who turned up in three black SUVs to question and search the Catalano family in Suffolk, Virginia, admitted they do about 100 of these intimidating visits a week! This takes the monitoring of speech and association into new and frightening territory. How quickly we have moved on from the lengthy home interrogation of harmless Lancashire pensioners who gently voiced concerns about homosexuality in printed leaflets! [CO, Feb. 2006]

Of course, everyone should know by now that we live in a "see something, say something" society, and if you say something questionable in an online, public forum, you are at risk of the authorities paying you a visit "just to ask you a few questions." Well, now it is not just the public domain you need to worry about. Watch what you type in the Google search box, or else you too might get a visit from police keen to ascertain if you’re a terrorist. This is what happened to the Catalanos when they ran a series of random Google searches which raised red flags and created a potential terrorist profile for the authorities. Just a year ago, this would have meant nothing. But since we live in a post-Boston bombing world, it seems you cannot search for "pressure cooker" and "backpack," as did Mr and Mrs Catalanos, without potentially being harassed by law enforcement.

These disturbing American developments should be viewed in light of what we know about the revolutionary views of Barack Obama, his like-minded administrative buddies, and the annual trillion dollar deficits which led to the potentially catastrophic debt ceiling crisis they contrived. ("You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste," said his former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, "it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid" — or would like an excuse to pursue!).
Also problematic is the enormous array of weaponry possessed by US state and federal officials, much of it excess military stock from recent wars, sold to local authorities at knock down prices. American officials have a reputation for overkill. Famously, 76 men, women and children of the Branch Davidian sect were killed in Waco, Texas, when a fire was triggered by an FBI assault. In 1985, the mayor of Philadelphia ordered the bombing of one of his city streets, killing five children and six adults, while targeting a small, radical collective called MOVE. But the reaction to the Boston bombing made such pre-9/11 dramas pale in comparison. During the extraordinary manhunt for the Tsarnaev brothers, 9,000 heavily-armed police placed a million residents of a Boston suburb in a terrifying lockdown. (In the aftermath, given how influenced we are by America when it comes to police and security affairs, Daily Mail columnist Peter McKay wondered. "How long before a police shootout here with terrorists or criminals results in the lockdown of a city?")

This is a reason why so many Americans refuse to give up their own weapons, saying they own guns to protect themselves from the state, as well as from criminals. Nearly half (48%) of those polled by the Washington Post days after the Boston bombings said that despite that tragedy, they are more concerned that government will trample constitutional rights than they are about the government failing to prevent terrorist attacks. A Fox News poll expressed similar sentiments. The growing lack of trust owing to the endemic lying, secrecy, corruption, and centralisation of power, is palpable in all such public surveys.

Outdoing Vladimir

Obama will continue to destabilise America. (Apropos his Obamacare monstrosity which a country on the brink of bankruptcy cannot possibly afford, its myriad injurious effects even prompted Democratic Senator Max Baucus to predict a coming "train wreck.") But Alinskyite presidential terms expire. Burgeoning bureaucratic 'armies' in every sector live on to enforce further damaging and intrusive measures introduced by all political parties, on the beguiling pretext of keeping us "safe" or helping the proles "progress" to the enlightened heights of the ruling elite.

A change to "conservative" government in 2010, for example, brought no British respite to this politically correct war on freedom of thought and expression. Despite historic resistance among its own ranks, the craven pro-homosexual Tory leadership rapidly pushed sodomitical "marriage" through the legislature to meet EU demands. Even while the punters endure every kind of inconvenience, intrusion and restriction, whether at the airport or at home, it is not the "war on terror" but government-sanctioned "gay" terrorism that continues to lead the PC way to tyranny. There is no need to exaggerate the state of play. The troubling "signs of the times" [Matt. 16:3] are omnipresent.

A recent packed meeting at Village Parkway Baptist Church in San Antonio was representative. At least 80 airmen informed Pastor Steve Branson about life since the acceptance of open homosexuals in the US military. Branson said:

There is an atmosphere of intimidation at Lackland Air Force Base... Gay commanders and officers are pushing their agenda on the airmen. There is a culture of fear in the military and it’s gone to a new level with the issue of homosexuality. The religious persecution is happening… It’s getting bigger every day. Gay and lesbian airmen can talk about their lifestyle, but the rest have to stay completely quiet about what they believe.

One of the attendees, Senior Master Sgt. Phillip Monk, claims he was relieved of duty after refusing his commander's order to say he supported homosexual marriage. After filing a religious discrimination complaint against the Air Force, Monk was then accused of making false statements and is now facing a possible court martial. Other airmen have told Branson that they are afraid to speak out publicly because of what is happening to Monk.

Branson relates the story of one airman who was told that even thinking homosexuality is a sin is discrimination:

A commander told him, "Don’t you understand discrimination –  that your thought process is discrimination?" The commander actually pulled up the definition of discrimination on Wikipedia and read it to him in front of everyone so he would understand what it was.

The parent of an airman at the meeting said that the 19-year-old was asked during basic training what religion he was. When the young airman said "Christian," he was required to retake basic training. One airman claimed he was written up for having his Bible out, while a nearby Muslim airman had out a prayer rug.

Branson said a colonel told him that officers are being ordered to publicly affirm support for homosexuality. If they don't, they are being "Mirandized" (i.e. informed, like criminal suspects, of their legal rights before questioning).

Similar stories about the trials of American servicemen and women emerge almost daily. Retired General Jerry Boyking told Fox News he is not surprised: "It reinforces what we’ve been saying… There is an orchestrated attack on Christians in the military and at this stage the Air Force is the worst."

This affront to the "core" democratic values the military is meant to defend — a purge by any other name — was foreshadowed several years ago by the US Department of Homeland Security's official warning about the potential terrorist threat of "conservatives," as also by Obama's pre-election contempt for people "bitterly clinging to their guns and Bibles," among countless other red flags [cf. CO, Aug-Sept 2009].

The persecutory pattern is replicated Down Under. In late September, a petition was launched to the Australian Minister for Defence, Assistant Minister for Defence and Chief of the Defence Force, after the latter admonished Bernard Gaynor, an outspoken Iraq veteran and Army Reserve Intelligence officer who is critical of Islam and the Army's participation in sodomitical parades:

"I respect your religious beliefs and your right to have, and express, opinions contrary to ADF and Government policy. However your public articulation of these matters whilst a member of the Army Reserve, whether or not you are on duty, or in uniform, undermine my confidence in your ability to uphold the values of the Australian Army and your effectiveness as a leader in today’s Army."

Gaynor replied:

The Chief of the Defence Force has declared war on Christianity. He has written to me that the public expression of my Catholic faith — and the Catholic opinions I hold as a result — is not on.

Well, I've got a message too: that view is not on.

My family certainly did not send its sons, brothers, uncles and fathers off to war so that Christianity could be attacked this way. They all served proudly and they were all Catholics. Some did not come back.

Just a few years ago the need to launch a petition to ensure "that Christian service members be able to continue serving this country openly and proudly" would have been viewed by the Australian public as bizarre, if not outrageous. Suddenly it is de rigeur.

An American evangelical commentator nailed the malign intent and the pedigree:

The current effort is aimed at controlling, breaking the spirit of and, if necessary, expelling those with a moral conscience. The only goal can be to create a military that won't care if it is ordered to engage in unethical behavior.

We don't have to look very far for actual examples of how such "ethically refined" armies have been used. Take your pick: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Communist China, Vietnam...

In fact, as regards conscientious objection the West is outdoing the Communists! Persecuted and Forgotten?, a report launched at the Houses of Parliament on 17 October 2013, describes a worsening persecution of Christians in 30 countries that "threatens Christianity’s status as a worldwide religion." While the persecutors are mainly Islamic, Communists have also increased efforts to exert control over their Christian populations. The ACN report notes, however, that in the Communist countries "Christians tend to be persecuted on account of their contacts with dissidents and the West, and not just because of their faith."

In the West, while the state is also gradually exerting control of religious practice indirectly via pro-homosexual legislation, the Christian moral conscience is its major target. 

Locally, the rising animosity is observable at every turn, not least within the British medical establishment. Consultant paediatrician David Drew was told by Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust to "keep his beliefs to himself" after sending a short, harmless, uplifting prayer of St. Ignatius to workmates  at "multi-cultural, multi-faith" Walsall Manor Hospital in April 2009. Dr Drew, who worked for the Trust for almost 30 years, insisted his Christian beliefs were "not against the law" but his claims of unfair dismissal, religious discrimination and victimisation were rejected last April by an employment tribunal. After his appeal against the decision was rejected he was sacked for refusing to accept the recommendation of the independent review panel. [Birmingham Mail, 23/9/13]

It is also increasingly apparent that the slightest pretext is being seized upon to arrest Christian street preachers. Of course, excessively loud evangelicals can be cause for legitimate complaint and police action (as long as the law is applied as rigorously to boisterous Islamic preachers). However, on 4 September 2013 evangelist Rob Hughes was arrested while preaching on a high street in Basildon, for a statement he never made. The false accusation of a bystander was sufficient to have him taken to Basildon police station where he was held for seven-and-a-half hours. After his release, Mr Hughes protested that he and his fellow preachers now face a situation where they appear to be "presumed guilty until found to be innocent." Andrea Minichiello Williams, CEO of the Christian Legal Centre which provided a solicitor to help Mr Hughes, said:

This is the third arrest in as many months. These street preachers are not breaking any laws and are perfectly within their rights. The police are overreaching their authority and misapplying the law. Their actions show an increasing hostility towards Christianity. Freedom of speech is a precious freedom that we must uphold. This injustice must be tackled to halt the chilling effect already felt by many Christians. The threat to freedom of speech is a concern for wider society, not just for Christians.

While Vladimir Putin arrests and/or kills whoever he likes, whenever he likes, for whatever self-serving reason, it must be said that those who publicly promote homosexual practices, not Christian preachers and doctors, currently top his black list.

Meanwhile, in a truly Vladimir-like move, LifeSiteNews reported on 16 October 2013 that the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR), comprising former heads of state and government leaders, has requested that the EU establish national surveillance units to monitor citizens suspected of "intolerance." These "special administrative units... should preferably operate within the Ministry of Justice."

The ECTR is a "tolerance watchdog" launched under the leadership of former arch-liberal Polish President Kwasniewski, and Moshe Kantor, President of the European Jewish Congress. Its proposal, called the "Framework National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance," is perhaps the most totalitarian document yet produced by an EU Leviathan based on the Soviet structure [see CO, Dec.2008 pp.25-7]. Unsurprisingly, it virtually quotes Mr Kantor's Jewish comrade Herbert Marcuse, declaring that "There is no need to be tolerant to the intolerant," especially "as far as freedom of expression is concerned."

European Dignity Watch [EDW], a civil rights group based in Brussels, has warned that this directive "aims to impose governmental control over the social and economic behaviour of citizens in the widest possible sense." In a scathing critique, the group says that the ECTR Framework’s basic principles are flawed and that it "interferes in an unprecedented manner with citizens’ freedom and rights" and "distorts the concepts of ‘justice’ and ‘equality’." Through "a reversal of the burden of proof," the proposal "encourages frivolous litigation" and will lead to "institutionalized public control" of private opinion and thought.

Sophia Kuby, a spokesman for EDW, said the Framework betrays the essentially totalitarian mindset of significant elements within the European Union’s apparatus. The document, if adopted by the European Parliament, she said, "could lead to situations in which vague or unwarranted accusations are leveled against individuals and groups. Faith-based groups and schools, adherents of a particular religion or even just parents who want to teach their children certain moral values would all be put under general suspicion of being intolerant."

"Even worse," this language "could lead to the possibility that charges are brought on unclear or even without legal grounds." She warned that it would "be a significant step backward," and "a dark day for European democracy."

A "democracy" ever on the cusp of real dictatorship. Just consider the dolly step required to progress from the ECTR's Framework to a version of Article 190 of the Russian Penal Code, under which it was a crime to "spread rumours or information detrimental to the Soviet societal or governmental structure"; which Article invested the KGB with unlimited power to hunt down dissidents who thought differently.

The idolatrous state

During an address to the Canon Law Association of Slovakia on 24 August 2010, Archbishop Chaput summarised these kinds of frightening developments on both sides of the Atlantic, and alluded to where it is all heading:

The United States has not seen a war on its soil in 150 years. Americans have no experience of bombed-out cities or social collapse, and little experience of poverty, ideological politics or hunger. ... But these and other differences don’t change the fact that our paths into the future are now converging. Today, in an era of global interconnection, the challenges that confront Catholics in America are much the same as in Europe: We face an aggressively secular political vision and a consumerist economic model that result – in practice, if not in explicit intent – in a new kind of state-encouraged atheism.

[...] how does the rhetoric of enlightened, secular tolerance square with the actual experience of faithful Catholics in Europe and North America in recent years?

In the United States, a nation that is still 80 percent Christian with a high degree of religious practice, government agencies now increasingly seek to dictate how Church ministries should operate, and to force them into practices that would destroy their Catholic identity. Efforts have been made to discourage or criminalize the expression of certain Catholic beliefs as “hate speech.” Our courts and legislatures now routinely take actions that undermine marriage and family life, and seek to scrub our public life of Christian symbolism and signs of influence.

In Europe, we see similar trends, although marked by a more open contempt for Christianity. Church leaders have been reviled in the media and even in the courts for simply expressing Catholic teaching. Some years ago, as many of you may recall, one of the leading Catholic politicians of our generation, Rocco Buttiglione, was denied a leadership post in the European Union because of his Catholic beliefs.

Earlier this summer we witnessed the kind of vindictive thuggery not seen on this continent since the days of Nazi and Soviet police methods: the Archbishop’s palace in Brussels raided by agents; bishops detained and interrogated for nine hours without due process; their private computers, cell phones, and files seized. Even the graves of the Church’s dead were violated in the raid. For most Americans, this sort of calculated, public humiliation of religious leaders would be an outrage and an abuse of state power. And this is not because of the virtues or the sins of any specific religious leaders involved, since we all have a duty to obey just laws. Rather, it’s an outrage because the civil authority, by its harshness, shows contempt for the beliefs and the believers whom the leaders represent.

My point is this: These are not the actions of governments that see the Catholic Church as a valued partner in their plans for the 21st century. Quite the opposite. These events suggest an emerging, systematic discrimination against the Church that now seems inevitable.

Today’s secularizers have learned from the past. They are more adroit in their bigotry; more elegant in their public relations; more intelligent in their work to exclude the Church and individual believers from influencing the moral life of society. Over the next several decades, Christianity will become a faith that can speak in the public square less and less freely. A society where faith is prevented from vigorous public expression is a society that has fashioned the state into an idol. And when the state becomes an idol, men and women become the sacrificial offering.

Better still: sacrifice them in the womb, en masse! Right there is the human fuel for state idolatry and the totalitarian trajectory described by the Archbishop; a nightmare evocatively captured by Michael O'Halloran: "If you desire a vision of America's future, imagine Obama knifing an unborn baby in the back of the head — forever." Even Pius XI, who insisted that "It can surprise no one that the Communistic fallacy should be spreading in a world already to a large extent de-Christianized," might have been taken aback to see that infanticidal fallacy now ensconced in the White House: the dictatorship of relativism incarnate.

Spiritual warfare

That dictatorship, as John Paul II explained, is simply "A democracy without values [that] easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism." Largely self-fulfilling, it has been openly informed, guided and enhanced with unbounded patience and wicked brilliance by subversive Marxist forces. It is our Catholic duty and obligation to match the indefatigable efforts of this enemy within through prayer, work, and the spirit of Viva Cristo Re! that sustained the anti-Communist crusaders of the past, such as CO's inspirational founder, Father Paul Crane SJ. Resigned pessimism only rots the soul, and the world.

But we need to understand that the fight for religious freedom and the Christian family is a demonic war; that the disordered rulers and the demoralised peoples of the West who live as though God does not exist are unwitting agents of Satan. Lutheran Pastor Richard Wurmbrands endured fourteen years of hell on earth in Communist prisons at the hands of such "unconscious Satanists"; men more brutal, to be sure, yet animated by the same materialistic worldview. "A man can be a Satanist without being aware that such a religion exists," he wrote in Was Karl Marx a Satanist?. "But if ... he lives as though he were only matter, if he denies religious and moral principles, he is in fact a Satanist."

After witnessing the extreme pro-abort violence during the 12 October "March for the Babies" in Melbourne, Australian writer and pro-life activist Bill Muehlenberg was left in no doubt about the subterranean forces at work. He wrote:

We must recognise [that] this horrific rage and hate ... is coming straight out of the pits of hell. There is no other way to explain the vitriol, obscenities, and utter hatred. These people are simply giving vent to demonic rage.

That is why I and so many others spent so much of this weekend in prayer and spiritual warfare. Such people cannot be reasoned with. You cannot offer them facts and evidence. You cannot discuss things rationally with them. You must pray that the spiritual bondage is broken, and the very devils of hell are repulsed. Sure, we need to offer logical arguments and facts about life, and provide creative alternatives to abortion, including counselling for all the post-abortion trauma which is out there. But we must also engage in heavy duty spiritual warfare, because at the end of the day this is a major spiritual battle.

Scripture states this quote plainly: “All those who hate me [God] love death” (Proverbs 8:36). Jesus said that Satan comes to kill, to steal and to destroy (John 10:10). So this is a battle that must be fought on all levels, but without the spiritual level fully taken into account, we will not win.

That also means taking account of the spiritual level of diabolic infestation throughout the West, now so overwhelmingly apparent as we find ourselves living through the final stage of ideological subversion. Whether classroom pornography dressed up as sex ed, sodomy and sodomitical "marriage," "endless war," endemic blasphemy — you name it — the "normalisation" of every conceivable perversion and aberration rages on.

New "norms"

In early October, the Episcopalian dean of the National Cathedral in Washington even claimed that it is now a sin to oppose homosexuality. "We must now have the courage to take the final step and call homophobia and heterosexism what they are. They are sin," said the diabolically disoriented Gary Hall. "Only when all our churches say that clearly and boldly and courageously will our LGBT youth be free to grow up in a culture that totally embraces them fully as they are." Pleading on behalf of counterfeit Christians who insist that evil is good, and good is evil [Isaiah 5:20], he further claimed that Churches that oppose homosexuality (i.e. who reject filthy acts that debilitate and/or kill its practitioners) produce a culture that is harmful to children!

Appropriately, Hall's mendacious presentation of sexual perversion as the path of truth and freedom was made during a weekend commemorating the death of Matthew Shephard, whose murder sparked the passage of the freedom-killing "hate crimes" bill signed into law by Barack Obama in 2009. As Michael Cook recounts herein, Shephard's legend, like homosexuality itself, is a self-serving lie.

In accord with Marxist praxis, embedding the unnatural as the virtuous new "norm" also requires the suppression of all counter-measures. Typically, Christian Concern reported last month that Dr Mike Davidson, a Christian counsellor who specialises in helping people with unwanted feelings of same-sex attraction, has been "hounded out" of his professional body, the British Psychodrama Association (BPA). Following two BBC radio interviews in January 2012, during which he carefully explained his evidence-backed opinions, the chair of the BPA wrote to tell him "that his trainee membership was revoked with immediate effect pending investigation. This happened without Mike being given any right of explanation or defence." The ideological mindset and totalitarian process at work in Dr Davidson's case is instructive and bodes ill for believers:

The BPA tried him against a set of so-called “Ethical Principles” of the UKCP [United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy]. These principles say: “It is not a sufficient defence for a therapist to argue that ... they were acting in the client’s best interests, or ... autonomy, as offering such therapy would be ... reinforcing their externalised and internalised oppression.”

So if someone asks a therapist for help to reduce unwanted same-sex attractions, they will be told that they are suffering from oppression and that it is unethical for a therapist to do what they ask.

Dermot O’Callaghan, a trustee of Core Issues Trust, a trust established by Dr Davidson, commented:

“…Mike’s professional life has been ruined by ideology even though he has done nothing wrong. They have ruined the life of a caring and courageous counsellor.  It is not that a bad therapist has been tried against good ethical principles; rather, a good man has been tried against bad principles.”

This moral and cultural assault is compounded by the post-9/11 political and military claim that so-called regime change is the path to democratic peace. Yet how can wars also "based on lies," as Senator Ron Paul charges, bear such fruit? Manifestly, they cannot and have not, either at home or abroad. One American commentator neatly summarised the perverse "normalisation" effect:

Each year of endless war that passes further normalizes the endless rights erosions justified in its name. The second term of the Bush administration and first five years of the Obama presidency have been devoted to codifying and institutionalizing the vast and unchecked powers that are typically vested in leaders in the name of war. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture.

Each year that passes, millions of young Americans come of age having spent their entire lives, literally, with these powers and this climate fixed in place: to them, there is nothing radical or aberrational about any of it. The post-9/11 era is all they have been trained to know. That is how a state of permanent war not only devastates its foreign targets but also degrades the population of the nation that prosecutes it.

Sole antidote

Corrupting faith, corroding freedom, uprooting that "tranquillity of order" that is peace and concord, the new ideological "norms" are as effective as any overt Soviet system of control. Yuri Bezmenov even insists that "No other force on earth but military can reverse the 'normalisation' period'." Nonetheless, he is one with Solzhenitsyn in arguing for a higher force that materialism can never vanquish. The sole answer to ideological subversion, stated this former master of propaganda in his 1985 lecture, is "Bringing back the society to religion. Something that you cannot touch and eat and put on yourself. But something that rules society and makes it move and preserves it." He went on to emphasise the religious ideas "moving society and keeping mankind as a society of human beings; intelligent, moral agents of God." Without them, "The facts, the truth, the exact knowledge [and] all the sophisticated technology and computers may not prevent society from disintegrating and eventually dying out." He explained:

Have you ever met someone who would sacrifice his life, freedom, for the truth like that [writing the equation 2 x 2 = 4 on a blackboard]. This is truth. I've never met a person who says, "This is truth, I'm ready, shoot me!" — to defend the truth. But millions sacrifice their life, comfort, freedom, everything, for things like God, Jesus Christ. It's an honour. Some martyrs in the Soviet concentration camps died. And they died in peace. Unlike those who shouted "Long live Stalin!" knowing perfectly well that he may not live long [laughter]. Something which is not material moves society and helps it to survive.

.... The answer to ideological subversion is, strangely enough, very simple. We don't have to shoot people. We don't have to aim missiles at Andropov's headquarters. You simply have to have faith, and prevent subversion. In other words, not to be a victim of subversion Do not try to be a person who in Judo is trying to smash your enemy and being caught by your hand. Don't strike like that. Strike with the power of your spirit and moral superiority. If you don't have that power it's high time to develop it. And that's the only answer.

Consecration as exorcism

Thirty demoralising years on, far from resisting the subversion process by reasserting that superior civilising Christian morality, the victims have become even more willing to accept the mendacious foundations of modernity: "slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude." With Yuri Samodurov, we can truly say that the West, like modern Russia, has "entered a new era of a totalising lie." However, unlike Samodurov and Masha Gessen (who freely admits the "gay marriage" lie), we not only perceive the Marxist lineage shared by Putin and Obama, we know their common patriarch. Our Lord identified him while rebuking those in thrall to his ancient perversities, ever disguised as new "norms":

You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. - John 8:44

To unlock his iron grip and cast out the "prince of this world" [John 12:31], we need the mother of all miracles. That is why so much hangs on the Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Such talk infuriates those content with Pope John Paul II's 1984 consecration of "all individuals and peoples of the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary." Father Joseph Fessio railed on St Gabriele Radio in Columbus: "Any God that would require a specifically minute formula for all countries including Russia to save the world is not a God I would want to worship… I’m not interested in discussing it…."

Why on earth not? Sister Lucia not only discussed it, she was insistent that heaven required "Russia" to be named in the consecration formula, and unambiguous about what Our Lady meant by Russia's "conversion." In 1976, Father Joaquin Alonso, the official archivist of Fatima who had many conversations with her in the course of his work, wrote:

[W]e should affirm that Lucia always thought that the "conversion" of Russia is not to be limited to the return of the Russian People to the Orthodox Christian religions, rejecting the Marxist atheism of the Soviets, but rather, it refers purely, plainly and simply to the total, integral conversion of Russia to the one true Church of Christ, the Catholic Church.

Now, this is not to say that grace was not unleashed, to a greater or lesser extent, by each of the flawed consecrations undertaken in 1942, 1952, 1964, and 1982. Fr Fessio's point is not wholly unreasonable. It is held by many upstanding Catholics and was shared by the late Fr Robert Fox, who felt that to insist on naming Russia "makes a taskmaster of God who nit-picks for fine details or wording rather than the intention of hearts." One may sympathise with that Catholic sentiment yet reasonably disagree with prudential ecclesiastical judgements on the matter.

In fact, it seems clear that the apocalyptic scenario set forth in the Third Secret as testified by Fr Luigi Villa, printed in last month's edition, was averted by John Paul II's sincere yet imperfect March 1984 effort. Especially since he alluded to Russia by adding: "In a special way we entrust and consecrate to you those individuals and nations which particularly need to be thus entrusted and consecrated."(3)  It is hardly coincidental that just six weeks after the Holy Father uttered those words, a major disaster struck the main administrative base of the Russian Northern Fleet:

On May 13, 1984, on the outskirts of Severomorsk, there was a major fire at a stockpile of naval missiles. The fire lasted five days, was accompanied by violent explosions, killed 200-300 people, and destroyed at least one third of the Northern Fleet's stockpile of surface-to-air missiles. [Wikipedia]

"Soviets claim ignorance in munitions depot blast," ran a New York Times News Service headline of 23 June 1984. "Soviet northern fleet 'disabled'," the Associated Press reported on 10 July 1984. "Soviets' northern fleet disabled... 'not viable' for six months," reported Jane's Defence Weekly of 14 July 1984.

The hand of our merciful God who does not "nit-pick for fine details or wording," as Fr Fox put it, is discernible here. At the same time, it does not undermine calls to precisely consecrate Russia. For while God is forebearing, it is also true that He does expect certain rules and guidelines to be followed. Despite his good intentions, Uzzah was struck dead for touching the Ark of the Covenant against God's directive [2 Sam. 6]. The sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, were struck dead for offering incense improperly [Lev. 10]. God does care about obedience to specific details.

In that demanding scriptural light, and given our Modernist-infested Church and the catastrophic state of Russia and the West, which is more likely to dissipate the "smoke of Satan" from all quarters of the globe: the consecration specifically requested by Our Lady, or the ruinous and jaded 60s nouvelle theologie Fr Fessio shares with his garrulous fellow Jesuit, Pope Francis?

To ask the question is to answer it. The wicked fruits of the pervasive "decadent narcissism" decried by Benedict XVI are such as to require divine intervention. Their height, depth and breadth recall Gregory XVI's depiction of his own time:

Depravity exults; science is impudent; liberty, dissolute. The holiness of the sacred is despised; the majesty of divine worship is not only disapproved by evil men, but defiled and held up to ridicule. Hence sound doctrine is perverted and errors of all kinds spread boldly. [Mirari Vos, 1832]

It seems that we are facing the dilemma explained by Our Blessed Lord in Luke 11: 15-26:

When an unclean spirit goes out of someone, it roams through arid regions searching for rest but, finding none, it says, "I shall return to my home from which I came." But upon returning, it finds it swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and brings back seven other spirits more wicked than itself who move in and dwell there, and the last condition of that person is worse than the first.

In other words, whatever cleansing was achieved in March 1984, a further precise consecrative "exorcism" is now required to drive out the even worse demons who have subsequently taken up residence in the West, not least within our ravaged Church. As for Russia, Vladimir Putin left to take up his KGB post in Dresden just after John Paul's consecration. By the time he returned home and was elected president some 15 years later, the anomalous decade of opening and "renewal" had closed and the "black colonels," oligarchs and mafia were all in bed together, dragging Russia back down to hell. They got the Gangsters; we got the Banksters —  all spawned by the Father of Lies.

Clearly, we need a heavenly purge! One it is surely prudent to request with the persistence Our Lord encouraged in the parable of the unjust judge [Lk 18:1-8]. The apocalypse-averting success of the flawed 1984 consecration points to the flood of grace we could expect by obedience to the Mother of God. Moreover, we have the Portuguese precedent. Following the 13 May 1931 episcopal consecration of Portugal to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, that besieged country was miraculously transformed from a Masonic republic into a civilised Catholic country [see CO, Oct. 2012].

Smug in their affluent isolation, citizens of the West are unable to see the totalitarian encroachment of the Godless forest for the "tolerant" pagan trees. At the very least, at such an advanced stage of civilisational decay, with the "green wood" so well and truly "dry" [Lk 23:31], the consecration of Russia, in strict accord with God's command, can only do us good. While at best, that supernatural remedy will exorcise nations East and West of their Marxist demons, both overt and covert, once and for all.

 

FOOTNOTES:

(1) Typically, Obama's false posturing during the recent debt-ceiling crisis was ignored by Hastings & Co. In fact, as a Senator he had previously damned the very position he assumed immediately upon taking office, fulminating in 2006: "The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government cannot pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that, 'the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better." 

(2) “I’m a Christian. I do believe that tradition and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.” —Barack Obama, 2004; “I’ve just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married...” — Barack Obama, 2012.

(3)It seems the Holy Father felt constrained by the same political and diplomatic pressures that had thwarted his first abortive attempt to consecrate Russia in 1982. After being asked why he failed to mention Russia by name on that occasion, John Paul II responded: "I tried to do everything possible in the concrete circumstances." - General Audience of 19 May 1982, reported in  L'Osservatore Romano (English edition) 24 May 1982.

 

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