The Bible speaks of a great "Latter Day" nation that shall rise up at the "end of the age;" a nation that will glorify herself as a dazzlingly beautiful QUEEN (Rev. 18:7), but a nation that the Bible says is -
"... DREADFUL and TERRIBLE, and STRONG EXCEEDINGLY with great iron teeth: that DEVOURS and BRAKES IN PIECES, and stamps the residue (i.e., those who remain) with its feet ..." (Daniel 7:7)
Isaiah describes this nation as an "OVERFLOWING SCOURGE" (Is. 28:18) - and the Bible goes on to say that this "BEAST-NATION" will gain mastery over the entire earth and establish a ONE-WORLD EMPIRE that will bring ruin and poverty to the peoples and nations of the world.
The Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon embodies within its doctrine a particularly vile heresy: that not only did Jesus fail in His earthly ministry, but that He had sex with the women who followed Him. The attack here is not one that is aimed only at His work on the Cross, but at Him personally as a moral Being. That any Christian in good conscience could have even the most indirect contact with such people defies all logic and rationale; and more, that Christians should involve themselves in a political alliance with them to "take back the nation for Christ" is "oxymoronic." There is simply no sense to it.
Robert Stewart, a former intelligence analyst writing for the Hartford Courant, reports that over the last few weeks the skeptics of American military predominance who exist in France, Germany and the rest of Europe - as well as liberal circles in this country - have been awed (perhaps the better word is "dazzled") into an abrupt and hushed silence by the ferocity and stunning success of the American attack on Iraq.
Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has pursued a policy of world domination. The empire which has resulted from all this is best envisioned as a pyramid with America at its apex as the indispensable "Hegemon." In the second rank are Western Europe and Japan which act as America's "associate partners." The genius of including these two areas as associates (maybe the better word is "accomplices") lies in the fact that by merging them into it's empire as partners (albeit, as "junior partners"), the United States has essentially co-opted them.
What does the Bible have to say about the United States? - yield a very disquieting view of America in these "Last Days" - a view which can render only one result: America as "Prophetic Babylon."
Details the manner in which the Pentagon, the CIA, U.S. corporate interests, and Protestant missionary groups like the Wycliffe Bible Translators (SIL), YWAM, etc. have teamed up to conquer the world for "Christ and the church" and in the process mutually enrich each other.
American evangelicals have a messianic image of the United States which pictures our country as God's chosen land. But, what if - rather than having the character of a "saint" - her real character is that of a "BEAST" - an evil, destructive predator that stalks the world looking for other nations and peoples to devour?
On Friday, June 18th, three synagogues were bombed simultaneously in Sacramento, California. What prompted all this? Well, for one thing, many Serbs - as well as countless other Orthodox Christians in Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece (a NATO member), etc. believe that they are defending Christianity against a new Islamic onslaught DIRECTED AND FINANCED BY A NEW YORK JEWISH CABAL - a scenario which is so convoluted it defies any easy explanation, but one which, nonetheless, enjoys great popularity among the front-line fighters in Kosovo and Bosnia. In today’s world, it seems, that anti-Semitism is not so dead after all. The fact is, it’s making an astonishing comeback. Indeed, the echo of jackboots has been swelling in the United States and Europe for several years now. Skinhead thugs invoking the name of Adolf Hitler were once dismissed as an aberration - but that’s no longer the case. All of these movements are feeding off white, xenophobic, "tribal extremism" fed by a panic which has been aroused by the conspicuous presence of foreign immigrants - in Europe, mainly Slavs from the east and Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East (most of whom are uninterested in assimilation into Western European societies); and in the United States, Mexicans, Haitian boat people and a flood of Asians. All this is coupled with a sense of extreme financial insecurity caused by the ravages of free trade and the fear of what the future will bring economically. And everywhere these ingredients (i.e., xenophobia and financial insecurity) are being blended with a profound hostility toward the traditional liberal elites - elites which ordinary people connect to the Jewish community and which they hold responsible for pushing economic globalism and a new multiculturalism with which few whites can feel comfortable.
The apostasy that the Bible says will occur in the "end of days" is not something that is going to take place OUTSIDE the church; rather it is something that is going to take place INSIDE it. But how? - that's the question. To understand the dynamic at work here we must put what is happening to the church in a larger context. Too many people try to understand "last things" from only the perspective of RELIGION. But that's not possible. There are other dynamics at work - political, economic and military dynamics - and all of them one way or another impinge on the church and the apostasy that is at work within it, transforming what we know as the ORGANIZED church into the monster the Scriptures say it will become. One of these dynamics is the increasing speed at which REAL democracy is disappearing in the world today - contrary to what one hears being trumpeted from the mainline press. The fact is, the world is not becoming more democratic, but less - and it is being driven forward in this process by the ever quickening pace of globalization and the inexorable division of the world into a small elite of wealthy "worthies" and a huge population of indigent "worker-serfs" - a division that follows in the wake of the globalization process as surely as water flows downhill.
The names of the two Argentine naval officers who testified about Argentine death squad atrocities to ABC, NBC and CBS in May of 1995 (see page 10) are Antonio Pernias and Juan Carlos Rolan (both naval Captains). Both officers also testified to this effect before the Argentine Senate in June. Their testimony was later corroborated by Captain Adolfo Scilingo, another naval officer (a captain), in testimony he gave to well-known Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky in the fall of 1995. All three - Pernias, Rolan, and Scilingo - detailed the practice of dumping leftist political prisoners (men women and children - some barely into their teens) alive over the Atlantic from the bellies of Argentine naval planes.
Nat Henthoff of the Village Voice has been tracking the effect of the USA Patriot Act on civil liberties in the United States, and has been utterly dismayed by what he has found, i.e., that it has been having a very profound and chilling impact on the free exercise of civil liberties in the country. [Please see our recent article on the repercussions of the USA Patriot Act on the exercise of civil rights in the United States.] According to Hentoff, there is a plethora of examples throughout the country to this effect. Hentoff cites a number of them in a column entitled "Making a List of Dissenters." Hentoff says that these particular examples were supplied to him by a friend over at the Christian Science Monitor, Kris Axtman.
Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, writes, "For the past six months Americans have been told repeatedly that the (economic) ... meltdown in ... Asia will not affect them, their jobs, or the American stock market. Even the 1997 U.S. trade deficit with Asia of well over $100 billion is considered good news because cheap imports (which, of course, displace American workers) will keep down inflation. But what is at risk in ... Asia is the real possibility of a global collapse of demand and another Great Depression ... The Asians may save a lot, keep their children in school longer than anybody else, and recruit smarter state bureaucrats than Washington does, but they are catastrophically over-invested in the wrong industries - principally automobiles, shipbuilding, steel, petrochemicals, and semiconductors.
In the first week of June 1994, "20/20" reported on charges of baby-selling in Guatemala. The charges - which had gained wide-spread acceptance among the peasants in that impoverished land - were that "middle men" were buying (and in some instances, stealing) babies for sale to rich, yuppie-class North Americans. The "20/20" report centered on two cases involving North American women who, while visiting Guatemala, almost lost their lives to infuriated mobs who believed the women had come to that unsettled and poverty-stricken land to receive stolen babies to take home. The program tended to treat the charges as myths generated out of superstition and ignorance; as a result, "20/20" was disposed to ignore the veracity of the charges by the peasants, and instead centered its report largely on the tragic plight of the two women - both of whom were well-educated, middle-aged, yuppies - exactly the type of women Guatemalan peasants had come to believe were at the center of the growing baby-trade.
The argument that at least the Political Right stands for morality and will send the homosexuals, the abortionists, the pornographers, etc. packing is not good enough. Hitler did the same in Germany; and, in addition, he made the trains run on time. But the price for all that was the Holocaust and the Diktatur (dictatorship). Is that the kind of exchange Christians are willing to make? - anti-Semites, fascists, racists, Moonies, etc. for abortionists, pornographers, homosexuals, etc.? If that’s the case, Christians have surely lost their way!
Most Christians in the United States live in a world of half-truths and lies insofar as their "world-view" (Weltanschauung) is concerned; a cosmos filled with phantoms and ghosts, and haunted by such bizarre and mysterious shadows as the "Bildeburgers," the Illuminati, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, black helicopters, road signs written in Chinese, and strange "goings on" in the United Nations; a universe in which it is difficult to separate fact from fiction, and reality from fantasy.
And for those Christians who eschew this fantasy world, they often resort to the opposite extreme, and delight themselves in the fact that they have no "world view" at all; that the world of politics, business and culture is of no importance to them. All they care about is the Bible - as if being ignorant of all things political, cultural and economic makes them that much more "spiritual." These are people who seem to revel in their own naiveté, and who wear it almost as a badge of honor!
On Monday, February 28, 2000, tensions that have been building in the Republican Party for years between so-called "moderate" Republicans (those whom conservative Christian activists derisively call the "BMW, brie and wine set") and the Religious Right broke out into the open when Senator John McCain of Arizona, a "moderate," delivered a brutal attack against what he considered to be the "stranglehold" Christian conservatives have on the Republican Party. He singled out Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as special targets of his angry assault - calling them "self-appointed leaders" of intolerance and religious bigotry. He compared Robertson and Falwell to "union bosses who have subordinated the interests of working families to their own (religio-political) ambitions." Speaking to an enthusiastic crowd of 4,000 at a high school only a few miles from the headquarters of the Christian Coalition in Virginia, McCain said, "The politics of division and slander (practiced by the Religious Right) are not our values. They are a corrupting influence on ... politics, and those who practice them in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame ... our party and our country." He continued by saying, "Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell on the right."
Today, as the Business Right moves to strengthen its relationship with the Religious Right, it’s bringing with it the same baggage of extreme right-wing ideology that it brought with it in the 1930s. And just how pervasive the alliance between the rich on the one hand, and the church on the other, has become can be measured by the harsh new attitude towards the poor manifested today by so many evangelicals - one which ascribes poverty to "laziness" and "individual failure" - a way of thinking which they have clearly picked up from their rich business allies. But what evangelicals have evidently not fathomed is the fact that much of the poverty which has developed in the country since 1972 is directly attributable to the "free trade" policies of their own business backers - phony "supporters" who, on the one hand, financially aid the ministries and churches of their evangelical allies (largely as a vote-getting ploy), while on the other hand they mercilessly ship American jobs (many of which are held by rank-and-file evangelicals) overseas to Third World sweat shops. And make no mistake about it, it is this reason, (i.e., the business community’s harsh and austere attitude towards ordinary, every-day working men and women) not "laziness" and "individual failure," which is at the root of today’s falling living standards. James the apostle wasn’t kidding when he warned Christians to beware of such men. (James 2:6; 5:4-6)
One of the main Christian perpetrators of such phrases as "cleansing action," "purging action," etc. in connection with "taking back the country for Christ" was a "prophet" named Bob Jones. Several years ago, Bob Jones was allied with John Wimber of Vineyard International. Bob Jones and John Wimber have since broken fellowship with one another; the reason given is Jones’ alleged immorality; but what’s important here is not so much Jones’ carnal corruption - as heinous and as hypocritical as that might be - but Jones’ sinister and malignant "theology" or eschatology (doctrine of "end times") which pictures the seizure of earthly power by a "New Breed" of Christians - death squad style.
Columnist Richard Reeves of the Universal Press Syndicate writes, "... what Buchanan has done (in talking about corporate "downsizing," Free Trade and economic insecurity) ... is agitate the plebes (i.e., the "common folk") ... The big danger ... (to the nation’s economic and political elites - both Democratic and Republican) is that ... Buchanan is spouting out the secrets of the lodge in public ..." Reeves continues, "Don’t you love it?" - Buchanan is denouncing the moneyed elites of his own party! The rich reply that Buchanan is stirring up "class envy" and "class warfare." But Reeves - who is not Buchanan's friend, and who says that Buchanan frightens him - counters, "Class Warfare? ... the rich (i.e., Wall Street, the "captains of industry," the yuppie elite) ... have already won that battle, and now this madman (i.e., Buchanan) is out there stirring up trouble among the losers (i.e., the nation’s blue collar workers and low and mid-level white collar workers) ... Doesn’t he (i.e., Buchanan) understand the benefits of disorganized labor (which unrestricted immigration and Free Trade promote), to say nothing of (the high) dividends (i.e., money which used to flow into the paychecks of blue collar workers, etc. and which now flows as dividends into the stock portfolios of the rich) ..." Reeves goes on, "Buchanan will (eventually) be beaten down by his enemies, now legion ... But there is (still) this: A lot of what he’s saying is true for many voters, and is extremely dangerous to ... (the nation’s economic elites). They have to try to destroy him, because he has the capability to destroy them - not just in this one election, but over time."
Why is it so difficult for Christians in America to see the incongruity of being "right" insofar as abortion, homosexuality, militant feminism and so forth are concerned while all the while refusing to acknowledge the rapacious, greedy and even predatory character of the corporate allies they have chosen to ally themselves with, to say nothing of the money-grubbing and avaricious life-styles many of them have adopted on a personal level? This article seeks to answer this question.
As evangelicals, we are faced with a kind of "chicken-and-egg" situation in speaking about the origins of the Catholic / evangelical rapprochement. "What came first? - politics or religion?
You ask, what do we mean? - well, let me put it another way. Did the rapprochement between the Catholics and the evangelicals really begin in the prayer meetings of Catholic and evangelical charismatics in the United States, as most who are involved in the rapprochement claim, or did it actually originate in the jungles and swamps of Central and South America in the 1970s and ‘80s - with the Death Squads and the CIA acting as midwives? Or more - do the origins of this rapprochement reach back even further? - are they to be found in the mist and haze which today conceal the real origin of the Central Intelligence Agency and such other shadowy and obscure organizations as ODESSA, the Gehlin organization, the Vatican’s "ratlines," P-2, Opus Dei, etc.?
There are strange things happening in the Caucasus Mountains, an area dominated by craggy mountains and deep gorges - a wild and untamed place that has about it a disturbing feeling of "long-ago" - as if it had suddenly appeared straight out of the Old Testament. It is here that a new and extremely dangerous struggle has begun that is pitting the United States and her NATO allies against the Russian Federation and Iran, a struggle that has been carefully hidden from the American people by the corporate media. What's America up to there? What business does the United States and her NATO allies have in insinuating themselves into this area, thereby precipitating the clash
There is a house just outside Washington D. C. called the Cedars; it is located across the Potomac River from Georgetown on 24th Street North in Arlington, and it is emblematic of everything that is WRONG with American Christianity. The mansion is named for the cedar trees that surround it. It is owned by a secretive organization called the International Christian Leadership Council (ICL), known today as the Fellowship Foundation. Lisa Getter of the Los Angeles Times reports that -
"... the mansion has been a private hideaway for world leaders, members of Congress, (etc.) ... Located on a quiet residential street, the $4.4-million estate called CEDARS sits at the highest point of the Potomac River, with spectacular views of Washington beyond the pool and tennis courts. It is owned by the Fellowship, a nonpartisan Christian group that sponsors the NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST."
On January 1st, 1994 a guerrilla movement "suddenly materialized" in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas near the Guatemalan border. One of the goals of the movement was declared to be the repudiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement - a goal which caused bemused snickering in American elitist circles - after all, what could uneducated Mexican peasants possibly know about NAFTA? The movement called itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. The movement’s leader was a mysterious hooded figure calling himself "Sub-Comandante Marcos." Elitist snickering or not, the so-called "international investor community" wasn’t laughing; indeed, there was a good deal of evidence to indicate that it had been thrown into a panic by the revolt, hinting that a lot more was "a foot" in the "goings-on" in Chiapas than most ordinary people realized - and that behind it all was the hidden hand of Wall Street. The extent to which this was true was revealed by an internal ("eyes only") banking community memo written by Riordan Roett, an advisor for Chase Manhattan Bank, which argued that the Mexican government "will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory ... (and restore the trust) ... of ... the (international) investment community (in Mexico) ..."
On the first day of September, 1991, in room 419 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, there was a hearing that had been structured in such a way as to elicit as little public attention as possible. Experts were on hand to speak in tones pitched to guarantee boredom. Committee members, typically half-prepared and distracted, seemed to ensure an atmosphere of monotony and torpor. The Subcommittee on "Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations" of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was taking evidence on the murky and obscure workings of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), an institution which in the months ahead was to become known as the "Bank of Crooks and Spies." In various postures of piety and relaxation were Sens. Jesse Helms (R-NC), James Jeffords (R-VT), Claiborne Pell (D-RI), Paul Simon (D-IL), Alan Cranston (D-CA), and John Kerry (D-MA), the subcommittee chairman. The two witnesses were Jack Blum, a former investigator for the subcommittee, and William von Rabb, U.S. Customs commissioner under Presidents Reagan and - until just that previous month - Bush - and dull their revelations were not. As Blum and von Rabb got deeper and deeper into their testimony, a number of reporters who had shown up - more out of habit and having nothing better to do - began to catch one another’s eye; in the seats reserved for the public, quiet gave way to murmurs and even a few whistles of astonishment.
Every so-called "Christian" in "Western Christendom" has historically had two loyalties: one to the "spiritual" church and one to the "temporal" state, i.e., those twin powers of Regnum and Sacerdotium that govern the lives of "Western Man" - most especially in the Middle Ages, but also - more than secularists would care to admit - even today. To the caesars of the state must be rendered certain honors, and to the church of God other honors must be rendered.
One of the most unusual developments in recent years has been the surprising spread of the so-called "Citizen’s Militia Movement" throughout the country. The Citizen’s Militia Movement has been a mainstay of the far-right, radical fringe for some time now, but until recently it was largely confined to anti-tax groups like the Posse Comitatus in South Dakota and white supremacist groups like the Aryan Nations in Idaho. That’s no longer the case! - citizen militia units now operate in all 50 states. Skeptical observers admit that the movement now has at least 10,000 followers nationwide, but a growing number of very informed researchers claim the real figure is closer to 10 million - the difference, presumably, between hard-core activists on the one hand, and "admirers," on the other - people who, given the right political context, could transition rapidly from the fringe to the core
The Bible speaks of "wars and rumors of wars" and "nations rising up against nations" in the "end of days" as one of the most pointed and distressing signs of those events leading up to the "Beginning of Sorrows" (i.e., the first half of the Tribulation and the appearance of the Antichrist as a messianic savior). But what exactly does that mean?
The war in the south Balkans is by now already far-advanced. Despite the presence of NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia, it has now spread to Kosovo where it is threatening to draw into the conflagration Greece, Macedonia, Albania, and Turkey - and possibly the entire Islamic World. The American media - dominated as it is by a multicultural chic - refuses to see the war in its religious dimension - as a clash of civilizations. But this is exactly how the war is perceived on the ground by those who are involved - a war which is pitting "Christian Civilization" against "Islamic Civilization."
Eric Rosenberg of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reports that there is pending legislation reinstating the draft in the House and Senate (twin bills: S 89 and HR 163) in order "to provide for the common defense by requiring that ALL young persons in the United States ... perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes." These active bills currently sit in the committee on armed services.
I think that a great deal of you might be surprised to learn that our website here at Antipas Ministries - i.e., www.endtimesnetwork.com - gets over 1.6 MILLION "hits" a MONTH. Our other website - www.isrp.org - receives a similar amount of "hits." Now that's quite a lot of "hits" - especially considering the fact that we have done NOTHING at all to advertise the website. NOTHING! - the fact is, we've never really had enough money to do so.
That makes Antipas one of the most visited CHRISTIAN websites on the internet. That's simply amazing, especially since our "popularity" (if that's what it could be called) is a word-of-mouth "popularity" based simply on the fact that one reader has told another reader about us, who in turn has told another, and so on, and on, and on.
Moreover, this is all the more amazing when one begins to comprehend the notion that this enormous readership has been largely generated out of the very community that supposedly forms George Bush's CORE political constituency.
What does all this suggest? Well, for one thing it seems to suggest that at the "RANK-AND-FILE" or "GRASS ROOTS" level of the evangelical community there is a lot of latent misgiving about the connection the church's leadership has been promoting with George Bush and his AMERICAN NEW WORLD ORDER SYSTEM - and that there is a willingness to listen on the part of "ordinary Christians" to what we are saying in opposition to what the church's leadership has been promoting.
This is a two part series; part 1 deals with what's happening in Colombia, how we got there, Colombia's place in America's "New World Order" System, and finally the evangelical community's involvement in what's been happening there; part 2 ["THE SPREAD OF AMERICA'S NEW WORLD ORDER SYSTEM NORTHWARD FROM LATIN AMERICA TO THE UNITED STATES" (please see under "S")] deals with the spread of America's "New World Order" System northward into the United States.
There is perhaps no other riddle in the Bible more well-known - not only to believers, but to unbelievers as well - than that which surrounds the number "666." This number permeates our literature and art (both secular and religious), and it is the theme of countless horror stories and fables and is also the subject of untold amounts of gang graffiti in our ghettos and inner cities, and on the sides of trains and subway cars. The fact is, so beguiled are most people by the "666" conundrum that they easily miss the larger meaning behind these verses; and that is this: that they are soon to face a great test, and this test revolves around the issue of money (and their love of it) more than it does anything else.
Iraq, the truth of the matter is, poses no real threat to the United States per se. According to most objective outside sources, Iraq no longer has any weapons of mass destruction. This is the considered opinion of most observers (other than those in the current Bush Administration and their mouthpieces on Fox News, and in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times). This is certainly what former Defense Secretary William Cohen thinks. Indeed, Cohen advised the incoming administration that "Saddam Hussein's forces are in a state where he cannot possibly pose a threat to his neighbors." This is also what Scott Ritter, the outspoken former US Marine and U.N. weapons inspector, thinks.
This article also has a lot to say about the ruling classes in America - the very classes that both Israel and the church have shamefully come to rely on today - and what these elites are capable of when their vital interests (i.e., their money and their investments) are threatened: Lies, deceit, betrayals, and even murder then become useful tools and possible solutions.
Concerned Women of America (CWA) is the largest women’s group in America. The CWA’s membership dwarfs the membership of the National Organization of Women (NOW), and there are many who claim that its structural sophistication makes NOW’s look sophomoric. Tim LaHaye’s wife, Beverly, heads the organization. Corporations helping to bankroll CWA include: Pepsico, Levi Strauss and Co., Avon, American Express, Sun Company, the United Bank of Denver and the Government Employees Insurance Company
The increasingly antidemocratic flavor of liberals in recent years has been remarked upon by many scholars, not just Alan Wolfe and Ronald D'Workin. Indeed, it has become ever more apparent that the power of the minority coalition rests not upon an appeal to a broad base of support in the electorate, but on liberal control of certain institutions of power - specifically, (1) the federal, state and county bureaucracies, (2) the liberal media, and (3) the state and federal judiciary. During the last decade, conservatives have begun to mount what appears to be a vast and powerful assault on these bastions of liberal power. The main axis of this attack has proceeded along the line of "shrinking the size of government" - largely hidden under the guise of "tax reform" and "tax relief."
Today it's fashionable to dismiss talk of conspiracy theories - or a belief in conspiracism - as the prattle of uneducated naïfs. This is certainly what the mainline media and "establishment" pundits would have us think. For example, take the way the conspiracy theories of today's militia movement are treated: essentially, they are written off as the product of an unsophisticated "redneck" and "blue collar" paranoia. But if that’s so, it’s a paranoia that the "establishment’s" own proven lies and deceit have helped to fashion over the last thirty years: Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the Contra fiasco, Irangate, the MIA controversy, etc. - all deliberate government fabrications (and recognized as such by most civil libertarians)! - lies which have over the years eaten away like an acid at the historic trust most so-called "redneck" and "blue collar" Americans have historically had for their government. As a result, there exists today a basic notion in "blue collar" communities throughout the country that the government is simply incapable of telling the truth; and that, therefore, its heated denials regarding F.E.M.A., the "black helicopters," the stationing of UN troops in remote areas, etc. cannot be taken seriously. The plain fact of the matter is, an aura of deceit now surrounds the government and bathes it in a light which is not conducive to engendering trust.
"WAR IS PEACE;" "SLAVERY IS FREEDOM;" and "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH" (George Orwell, 1984) - the exact opposite of what we always thought was true, is true; the "Thought Police" have made it so! And the greatest practitioner of Orwellian thought control ("newspeak") in the world today? - it's the American elite media, a media which has been bought up "lock, stock, and barrel" precisely for this purpose by "Corporate America." Presenting that which is false as true! Making people appear to be what they are not! "Morphing" the truth! - in Orwell's novel, all this was the job of the "Ministry of Truth." In today's America, this has become - as we just indicated - the job of the American press. And the primary focus of all this distortion in the elite media? - hiding what America is really up to in the world at large; portraying the presence of America's multinational corporations throughout the world as "little angels" in the service of humanity rather than what they really are - ravenous wolves; picturing America as a benevolent giant rather than what it really is - a beast which is: "... exceeding dreadful, whose teeth are of iron, and his nails of brass; which devours, brakes in pieces, and stamps the residue (of the nations) with his feet ..." (Daniel 7:19)
The CNP (Council on National Policy) is an organization formed by members of the Religious Right, right-wing politicos and powerful members of the American business community. It is no accident that these are precisely the same three groups which have historically fostered a belief in conspiracism - specifically, the Illuminist Myth, each for its own reasons: the business community as a means of defense against unionism, the Religious Right as a defense against "atheistic socialism," and the Political Right against "one-world universalism." The organization was founded by Tim LaHaye, a prominent leader in the Religious Right. Indeed, it would not be an unfair characterization to list Tim LaHaye’s prominence in the Religious Right as second only to that of Pat Robertson’s.
The apostasy and even heresy that has taken root in the church today is becoming ever more appalling and frightful to those serious students of the Word of God who have taken the time to study what's been happening in all that passes at present for "evangelical Christianity" - from the bizarre and even grotesque "goings on" in Toronto and Brownsville [such as people writhing uncontrollably on the floor, barking like dogs, crowing like roosters, laughing hysterically, etc. (and all the while calling such maniacal exhibitions "manifestation" of the Holy Spirit)] to the "New Age" deification of believers as taught by Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, and Bennie Hinn [for example, Hagin's belief that we are all "little Jesuses" - divine as Jesus is divine, and as much God as Jesus is God: Hagin says, "That's who we are; we're Jesus." The false teachings of those people who are involved in all this - from the older so-called "Prophets and Apostles" of this modern, magical carnival show of "extraordinary and amazing Signs and Wonders" like William Branham, Stanley Comstock, Earl Ivy, Tommy Baird, Myrtle Page, Franklin Hall (and his brothers, Delbert, Harold, and Virgil), William Freeman, A.A. Allen, O.L. Jaggers, Gayle Jackson, Oral Roberts, David Nunn, W.V. Grant, William Hagen, Dale Hanson, Tommy Hicks to newer luminaries such as Bob Jones, Rick Joyner, Emanuele and David Cannistraci, Dick Iverson, Bill Hamon, C. Peter Wagner, Chuck Pierce, Robert Stearns, Mike Bickle, Reuven Doron, Che Ahn, Frank Hammond, Cindy Jacobs, John Eckhardt, Bobbie Byerly, Dutch Sheets, Jack Hayford, Jim Goll, Frank Damazio, Ed Silvoso, Carlos Annacondia, Claudio Freidzon, Roger Mitchell, Ted Haggard, Tommy Tenney ad nausium - are so incredible that it is almost easy to forget that there is another factor motivating these men beyond their titillating teachings - specifically, their incredible and even egregious worldliness.
What follows is an address by David Duke. As one reads this address (which was given in his 1992 run for the US Senate), one can almost hear the echoes of Serbian jackboots reverberating up the corridors of this earth's byways and highways from Kosovo to the United States to resonate finally here in the American heartland. And for those who would brush Duke off as a "marginalized, bit player," one should note that Duke, a former Klansman and an avowed racist, carried over 60 percent of all white voters in Louisiana - an overwhelming majority of white voters - in his bid for the US Senate. Duke was only stopped by a massive black and liberal white turnout whipped up into near hysteria by the press and the national leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties. This kind of talk has a certain resonance in many Christian's hearts today - perhaps even in your heart, and maybe a lot more so than you would care to admit - at least in public.
"America is at the crossroads. Americans have a simple yet very difficult decision to make. Are they willing to let this nation inevitably become a Third World society, or are they willing to stand up and fight, while they still can, for their heritage, traditions, and values?
Strange things have been going on in the name of Christ. Take the example of an evangelical pastor, Clemente Diaz Aguilar, who was detained by government forces in Guatemala and tortured by mistake: "My captors stole everything from me ... Those who captured me ... divided up my money, and later they led me into the hands of the torturers. In the long hours of torture, they asked me constantly about other pastors ... of some churches in the capital; they asked me also about my views on liberation theology ... The torturers, tired of doing so much damage to me, rested for a while; then I recognized some of them: two are members of a singing duo from these churches (i.e., Verbo and Mision Elim); I begged (them) to recognize me because I recognized them; then they asked me questions about my capture, my complete name, my address, my church and my activities. When they realized I was not the person they were looking for, they begged my forgiveness, saying, "Brother, we are also Christians." What does this mean? - that in building the kingdom of God on earth, it’s OK to torture? - even your brothers in Christ if they are perceived to be on the "wrong side?"
Verbo (a Protestant church in Guatemala that harbors death squad functionaries), is connected to the late Jim Durkin* and Gospel Outreach in Eureka, California. Gospel Outreach is one of an almost countless number of groups (groups headed up by such charismatic luminaries as John Jimenez, John Mears, Larry Lea, the Ft. Lauderdale Five, etc.) which originated out of the Jesus Revolution of the late '60s and early '70s. These groups - when taken together - form the core constituencies of today's New Charismatic Movement. Together, they form an exceedingly tight-knit, interlocked network of churches, denominations and ministries. All have - to one degree or another - been affected by the post-millennial concepts of Latter Rain - especially those which postulate that it is the church's destiny to take over the world for "Christ and the church" - even if it means resorting to political and military activity.
Recently we received a letter from a somewhat disgruntled subscriber. He wrote: "Essays posted on the site (i.e., www.endtimesnetwork.com) tend to characterize the gospel as a revolution of the poor against the rich, or at least they try to frame spiritual questions in the context of the Marxian class struggle paradigm ..." This is, of course, not the only letter on this subject that we have received; nor is it the first time that we have been called "Marxists" - though I suppose by this standard, this subscriber would have consigned the Church in Jerusalem to "Marxist" status since, according to the Book of Acts, they "... had all things common" (Acts 2:44) and they were of "... one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common" (Acts 4:32). Nonetheless, the fact is there are a lot of people who feel as this subscriber does and are apparently bothered by our attitude towards the rich and money.
Derivatives are "investment instruments" whose value is linked to or "derived" from some other security. Derivatives are an extremely high-risk form of market speculation, nonetheless, they have become in recent years one of the largest markets in the world. The size of the derivatives market was estimated at $55 trillion in 1996. More often than not, derivatives are linked to very complicated speculation in the currency market
Many years ago, German political economist Werner Sombart wrote that radical ideologies (fascism, communism, etc.) were doomed to founder in the United States upon the rocks of "roast beef and apple pie," a metaphor for America’s wealthy and ever-expanding middle class. But something happened in the interim to Middle America which has not only stopped its expansion, but has threatened its wealth. Somewhere around 1973 the economic floor it stood on started to give way. Jack Beatty, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, reports that between 1974 and 1989 workers with less than a high school education saw their wages fall by 21.7 percent, and high school graduates saw theirs fall by 14.7 percent.
The Bible alludes to a coming REACTION the modern feminist movement, a REACTION that the Antichrist will ride into power on proclaiming the sanctity of "Traditional Values." This is the DECEPTION of the end of days: Antichrist appearing as Christ and in the name of Christianity (Matt. 24:24 and I Tim. 4:1-2). This is especially true insofar as the status of women is concerned - this is precisely what Dan. 11:37 seems to indicate when it says that he (i.e., the Antichrist) will oppose the "desire of women." While there are some who insist that this particular verse refers to the desire of women to "bring forth the Messiah," such an interpretation requires an inordinate amount of convolution and seems to imply that women are more desirous of this than men. The more likely interpretation is the "common sense" one - i.e., that he will oppose the "modern-day" desire of women to seek "equality" with men in the world of business and politics.
"Dominionism" is a militant post-millennial eschatology ("doctrine of end times") which pictures the seizure of earthly (temporal) power by the church as the only means through which the world can be rescued; only after the world has been thus "rescued" can Christ return to "rule and reign." (Some dominionists see the seizure of the earth as the result of "signs, wonders, and miracles;" others picture it as the result of military and political conquest; most see it as a combination of both.)
"Dominionism" is a militant post-millennial eschatology ("doctrine of end times") which pictures the seizure of earthly (temporal) power by the church as the only means through which the world can be rescued; only after the world has been thus "rescued" can Christ return to "rule and reign." (Some dominionists see the seizure of the earth as the result of "signs, wonders, and miracles;" others picture it as the result of military and political conquest; most see it as a combination of both.) Dominionists - whether subtly or otherwise - discount altogether the possibility of a rapture. They have rejected pre-millennialism completely - and in doing so, they have not only rejected the possibility of a pre-tribulational rapture of the church, but also the possibility of a mid-tribulational rapture and a post-tribulational rapture. This is post-millennialism - the historic teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.
"I came to understand that all the values that made me admire the American people were being eroded by the covert operations of the CIA and kindred secret bodies ... The survival of this great (nation) ... is now being gravely threatened by the covert criminal actions of the Central Intelligence Agency and its associate services ... Democracy and the rule of law cannot survive side by side with a state agency that engages in covert operations ranging from assassinations to levying mercenary armies to directing lethal biological weapons experiments and public health policies ... The whole concept of a secret government and army within a government is a menace to the democratic system."
This is a very revealing article on the way the mainline press is orchestrating the coverage of the fighting in Chechnya - specifically, how the mainline media is trying to hide the attempt by the Western Oil Companies to grab the oil and natural gas riches of the Caspian basin for themselves to the exclusion of Russia - and laying all the blame for the resulting fighting in the area, and most particularly in Chechnya, off on so-called "narco-traffickers" in the Russian military.
It is sometimes difficult for ordinary people to believe that there exists the kind of people who are so past all feeling toward their fellow man, and so lacking in any kind of compassion that they are able to involve themselves in the type of venal and despicable behavior that the CIA and the shareholders of United Fruit were able to get themselves involved in during the 1950s in Guatemala for the sake of corporate profits and the "bottom line" (please see last newsletter, "The American Empire"). Worse yet, it's even more difficult to believe that the United States has built up an empire of client states around the world (i.e., the Philippines, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, etc.) using as its model the sordid and corrupt "methodologies of empire" developed by the CIA and United Fruit in that poor and impoverished land (i.e., Guatemala). But, of course, that is what has plainly happened. This is, however, what elite power is all about; this is what it ultimately leads to: for the elite, money-making and the accumulation of wealth has become the raison d'être of life. These people have no real sense of "right" and "wrong." "Right" to such people is simply that which advances their own selfish pecuniary ends; "wrong" is that which hinders them; these words possess no other meaning beyond this. Their loyalty is to themselves and to their personal enrichment, and hang all those who get in their way - and it's only when one begins to grasp this fact that it becomes at last possible to "identify" the American elite and "track" its activities. "Tracking" the elite using any other "marker" than money is an exercise in abject futility.
We are at the "End of the Age!" That is what our last newsletter - "The Caucasus Mountains, Gog, Magog, and Chevron Oil" - was all about. The process is unfolding right before our eyes exactly as the Bible said it would - and we are not talking here about the sometimes inane speculation that surrounded Y2K, but rather we have very specific reference to what the Scriptures say! What does that mean to you? Does it mean that you should run away and hide? God forbid! Would it surprise you to find out that God has something very important for YOU to do? - something that has ETERNAL meaning and has nothing to do with buying a mountain cabin, storing up food, and hiding. There is a call on your life, indeed, on all of our lives - but the choice is ours as to whether or not we will answer that call. Oswald Chambers once wrote, "We are in danger of forgetting that we cannot do what God does, and that God will not do what we can do. We cannot save ourselves nor sanctify ourselves, God does that; but God will not give us good habits, He will not give us character, He will not make us walk aright. We have to do all that ourselves, we have to work out (i.e., develop) the salvation God has worked in (us) ..." What Chambers was saying is that if we fail to take advantage of those opportunities now to "develop our salvation" [i.e., to bring it to maturity, to develop Christian character in ourselves, to have Christ’s life actually worked out in us (Phil. 2:12)], then we will fail to do so when the end finally does come.
David Ramsey Steele, writing in Liberty, the monthly publication of the Libertarians, believes that The Bell Curve, a book which purports to document racial differences in IQs, is the opening shot by conservatives in a Culture War which aims at reinstating the old Euro-centered, Christian culture of the white majority. Steele writes, "Equalitarianism (i.e., multiculturalism, affirmative action, etc.) is at the end of its rope. At some point in the future ... statements about human differences of the kind now subject to frenzied outbursts of vilification will be the most commonplace of truisms, accepted by all mainstream media and all respectable university humanities departments ... Whatever the intentions of its authors, The Bell Curve is a manifesto for (conservative whites)..." Steele believes that soon - very soon - the liberal cultural edifice which has suppressed majority whites - i.e., multiculturalism, "equalitarianism," affirmative action, feminism, etc. - will come crashing down, and the results of the 1994 elections tend to bear him out.
Large numbers of evangelicals including Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition and president of the Christian Broadcasting Network; Charles Colson, head of the International Prison Fellowship Ministry; Steve Sheldon, director of the Traditional Values Coalition; Dr. Richard Land and Dr. Larry Lewis, officers of the Southern Baptist Convention; and a great deal of other prominent evangelicals joined with Roman Catholic leaders to endorse a declaration put together by the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic theologian who heads the Institute on Religion and Public Life in Manhattan. The document is entitled "Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium;" the declaration’s aim is to promote the growing ties among the nation’s largest and most politically active religious groups; its purpose is to encourage continued Christian political activism aimed at "taking the country back for Christ and the church."
How is it possible for people to hate America to such an extent that they would hijack four planes and run two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and another into the Pentagon - killing not only themselves, but over 6,000 innocent people as well? The only answer that comes readily to mind - and the answer that the American propaganda machine is "pushing" for all its worth - is that such people aren't really human beings at all; that they are nothing more than vicious beasts - bloodthirsty animals - given over to a medieval kind of religious fanaticism that only imbeciles, simpletons and maniacs of the worst kind could embrace. Surely the only thing one can do with such monsters is to hunt them down and kill them like rabid dogs. This kind of answer, of course, is a very "convenient one; by DEMONIZING the perpetrators in such a way, it alleviates the necessity of really examining the GENUINE and underlying reasons behind what happened.
In today’s world, it seems, fascism is not so dead after all. The fact is, it’s making an astonishing comeback. Indeed, the echo of jackboots has been swelling in the United States and Europe for several years now. Skinhead thugs invoking the name of Adolf Hitler were once dismissed in both North America and Western Europe as an aberration - that’s no longer the case.
A case study of elite press manipulation, a study that forces us to ask the question, "... have we become in fact nothing more than a cog in a machine the elites have built for us? Is our reality of family, work, political ideology, and even religion become only that which the elites feed us?" If so, we are truly in danger of our souls. Why? - because the kind of realties that the elites would deign to spoon-feed us are certainly not realities that would have anything to do with the Kingdom of God; but just the opposite - snares meant to entrap us in the kingdom of their (this) world. If the elites have gained such mastery over the realities that govern our daily lives, then we really have become nothing more than a cog in their machine - a machine which may ultimately take us all to hell (or at least dishonor) with it.
AN ELITE SPONSORED DRUG EPIDEMIC DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY TO RENDER THE POOR IMPOTENT INSOFAR AS THEIR ELITE OPPRESSORS ARE CONCERNED! - YOU'VE NEVER HEARD ABOUT THIS BEFORE? Well, it's not much of a secret, and if you haven't heard about it (especially after Gary Webb's sensational expose in the San Jose Mercury News) then it's probably because you have stubbornly chosen not to know anything about it.
Well-known academician Ian Kershaw says that - at least in the modern world - there are three elements necessary for the emergence of a new messiah-king: (1) the existence of an actual person around which a "messiah myth" can be built; (2) a propaganda machine or "PR" mechanism capable of generating the "mythos" which must accompany any new messiah-king; and most importantly, (3) a willing population ready to accept the new messiah.
The question that now fairly begs to be asked is, Is such a phenomenon beginning to reveal itself again in the snarled course of events following the calamity of September 11, 2001? - a course of events that possesses the power and vigor to generate a new Napoleon or a new Hitler. Have we reached one of those points in the so-called "historical process" that could lend itself to such an outcome?
The great tragedy of today's American Christianity is that it has so OPENLY and SHAMELESSLY permitted itself to be transformed into a CO-CONSPIRATOR with America's Business Elites in their effort to create a "New World Order System."
Sadly, it’s too often characteristic of those who do battle for Christ - especially in the field of politics - that they are prone to see demons; more often than not, they seem to have a greater interest in the devil than they do in God. In their pursuit of the "Just Cause," they often seem not merely to be tantalized by evil, but are actually in very great need of its presence. When there is no venal force afoot, it is difficult to galvanize people - particularly Christians - into political action, especially when that action is as fraught with discomfort and peril as "taking the nation back for Christ." This is no mere "spiritual exercise" in which one can participate at home in the comfort of a "prayer closet." This involves street demonstrations, strikes, passing out leaflets, possibly even jail - all very unpleasant and painful activities. One does not enter into such activity lightly. There has to be a compelling reason - and that reason must be personified! It’s not good enough to be simply against an idea, a system of thinking. How does one visualize an idea? How do you stick a knife into a thought? Secular humanism, what’s that? This is why Robertson and people like Robertson need the Illuminati - even in the face of all the evidence which indicates that no such cabal has ever existed. The Illuminati Myth personifies the evil against which Robertson et. al. feel themselves arrayed. Indeed, arguments and evidence which might demonstrate to Robertson and his cohorts the groundless or exaggerated quality of such a fear are not welcomed as sources of relief, but are resented as denials of their own deep psychological outlets - intrusions which, if taken seriously, would demand a drastic reorientation of their "life-work." It is in this way that myths like the Illuminati Myth have become "precious things" to them, and rather than seeking liberation - of being relieved to find that there is no substance to these myths - they often hold blindly to them, even in the face of persuasive arguments to the contrary.1 And in a perverse sort of way, who can blame them? - after all, if the impetus of one’s life feeds on this myth (perhaps the better word is "phobia"), then the myth, instead of being easily discarded, will be maintained at all costs.
I was utterly shocked recently by some who apparently had no idea what I meant when I spoke of the "Gospel of the Kingdom" in our article "The Aliya Foundation," and who were mystified when I talked of it as something distinct and separate from the "Gospel of Salvation." Many people acted as if I had made this up out of thin air - even some who are closely and very positively associated with the ministry.
This is extremely unfortunate because there is nothing more important today than this specific Gospel, and that is so because of the presence on this earth at this time in history of an entity - the American New World Order System - that falsely claims to represent Christ on earth.
Last month (July, 2003) the government released new jobless figures - figures which pegged the nation's OFFICIAL unemployment rate at 6.4 PERCENT (approximately one out of every sixteen workers). [NOTE: the rate recently fell two-tenths of one percent; but that's simply because a large number of workers gave up trying to find work.]
These figures, however, don't come close to divulging the real extent of unemployment or under-employment in America today. The fact is, for years now the actual unemployment rate in the United States has been PURPOSEFULLY understated by the government. This phenomenon - i.e., the circumstance of hiding the real rate of unemployment - has been occurring for some time now not only in the United States, but in Western Europe and elsewhere throughout the first tier of "client states" in America's New World Order System. It's done in different ways in different countries; but in the end, the result is the same: the true rate of unemployment is being persistently concealed from the public at large.
The pandemonium which companies like Cargill, Con-Agra, Archer Daniels Midland, etc. have unleashed on rural America is responsible for the loss of over 1 million small to medium-sized farms since 1980. Indeed, in one twelve month period in the late 1980s more than 1 million people were forced from their land. In 1996 alone, 10,000 families in Oklahoma (one-sixth of all farm families in the state) lost their farms through bankruptcies and foreclosure. And it’s not just that; for those who manage to hold on, it often means holding on in grinding, unending poverty and a constant struggle just to meet the day-to-day necessities of life. The fact is, while only 20 to 25 percent (depending on who one counts as "rural") of the U.S. population live in rural areas, 38 percent of all people living in poverty live there. Sixty-seven percent of the nation’s substandard housing is rural, and 27 percent of the children in rural America are growing up hungry, forced to live in destitution even though the parents of most of them work. As a result a vast revolutionary movement has taken root in America’s heartland which most Americans know very little about - a movement which is, in both its breath and scope, far greater and much more massive than urban Americans have been led to believe, and one which is unalterably committed to overthrowing America’s present government which those in "the movement" see as being dominated by corporate, globalist elites which are committed to destroying rural America economically and culturally.
It’s difficult today for most Christians - especially evangelicals - to understand with any degree of appreciation the kind of "Racial Christianity" which was practiced in Africa, India, and portions of Asia by the great majority of European and American missionaries - Catholics and Protestants alike - during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, notwithstanding some very notable exceptions to the contrary. The fact is, it was pervasive, widespread and its effects long-lasting and extremely pernicious - so much so that its consequences are even today - almost eighty years later - easily discernible in much of the "ethnic" strife which at present is ripping Africa apart (to say nothing of India and parts of Asia). The specific culprit insofar as Africa was concerned was a kind of racism which combined in itself a strange and eccentric mixture of various passages of Scripture which had been thoroughly distorted and gnarled, and then grotesquely tied to bizarre evolutionary theories which postulated that black Africans were somewhat lower on the evolutionary scale than whites - an evolutionism which is, in reality, not that much different from what J. Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario in Canada is "pushing" today (see page 12 this journal). This freakish mixture of evolutionism and Scripture was known as the "Hamitic Hypothesis."
What a horrible and repugnant history the CIA - which, one must always bear in mind, is the HANDMAIDEN to the elites - has with drug trafficking! It reads like a history of the Mafia.
On April 19, 2004, President George W. Bush nominated John Negroponte to become U.S. Ambassador to Iraq following the projected June 30, 2004, handover of sovereignty to as yet undetermined Iraqi authorities. The Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Dick Lugar (R-Ind) is backing the nomination and has indicated that he will work closely with Secretary of State Colin Powell to provide a prompt public hearing for Negroponte.
Evangelicals need to clearly understand that the ideological origins of the CNP are not to be found in the theology of old-line evangelical Christianity, but in the gloom and shadows which spin and whirl around belief in the Illuminist Conspiracy and in the reactionary fascist, racist and anti-Semitic circles of the Political Right. Russ Bellant, an investigative reporter, traces the conspiracist impulses behind the Council on National Policy (CNP) [the agency established by Religious Right leader Tim LaHaye to coordinate the activities between the Political Right and the Religious Right] back to the murky ideas which surround Illuminism. He writes, "The view on the Radical Right that an organization such as the CNP was needed stemmed from their perception that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) - closely identified with the Rockefeller family - was selling out American interests in the pursuit of a ... left-wing foreign policy agenda." Indeed, there can be little doubt that the obsession of the CNP towards the activities of the CFR and the Rockefellers stems in part from the fixation of certain of its members on the Illuminist Conspiracy [Both the CFR and the Rockefeller family are main players in the mythology of Illuminism.] - and we don’t have to rely merely on conjecture or Bellant to substantiate such a conclusion: Pat Robertson clearly makes the connection in his 1991 best seller, The New World Order.
Over the last few decades, a new, worldwide economic system has developed that has reduced most people in the world to little more than cogs in a giant economic machine, one that is totally impersonal and lies COMPLETELY outside their immediate control, making them PRISONERS to it and shackling them to its peculiar universe more tightly than any prisoner was ever chained to the walls of his prison cell. "Subsistence farming," which most people throughout the earth had been engaged in until the turn of the last century (1899-1900), and which - though it provided only a meager existence compared to what capitalism can provide, had at least provided a certain amount of economic independence - has gone the way of the "Do-Do Bird." It has become extinct! Economic independence, even in "Third World" countries, is a thing of the past. The words, "You're fired" have taken on a terrifying and ghastly meaning they NEVER had before. To those millions and millions of workers in the First World - and most particularly in the United States - who have lost their jobs to the "cheap labor" factories the SYSTEM has set up in the "Third World," it means the system has REJECTED them. They have now become "SURPLUS POPULATION!" "THROW-AWAYS!" And for people in the Third World, those words can mean starvation and death, especially as First World agri-businesses like Carnac, Mitsui/Cook, and Cargill move in and "buy up" the land that "subsistence farmers" had used over the years to earn a living - forcing them off the land and into the teeming slums of Lagos in Nigeria, Cairo in Egypt, and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
"One result of the Reformation was that the Bible - not church authority, and most especially not an ecclesiastical caste of paid professionals - was made the sole source from which all divine authority flowed (Sola Scriptura). The practical outcome of this for Christians everywhere was twofold: on the one hand, they were freed from the tyranny, superstition, and oppression of Rome; but on the other hand, with freedom came individual responsibility before God.
Bible speaks of a great "Latter Day" nation that shall rise up at the "end of the age;" a nation that will glorify herself as a dazzlingly beautiful QUEEN (Rev. 18:7), but a nation that the Bible says is -
"... DREADFUL and TERRIBLE, and STRONG EXCEEDINGLY with great iron teeth: that DEVOURS and BRAKES IN PIECES, and stamps the residue (i.e., those who remain) with its feet ..." (Daniel 7:7)
Most Americans are used to thinking that almost any issue can be worked out if people will only sit down and talk. Unfortunately, that is not always the case, and that may be particularly true with regard to the Culture War now being played out in America. Even a liberal like Ronald Dworkin believes that with regard to issues like abortion and homosexuality, there may be no middle ground - and Americans are only kidding themselves in thinking that there is one.
This is the second in a series of articles dealing with the fighting in the Middle East; the first article, Part I [THE REAL ENEMY OF ISRAEL: IT'S NOT WHO YOU THINK, listed under "R"], dealt with the question of who the REAL enemy of Israel is in the Middle East. Part II, this article, deals with the Scriptural basis for Israel in God's "Plan and Purpose in the Ages" - especially as it relates to the fighting that is currently raging in the Middle East over the question of Jerusalem. These two parts (i.e., Part I and Part II) form the basis for all the articles that follow. We urge you, therefore, to study these articles. If you don't, you will most assuredly lose your way in the articles that follow them.
Once again, this is a long article; but it is an EXTREMELY important one - especially in light of what's been happening in the Middle East. It has required an extensive amount of time and effort to write. In reading it, you should not skip around: each section builds on the previous one, and if you jump around, you may very well get lost. In addition, links are provided to previous articles that reinforce the content of this article. The article is divided into five parts. Part I, "A Cup of Trembling," deals with the re-emergence of anti-Semitism as a powerful force in world politics; it also describes the new anti-Zionism that is spreading like a wildfire throughout Europe and in certain parts of this country as well (most particularly in the liberal left and on college campuses); finally it details the irreconcilable differences that exist between Israel and the Islamic world that are pushing both sides irresistibly toward war with one another. Part II. "God's Unconditional Promises to Israel," deals with the nature of God's relationship with Israel. You are urged to read this section carefully because it forms the theological foundation for much that will follow. Part III, "A Covenant with Death and Hell," describes the relationship between Israel and the United States. Unlike what you might imagine, it is not a relationship that the Scriptures have glossed over, but one that is treated in great detail by the Word of God; it also deals at length with what the Scriptures say concerning the upcoming war in the Middle East. Part IV, "The Making of a Messiah," deals with the anti-Christ and his relationship to Israel, the United States, and - sadly - the American Evangelical community. Finally, Part V, "The Tribulation," deals with the Tribulation Period, and what it will mean in YOUR life. I urge you with all of my heart to read this article carefully. It may very will change your life forever.
Most of us remain blissfully ignorant as to how important a matter money is to us until our financial security is endangered. It’s only when our finances are threatened that we become aware of how important it is to us; how much it commands our thinking, our planning, the careers we choose, the way we lead our lives, the personal life-styles we adopt, etc. - indeed, how enormously it dominates our every waking moment. And this is true not only with unbelievers, but, sadly, it's true with us as Christians as well. The reality is, no matter how spiritual some of us pretend to be, nothing so frightens us - nothing "brings us down to earth" so fast - as the threat of losing our financial security. Would it surprise you, then, to learn that it is precisely on this point that all of us may soon be tested?
The Jesus Revolution! - it was, as one former member of Shiloh Ministry put it, the "best of times," and the "worst of times;" and for a great number of those who lived through it, it was - for good or bad - the spiritual "high water mark" of their lives - an experience not unlike that which many combat veterans experience after having participated in some great, magnificent and noble "cause" too early in life. It leaves the rest of one’s life as an anti-climax to the grand adventures of those earlier years. For many, nothing in the twenty or so years since has come close to creating the thrill, the "meaning to life," the vibrant community of close, intimate friends, etc. which those times produced. Indeed, those who participated in the "revolution" felt that they had been caught up in a great "cause" - a "crusade" which was bigger than their own individual lives and which had, as a result, excited in them an exhilarating and reckless abandon that had stimulated a sheer "delight of living" and "electricity to life" which the money and "success" of their later years (if, indeed, there had been any) had not been able to replicate. Unfortunately, however, their experience with the "Jesus Revolution" left many of them with a quiet - even unconscience - disdain and scorn for "normal Christianity," the kind of pew-sitting, meet-you-at-church-on-Sunday-morning Christianity with which most evangelical Christians are familiar. To most of the veterans of the "Jesus Revolution," this type of Christianity is nothing more than a rather pathetic, pitiful shadow of the kind of church-life they had experienced during the "revolution." Try as they will to rid themselves of such "unbecoming" sentiments, the lingering nature of these feelings has created in many of them a never-ending and morose melancholy - a wistful longing for the "purpose in life" and the friendships that they had experienced so many years ago - and all this despite the fact that, in the end, the revolution had ravaged and wasted most of them, leaving countless numbers of them thrown up on a myriad of lonely beaches - as it were - like so much flotsam and jetsam from an ancient shipwreck. Indeed, the "oxymoronic," "dichotomous," "love-hate" way that many of them talk about their experience is a source of continual amazement to those who never went through the "revolution." On the one hand, the bitterness which spills out from them as a result of what most of them now consider to be the failure of the "revolution" (at least as it impacted their personal lives) is psychologically shattering to those brothers, sisters, wives, husbands and friends who have to sit and listen to them rant endlessly on, but who never experienced the "Jesus upheaval" first-hand. Yet, in the midst of their bitterness, most of these ex-revolutionaries seem quite unconsciencely to exhibit a certain wistful yearning about their participation in the "revolution" which is both extremely sad and, at the same time, very disquieting. It’s a dichotomy which most "normal people" are simply unable to understand and which, as a result, has left most of the "Jesus revolutionists" that much more isolated and cut-off from their peers in what passes today as "normal Christianity."
Today, in three of the earth’s eight great civilizations - civilizations which increasingly are finding themselves at one another’s throat, specifically, (1) Western Christianity, (2) Orthodoxy, and (3) the Islamic World - anti-Semitism has re-awakened, like some hideous phoenix, and has become a major "player" among each civilization’s radical right-wing champions. It seems that it has fallen to the Jews once again the bad luck of playing the villain in the "civilization drama" of all three cultures - and the incongruity of each feuding civilization choosing as its main villain the same "player" matters little to the right-wing partisans of each respective civilization. It is a unique situation where the old saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" does not apply. And the role assigned to the Jews in the mythology of these right-wingers? - they are the hated "globalists," the intellectual force behind multiculturalism, the bankers and financiers driving the economic integration of the world [Please see "The Elite, Money, and the End of Days"], the media moguls responsible for the destruction of "traditional values," the destroyers of the old Orthodox World through communism and socialism, and - finally - the Islamic World’s "Zionist Specter" - a "nightmlare" which has even "seized control of 'Holy Jerusalem'."
Recently, the nation's top lawyer appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court and argued the proposition that the government has the right to LIE to the American public in instances where "the greater good is served." What? - the government has a right to lie? Is this what George Bush's Solicitor-General, Theodore Olson, actually said? Yes! - that's EXACTLY what he said.
Carrie McLaren writes in the magazine, Stay Free:
"In the sci-fi film They Live, urban drifter John Nada unwittingly discovers that a hideous cabal is secretly ruling America ... Nada happens upon special sunglasses that allow him to ... (see the hidden messages of the cabal). More importantly ... he can see that business people and government leaders - who appear to be human - are, in fact, aliens."
Referring to the United States, McLaren continues:
"They Live, as goofy as it is, makes sense in a way (with regard to what's happening in America today) ... (However) the powers that be are (not aliens) but real people and they are not sustained by secret teams of evildoers but BY EVERY DAY INSTITUTIONS AND THEIR STAFFS. Peer behind most conspiracies and you will find people just 'doing their jobs'."
Is that what you're doing today? - just doing your job?
As we indicated in our last journal, [Vol. 8, No. 3 (March 27, 1999)], the real reason behind the elite establishment's strategic "tilt" towards the Muslims in the Balkans is oil - and not just Middle Eastern oil, [where American and British multinationals (Exxon, Shell, Mobil, etc.) have billions and billions of dollars invested], but also Caspian Sea oil (where the same multinationals are preparing to spend billions more in pipelines which they plan to build across Turkey and / or in countries close to Turkey - and all this to say nothing of the additional billions these same multinationals are spending in drilling rights and pumping operations in Azerbaijan, a country contiguous to Turkey which is populated by "Turkik Muslims." The multinationals could very well see all these billions go up in smoke if Turkey - which has a growing problem with militantly anti-American Islamic fundamentalists - were destabilized as a result of being drawn into the conflict in the Balkans; hence America's "tilt" towards the Muslims and Turkey - a "tilt" which, again, necessarily demands that the elite "play down" the religious aspect of the war while at the same time "demonizing" the Serbs (i.e., the Orthodox Christians). "Big Oil" must be able to show the Muslims of the Middle East that they can "deliver" American support in this kind of crisis.
Christians have always believed that pestilence and disease would characterize "The End of Days." That's what the Bible says! Most Christians, however, have probably never considered the possibility that many of these diseases might be man-made ones. This appears to be what has happened insofar as Gulf War Syndrome, AIDS, Ebola and countless other "new" diseases are concerned.
Take, for example, "Gulf War Syndrome." The government denies that it exists - and if it does exist, it resulted from the use by the Iraqi military of chemical and biological agents during the Gulf War. But a growing number of scientists throughout the world now believe that not only does "Gulf War Syndrome" exist, but that it hasn't resulted from the use by the Iraqis of chemical and biological weapons, but from the use by the American military of depleted uranium (DU) weapons. What put scientific researchers on to this was the mysterious presence of higher than normal readings for U-235 in Kuwait and Iraq after the end of the Gulf War. The question naturally presented itself, what could account for these readings? No atomic warheads had been used during the war. Then in 1993, Eric Hoskins produced a report for a Harvard research group which found that 40 tons of DU had been dispersed in Iraq and Kuwait by American forces using depleted uranium weapons during the war - and it was this that accounted for the above normal reading for the presence of U-235 in Kuwait and Iraq. Now these higher than average readings for the presence of U-235 are showing up in Serbia and Kosovo. It seems that wherever the U.S. military goes, these higher than normal measurements for fissionable material go with it.
It is not our purpose here to dwell at great length on the impact of the Jewish community's liberal policies on the Orthodox and Islamic worlds. Suffice it to be said that the right-wing, fundamentalist propaganda being produced out of both civilizations (i.e., Orthodoxy and the Islamic world) names the Jews as the main force behind the globalist (i.e., multicultural or liberal) effort to diminish the religious aspects of their civilizations. Interestingly, in the propaganda that's being generated in both the Orthodox and Islamic civilizations, the United States has been painted as the main force behind these efforts - a country which has fallen under the impress of a Jewish clique which operates out of New York and Jerusalem - a cabal of intriguers pushing a secular multiculturalism which is aiming to take control of the world using the United States as its "springboard."
Arundhati Roy, a tireless worker for the poor in India and throughout the world, writes:
"The U.S. government's war ... (to secure its New World Order System) has launched a two-pronged assault on the world. One is a (U.S.) military assault on the Middle East that seeks to redraw the map of that region ... (in order to) establish (its) hegemony over oil. The other is an assault on the intelligence of the human race. IT'S NOT THE LIES WE ARE BEING TOLD, BUT THE QUALITY OF THOSE LIES THAT IS TRULY INSULTING."
And she is right. The lies - while staggering in the sheer quantity of them - are so blatantly spurious that one wonders how anyone could possible buy into them. Take, for example, the belief pushed by Bush's evangelical Christian followers, that in making war on Iraq, Bush is - in the words of Don Evans, the president's Commerce Secretary, and John Ashcroft, the president's Attorney General - "doing the Lord's work."
American troops and material continue to pour into the Middle East despite the frantic, almost hysterical efforts of France, Germany, Russia and China to prevent the by-now almost certain U.S. attack against Iraq. It seems that nothing that these nations can do or threaten to do has been able to dissuade Bush from his planned war in the Middle East - not their vetoes in the United Nations' Security Council, not world opinion (which is running overwhelmingly against the attack), not even the disruption of NATO - not anything.
President Bush has written: "I build my life on a foundation that will not shift. My faith frees me. Frees me to put the problem of the moment in proper perspective. FREES ME TO MAKE DECISIONS THAT OTHERS MIGHT NOT LIKE ..." One of these "decisions" that people "might not like" (but one that Bush and his business cohorts and banker friends feel is the "RESPONSIBLE" thing to do) is a measure aimed at modifying the bankruptcy laws. Bush justifies the change with rhetoric straight out of the lexicon of the Religious Right, the kind that vilifies the poor as irresponsible failures whose indolence and inertia are responsible for their destitution, and treats bankers and creditors as paragons of virtue whose wealth is proof positive of their moral superiority.
It is an unfortunate fact of life insofar as today's Christianity is concerned that most of us have been trained as "hearers," but not as "doers;" "observers," but not as "participants;" "pew sitters" but not as active, vibrant members of the Christian community. We have an "audience" mentality; not a "participant" mentality. We've been trained "to listen," not "to act." Indeed, the rather bizarre fact of the matter is, many of us think that by hearing and listening we have done everything that is required of us. We've come to believe that "doing" is something for the "professionals;" it has nothing to do with us. Our job is simply to act as an audience for the "professionals," and to say "amen" at appropriate times.
But that's NOT what Christianity is all about. The church belongs to ALL the saints. And the responsibility for the church rests on ALL our shoulders, not just simply on the shoulders of the "paid professionals." We've ALL been called as "doers." The Bible says,
"... be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves." (James 1:22)
In 1997, Ford Motor Company took a U.S. taxpayer subsidy of $1.5 billion; Chrysler, $966.2 million; General Motors, 899.5 million; Philip Morris, $603.1 million; Berkshire Hathaway, $489.2 million; GTE, $441.2 million; Mobil Oil, $439.6 million; DuPont, $388.5 million; Bristol-Myers Squibb, $369.8 million; and Merck, $314.3 million. In addition, Archer-Daniels-Midland received "corporate welfare" totaling $1.4 billion; Cargill, $1.3 billion; Boeing, $1 billion; Citibank, $795 million; General Motors, $240 million; Barrick Gold, $200 million; Philip Morris, $40 million; Sea-Land Services, $31.5 million; Xerox, $6 million; Sunkist, $2 million. If all this were added to the compensation packages of the top ten highest paid CEOs in the country [($646.6 million) see article this page], the tax breaks of ten of the largest corporations in the country ($6.4 billion), and the "corporate welfare" another ten of the biggest U.S. corporation have managed to wrangle for themselves, it would amount to almost $13 billion.
To the uninitiated, MK-ULTRA was the CIA's effort at producing a "Manchurian Candidate" - the same kind of assassin who most likely was responsible for the assassinations of not only such Third World leaders as Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Salvadore Allende in Chile, but also JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and the crippling of Alabama governor, George Wallace - all here in the United States. [All of these men - the two Kennedy's, Martin Luther King, and George Wallace - (whether of the political left or the populist right) were considered to be threats to the "established order" of things, i.e., the elite establishments of both the Democratic and Republican parties.] Americans, of course - especially "middle-class Christians" - like to believe that these kinds of things don't go on in the United States. Undoubtedly, they occur in Third World countries, in some European capitals, and - no doubt - in the Middle East, but surely not here. But the Bible says that "We are all sinners" (Romans 3:23) - and Americans are no more immune from these sorts of things than anyone else. The only thing we might be better at is in covering them up. As you read this material, you will be amazed at what's been happening - at what the elites have been up to over the years; and you will be shocked by their unfeeling callousness and cold cynicism.
What follows is a report by George Lardner of the Washington Post on new evidence that has surfaced with regard to the JFK assassination. What the report indicates is that evidence which supported the claim that Kennedy was shot by "unknown" assailants from the front (from the area of the so-called "grassy knoll") rather than from behind (from the Texas Book Depository Building) by Oswald was not only quashed, but "rigged" to show the exact opposite - i.e., that Kennedy was shot by Oswald from behind. Doctors who conducted the autopsy on President John F. Kennedy may have performed two brain examinations in the days following his assassination, possibly of two different brains, a staff report for the Assassinations Records Review Board said.
Today we all - Christian and non-Christian alike - stand at the edge of a financial precipice. It's just a matter of time before we all fall off - precipitating a panic for which we are ill prepared. How we - as Christians - react to this panic will determine our future, both now and in the world to come - either to honor or to dishonor. Two paths lay open before us: one path leads into apostasy; the other leads to a transformed life. The path we choose will reveal us for what we really are - children of this world, or children of the kingdom heaven. Unbelievers will be looking at us to see how we react to the turmoil to come. If we panic and join the mob in its stampede for an easy way out - for renewed financial security - then we will be led straight into the arms of the "coming world-ruler." But if we can say with the prophet Habakkuk: "Though the fig tree may not blossom, Nor fruit be on the vines; Though the labor of the olive may fail, And the fields yield no food; Though the flock be cut off from the fold, And there be no herd in the stalls - "YET I WILL REJOICE IN THE LORD, I WILL JOY IN THE GOD OF MY SALVATION." (Habakkuk 3:17-18)
The thought of a Muslim state in the center of the Balkans strikes a certain terror in the hearts of most Europeans who remember Western Christendom’s millennial-long struggle with the Muslims. To Austrians, Germans and other Western Europeans - if not to Americans - it was not such a long time ago that the "Muslim terror" stretched all the way up to the gates of Vienna and threatened the heart of "Christian" Europe with destruction and ruin.
In his investigation of private spies, author Jim Hougan learned that Nelson Bunker Hunt, the close confidant and fund raiser for such Religious Right luminaries as Tim LaHaye and Pat Robertson, once organized a para-military force called the "American Volunteer Group" which - Hogan alleges - Hunt intended to use, death squad style, against political opponents. Hunt is also a member of the Military and Hospitaller Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem, a racist "brotherhood" modeled after the Hospitalers.
There are countless numbers of people throughout the world who refuse to come to grips with the reality of American economic and military preponderance today. This is particularly true in left-wing, intellectual circles in the United States, and ESPECIALLY IN EUROPE - to say nothing of American Christian circles that stubbornly [and very foolishly (or maybe just stupidly)] refuse to see what America has become - "...a BEAST, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly ... that ... devoures and brakes in pieces, and stamps the ... (people of the earth) with its feet ..." (Dan. 7:7).
The Ponzi scheme which is at the heart of today's investment craze is relentlessly dividing the earth into a world of "haves" and "have nots." The process knows no national boundaries and is at work in both the developed and non-developed worlds. On the one hand, it is creating a worldwide yuppie elite whose extravagance and lavish life-styles seems to know no boundaries of shame and modesty; and on the other hand, it is grinding countless numbers of American workers down into a pit of hopeless poverty and forlorn despair, leaving millions of them in a shrinking job market with declining prospects. And what’s happening to American workers is happening not only to their counterparts in France and Germany, but in Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil as well. The danger today for most workers is seeing "... their jobs getting swamped in the global labor pool ... The worldwide elite which this process is producing [i.e., those lucky few who sit atop today's Ponzi Pyramid] is a dazzling, brilliant group of speculators who are earning fabulous amounts of money not heard of since the days of the so-called "Robber Barons." These are people like Lawrence Coss of Green Tree Financial who earned in one year alone (1997) $102.4 million (that is 4,655 times greater than the average annual wage of an ordinary American worker - which is to say, if money is the measure of a man’s worth, then a man of Coss’s caliber is worth 4,655 times more than a normal, everyday, working American - hardly a vote of confidence for the precepts upon which democracy is based); then there is Andrew Grove of Intel who made $97.6 million in one year; Sanford Weill of the Travelers Group who earned $94.2 million; Theodore Waitt of Gateway 2000 who made $81.3 million; and Anthony O’ Reilly of H.J. Heinz who earned $64.2 million. Others have made similar amounts: Sterling Williams of Sterling Software ($58.2 million); John Reed of Citicorp ($43.6 million); Stephen Hilbert of Conseco ($37.4 million); Casey Cowell of U.S. Robotics [now 3Com ($34 million)]; James Moffett of Freeport-McToRan Copper & Gold ($33.7 million). And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The well-known Italian Christian Giovanni Papine wrote more than three-quarters of a century ago,
"... The prophet is a troublesome ... voice, HATED by the church’s leaders and out of favor with the church’s members. Like a wild, ragged, unkempt coyote scenting from afar the smell of carrion, like a raven always croaking out the same cry, like a ... wolf howling on the mountain top, the prophet travels throughout the church ... followed by suspicion and hatred ... He is ... a man who sees with a troubled heart - but with clear eyes - the compromises the church is making with the world today, and the consequences that will accrue to it tomorrow ... as a result. Like all truthtellers who disturb the slumbering majority and who unsettle the peace of the church’s leadership, he is avoided like a leper, persecuted like an enemy and those with a reputation in the church for ‘being somebody’ detest him. The prophet is an accuser, but today’s Christians do not want to admit their guilt. He is an intercessor, but Christians do not want to be shown their error ... He is an announcer, but Christians do not want to hear ..."
As I look around today - even among those who are biblically
oriented and seem to genuinely grasp what's happening insofar
as the unfolding events of the "end of the age"
are concerned - I am UTTERLY appalled at how ill-prepared
people are both psychologically and spiritually for what awaits
them. There seems to be no way to get through to people; to
convince them that NOW is the time for action, not tomorrow
or the next day or the day after that. Most Christians today
seem to be helpless prisoners of the "here and now,"
and though from time to time they may be excited by a particular
calamity that augurs for the "end of the age" such
as 9-11 or the American invasion of Iraq, once the commotion
of the event dies down, they tend to gravitate back to their
old habits of doing things and their old ways of thinking.
The charge by the President's wife, Hillary, that the current sex scandal against her husband is part of "a vast right-wing conspiracy" that has targeted them is dismissed as nonsense. Indeed, she has been widely criticized - and crudely psychoanalyzed - for uttering the dreaded "C" word (i.e., "Conspiracy") and by doing so, aligning herself with "paranoid conspiracy theorists." What makes this all so amusing, however, is that many of the people who are criticizing her now for using the "C" word are themselves full-time believers in the "Illuminist Conspiracy" - for example, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye. It's evidently "OK" for the right to believe in conspiracies, but not for the left. Nonetheless, there may be more to Hillary's charge than what first meets the eye. The fact is, there are some very strange connections between Starr and the right-wing - connections which are very, very suspicious - indeed, much more so than most evangelical Christians would like to admit.
By "Organized Church" we have particular reference to those churches which have become so large and cumbersome that they have come more to resemble a social organization than anything else - an institution which relies on committees, subcommittees, boards, councils, staffs, groups, cell groups, programs of all types, agendas of all sorts, timetables, and the other accouterments of modern bureaucracies and hierarchies to make it work. This is the direction that the churches in America are headed - from small to big! From unaffected and plain to involved and perplexing! It's the direction of the age! Sadly, the church today is a place where "big" means success and "small" means failure; where numbers count, and simplicity is depreciated. In such systems, people "go along to get along," and conformity is the order of the day. In these kinds of churches, those who refuse to conform - who deem principle to be more worthy than accommodating oneself to the current of the age - it's not so much a question that they will have to decide to leave, as it is that if they try to remain faithful to their persuasions and refuse to be silent about them, they will be "invited" to leave - and, as time goes on, maybe much worse. Why is this so? - because the present-day "Organized Church" is caught up in the same process of "globalization" as is today's political and economic world. The truth is, EVERYTHING IS MOVING IN THIS DIRECTION!! - our business corporations; our politics; our nations, our cultures and now even our churches. It's a direction which leads to a place where "Group Speak" and "Consensus" are the watchwords of the day; where "ACCOUNTABILITY" (i.e., "group accountability) and HIERARCHY are practiced in an overbearing and even despotic manner (as for example in the churches of Jack Hayford, D. James Kennedy, the late John Wimber, etc.). These are places where parishioners are told that they do not possess the spiritual wherewithal to understand the Scriptures themselves and that, therefore, their job is simply to obey their leaders and shut up.
Illuminati enthusiasts and devotees like to paint the myth as extending back into the misty past, but that simply is not the case. The Illuminati Myth did not exist as literature prior to the French Revolution - and even then only as disjointed pieces, not as a consistent whole. Not until 1905 did the myth explode on the world as a coherent body of literature. What anti-Semitic writings that did exist prior to 1797 had nothing to do with the Jews as participants in a revolutionary world-conspiracy aimed at the destruction of Christianity; it was largely confined to religious themes with only the most indirect political overtones. Clearly, the anti-Semitic literature which existed prior to 1797 tied the Jews to the death of Christ, and on that basis they were persecuted; it also pictured them as "moneylenders," and occasionally it linked them to the practice of witchcraft; but it never portrayed them as revolutionaries bent on the conquest of the world. On the contrary, Jews were painted as weaklings and cowards; a people hardly worth even the most indirect kind of political attention - and for that reason, most European armies excluded Jews from military service well into the nineteenth century. The first disjointed pieces of the Illuminati Myth can be traced back to the French Revolution, specifically to the French cleric, the Abbe Barruel. [Please see Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (New York: Harper and Row)] As early as 1797, nine years after the revolution, Barruel, in his five-volume Memoire pour servir a l’histoire du Jacobinisme, argued that the French Revolution represented the culmination of an age-old conspiracy of the most secret of secret societies. Down through the centuries this secret society had purportedly poisoned a number of monarchs; and in the eighteenth century it had captured the Order of Freemasons [here, Robertson’s Juden-frei rendition parallels the original unswervingly (please see pgs. 67-68 of Robertson's New World Order)]. In 1763, the conspiracy supposedly created a secret literary academy consisting of Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, Diderot, d’Alembert and other luminaries of the "French Enlightenment." This group of men ostensibly met regularly in the house of Baron d’Holbach and through its publications had undermined all morality and true religion in France [parallels pg. 67, Robertson's New World Order]. From 1776 onward, Barruel maintained, Condorcet and the Abbe Sieyes had built up a vast revolutionary organization of half a million Frenchmen who were the "Jacobins" of the French Revolution. But the heart of the conspiracy - the real leadership of the revolution - was supposed to rest in a Bavarian group known as the Illuminati under the headship of a certain Adam Weishaupt [parallels pg. 67, Robertson's New World Order]. To this handful of Germans, all the Freemasons and Jacobins of France owed blind allegiance - or so Barruel thought.
The fear of a hidden conspiracy directed against Western Civilization, Christianity, and the "American free enterprise system" is a recurring theme which runs through and permeates the entire Right-Wing matrix. Its being peddled by leaders in the New Right to Americans desperate for an easily understood reason as to why their European, Christian-based culture has seemingly been stripped from them by "secular humanists" and replaced by what is perceived to be an "amoral" multiculturalism with which few of them can easily relate. It’s most extreme expression has taken the form of the Illuminati Myth; its most moderate version is the "Secular-Humanist Conspiracy." The first version names the Jews and the Freemasons as the principle villains; the second names the liberal establishment. In both instances, Communism and Socialism are the tools through which the hidden cabal (i.e., the Jews and the Freemasons in the one instance, the secular-humanists in the other) hopes to achieve its goal of world domination. In reality, the second version is nothing more than a sanitized and less offensive version of the first - one which has been "cleaned up" to suit the sensibilities of moderate conservatives.
Many Christians, of course, will find it difficult to come to any meaningful understanding of a man - Robertson - who can, on the one hand, have a black co-host for his flagship TV program, the 700 club and who also is an enthusiastic supporter of the nation of Israel, while on the other hand he embraces the anti-Semitic concepts inherent in the "Illuminist Myth" and maintains a close relationship with a man - Tom Ellis - who is (or has been) a director for the Pioneer Fund. How does one balance a Tom Ellis against a Ben Kinchlow?
In recent years the intensity of the attacks on those who are standing against the Christian "unity movement" has grown enormously. These people aren’t waiting for the appearance of a Messiah; indeed, quite the opposite - they believe that the earth must first be taken before the Messiah can appear or "come back." The seizure of the earth is, therefore, imperative - by force if necessary! And in order to carry out this "seizure," Christians must first unite. This is the impetus behind the new Christian ecumenicism! Theology doesn’t matter! Politics are everything! Take one example, Paul Crouch of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). Crouch has said, "... that old rotten Sanhedrin crowd (i.e., those who oppose the "unity movement" for doctrinal reasons - for instance, those who allege the incompatibility of Catholic and evangelical theology), twice dead, plucked up by the roots ... they’re damned and on their way to hell and I don’t think there’s any redemption for them ... the hypocrites, the heresy hunters that want to find a little mote of illegal doctrine in some Christian’s eyes ... when they’ve got a whole forest in their own lives ... I say, to hell with you! Get out of my life! Get out of the way! Quit blockin’ God’s bridges (of ecumenicism)! I’m tired of this! ... This is in my spirit. Oh Hallelujah ...
Fascination with the phallus [i.e., the erect male sexual organ (penis) as it appears just prior to penetration of the female vagina] was common in the ancient world. Indeed, "penis worship" is the basis of nearly all pagan worship - even today - and is especially associated with concepts of male domination and male aggression. Sadly, this disgusting phenomenon is making an astonishing comeback - and not simply in pagan circles, but in evangelical circles as well. Take, for example, Robert Hicks, a well-known speaker and teacher in the Promise Keepers movement, an ecumenical men’s movement that has been sweeping the country and bringing together Catholics and evangelicals for the ostensible purpose of strengthening the country by re-establishing male "headship" in the "... family, community and nation (please see page 31)." Hicks suggests that Jesus was a "phallic kind of guy" - i.e. that He was stimulated sexually and that He possessed an aggressive sex drive.
The Pioneer Fund was established as a charitable trust on February 27, 1937 in New York City. Harry H. Laughlin, Frederick Osborn and textile magnate Wickliffe Draper were the principle founders. The Fund’s stated purpose was to "improve the character of the American people" by encouraging the procreation of descendants of "white persons" and to provide aid in conducting research on "race betterment with special reference to the people of the United States." The current president of the Pioneer Fund is a shadowy figure named Harry F. Weyher, a financier and corporate lawyer who eschews interviews and runs the Fund without pay or staff from his offices in New York; he is assisted in his work by four other "Trustees" - one of whom has been Tom Ellis, a close associate of Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye in the Council on National Policy (CNP), the principle coordinating agency in bringing together various members of the religious right with the business right and the political right. All serve without pay and staff.
Islamic Fundamentalism surfaced in Iran as a counterweight to the influence of what was perceived to be a foreign culture, but which was in fact the process of globalization. It was "the people’s" answer to what "the people" considered to be the increasing "westernization" of Iranian society. It wasn’t a sudden impulse to "find God" that drove the people back to their religion, as it was that their culture, which was under siege, gathered them back to her "ancient fountains and primeval groves" in her defense. So long as the culture was not threatened, the mosques could remain relatively empty, the religious trappings left to decay; but once the "people" perceived that their culture was in danger of collapse because of the impress of a foreign one, then the people returned to the mosque, and Islam resurfaced with a vengeance. There is an ominous parallel to all this today in the United States. Today’s "secular state" may resemble nothing so much as a devout priest stripped of his clerical frock and dressed up as a modern businessman - but a priest nonetheless. It isn’t necessarily the clerical garb that makes the priest, as it is his inner disposition of mind. One may strip a man of his garments and alter his outward appearance, but it is a far more difficult task to strip him of the way he thinks and to alter his inner most being.
In December 1919 a certain Mr. Luigi Ponzi of New York initiated an "investment" scheme in which he put up $150 dollars and got ten friends to do the same. He promised his friends a 50% return on their "investment" in 90 days. He then got a second set of friends, many times larger than the first, to put up similar amounts and promised them the same "return on investment" that he had promised the original group of "investors." With the money he collected from the second set of "investors," he paid the first set back their $150 dollars plus the promised 50% "return" ($75 dollars). Naturally, the original investors were thrilled and enthusiastically began promoting the scheme. The process was quickly repeated with the second set of "investors" - and rapidly mushroomed from there. The intrigue was simplicity itself: give Ponzi money and in 90 days (and usually much sooner than that) he would give you your money back plus 50%, plus 10% to the recruiter. There was only one problem with the scheme: while the originators and early participants were handsomely paid off from the cash flow of those they recruited, the last ones who were brought into the scheme found that there was no one left to be recruited, and the cash flow stopped - leaving them "holding the bag." Before the scheme broke down, however (in May of 1920 - six months after it began), Ponzi had made more than a million dollars. Whether Ponzi knew it or not, what he had done was formulate or give expression - so to speak - to much of the thinking which lies behind today’s New World Economic Order. The driving motivation behind the scheme, from top to bottom, was greed. Everyone - from Ponzi on down to the last "investor" recruited - knew that in the end someone would be left "holding the bag;" that people would get hurt; and that some would be hurt very badly. They didn’t care! - just so long as it wasn’t them. Most who involved themselves in the scheme felt that they could get "in and out" of the pyramid before it collapsed - and "to hell" with those who were "dumb" enough to get caught. Needless to say, it took very cold-hearted people to push the scheme, and very greedy and selfish-minded ones to participate. The scheme Ponzi devised is today called a "Ponzi Pyramid."
Prophecy is like a road sign saying: "Slow down, sharp right hand turn ahead!" But if we fail to heed the sign, if we fail to slow down before we get to the turn, it will be too late to brake once we finally get there, and we will surely slide off the road and crash. Like a road sign, prophecy tells us things before they