Nothing Is Shocking

There is no shock any longer. We've had to invent novel sins (such as "racism" and "homophobia") into order to preserve our capacity for outrage, and therefore the thrill of violation. For this reason there are Jewish Nazis. The swastika for them is a sexual talisman, evoking concupiscence when the taboo is dead from continual transgression. Eventually, all such prurience ends in boredom & impotence. This impotence spawned the Marquis de Sade. When one becomes acclimated to de Sade, there is only either madness, or Faith.

War of the Babies by Gary Brecher

This articles was originally published in Taki's Magazine on May 6, 2008.

What was the most important battle of the late 20th century? You could argue it was the one that took place on the southern border of Morocco on November 6, 1975. Of course, we’re not talking about another Stalingrad here. In fact, what happened that day isn’t usually called a battle at all. Its official name is “The Green March.” On one side were 350,000 unarmed Moroccan civilians carrying green (Islamic) flags, and on the other -- miles inside the border, because they were hoping not to have to confront any of the marchers -- was a shaky, demoralized token force of Spanish troops pretending to defend a former Spanish colony, the Spanish Sahara.

The Spanish Sahara hangs below Morocco where the Sahara meets the Atlantic like a crumbling brick wall. It was about the least desirable chunk of coastal Africa around, with no water to speak of and a tiny population, which is why the Spanish got it. By the time the European powers were ready to divide up Africa in the late nineteenth century, Spain had long since lost its glory and tended to get the scraps and leftovers.

But one thing we’ve learned over the last century is that on this crowded, hungry planet, there’s no such thing as worthless land. Spanish Sahara has proven that: in the 30 years it’s belonged to Morocco, big money has been made from the fishing off the coast and the huge phosphate mine at Bou Craa, a hundred miles inland.

That’s why the Moroccan King Hassan II, a wily old sultan with friends in the CIA, decided it was worth his while to ship all those loyal subjects down to Morocco’s southern border, hand out little green flags for the cameras, and send them across the border toward those Spanish troops.

The Moroccans had to think outside the traditional military-conquest box, for the simple reason that Morocco’s armed forces are pathetic. They’re so bad their only contributions to military history have been in the “slapstick comedy” department. For instance, the Minister of Defense once tried to have fighters from the Moroccan Air Force kill Hassan II by shooting down his Boeing 727 as it came home from a foreign trip. They failed. Seriously: jet fighters failed to intercept and destroy a big, fat, slow civilian airliner even when they knew its exact flight path. A military like that pretty much has to resort to unarmed conquest, because its chances in a fair fight are zero.

Of course the Moroccans had the advantage of facing a weak, dispirited colonial Spain just at the moment the Spanish dictator, General Franco, finally got around to dying. If you’re old enough to recall those early SNL seasons, you probably remember Chevy Chase’s running joke, “This just in: General Franco still dead!” The reason that joke worked is that it took the old General a long time to die, and that meant that greedy up-and-coming regional powers like Morocco had plenty of time to plan ways of getting their hands on former Spanish colonies.

It may not have been very exciting for combat fans, but it was an extremely effective invasion. The Spanish troops didn’t fire a shot. The marchers walked over the border, got sand in their shoes, shouted about how this sacred patch of waterless, flat desert was now an integral part of the Kingdom of Morocco, and went back home. And since then, the Spanish Sahara has been dominated by Morocco, although the local guerrilla army, POLISARIO, gave them some serious problems for a while.

What makes this weird episode my nominee for “Most Significant Battle of the Era” is that it showed the new way of winning disputed territory. If there’s one thing that we should have learned over the past hundred years, it’s that traditional armed conquests are getting less and less effective. This is one of the most surprising twists in all military history. All through the nineteenth century, the European powers, led by the British and French, took the land they wanted on the grounds that they had better military technology, transport and organization. Locals who disputed that notion tended to disappear as casualties of inevitable progress. And that was just an updated version of what had been happening all over the world for thousands of years: bigger, stronger tribes displace and wiped out weaker tribes whenever they could. That was the norm, even in pre-contact North America, where the Navajo were displacing the Ute in the American Southwest long before the white guys showed up.

Now, even though the balance in conventional warfare is if anything tilting further toward the first world, the technologically advanced and organized countries are in retreat, and the former victims are pushing back, not just claiming their old territories but infiltrating the former colonizers’ countries. What matters now is morale, national will. The Spanish didn’t have it, and the Moroccans did. So even though the Spanish troops could have wiped out those unarmed marchers, they failed to open fire. Weapons are only weapons if you’re willing to use them. A technologically advanced army without the will to fire is no army at all.

Only us dedicated war nerds seem to realize how weird this is, how totally unprecedented in military history. Until the 20th century, the problem wasn’t usually getting militarily superior forces to open fire -- it was getting them to stop before the weaker tribe, army or country was totally wiped out. I don’t know of a single case, before the 20th century, of a militarily superior tribe or nation lacking the will to defend its territory, or for that matter, take the territory of weaker neighbors.

The 20th century was the big turning point. New powers like Germany and Japan tried to imitate the older colonial powers of the 19th century and suffered total, disastrous defeat, even though they usually prevailed on the battlefield. That’s the weird lesson of the two world wars: military superiority in the narrow sense just doesn’t cut it any more. Despite the total battlefield dominance of the Wehrmacht (and to a lesser extent the Imperial Japanese forces), Germany and Japan ended the war not just without additional territory but with their home territories in ruins, their cultures gelded, their birthrates for generations to come among the lowest in the world.

Even the older colonial powers, Britain and France, finished the century in big trouble, without the will to resist the immigrants from the colonies they’d once ruled. We’re at a very strange moment militarily: our weapons still work but our will is gone.

The colonies that were established earliest are the most successful. For example, northern North America, now the U.S. and Canada, passed into permanent possession of the European settlers (or so it seemed, until recently). Two things determined this: first, they were settled in the 17th and 18th century, before conscience set in, and because most of the native population had been relatively tiny groups of hunter-gatherers (which also holds true for Australia, though it was settled much later). Everywhere else -- in Latin America, Africa, Asia -- the locals have been pushing back the colonizers without coming close to what old-style military theorists would call military superiority. That’s what we’re seeing now in South Africa, and more slowly in Europe and the southern United States. In other places, especially those colonized by the French (who were never as good at it as the Brits), huge colonial populations were totally eliminated, like the million-plus French residents of Algeria.

So there’s a shocking lesson that military buffs have been slow to face: military superiority doesn’t matter nearly as much right now as birthrate and sheer ruthless will.

Ah, birth rate -- funny how it’s become such a taboo subject for both Left and Right. The Lefties wouldn’t dream of telling third-world people to limit their baby-making, and most right wingers can’t bring themselves to endorse birth control even if it could slow the destruction of their own countries.

So birth rate is a weapon without a counter-weapon right now. So it tends to win. The Moroccans made it clear that the Green March was all about birth rate. The number of “volunteers” they sent to the border was 350,000, exactly the number of births per year in Morocco. So this was basically a ”Lebensraum” argument like the one the Germans tried earlier in the century. You might have heard about that one, a little dust-up called the Eastern Front. And you might be saying right now that if any policy ever failed decisively, it was the Nazis’ attempt to elbow themselves a little living space from Stalin. Which is totally true. But the Nazis tried it the old-fashioned way, with armed conquest.

To succeed in the post-1918 world, the world Woodrow Wilson dreamed up where “small nations” have rights even if they can’t defend them, you need to use slower, less obviously military methods, like birthrate and immigration. The classic example of this kind of slow conquest is Kosovo. The Serbs could always defeat the Albanians on the battlefield, even when outnumbered, but the Albanians had a huge advantage in the most important military production of all -- babies. According to the BBC, the birthrate of Kosovo Albanians 50 years ago was an amazing 8.5 children per woman.

The Serb/Albanian conflict offers damn near perfect lab conditions to prove my case that birth rate trumps military prowess these days, because the Serbs always beat the Albanians in battle, yet they’ve lost their homeland, Kosovo. Here again, we can blame Woodrow Wilson and his talk about “rights.” In places where tribes hate each other, a tribe that outbreeds its rival will become the majority, even if it can’t fight. So, after generations of skulking at home making babies, letting the Serbs do the fighting, the Albanians finally became the majority in Kosovo and therefore the official "good guys," being oppressed by the official "bad guys," the Serbs. At least that’s the way the nave American Wilsonian types like Clinton saw it. So when the Serbs fought back against an Albanian rebellion in Kosovo, and dared to beat the Albanians, Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs into letting go of Kosovo, the ancient heartland of a Christian nation that had spent its blood holding off the Turks for hundreds of years.

The Kosovo Albanians proved that military skill doesn’t matter, because they tried and failed to conquer Kosovo the old-fashioned way: armed rebellion by the Kosovo Liberation Army. It was a wipeout: local Serb militias, a bunch of tired middle-aged part-timers and cops, crushed the KLA. What happened next is a beautiful illustration of the way losers win these days: the Albanians took the bodies of KLA men who’d been killed in battle, stripped all weapons and ammo from them, and showed them to gullible Western reporters as victims of a Serb “massacre.” It was a massacre, all right, but only because the KLA couldn’t fight worth a damn. Alive and armed, they were a joke; dead and disarmed, they helped win Kosovo by making their side the "victims," which led directly to U.S. military intervention.

To win the way the Albanians won in Kosovo, you need to make a lot of babies. It’s that simple. And to see how it works, you have to drop the namby-pamby liberal idea that people only have babies out of “love.” In lots of places on this planet, baby-making is a form of weapons production.

In some places, it’s open policy. For example, in Palestine there’s an all-out birthrate war going on between the Palestinians and the Israelis. And one of the most frustrating things about this kind of struggle, from the Israeli perspective, is that the worse you make life for the people in the occupied zones, the more kids they have. The Gaza Strip, for instance, has one of the highest fertility rates in the world outside Africa, at 5.6 kids per woman.

The rate for Israeli overall is about 2.8 children per woman, high for a rich country. But the most amazing rates anywhere, even higher than for the Gaza Palestinians, are in the most extreme Zionist groups, the Haredi “ultra-orthodox” Jews. Until recently they averaged eight or nine children per woman. There was actually a big panic in the Israeli settler press when news hit that their rate had dropped to a mere 7.7 kids per woman.

That’s actually higher than the rate for Mali (7.38 per woman), which has the highest birthrate in the world.

The settlers don’t hide the fact that they’re producing as many kids as they can in order to change the demographics of “Greater Israel” in their favor -- above all to make sure the Palestinians never become the majority.

What’s interesting is that there were plenty of voices in the ultra-Orthodox community in favor of using Israel’s military superiority to settle the problem the old-fashioned way, by expelling or wiping out the Palestinians. Those people lost out; their leader, Meir Kahane, was assassinated by an Egyptian cabbie in New York, but he’d lost the debate long before he died. You just can’t get away with those methods these days, not even with every born-again Baptist Zionist in Texas backing you to the hilt.

If you want an example closer to home, just go to Northern Ireland where the Protestant majority the border was designed to maintain has been getting smaller and smaller, thanks to the higher birthrate among Catholics. As of 2001, the Catholics were about 46% of the population, up from 35% in 1961.

But as the dreaded “Catholic Majority” date approaches, a funny thing is happening up in Ulster: the Catholic birth rate is slowing down even faster than the Protestant rate. This always happens when a tribe breaks out of its slums into the middle class. This illustrates one of the real brain-twisters of contemporary demographic struggle: if you really hate the enemy tribe, the best thing you could do would be to make them rich. Rich people don’t have nearly as many kids. Of course there are exceptions like the Ultra-Orthodox Israelis, who are fairly well-off and just dedicated to making as many kids as possible, but generally, money distracts people from starting big families. So the old methods of keeping down the enemy tribe are usually counter productive. If the Ulster hotheads like Ian Paisley had had their way and kept the Catholic s down in the slums, their birthrate over the past 30 years would have been much higher and they’d be ready to stage a Kosovo-style “majority rule” coup like the Albanians did against the Serbs, complete with the USAF blowing up every television tower in Belfast like we did to the ones in Belgrade, just to teach those Serbs a lesson: “No TV till you let your little Albanian brother have Kosovo!”

Makin'em rich is the only way you’re going to settle the kind of conquest-by-immigration we’re seeing now in Europe and North America. Nobody will even say honestly how many illegal immigrants there are in the U.S. right now, but just from what I see driving to work, I’m inclined to go with the higher estimates, something up to 20 million people who snuck in from Mexico and points south looking for work.

As far as I know, nobody’s claiming the Latino immigrants decided to have a lot of kids as a way of reconquering Texas and California, the way the Israeli settlers are doing. La reconquista, if it happens, will be an unforeseen result of rising birth rates and falling death rates for countries like Mexico that are just moving up from the third world to, say, the second-and-a-halfth.

By 1970, Mexico was at that dangerous stage where there’s just enough basic medical care to keep people alive, so death rates are falling sharply, but people are still poor enough to want a lot of kids. Between 1970 and 2000, the Mexican population doubled, from 48 million to 98 million. So on one side of the Rio Grande you had a lot of young poor people, and on the other, a lot of money and companies eager for cheap labor. And a muddy little creek like the Rio Grande wasn’t nearly wide enough to keep those two groups apart.

As the population of Mexico increased and the living standard rose, the fertility rate actually went into an amazing dive, to the point that the rate for Mexican women now is only 2.39 kids per woman, just two places up from Israel’s 2.38.

And the only thing that’s brought the Latino birthrate down -- in their home countries, not among the ones who immigrated to the U.S. -- is getting enough money that peasant families start thinking of themselves as consumers, and get more excited about buying a new truck or a flat-screen TV than having little Jos.

This is all pretty slow to unfold, compared to traditional military conquest. Birth rate takes decades to have an effect; the Albanian victory in Kosovo is the result of birth rates from the mid-20th century. And in some parts of the world, like the US and Europe, immigrants have a history of being absorbed by the locals rather than sticking to the old tribal hatreds in the style of the Balkans and the Middle East. It’s a cultural deal, after all, not racial. Studies of the U.S. Hispanic population show that within a generation or two, most American Hispanics are ranting about policing the borders and keeping those damn immigrants out of the country.

What’s really weird -- and I can testify to this from my own experiences growing up -- is when the local culture infiltrates the immigrants, like the fact that Mexicans in the U.S. are deserting the Catholics and becoming born-again Protestants. Go to any of the younger, feister churchers in the U.S. like the Church of the Nazarene and you’ll see lots of Mexican families with plenty of kids, singing old Scottish hymns in Tex-Mex English. In fact, I ran into a really hilarious article by a U.S. Baptist writer who worried that the Baptist birthrate is going down while the Nazarenes are having babies at a rate of three-plus per woman. So the nightmare scenario that anti-immigrant bloggers are always predicting, where the U.S. turns into one giant Mexico, might end up being true in what you might call “racial” terms -- I mean, your second-grade class photo might be two-thirds Hispanic -- but those Hispanic faces would have absorbed a whole born-again American world picture that actually comes from the Scots-Irish who settled the American south hundreds of years ago.

This is one point where people’s anxiety over these slow, demographic conquests splits according to their real fears: do you just not want to see that kind of face when you go outside, or do you not want to import the culture of the immigrants’ home country? The whole debate right now is so censored, so totally dishonest on both sides, that nobody will come clean about which it is. I suspect for some people it’s the faces: they want the faces on their street to be the same shape and color they were when they were growing up. If that’s what you want, then no matter where you are, I can guarantee that if you’re rich enough to worry about things like this (as opposed to where your next meal’s coming from), then yup, you definitely have grounds for worry. People move around to where the food is, the money, the good grazing, the jobs. The Germanic tribes who moved in on Europe a couple millennia back took a more reasonable view; they called wars “the movements of the peoples.” The Huns push the Goths off the steppe, and boom! Next thing you know, the Goths are wiping out a Roman army at Adrianople.

The faces are going to change. We are in a new military-historical era, in which the only states with the sheer will to resist slow “conquest” by immigration were the Stalinist states. Of course they didn’t have much of a problem there anyway -- not too many immigrants trying to sneak into North Korea or the old USSR -- but even if they had faced real demographic challenge, they had the will to open fire. The Berlin Wall is a nasty case in point, where the will was used to stop people leaving.

But those Stalinist states are not exactly a growth industry these days, and no liberal democratic state has the will to shoot down unarmed people trying to get in (or out, for that matter). Even the Israelis, who are maybe the fiercest first-worlders on demographic issues, don’t shoot the poor Africans who cross to Beersheba for jobs in the cafes. They just send them back to Sudan to be shot there.

So the movement of the peoples, the slow demographic wars, are going to go on. We just don’t have a counter-move, except maybe bombarding poor people with money to stay home. Basically, no matter where you are, the complexions and the features you see on the streets are going to change. If it’s any consolation to face-fascists, Europeans got their licks in first, so to speak. Not many African-Americans around with pure African blood; not many Mexican Indians without some Spanish in them. So now the faces blend the other way.

For most people the real worry, if they were allowed to even say it out loud, is culture: if you’re French, you really don’t want Paris turning into Kinshasa, because let’s be honest, Kinshasa is a Hellhole. If you’re English, you don’t want London turning into Karachi, because Karachi is a nightmare. If you’re American, you don’t want Houston -- oh Hell, ever been to Houston? If you have half a brain, you don’t want Houston at all, the lousy sweatbox.

The thing is, most of the people who invaded from those places tend to agree with you. That’s why they moved in the first place. Nobody knows what a Hellhole the Congo is like a Congolese. I read somewhere that on the Congo riverboats, they have these slang terms for the different decks. The first-class deck they call “Europe.” The second-class deck is “China,” meaning not that great, but livable. The third-class deck is “Congo,” and nobody wants to be there, least of all the Congolese.

So to assess your situation in terms of the new conquests, you have to decide whether you’re in a Kosovo -- two tribes hating each other forever, turning out babies as weapons -- or that Congolese riverboat, where nobody wants it too “authentic” if they can help it. There’s a lot of blurring and overlap between those two models, sure. Take Northern Ireland: a lot of yelling, a lot of noisy tribal hate, but I just don’t think they have it in them to be another Kosovo. Too interested in TV and cars.

That’s what’s funny about the debate right now: the diehards in the U.S. and Europe wish we had the old ruthless will to seal the borders, but the “weakness” of the advanced countries generally works pretty well to turn the immigrants into immigrant-hating locals in a generation or two. The old model, bayonets on the border, isn’t even in the running. Time to face that fact. So the faces will change.

If you can handle these new faces, you’re likely to be surprised to see your “weak” American or European culture win out, slowly, un-gloriously but surely, and you may live long enough to see a whole new crop of pols who look like they just came from Karachi or Kinshasa until you turn the sound on and hear them ranting about how we need to get rid of all these damn immigrants.

Gary Brecher is the author of the book, The War Nerd. 

See also: Twilight of the Godless

Why Judaism Survived

From: Mail.Liberal-Judaism
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005
Subject: Why Judaism Survived

Studying Jewish History in a wandering way, I asked myself this. Why
did Constantine allow Jews to exist at all? He made all Pagans,
Christian and made it a capital offense to convert to Judaism,
circumsize and study Talmud Torah. It seems to me he thought that
Judaism would just go away. After all, in terms of the Roman Empire,
they were such a small minority. Another puzzlement,
why during the Dark Ages did Judaism thrive. THEN, it's like putting
two pieces of the puzzle together. Constantine was scientifically
correct. However, the Germanic tribes destroyed the empire, not too
long after standardization of Christianity and that's why we're Jews
today. First the Babylonians, then the Germanic tribes. The irony is
that it was the German tribes. In the meantime, the separated Christians
were busy figuring out how to Christianize the Germanic peoples.

I know this is too simple to be true. But every which way I read stark
history, it all makes so much sense. I think Hitler understood all this
and said there is only one way. Kill the Jews. In addition, there's a
lot of modernity in all this.

An additional question, why did these Germanic tribes invade? Seems
overpopulation and natural disasters. My source is the Encyc Britannica
cdrom.

Death of the West & The Age of Man-Gods

What a sorry state we live in, or rather that of the rotting and dieing West. A people without morality, an amoral humanity made of tens of millions of individual man-gods, each nurtured from birth on the value of his own self worth above that of all of humanity.

It started a long time before, the roots planted in the Renaissance, nurtured in the Reformation and given full birth in the explosion of Nihilism that prevailed the world and especially the West in post Great War countries.

Western tradition, long ago, planted the roots of its own destruction, when it started to view itself as the center of the universe. Sure, people learned that the Sun did not rotate around the earth, but the earth around the Sun, however, at the same time they learned that the world, that reality, also rotated around something and that something was no and could not be God, it was them, each and everyone of them.

The Nihilism lead to the Marxisms: Stalinist Communism on one hand, Leninist-Trotskyte War Fascism on the other and 3rd War Socialism in the Anglo-spheres, Marx with a kinder gentler face and velvet lined club behind his back.

The veterans of the 1940s did not believe in large families, they believed in "quality" families. What this really meant was one or two children that could be spoiled rotten...give the "proper" amount of attention, that is, enough to make them think that they were the centers of the universe.

These spoiled and listless brats were the hope of that generation, not God. God, you see, was already on the way out, replaced with militant atheism or some pseudo Eastern mombo jumbo in half understood fashion or fashionably replaced by a neo-paganism that thought to take only the kinder parts of the pagan world and ignore the blood and guts. Just like the modern Druids running around in circles and chanting but avoiding, at least in public, the human sacrifices demanded by their blood thirsty gods. What no humans sacrificed inside the Burning Man every year? Where's the tradition? Where's the authenticity?

And so here we are, a West immoral, trying through bombs to instill its "correct" form of life upon all of humanity, while itself dieing from the now not so slow rot of its putrid moral guts. Everywhere in the West, a Christless, traditionaless, amoral elite has taken over, raped the dumbed down sheep that pass for citizens, and instilled a police state under which they control the very life and death of their public.

But these were the supposed enlightened republics and democracies for which the public over threw their age old, and God chosen Kings, bound by faith, the Church and tradition to take care of the people. As the populace abandoned God, so has God abandoned the populace, driven insane by the very inadequacies that they feel as man-gods at their own lacking statures.

After all, they were told that they were so ever very special, the centers of Creation itself, the purpose of the world's creation, each and everyone. Yet they are passed by life, aging, sagging and dieing, unable, through their vaunted science to live forever and have everything, finding that the material junk they have collected does not replace the relationships with God, family and friends that they have lost or worse never known.

They cling ever stronger to their own self worth, as they slide into the long night, feeling ever stronger their own self-loathing. These are the people who lead the West and populate the majority of its citizens. These are the fools who will quite willingly drag their fellow man into the Hell that they so well prepared for themselves.

I would say repent, but what has a man-god to repent for?

By Stanislav Mishin Saturday, March 20, 2010

Fr. Zalalas on Biometrics & "The Mark Of The Beast"

A note from TTHC Blog editor el greco.

The back story to this post:

Human implantation of Radio-frequency identification (RFID)

The Food and Drug Administration in the US has approved the use of RFID chips in humans. Some business establishments have also started to chip customers, such as the Baja Beach nightclub in Barcelona. This has provoked concerns into privacy of individuals as they can potentially be tracked wherever they go by an identifier unique to them. There are concerns this could lead to abuse by an authoritarian government or lead to removal of freedoms.

On July 22, 2006, Reuters reported that two hackers, Newitz and Westhues, at a conference in New York City showed that they could clone the RFID signal from a human implanted RFID chip, showing that the chip is not hack-proof as was previously claimed.

Related subjects include eschatology (theology and philosophy concerned with the final events in the history of the world) and dispensationalism (which sees the past, present, and future as a number of successive administrations)

Passports with biometrics for Romanians - 10 May, 2006

Starting with 1 January 2007, passports containing electronic chips will be put into circulation for the Romanian citizens. The passports will include a storage system (probably RFID) for personal data, including a facial image and digital fingerprints.

The present passports will preserve their validity and they will be replaced at the request of the citizens. According to a draft Government Decision under public debate the producer of the electronic passports will be designated by international bidding. The sole supplier must provide the necessary documents and technique for the introduction of the electronic system at EU standards. The provider will finance the project and will be further on reimbursed in instalments as established by the contract. The provider, with the agreement of the Ministry of Finance, will also establish and update the fee to be paid by the citizens when obtaining the passports.

The decision to use only electronic passports will not be the subject of a law adopted by the Parliament and there have been no discussions so far on the privacy and security concerns raised by usage of the RFID technology.

The Romanian officials, as in other eastern European countries, just indicated that the European Union is requesting such a change and therefore no special debate was needed on the decision. The substantiation note accompanying the draft Government decision says: "At the European level, it was considered that the introduction of passports containing electronic information will increase the prevention of person substitution or counterfeit, will facilitate more rapid control procedures at the borders and will further on allow exercising the right to free circulation in those states having imposed such a travel document".

Romania: Protests against biometric passports - 23 Feb, 2009

A few hundred Romanians gathered on 1 February 2009 to protest against the introduction of the obligatory biometric passports starting with the beginning of 2009.

The event comes after the first passports with biometric identifiers (including fingerprints) were issued at the end of January in the county of Ilfov, as a first implementation in the country. The decision was heavily contested by several prominent members of the Orthodox Church that consider it as the first step towards the introduction of biometric identifiers in all ID cards, which is a direct action against freedom of religion and freedom of expression or the right to a private life.

A few civil society pro-orthodox groups, gathered under the name "Coalition against the Police State", started on online petition, with more than 15 000 signatures, calling for a stop to the biometric passports and biometric driving licences, until the situation has been properly explained by the authorities. The coalition also organized the event on 1 February in front of the Patriarchy Palace and announced that one lawyer started a civil action in court in order to stop the Government Decision that allows the issuing of the biometric passports.

The people protesting presented banners stating: "Let us choose!" or "Support the Church ! Refuse the implant!". Several speakers expressed their concern that imposing obligatory biometric IDs is an attempt to make humans same as cattle as a first step to Total Control from the state. Others have considered that the new electronic chip contains the number 666, which, in their opinion, means the first step towards the Apocalypse. The extreme right-wing party Noua Dreapta has joined the demonstration with their specific flags.

The Romanian Patriarchy Orthodox Church refused to publicly support the events, calling for calm and prayers, but at the same time asked the Romanian Government more information regarding the new biometric passports. An official opinion should be issued after their meeting in 27-28 February 2009.

A similar event on 4 February organized by the Coalition against the Police State gathered more than 100 persons with images with politicians looking like sheep. The organizers protested about the fact that no public debate was initiated by the Government in order to asses the social, economical and religious impact of the decision to have obligatory biometric passports.

In both events the participants also protested against the new law on data retention, explained as the law that will permit authorities to "record and keep all the electronic communications of the Romanian citizens."

Another civil society organization - Civil Society Commissariat announced that it has sued its own telecom provider Orange to oblige it to respect the contractual obligations regarding the confidentiality of the communications.Thus, the provider should not implement the data retention law. The organization wants to use this opportunity to challenge the law to the Constitutional Court based on the right to privacy.

Holy Synod of Romanian Orthodox Church calls for alternative to biometric passports - 3 Mar, 2009

In work session on Wednesday, 25 February 2009, the Holy Synod adopted unanimously, Case no. 638/2009 regarding the issue of new electronic passports that include biometric data:

1. Take note of the letter no. 638 of 28 January 2009 Patriarch Daniel to the Ministry of Administration and Interior, which requires some clarification about the new electronic passports that include biometric data.

Also, take note of clarification to address nr.3622071 of 5 February 2009 the Ministry of Administration and Interior - General Directorate of Passports which shows two major insurance:

a. Having a passport is a right and not an obligation, the passport is a document issued on request for those wishing to travel outside the European Union. Thus, it concludes that those who claim conscientious objection or religious grounds are free not to apply this new type of passport;

b. Every citizen has a right to know the direct content of personal data included in the new electronic passports that include biometric data.

2. Itself notes that the European Commission opinion expressed on 16 March 2005, the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies is against implantation in the body of the electronic chip, "the use of implants for non-information and communication is a potential threat human dignity and democratic society "(section 6.4), and" implants for surveillance ... could be used by state authorities, individuals or groups to increase their power over others "(section 6.4.4).

3. Since some people have reluctance towards biometric passports, will help the Romanian state institutions (Presidency, Parliament, Government) with the request to adopt the necessary measures to amend and supplement existing legislation by extending the provisions related to emergencies (passport temporarily) and cases where, for reasons of conscience or religious person does not want electronic passport including biometric data.

4. In future, any initiative religious interest, which comes from a diocese must, first, analyzed and discussed at the Diocesan Center and the Metropolitan synod, and then be submitted to the Holy Synod for debate and decision.

5. Seeing the disturbance caused by the confusing and contradictory opinions on the new biometric passports, the Holy Synod urges clergy, monahii and remain faithful to establish faith in the Savior Jesus Christ Biruitorul hell and death, increase in prayer and good deeds, in vietu Christianity family and society monastery without spread panic and concern by excessive concern for passing things. Thus, God is light, we will defend all evil and will help us to execute well.

Press Office of the Romanian Patriarchate.

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Now here's a copy of a letter sent by Fr. Zalalas to a concerned Christian about Biometrics.

“Dear Adrian and brothers in Christ:

On March 13, I saw Elder Ephraim at the monastery of Saint Anthony in Arizona. Along with the multitude of my sins and transgressions I also conveyed to him the greetings along with the concerns of our Elder Justin of Petru Voda. I have very good memories of the holiness and great hospitality of the monastic brotherhood of Petru Voda and the love of the Elder Justin toward us.

We were asked to speak on a number of things and specifically of the signs of the times. Some of the brothers at the time held the opinion that the magnetic stripe of contemporary bank cards (visa,m/c etc.) is somehow equivalent to the sign-mark-charagma of the Apocalyptic beast. Of course we disagreed with them at the time insisting that the ownership of such a business card does not separate one from the grace of God. We were made aware that even Elder Paisios may have alluded to that effect.

I understand now that our Romanian brothers are being compelled by the European Union to show their “good behavior” and use the latest technology (biometric chip) for identification purposes (ID cards, licences and passports). Unfortunately this technology is being used in the US and Greece. The powerful display of the reposed Archibishop Christodoulos was fruitless because after he received millions of signatures he suddenly abandoned the struggle for no apparent reason.

During the time of my recent confession I explained the concern of our Romanian brothers and Elder Justin to Elder Ephraim of St. Anthony’s and whether the acceptance of this biometric RFID chip alienates them from the Church of Christ.

The response of the elder was very direct: NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT! THIS IS NOT THE MARK OF THE BEAST. THE MARK WILL BE IMPOSED AFTER WORLD WAR THREE! AND PRIESTS ARE WRONG TO EXCOMMUNICATE CHRISTIANS FROM THE HOLY CUP BECAUSE THEY ARE USING THIS TECHNOLOGY!

(My comments based on the teachings of my holy and learned elder Athanasios Mitilinaios.)

Adrian, I do agree with Fr. Justin that this technology is a forerunner of the systems used to eventually mark people with the sign of the beast. We are headed toward a one world government which will be instituted after a major world war as Elder Ephraim said.

However the Mark of the Beast –which will be the full acceptance of the spirit of the Antichrist- will be a willful and conscious action of self- dedication and devotion to this newly revealed god! The mark will not have any meaning if imposed to a person by mere force or unconsciousness whether at a hospital bed, during sleep or at the state of infancy.

The final mark much like the Christian Baptism is not something magic. It requires the actual adherence to the precepts of faith. People will accept the mark because they will actually believe that the Christ of Nazareth was a philosopher a great teacher and so on but not divine like the Apocalyptic world leader. For this to happen we must first succumb to total ecumenism, the sinister admixture of all religions which will eventually be replaced by the religion of the Antichrist. This is why Christ sadly asked: When I return will I find faith on earth? People will lose faith in the God-human person of Christ. Although our times are very sinful we are not at the final days of history since we don’t have any definite signs that the antichrist might be born.

However the time is ripe to teach, educate and attempt to awake our people and the people of the world by every possible means. And while I believe that it would be commendable for our pious monks, priests and spiritually advanced laypeople to resist this technology to cause some commotion which could be instrumental in peoples awakening we cannot impose this voluntary action to the general public.

I also agree with Elder Justin that the time of martyrdom is now! We must speak to our faithful about these dangers and we must prepare them to prefer 1000 deaths over the selling of their souls for a few Euro’s , a few carob pods that will soon give them a terrible indigestion as the poor Greeks are now finding out. What the Turks could not accomplish in 400 years the carob pods of the European Union did in less than 30.

The average Greek today lives a life of idolatry and breathes the spirit of the antichrist.

This has nothing to do with the electronic ID card, but with the bondage of the carnal passions. We need to expel the spirit of the antichrist from our lives and to begin to live the life of Christ. By purifying our hearts and practicing humility we will have Christ in our hearts Who will easily fight our enemies for us by His mighty hand.

A blessed Lenten season and a joyous Ressurection.

Constantine Zalalas

3-15-09 Arizona.

Ps. Please have father Justin forgive me for my egotism and audacity if this letter gets to him and to please pray for my family. Instead of crying for my sins I attempt to teach others.”

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More on Biometrics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_passport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID
http://waronyou.com/topics/category/issues/rfid-issues/
http://inspiks.com/2008/07/15/rfid-the-rise-of-the-mark-of-the-beast-billy-chrone
http://www.infowars.com/articles/bb/rfid_computere_chips_under_the_skin.htm