The Fraud of Democracy

By Matt Johnson (rusjournal.com)

No one takes "democracy" seriously, and this is because, despite the pompous verbiage, democracy is about the bring to power of one’s favorite media image by any means necessary. Democracy is about manipulating enough people to vote for an image hundreds of times removed from reality. It is a pageant of power, of fund-raising and the manipulation of images. In short, it is alchemy: the manipulation of images to create a counter-reality, and this counter-reality is what is “voted” on. It is this counter-reality, which is filtered through hundreds of "image-makers," campaign staffers, major donors, major media, ad agencies, PR agencies, and dozens of other species of manipulation. It is not a part of reality.

Of course, everything in this fallen world is about power. Universal "ideals," such as “equality” or “liberty,” exist as another form of alchemy, the use of such images disguises the unchanged nature of being: that of force. The use of such mindless slogans are mere symbols for a faction who seeks power at the expense of another.

John "Wetstart" McCain Video, Courtesy of Wayne Madsen

Of course, power is money and money is power. Modernity can be reduced to the alchemical alteration of all actual reality, i.e. Aristotle’s essences, into money. Everything has a monetary value, and this, for the nominalist, is the nature of all things. Hence, just for the McCain candidacy in 2008, here are the top donors to date (all figures from the FEC database):

• Merrill Lynch $284,610
• Citigroup Inc $252,801
• Morgan Stanley $211,821
• Goldman Sachs $198,045
• Blank Rome LLP $171,026
• AT&T Inc $169,613
• JPMorgan Chase & Co $165,275
• Greenberg Traurig LLP $152,687
• Credit Suisse Group $133,125
• UBS AG $127,315
• Bank of America $116,125
• US Government $114,176
• Lehman Brothers $112,700
• PricewaterhouseCoopers $111,070
• Wachovia Corp $111,046
• FedEx Corp $97,753
• Pinnacle West Capital $94,900
• Bear Stearns $90,100
• Blackstone Group $89,500
• Bank of New York Mellon $89,500

The rulers of finance capital control democracy. This make sense because republican forms of state have always existed in areas where big money is the true king: Novgorod, Venice, Florence, America, parliamentary Britain, the Netherlands, etc. Republican states exist solely to manipulate the poor into believing they are "free" (always in some vague sense). In Florence, the Medici clan, the group who began and controlled the "Italian Renaissance" and bankrolled the early "scientific revolution," centered around alchemy, controlled Florence from behind the scenes, while secretly approving all candidates to office. No serious historian today will deny that proposition.

What is even more interesting is the fact that the above list is nearly identical to the list of Obama's top donors:

• Goldman Sachs $627,730
• University of California $523,120
• JPMorgan Chase & Co $398,021
• Citigroup Inc $393,899
• UBS AG $378,400
• Google Inc $373,212
• Harvard University $369,802
• Lehman Brothers $353,922
• National Amusements Inc $352,603
• George Soros $347,463
• Sidley Austin LLP $326,845
• Skadden, Arps et al $304,050
• Time Warner $298,972
• Morgan Stanley $291,388
• Microsoft Corp $276,925
• Jones Day $266,705
• Latham & Watkins $252,845
• University of Chicago $250,685
• Wilmerhale Llp $249,282
• Exelon Corp $239,061

In this case, finance capital still dominates, though with the university establishment and entertainment corporations adding their funds, making Obama a better fund-raiser than McCain. Goldman-Sachs, howeer, controls both campaigns. Even in Hilary's campaign,. Goldman-Sachs was the third largest donor, and the list was almost identical to Obama's and McCain's, with the exception of Harvard, who backed Obama from the beginning.

So far, Obama has raised $176 million dollars, while McCain has raised $105 million. Nearly $300 million dollars to convince Americans to vote for a media image. The reality is that finance capital, no matter what the candidate, party or issue, controls the debate. In overall giving, Finance has given $100 million in contributions to federal candidates this year alone, far outstripping any other sector. They are followed by the legal profession.

Contrary to myth, defense contractors have given to Obama more than McCain, the former with $410,000 to McCain's $393,000. While energy corporations, corporations in direct competition with Russian and Venezuelan capital, have given to McCain in far greater numbers than to anyone else. They have given to him $2.4 million, while to Obama, $1.3 million.

The oil and gas industry specifically, as a subset of energy, has backed McCain exclusively: $1.3 million to Obama's paltry $394,000. This is solely due to McCain's harsh stand on Russia and his continued commitment to Middle East war. It should be noted, however, as has been written elsewhere on this e-journal, that oil firms support domestic interests solely of the leftist variety, while bankrolling the neocons on foreign policy.

True to form, the entertainment industry is nearly a mirror image to oil and gas, giving Obama and Hilary a combined $8 million, while giving to McCain about $300,000, according to the FEC. Labor is irrelevant, as it gives only about 2% of campaign contributions. Big business provides well over 75% of all money to all campaigns nationwide. According to the invaluable site Open Secrets, law firms give almost exclusively to democrat candidates, while the major banks give equally to both. Real estate gives to candidates in a precise 50-50 split.

Of the top 10 donors for all candidates nationwide, and who, ipso facto, control the state, only one gives in any amount to republicans, and that is, AT&T (only 41% to democrats), though have a domestic record of supporting only liberal causes. Goldman-Sachs gives almost exclusively to democrats (with the exception of McCain), as does Citigroup, JP Morgan, General Electric, Lehman Brothers, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. George Soros, however, blows all other organizations away with $11 million in contributions to liberal candidates only. He functions, as always, through front groups, this time, a group called ActBlue.

Democracy is the alchemy of modernity: the final dissolution of truth into a haze of money, power and backroom deals, almost exclusively done in the interest of liberal/leftist candidates. Refusal to vote, and agitating to delegitimize the Regime, seems to be the only rational response to this System. Parliamentary systems are based on capital, on its victory. What has it been victorious over? The land, the ancient aristocracy, justice (conceived platonically), and natural hierarchy. There is no live without hierarchy, and the systems dedicated to equality normally create the most rigid of hierarchical systems, such as in the USSR. The hierarchy of republics are created by access to money, which, though it mystifies itself as productive and inventive, is in fact resolvable to finance capital: the production of credit, hence, the control of the society.

Monarchies reflect nature, while republics reflect the very images capital creates. Neither system is capable of creating anything, as governments are pale reflectives of society. Monarchy reflects agrarianism and aristocracy, since it is the oldest form of government. Monarchies reflect nature: hierarchy, unity, tradition and love of God, each notion as old as humanity. All of this exists according to natural law, while modern liberalism and nominalism exist as a matter of convention, i.e. power. Parliaments exist according to convention, specifically, the contract created by property owners to protect their interests. Parliaments, the creation of capital (in that there is no republic without a strong financial sector), exist solely for revolution; the continuing alterations of the life of people, continued innovation and debt, always in its train. The capital that places politicians in office is not “democratically elected,” (using the term in its normal, vulgar fashion) in reality, few know the true string pullers. Politicians are a reflection of a reflection: money, the center of all modern life, is a reflection of alchemy, or the constant innovation which transforms life, attitude and opinion, even the human sort itself. Politicians are a reflection of this money, itself a conventional idea that binds elites together. It is a lie which depends on many other lies to make the system operate.

Monarchy exists only because of nature, it is a reflection of the natural order. Man craves stability, not innovation; order, not transformation; nature, not convention. Few farmers are miserable due to the nature of their work. Modernity has created a drug dependent post-industrial class enslaved to the mindless routine of administration. Farmers exist, when financially stable, within a natural sphere which few suburbanites can comprehend. The work differs from day to day, season to season, as a part of the organic development of the natural world, and has thus, its own built-in rewards. Aristocracy is the cultural and religious center of a people, not necessarily its financial center. It is based on love of land, of a self-less fighting for country and the protection of the weak, this is the knights code of long standing. Aristocracy exists because it and it alone, is responsible for the “abstract” nature of political rule and law relative to the royal prerogative. It’s freedom is nearly non-existent, but its responsibilities never exhausted. Aristocracy, in order to truly be such, must maintain the highest standards of decorum, piety and philosophical depth. Modernity has not changed the order of being, but through rhetoric, has altered the nature of attitudes, hence the world of ideas in which the rabble live. Monarchy deals in stability and natural hierarchy, authority over domination. This natural hierarchy imitates the existence of nature: essence, species, genus, God. Reality as a series of spiritual moves leading to the most spiritual, thus, the most real. Capitalism, the creator of republics, deals in revolution, transformation and fraud. Capitalism can only function within a nominalist epistemology, and hence, seeks the transformation of all natural gradations into a single domination of money. Nature is a set of dollar values. Images can never tell of their source, while in monarchy, responsibility is solely due to the crown (not the state, which is another matter). Capitalism depends on constant revolution for the profit of a few. Monarchy is forced to defend the stable order of Plato's hierarchy and natural law (which are one in the same). Justice, love, dependency, stability, sin, devotion: these are things each man is born fully understanding intuitively. The symbol for modernity is alchemy, the symbol for monarchy is nature, of the essences which define created things.

Monarchy believes in a rationally grounded hierarchy. It believes in the agrarian life, and authority over domination. It holds that God can be found in nature, and hence, the spiritual life is the highest, but is never departed from the life of agriculture. They are distinctions of perspective only. The stability of the natural order is paramount, and the realization remains that all revolutionary forces exist to take power from the aristocracy to give it to the oligarchy. Hence, throughout history, and irrespective of race or religion, man has two options: the alchemical revolutionary statism and worship of matter, which traces its roots to ancient Babylon and Tyre, and finds its apogee in modern America and NATO, or the natural rule of Adam and Abel, manifest in Israel and reaching its apogee in Holy Russia. There is no third option.

******* A Timeline of McCain's Career From the Rense e-journal.

1982: McCain, recently remarried to Arizona beer heiress Cindy Hensley, moves to Phoenix and wins a seat in the US House. He quickly forges a relationship with the Democratic House eminence from Tucson, Mo Udall, who although a strong progressive, has always welcomed the opportunity to work with Republicans.

1982-88: McCain takes over $100,000 in contributions from our well-remembered buddy from Lincoln S&L, Charles Keating, and his employees. McCain and Keating are very close, with McCain frequently joining Keating on outings to the Bahamas, on Keating's dime. Keating also has what Silverman calls a "business relationship" with Jim Hensley, Cindy Hensley's father, and with Cindy as well.

1986: During McCain's race for the Senate, Arizona Democrats ask the Udall staffers not to allow McCain to cling too closely to Udall, worrying that McCain is using Udall as a campaign tool. Udall aide Bob Neuman later says he tries to be subtle, but when McCain figures out what Neuman wants, he bawls Neuman out using words the aide refuses to repeat. Neuman later says McCain was so extreme in his reaction that, as Silverman writes, he thought "there was something really wrong with the guy." McCain is running for Barry Goldwater's seat, with Goldwater's endorsement. But after the Keating scandal, Goldwater loses much of his respect for McCain, and, Silverman writes, "soon found he had to stop McCain from using his good name."

1986: McCain jokes to an audience from the National League of Cities and Towns, asking if they've heard "the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly, and left to die?" The punch line: "When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, 'Where is that marvelous ape?'" Neuman later says, "John McCain is the Eddie Haskell of politics. You can attribute that to me, and he'll kill me for it."

1987-1988: McCain battles against campaign finance reform, in part on behalf of his pal Keating.

April 12, 1988: Governor Evan Mecham (R-Lunatic) has just been impeached, and Democrat Rose Mofford, the Secretary of State, takes over the position. Mofford, a kindly lady with an astonishing snow-white beehive bouffant, is as non-partisan as one can be and still belong to a political party, gracious and well-liked by just about everyone in the state government. But not by McCain and some of his buds. (Disclaimer: Mrs. Max, who describes herself as either a Goldwater Republican or a Reagan Democrat depending on the day of the week, knows Mofford, and likes her tremendously.) McCain and his pals want to eject Mofford using the same recall process that was launched to yank Mecham. Eight days into her tenure, Mofford goes to DC to take part in what one aide later calls the "perfunctory wet kiss" meeting with the Arizona congressional delegation. The meeting is strictly ceremonial, or so most people think. Mofford is quite conversant with her duties as secretary of state, primarily the elections department. She doesn't know a great deal about the Central Arizona Project (CAP) or the technical details of water provision in that dry state. And in eight days, she hasn't been able to learn a hell of a lot. She speaks before the Senate Energy and Water Subcommittee on Appropriations about CAP. McCain is not a member of that committee, but his Republican buddy from Idaho, James McClure, is. McClure asks Mofford, in Silverman's words,

a series of questions that would leave any water expert's mouth dry. Her staff jumped in to try to answer, but even so, ultimately they had to file an addendum to the testimony.

Sandbagged. The publisher of the Arizona Republic, Pat Murphy, who considers himself a friend of McCain's, is "crushed" by the incident. It is, Silverman writes, "the beginning of the end of his respect for and friendship with McCain." During lunch, a "mischievously glee[ful]" McCain brags about his setup of Mofford. As Murphy recalls, "he had slipped some highly technical questions to [McClure] to ask Mofford--questions she wouldn't be prepared to answer or expected to answer. Flabbergasted, I asked McCain why would he want to sabotage Mofford's testimony, when in fact the CAP was the nonpartisan pet of Republicans and Democrats--such as far-left Udall and far-right Goldwater--since its inception. His reply, as near as I remember, was, 'I'll embarrass a Democrat any time I get the chance.'" Murphy accompanies McCain back to his office, where reporters ask about a rumor that McCain had tried to sabotage Mofford's testimony. Murphy is floored to hear him answer, in classic straight-talk fashion, "I'd never do anything like that." Murphy later learns that McCain had even brought in a private film crew to film the testimony for use in embarrassing Moffatt in the recall election. The Arizona Supreme Court strikes down the recall effort, so McCain's gamesmanship did little except destroy his friendship with Murphy and embitter Mofford. While she doesn't talk much about the McCains, having known Cindy since she was little, she will tell Silverman, the CAP hearing, "hurt me more than anything ... to be set up like that." She also says that McCain is "certainly no Barry Goldwater or Mo Udall."

Late 1980s: McCain hosts an event ostensibly to honor Goldwater, but in reality to raise funds for his Senate campaign. Goldwater initially refuses to participate and tells McCain to give half of the proceeds to the Arizona Republican Party. McCain retools the event to honor Reagan instead. Goldwater does speak at the event, but later writes to McCain, "You will recall during my speech at the dinner for the president in Phoenix, I announced that you were going to give half of the funds you raised to the State Republican Party. I am told by the Party, that you still owe them $35,000, and unless you pay all of it, or most of it, they cannot meet their payroll next Wednesday." McCain will continue to use Goldwater, a legend in Arizona politics, as well as Udall as a campaign touchstone for himself.

1990: Facing criticism over his relationship with Keating and an upcoming re-election battle, McCain flip-flops and becomes a proponent of campaign finance reform and reducing government spending. Silverman calls McCain's efforts "a farce. McCain famously sponsored a law designed to control special interests' grip on Washington, but at the same time, he took money from those interests." She adds details and links that I won't go into here, but her summation of his efforts: "sadly cosmetic." What he has done is take such a shrill stance against certain types of earmarks--pork, in the vernacular--that Arizona has lost out on federal funding for, among other worthy projects, a program at a Scottsdale hospital that trains military medical personnel in trauma care. Some of that training has been used in Iraq and Afghanistan, for those who were lucky enough to receive it before the program lost much of its funding. Silverman notes:

Arizona's political forefathers--Mo Udall, Barry Goldwater, Carl Hayden - pushed through one of the biggest pork barrel projects in the history of the United States Congress: the Central Arizona [Water] Project. If they hadn't, there wouldn't be much of a state to represent. As a native Arizonan, those are the politicians I grew up learning about. McCain just doesn't compare.

1991 and After: When Udall leaves Congress, McCain, who had voted with Udall on some environmental issues, quits supporting those issues, and begins to rack up low marks from environmental groups. One of his most recent is a zero from the League of Conservation Voters. He has refused to oppose efforts to mine uranium from sites perilously near the Grand Canyon, and refuses to support proposed changes to the Mining Act of 1872, oblivious to the fact that Arizona is a testament to the environmental degradation that comes with strip mining and other practices. He is well remembered for threatening the job of a Forest Service official who disagreed with him on the topic of the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel. However, in campaign appearances, McCain regularly invokes the name and environmental passion of Udall. In April 2008, Newsweek writes, "He traces his environmental awareness to the sainted Rep. Mo Udall, an Arizona Democrat who took McCain as a young congressman under his tutelage ... To environmentalists, that's like saying you learned about civil rights by driving around Alabama with Martin Luther King Jr." It's doubtful that Newsweek bothered to find much on the other side of the story.

Spring 1994: Silverman begins hearing rumors of Cindy McCain's addiction to prescription drugs. She learns of Tom Gosinski, who had been fired from his position as director of government and international affairs for Cindy McCain's nonprofit charity, the American Voluntary Medical Team (AVMT), which provides medical relief to poor countries. Gosinski had gone to the DEA and told them that Cindy McCain was using an AVMT doctor to illegally prescribe her drugs in her employees' names. Gosinski was one of those employees, and he was worried that he might be culpable. Cindy McCain had had numerous prescriptions written for her, some with as many as 500 pills on a single refill. Dr. John Max Johnson, her AVMT drug connection, told the DEA that she kept them in her personal luggage. Gosinski had not just ratted her out, but filed a wrongful-termination suit against the charity. That alerted John McCain's lawyer, John Dowd, to the situation. Dowd charged Gosinski with extortion. The extortion investigation produded public records that Silverman finds and uses for her reporting. But the McCains learn of her records request, and try to inoculate themselves against her reports, acknowledging Cindy's prescription drug addictions and blaming it on her back surgeries and the stress from the Keating scandal. They also claim, falsely, that Gosinski is trying to blackmail them. In her September 8, 1994 story, Silverman prints the following excerpt from Gosinski's personal journal, an entry from July 1992: "I have always wondered why John McCain has done nothing to fix the problem. He must either not see that a problem exists or does not choose to do anything about it. It would seem that it would be in everyone's best interest to come to terms with the situation. And do whatever is necessary to fix it. There is so much at risk ... During my short tenure at AVMT, I have been surrounded by what on the surface appears to be the ultimate all-American family. In reality, I am working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. Senator has driven her to: distance herself from friends; cover feelings of despair with drugs; and replace lonely moments with self-indulgences." Cindy avoids criminal charges by going into a drug rehab program.

1997: McCain is a frequent and steady visitor to Mo Udall, who is slowly dying of Parkinson's disease. Neuman is pleased with McCain's loyalty, but he is stunned when McCain brings reporter Michael Lewis with him to Udall's hospital bedside. (McCain is unable to wake Udall during the visit. Udall will die in 1998.) Neuman later recalls, "That was devastating to me, that he brought in a reporter. I thought that was crossing the line, and it destroyed me." Silverman writes, "I'm sure I would have accepted the offer to go the hospital, as well. I can't blame Lewis, but maybe the sight of the legendary Mo Udall in his final, sad days wasn't McCain's to share."

2000: As the presidential primaries heat up, Silverman flies to Washington to be interviewed by 20/20's Sam Donaldson on McCain. After the interview, Donaldson decides he doesn't want to report anything negative about McCain, and cans the interview. The same thing happens when she helps put together background research for 60 Minutes, when Mike Wallace decides he wants to do a positive story on McCain.

Whee doggies. And there's plenty more in the article: this is just the highlights. Even better, there are links to other New Times stories on McCain. So get to reading, and share the wealth.

The Media's Attack on Masculinity

By S. T. Karnick

The tendency of the nation’s schools to suppress boys’ natural way of seeing and doing things, brilliantly documented by Christina Hoff-Sommers in her 2001 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, is becoming increasingly evident in the culture.

According to Hoff-Sommers, programs in America’s public schools are set up to obliterate all that is masculine and establish femininity as the human norm:

This book tells the story of how it has become fashionable to attribute pathology to millions of healthy male children. It is a story of how we are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world. No one denies that boys’ aggressive tendencies must be checked and channeled in constructive ways. Boys need discipline, respect, and moral guidance. Boys need love and tolerant understanding. They do not need to be pathologized.

Hoff-Sommers goes on to note that "it’s a bad time to be a boy in America. . . . Routinely regarded as protosexists, potential harassers and perpetuators of gender inequity, boys live under a cloud of censure.” The school curricula, she observes, are skewed toward girls’ strengths and away from those of boys. That’s why classes emphasize word problems in math class and writing essays in science class, for example.

Boys mistreated by our educational system must advance into society and try to become men, having been taught to disrespect masculinity and suppress it in themselves. One obvious coping mechanism is for males to act more sensitively, making a determined effort to "share their feelings” and be less aggressive and competitive.

Hence a recent Associated Press story describing how TV’s new primetime schedule "puts the softer side of men on display”:

In a number of broadcast ensembles premiering this fall, men are opening up about issues beyond sports, money, power and sexual conquests. They’re expressing their feelings—often to other men—on fatherhood, intimacy and love.

The AP story goes on to quote Nicole Vecchiarelli, entertainment director of the men’s lifestyle magazine Details, as saying of today’s men, "now it seems they can, on the inside, feel a little bit more like girls and that’s still OK.”

The central characters of the new ABC show Big Shots exemplify this elevation of emotions over achievements. These men are the heads of four big corporations, and the hook is that although their businesses are doing well, their personal lives are a mess. One is enormously henpecked, another is divorced and has a young-adult daughter who openly hates him (or seems to), another is distressed by the close friendship between his wife and his mistress, and the other’s wife has been cheating on him with his boss.

Get the irony? At work they’re Masters of the Universe, but in the social realm they’re ineffectual schlubs. Women can do whatever they want to them, and the men can’t find a way to get control over their personal lives. They spend much of the program discussing their feelings about the terrible things that are happening to them.

These otherwise powerful men show that no man is safe from the myriad humiliations women and life in general are apt to heap upon them. A Salon.com article summarized the depiction of men in the current TV season as follows:

There are guys whose wives cheat on them, whose girlfriends get promoted over them, whose mates make more money than they do; guys who get left out of baby-making, who date women with penises and at least one who gets anally raped by a monkey.

That last instance occurs in the ABC comedy Carpoolers. Similarly, in the pilot episode of the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, two brilliant scientists are "pantsed” by their attractive neighbor’s angry ex-boyfriend and spend the next couple minutes of screen time walking around in their briefs. When attempting to gain entry into a locked apartment building, they are outsmarted by two 8-year-old girls. In the pilot episode of Big Shots, the divorced man (Dylan McDermott) explicitly ties the men’s sense of powerlessness to a social trend toward the feminization of males: "Men—we’re the new women.”

Naturally, if men are the new women in today’s culture, "Women are the new men on TV,” as the aforementioned Salon.com essay noted:

When you turn on your television this fall, you’ll be watching more women kick more ass than you can possibly imagine—physically, economically and sexually. Hard-bodied and smart, rich and aggressive, confident and independent, the chicks who populate the prime-time lineup are being cast in roles that once belonged almost exclusively to men. These broads are cops and lawyers and masters of the business universe. . . . Julianna Margulies will star as a nasty Nancy Grace knockoff, Angie Harmon as a police lieutenant, Lucy Liu as a publishing executive, and Patricia Heaton as a news anchor; there’s a new Bionic Woman and a whole show about the world’s leading incubator of the future, The Terminator’s Sarah Connor. The flinty Cagneys, Laceys, Murphys and Buffys of yore aren’t the exceptions in the new TV season; they rule.

The same trend is evident at the movies. We have the vigilante killer played by Jodie Foster in The Brave One, the ferocious female zombie-killer played by Milla Jovovich in the Resident Evil films, the werewolf hunter played by Kate Beckinsale in the two Underworld movies, countless machinegun-toting female police officers of extraordinary fierceness in all sorts of action movies, and the increasingly common occurrence of female characters punching men in the face, especially in comedies. As these cultural products indicate, and as Hoff-Sommers notes, masculine behavior is acceptable as long as the person engaging in it is not actually male.

Of course, something as natural as masculinity cannot be completely eradicated except by exterminating every man in the world, and thus many young men rebel against their indoctrination, consciously or otherwise. The culture is thus also replete with both real and fictional males who take masculinity to decidedly unattractive and even dangerous extremes.

Consider, for example, the brutish ex-boyfriend in the pilot episode of The Big Bang Theory, the Russian thugs at the center of the film Eastern Promises, the foul-tempered chef Gordon Ramsay on FOX’s Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, and the misogyny and glorification of violence in current hip-hop music. Real-life sports heroes are increasingly being arrested for drunken driving, drug possession, physical assaults, and in the case of former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, running a dog-fighting ring.

Even roughnecks such as these, however, are subject to cultural education into the joys of femininity. The hero of the movie The Game Plan, an NFL quarterback played by hyper-muscular Duane "The Rock” Johnson, is narcissistic, arrogant, egotistical, and selfish—both on the field and off. Only after dancing in a ballet and being reeducated by his 8-year-old daughter, his sister-in-law, and the daughter’s dance teacher does he finally win a Super Bowl ring. In today’s culture, women even make the best football coaches.

Other men respond to the cultural denigration of masculinity by simply trying not to grow up at all. This, too, is evident in pop culture. Writing in National Review Online, Justin Shubow notes that "porn-addicted, video-game-playing man-children are the subject of so many recent comedies like Knocked Up; The 40-Year-Old -Virgin; You, Me, and Dupree; and Failure to Launch. Not having been effectively socialized into masculinity, adult males have become less manly but more boyish.”

The central characters of the new TV programs Chuck and Reaper are afflicted with just such a Peter-Pan syndrome. Chuck Bartowsky (Zachary Levi) is a young man of positively stunning ordinariness who works at a Buy-More store, fixing computers and cell phones and being bullied by a jerk coworker who has the inside track on the open assistant-manager job. The two main characters of the new CW series Reaper are college-age (though not college-attending) males who work at their local big-box retail store. Although one is definitely intelligent enough to go to college, he has low self-esteem and little ambition and so decided not to. He spends his time hanging out with his friends and wishes he had the nerve to make a date with an attractive female coworker.

Thus, the war against boys seems to have created three main character patterns for the adult male of our time: sensitive guys who want to please women; weenies and dorks who want only to be left alone to drink beer and play video games with their dork buddies; and thugs who, in rebellion against their unnatural education, are perpetually concerned with proving their toughness through increasingly loutish behavior. There are, of course, examples of decent, positively masculine males in the culture, but they are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the products of educational and cultural feminization.

The fact is that people learn what you teach them. And the consequences of the war against boys—and the broader social war against masculinity in general—are increasingly evident in both the culture and the world at large. We should hardly be surprised that the results are anything but pretty.

From Salvo 4 (Winter 2008)

Solzhenitsyn & Bogus Mythology of WWII

By Eric Margolis.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died this week aged 89, will rank with literary immortals Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as a great chronicler of Russia’s soul and its profound suffering.

Solzhenitsyn’s epic works Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago are literary monuments for all mankind. After years as a political prisoner in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn declared, "a writer’s goal is to fight the lie" – meaning propaganda, historical distortion, and perversion of facts.

Thanks in good part to Solzhenitsyn and fellow dissident writers, the world finally learned the Soviet Communists had murdered over 30 million people and imprisoned millions more.

At the 1945 Yalta Conference, Stalin boasted to Winston Churchill that Commissar Lazar Kaganovitch, who had supervised the murder of at least seven million Ukrainians and sent 2 million to concentration camps, "is my Adolf Eichmann," referring to the Nazi official responsible for killing millions of Jews.

In 1945, the Soviet Union – the close wartime ally of Britain, Canada and the United States – had 5.5 million prisoners in its prison system, the gulag, of whom 25% died annually from cold, hunger, exhaustion and disease.

Though Stalin’s worst crimes were committed before World War II, the full horror of his system of industrialized murder and slave labor were barely known outside Russia until the 1980’s. To this day, the world is constantly reminded of Germany’s crimes during the National Socialist era. But Stalin’s victims, who surpassed those of Hitler by a factor of three times, are almost forgotten. Why?

History is the propaganda of the victors. Few photographs of the gulag have survived, evidence was destroyed, and witnesses have died. Churchill and Roosevelt could not admit they were allied to the greatest mass killer since Genghis Khan, and complicit in his crimes. Or reveal that Communist agents of influence had shaped White House policy. The feeble-minded Roosevelt even hailed Stalin as "Uncle Joe."

The world’s Communist and Socialist parties managed to suppress the full scope of Stalin’s crimes even after Nikita Khrushchev denounced him in 1956. Solzhenitsyn warned that socialism, and big sister communism, inevitably led to totalitarian states.

Many Western liberal intellectuals were infatuated with Stalin’s brute power and didn’t want to know about their idol’s crimes. The French leftist thinker Jean-Paul Sartre even refused to admit the gulag existed.

Revealing the truth about the Allies’ role in supporting Stalin and his crimes would undermine the whole bogus mythology of World War II that has become the state religion for the political right in North America, Britain and Australia.

Those who considered the Jewish Holocaust a unique historical crime were not eager to bring attention to Stalin’s genocide lest it diminish or dilute their own people’s suffering.

The Soviet Union punished Solzhenitsyn by making him into a "non-person." He was exiled to the United States, where he was at first hailed as a hero. But the uncompromising Solzhenitsyn, ever the Old Testament prophet, fulminated against the "soulless capitalism system" and "mindless western consumerism."

Then he published a book about a hitherto taboo subject, the prominent role of Russian Jews in the Communist party and secret police. The book provoked a storm of criticism in North America. Solzhenitsyn was branded anti-Semitic and quickly became a non-person for the second time.

Solzhenitsyn returned to the new Russia after the fall of Communism and became the leading exponent of the revived cult of reactionary 19th-century pan-Slav nationalism. He championed Russia’s Orthodox Church as guardian of the nation’s soul, proclaimed Russia’s manifest destiny, and advocated a form of modern czarism that looks remarkably like today’s Kremlin run by Vladimir Putin and Dimitri Medvedev.

Being a prophet in the wilderness is a hard, thankless profession. But Solzhenitsyn’s dauntless courage and tenacity shone the light into some of the darkest cellars of Russia’s tortured history. He influenced a generation of writers, including this humble one, whose goal, like his, has always been to "fight the lie."

Soros, the CIA, Mossad and the new media destabilization of Iran

It's the 2009 presidential election in Iran and opposition leader Mir-Houssein Mousavi declares victory hours before the polls close, insuring that any result to the contrary will be called into question. Western media goes into overdrive, fighting with each other to see who can offer the most hyperbolic denunciation of the vote and President Ahmadenijad's apparent victory (BBC wins by publishing bald-faced lies about the supposed popular uprising which it is later forced to retract). On June 13th, 30000 "tweets" begin to flood Twitter with live updates from Iran, most written in English and provided by a handful of newly-registered users with identical profile photos. The Jerusalem Post writes a story about the Iran Twitter phenomenon a few hours after it starts (and who says Mossad isn't staying up to date with new media?).

Now, YouTube is providing a "Breaking News" link at the top of every page linking to the latest footage of the Iranian protests (all shot in high def, no less). Welcome to Destabilization 2.0, the latest version of a program that the western powers have been running for decades in order to overthrow foreign, democratically elected governments that don't yield to the whims of western governments and multinational corporations.

Ironically, Iran was also the birthplace of the original CIA program for destabilizing a foreign government. Think of it as Destabilization 1.0: It's 1953 and democratically-elected Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh is following through on his election promises to nationalize industry for the Iranian people, including the oil industry of Iran which was then controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The CIA is sent into the country to bring an end to Mossadegh's government. They begin a campaign of terror, staging bombings and attacks on Muslim targets in order to blame them on nationalist, secular Mossadegh. They foster and fund an anti-Mossadegh campaign amongst the radical Islamist elements in the country. Finally, they back the revolution that brings their favoured puppet, the Shah, into power. Within months, their mission had been accomplished: they had removed a democratically elected leader who threatened to build up an independent, secular Persian nation and replaced him with a repressive tyrant whose secret police would brutally suppress all opposition. The campaign was a success and the lead CIA agent wrote an after-action report describing the operation in glowing terms. The pattern was to be repeated time and time again in country after country (in Guatemala in 1954, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in Serbia in the 1990s), but these operations leave the agency open to exposure. What was needed was a different plan, one where the western political and financial interests puppeteering the revolution would be more difficult to implicate in the overthrow.

Enter Destabilization 1.1. This version of the destabilization program is less messy, offering plausible deniability for the western powers who are overthrowing a foreign government. It starts when the IMF moves in to offer a bribe to a tinpot dictator in a third world country. He gets 10% in exchange for taking out an exorbitant loan for an infrastructure project that the country can't afford. When the country inevitably defaults on the loan payments, the IMF begins to take over, imposing a restructuring program that eventually results in the full scale looting of the country's resources for western business interests. This program, too, was run in country after country, from Jamaica to Myanmar, from Chile to Zimbabwe. The source code for this program was revealed in 2001, however, when former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz went public about the scam. More detail was added in 2004 by the publication of John Perkin's Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which revealed the extent to which front companies and complicit corporations aided, abetted and facilitated the economic plundering and overthrow of foreign governments. Although still an effective technique for overthrowing foreign nations, the fact that this particular scam had been exposed meant that the architects of global geopolitics would have to find a new way to get rid of foreign, democratically elected governments.

Destabilization 1.2 involves seemingly disinterested, democracy promoting NGOs with feelgood names like the Open Society Institute, Freedom House, and the National Endowment for Democracy. They fund, train, support and mobilize opposition movements in countries that have been targeted for destabilization, often during elections and usually organized around an identifiable color. These "color revolutions" sprang up in the past decade and have so far successfully destabilized the governments of the Ukraine, Lebanon, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, among others.

These revolutions bear the imprint of billionaire finance oligarch George Soros. The hidden hand of western powers behind these color revolutions has threatened their effectiveness in recent years, however, with an anti-Soros movement having arisen in Georgia and with the recent Moldovan "grape revolution" having come to naught (much to the chagrinof Soros-funded OSI's Evgeny Morozov).

Now we arrive at Destabilization 2.0, really not much more than a slight tweak of Destabilization 1.2. The only thing different is that now Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media are being employed to amplify the effect of (and the impression of) internal protests. Once again, Soros henchman Evgeny Morozov is extolling the virtues of the new Tehran Twitter revolution and the New York Times is writing journalistic hymns to the power of internet new media...when it serves western imperial interests. We are being asked to believe that this latest version of the very (very) old program of U.S. corporate imperialism is the real deal. While there is no doubt that the regime of Ahmadenijad is reprehensible and the feelings of many of the young protestors in Iran are genuine, you will forgive me for questioning the motives behind the monolithic media support for the overthrow of Iran's government and the installation of Mir-Houssein "Butcher of Beirut" Mousavi.

The Corbett Report

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

A brief word on celibacy

From the editor: This epistolary examination of the call to lifelong celibacy, such as is embraced by monks and nuns, centres upon the character of that calling as a spiritual gift. An understanding of the proper Christian view of celibacy is ever more important in a world that continues to accord it less and less value, and view it more frequently than not as aberrational.


The notion of celibacy is one hard for the modern mind to understand, still less to appreciate. To what end might a man or woman rebuke (so it seems to many) the rich gift of the married life? For what reason might the human person embark upon a life that seems to 'fail to appreciate' the marvel of this type of precious relationship? Since many stumble at the weight of these and similar questions, so do many dismiss all together that 'other' way of life whose motivations seem so foreign, so unapproachable. In the conceptual struggle of contemporary man to comprehend a manner of living divergent from the 'mainstream' with which he is familiar, that whole way of life is all too often dismissed with the arguments that seem unable to support or defend it. Little does this modern man, who prides himself on the breadth of his understanding and the scope of his embracing acceptance, realise how truly closed his mind can be. Following the example of millions throughout history who have shunned and disparaged that which is not understood or personally appreciated, modern man regards the notion of celibacy as flawed, defective, at its core a distortion of the good and the fullness of human life.

There is little we can do to change this view which predominates in the contemporary world. A people that closes its eyes and stops up its ears to the unfamiliar will not be swayed by many words or patterned arguments. It is possible to have ears, but not to hear; to have eyes, but not to see. Understanding cannot be forced. Changes of heart come more gradually, more mystically. But we may, we must, reinforce in ourselves the understanding of realities which the world around us may not accept. There is a higher judge, a far greater standard, than the opinions of the society of men. When we live according to the truth of His standard, then shall the world come gradually to see through our lives what it might not otherwise accept from our lips.

And so with the calling of celibacy, we must not permit our hearts to be turned by a world which accords it no value. We must understand and always appreciate, cherish, the breadth of the love of God which gives divergent gifts to His precious children. And here the heart of our mystery: gift. As much as the blessing of the sacramental married life is known so to be, so must we come to understand, first of all, that the celibate life is, too, a gift. Only when it is so approached, only when it is so conceived, can it properly be comprehended. The heart of Christ, which accords all men their spiritual gifts through the person of the Holy Spirit, is the true source of the celibate vocation. Spiritual things come only from the Spirit, and a divine gift is always something given, when and to whom God Himself wills. To call celibacy a gift is to affirm that which is all too often forgotten in contemporary life: that it has its root and source in the divine life of God—that it has its manifestation in the person of such an individual as this same God has created, chosen, and formed to journey into the Kingdom by such a way.

From the holy voices of the Fathers of the Church we have been taught, time and time again, that this life, this calling, is not for all. Saint Paul, himself a great lover of the celibate way, affirms nothing less when he says: 'I wish that all men were even as I myself'—that is, that all could be celibate. But then he quickly adds, 'But each one has his own gift from God, one in this manner and another in that' (1 Cor 7.7). Only those to whom God has given this gift may truly possess it, and only such a one should endeavour to embrace it personally. Just as a man who has not been given the gift of prophecy will never be a prophet, and as a woman who has not been given the gift of visions will never be a seer, so the individual who has not been given the gift of celibacy will never truly be a celibate. It is a holy way of life, but it is not the exclusive way of life. It is a gift given to some through the love of God, which neither debases nor exalts them in relation to their brethren to whom God has given the gift of the call to marriage. God's gifts are not to be 'rated'. All are holy blessings.

In appreciating this reality of celibacy as a spiritual gift, we are able to address and to quell in our hearts many of the concerns the world bears toward this life. First, and perhaps the most insidious among the views of the world, is the belief that the way of celibacy stands in judgement of the way of marriage. There is fear in our contemporary culture, that an acceptance of the notion of celibacy equates to an acceptance of a tacit devaluation of marriage—that the celibate man looks spitefully on his married brother and the celibate woman scorns her married sister. But it is the world, not the holy Church, which approaches our topic with such an 'either-or' attitude; for how can one who truly views both the married and celibate ways as gifts of one and the same loving God, set one in opposition to the other? How can he be serious of his faith, who would receive one gift from Christ, but call another evil? No, the value and sanctity of all things is in the Giver, who by His radiant energies makes all gifts holy. Celibacy and marriage both have their essence in Him who draws all things to life. How striking to our expectations that some of the most poignant phrases ever composed in support of and love for the married way, have come from the pens of celibate monks, nuns and Apostles. Such individuals know how deep, convicting and abiding God's gifts may be within a human life, and how precious can be that embodiment of Trinitarian love that is made manifest in the gift of Christian marriage. But they magnify a gift they know is not their own. Their own life is rooted in a different gift, another way, and it is this gift that receives the personal love of their own hearts.

Saint Paul, the great Apostle, taught us well concerning the varieties of spiritual gifts, that they are numerous, divergent, yet all precious and divinely personal. He himself received the wondrous and exceptional gift of the apostolate and therefore was in a position, it might be thought, to place one gift above another in the manner that some gifts bring authority over the exercise of others (cf. 1 Cor 12:1-31). But it is our same Saint Paul who reminds us of the inherent value of all the gifts of the Lord, precisely because they are gifts of the Lord. Because we know to call celibacy a gift, so we know not to use it in judgement of other gifts. The world which sees in Christian celibacy a despisal of the married way, sees but the illusion of its own misunderstanding.

Secondly, our understanding of celibacy as a gift helps us to appreciate the fact that this life is not a negative, but a positive calling. All too often is celibacy described in terms of negation: the celibate is one who 'lacks' a spouse, who 'goes without' marriage, who 'suffers the absence' of a partner. But gifts are not matters of negation, they are rooted in the active receipt of otherwise un-possessed blessings. Celibacy is only a negative state when viewed from one, specific angle. How often does modern man stop to think of celibacy, even attempt to think of celibacy, as the embracing of a different kind of positive? Perhaps never, certainly not often; and yet this is the very message of celibacy as gift. The celibate man may live without a wife, but he possesses the great gift of being wed solely to Christ, of having none for the object of his intimate love than his own Creator. She who lives in celibate devotion to God vests herself in the same manner of life embraced by the Son who walked on this earth with neither spouse nor mate, yet wed Himself to all the world as the perfect Bridegroom for a waiting bride. Are not such things positive, not states of deprivation but of rich fulfilment? The celibate does not see his life predominantly as one of 'going without', but one of going with Christ in a different way. Yes, there are sacrifices made, oftentimes severe in form and nature, but this is no less true in a holy marriage. In the requirement of great sacrifice, the callings are the same. Their distinction lies in the manner, not the quantity, of the offering. Only when we are truly, deeply biased, do we fail to see that both gifts require tremendous personal sacrifice, yet from and through this sacrifice grant many rich blessings.

The celibate's call is to walk toward Christ in a different manner than his married brother. Due to the unsearchable wisdom and love of God, he is called to a type of journey into the Kingdom that is more socially solitary—but he is never alone. The celibate, too, believes that 'it is not good for man to be alone'; but let us not be so naive and closed-minded as to think that marriage is the only way to be 'together'. The celibate joins himself to the world in a relationship of no single intimate union with another, that through his one union with Christ, and through Him the Spirit and the Father, he may be lover and companion to all. It is a very different call than to the blessed state of marriage; but a call is always, by its nature, social.

Celibacy is a positive calling, and we are reminded of this when we appreciate its nature as divine gift. We find here, too, reassurance of the fullness of life to be had in such a calling. Society may be eager to decry the celibate way as one in which the individual 'misses out' on the fullness of life attainable in marriage, but in so doing, our modern world only shows more clearly its failure to understand the nature of the gifts of God as effective personal realities. The richness, the wholeness and the completeness of life do not come from the adherence to any social or relational model: they come from personal union with God. Such union is always and only available to man through the gifts given him by our precious and loving Lord; and so individual fullness comes from realising, embracing and fostering within us the gifts we, and not any other, have received. Many receive the gift of the married vocation, and to these the richness of union with God comes, in part, through that gift's actualisation in a holy and sanctified marriage. Not to embrace the gift is to wage battle with God, who knows better than man what life is most suited to him. And this same concept is equally true of him who has received the gift of celibacy: only in the gift's embrace will such a person ever truly know the richness and fullness of life as God has set it before him. No other way shall ever satisfy the longing in his heart, even if that other way is that which brings fulfilment and union to a hundred million others. It is not his way. To live a celibate life is, for the one who has received this gift, the context of his journey into union with God.

Our life in Christ is the true soul of our being as human persons. We live in Him through His coming to us as man—the divine Man to whose life we were joined when, through the mystical power of the Holy Trinity, we were baptised in the same waters that flowed over His own flesh and sealed with the same Spirit that soared over the creation formed in Him. It is to this life that we must attend with all diligence and care, working to attain the discernment that will enable us to see and to recognise the unique and precious gifts God has given to each of us personally as His own priceless children. Let us never succumb to societal pressures that would have us walk one way or another based upon the comforts and preferences of a troubled world. Let us never be swayed into judging or pre-determining the gifts of God, which only He has the right to determine and give. We must find in ourselves the light of Christ which calls us toward Himself, and see through its illumination the path by which He calls us to His side. Whether it be by the celibate or married way, our response should be only joy—and great joy at this. How can we do anything but rejoice when our Maker shows us the road which He has fashioned especially between us and Him? Shall we once again take from the Tree of Life the fruit that seems sweetest to our senses, rather than the food sprung forth specifically for our growth and sanctification? May our societally-induced 'preferences' never cause us to scorn our gift through longing for another. May God give to us the patience and the openness to discern which gift we have been given; and when we have found it, to follow Him in that gift. If we are thus faithful to Him and Him alone, surely our wise Lord will bless our lives with richness beyond imagining and fullness beyond expectation; for He is a good and loving God who knows and desires what is best for His children.

May we always have His blessing.

http://tinyurl.com/monachos-celibacy

More on Neo-Paganism

User Adamantios speaks again on the Neo-Pagan trend

"Message From A Hellenic Nationalist Comrade On Golden Dawn and Neo-Paganism" post on Hellenic Nationalist Blog


"Anyone who supports -- or even tolerates -- Neo-Paganism is not a nationalist or could ever be as long as they hold such traitorous beliefs.

Neo-Paganism is a Western import. It's roots trace directly to the Worldwide Theosophical Society that was established by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1875 in the United States. All Neo-Pagan movements and factions, to one extent or another, are ideologically based on this organization's principles and, all of them, without exception, originate from the creation of this organization. Although there are a few highly confused individuals (mostly in the diaspora) who are Neo-Pagan and believe themselves to be "nationalists", the extreme majority of Neo-Pagans are New Age spiritualists who advance egalitarianism, promiscuity, secularism, democracy, and other anathemas. The commonality between Neo-Pagans of the first variety and the second is that they both lack all comprehension of ancient Hellenic civilization. Indeed, many times they have never read a single piece of ancient Greek literature (but still speak about ancient Greek philosophers as if they were experts on the matter) or, if in the diaspora, can not even speak demotic Greek (let alone any form of ancient Greek).

Regarding paganism in ancient Greece, it is not strange at all that every great Hellene from that period highly criticized and/or rejected that dark and barbaric religion in one form or another. Such individuals include (but are not limited to): Xenophon the Kolofonios, Heraclitus, Anaximandros, Ebedocles, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Mitrodoros, Protagoras, Herodotus, Aristodimos, Dimosthenes, Pindar, Prodikos, Antisthenes, Theofrastos, Euripides, Socrates, Plato, the Stoics, Karniades, Theodoros the Kyrinaios, Leukippos, Dimocritus, Epicouros, the Sophists, the Cynics, St. Julian the Philospher and Martyr, and Klimis the Alexandrean. It's also worth mentioning that ancient paganism was exceedingly degenerate. Homoeroticism, sexual orgies, pedophilia, temple prostitution, and even bestiality were widespread in Greece precisely because these things were promoted as a result of the demented actions of the mythical gods. This is why the greatest Hellenes came into conflict with the religion (and, as a result, were often exiled, sentenced to death, or murdered by pagan fanatics).

Orthodoxy, on the other hand, is an ethical, civilized religion (and which ironically has more in common with Socratic/Platonic philosophy than paganism ever did). It is an integral part of Hellenism, rooted in our culture, and is inseparatable from Hellenic Civilization. Thus, it's rejection constitutes both a cultural and historical rejection of Hellenism. And that is essentially what treason is. Furthermore, Orthodoxy -- as proven by countless miracles (including the Holy Fire miracle that occurs every single year) is the One True Faith. Anyone who would reject the Truth of Orthodoxy for any other religious, political, or philosophical belief is, along with being a traitor to Hellenism, a fool."

George Soros, Postmodern Villain

The following is an extremely enlightening article regarding the Jew George Soros. It is written by Srdja Trifkovic, a Serbian journalist, and was published in the American magazine "Chronicles". This article exposes Soros' billion dollar campaign to export his ultra-Liberal social and political views around the world, and particularly in post-Communist Eastern Europe, through a global network of "non-governmental organizations" that are dedicated to: promoting abortion and helping local and international "non-governmental organizations" counter and obstruct the efforts of anti-abortion groups; legalizing drugs; promoting homosexuality by using the media and politicians to influence society and the legal system; legalizing euthanasia; supporting immigration and open borders policies; supporting minority rights at the expense of the majority and giving minorities (principally gypsies) affirmative action; supporting feminism; controlling the education system; and generally advocating relativism and denouncing anything absolutist as "oppressive" and "undemocratic".

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/February2004/0204Trifkovic.html

George Soros, Postmodern Villain
by Srdja Trifkovic

NGO's, Behold Your God.

George Soros was born in Budapest in 1930 but, today, spends most of his time in New York City. Not much is known about his early years. He is the only eminent "holocaust survivor" who has been accused of collaboration with the Nazis. In 1947, he managed to sneak through the Iron Curtain, and, the official story goes, "he landed penniless in London, but by hard work and sheer genius, he rose to become one of the planet's most successful investors and richest men."

Mr. Soros' peculiar moral values, political views, and ideological preferences would be immaterial without the money that he can spend promoting and imposing them. The bulk of that money-currently estimated at not less than seven billion dollars-was earned in the minus-sum game of currency and stock speculation, contributing nothing to the creation of wealth and making millions of ordinary people poorer in the process. His offshore Quantum Fund-legally headquartered in Curacao, beyond U.S.-government supervision-specializes in speculative investments to take advantage of deliberately induced political and economic weaknesses of different countries and regions. In an interview with the Swiss weekly L'hebdo (May 1993), Soros outlined his strategy: "I speculate on discrepancy between the reality and the public image of this reality, until a correctional mechanism occurs, which approaches these two."

His profits are staggering. On September 16, 1992, he famously made a billion dollars in one day by betting against the Bank of England and the pound sterling. In July 1997, he contributed to the Southeast Asian financial crisis by shorting the Thai bath. In early 2000, he supposedly suffered losses on tech stocks, but some analysts now suggest that the burn of the NASDAQ was controlled and that Soros helped to start the fire. By last November, he was betting the U.S. dollar would plummet. As the London Independent reported (November 28, 2003), his activities were contributing to a growing belief on Wall Street that the dollar would slide even further.

There is nothing new in Soros' approach to making money or in the ability of such a person to make an impact, invariably detrimental, on his host society's morals and culture. What is new with Mr. Soros-in addition to the implausible claim that a private speculator could get as far as he has unaided by any established financial interests-is his systematic, concerted effort to use a large part of his fortune to promote his peculiar social and political views. He does so through a global network of "nongovernmental organizations" named after himself and active primarily in Eastern Europe but also in Africa, Latin America, and the United States. At age 75, money is not his object but his tool. He has used it to develop a well-coordinated global operation centered on the Open Society Institute (OSI) in New York, which funds a network of subsidiaries in over 50 countries.

Even before the Open Society network came into being, Soros' blueprint for postcommunist "shock therapy" reform had been put to the test. First came Poland, where the first postcommunist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, was close to Soros and subsequently remained associated with his local subsidiary, the Stefan Batory Foundation. In his book Underwriting Democracy, Soros says that he personally prepared the broad outlines of Poland's comprehensive economic reform:

I joined forces with Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard University, who was advocating a similar program, and sponsored his work in Poland through the Stefan Batory Foundation . . . The IMF approved and the program went into effect on Jan. 1, 1990. It was very tough on the population, but people were willing to take a lot of pain in order to see real change.

Poland was only a start, however; far more important to his goals was his association in 1991-92 with Russia's "reformist" leaders Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar and their Harvard guru Sachs. Within a year of their "shock therapy," hyperinflation had wiped out Russians' savings and the long-suffering middle class with it. Pensioners were literally starving. The parallel "privatization" of Russia's huge resources-timber, oil, gas, chemicals, media-created the robber oligarchs and contributed to Russia's effective deindustrialization. The country was lowered into neocolonial dependence: a supplier of energy and raw materials and an importer of high technology and manufactured goods. Nevertheless, in early 1993, Soros felt that Russia had not gone far enough: "The social safety net would also provide a powerful incentive to shut down loss-making enterprises. Factories could be idled and the raw materials and energy that go into production could be sold for more than the output."

George Soros is out to deconstruct nations and states as Europe has known them for centuries, with Russia always the main prize. In an interview with the Moscow daily Komersant (August 8, 1997), he declared that "a strong central government in Russia cannot be democratic." "The rescue of a free Russian economy depends on the attraction of Western investments," he added, and, to that end, "Russia's general public must accept the ideology of an open society."

By that time, a total of 29 "Soros Foundations" were active in every postcommunist country. In 1994, his foundations spent a total of $300 million; by 1998, that figure had risen to $574 million. These are enormous sums in an impoverished and vulnerable Eastern Europe.

Those foundations say that they are "dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of an open society." What this means in practice is clear from their many fruits. Regarding "women's health" programs in Central and Southeastern Europe, for instance, one will look in vain for breast-cancer detection or prenatal or postnatal care. Soros' main goal is clear and frankly stated: "to improve the quality of abortion services." Accordingly, his Public Health Program has supported the introduction of medical abortion in Albania, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia and the introduction of manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) abortion in Macedonia, Moldova, and Russia. In addition,

OSI has also worked with international and local NGOs to respond to the growing strength of the antiabortion movement. Through its influence on ministries of health and hospital administrators, that movement has made strides in reducing access to abortion . . . OSI will continue to support training in quality of care and efforts to keep abortion legal, safe, and accessible for all women in the region.

Why is Soros so interested in promoting more abortions in Eastern Europe? Overpopulation cannot be the reason: The region is experiencing a colossal demographic collapse and has some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Unavailability of abortion cannot be the answer either: According to a recent U.N. report, five European countries had more abortions than live births in 2000-the Russian Federation, Bulgaria, Belarus, Rumania, and Ukraine. Overall, the report said, abortion rates are "substantially higher in central and eastern Europe and the CIS countries than in western Europe and North America." The only logical answer is that Soros wants as few Russians and others born into this world as possible.

Soros' public-health programs also "support initiatives focusing on the specific health needs of several marginalized communities" and promote "harm reduction": "Its primary goal is to empower drug users to protect their health. Needle/syringe exchange and substitution therapies (e.g., methadone) are at the center of harm reduction health interventions." His "harm reducers" have expanded their work with special initiatives on "sex workers" and prisoners and launched a policy initiative that attempts to ensure that "repressive drug policies do not impede the expansion of harm reduction efforts."

Over the past five years, the Soros network has given a successful start to previously nonexistent "gay" activism in almost all of its areas of operation. The campaign for "LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] Rights" is directed from Budapest, where Miriam Molnar's 1999 policy paper published by OSI defined the "problem" as discrimination and the low level of acceptance, visibility, and political representation of LGBT's. It was necessary either "to convince the society to accept LGBT people as equal and let the society make pressure [sic] to the politicians (through media) to change laws" or "to convince the politicians that LGBT people are equal and that they need help in convincing the rest of the society." The overall goals were to generate discussion about LGBT identity within the community, to make them visible and "create a positive image," and to establish regular forums of discussion with other groups in the region. Specific tasks included the development of websites in English with subsites in local languages, the establishment of task forces that would react to all "homophobic" media outbursts in one "Pink Book," and the organization of two-week summer schools for teachers that would "provide training about discrimination of [sic] LGBT people, disabled people, overweight people etc."

In November 1999, a pilot project began at the Center for Publishing Development (OSI Budapest) on homosexual books in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, and Slovakia. That same year, Nash Mir (Our World) Gay and Lesbian Center announced that it had been registered as an NGO in the Ukraine. From that moment, the group was free to pursue its stated goals, including "fight against sexual-orientation discrimination" and "homophobic sentiments in societal consciousness" and "assistance to upbringing of gays' and lesbians' self-consciousness as equal and valuable members of society." The group expressed gratitude for its legalization to the "Ukrainian branch of Soros Foundation Network (Renaissance Foundation) which lobbied our question in the Ministry of Justice and render [sic] legal assistance to us."

Gay.ru is a Soros-funded Moscow NGO that has developed "into an established and recognized Russian gay and lesbian center" and "the clearing house for lesbian and gay groups scattered across the country":

We keep contacts with all existing gay, lesbian, and AIDS organizations in Russia and maintain on-going correspondence and reporting to international gay and lesbian organizations . . . We have collected the biggest off-line library that features over a hundred Russian titles and some fifty English classic books on gay studies. It was greatly enhanced by the Core Collection on Gay and Lesbian Issues awarded to us by the Soros Foundation in 2000.

In Bucharest, Monika Barcsy of the local Soros branch bewailed the fact that, in Rumania, "the homosexual identity is stigmatized" and is one of the main bases for treating individuals as "the others" in an attitude of intolerance. Their families became the victims of prejudice "just because the society is unable to accept the legitimacy of same-sex relations as a 'normal' manifestation." The author singles out the Rumanian Orthodox Church as a prime culprit: "The problem is that many Christian Orthodox students' organizations and other student groups support the church." In 1994, she points out, more than 100 theology students began a series of demonstrations in front of Rumania's parliament against homosexual propaganda in the media and collected signatures demanding legislation to criminalize same-sex relations. Barcsy concludes by reiterating the standard Soros line:

Gay men and lesbians need rights that guarantee them the expression of their identity in the public sphere . . . [T]he legal status of gays and lesbians, their ability to move and appear in public, to speak out and act together should be considered a very good test of the civic openness. [It] can't be resolved with the new laws made under the pressure of different human rights organizations. Romania needs . . . to ameliorate the negative responses towards the homosexuals from the majority population . . . There are "problems" with the society as a whole, and the society's mentality can't be changed overnight.

A key pillar of Soros' activities is his dictum that "no-one has a monopoly on the truth" and that "civic education" should replace the old "authoritarian" model. Civic education does not have to be "just a dialogue" between a teacher and students, he says; in addition, "we have projects like health education, where people use new ways to discuss issues like hygiene, diet, and sex." While "this does not sound like traditional civic education," he continues, it is "a new way for teachers to relate to their pupils," just as citizens must relate in new ways to governments and elected officials in societies trying to become more open and democratic.

Accordingly, throughout postcommunist Eastern Europe, the Soros Foundation's primary stated goal is to "democratize the education system" by "instituting curriculum reforms." What this means in practice has been demonstrated over the past three years by Serbia's education minister Gaso Knezevic, a friend and confidante of Soros. Since the first day of his tenure, Mr. Knezevic has insisted that schools must be transformed from "authoritarian" institutions into "exercise grounds" for the "unhindered expression of students' personalities in the process of equal-footed interaction with the teaching staff, thus overcoming the obsolete concept of authority and discipline rooted in the oppressive legacy of patriarchal past." Mr. Knezevic started his reform with primary schools, with a pilot program of "educational workshops" for children ages 7 to 12. The accompanying manual, financed by the Open Society, rejects the quaint notion that the purpose of education is the "acquisition of knowledge" and insists that the teacher has to become the class "designer" and that his relationship with students should be based on "partnership."

In Russia, Soros' associates exercise great control over the selection of textbooks for Russian schools. According to a press release by the Gaidar Youth Library, financial support from the Open Society Institute provided it with computers, videocassettes, and CD's, all of which made "special training" for the children of "underprivileged people" possible in the library:

We organized a special seminar "Children's rights nowadays" for all specialists who took part in our project . . . The working group of the program "The Circle of Friends" is grateful to the "Open Society" Institute (Soros Fund, Budapest) for the opportunity to realize this project in a full volume.

In 1999, the Moscow Open Society office started a major five-year project, "The Development of Education in Russia." Its goal is to "reeducate rural teachers at a cost of US $100-150 million" (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, September 19, 1998). It is also applying a program called "Tolerance" in Russian secondary schools, but its masterminds may have made a linguistic blunder. According to a Russian critic of the program,

The Russian translation of this Latin word-tyerpimost-has the dual meaning of prostitution and could be confused with doma tyerpimosti, houses of ill fame . . . How come this financial manipulator tries to teach us about tolerance, us who grew up with Leo Tolstoy, one of the first philosophers of non-violence? . . . But Mr. Soros is also a horribly distorted mirror, which should make us see our own, present image, without blinking or turning away. There are times when evil can become an eye-opener, when its derisive laughter can waken us up and help regaining our strength. We should not miss this opportunity.

A first step in that direction may have been taken last November 7, when the OSI Moscow office was raided by a private security company hired by the owner of the building with whom the foundation was engaged in a protracted legal battle. Only weeks before, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the billionaire oligarch and OSI Moscow executive director who has his own NGO called the Open Russia Foundation, was arrested and charged with tax evasion, theft, forgery, and fraud. Soros denounced the arrest as an act of "persecution" that should disqualify Russia from belonging to the G-8 group of industrialized countries. "I believe that he acted within the constraints of the law. I am doing the same in the United States," said Soros, alluding to his multimillion-dollar donations toward "regime change" in Washington next November. The American press indignantly reported that the raid was directed against a philanthropic organization that had spent "more than $US 1 billion on charitable projects in Russia in the past 15 years."

"Racism" is Soros' regular obsession, but he faced the potential problem of finding it in racially nondiverse Eastern European countries. This has been resolved by identifying a designated victim group-Gypsies! "Few minority groups in Europe face as much social, economic, and political discrimination as do Romani people," says OSI. Being a "Roma activist" has become a lucrative designation within the community. Seventy of the most promising ones came to the conference "Roma in Expanding Europe: Challenges for the Future," held in Budapest last summer, at which Soros inaugurated a "Decade of Roma Inclusion." The conference offered policy recommendations, some of which could have been written by Jesse Jackson: first, obligatory and free preschool education in desegregated classrooms; second, Romani assistants in the classroom, especially in preschool; third, antibias training for teachers and school administrators; and fourth, integration of Romani history and culture in textbooks at all levels.

Legally mandated affirmative-action programs for Roma in high schools and universities were recommended by the delegations of Rumania and Serbia-Montenegro. On employment, the conference recommended tax incentives for those who employ Roma and access to low-interest credit for small Roma-owned family businesses. The Czech and Slovak delegations also proposed setting aside a percentage of government contracts for Roma construction firms. In the area of housing, specific demands were made to combat "racism and discrimination," including the "legalization" of shantytowns and "equal access" to municipal housing. The conference concluded that combating racial discrimination against Roma must be pursued through the adoption of comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation complying with the requirements of the E.U. Race Equality Directive.

The Rumanian delegation demanded that the Bucharest government recognize the Roma holocaust by issuing a public apology along with urgent adoption of a reparations package. The European Union was asked to make sure that Roma are broadly involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of all E.U. spending on Roma projects.

Soros' "programs" would have been deemed laughable or outrageous in their target countries only a decade ago. No one is laughing today, however. For thousands of young Eastern Europeans, to become a "Soroshite" represents today what joining the Party represented to their parents: an alluring opportunity to have a reasonably paid job, to belong to a privileged elite, and, for many, to travel abroad. The chosen few go to Soros's own Central European University in Budapest, where they are taught that affirming a scientifically grounded truth is "totalitarian" and that the sovereign nation-state is evil.

There is not one patriot (Russian, Croat, Latvian, Serb, Rumanian, Hungarian) or one practicing Christian on Soros' payroll. In all postcommunist countries, Soros relies on the sons and daughters of the old communist establishment, who are less likely to be tainted by any atavistic attachments to their native soil, culture, and traditions. The more successful among them-and the most loyal-may spend years drifting from one "project" to another, and some have been living that way for more than a decade. Soros has revealed (in Underwriting Democracy) that his Open Society foundations will help create an international web, at the heart of which will be the computerized base of personal data that will enable Western multinationals to find the local candidates they need.

These new janissaries, just like those of the Ottoman army of old, have to prove their credentials by being more zealous than the master himself; as the Balkan proverb has it, "a convert is worse than a Turk." Nobody is more insanely vehement in his insults against the Serbian people and their history, religion, art, and suffering than a dozen Serb-born columnists who are on the payroll of Sonja Licht, Soros' Gauleiter in Belgrade.

Hoi polloi are force-fed the daily fare of OSI agitprop by "the Soros media"-the term now exists in over a dozen languages-from the Gazeta Wyborcza in Warsaw to Danas (Today) in Serbia, the Monitor in Montenegro, the Markiza TV channel in Bratislava, and Vreme weekly and the B-92 electronic media conglomerate in Belgrade. They invariably parrot Soros' views and ambitions, reflected by the agenda of the local Soros foundation at home and, in world affairs, by the International Crisis Group (ICG), largely financed by Soros and run by his appointees.

Soros' agenda in world affairs is clear from the fact that his appointees include Gen. Wesley Clark, who commanded NATO forces in the war against Serbia in 1999; Louise Arbour, the former chief prosecutor of the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal at The Hague; former assistant secretary of state Morton Abramowitz, an enthusiastic supporter of Bosnian Muslims and Albanians in the wars of Yugoslav succession; and former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose visceral Russophobia aided and abetted the rise of Osama bin Laden and his jihadist cohorts.

As Gilles d'Aymery noted two years ago, Soros is not just the power behind the Open Society Institute, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Crisis Group:

[L]ike an immense Jules Verne octopus, [he] extends his tentacles all over Eastern Europe, South-Eastern Europe, the Caucasus as well as the republics of the former Soviet Union. With the help of these various groups [it is possible] not only to shape but to create the news, the agenda and public opinion to further aims which are, in short, the control of the world, its natural resources and the furtherance of the uniform ideal of a perfect world polity made in America.

That polity will not be "American" in any recognizable sense if Soros has his way, however. Here, he supports increased government spending and tax increases, drug legalization, euthanasia, open borders and immigration, immigrant entitlements, feminism, free abortion on demand, affirmative action, and "gay" rights. He opposes the death penalty in any circumstance. One of the trustees of OSI is Lani Guinier, the law professor whom Bill Clinton tried to nominate as head of the civil-rights division of the Department of Justice but changed his mind when she was found to favor minority veto power over legislation. Its president is Aryeh Neier, who had for 12 years been executive director of the Soros-funded Human Rights Watch and, before that, national director of the American Civil Liberties Union for eight years.

That he is anti-Bush is unremarkable, but Soros' statement last December that the defeat of the President is "a matter of life and death" was silly. His largesse to Bush's foes-although substantial-does not reflect the stated urgency of the moment: $15 million for America Coming Together; $3 million for John Podesta's new think tank; and $2.5 million for MoveOn.org falls far short of a month's cost of running his many foundations around the world.

Soros remains primarily committed to destroying the remaining bastions of the family, sovereign nationhood, and Christian Faith east of the Trieste-Stettin line. He senses that his full-throttle intervention in America is not necessary, because things are gradually going his way anyway. No matter who is his party's anointed candidate come next November, the real choice will be between George and Gyorgy, and that is not much of a choice.

Chronicles' foreign-affairs editor Srdja Trifkovic is the author of The Sword of the Prophet: Islam-History, Theology, Impact on the World.