By Steve Bolton
The bottom line on the National Security Agency (NSA)
surveillance scandal is that when Edward Snowden blew the whistle, the American
public rolled over and went back to sleep. The moral of the story is this: the
nation is in the grip of an apathetic coma so deep that no whistle may be
sufficiently loud to wake us up again. Consequently, men in high places now
have unprecedented power to act in immoral and unconstitutional ways, even to
the point of getting away with murder right under the public’s nose. In fact,
the public has lackadaisically slumbered right through several decades of disgraces
that dwarf Snowden’s revelations in importance, as well as numerous trends in
international politics which threaten the very future of Western civilization.
This soporific trend began after the 1970s, when ordinary
Americans responded sluggishly to alarms sounding over scandals like Watergate
that seriously threatened the integrity of our democratic institutions.
Thankfully, the people of that era roused themselves in time to enact some
badly needed reforms that bought the republic some time. Contemporaneous scandals
perpetrated by various other branches of our national security establishment
were also greeted with yawns, such as the overthrow of Chile’s democratically
elected government by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the cost of
30,000 lives, as well as numerous crimes committed by well-known figures like
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. One of the
worst disgraces was the genocidal counterinsurgency plan developed by the top
brass of our armed services, which killed 10 percent of the Vietnamese
population and thereby brought about our defeat in the Vietnam War, at a cost of
more than 50,000 rank-and-file American servicemen. America has always shown a
lack of moral backbone when it comes to punishing members of the national
security establishment who betray the public trust, but up until that point,
there was still at least some risk of consequences and therefore deterrence. Even
that flimsy barrier dissolved under the Reagan Administration, which was caught
red-handed supporting right-wing death squads that cost hundreds of thousands
of innocent Latin American lives in the 1980s; the documentary evidence was
beyond question, but the public simply no longer had the stomach to see that
its leaders were held accountable for state-supported political murder, or the serious
violations of the Constitution committed in the Iran-Contra Scandal. By the
time George W. Bush left office, it was clear that agencies like the CIA could
even routinely commit acts of torture in full view of the public without fear
of punishment. The revelations about the scope of the NSA spying scandal that
Snowden began making in May should surprise no one, given that they were caught
red-handed committing similar offenses during the Bush era, yet were let off
scot-free. Oversight of our national security personnel had become such a joke
that the NSA knew it was essentially open season on the entire planet: they
could eavesdrop on anyone, anywhere, on the flimsiest of excuses, without fear
of punishment.
Being devoid of virtue, as government officials often
are, they naturally acted upon the temptation that new surveillance
technologies and data mining techniques represented. Anyone who did not see
this coming is simply grossly naïve, because the first lesson of human history is
that governments cannot be trusted. In every generation, evil tends to flow
upwards and concentrate at the highest levels of human society. The second
lesson is that security services must be watched like a hawk, for they are the
one segment within government that represent a constant threat to liberty in
every generation. “The price of democracy is eternal vigilance,” as the saying
goes, but our generation simply isn’t willing to pay that price. It simply
doesn’t care about authentic liberty anymore. In fact, Americans don’t even
care about their own children; if they did, they would not have stood idly by
while 48 million of them were murdered by their own mothers since Roe v. Wade;
freedom has become an Orwellian term for taking away the freedom of the
innocent. Ordinary Americans can’t even keep their marriages together, let
alone stand up to Big Government and Big Business run amok. Americans can no
longer keep their own homes from facturing, which is why America’s
global-spanning empire is flaking away at the edges. The NSA scandal is deadly
serious, but the Big Picture is that it represents merely one thread in a
tapestry of across-the-board decline in morals and institutional strength. The
only whistle left to blow is the one warning that the age of whistleblowing itself
has passed, for the public no longer has the will to punish authentic crimes,
especially when committed by the rich, the powerful, the popular, the clever
and the beautiful. It is certainly possible to mobilize the public to destroy
false devils, such as the high-handed and Pharisaical crusade against smoking,
which is not intrinsically wrong when done temperately. The flip side of the
coin is that it is all too easy to whip up a mob on behalf of perverted fringe
causes like the homosexual marriage movement, which represents a “hate crime”
in and of itself. False ideas like moral relativity and the equality of
religions have simply paralyzed the public mind, rendering a growing proportion
of the American public incapable of distinguishing good from evil or virtue
from vice. In such an atmosphere of widespread corruption, it is not surprising
that there is no backbone to put the NSA officials in charge of the spying
programs Snowden revealed behind bars. It is the same moral fault which
likewise makes it impossible to bring the villains of Wall Street or the
perpetrators of state-supported terrorism to justice. Of course, if the public
can’t even resist the temptation to slaughter its own kids and betray their own
families through divorce, then they’re never going to be capable of righting
these lesser wrongs. The real scandal is that the public itself has rejected
the ideals embraced by the Founding Fathers, as well as the Christian moral
code that they drew upon, to the point that America and its fellow Western
nations may need to be punished. There can be no doubt that our empire is
already in decline in every form of national power, as I discuss in great
detail in The Retreat of the West and
have touched upon in this column. Worse still, it may soon be entirely bereft
of virtue, at which point it will deserve
to fall. The NSA scandal and the tepid response to it are dwarfed in importance
by this larger pattern, which ultimately made them possible.
The Real Sources of National Security
To paraphrase, G.K. Chesterton, the leading English
literary defender of Catholicism in the early 20th Century, hardness of heart
and softness of mind often go hand-in-hand. It is not surprising that the steep
moral decline of Western civilization has been accompanied by a pronounced
increased in gullibility in the common people, including those of America; to
put it bluntly, if you can accept the murder of more than one billion unborn
children worldwide in the last 40 years on the quite mad grounds that a fetus
is not a person, you’re gullible enough to swallow any excuse for any crime.
That includes offenses committed in the name of “national security” that
represent dire and direct threats to one’s most selfish interests. One of the
most frightening aspects of the NSA scandal is that a shocking proportion of
the public accepts the excuses given by the American government for its bad
behavior, in defiance of all common sense. In every age and in every nation
where democratic ideals have been valued, the greatest transgressions against
them have invariably been committed by security services that cited some
internal or external threat as excuses for their bad behavior. Historically,
“national security” has been used as a get-out-of-jail-free card by agencies
like the CIA which routinely commit crimes against international law -
including overthrowing democratically elected governments and committing
genocide – merely to protect against imagined threats or the interests of Big
Business. One of the most famous cases was the aforementioned coup in Chile,
which the CIA instigated at the urging of the Kennecott and Anaconda copper
companies, whose mines had been nationalized by Salvador Allende’s freely
elected government. One of the most disgusting examples was the 1954 coup
against Guatemala’s democratically elected Arbenz regime, which was engineered
by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, who directed
the CIA at the time. Both brothers were major shareholders in the United Fruit
Company, which was clamoring for intervention after Arbenz nationalized its
ill-gotten holdings. Both Dulles brothers should have served the rest of their
lives in prison for this act of self-aggrandizement, but the public bought the
excuse they contrived that Guatemala was threatened by Communist agitators who
in turn represented a threat to the U.S. The American public would be shocked
to learn just how common it is for their high government officials to misuse
national security in this manner as an excuse to line their own pockets, or
simply murder innocent foreigners by the hundreds of thousands.
Whenever this catch phrase is trotted out, it is time
to raise a few eyebrows, not to close our eyes and be lulled to sleep, in the
false belief that institutions like the CIA and State Department are valiantly
standing guard over us. Quite often, they’re engaged in mischief that imperils
our security in the long term and eventually costs American lives; for example,
many of the interventions the U.S. undertook out of corrupt motives in the 20th
Century ended up backfiring badly, particularly the 1953 coup against Mohammed
Mossadegh’s democratic government, which paved the way for the Iranian
Revolution of 1979. Failing to punish the Joint Chiefs of Staff for its
genocidal but incompetent conduct of the Vietnam War did nothing increase our
security, but its sheer brutality did provide a great recruiting tool for the
Viet Cong, which is the real reason more than 50,000 American servicemen ended
up dying in a lost cause. Likewise, allowing the Reagan Administration to
openly fund the death squads of Latin America did nothing to increase our security;
in fact, when they weren’t busy gunning down easy targets like civilian peace
activists and union organizers, many of them were busy establishing the drug
smuggling networks which made the crack epidemic of the 1980s possible.
Authentic external threats do exist, but relaxing oversight and standards of
justice rarely provides any strategic benefit in combatting them and
historically, such lenience may actually enable sloppy or outright immoral
decisions that endanger us all to benefit a privileged few. Giving the NSA
carte blanche to eavesdrop on the entire planet without fear of prosecution
doesn’t provide any substantial protection against the few thousand terrorists
who subscribe to Osama Bin Laden’s ideal, because the other 6 billion people on
the planet they’re spying on aren’t members of Al Qaeda. Some Americans have
defended such intrusions against their privacy on the grounds that their
constitutional rights will be restored once this temporary emergency is over,
but they’re quite mistaken: as I have outlined in past columns like The Berlin Solution to the Syrian Conundrum and Mali and the Return of Mohammed, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism is going to
become a permanent feature of international relations. Just as the Cold War dominated
international politics throughout much of the 20th Century, the rest of the 21st
is likely to be characterized by the Clash of Civilizations theorized by
political scientist Samuel P. Huntington; this Clash has in turn been made
possible by a long-term decline in ten categories of national power among the
nations often collectively referred to as “the West,” as described in great
detail in my would-be dissertation, The Retreat of the West. The balance of power is tilting against North
America and Europe and in favor of the lands they once colonized with
frightening speed, which is in turn reigniting the battle that raged across the
Mediterranean between Islam and the West from the 7th Century right up until
the West’s rise began in the 16th.
As I have discussed in recent columns, these ancient
fault lines may be reemerging, but the substance of Western civilization has
completely changed in the intervening time; our true religion is now Mammon,
i.e. the worship of the Almighty Dollar, but a society based on a commercial
values cannot stand against any rival philosophy based on self-sacrifice,
whether for good or evil. It is precisely like the game Rock, Paper, Scissors:
we simply cannot defeat an enemy devoted to otherworldly values using an
explicitly worldly philosophy. No matter how many Islamic fundamentalists we
kill, they are simply going to proliferate as rapidly as they have since late
‘70s until we can match them with an otherworldly philosophy of our own. The
only way America and the rest of the West can bolster their security is through
rejection of the commercial value system they have embraced; the handful of
terrorists we catch by allowing institutions like the NSA to trample on our
democratic ideals is just a drop in the bucket compared to the number that
await us a generation from now, or a generation after that. Allowing the NSA to
spy on the whole planet is a bit like prescribing chemotherapy for a heart
attack: it weakens us without addressing the real threat. If we really want to
stop the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism, then we need a concerted effort
to convince people who call themselves Muslim just what a monster Mohammed was.
Unless the world’s one billion Muslims realize that the Koran is a book far
more frightening and immoral than Mein Kampf, produced by a butcher and pedophile
in the same league as Hitler, then we are doomed. Rummaging through people’s
E-mails and tapping into transoceanic cables might be a lot easier, but it does
nothing to address the root of the problem. If Americans can’t even rouse
themselves to indignation against the NSA’s brobdingnagian violation of their
own constitutional rights, they’re not going to be capable of rolling up their
sleeves and taking the only steps that will fix this greater problem: rejection
of the false brand of secularism that has become our state ideology, followed
by recognition of the worth of orthodox Christianity. The NSA is adept at
eavesdropping on encrypted communication, but can’t seem to realize that the
key to defeating Islam resides in honest readings of the freely available,
unencrypted and often quite vile communication embodied in the Koran. The
reason they make this mistake is that the state-mandated secularist philosophy
of comparative religion has been drilled into them since childhood, filling
them with factually false notions that “all religions teach the same thing” and
are thus of equal worth. In practice, this really means that all religions are
equally worthless in comparison to “real” considerations that revolve around
money. The NSA and our other security services have utterly failed to stem the
rapid rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the last four decades precisely because
they don’t allow themselves to even consider what Islam itself is, let alone
question their own commercial values or appreciate Christianity for what it
truly is. These topics are verboten.
Until a sea change in Western attitudes occurs and these taboos can be broken,
Islam is going to continue to spread misery across the planet unchecked, as it
always did from the time Mohammed first went on the warpath up until Catholic
powers decisively broke the power of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th
Centuries.
Snowden and the Senseless Snitches
Billions of lives are at stake in trends like the
Retreat of the West and the Clash of Civilizations, which tower over Snowden’s
revelations in importance. Nevertheless, the case is illustrative of what
really ails America in myriad ways, as a sort of microcosm of our empire’s
decay. It has even affected the virtue of our whistleblowers, who are not as
valiant today as they were in the Vietnam War era. Back then, we had men like
RAND Corporation employee Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in
1971 to expose misconduct and bad decision-making among high-ranking officials.
Predictably, he was accused of putting American servicemen at risk when they
were really endangered by the men he exposed. Ellsberg and fellow RAND employee
Anthony Russo were tried under the 1917 Espionage Act but the case was
dismissed in 1973, after it came to light that the Nixon Administration had
illegally spied on Ellsberg in the course of the Watergate scandal. Like
Ellsberg and Russo, Snowden is likely to face prosecution under the same act,
despite the fact that he too leaked information to newspapers without
compensation in order to protect the Constitution and the nation, rather than
selling secrets that might get our soldiers killed to foreign governments. It
is highly likely that in the long run, Snowden will be caught, because the only
nations that have tendered definite offers of permanent asylum are politically
unstable Latin American nations like Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua.
Currently, all three nations are governed by freely elected presidents who
routinely oppose U.S. hegemony in the region, but Washington has manipulated
the political systems of these particular countries on many occasions in the
last two centuries. Sooner or later the political winds will change and Snowden
will be even more unwelcome there as he currently is in Moscow’s airport. In
all likelihood the U.S. will probably be capable of capturing him sooner or
later, but that does not mean it is in their interests to do so. That might
trigger a flood of further leaks from Snowden, particularly if his case turns
into a primetime courtroom drama. The American public seems more obsessed with
inconsequential matters like the Zimmerman trial at the moment, but the NSA
cannot afford to take the chance of his case taking its place. Do not be
surprised if he meets with a plausible “accident” at a young age, or suddenly
becomes “despondent” and commits “suicide.”
Snowden is already a martyr of sorts, although not in
the same class as Ellsberg. Wanton spying is certainly a substantial threat,
but the information Ellsberg divulged was more directly related to life and
death matters affecting millions of Americans and foreigners alike. Secondly,
his initial revelations concerned crimes committed against the American public,
but in succeeding weeks, he divulged information about surveillance of
foreigners, which is not a crime. It may be immoral to essentially spy on the
entire planet as the NSA was doing, but it is not a crime under American law.
It might be an offense under international law to eavesdrop on the Internet communications
and phone calls of all six billion people who don’t enjoy American citizenship
- in fact, it might be considered an act of war against the entire planet – but
it does not technically qualify as misconduct under our domestic law. Third,
Snowden could have seized the moral high ground by facing punishment rather
than fleeing, as Ellsberg did, if he wanted to be a more effective martyr. I’m
merely differentiating between shades of white here, not casting aspersions,
because I certainly don’t have that kind of courage. There is a difference
between that and mere reckless disregard of consequences to others, which is
what WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange did in 2010 when he began wantonly
divulging the contents of more than 250,000 State Department cables stolen by
Pvt. Bradley Manning. In the previous five years of its existence, WikiLeaks
had published a wide variety of secret information regarding real scandals,
ranging from corporate malfeasance in Europe to corruption among public
officials in Peru to secret censorship of the Internet in Thailand, Denmark and
Australia.[1]
In this instance, the organization simply published secret documents merely
because it could, not because there was anything in them pertaining to
illegality or matters of life and death. The leaks proved embarrassing to
Washington, but did not cast light on any substantial wrongdoing, which
suggests that the real wrongdoing was on the part of Assange and Manning, who
stole and published the material merely because they were on power trips. If
Manning were in possession of evidence of real misconduct on the part of his
superiors he might have had sufficient justification (or even a duty) to reveal
it, especially if it were life threatening in nature, but that was not the
case. Whistleblowers must always have a strict sense of right and wrong and
carefully weigh all of the consequences to others before acting, especially if
they must do so in defiance of the law, but the criteria subscribed to by
Assange and Manning were far too vague. It is difficult to pin down their
motivations, which is sufficient in and of itself to demonstrate that their
actions were unjustified. It seems that they subscribed to a definition of
whistleblowing that was far too broad and imprecise, but in which any secret information qualified as a
scandal. Everyone needs some amount of
privacy, even government officials, merely in order to carry out their duties -
especially when they pertain to matters of life and death in international
politics, which requires much deep thought and difficult decision-making
processes to arrive at precisely the right course of action. Some technology
enthusiasts like Assange take their appreciation of the Information Age to the
opposite extreme of making all things public, which is likewise
counter-productive and sometimes quite immoral. Not all information should be
public; not all secrets are scandalous. Assange is not an American citizen and
thus cannot be prosecuted here as a traitor, but Manning deserves some punishment
for leaking information without sufficient justification. Snowden and Ellsberg
exposed crimes by high officials, some of which represent grave threats to
life, limb and the Constitution, but Manning did not. Those are the precise
criteria that sharply divide morally mandatory disclosures about corruption
among high officials from wanton, pointless divulging of state secrets that are
secret for a good reason. The fact that we now have whistleblowers like Assange
and Manning who can’t tell the difference is itself just another minor
manifestation of the moral decline of Western civilization. We still have
heroes willing to engage in acts of self-sacrifice for the greater good, but
the definition of “good” isn’t quite as clear as it was to our ancestors.
Snowden is far from perfect, but he’s demonstrated
more moral backbone than any prominent American political figure in the past
generation, for he alone as had the guts to risk his personal safety for a
truly important cause. He rightly said that “Being called a traitor by Dick
Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American,” because of the many
crimes and betrayals of American ideals the former vice president committed
during George W. Bush’s terms in office.[2]
Men like Cheney like to wave the flag while betraying everything it stands for,
because as English literati Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) once pointed out,
“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Authentic patriots perform
services for their countries that are often unpopular and unrequited. The fact
that Snowden is on the run while Cheney is living quite comfortably in the U.S.
is a clue to how corrupted our ruling class really is. In a healthy system,
those at the top would be subject to greater scrutiny because of the sheer
gravity of the tasks they must perform, as well as the potential for abuse.
Furthermore, throughout history, evil has typically concentrated at the top of
societies, for as Chesterton pointed out in his 1914 book The Flying Inn, “The rich are the scum of the earth in every
country.” The upper class is extraordinarily prone to corruption, so therefore
must be accorded less trust by the very fact of their status, not more. The
cause of this truism is a really deep matter pertaining to the human soul, but
it is a truism nonetheless. The need to keep an eye on the upper class is
magnified exponentially when they are put in charge of important public
business, particularly when it poses temptations to misuse public assets
against the public itself.
Orwell’s Error
Any temptation is usually too strong for the rich and
the powerful, but the power afforded by modern technology is no ordinary lure.
Modern surveillance and data mining techniques are so potent that their
potential for abuse is simply staggering. A generation ago, Americans were
rightly concerned about the threat posed by warrantless wiretapping and eavesdropping
on the phone calls of a few leading political figures, but the NSA spying
program dwarfs Watergate in its scope. Corrupt officials who have a bad habit
of not following any law or acknowledging any restraint can now log practically
every phone call on the planet, as well as keep an eye on every piece of
written correspondence, now that the Bush Administration established the
precedent of scanning the addresses on everyone’s mail at will. It’s worse than
that, however, for in the Internet Age, every packet sent from every computer
and cell phone in the country is now logged, thereby allowing snoops insight
into our very thought processes that goes far beyond what they could once glean
from intercepting a few phone calls. Snowden wasn’t engaging in hyperbole when
he declared recently that the NSA could glean your thoughts even before you
think them, using sophisticated data mining techniques that I have some amateur
experience with. Richard Kimball, the leading authority on data warehouse
design, once cited a potential compromise developed by scientist David Brin in
his 1999 book The Transparent Society:
Will Technology Force Us to Choose between Privacy and Freedom?[3]
I have yet to read the book first-hand, but the gist is that “an effective
compromise between freedom and privacy can be struck by watching the watchers”
through a more “transparent process” of intelligence gathering. There is
something to be said for this approach, which ingeniously makes use of the same
technology used to surveil us to make sure that the surveillers do their jobs
properly. The problem is that the intelligence community is never going to
grant us those powers unless we force them to. What Snowden essentially did was
to make the process transparent, albeit through guerilla means. This
extraordinary step would not have been necessary if the oversight programs put
in place in the 1970s actually worked, such as the Foreign Intelligence Service
Act (FISA) courts which are supposed to vet requests by agencies like the NSA
and CIA for wiretaps. They were completely corrupted to the point of utter
uselessness under Reagan, which in turn allowed him to routinely engage in
illegal activities like the Iran-Contra Scandal and worse still, the crimes
against humanity that his officials committed when they aided Latin America’s
death squads.
Now that there is no real oversight program in place,
we run a real risk of a descent into an Orwellian nightmare. One of the worst
symptoms of the breakdown of the American mind is the widespread belief that
the people in charge today really have our best interests at heart and can be
trusted to use their surveillance technology licitly. The stupidity of this
idea is illustrated by the fact that they’ve already been caught repeatedly
misusing it behind the public’s back in a manner that has grown increasingly
flagrant since the Reagan era. The agencies that these people work for have
culturally ingrained contempt for the Constitution, democratic ideals and
Christian ethics, stretching back to the founding of the CIA in 1947. It is
dangerous for any narrow elite to wield this kind of power without truly
stringent safeguards, but we already know that these agencies are not at all
averse to flouting the law. If the CIA did not admire police states, then they
would not have helped establish scores of them in the last six decades by
aiding military coups and providing training in torture techniques to numerous
dictators. The risk is even worse than that, for the ruling class of the West
is particularly unstable, even by the standards of the rich and powerful. When
my grandparents were children, the upper class suddenly decided to go on a
half-baked crusade against liquor consumption; now, in my generation, they’ve
gone off the deep end again and decided to treat smoking like a criminal
offense. There is no sin in it, as long as it done temperately - which I cannot
do, therefore I no longer do it. There is plenty of sin in homosexuality,
however, which as I explain in Straight Talk About the Homosexual Movement, is itself a hate crime: as with any other
perversion, the underlying cause is sex addiction, particularly to breaking
taboos against defiling a divine gift. Yet for some mad reason it has suddenly
become the cause de jure, despite the
fact that a mere twenty years ago, homosexual marriage was considered a lunatic
fringe idea. Even if were a justified cause, the sheer speed with which it has
become a sudden crusade, without any substantial debate whatsoever, ought to be
a clue of how unbalanced our ruling class really has become. There’s no telling
what outlandish cause our rulers will take up next; I’m only half-jesting that
they might decide to permeate the nation with drones equipped with fire hoses,
on the pretense of saving a handful of people from fireworks accidents on the
Fourth of July. There is a pattern to their madness, however, which is easily
recognizable to anyone familiar with Thomist psychology and its explanation of
how virtues and vices direct human behavior. The primary motivation of our
upper class is avarice, i.e. the worship of the Almighty Dollar. Other
civilizations suffer from different primary vices, such as Nazi Germany and the
current leadership of China, both of whom have been subject to the temptation
of nationalistic pride. That is why when China violates Internet freedoms, it
always does so in the name of political stability and national security,
whereas the U.S. muscled the government of New Zealand into using its elite
anti-terrorist forces to arrest Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, in 2012.
Copyright violations of music and film are hardly threats to our national
security warranting the involvement of the armed forces. Make no mistake about
it: there is no barrier in place to stop the NSA from misusing its intelligence
to enforce copyright law on behalf of Corporate America; all they have to do is
whip up a crusade and invent a few scary buzz words like “piracy.” In fact, the
Megaupload affair shows that they’re certainly willing to put piracy on the
same plane as national security. There’s no telling what our ruling oligarchy
might do next. They might decide to make red meat illegal and sift through our
medical records and the databases of grocery store chains to see what we’ve
been eating. The problem is that they have no well-thought out system of
morality, so that they go careening from one crusade against false devils after
another, as they have ever since the witch hunts that augured the birth of Protestantism
in the 1500s. In the absence of any stable guiding philosophy, there is no
telling what direction these loose cannons might be pointed in next.
The new technologies in the hands of the NSA allow
whoever’s at the helm to point those cannons with laser precision, on behalf of
any fringe cause they choose to serve. Given that the primary vice of Western
civilization is currently mad enthusiasm for money, we are likely to see it used
to enforce capitalist values, as it was in Megaupload’s case. George Orwell’s
dystopian vision was startlingly accurate, for the surveillance devices and
brainwashing techniques he described in his classic novel 1984 are eerily similar to those in use today. His great mistake
was to underestimate the dangers of capitalism, which has never been a friend
of democracy. Now that it is triumphant across the globe, all six billion
people living today are subject to the rule of a single global capitalist
class, all sharing the same corrupt commercial values and possessing the money
and power to enforce them. One of the most disturbing differences between the
New World Order envisioned by the U.S. and its Western allies and the
totalitarian states of the past century is that capitalists are simply much
better at propaganda than the Nazis and Communists, who were rather ham-fisted
about it. We are essentially governed by salesmen, who have a natural talent
for obscuring the truth about whatever they’re trying to sell in quite
sophisticated ways. Above all else, a commercial civilization must ensure a
false peace among consumers and producers, which is why the expression of any
strong opinions about politics and religion are frowned upon today; patently
false ideas like comparative religion are forcibly taught despite their
falsehood (which is manifest to anyone who actually bothers to read the incredibly
divergent holy books of the world) because they keep the people in line.
Religions now are regarded as cultural affectations, not as truths that ought
to be fought for. It is quite illegal to question those reigning assumptions of
radical secularism, which goes hand-in-glove with capitalist ethics. If you
doubt this, try discussing religiously motivated solutions as alternatives to
failed secularist policies, such as implementing the Catholic economic theory
of distributism, or using Thomist psychology to treat mental illness, or teaching
that evolution is logically impossible. These things are legally forbidden,
regardless of whether they actually get results in practice. In fact, you can’t
even discuss religion at all, anywhere, unless it is to denigrate orthodoxy in
some manner. It is possible to teach blatant falsehoods about Catholicism at
public expense, such as myths about the Inquisition and the Galileo Affair that
were debunked long ago, but it is illegal to teach that any particular religion
is actually true. It is likewise forbidden to criticize reigning ideologies
like capitalism in public, even on purely secular grounds. Question these
sacred cows and your employer can legally fire you; the Supreme Court has
already decided that you cannot be punished for declaring membership in a
particular political party or church, but you can be persecuted for declaring
sympathy for any unpopular position they teach.
Once again, the common denominator here is that power
lies in the hands of the capitalist class; Orwell got it wrong, for Big
Government is less of a threat to civil liberties than Big Business, which is
the real power behind the throne. Corporate America and its international
affiliates wield unbounded power through their absolute control over the
broadcast media and newspapers, as well through the incessant bombardment of
the public with advertising. Most of our international institutions are
designed to serve its interests, including the European Union, International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which extended their power into every nook
and cranny of the planet today, from the villages of Colombia to the deserts of
Sudan to the corporate board rooms of Wall Street. The educational systems of
the entire planet are likewise being thoroughly homogenized as we speak. Almost
all of the religious institutions of the globe have been tamed and put in
service to global capitalism, except for Islamic fundamentalists and the
fervent Catholics of the Third World. This labyrinth even has room for
designated rebels like Rush Limbaugh, who serve the Establishment
wholeheartedly by casting the rich and powerful as poor, persecuted martyrs. Even
activists like Alex Jones serve it, by mixing their quite accurate observations
about the “Prison Planet” the U.S. and the EU are trying to build with dozens
of patently ridiculous crackpot ideas. I’m not speaking of one of those
paranoid delusions about invasions by the U.N. that the right-wing fringe is
prone to. This is something much deadlier because it is much more subtle: a
single spirit, utterly devoid of virtue, yet shared by an exceptionally corrupt
clique which in turn permeates this entire global system. What sets them apart
from any ruling class in human history is not merely their global reach, but
that they are no longer content to merely exploit the common people: they want
to convert them to the Gospel of Greed and all of its satellite ideologies,
like radical secularism. What they seek is to turn the entire planet into a
park for the ultra-rich, which will be quite orderly and manicured but “full of
dead men’s bones” like the whitewashed tombs that Jesus warned about.
This system will
be far deadlier and more difficult to root out that Nazism or Communism because
it makes pretenses about false liberty and prosperity that take great effort to
debunk; salesmen must always be upbeat, which is why capitalists have built
Orwell with a Happy Face. Augmenting this system with the kind of surveillance
technologies the NSA already possesses would make it virtually impossible to
tear down the system from within; imagine a world in which, for example,
webcams, cell phones, shopping databases and medical records are used by Big
Business to control their employees around the clock. Monopoly power would
ensure that workers and consumers are not truly free to opt out of the system.
Big Government could be applied as an extra layer of safeguards, and used to
root out anyone who slipped through that first layer of control and dared to
challenge the system. The propaganda currently in use is so effective that Big
Brother might brainwash Big Brother himself; those who manned such a system
might be blissfully unaware that they were the bad guys, or even that they were
engaging in propaganda at all as they blithely persecuted the whole planet. Snowden,
Orwell and Jones are all on the right track, but they all missed important
truths about the system. Big Brother has already been with us for a long time
and has established a global system more devious that anything Orwell
envisioned. The goal of the Prison Planet is to enforce the worship of Mammon,
which from time to time might mean going to such ridiculous lengths as using anti-terrorist
squads to take down guys like Kim Dotcom. Yet the greatest enemy of the system,
the one who must be consigned to a forgotten dungeon like the Man in the Iron
Mask, is Christ. The consistent account of him given by Catholic saints is what
they fear most, for he represents rebellion against the corrupt commercial
values the system is designed to defend. In fact, most of his ministry was
spent fighting with the Pharisees, whose mindset is practically identical to
that of modern capitalists. The last straw that motivated them to kill him was
his whipping of the merchants in the Temple, which is the worst nightmare of
any capitalist - except perhaps for the Catholic philosophy of distributism,
which is totally antithetical to capitalism. Our whole society is conditioned
from cradle to grave now to reject the idea that he had practical solutions like
this to real world problems, not to mention more important matters in the
afterlife. The possibility of acting upon them is the one Topic of Which We Must
Not Speak, even in casual conversations, and especially not in church.
The Injustice System and the Reversal of
the American Moral Code
This is a scandal of much greater severity and
breadth than mere surveillance by the NSA, especially since this system has
been built on an ocean of blood that would not have been shed if He had been
listened to. One billion children have been aborted worldwide in the last four
decades to pay for it; eight million more have starved to death annually as a
direct result of capitalist economic policies; millions more have lost their
lives fighting against intermediate institutions like colonialism and slavery. Millions
of elderly and disabled are bound to lose their lives in euthanasia, the next
Holocaust, which may one day cost more American lives annually than abortion
does. These gargantuan injustices deserve much louder whistles, but there is
only one institution left that dares to blow them all. The common denominator
that explains much of the political behavior of the Western world today is the
rejection of that institution’s value system, in what Fr. Malachi Martin termed
the Great Apostasy. It is a historical process I discuss in much greater detail
in The Falling Away, one that started
gradually a few centuries ago but is now proceeding at a torrid pace. Catholic
morals are quite stark and well-defined, just as modern statistics about
abortion, divorce, usury, speculation, premarital sex and a hundred other sins
attest to the recent rejection of them all, across the board. If Catholic
ideals about liberty were still valued, the officials who staff the Prison
Planet would be subject to imprisonment themselves; if Catholic common sense
about the responsibilities of power were followed, they would be subject to
double the penalties because of their positions, not absolved out of
favoritism. If the public still grasped what justice was, Dick Cheney and the
top brass of the NSA would be scurrying across the planet today searching in
vain for asylum, not Edward Snowden. Without stringent punishments of the men
at the helm, any oversight system is doomed to fail, but the will to hold them
accountable for their offenses is utterly lacking in our generation. This
paralysis is the result of the smudging of the definition of morals among the
common people, not just the upper class, which has left both our oversight
institutions and the public at large quite unsure of what right and wrong are –
or worse still, passionately devoted to defending evil and thwarting good. This
includes a common mistake about mercy, which is today used as an excuse to
whitewash the crimes of leading citizens; this type of false absolution makes
forgiveness itself impossible, because it asserts that there is no guilt to
forgive. As I explain in Judge Not: The Modern Confusion about Whitewash and
Forgiveness, the definition of mercy
has been twisted by the present generation in order to absolve the guilty and
punish the innocent, which makes the exercise of real mercy impossible. “Judgmental”
has become a code word to prevent the rich, the powerful, the smart, the
popular and the beautiful from being punished for committing real wrongs,
whereas things that are not wrong – like smoking, watching Star Trek or
accepting charity - are treated quite judgmentally. As Chesterton once said,
there is no punishment for the man who commits a crime, but there may be a
punishment for the man who discovers it – as Snowden is discovering first-hand.
Both of these phenomena are products of the gradual reversal of Catholic
standards of justice which ones permeated the entire Western world.
Little by little, we have constructed an Injustice
System in which it is increasingly difficult to hold the guilty accountable but
frighteningly easy to punish the innocent. Unless the governments offended by
this scandal issue international arrest warrants for the top officials at the
NSA, justice simply won’t be done, because America is no longer up to the task;
perhaps only a poor, tiny Catholic country under the leadership of a sensible
leftist government, like Bolivia, Nicaragua or Ecuador, might have the courage to
stand up to the American government and hold it accountable for this crime, as
well as many others committed in the last few decades by men like Kissinger,
Cheney and the Dulles Brothers. The bottom line is that neither Americans nor
any of their branches of government are capable of doing the job anymore. Our
system of government is now so thoroughly permeated by this dangerous reversal in
morals that it is no longer possible to hold powerful men to any standard of
justice, for the executive branch, Congress and the Imperial Judiciary now
routinely exonerate them in knee-jerk fashion. For example, the executive
branch has not arrested any members of the State Department, the NSA or the CIA
for any of the numerous crimes they’ve committed in the name of “n national
security” since Watergate, even though that is its function. Congress has
either willfully ignored evidence of their wrongdoing, as in the case of subsidies
to Latin American death squads, or has even publicly voted to fund them, as in
the case of the terrorist group known as the Contras that killed some 30,000 Nicaraguan
civilians in the 1980s. Our legislators have likewise applauded the NSA
scandal, by granting blanket amnesties and mandated participation by
corporations that assist the NSA in its illegal activities. In less
dysfunctional times, Congress would have held impeachment hearings, cut off
funding to the illegal aspects and punished corporations that violated the law
by cooperating. This is precisely what happened in the Watergate era, which
inaugurated a decade of reforms of the foreign policy apparatus which were
completely swept away or nullified under Reagan. Among these were the
aforementioned FISA courts, which were designed to provide judicial oversight
and ensure that domestic spying operations were rigorously controlled on the
grounds of actual dire necessity. Begin with Reagan, such institutions became
rubber stamps; during the terms of George W. Bush, this nagging inconvenience
was simply ignored. The possibility of punishment for members of our security
services simply evaporated, thereby enabling them to do whatever they pleased
with impunity. This kind of lawlessness on the part of the military and
internal police is precisely what has caused the fall of every failed democracy
throughout history.
The most alarming aspect of the situation may be the
fact that none of our branches of government actually believes in democracy
anymore, particularly the Imperial Judiciary, which has no respect whatsoever
for the Constitution. As I have said before, “interpretation” means discerning
precisely what meaning was assigned to a document by those people invested with
the authority to assign it. If we’re speaking of a letter from your boss, he or
she would be that authority; if we want to understand what the Koran or Zend
Avesta actually mean, we would have to rely solely on the definitions assigned
by Mohammed and Zoroaster; and if the topic is the Constitution, then that
signifies fleshing out the meaning assigned by the framers and amenders. For
the last century and a half, the Supreme Court has developed a bad habit of
issuing written opinions on any grounds beside that; they quote Greek
philosophers, law professors, their own private opinions that “this would be a
good idea,” anything other than the meaning assigned by the framers and
amenders. The Supreme Court was given a legitimate power of judicial review,
but has become accustomed to rewriting the Constitution to suit itself. Every
time the Imperial Judiciary deliberates in this manner, it essentially
overthrows the public and thwarts democracy. As I discussed in Contemptible Courts, there is a method
to their madness though. Their worst illegal decisions, ranging from Dred Scott (1857) to Roe v. Wade (1973) to Buck vs. Bell (1827) to Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission (2008), always exhibit five characteristics:1) anti-democratic
sentiment; 2) bias in favor of the upper crust of society; 3) danger to the
interests of the most defenseless members of society; 4) antagonism to Catholic
moral doctrine; and 5) they’re also contrary to the wishes of the Founding
Fathers, who we know explicitly would not have approved of such monstrous
causes as abortion or corporate personhood. Likewise, we know for a fact that
the Founding Fathers explicitly intended the Fourth Amendment to prevent the
kind of general warrants that the NSA scandal amounts to. Instead, the Supreme
Court has misused it to invent a twisted version of the “right of privacy” that
we know for a fact the Founding Fathers did not approve of, including legalized
contraception in such illegal decisions as Griswold
v. Connecticut (1965) and legalized homosexuality in Lawrence v. Texas (2003). These are merely additional symptoms of
how the Constitution has been perverted in the new Injustice System. The extent
of this juridical corruption was powerfully illustrated in 2012, when seven
companies were caught red-handed spying on at least 420,000 people, including
logging every word they typed and taking pictures of them in their own homes
using spyware hidden in rent-to-own devices.[4]
This included capturing photos of them in compromising personal situations,
such as making out on the couch near their rented computers. Their punishment?
A consent decree. That means “Don't do that again, please.” Zero employees
faced zero hours of jail time and the companies paid zero dollars in fines. There
was no pretense of “national security” in this case; it was just a naked
reminder that Corporate America is held to a different standard than you and I,
out of sheer class prejudice. If ordinary Americans did this, they would face
many years in prison and would rightly be ostracized as peeping toms. Ordinary
people can’t even make decisions for themselves about what to eat or whether to
smoke, but both Corporate America and the federal government now have carte
blanche to invade our privacy at will. The only privacy we have is designed to
prevent punishment of things our ancestors considered to be destructive of
society, such as contraception, which was universally detested until the
generation that lived between the 1930s and 1960s suddenly caved in to upper
class propaganda. Perhaps the most telling symptom of the Injustice System is
that your neighbor can be arrested if they don’t mow their lawn, but cannot
even be criticized if they murder their own unborn child. No generation prior
to ours would have tolerated this kind of behavior, including that of the
Founding Fathers, which makes the NSA scandal look trifling in comparison.
Even the so-called “Fourth Branch of Government” has
failed to prevent this moral free-fall, for three reasons. First, ownership of
the media is concentrated exclusively in the hands of a narrow capitalist class
who share the same values and therefore would frown upon the mere mention of
these true scandals. Secondly, the press itself has been contaminated by the
same value system and thus has no stomach for true investigative journalism;
the media’s definition of whistleblowing has been corrupted precisely because
it has no clear definition of right and wrong. Worst of all, however, the
public is simply too lazy to swallow anything but fluffy human interest stories
and court dramas that act as a particularly lurid form of entertainment. If
voters truly appreciate their democratic rights, they will exercise their
responsibility to make sure that their votes are not wasted, which entails a
lot of deep and difficult thought about public issues. In the Watergate era the
American public was admirably well-informed and interested in such issues
because it retained an authentic patriotic appreciation of democracy, which has
now almost entirely evaporated. If our servicemen were once again put at risk
of dying senselessly in another lost, immoral cause like the Vietnam War, fought
through genocidal means on behalf of selfish corporate interests, who would
march to protect them? What would happen if the rights of American labor were
so thoroughly gutted that it became necessary once again to strike on their
behalf, as our ancestors risked life and limb to do in the early 20th Century?
As I discuss in The Deaf Protesting the Blind: The Failure of the
Occupy Movement and Other Organized Dissent Since Reagan, authentic reform movements are no longer possible
because activists themselves no longer understand what reform consists of. They
are further crippled by the current mood of public indifference, which has made
possible far more serious crimes such as the Holocaust of abortion, which in
turn deprives reformists of the manpower that mass action require. Thanks to
the complete reversal in morals, it is possible to rile the public up on behalf
of its ugliest vices, as Rush Limbaugh does on behalf of class prejudice and
the homosexual marriage movement does on behalf of unnatural lust. Liberty now
means libertinism; “freedom” now means the “freedom” to violate the human
rights of others; human rights now means the right to do inhuman things, like
commit sodomy or abortion; justice now means protecting vice and punishing
virtue; mercy now means denying the guilt of the powerful, while treating the
most defenseless members of society unmercifully. The situation we now fact is
dangerously reminiscent of the situation described in William Butler Yeats’
widely quoted poem, The Second Coming,
in which “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate
intensity.”
Our Founding Fathers designed an ingenious system of
checks and balances, which have all failed simultaneously in our generation.
That leaves two last lines of defense, the first of which is the possibility of
revolt by the people themselves. Unfortunately, the capitalist class that
governs us has accomplished something no other ruling elite has ever attempted:
converting the common people to appreciation of its own vices, in the Gospel of
Greed preached by capitalism. The public is now thoroughly controlled from
cradle to grave in a mesh of educational institutions, mass media programming
and conditioning by employers that have succeeded in inoculating them against
Christianity and perverting their sense of right and wrong. Furthermore, Karl
Marx got it wrong: the true “opiate of the masses” is not religion, but
commercialism, whose salesmen have successfully paralyzed the public will far
more effectively than Nazi and Communist propagandists ever did. As I discuss
in Contempt for Content: Fresh Evidence of a Stale
Culture, the commoners of the West
are now fully anesthetized by particularly ugly forms of entertainment that
they don’t even enjoy, like shopping, gangster rap, splatterporn horror movies
and fiction series “rebooted” by talentless writers. This “Culture of Contempt”
doesn’t make the public happy any more than eating to the point of obesity
does, but these additional telltale signs of Western decadence do manage to
keep people quiet and sap their will for action or self-sacrifice.
The lukewarm response to Snowden’s revelations is
merely another illustration of the sheer indifference of the populace to
anything, even its own genuine rights. A rapidly growing proportion of the
public is simply unresponsive to the rights of others, without realizing that
cold indifference is far closer to Hate than righteous anger. The lack of anger
itself can be as great a sin as unrestrained wrath. Far too many Westerners
don’t act to defend the rights of others because they simply don’t care, in
which case they deserve to discover the meaning of this warning against
cowardice by Rev. Martin Niemöller, a Nazi concentration camp survivor: “First they came for the
communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came
for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist. Then
they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a
trade unionist. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for
me.” The situation is even direr than that, for as the NSA scandal illustrates, the public is in fact not even concerned
with its own self-interest. A frightening number of Americans have shrugged off
Snowden’s revelations with the excuse, “Let them read my E-mail and eavesdrop
on my conversations. I haven't done anything wrong.” First, our ruling class is
terribly unstable and at any minute might decide to make perfectly harmless
conduct on your part the subject of another insane crusade. Secondly, everyone
living in the Western world today has done plenty of wrong by the standards of
Christ, including myself. The fact that our civilization explicitly rejects
those standards merely compounds our sin, rather than absolving us. Many
readers probably say they don’t have any problem at all with many of the evils
pointed out in my column, but both Christ and the men who founded our Republic
did, not to mention almost all of our ancestors; your rejection of their values
is another powerful proof of just how thorough the brainwashing of the
capitalist class is today. What is “normal” by modern standards was typically
considered abnormal by every generation prior to ours, whose advice we are
rejecting on the flimsiest of grounds without any substantial debate
whatsoever. The lawless guards who are busy constructing the Prison Planet are
succeeding doing something far direr than simply eroding our democratic rights
or reducing us to captive consumers enslaved by a global capitalist system:
they are poisoning the culture of the world itself by corrupting it at a
spiritual level. They will not succeed in turning the planet into a park for
the rich, because the stupid prejudices subscribed to by our rulers blind them
to dangers like the Clash of Civilizations and the Retreat of the West, which
are reviving the fortunes of rival civilizations like China and the Islamic
world. It also blinds them to inefficiencies of the system they have forged,
which are weakening the West internally. As a result, sooner or later the walls
of the Prison Planet are likely to be knocked down in the course of foreign
policy crises that our leaders did not foresee; this is the pattern of decay
that has accompanied the fall of many ancient dynasties, who are often taken
completely by surprise when the consequences of their own deterioration are
suddenly manifested in the areas of economic and foreign affairs. I love my
country and the civilization it belongs to, so I will continue to blow the
whistle in the hopes that they wake up before such a collapse becomes
inevitable. I am not optimistic, because the rejection of Christianity entailed
in the parallel processes of The Falling Away and the Great Apostasy is
likewise sapping the will of the common people to act justly. To survive, our civilization must quickly wake
up to the fact that our physical security is threatened by the decline in
material power embodied in the Retreat of the West. To deserve to survive, it
must also heed the threat to our souls embodied in these greater spiritual
trends.
The Big Picture behind the Snowden episode is that it
pales in comparison to the overarching trends that represent much greater
threats to our civilization, like the Culture of Contempt, the Retreat of the
West, the Failing Away, the Great Apostasy, the Clash of Civilizations, the
establishment of a Prison Planet and the mind-boggling global Holocaust of
abortion. The NSA scandal may be deadly serious and in need of immediate
correction, but it is merely one thread is a much larger tapestry of
unprecedented evil, which also includes the widespread atmosphere of apathy.
Whistleblowing simply doesn’t get results anymore because no one is willing to
make sacrifices to act in the public interest. The American public has simply
abdicated its democratic responsibilities to make sure that powerful men are
punished for betraying the public trust in myriad ways, while a significant
segment of it even applauds wrongdoing of all stripes. Divulging critical
information is only useful if it leads directly to action, but the public will
is paralyzed today. The Common Man no longer cares if the government tortures
prisoners or funds death squads, or if their neighbor puts their own kid to
death, as long as they do it quietly with no mess or fuss. They don’t even care
if their own genuine constitutional rights are violated. The reason they are
indifferent is because they have been bought off by the cheap thrills of our
commercial civilizations, which has in turn corrupted their sense of right and
wrong, sometimes to the point of applauding vice and punishing virtue. In such
an atmosphere, whistleblowing is akin to casting pearls before swine, who will
turn around and trample the whistleblower and their information as well. The
whole thrust of the long-term, civilization-wide spiritual decline known as The
Falling Away and the Great Apostasy is that the proportion of such swine will
continue to increase, as it already has quite markedly since the Watergate era.
As Chesterton once said, revolt is healthy in the same sense that vomiting is
healthy if one has swallowed poison, but the particular poisons Western
civilization has taken may have paralyzed its vomiting reflex. Chesterton also
once said, “Evolution is what happens when everyone is asleep. Revolution is
what happens when everyone is awake.” Unless the West can wake up and take
revolutionary action to vomit out the poisons it has swallowed, it will perish
in the long term. If the common people cannot relearn the value of democracy,
keep their families together, resist the unnatural temptation to abort and
contracept their kids out of existence, take courageous action to hold powerful
men accountable, and otherwise obey the Christian moral code, then the last
line of oversight will have failed.
It is child’s play for God to remove a corrupt ruler
from power; replacing an entire populace that has willingly gone sour would be
a much messier operation. When the Common Man fails, there is one last line of
defense left, one last check and balance built into the system: the guarantee
of infallibility given to the pope and councils of the Catholic Church under
very narrow conditions. It amounts to stuffing a sock in the pope’s mouth in
instances in which he desires to speak against Catholic doctrine in matters of
faith and morals, not a guarantee of his personal sanctity. I once disbelieved
in this claim so strongly that I tried to debunk it, but was forced to admit
its accuracy after searching in vain for true contradictions in the last two
millennia of papal and conciliar pronouncements on Catholic dogma. In fact, it
is the only thing in human affairs
that hasn’t changed in the last two thousand years, which amounts to an
airtight corroboration of the guarantee Jesus gave to St. Peter that even the
gates of Hell would not prevail against his Church. We have a supernatural
guarantee that this last check and balance in the system won’t give way, unlike
those wisely embodied in our Constitution, which are nonetheless failing before
our eyes. The world ought to be alerted to the fact that Catholicism is
provably true, which is a much more important matter than the NSA scandal, or
even overarching global trends like the Retreat of the West. To a generation
that has explicitly rejected the commandments given by Jesus, the Gospel
represents the Bad News, which is why they do not listen to it. In his own
words,
“If God were your Father, you
would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord,
but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot
bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do
your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand
in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of
his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell
the truth, you do not believe me. Which one of you convicts me of sin? If I
tell the truth, why do you not believe me? Whoever is of God hears the words of
God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.”
This is the same reason why so few people have heard
the whistle blown by Snowden. It is precisely why no one cares about the
whistles being blown to draw attention to torture by the Bush Administration,
funding of death squads under Reagan, the exploitation embodied in the
capitalist system, the horror of abortion and other such far more serious
crimes. The greatest scandal that encompasses them all is the Great Apostasy,
i.e. the rejection by Western civilization of its Christian roots. If
whistleblowing does not suffice to wake up the slumbering people of the decadent
West, then there will be no alternative left but to resort to the blasts of
Trumpets.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in
journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at
Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in
U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a
paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate
in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has
been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to
psychology to economics since age 9.
1. For the sake of convenience, I consulted the Wikipedia webpage on WikiLeaks, which contains a
smattering of such widely divergent scandals.
3. p. 378, Kimball, Ralph and Ross, Margy, 2002, The
Data Warehouse Toolkit. John Wiley & Sons: New York.
4. See Netburn, Deborah, 2012, “Software Let Rent-to-Own
Companies Spy on Customers,” published Sept. 25, 2012 in the online edition of
the Los Angeles Times. Available online at http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/25/business/la-fi-tn-designerware-pc-rental-agent-20120925
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