10.
Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower
whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, lest we
be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.
- Genesis 11:4
When
Speaking to the Roman governor, Jesus defined his kingdom as
follows (John
You say that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.
Pilate answered, “What is truth?” and went out, not waiting for an answer.
To Jesus, the
That’s why
Self-made Unity
Behold how good and how pleasant it is
for brothers to dwell together in unity!
It is like the precious oil on the head, coming down
upon the beard, Aaron’s beard,
Coming down upon the edge of his robes.
It is like the dew of Hermon, coming down upon the
mountains of
For there the Lord commanded the blessing – life
forever.
- Psalm 133
Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on
earth? I tell you no, but rather
division, for from now on five in one household will be divided, three against
two and two against three. They will be
divided, father against son, and son against father; mother against daughter,
and daughter against mother; mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and
daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.
- Jesus, Luke 12:51-53
An unpleasant truth that we all really know is that truth
causes division. The truth-teller
therefore becomes the enemy of unity and whatever wonderful things we want to
do together. Elijah, the truth-teller,
was the “troubler of
Genuine unity is priceless, because it is given by God from above through His spirit. We meet trouble when we notice a conflict between unity and truth, and then choose unity at the expense of truth. Such unity is not from above - it’s an idol. From the first day of creation, God has been breaking such unity, dividing the light from the darkness (Genesis 1:4).
Whenever we apply pressure to unite, or to abide in a false
peace in which truth is hushed up to keep things smooth, we have rejected the
The greatest of these is hatred. Loving one another and others unlike ourselves always demands self-denial. Without God, does that often happen? But to hate we don’t need the power of God, and hatred unifies wonderfully. Since Pharisees find their identity in being better than others, they cannot really love one another, since that is to esteem others better than ourselves. Having an Enemy that we can hate together keeps us Pharisees from falling out among ourselves, and we can all feel superior together in our common hatred of the depraved enemy. What would we do without a “war on terror?” Babylonian and Pharisaic unity always involves uniting in fear and hatred of the Other. We see this appeal in almost any political fund-raising letter, not least from supposedly Christian ministries. Pharisees and Babylonians can do without God, but not without a devil.
God is truly both just and merciful when he disrupts unity
of this kind. The Babylonians shout,
“United We Stand!” The
Wisdom of God says, “Though hand
join to hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished” (Proverbs
Self-ordained Justice
They are terrible and dreadful;
Their judgment and dignity proceed from themselves.
- Habakkuk 1:7
Since the Babylonian spirit makes its own unity, it inevitably decrees its own justice. The Babylonians unite to make a name for themselves, so they decree “justice” to justify what they must do. We never simply say that we have no sin. We must prove that this lie is true, and as long as our aim is to be right, that is the only real purpose of our “justice” system. Everything else serves that end. The Babylonian and the Pharisee must prove that they are right, and to do that, they must prove others wrong. This is why Pharisees are always experts in the law, authorities in doctrine which condemns other people. They sit in the seat of Moses, their judgment and dignity proceeding from themselves, because like the Chaldeans in Habakkuk, they ensure in this way that they are justified at the expense of others.
As Habakkuk says, this makes them “terrible and dreadful.” There’s no time for mercy when we have to prove we’re right. And since justice that does not proceed from ourselves will prove us wrong, all such justice must be violently suppressed. Jesus said to the Pharisees, “If you knew what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” you would not have condemned the guiltless” (Matthew 12:7). The Pharisees sacrifice, and the Babylonians build a tower of bricks stuck together with tar to reach into heaven. The Babylonians and the Pharisees are one in the spirit of the Lie.
The religious project of the Pharisee is to build a tower to
heaven out of his religious zeal. The religion
of the Pharisees is indeed the religion of
This is why the American empire has become terrible and
dreadful to the rest of the world, slaying nations without pity, as Habakkuk
said. This is why the wretched of the
earth are set to making bricks like the Hebrews in
The Hammer of the Earth and the Prison of Every Foul Spirit
Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and has become
a dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit, and a cage for
every unclean and hated bird!
- Revelation 18:2
How the hammer of the whole earth has been cut apart
and broken! How
- Jeremiah 50:23
“Fallen” here does not refer to
It’s quite simple. Babylon becomes full of evil by being the hammer of the whole earth, and Babylon elects itself to be the hammer of the whole earth by sitting as judge and deciding that the whole earth deserves to be hammered – indeed, needs to be hammered for its own good in order “to rid the world of evildoers.” As we see in the gospels, the Pharisees are full of this Babylonian self-righteousness – always ready to stone a woman caught in adultery - and full of all uncleanness.
Self-righteous punishment of other sinners fills us with uncleanness, but how?
The proverb says, “Let a man meet a bear robbed of her
cubs rather than a fool in his folly” (Proverbs
When we meet the arrogant, how easily we are provoked to proudly say, “He’s going to learn that he just messed with the wrong person!” When someone insults us, how easily we are provoked to insult him back! When someone lies about us, aren’t we ready to find some way to defame him in return?
The insult frightens us, and that amounts to admiration, because we see that the wrongdoing is working in some way. This is what Psalm 73 calls being “envious of the wicked.” The psalmist says it caused him to become like an animal, without sense. This mingled fear and admiration fuels our hatred, and we respond in the way that seems to give our enemy success, thereby coming to resemble the enemy that we hate.
Whenever we hate, the real problem is always fear and admiration of our enemy’s success. Even when we’re ready to admit that the hatred is a problem, we generally prefer to dwell on that surface problem. What we’re really ashamed to admit is that we actually admire our enemy and want to succeed as he does – that we are in fact what we hate. It is true just the same, always. When we truly love our enemies, we pity them without contempt, because we have learned that their wrongdoing really doesn’t work. Only then are we free from the evil that they mean to do to us.
When we elect ourselves to punish evildoers, we’re
forgetting something. Folly is extremely
contagious. This is why Paul writes,
“You who judge are doing the same things” (Romans 2:1). Paul warned the church in
Consider just a few cases:
The Bolsheviks and Tsarist
The Kronstadt sailors who rose against the Bolshevik dictatorship in 1921 said it best in their statement “What we are fighting for:”
“By carrying out the October Revolution the working class had hoped to achieve its emancipation. But the result has been an even greater enslavement of human beings. The power of the monarchy, with its police and gendarmerie, has passed into the hands of the Communist usurpers, who have given the people not freedom but the constant fear of torture by the Cheka, the horrors of which far exceed the rule of the gendarmerie under tsarism . . . The glorious emblem of the toilers’ state – the sickle and the hammer – has in fact been replaced by the Communists with the bayonet and the barred window, which they use to maintain the calm and carefree life of the new bureaucracy, the Communist commissars and functionaries.”[1]
Indeed the
The Nazis and the
The Nazis saw
themselves as the renewers of German national life,
overthrowing the decadent and immoral order of 1920s
“Had I been able to think the matter out consistently, I ought to have argued further that my designs for Hitler were following the pattern of the Late Empire and forecasting the end of the regime; that, therefore, Hitler’s downfall could be deduced from these very designs. But this was hidden from me at the time . . . The last buildings we designed in 1939 were in fact pure neo-Empire, comparable to the style that prevailed 125 years before, shortly before Napoleon’s fall. They were marked by excessive ornamentation, a mania for gilding, a passion for pomp, and total decadence.”[2]
In 1763 the American colonists were proud to be loyal
subjects of
It took an amazing combination of arrogance and
incompetence, inspired by proud disdain toward the Americans, to accomplish
this folly, which is the wonder of historians to this day. The corruption of the British government was
legendary. The poor were ground down so
that the rich could live in immorality and luxury, and the British could still
be proud of their liberties and moderation.
Seats in parliament were openly bought and sold, including “rotten
boroughs” in which there were no voters, and “pocket
boroughs” which were completely controlled by some rich patron. The Americans wanted none of this in
Removing the French threat did two things. The colonists really didn’t need the
mother country’s protection any more, and the mother country, flush with
victory but needing money, felt entitled to push the colonists around –
expecting their undying gratitude. These
two factors worked together to bring war and independence. Imperial
The parallel to recent American history is obvious. Removing the Soviet threat made
The astonishing corruption of the American political system,
in which everything including the national interest is openly for sale,
likewise recalls the corruption of 18th century
Like the Americans in the 1760s, the Europeans can’t
quite understand why they should be taxed to support the destruction of their
liberties or why they should admire a corrupt, violent, and increasingly
undemocratic political system. A mixture
of American bullying, arrogance, incompetence, and lordly disdain – just
like that of
Hitler stated himself that his project of conquest and genocide in the east was inspired by the American conquest and genocide against the Indians. Given this obvious kinship, the Americans would have done well in approaching the Nazis to take Paul’s advice, “looking to themselves lest they be tempted.” American Pharisaism made that impossible, because Pharisees think their authority to rebuke sin comes of being better than those they rebuke. American Pharisaism requires us to feel superior to other people so that we can feel we have moral authority. We are afraid of someone answering back, “Well what about you?”
In fact, moral authority comes from only one place, from God and therefore from the truth. It has nothing to do with being better than other people. We are not better than other people, and we don’t have to be. We just need to tell the truth, first about ourselves. The answer to “What about you?” is, “It’s not about me, because it’s not about me being better than you. It’s about this behavior not being OK. If I forget to put oil in my car, does that mean you should do the same dumb thing? Let’s both find out how to wise up!”
Nazism gloried in being merciless, in punishing weakness. The heart of Nazi ideology is that weakness is shameful, and therefore power is virtuous. It was perfectly natural to answer the Nazis, "Well then, we’ll be stronger than you.”
That answered the Nazis.
Their defeat was complete when Hitler commanded the destruction of
Events proved him right.
The allies targeted the civilian populations of German and Japanese
cities in a manner not seen at least since the Thirty Years War 300 years
before, and really no different than the Nazi war against civilians. Allied bombers killed hundreds of thousands
of people in
After the war, the Americans recruited Nazis like Walter Dornberger, with whose approval 20,000 people from the Dora concentration camp were worked to death building rockets under his direction at the Nordhausen rocket works, the first slave labor facility liberated in 1945 by American troops. Dornberger became a senior vice president of Bell Aerosystems and died in bed with many honors and high security clearances. Like the Communists, the Americans also recruited Nazi SS and intelligence officers, but unlike the Communists, they put Nazis like Reinhard Gehlen in positions of trust, often with disastrous results to Western intelligence networks.
The Americans never found an answer to the Nazi belief that
power is virtue and that weakness is shameful, deserving death and
humiliation. They tried to answer it
with American virtue, but that’s spiritual pride, not an answer. What answer is there, really, short of Jesus
hanging stark naked on a cross by the side of the main drag in complete
weakness, and then being raised from the dead?
In the cross and resurrection we learn that what counts is not worldly
power but whether we please God, because God overcomes weakness with
resurrection in those that are His. But
And so the long train of slaughter began after World War 2:
Iraq, 1991-2003: several hundred thousand little kids and many others killed by embargo, after a war in which every water treatment plant was deliberately targeted in order to cause water-borne disease, which specifically kills little kids and old people.
Iraq, 2003-2004: 100,000 civilian deaths in 18 months, mostly by indiscriminate US Air Force bombing of civilian neighborhoods; while Saddam Hussein took 24 years, 15 times as long, to reach 300,000, which is only three times as many. We’re not even counting the cancers and birth defects that American depleted uranium dust will be inflicting forever.
These are only the high points. It is impossible here to do justice to this history of mass murder since the Nazi defeat in World War 2.
Since Americans are better than others, it follows logically that others are inferior to Americans. The weakness of others confirms their inferiority, confirming that they deserve to die if their existence obstructs the noble purposes of virtuous American power. In the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (May 12, 1996), the deaths of 500,000 innocent children “are worth it.” If this is not the essence of Nazism, what is?
Remember the “China Incident” -
Consider Foreign Minister Matsuoka in 1937, explaining that
“No treasure trove is in her eyes – only sacrifices upon
sacrifices. No one realizes this more than she does. But her very
life depends on it, as do those of her neighbors as well. The
all-absorbing question before
History shows that this assertion of purity was complete nonsense, but I have no doubt that Matsuoka was sincere. To live with themselves, oppressors and robbers must bewitch themselves with the nobility of their undertakings, just as Jesus said, “They rob widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayers.”
Now Bush and his people talked just like Matsuoka, and American foreign policy is more and more driven by narrow military thinking, as happened to Japan in the 1930s, and among much else that has not changed, it remains the same under Obama, in some ways even more so. Just as Japan looted Asia in the 1930s, the new American militarists openly plunder even their own citizens - never mind Iraqis and other foreigners. Haven't we in California been ripped off by Dick Cheney and his friends at Enron just as they are doing to the Iraqi people, putting the Iraqi economy up for sale contrary to the Hague Convention? To the end Cheney stonewalled Congress about the energy swindle, just as the Bush administration stonewalled Congress about 9/11, and under Obama this too remains unchanged. Disaster in New Orleans has been transformed into an opportunity for rich real estate developers to dispossess poor people for profit.
Like Japan in China, today's American militarists keep winning in Afghanistan, Iraq, Columbia, and elsewhere, killing and dispossessing many thousands - and yet final victory eludes them as they antagonize the whole world. The Japanese drive for empire and conquest was in fact driven by weakness, the fear of being starved for oil and other raw materials, and by an exaggerated fear of Communism and instability in China. The American drive for empire is driven by the same cowardly fear of not being in control of everything - fearing hostile ideology and instability, and fearing to be cut off from raw materials, notably petroleum. In the same way that Japanese parliamentary politics gradually gave way under this endless war to a militarized, though ostensibly civilian, dictatorship, the US is reaping at home the oppression it sows abroad. Already the American press is completely cowed, afraid to show America the truth about its behavior in Iraq that the rest of the world sees every day. It will be interesting to see in coming years how flagrantly the American empire will act to seize Canada's water to solve its own impending water crisis, especially as global warming increases the pressure.
My coworker came by my desk in 2003 to crow about the parade of American tanks in Tikrit, because now the Iraqis would know the Americans mean business - and what a triumph it was that the Americans had Iraqi civil defense guys in their parade. Yes, I reminded him, and they've been blowing up the houses of people they suspect of fighting against them, just like the Israelis in their occupation. “It’s not like Israel at all! It’s not an occupation, it's a liberation! You know that!” was his response. In vain did I point out that how he wants to see it will not determine how others see it, and how it actually is.
He is a Christian Zionist who considers himself a born again Christian, although welcoming hard truth, as Jesus taught, is no part of his religion – much the contrary. My point here is that his mentality is that of the ideologues running this show - like that of the Japanese militarists, Stalinists as documented in Solzhenitsyn, and other fanatics of that type. Being idolaters who worship their own “wisdom,” they define reality by their view of the world, rather than letting their view of the world be disciplined by truth as real life teaches it. They will keep on doing astonishingly stupid things, because fanatical ideology makes drunk.
Imitating imperial Japan, the United States has gone to war against Iraq and the Muslim world to defeat political Islam. They have instead strengthened it by their atrocities against the Iraqi people, just as Japan went to war in North China to stop Communism, and thereby brought the Communists to power by their atrocities against the Chinese people. Like the Japanese in North China, the Americans have set up puppet governments through which to work their imperial will, but are America’s Afghan and Iraqi “governments” any more credible than Japan’s Manchukuo?[4]
New York Times correspondent Otto Tolischus wrote of the Japanese just before Pearl Harbor:
As members of a divine family state, in which religion and patriotism merge, they do not merely say, "My country right or wrong!" but they are convinced with all the fervor of religious faith that their country is right, whatever mistakes individual statesmen may make.[5]
Is this not just how Americans think of their own country, especially American Christians, who can only think this way by rejecting everything that Jesus and the prophets teach about the nations of this world? America defeated imperial Japan, but did not take care to confront its own vulnerability to the Japanese imperial mindset. Imperial Japan was defeated, but the Japanese imperial spirit found a comfortable home in a land full of pride.
America and Slobodan Milosevic
Slobodan Milosevic was a colorless political hack in the Serbian League of Communists - until one day he went out on a balcony in Kosovo to speak to demonstrating Serbs and appealed to Serbian pride and their national myth. He discovered that he could be eloquent, that he could move people, and overnight he became a hero addressing huge adoring crowds. Instead of appealing explicitly to ethnic hatred as some suppose, he called for the Serbs to unite in their defense while remembering that Serbia had room for other nationalities (but they had to behave themselves), claiming that “We Serbs will save Yugoslavia.”[6]
In practice, this meant pushing the Kosovars around, a war with Croatia, and a proxy war in Bosnia. Being a neighbor of Slobodan Milosevic was not easy, but he and the Serbs were only victims, never aggressors.
Milosevic was prologue. Consider the transformation of George Bush from nonentity to conquering hero by evoking the American national myth, mobilizing a people who feel wronged, even though September 11 was in fact just blowback from years of American oppression and even genocide, a mere taste of what America routinely shells out to others.
This meant a "defensive" war of aggression against America’s neighbors, calling it a "war on terror", but only against terror directed against the American empire and its interests. Terror employed by the American empire and its clients is no target of this war, though such terror terrorizes many more people and much more unrelentingly, causing many more casualties. For some time, being America's neighbor has been a challenge, if you're not on the payroll, but now it's a real job - and who's far off enough not to be a neighbor?
It’s not about George Bush. If Al Gore had been President, exactly the same transformation would have happened. He would have jumped at the chance to be the tough resolute liberal, like the ones who brought us Vietnam, and he too would have been eloquent. John Kerry, veteran and opponent of the Vietnam War, played it just that way when he had the chance.
The Bible warns us that when we correct the wicked, we need to do it in humility, taking care that we be not tempted to do exactly the same thing (Galatians 6:1). In Romans 2 we read, "You the judge are doing the very same things." In self-righteously judging Milosevic without taking care not to be like him (in its vast self-righteousness knowing that that could never be), America invited that spirit to jump over and find its place in the United States. Now the American empire's neighbors - and who isn't one – are beginning to find out that they are all Bosnian Muslims. And aligned with its patron, Israel is walking in the same spirit, and so Slobodan Milosevic struts through the Holy Land in Israeli uniforms.
Whoever walks in the spirit of Babylon will be judged like Babylon, because with God there is no partiality. Since Babylon elects itself the hammer of the whole earth, as the Pharisee elects himself the judge of all, whoever walks like Babylon will become the dwelling place of every evil spirit, just as the Bible declares. God is not mocked.
America and Saddam Hussein
America complains of Saddam Hussein that he 1) slaughtered his own citizens, 2) tortured them, 3) raped them, and 4) used chemical weapons against them and the Iranians, although the Americans approved at the time and even supplied precursor chemicals.
Having conquered Saddam Hussein, the United States has:
1) Installed CIA agent Iyad Allawi, formerly a servant of Saddam Hussein, who sent the American military to destroy the cities of Najaf and Fallujah in imitation of Saddam Hussein in 1991. Just as Saddam Hussein dropped white phosphorus on residential neighborhoods to suppress those who resisted his rule, the Americans dropped white phosphorus and a ghastly form of napalm called MK77 on the people of Fallujah. The unquenchable flames of MK77 and of white phosphorus, which melts the flesh off human beings and continues to glow under the skin as it burns under there, resemble the flames of hell as much when used by the US Air Force as when it was used by Saddam Hussein.
2) Tortured people all over Iraq, and indeed all over the world, in the full knowledge that the vast majority are innocent of anything. This torture was advocated in memos written by one man who has since been appointed a Federal judge by President Bush, and by President Bush’s White House counsel, who then was made Attorney General.
3) Systematically raped women in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere and encouraged its Iraqi servants to do the same, in addition to sodomizing little boys.
4) Has filled Iraq with depleted uranium dust, which is not only a serious chemical poison but also a radioactive substance with a half life of over 4 billion years, which means that it will be killing people forever. No chemical poison used by Saddam Hussein is killing anyone today or causing horrible birth defects and cancer, as America’s lethal dust will do until God makes new heavens and a new earth.
On April 30th, 2004, George Bush stated that there are no longer mass graves, torture chambers, or rape rooms in Iraq. He knew when he said this that this entire statement was a lie – America was overseeing all three as he spoke. America conquered Saddam Hussein’s regime, but the spirit of Saddam Hussein’s regime has found new and more spacious quarters in America, just as the Bible warned us.
[1] Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997), p. 763-764.
[2] Albert
Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New
York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 160
[3] John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945 (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 48
[4] For a
detailed description of this remarkable history, see Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The
Emergence of Revolutionary
[5] Toland, p. 189-190.
[6] Gale
Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The
Collapse of Communism in