Long Live Freedom!

It is now my sad undertaking to relate to you the events of this week which have plunged Greece back into crisis mode.

The government announced at 6:00 Tuesday evening that as of midnight it was going to shut down all the the state media:  television, radio, and their Internet streaming.  That is a little like shutting down NPR and PBS in America, except that here in Greece, it amounts to a major chunk of the media instead of just one among many.  A more apt comparison would be the British government shutting down the BBC and all its affiliates.  Included here are the National Symphony and the Conservatory of Music and the channel that was the equivalent of C-SPAN, on which you would watch the debates in Parliament.  (Now we have no idea what that body may be up to.)  Also, for reasons unknown, the student union shut down in the university in Athens, and I think, but cannot yet confirm, here in Thessaloniki's university, too.

The news anchors began putting out pleas for the public to gather at the broadcasting station and prevent the closure.  Police were sent in, not regular police who are public servants, but private thugs working for the government officials.    

Just before eleven, we went into another room to discuss whether we ought to go downtown or not.  By 11:15, when we turned the TV back on, the signal for those stations had gone dead.  So, as it was too late to try to prevent the deed, and in view of  my still lame foot and the fact it was raining, we stayed home.  Hundreds did gather, though,  here in Thessaloniki, and thousands in Athens.  They are still there and the crowds are growing.  So far, they are peaceful.

We have a few junk channels left, home shopping channels and soap opera channels and Nickelodeon and cartoons.  The BBC is gone and so is Deutsche Welle, both of which were operating here under contract with the Greek government.  (And both of which had programming in English, so there were a few things on television I could enjoy.)

The government claims this is for cost-cutting, and every news report you may read will tell you the same.  It's a lie.  How can we know?  Because had the objective been merely to trim the budget, per the demands of the EU, the way to do it would have been simply to cut the funding, not to send in the special police to evict the staff and lock the building.  Had it been merely a cost-cutting measure, the politic thing to do would have been for the government to say, in effect, "We're so sorry.  We entirely sympathize with you the public.  We hated doing this, but it was unavoidable."  Instead, we are hearing invective against the public TV and radio from the Prime Minster and other officials such as has rarely if ever been heard in Greece before, betraying that something more and something bigger is at stake.  We do not know what, but here is a quote from the Prime Minister:

"Greece had become a true Jurassic Park, a unique country in the world that saw the survival of dinosaurs with antiquated ideological obsessions that have become extinct everywhere else," Samaras said.

So the issue is an ideological one.  You can bet the so-called ideology of the ruling elite has strictly to do with the enhancement and protection of their own wealth.  And such quaint ideas as freedom of the press are the dinosaurs to which he refers - freedom, period, actually, or national sovereignty.  That crude, outdated, blood-soaked thing called "nationhood" must be wiped out.  (It's not just here in Greece.  I know from watching the BBC and Deutsche Welle that the Germans are being told anything distinctly German is bad, and the English are being told anything distinctly English is bad.)

"The sinful ERT," said Mr. Samaras in a hateful tone, "is finished."  ERT is (H)ellenic Radio Television.  A strange thing to say of an arm of your own government, because who is to blame if ERT is "sinful"?  Yes, it was a state-run outfit, and yes, there were too many people doing too little; that's how government organizations run; you reward your family and friends with cushy jobs.  Yes, these channels had a definite pro-government slant, so not everybody is sad to see them close.  The Golden Dawn party shrugs its collective shoulders and says to the ERT, you never gave us any coverage or access anyway (Golden Dawn got the same treatment as presidential candidate Ron Paul in America.) so what is there for us to say now?  But not merely to stop funding, but to shut off the signal and seize the premises, suddenly, in the middle of the night, with private police and contemptuous rhetoric?  It smacks too, too much of a coup, which some people in fact are calling it.  These were not all my favorite channels, but they did still (apparently) believe in freedom, including freedom of the press, and that is the point.

The crowds are still protesting.  The nationwide general strike (general meaning all the unions) is in its second day.  

The European Broadcasting Union, in defiance of the Greek government, has sent a van here to Thessaloniki and set up a pirate signal, using the car parking lot at the broadcast building.  So subscribers can still get the outlawed channels.  And everyone, apparently, can get the Internet version, unless or until Google decides to censor it as it censors news in China and in the US and UK drastically curtails items about the unrest going on right now in Turkey. 

The European Union itself has said very little, except by way of vague support for the government, in spite of the fact that this deed is against EU Law.

The Geek Government says it will re-instate the ERT as a leaner organization by the end of the summer.  I personally doubt they will, but if and when they do, then we shall know what was really afoot.  We shall see who owns and who controls the Greek media and what "ideology" these media will espouse.  I suspect that, beside the obvious  attempt to gain more control over the people, all this is also another part of the looting of this country that has been going on for some years now.  

Welcome to the Brave New World.  Welcome to the New World Order.  Welcome to the EU.

Sad State of Greece

The Greeks have now been reduced almost to the status of slaves.  The average worker here earns 20 Euros a day, or about $12,000 year.  Last week we met a woman whose daughter is a physician, an eye ear, nose and throat specialist, who is moving to Switzerland because her pay here is 800 Euros a month, approximately $1067 dollars a month or $12,800 per year.

Some few of the many shops that have sat closed for a long time have re-opened, but they are no longer mom and pop operations; they are mega corporations using small spaces.  Gone are:  our favorite greengrocer, our favorite general store, our favorite gyro restaraunt, and my Internet cafe.  (Thank goodness for my iPad!)

Meanwhile, numerous tyrannical laws have been passed, all in too great a hurry to permit discussion. One of them forces businesses to open on at least some Sundays.  Another says any deceased person is an organ donor, no matter what he or his family may desire, or even what their religious scruples may be.

It occurs to me that the so-called Troika, which runs this cuntry and others, is not a purely European thing.  It consists of the European Comission, yes, and the Central European Bank, but also of the International Monetary Fund.  International, not European. The pan-cosmic government, as the Greeks call it, is not merely some conspiracy theory; it is already in place in some countries.  And it is no democracy.

Aesop

Having given up on War and Peace, I am now reading Aesop's Fables instead.  What a perfect delight, and so full of wisdom.

Here ate two that have especially claimed my attention.

THE WOLF AND THE LION

WOLF, meeting with a Lamb astray from the fold, resolved not to lay violent hands on him, but to find some plea to justify to the Lamb the Wolf's right to eat him. He thus addressed him: "Sirrah, last year you grossly insulted me." "Indeed," bleated the Lamb in a mournful tone of voice, "I was not then born." Then said the Wolf, "You feed in my pasture." "No, good sir," replied the Lamb, "I have not yet tasted grass." Again said the Wolf, "You drink of my well." "No," exclaimed the Lamb, "I never yet drank water, for as yet my mother's milk is both food and drink to me." Upon which the Wolf seized him and ate him up, saying, "Well! I won't remain supperless, even though you refute every one of my imputations."
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.

THE KINGDOM OF THE LION

THE BEASTS of the field and forest had a Lion as their king. He was neither wrathful, cruel, nor tyrannical, but just and gentle as a king could be. During his reign he made a royal proclamation for a general assembly of all the birds and beasts, and drew up conditions for a universal league, in which the Wolf and the Lamb, the Panther and the Kid, the Tiger and the Stag, the Dog and the Hare, should live together in perfect peace and amity. The Hare said, "Oh, how I have longed to see this day, in which the weak shall take their place with impunity by the side of the strong."
And after the Hare said this, he ran for his life.

That Supreme Court Decision

No, not Roe v. Wade, although this is the anniversary of it, God help us. But I mean the one yesterday. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can give unlimited amounts of money and aid to political campaigns.

You have to stop and ponder that a while before all the implications hit you.

Why would you and I ever contribute to a political campaign again? A big corporation can donate more than all of the individual American people combined - in a single check. And the corporation perhaps will not even be American-owned.

Why would you or I ever bother to volunteer for a candidate again? Nothing we can contribute can outweigh or even compare with what a large corporation (or group of corporations) can do.

Churches, too, if they are incorporated, can donate as much as they like and can raise. And mosques, receiving limitless money for this purpose from, say, Saudi Arabia.

Why would a candidate ever refuse corporate money, when it's perfectly legal and without it he is dead in the water? Worse, if big corporations are against a candidate, they have the wherewithal to destroy him via massive negative propaganda.

How long will it take before every politician from mayor to governer, senator and president, will be owned lock, stock, and barrel by some large corporation(s)?

And then what? Which congressman or senator will vote to overthrow the corporatocracy established yesterday? That would be instant political suicide.

Perhaps another Supreme Court will eventually overthrow this terrible decision? No way. Future justices are going to be appointed by presidents who are corporate agents.

It's not as though this hadn't been going on for a long time already. But now it's legal and now it will be happening on a virtually unlimited scale. I suppose there's a certain poetic justice to it all, seeing as we've tolerated it all these years. Seeing as we've almost all just taken it for granted and for normal that "money speaks". Seeing as we've seen how candidates lie and lie and lie, and we still vote for them. (I was brought up to believe voting was my civic, almost sacred, DUTY as an American. But there is no duty, much less any sacred one, to vote for a crook. So when they're all crooks, we ought not vote for the one we perceive as the lesser crook. We ought to withhold our mandate from any of them.) "Put not your trust in princes, in sons of men, in whom there is no salvation."

I've been waiting to see when the democracy we've known in this Republic would be formally ended (it having unofficially ended years ago). And I believe yesterday was the day.

The optimistic note, if you can call this optimism, is that this sort of corruption can never stand for long. The rot eventually causes the whole edifice to collapse.

Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.

...and One Thing I Do Understand

When some 80-90 percent of Brits are against their country entering into the war in Iraq, but their government takes them in anyway, telling their populace it's in the U.K.'s best interests, but never explaining what interests, and the Blair government ends up not accountable to anybody for it,

When the American government takes this country into war on the basis of lies (and yes, they were lies, not just faulty intelligence!), and has never explained to us what the REAL reason for that war is/was, and the administration remains unaccountable to anybody for it,

That is not democracy.  We do not live in a democracy, and somehow, we need to face up to that.

Lee-Jackson-King Day

Yup, that's what today is called here in the Commonwealth of Virginia.  Kinda embarrassing.  We had to add in Lee and Jackson, as if to save face, and ended up with egg on our face instead. 

Robert E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson both have huge memorial markers along Monument Avenue.  For all I know, perhaps wreaths will be laid there today, or have been already.

Yes, they were both heroic figures.  In a way.  But face it, no matter in what terms you cloak the War Between the States (or "the War of Northern Aggression," as people from here prefer to call it), no matter how much you invoke lofty-sounding principles, the fact is that for the South, it was all about defending slavery.  That was the main "right" implied by "States' Rights". 

To me, it's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

The Orthodox Through Catholic Eyes

Part V from the book I’m reading, The Keys of This Blood by Malachi Martin (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1990, p 288).

This is remarkable, although, I've been finding out, typical. We are viewed in such thoroughly secular terms that Catholics think if we don't have their idea of enough political clout, then our "ancient tradition ... today avails them not."  

For John Paul, the pathos of their [Orthodox] position is accentuated by the fact that these groups are heirs to an ancient tradition that today avails them not. Within that tradition, they have an instinct for the georeligious and, therefore, for the geopolitical. But the passage of time and the development of circumstances exclude them from that georeligious and geopolitical stance they feel in their bones as part of their heritage, part of their mandate and part of their reason for existence as religious groups.

Because they climbed into their positions by breaking with the Roman papacy and so abandoned their only realistic hope of georeligious status, John Paul looks upon them with a special solicitude. But he knows that as they now stand, their future lies down one of two pathways. Either they will remain lodged in relative isolation in their historical crevasses, holding on to their traditions. Or, as some of them have already shown an inclination to do, they will decide to accept some forms of merger with the various tides advancing on their positions. Beyond that, any final and satisfactory relief of their pathos must await near-future historical events of a worldwide magnitude.

In the meantime, because of their past they exercise a certain political influence of a localized nature, with which John Paul must reckon. The Russian Orthodox Church centered in the Patriarchate of Moscow not only wields considerable influence over some 100 million members, it also becomes the consenting, if unwilling, handmaiden of the Soviet Party-State. Its major officials accepted positions in the KGB. Its authorities acquiesced in the massacre of thousands of Roman Catholic clergy and accepted —as spoils of war — many Roman Catholic churches and institutions. Indeed, today, at least one solid faction in the Patriarchal Church is virulently antipapal. Throughout the remaining branches of Eastern Orthodoxy there persists a deeply buried antipapal and anti-Roman prejudice; it is felt that any aggrandizement of the papacy can only come at the cost of Orthodox dignity and privilege.

Dear Catholics:

We do not see any pathos at all in our situation.  In fact, we rejoice to be in much better circumstances, currently, than we usually have been throughout our history.   (This was less so when the book was published, 1990.) 

Granted, there are few Greeks who wouldn't like to see a new Byzantium of some sort.  But this is definitely not any part of the Orthodox Faith, much less any part of our reason for existing.   There is no such thing as any "mandate" in our religion either, to acquire political power.  In fact, quite the opposite; our mandate is to divest ourselves of eveything worldly.  We pray for any bishop who develops a lust for political power or any other fleshly ambition; and we seek to correct him, whether by admonition or (in extreme cases) by demonstration. He ceases to carry much weight with us. He may even find himself the object of ridicule.

No, really, for the Orthodox, it is not about "dignity and privilege" and never has been.   Please, God, let it never be.

No, it is not prejudice that causes us to reject papal supremacy.  (Why would you promote such a slur?)  The issue is primarily theological.

But yes, there are also some bad feelings, reinforced by very sad experience.   Forget dignity and privilege; historically, it's our homes and/or our lives have been at stake.  (Pun intended.)  And we're not speaking only of ancient experience, either, so please skip the uncharitable part about us nursing ancient grudges.  No, we're talking also about what is happening up to and including the present day. For only one example, didn't I just post a description of how Pope John Paul II planned to subvert the Orthodox Church and culture and use her people as political pawns?  All in the name of fostering closer ties with us.  If that's what "closer ties" means, how can you expect us not to shy away?

Finally, here's a puzzle for you: we find our ancient tradition avails us everything; yes, everything.  If this surprises you, please go and try to find out what it means.

The Orthodox as the Pope’s Political Pawns

Part IV from the book I’m reading, The Keys of This Blood by Malachi Martin (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1990).

Pope John Paul had a two-pronged approach toward the Soviet Union. One was political; the other was to foment sociocultural change within it. This is from pages 43-44:

…there was nothing in the Vatican’s Ostpolitik, and nothing in the Vatican protocols, to keep [the Pope] from attempting an end run around the Soviet Party-State. In precisely such a move, the New Holy Father set about building closer and ever closer ties with the Russian Orthodox Church and with Eastern Orthodoxy in general.

This papal end run included overt moves – John Paul visiting the Greek Orthodox center in Instanbul, for example; and he received and openly favored visits to the Vatican by Orthodox prelates. But there were also constant covert moves originating in Poland and radiating into western parts of the USSR, moves that fostered a common religious bond between Eastern European roman Catholics and Russian Orthodox communities.

Later historians with access to records unavailable today will document the successes of John Paul’s end-run policies and their basic premise. Suffice it to say now that, in spite of the official prostitution of the Russian Orthodox Church to the ideological policies of the Party-State, John Paul’s efforts nourished within that Church a genuinely Christian core of prelates and people eager once and for all to reenter the mainstream of European Christianity as vindicated by papal Rome; and eager as well to renounce the role, accepted once upon a time by Russian Orthodox Church authorities, as servants of the Soviet Party-State in the fomentation of worldwide revolution.

By the opening of the eighties, about half of the Orthodox prelates were already secretly prepared, if the opportunity were afforded, to place themselves under the ecclesiastical unity of the Roman Pope.

Martin Malachi remarks a couple of paragraphs later (p. 45) that this "end run around Soviet officaldom was not a religious gambit, but a geopolitical strategy."

So much for the self-congratulatory talk one sometimes hears in Orthodox circles about the pope: He's afraid of us because he knows we have the true Faith. He dares not deny our doctrine, because the Catholics themselves once taught it. So since he cannot deny our doctrine, yet it is differenct from his, he feels the only thing left is, he has to get rid of us.

Nnnnnnno. Theology and spirituality don't enter into it. The Pope isn’t even interested in us religiously at all. Only in whatever political power or influence the Orthodox Church may have.   It is our misfortune, you see, to occupy, in Europe, a place of great strategic importance.  "In John Paul’s geopolitical analysis, Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals is a giant seesaw of power. Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic Sea is the center of that power. The Holy Father’s battle was to control that center."

You Can’t Really Root for Any Side

Part III of exerpts from The Keys of This Blood by Malachi Martin (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1990

If you are hoping the Western alliance will win the competition for ruling the New World Order, think again.

In the first place, these people are not religion-friendly. Or if they are, most of them are Jews, among the entrepreneurs, the global executives, the shakers and movers, even among the heads of State. Mr. Obama, of course, is not Jewish, but his top advisors are: David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Emmanual Rahm. Read The Israel Lobby for much more and valuable information.

Moreover, a global government is not going to look anything like a traditional, American, Jeffersonian democracy. Here’s a sober reminder from the book I’m reading (pp. 15-16).

The fundamental idea of democracy – government of, for and by the people, with its ancillary institutions guaranteeing both continuity in government and fundamental rights on the person and civic levels of life – is inviolable in its structural elements. Take away any element – the right to vote, say, or the right of free association – and the entire structure loses its integrity. Tip the balance in favor of one institutional arm, executive over legislative, or legislative over judicial – and the orderly system is jiggered. Adopt only one provision of democracy – take the right of free association again – or even three or four, and as Mr. Gorbachev is presently learning the hard way, you will not have anything like the democratic egalitarianism of the United States or Great Britain.

The fact of the matter is, however, that any geopolitical structure worthy of the name would necessitate an entirely different regime of rights and duties. In a truly one-world order, it would not be possible to regulate an election of high officials in the same manner as democratic egalitarianism requires. General referenda would also be impossible.

So obvious has this difficulty been … that warning scenarios have long been prepared in the democratic capitalist camp itself. Scenarios that show in considerable detail just how and why, in the transition to a world order, the various processes of democracy would have to be shouldered by select groups, themselves picked by other select groups.

It takes little imagination to see that such a situation is not likely to lead to egalitarianism, democratic or otherwise. Nor is it likely to lead to wide rolling plains and smiling upland meadows of popular contentment.

On the Vatican's Role in Geopolitics

When I first began reading The Keys of This Blood by Malachi Martin (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1990), I took it as an indictment of the Vatican. Upon re-reading the first chapter (Yes, it’s worth more than one reading!), I now find it all full of breathless admiration. Well, it’s a bit difficult to tell, as if Malachi Martin himself were ambivalent about it.

At any rate, most of us never attributed nearly as much importance as this author does to the pope’s role in the geopolitical arena.

In any case, though, it’s alarming to think of the papacy now once again imagining itself in such a role, seeking to control the world and considering this its rightful place. Here’s another couple of excerpts from the book to make us ponder. I’ve put into boldface the phrases I find most troubling, although all of it is.

In October of 1978, when [Korol Wojtyla] emerged from the Sistine Chapel in Rome as Pope John Paul II, the 263rd successor to Peter the Apostle, he was himself the head of the most extensive and deeply experienced of the three global powers that would, within a short time, set about ending the nation system of world politics that has defined human society for over a thousand years.

It is not too much to say, in fact, that the chosen purpose of John Paul’s pontificate – the engine that drives his papal grand policy and that determines his day-to-day, year-by-year strategies – is to be the victor in that competition, now well under way.

(p. 17)

In a move that was so totally unexpected at that moment…that it was misread by most of the world – but a move that was characteristic in its display of his independence of both East and West – Pope John Paul embarked without delay on his papal gamble to force the hand of geopolitical change.

In the late spring of 1979, he made an official visit as newly elected Roman Pope to his Soviet-run homeland of Poland. There, he defined [the issues of the day] again and again in terms based solely and solidly on Roman Catholic principles…

It is a measure of the frozen mentalities of that time that few in the West understood the enormous leap John Paul accomplished in that first of his many papal travels. Mot observers took it as the return of a religious leader to his beloved Poland, as an emotional but otherwise unremarkable apostolic visit, complete with sermons and ceremonies and excited, weeping throngs.

…

Presciently as well as by planned design, the Pontiff’s first step into the geopolitical arena was eastward into Poland, the underbelly of the Soviet Union. In John Paul’s geopolitical analysis, Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals is a giant seesaw of power. Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic Sea is the center of that power. The Holy Father’s battle was to control that center.)

ANASTASIA’S NOTE: That center includes Greece and several other Orthodox nations.

World commentary and opinion aside, therefore, the point of John Paul’s foray into Poland was not merely that he was a religious leader. The point was that he was more. He was a geopolitical pope. … Now he served notice that he intended to take up and effectively exercise once more the international role that had been central to the tradition of Rome, and to the very mandate Catholics maintain was conferred by Christ upon Peter and upon each of his successors.

(p. 21-22)

On his trip to Poland in 1979, barely eight months after his election, he signaled the opening of the millennium endgame. He became the first of the three players to enter the new geopolitical arena.

(p. 23)

ANASTASIA’S NOTES: If this is true and if the author's earlier statement is also true, that "now that it [the competition] has started, there is no way it can be reversed or called off," then the Pope did us no favor in initiating it.

But it seems to me the Pope was the last of the three competitors to enter the arena. The United States and the Soviet Union had been at it since the end of World War II. Cold War, and all; anybody remember that?

New World Order

Willing or not, ready or not, we are all involved in an all-out, no-holds-barred three-way global competition. Most of us are not competitors, however. We are the stakes. For the competition is about who will establish the first one-world system of government that has ever existed in the society of nations. It is about who will hold and wield the dual power of authority and control over each of us as individuals and over all of us together as a community; over the entire six billion people expected by demographers to inhabit the earth by early in the third millennium.

The competition is all-out because, now that it has started, there is no way it can be reversed or called off.

No holds are barred because, once the competition has been decided, the world and all that’s in it – our way of life as individuals and as citizens of the nations; our families and our jobs; our trade and commerce and money; our educational systems and our religions and our cultures; even the badges of our national identity, which most of us have always taken for granted – all will have been powerfully and radically altered forever. No one can be exempted from its effects. No sector of our lives will remain untouched.

The competition began and continues as a three-way affair because that is the number of rivals with sufficient resources to establish and maintain a new world order.

Nobody who is acquainted with the plans of these three rivals has any doubt but that only one of them can win. Each expects the other two to be overwhelmed and swallowed up in the coming maelstrom of change. That being the case, it would appear inescapable that their competition will end up as a confrontation.

As for the time factor involved, those of us who are under seventy [in 1990] will see at least the basic structures of the new world government installed. Those of us under forty will surely live under its legislative, executive, and judiciary authority and control. Indeed, the three rivals themselves – and many more besides as time goes on – speak about this new world order not as something around a distant corner of time, but as something that is imminent.

These are the opening words of The Keys of This Blood, a non-fiction work by the former Jesuit, Malachi Martin. Martin was a long-time Vatican insider; his book details the role of the Vatican in this three-way struggle. What role? The Vatican, he says, was first in the arena, initiating the competition. And the Vatican is one of the three competitors. The other two, says Martin, writing in 1990, are the Soviet Union and certain allied Western interests, namely, global corporations and their political lackeys, presidents, senators, congressmen, etc.

Today, 20 years later, we'd probably say the Soviet Union has been replaced in the arena by China. And perhaps the Vatican has been eclipsed by Islam.

But the competition is still on, and it's the real reason for so much of what governments do, including our own, that otherwise seems to make so little sense.

No, this competition didn't start under President Obama, but in the late 1970s. And it has been joined by every President since, Republican or Democrat. With the possible exception of Bill Clinton, whose administration was too scandal-ridden to deal with much else. And - biggest scandal of all, though it received less attention - who actually sold himself to China.

No, our politicians aren't stupid. They're just out to rule the world. Or at least to prevent their rivals from doing it, which amounts to the same thing.

This is going to be a fascinating book. I can hardly wait to read the rest.

Veterans Day/Armistice Day - a Side Note

This morning we heard on the radio that Britain's Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, sent a letter of condolence to the mother of one serviceman killed in combat, and it contained 25 spelling errors. The mother called the intended tribute an insult.

What is more disturbing than the thought of the Prime Minister of the U.K. being functionally illiterate? The thought that apparently, his staff is, too. Or else... what?

________

Rethinking

But good heavens, if Mr. Brown really did have this dysfunction, surely, surely, he would realize it and have his staff covering it for him. Or else the staff would have realized it and would have developed some protocol to protect the Prime Minister from embarrassing himself.

Unless the staff were too intimidated?

Or did the staff despise him and purposely let him hang out in the wind?

Okay, surely the Prime Minister didn't personally write that letter at all, right? Much more likely one of his staff did, even though it went out above his name.

Yes, some staffer dictated the letter and the typist listening to the tape didn't know how to spell and then whoever dictated it failed to proof-read it.

No, wait, there would have been a form letter, needing changes only to the date, the addressee, the name of the deceased.

Okay, it was a new secretary who didn't yet know of the existence of the form letter, so when told to send one to so-and-so, she composed one from scratch. (Nobody knew she couldn't write English, because she'd had her boyfriend fill out the employment application.) And the reason his or her boss didn't proof it is, everybody is accustomed to perfection at 10 Downing Street.

Sigh. Whichever way you imagine it, it sounds so implausible. And I don't know about you, but to me, this is shaking-the-foundations material. Literacy is one of the foundations of civilization and this is the office of the Prime Minister of the U.K. we're talking about! This really bothers me.

Banking Blues...and other Observations

Demetrios went to Home Depot to buy railings for our new porch. He used his new BankAmerica debit card, telling the clerk, "I'm not sure I have enough money in this new account, but try it and see if it goes through."

It did.

But the catch is, it shouldn't have. The account was $17 short.

So what does BankAmerica do? Sends us a letter saying we're being charged a $35 late fee. The money must be deposited within 5 days or they will charge another $35. Trouble is, we didn't receive that letter until 6 days afterward.

This morning, Demetrios went to the bank, paid the $70, and closed the account.

* * *

In the news today, we learned that the nation's leading banks, the ones remaining after the others were creamed, are paying their top employees more than ever this year. In fact, the total amount they've set aside for these big bonuses is $75 billion. Wait, wait! Isn't that a familiar number, $75 billion? Oh, yes. That's the exact amount those banks have received so far in bailout money, which is to say, yours and my money!

* * *

President Obama is no longer calling for "Health care reform." Now it's "Health Insurance Reform." Ah, so that's what it was all about all along! Not care, but insurance. Of course.

Whatever "reform" comes out of all this, you may be sure that the big interests (insurance companies, drug companies, doctors and hospitals, all of which are backing the "reform") will be getting as much money out of it as ever, in fact more. What will you and I get out of it? Cosmetic change only. It'll look good superficially.

* * *

The United States is the only foreign power left in Iraq. All the other members of the coalition have brought their boys home. Our boys are not being brought home from Iraq; they're gradually being transferred to Afghanistan, just exactly as they would have been by now under President Bush.

Obama, Half a Year Later

When I endorsed the candidacy of then Senator Obama last year, I said I'd be the first to speak up if he were a disappointment.

Well, he is. 'Nuff said.

A Political Thought for Lincoln's Birthday

A government willing to torture anybody -- terrorists, illegal combatants, whomever -- is perfectly willing to torture YOU. And will, the day it thinks it can get away with it and can gain some advantage from doing so.

To think otherwise is pure folly.

A Partial List of Things Incompatible With Democracy...

...and Inimical to It

• Empire


• Militarism


• Terrorism


• Off-shore prisons


• "Extraordinary Renditions" (Sending our prisoners to foreign jails so they can be mistreated in ways illegal here)


• Torture (Yes, waterboarding is torture!)


• Government-run economy


• Domestic spying without court order


• Weak independence of the judiciary branch


• Corruption, including bribery, graft, nepotism, cronyism, and patronage, if it involves promoting less competent people over more competent ones


• Over-taxation


• Weak or non-existent middle class


• Under-educated populace


• Politically unaware or uninvolved populace, asleep at the wheel

Feel free to add things I've overlooked; there are bound to be zillions of them.

Prop Hate?

Many people, including many Hollywood stars, are angry about Tuesday’s vote in California in favor of Proposition 8, banning “gay marriage”. I’ve seen it called, in numerous places, “Prop H8” or “Prop Hate”. But the assumption that to be against “gay marriage” stems from hate is neither fair or accurate, any more than the assumption is fair or accurate that President-elect Obama is the Antichrist or the precursor of the Antichrist because he is pro-choice. People on both sides of such hot-button issues are prone to demonize each other and this is always a mistake. Christians, especially, are forbidden by their Lord to judge their fellow man. That means we can call an action right or wrong, but we cannot always see the motive(s) behind an action. It is therefore presumptuous of us to think we know someone else’s heart.

The idea that to oppose “gay marriage” is a function of hatred stems from the matter having been framed as a civil rights issue. Obviously, anyone who would deny another human being his civil (or human) rights is promoting hatred. (Well, that may not so obvious; if we were to brainstorm for a few minutes, we could probably come up with half a dozen humane, loving reasons for doing that temporarily in bizarre circumstances.)

The idea that "gay marriage" is an issue of civil rights, in turn, only works if we accept the view gays and lesbians are promoting so vigorously (and often, so ruthlessly), namely, that their condition is perfectly normal.

Here I’d like us to pause to make a distinction between natural and normal. Some things, like chickenpox and conjoined twins, are natural phenomena, but they are aberrations of nature; they are not normal. Homosexuality may be like that; even if one concedes that it may be natural, it is hard to find any intellectually respectable argument for its being normal, especially when a mere glance at human anatomy rather conclusively demonstrates the opposite.

Homosexuality is a condition in which a person cannot relate normally either to the same sex or to the opposite.

Viewed this way, homosexuality simply is not a civil rights issue; it is a handicap. And if you love a person, you do not reinforce his handicap in any way. You do not affirm his dysfunction as functional. You do not give a drink to an alcoholic, even if he begs for it, even if he curses you and calls you names for not giving it to him. If you do, that might be guilt or a show of broadmindedness or it may even be an attempt at love; but whatever it is, it is misguided. It isn’t any wise way to love.

Should we love homosexuals? Of course. Should we acknowledge that they should and do have human and civil rights? Of course. But no matter what they say, we do gays and lesbians no favor to categorize their handicap as normal. And we won’t be doing society any favor, either. We can protect all the legitimate rights of homosexuals without pretending to them or to ourselves that their relationships are the same as marriage.

Now you can agree or disagree about whether homosexuality is normal and whether, therefore, it is properly a civil rights issue. My only point is, even if you support "gay marriage," it is a mistake to suppose oppposition to it necessarily involves hatred. No doubt it sometimes does, and when that happens, it is of course reprehensible. But from my point of view, and I submit from the Christian point of view, to oppose "gay marriage" is a thoroughly loving thing to do, in fact, the loving thing to do.

P.S.) You can read more about Propositions 8 and 4 from an Orthodox point of view here. And you can find out the real (political, not medical) circumstances here, of the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

The Day After

Why do we Vote for Crooks?

Ron Paul will tell you the truth. Bob Barr will tell you the truth. Ralph Nader will tell you the truth. Mike Gravel will tell you the truth.

Why is it that every one of these truth tellers comes across to us as somewhere in the spectrum between slighly kooky and totally nuts?

They aren't really. Closer attention shows them to be serious men. Ralph Nader, in particular, is highly intelligent, well-educated, well-informed, politically savvy, experienced, and articulate. And yet, we take none of these men seriously. I even heard someone say (about Barack Obama), "He's too honest!" - which recent events have shown him not to be, but that was the reason given for NOT voting for him!

Why is it we scoff at the honest ones? Why is it we don't want them, don't consider them qualified? Above all, WHY do they invariably seem to us like weirdos?

Living in the Age of Scoundrels

from The National Herald (Greek-American weekly newspaper), September 27, 2008, by Dr. Nikolaos A. Stavrou

Bankers of the world, unite to defend your loot! The system that produced, nourished and coddled you still needs your breed very badly and you need it. Neither you nor the system can afford to follow the path of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Be reminded that your persistence in the art of theft of public assets and peoples' wealth paid off. Indeed, you, the bankers, succeeded where Stalin and Trotsky failed. Those two historical anachronisms fought each other to death over the issue of whether "permanent revolution" (Trotsky's choice) or "Socialism in one country" (Stalin's) should be the goal of the first Marxist state. As we now know, they both failed; but you, the bankers, succeeded brilliantly. You achieved "socialism in one country", the United States, and a "permanent global turnoil" which is pretty much the same as "permanent revolution."

It is a unique type of socialism: big business, bankers, and assorted crooks get the profits and the tax-payers assume the losses. The latest effort to save the bankers of the world will cost each and every American taxpayer approximately seven thousand dollars. Indeed, it took the ingenuity of capitalism to bring the world closer to what Karl Marx envisioned, i.e., a world in which the state would be irrelevant and will be ruled by financiers, with no national or state allegiance, and eternal global allegiance with each other to defend their class interests. The only mistake Marx made was that he picked the wrong class to put an end to the concepts of nation, national interests, and nation-state. He should have known better than depend on the working class to abolish the global political edifice known as the bourgeois state system. That is the specialty of thieves, the bankers, and the products of Harvard's Business School; in other words, the very people who for thirty years worshiped the Gospel of privatization, and worked tirelessly to demolish the regulatory system that Franklin Roosevelt establsihed to avoid a repetition of the Great Depression...

The still unfolding financial meltdown is the logical consequence of thirty years of a carefully orchestrated social engineering that went through four stages:

First, the educational system was re-programmed to produce human robots instead of citizens equipped with the necessary ethical foundations and critical skills to challenge the system. Ethical norms were dismissed as the ruminations of "dead, white European philosophers."

Second, a systematic assault was unleashed against the social ownership of critical economic assets. Privatization became an article of faith and was promoted with evangelical zeal by Ronald reagan and every president since. "Get the state out of the way of the private sector" was the credo of modern conservatism. As we all know, the fastest way to privatization of public assets is to steal them.

Third, a systematic assault on Franklin Roosevelt's regulatory and social welfare system as well as on workers' rights was unleashed and exacerbated with advances in technology. Exporting the industrial production to China, Bangladesh, India, and Mexico negated any influence of labor unions, leaving financiers and industrial magnates to roam from country to country in pursuing easy profits and corrupt politicians.

Fourth, with the removal of oversight and regulations, the state was relegated to one and only one function: to secure the unimpeded flow of capital from one country to the next in search of the cheapest labor and the highest profits.

But when the sandcastle collapsed, the scoundrels tell the government, "We are too big to let us fail." The government in turn tells its citizens, "You are too stupid to understand." Just strust us, "be happy, don't worry," The age of scoundrels pursuing socialism of big business has dawned. Fasten your seat belts.



Dr. Nikolaos A. Stavrou is Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at Howard University.

DISCLAIMER: I know some very good, ethical, wonderful people who work for banks, who are definitely not crooks and far from it - including my next-door neighbor and my son-in-law. (Please pray for him, as he is with Wachovia.) Also, I worked for a bank myself once...