MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Christian Worship of the False God of Politics

Posted by M. C. on May 16, 2024

What exactly are evangelical Christians worshipping when they so slavishly worship the government of Israel? They are not worshipping God or Godliness – just the opposite. They are worshipping the kind of people described by George Washington in his Farewell Address as “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men.” Ordinary politicians, in other words.

https://mises.org/mises-wire/christian-worship-false-god-politics

Mises WireThomas J. DiLorenzo

Millions of American “evangelical” Christians have been indoctrinated in the idea that they must be worshipful of Israeli politicians and bureaucrats. This is so because they are taught by preachers like John Hagee that the Bible says that God will bless those who bless the nation of Abraham. The absurdity of it all is that pop religionists like Hagee falsely conflate the Israel of the Bible with today’s politicians and bureaucrats of the seventy-six-year-old government of the country of Israel. The two have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Israel’s politicians can be just as sleazy, immoral, corrupt, criminal, and murderous as any politicians anywhere. Hence the spectacle of American evangelical Christians cheerleading the killing of fellow Christians in Gaza by the Israeli military (and of the killing of even more fellow Christians from Russia by supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia).

What exactly are evangelical Christians worshipping when they so slavishly worship the government of Israel? They are not worshipping God or Godliness – just the opposite. They are worshipping the kind of people described by George Washington in his Farewell Address as “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men.” Ordinary politicians, in other words.

When politicians of any country use the coercive powers of the state to confiscate one person’s property, give some of it to political supporters, and keep some for themselves they are engaging in theft. Calling it “democracy,” “majority rule,” or “the only democracy in the Middle East” does not make it any less sinful. 

In order to get elected all politicians everywhere must promise to steal money from those who have earned it and give it to others (and themselves) who have no moral right to it. Calling it “progressive taxation” does not make it any less sinful.

All politicians make promises to allocate other people’s stolen property to their political supporters, most of which they know they cannot keep. They lie, in other words. As Murray Rothbard once wrote, a master politician is a masterful liar, conniver, and manipulator. That is why so few moral people are ever elected to political office. And if they are they are usually quickly beaten down by harsh criticisms and condemnations, or ignored and marginalized. 

When F.A. Hayek titled one of the chapters of The Road to Serfdom “Why the Worst Get on Top” he was referring to totalitarian socialist societies, but the same thing is true of any democracy anywhere. Just look at the current makeup of the U.S. House and Senate “leadership.” 

To a large extent politicians become politicians because they can enrich themselves by soliciting and taking bribes. The late Yuri Maltsev, who defected from the Soviet Union to the United States after working for Mikhail Gorbachev, once remarked about how similar the U.S. government was to the Soviet government because, in his words, “government is all about taking bribes.”

It is a common practice of politicians in Washington to propose onerous taxes or regulations on an industry, then sit back and collect millions of dollars in bribes, euphemistically called “campaign donations,” and then once sufficient loot is collected, call the whole thing off. They call such proposed legislation “milking bills” because they milk “campaign donations.” Legal scholar Fred McChesney even wrote a whole Harvard University Press book about this phenomenon entitled Money for Nothing

All politicians everywhere, including Israel, are showcases of the Seven Deadly Sins. Self-pride trumps humility for starters. What member of Congress is not an egomaniac? Envy poisons the heart of every proponent of “income redistribution” schemes, the cornerstone of welfarism everywhere. 

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The sad farce of German “democracy”

Posted by M. C. on May 16, 2024

In summary: A constitutional protector who owes his office to a Minister President who was appointed to a second term via the anti-constitutional interventions of outsiders is now vowing to use his office to forestall political developments that may deprive his Minister President of power in the future. It is almost like “democracy” in Thüringen is synonymous with left-wing government.

eugyppius

To make all of this even harder, we are told that the upcoming September elections in Thüringen, Brandenburg and Saxony present a grave threat to democracy. To counteract this threat we have things like the Thüringen Project, where our greatest legal minds are at this very moment brainstorming ways to defend Thuringian democracy from the political preferences of actual voters. Crucially, the very existence of the Thüringen Project means that democracy must still reign supreme in Thüringen. Otherwise, there would be nothing for the democratic police of the Thüringen Project to defend. We therefore need only study Thuringian politics in their present state to gain a better idea of what this mysterious, shape-shifting, elusive phenomenon we call German democracy might be.

We will start at the top. The current Minister President (i.e., governor) of Thüringen is a highly democratic man named Bodo Ramelow:

Ramelow is a member of Die Linke, or the Left Party, which is the direct successor of the Socialist Unity Party (or SED) that used to govern the DDR. That might seem baffling, as the SED and the DDR were anything but democratic. Still more baffling is the fact that the constitutional protectors suspected Ramelow of antidemocratic tendencies and even surveilled him for many years. But democracy as we have learned is extremely complicated, and whatever antidemocratic essence Ramelow may have harboured in the past, he is a stalwart democratic politician today. He is also a huge fan of the mobile game Candy Crush, which he enjoys playing during government meetings. That at least seems unambiguously democratic, and perhaps it is even enough to overcome Ramelow’s political unreliability in other respects.

Ramelow first became Minister President in 2014, in a coalition government formed by Die Linke, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens. Ramelow then appointed a man named Stephan Kramer to head the State Office of Constitutional Protection in Thüringen:

Kramer, who will become important later, is a member of the leftist Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which was founded by an old Stasi informant named Anetta Kahane and which is active in extremely innovative democratic pursuits like internet censorship. Democracy, we have seen, just gets more and more complicateder.

To live in Germany in 2024 is to be lectured constantly about democracy. An endless parade of doubtful personalities – pundits, experts and a lot of very shrill women – appear on the television every night to tell you which parties are democratic, which people are democratic and therefore who enjoys democratic legitimacy. As we have seen, however, the whole concept of democracy is very confusing. Those people and organisations who want to mute free expression and ban political parties are all held to be extremely democratic, while those parties that demand more direct democracy and talk constantly about respecting the popular will are the direct modern equivalent of illiberal antidemocratic fascists.

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Thomas Massie Isn’t “Hostile To Israel” – He’s Loyal To Americans By Voting Against ALL Foreign Aid

Posted by M. C. on May 16, 2024

The Ron Paul Liberty Report

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Duke Protesters Smeared As Antisemitic After Jerry Seinfeld Speech Walk Out

Posted by M. C. on May 16, 2024

Glenn Greenwald

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Thomas Sowell: The Government Doesn’t Give You Something For Nothing – The Case of Social Security

Posted by M. C. on May 16, 2024

There is nothing that politicians like better than handing out benefits to be paid for by someone else.

“Money with strings is worth less than money without strings.”

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell: Rhetoric Is No Substitute For Reality – The Case of Universal Healthcare

Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2024

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication, and a government bureaucracy to administer it.

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Anti-War Protestors Are Being Treated Like The “Unvaccinated” Were Treated

Posted by M. C. on May 13, 2024

The Ron Paul Liberty Report

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When Your Rulers Ignore Voters But Are Terrified Of Protesters, That Tells You Something

Posted by M. C. on May 13, 2024

The difference between liberals and rightists on middle east policy is that rightists openly believe middle easterners are apelike savages who should be beaten into submission or eliminated, whereas liberals believe exactly the same thing but have the decency to lie about it.

Caitlin Johnstone

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/when-your-rulers-ignore-voters-but

Politico reports that the DNC is planning to move the Chicago convention partially online in order to “tamp down demonstrators” against Biden’s genocide in Gaza. The Democratic Party’s apathy toward this election is almost as blatant as its support for police crackdowns on political dissent.

When nobody in power will lift a finger to earn your vote but they’re falling all over themselves trying to stomp out a robust protest movement, that tells you what the powerful are actually afraid of and where you should really be focusing your political energy.

Your votes don’t matter, but your activism does. These freaks are terrified that one day the people will stop playing with the toy steering wheel of voting that they were given to divert their political energy and use the power of their numbers to grab the real steering wheel.

If I were Jewish I would be enraged that the world’s most powerful governments and the world’s most influential media outlets keep telling everyone over and over again that opposing mass murder is anti-Jewish.

Israel supporters pretend to believe pro-Palestine protesters have a genocidal hatred of Jews when their real crime is that they don’t share Israel’s genocidal hatred of Palestinians.

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Noam Chomsky

Posted by M. C. on May 13, 2024

A quote from Chomsky:

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

Another quote from Chomsky:

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

Another:

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”

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Next Up, Realism!

Posted by M. C. on May 13, 2024

By Karen Kwiatkowski

Following this settlement between Kiev and Moscow, we will learn the real reasons for the neocon and NATO obsession with Ukraine. Not surprisingly, they are: 1) US and NATO desire to completely control the Black Sea – even though (or perhaps because) many of their ships can’t even get there without multiple maintenance stops; 2) US and EU desire to hide, and continue, their involvement in money laundering, illicit weapons and terrorism export, human smuggling, as well as the dirty money being made by western politicians and their families and companies via Ukraine; 3) Ukraine’s natural resources, including underground mineral deposits, hydroelectric potential and agriculture – not for the energy, construction or food output but to better profit in the fake economy of carbon offsets, credits and green energy subsidies; and 4) to gain a new free-for-all zone for NATO exercises, weapons system testing, military airspace, and biological and nuclear research and development, far removed from regulatory restrictions and NIMBY attitudes that exist in Western Europe and the US. Sadly, we won’t find out that neoconservatives hate Russia and love snuff films, because we already knew that.

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