Why is Christmas the most wonderful time of the year? Is it all the mistletoeing and hearts that are glowing? Yeah, that all rocks, but my values — and kicks — revolving around Christmas joy have taken a holly jolly turn, and I’d like to get you on board.
If you think eggnog and caroling are fun, wait until you get your bald-headed niecephew so mad zhe poops zher Che Guevara manties.
FACT-O-RAMA! The commies hate when we mock them, so mock I shall until we lock the doors of Ark 2.0 and listen to them get flushed away like the human feculence they are or, should we lose, until they learn how to load, aim, and fire a gun as I face a firing squad for the hundreds of articles I’ve written making fun of the joyless frown clowns.
But first a quick reminder from our favorite KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, who presciently told us back in the 1980s that there is ONE thing Marxism can’t overcome — Christianity. That is why they hate and fear us. This is why the miserable skanks show up to children’s Christmas choirs and bullhorn their support for terrorists who rape women and burn children alive. They utterly hate you.
And don’t forget how the U.S. Capitol Police made kids stop singing the National Anthem lest the song “offend” someone. The rot is deep, my friends. Enjoy Christmas before it is outlawed.
Remember, Christmas is the season to give, so let’s give it to the Marxists good and hard.
#5 Mele Kalikimaka Is the Thing to Say
This one is simple and yet devastating: say “Merry Christmas.” This is kryptonite to the simpering, pink-haired, troglodyte narcissists who believe that, in a world full of adults, their feelings mean something — like this jackpudding who laughingly tries to associate the phrase “Merry Christmas” with anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and, of course, hatred of the LGBTWTF crowd, all of whom, by the way, loathe Christians.
PINKO-RAMA! The journalistic ambergris I quoted above managed to fit the words “diversity” and “inclusivity” into zhim’s victim manifesto. It only missed “equity.” Commie Rating: Three out of Five Stars, Hammers, and Sickles.
“KDJ, what if I say ‘Merry Christmas’ and a com-symp whines, ‘I don’t celebrate Christmas’?”
You have several responses from which to choose:
“Then don’t have a Merry Christmas!”
“Try some diversity for a change.”
“I was being inclusive. I didn’t know you’re a hater.”
“Say ‘Happy Ramadan’ to Hamas when they are done slaughtering gay people, you homophobic pile of pig vomit.”
Pro tip: Laughing as you say these things will denote mockery, and that is their Achilles heel. Also, belittling them with their own weapons is easy, effective, and fun to do.
I’m aware that they judge us when we say “Merry Christmas.” I don’t care. Neither I nor my language will be controlled by some entitled, basement-dwelling dime museum or the Communist Chinese Party (CCP) that pulls its strings.
Christianity’s emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such power as Lenin claimed, and Washington now claims, unthinkable. Be we religious or be we not, our celebration of Christ’s birthday celebrates a religion that made us masters of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.
Thank you for your support in 2023. Although you have kept me working yet another year, I find it encouraging that there are still some Americans who can think independently and who want to know. As Margaret Mead said, it only takes a few determined people to change the world. Perhaps some of you will be those people.
My traditional Christmas column goes back to sometime in the 1990s when one of my occupations was being a newspaper columnist. It has been widely reprinted at home and abroad. Every year two or three readers write to educate me that religion is the source of wars and persecutions. These readers confuse religion with mankind’s abuse of institutions, religious or otherwise. The United States has democratic institutions and legal institutions to protect civil liberties. Nevertheless, we now have a police state. Shall I argue that democracy and civil liberty are the causes of police states?
Some readers also are confused about hypocrisy. There is a vast difference between proclaiming moral principles that one might fail to live up to and proclaiming immoral principles that are all too easy to keep.
In the days of my youth Christianity was still a potent force in America. It was part of most people’s lives, whether they were believers or not, and it regulated their behavior. That is why in Atlanta during the 1940s and 1950s we did not have to lock our door at night, and boys and girls could be gone all day without parental supervision and be completely safe. It is why I, as a 5-year old, could walk a mile safely to school and return home safely. Today parents who allowed such independence would be arrested for “child endangerment.”
The power of Christian morality over behavior has faded substantially. Nevertheless, even today in the remains of our civilizational foundations many, if not most, people are still guided by Christian morality. As Christian tradition fades as the basis of behavior, barbarity will gather more strength and reign over us.
Liberty is a human achievement. We have it, or had it, because those who believed in it fought to achieve it and to preserve it. As I explain in my Christmas column, people were able to fight for liberty because Christianity empowered the individual.
The other cornerstone of our culture is the Constitution. Indeed, the United States is the Constitution. Without the Constitution, the United States is a different country, and Americans a different people. This is why assaults on the Constitution by the regimes in Washington are assaults on America that are far worse than any assaults by terrorists. There is not much that we can do about these assaults, but we should not through ignorance enable the assaults or believe the government’s claim that safety requires the curtailment of civil liberty.
In a spirit of goodwill, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a successful New Year.
Paul Craig Roberts
The Greatest Gift For All
Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of the season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national Christmas tree on the White House lawn.
The cancerous spread of woke ideology into every facet of society and government is more obvious in some places compared to others, but every so often the movement crosses a line and sparks considerable opposition. In the US, the social justice movement seems to have hit a few snags; numerous companies adopting and promoting ESG related propaganda have been pummeled with successful boycotts, losing billions in profits and in stock value. Overall public sentiment is quickly turning against major universities as a root source of woke beliefs. And, government officials pandering to the extreme left are confronted with increasing vitriol from the populace.
It would seem that Canadians are also hitting their limit these days when it comes to the far-left, and it took a thinly veiled attack on Christmas to do it.
Part of the ongoing invasion of the woke movement involves regular attempts to undermine Christian holidays as “problematic” and archaic. Leftists argue that increasing diversity (mostly through open border policies or illegal immigration) requires increasing inclusion at the national level. Meaning, it is not for immigrants to adapt to the west, the west must adapt to them. National celebrations like Christmas are therefore a representation of “discrimination” because they are being given preference over minority holidays.
This was the message given by the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) in a paper published under the radar in October. The treatise on “Religious Intolerance” was then condemned in a motion unanimously adopted on Nov. 30 by the House of Commons, the lower chamber of the Canadian Parliament. The paper cited Christianity’s two biggest holy days (Christmas and Easter) as examples of “present-day systemic religious discrimination” linked to colonialism because they are statutory holidays in Canada.
The CHRC was established by the Canadian government in 1977 and claims to be an “independent” watchdog. It is empowered under the Canadian Human Rights Act to investigate and to settle complaints of discrimination in employment and in the provision of services within federal jurisdiction. The group is similar to the ACLU in that its momentum is ever to the deepest reaches of the political left. Their ideological positions carry weight in the higher echelons of government; for example, their paper attacking Christmas has since been avidly defended by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The woke all-or-nothing argument against state recognized religious holidays is built on a host of illogical demands. First and foremost, Canada is a majority Christian nation, with 53.3% of the population identifying as Christian, 34.6% identifying as non-affiliated, and around 12% identifying with several other faiths. The next largest religious group in Canada is Muslim, representing only 5% of the religious population.
But what about that 34% of people who are non-affiliated? Do they feel discriminated against by national Christmas celebrations? No, not really.
FAYETTEVILLE, AR — As the December days began to tick away, a local man grew so desperate in his attempt to buy his wife a great Christmas gift that he decided to reach out to the National Security Agency to find out what she wants.
“I figured it’s my best shot,” said Willard McBane. “She’s always so difficult to buy for, and she doesn’t ever give me any hints, so I knew I needed to bring the NSA in on this one.”
At first, Willard’s attempts to ask for help were subtle. “I just started speaking out loud whenever I was around my phone or near our Amazon Alexa,” he said. “I’d just wonder aloud to myself ‘Gee, I wonder what Margaret wants for Christmas this year.’ It didn’t seem to yield any results, so I decided I needed to contact the NSA directly.”
A spokesman for the NSA acknowledged that the agency began receiving phone calls and emails from McBane last week. “Yes, I can confirm that we were contacted by a Mr. Willard McBane,” said Agent Dan Henry. “I am not at liberty to divulge the details of our conversations with Mr. McBane at this time, nor am I able to confirm whether or not we advised him that his wife would really love a 64-ounce Stanley Quencher insulated tumbler with a straw, preferably in the Rose Quartz Glow color.”
At publishing time, Willard had reportedly received the information he was seeking and had also advised the NSA that he would appreciate it if they would somehow get word to Margaret that he would prefer it if she stopped putting green peppers in her chili.
The truth is that we are sustained by stories – oral, written, existential – not by things, as a commercial civilization would have us believe. From infancy to old age, we crave stories that will allow us to make sense of our lives, to give them shape and spiritual significance. And the greatest gifts we can give each other are stories that draw on the mystery and sacredness of existence, stories that express, in ravishing language and a musical spirit, clarification for our lives. Stories that help us resist the nihilistic ethos of our times, the violence and deceit that defines them.
“The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.”
– Karl Kraus, Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half Truths
Things, possessions, life on the installment plan or credit card. This is the season to buy, to accumulate more folderols, to give things to one’s children and each other, which, we like to believe, will bring joy. It’s make-believe, of course, an adult lie conjured up out of guilt and fear that our lives, the stories we live, the stories we dream, and those that dream us, are insufficiently meaningful to bring our children and ourselves the joy we say we seek.
Driven by a pure sense of guilt devoid of any sense of redemption in a capitalist materialist culture, we buy and buy, accumulate and accumulate, in the vain hope that such tangible “gifts” will bring a magic that we can possess. Our exchange of gifts is a consumer culture’s parody of the true meaning of a gift: that gifts are given to be given away, to be passed around, like the peace pipe of native American Indian tribes.
As Lewis Hyde writes in his extraordinary book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, “… a gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. The spirit of a gift is its constant donation.” What we are given, in the inner and outer world, must be shared, allowed to circulate.
But we like to own, to stop the flow. As a result, we have become stuck, selfie people who can’t understand that to possess is to be possessed.
Stop, pose, click. Got it!
Describing art as a way of life, or walking life’s way as an art, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it thus:
Not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself; not caution, but rather a wise blindness; not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all perishable values. This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it, and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous consciousness , namely the period of childhood.
The truth is that we are sustained by stories – oral, written, existential – not by things, as a commercial civilization would have us believe. From infancy to old age, we crave stories that will allow us to make sense of our lives, to give them shape and spiritual significance. And the greatest gifts we can give each other are stories that draw on the mystery and sacredness of existence, stories that express, in ravishing language and a musical spirit, clarification for our lives. Stories that help us resist the nihilistic ethos of our times, the violence and deceit that defines them.
For example, long ago a Jewish boy was born in a stable because his parents couldn’t get a room anywhere. The parents then had to flee with the boy because the government was murdering children and was out to get him. Later in life, this child Jesus, became a radical opponent of church and state, preached peace, love, non-violence, and living by faith, not money; he embraced the outcasts, condemned the hypocrites, and was finally executed as a radical criminal by the state. But his spirit was undefeated; he conquered death; and his name has become synonymous with love and kindness to such a degree that we celebrate his birth as the light of the world as the darkest days of the year turn brighter.
It’s a beautiful story from beginning to end, and if heeded, would bring massive resistance to the way things are throughout the world. No wonder it has touched the hearts of so many for so long.
Sadly, however, Wordsworth put it perfectly when he said that, “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” And the consumer-gift-stories we indirectly tell our children by participating in the madness of holiday shopping are tales unfit for young ears.
To live to buy is to tell them lies.
Our children (and all of us) wish not things but stories that will help them face life with enthusiasm and courage. When I was a young boy, my father would ease me to sleep with “Jiminy Cricket Stories,” imaginary improvisations on Pinocchio and his conscience. They were in no way trendy like the most recent Pinocchio film adaptation, but fundamentally sound as in the song As Time Goes By – it’s still the same old story.
I can’t remember any of his stories today, but what stays with me is their underlying theme, their spirit: to become a real boy, a genuine person, one must determine to tell the truth. One must be brave, truthful, and unselfish. Yet even more, when I think of them, I feel my father’s unconditional love and the timbre of his lilting voice.
These stories about truth and bravery contained hard but vital lessons for a father to pass on to a son, but he did it in such an entertaining way that I took the lessons to heart. Ever since, in gratitude and wonder, I have been trying to make my story adhere to that spirit of truth. Trying; for as we all know, truth is a hard taskmaster. We never hold it, only seek it, and can only approach it if we are possessed by language and allow its musical spirit to carry us on into the unknown.
When I became a father myself, I tried to pass on to my children a love for stories and the words we use to express our lives. Without words, and the ability to use them meaningfully, we are lost in the world of things, a place where consuming replaces creating. So from infancy onward, my wife and I would read to them, and eventually I began to tell them imaginary stories of my own, “Willy Daly Stories,” inspired by a boyhood pal. They would hang onto each word, and swing into depths of reverie as I strung them together into tall tales.
“At the bottom of each word/I’m a spectator at my birth,” wrote the French poet Alain Bosquet.
Entering into this creative spirit, Susanne and Daniel would ask me. “Is that really true?” And I could not lie and say no. So they would laugh, I would grin, and we would go on.
Like all children, they loved these stories, the ones I told and the ones we read. They entered into them, and they, into them; their inner worlds germinated. When they were very young, each started to read, not haltingly but fluently and with amazing comprehension. “Out of the blue” something clicked (and neither was “taught” to read, but was read and talked to by my wife and me as though they comprehended everything, even the most abstruse words), and from that day on the words that they previously heard became theirs. They received the gift, even when they didn’t understand the meaning, they grasped the music.
Now it has passed to my grandchildren, Sophie and Henry, who are children of the word, lovers of the epiphanies stories can disclose.
“The bright book of life,” as D.H.Lawrence called the novel, opened to them. Novel: New. New life forever arising out of the old. Miraculously (is there any other word for it?), they were in possession of the gift of words that they could pass on; they had the power to hear and tell their own stories, to understand their lives, not as the pursuit of things, but as the pursuit of meaning. They felt proud and I felt blessed.
“Art tells the truth,” wrote Chekhov. Indeed. And the wheel of life turns with the seasons. The gift of stories is passed on. Christmas turns to New Year’s. People pass on, but so do stories. The things are forgotten.
The wordsmith Leonard Cohen sang in his song, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” that “I hope you are keeping some sort of record.” The words stick on the page, but the beautiful melody carries them into our present and into the future and we imagine stories carrying us on as the music and the words don’t stop and we keep humming the tune and imagining as we move along to that which cannot be said and about which it is impossible to be silent, to paraphrase Victor Hugo.
While the gift described above is not on par with the gift of salvation and the one true perfect sacrifice we celebrate at Easter, or the incarnation of God that we celebrate at Christmas, it is a wonderous gift to all men Christian or not. For it is through the lens of what was previously discussed that we can form a world where religion and science are not in conflict with one another, where the discovery of the laws of nature is seen as good, for this leads to the discovery of God through his wondrous creation.
With the Christmas season at hand, who is Christ? In English, we describe Christ as the “Word Incarnate,” the Alpha and the Omega, the Son of God. In the Nicene Creed, Christ is described as follows:
The word is a weak translation of the Greek word Logos. The Greek word Logos has a much deeper philosophical meaning than the English word. The meaning of the Greek word logos takes up pages in a Greek-to-English dictionary. Logos was used to express the underlying rationality of the universe, reason, speech, words, and many other things, before it was used to describe the Second person of the Godhead in Christianity by St, John.
The Greeks and Logos
While we think of the Ancient Greeks as worshipers of many gods, starting with the pre-Socratics, the Greek philosophers concluded that there was one God and this God was a transcendent mind (Nous). Heraclitus has been credited as the first Greek philosopher to use the word logos. According to the pre-Socratics the universe was governed by universal principles that were called Logos. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and later Greek Philosophers expanded on this concept. It culminated as God as the unmoved mover in Aristotle. But all the philosophers had a problem that could not be solved through reason alone. If God was, as Aristotle thought, an omniscient, omnipotent, mind that existed in a state of unchanging perfection, why would he create the universe and man? He didn’t need it, nor could his existence be improved by it. Why would He engage in creation?
Christianity’s emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such power as Lenin claimed, and Washington now claims, unthinkable. Be we religious or be we not, our celebration of Christ’s birthday celebrates a religion that made us masters of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.
Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of the season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national Christmas tree on the White House lawn.
Gifts are another shared custom. This tradition comes from the wise men or three kings who brought gifts to baby Jesus. When I was a kid, gifts were more modest than they are now, but even then people were complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. We have grown accustomed to the commercialization. Christmas sales are the backbone of many businesses. Gift giving causes us to remember others and to take time from our harried lives to give them thought.
The decorations and gifts of Christmas are one of our connections to a Christian culture that has held Western civilization together for 2,000 years.
In our culture the individual counts. This permits an individual person to put his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle, to become a reformer and to take on injustice.
This empowerment of the individual is unique to Western civilization. It has made the individual a citizen equal in rights to all other citizens, protected from tyrannical government by the rule of law and free speech. These achievements are the products of centuries of struggle, but they all flow from the teaching that God so values the individual’s soul that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so elevating the individual, Christianity gave him a voice.
Formerly only those with power had a voice. But in Western civilization people with integrity have a voice. So do people with a sense of justice, of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform, investors can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial enterprises, new products and new occupations.
The result was a land of opportunity. The United States attracted immigrants who shared our values and reflected them in their own lives. Our culture was absorbed by a diverse people who became one.
In recent decades we have lost sight of the historic achievement that empowered the individual. The religious, legal and political roots of this great achievement are no longer reverently taught in high schools, colleges and universities or respected by our government. The voices that reach us through the millennia and connect us to our culture are being silenced by “Identity Politics,” “political correctness,” “critical race theory” and the war against “white culture.” Prayer has been driven from schools and Christian religious symbols from public life.
Christianity is being gradually marginalized. Each year it becomes more difficult to find a Christmas card that says “Merry Christmas” instead of “Seasons Greetings.” In place of Christmas carols we get Hollywood Christmas songs. In some churches Christianity is being transmuted into Christian Zionism and the worship of Israel. Others fly LGBTQ and BLM flags. We are approaching a time when a Christian Christmas cannot be celebrated as it is not inclusive in a diverse society and therefore is politically incorrect if not a hate crime.
Constitutional protections have been diminished by hegemonic political ambitions. Indefinite detention, torture, and murder are now acknowledged practices of the United States government. The historic achievement of due process has been rolled back. Tyranny has re-emerged.
Diversity at home and hegemony abroad are consuming values and are dismantling the culture and the rule of law. There is plenty of room for cultural diversity in the world, but not within a single country. A Tower of Babel has no culture. A person cannot be a Christian one day, a pagan the next and a Muslim the day after. A hodgepodge of cultural and religious values provides no basis for law – except the raw power of the pre-Christian past.
All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we are individually believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral doctrine that has curbed power and protected the weak.
Power is the horse ridden by evil. In the 20th century the horse was ridden hard, and the 21st century shows an increase in pace. Millions of people were exterminated in the 20th century by wars that served the ambitions of political leaders and ideological movements. Many were murdered simply because they were members of a class or race that had been demonized by intellectuals and political authority. In the beginning years of the 21st century, hundreds of thousands of Muslims in seven countries have been murdered and millions displaced in order to serve the neoconservatives’ agenda of extending Washington and Israel’s hegemony.
Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is not limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin made this clear when he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as “unlimited power, resting directly on force, not limited by anything.”
Washington’s drive for hegemony over US citizens and the rest of the world is based entirely on the exercise of force and is resurrecting unaccountable power.
Christianity’s emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such power as Lenin claimed, and Washington now claims, unthinkable. Be we religious or be we not, our celebration of Christ’s birthday celebrates a religion that made us masters of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.
As we enter into 2023, Western civilization, the product of thousands of years of striving, is in decline. Degeneracy is everywhere before our eyes. As the West sinks into tyranny and degeneracy, will Western peoples defend their liberty and their souls, or will they sink into the tyranny, which again has raised its ugly and all devouring head?
It’s nice to be back in good old Helvetia again, but as the holiest of holy days approaches, I cannot help but think of my friend Jeremy Clarke and his struggles. Philosophers have dealt with life’s problems starting with the Greeks, yet not one of them was able to pin down man’s ultimate defeat: death, that is. The one who did manage it was no philosopher, just a simple carpenter, and his take on it has given more comfort and hope to us mortals than all the eggheads put together. Nowadays we have doubters who see us believers as dark-age ignoramuses; you know the kind I’m talking about—smelly, bearded, lefty, conceited know-it-alls. But even Charles Darwin believed in God, so who are these modern clowns to doubt him and his son?
Mind you, who am I—a very fortunate man—to talk about pain and death? We’re all hostages, as far as I’m concerned, to fate or destiny or whatever you want to call it. When religion that is now equated with ignorance and superstition gave way to science that we now equate with fact and reason, it was the beginning of the end. Has man seen a worse century than the 20th? The senseless slaughter of young men during World War I should have had the generals on both sides lined up against a wall and shot, their bodies given to wild animals for Christmas. Instead, their statues are still around. Two atomic bombs dropped on innocent Japanese women and children was as great a crime as I can think of, yet Truman’s statue stands proudly near my Athenian home. George W. Bush is a sort of hero to Americans because of his folksy manner and tangled syntax, while the foul neo-cons who planned the war in Iraq walk around Washington with their ugly heads held high. One million dead, I suppose, is not enough to shame them. Israel’s cruel treatment of the Palestinians and arbitrary appropriation of their land now overshadows that greatest of crimes, committed against the Jews by the Nazis.
“Take it from me, life can be beautiful if one only has beautiful thoughts.”
I’ve been finding lots of faults with today’s America as of late, only because no one in the land of the depraved ever practices what they preach. Land of the free sounds fine, but dare to say a word that is not politically correct and the mob demands your head. Canceling people over one wrong word has become very American, but also in Britain one’s canceled the instant they pronounce it. John Locke, everyone’s favorite philosopher at the time of America’s founding, tolerated everyone except atheists: “Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God.” The good philosopher insisted that the taking away of God even in thought dissolves us all.
Try to tell this to some of those monstrous-looking females who refer to women as people with cervixes, and watch the ghastly ones go bananas. The trouble with the left has always been intolerance, and their way of thinking has always been how things should be. That is why they look as troubled and downright frustrated as most leftists do, both men and women. Take it from Taki, life can be beautiful if one only has beautiful thoughts. Forget hating and envying people who are better off, richer, better-looking, and have better-looking wives or hubbies. It’s the luck of the draw. Stop being antisocial and hateful. Try going to church and see how cleansed and hopeful you emerge. Believe you me, as they say, it is the exact opposite feeling when emerging from a nightclub, and I’m one who knows.
Sometimes I think that anti-Christians take Christ more seriously than true believers do.
Christianity’s emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such power as Lenin claimed, and Washington now claims, unthinkable. Be we religious or be we not, our celebration of Christ’s birthday celebrates a religion that made us masters of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.
Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of the season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national Christmas tree on the White House lawn.
Gifts are another shared custom. This tradition comes from the wise men or three kings who brought gifts to baby Jesus. When I was a kid, gifts were more modest than they are now, but even then people were complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. We have grown accustomed to the commercialization. Christmas sales are the backbone of many businesses. Gift giving causes us to remember others and to take time from our harried lives to give them thought. The decorations and gifts of Christmas are one of our connections to a Christian culture that has held Western civilization together for 2,000 years.
In our culture the individual counts. This permits an individual person to put his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle, to become a reformer and to take on injustice.
This empowerment of the individual is unique to Western civilization. It has made the individual a citizen equal in rights to all other citizens, protected from tyrannical government by the rule of law and free speech. These achievements are the products of centuries of struggle, but they all flow from the teaching that God so values the individual’s soul that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so elevating the individual, Christianity gave him a voice.
Formerly only those with power had a voice. But in Western civilization people with integrity have a voice. So do people with a sense of justice, of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform, investors can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial enterprises, new products and new occupations.
The result was a land of opportunity. The United States attracted immigrants who shared our values and reflected them in their own lives. Our culture was absorbed by a diverse people who became one.
In recent decades we have lost sight of the historic achievement that empowered the individual. The religious, legal and political roots of this great achievement are no longer reverently taught in high schools, colleges and universities or respected by our government. The voices that reach us through the millennia and connect us to our culture are being silenced by “Identity Politics,” “political correctness,” “critical race theory” and the war against “white culture.” Prayer has been driven from schools and Christian religious symbols from public life.
Christianity is being gradually marginalized. Each year it becomes more difficult to find a Christmas card that says “Merry Christmas” instead of “Seasons Greetings.” In place of Christmas carols we get Hollywood Christmas songs. In some churches Christianity is being transmuted into Christian Zionism and the worship of Israel. Others fly LGBTQ and BLM flags. We are approaching a time when a Christian Christmas cannot be celebrated as it is not inclusive in a diverse society and therefore is politically incorrect if not a hate crime.
Constitutional protections have been diminished by hegemonic political ambitions. Indefinite detention, torture, and murder are now acknowledged practices of the United States government. The historic achievement of due process has been rolled back. Tyranny has re-emerged.
Diversity at home and hegemony abroad are consuming values and are dismantling the culture and the rule of law. There is plenty of room for cultural diversity in the world, but not within a single country. A Tower of Babel has no culture. A person cannot be a Christian one day, a pagan the next and a Muslim the day after. A hodgepodge of cultural and religious values provides no basis for law – except the raw power of the pre-Christian past.
All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we are individually believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral doctrine that has curbed power and protected the weak. Power is the horse ridden by evil. In the 20th century the horse was ridden hard, and the 21st century shows an increase in pace. Millions of people were exterminated in the 20th century by wars that served the ambitions of political leaders and ideological movements. Many were murdered simply because they were members of a class or race that had been demonized by intellectuals and political authority. In the beginning years of the 21st century, hundreds of thousands of Muslims in seven countries have been murdered and millions displaced in order to serve the neoconservatives’ agenda of extending Washington and Israel’s hegemony.
Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is not limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin made this clear when he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as “unlimited power, resting directly on force, not limited by anything.”
Washington’s drive for hegemony over US citizens and the rest of the world is based entirely on the exercise of force and is resurrecting unaccountable power.
Christianity’s emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such power as Lenin claimed, and Washington now claims, unthinkable. Be we religious or be we not, our celebration of Christ’s birthday celebrates a religion that made us masters of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.
As we enter into 2022, Western civilization, the product of thousands of years of striving, is in decline. Degeneracy is everywhere before our eyes. As the West sinks into tyranny and degeneracy, will Western peoples defend their liberty and their souls, or will they sink into the tyranny, which again has raised its ugly and all devouring head?
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House. Visit his website.
God does work in mysterious ways and often through strange people. Taking Christmas seriously is the lesson of “A Christmas Carol.” Through Scrooge we see that it is never too late to love God and to show that love through our hearts by loving others.
Last weekend, two friends and I were deeply moved when we saw a theatrical production of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” This is the famous and popular tale of the transformation and redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge from a rasping, grasping old miser into a lovable, generous old man who, late in life, becomes determined to make amends for all his extreme selfishness and his public denunciations of charity.
After a tossing and turning in bed Christmas Eve night, during which he has dreams showing self-imposed loneliness in his youth, showing present suffering he could easily alleviate and showing future rejoicing and mockery at his death, he awakes on Christmas morning a new man.
He immediately parts with some of his wealth to the very people and institutions he formerly rejected; he makes amends with relatives he had ignored; and his heart swells with joy — a joy he had never known.
It was a joy his riches had never brought him.
In the production we saw, Scrooge gave numerous soliloquies in which he bared his soul, at first condemning the poor for being useless (“are there no prisons, are there no workhouses?”) and then embracing them.
This is, of course, fiction; yet it is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ that one can — with a firm purpose of amendment — turn to God and love Him at any time in one’s life, no matter one’s past.
In one of his final soliloquies, Scrooge questions whether he has the bravery to become a new man. Of course, he does. And the remainder of his life is changed for the good.
I have read “A Christmas Carol” a half-dozen times, and I have seen many theatrical and motion picture renditions of it. The last two times I saw this production I was moved deeply by the bravery comment. As Scrooge approaches the end of his old life with fear and trembling, he embraces his new life with generosity and joy. However, it is not easy, and he must summon much bravery.
While watching this theatrical transformation, it occurred to me that Our Lord and Savior demonstrated extraordinary bravery when he took on human form. Taking Christmas seriously means believing that Jesus was conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary by an act of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Blessed Trinity.
Because Jesus is both the second person of the Blessed Trinity and was born of a woman, he is true God and true man. His nature — the hypostatic union of God and human flesh — is not only unique in all existence and in all time; it is inseparable.
Thus, through the miracle of transubstantiation, which Christ performs at every Mass through the instrumentality of a Catholic priest, He is physically present. Taking Christmas seriously means that the Holy Eucharist is not a representation of Jesus Christ; it IS Jesus Christ. It is His body, blood, soul and divinity.
All of this came about because God the Father — the first person of the Blessed Trinity — chose a young Jewish girl in Palestine to be the mother of His son 2,000 years ago, and the girl — the Blessed Virgin Mary — said yes.
Dickens does not get into the theology of Christ’s birth, but he emphasizes the value of charity to human happiness and eternal salvation.
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