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 National Socialists in Germany and by
Soviet and Chinese communists simply because they were members of a race or
class 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 extend
Washington’s hegemony.
Dear Donors, thank you for your support in 2018. Although you
have kept me working yet another year, I find it encouraging that there are
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 I was 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.
Liberty
is a human achievement. We have it, or had it, because those who believed in it
fought to achieve 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.
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” and “the war on terror.” Prayer has been driven from schools and
Christian religious symbols from public life. 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 National Socialists in Germany and by
Soviet and Chinese communists simply because they were members of a race or
class 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 extend
Washington’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 2019, 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, 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?
