|
When you say that you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out
in practice.
- Otto von Bismarck
A Christian Critique of American Foreign Policy
by Jean-Marc Berthoud
My last (and only other) visit to the United States was early in 1986. I was visiting the Capitol at the invitation of a friend
who, at the time, was working for a Republican member of the Senate. It was on the day of President Reagan's State of the
Union Address. In the silence and solitude of this huge building, I experienced a feeling of awe which I shall never forget.
When in Versailles or in Paris, among the palaces of Genoa or walking down Whitehall towards Parliament, one has a vivid sensation
of the power which went forth from these great buildings. But what one senses are the vestiges of power, not its reality.
In those silent spaces of the Capitol, I was overwhelmed by the presence of a very real power. And I said to myself: "I
stand here in the seat of the mightiest power this earth has seen. Woe betide the nations of the world when such a power falls
into evil hands."
That same week, I had arranged a meeting with a personal advisor to the President on European
and Soviet affairs. I wanted to share with him -- and, through him, the President -- my dismay at the extraordinary cordiality
Ronald Reagan had displayed toward President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union during their meeting in Geneva early in
December of the previous year. Such warmth contrasted with Reagan's recent public denunciation of the "Evil Empire."
I thought that such effusions could only weaken the Western perception of the great danger that the Soviet Empire represented.
When supping with the devil, goes the English proverb, use a long spoon.
On that cold morning in February 1986,
I shared such thoughts with the advisor. He listened in silence, then strode across his office and took a document out of
a cabinet. "Look at this," he said. "I gave exactly the same advice to the President before he went to Europe.
He paid not the slightest attention to my recommendations."
These anecdotes illustrate the great distance between
Reagan's rhetoric and the underlying political reality of cordial fraternization. What really mattered, of course, was the
realpolitik, not the rhetoric. The events of the next few years were to show that the international political scene had already
radically changed.
When Reagan was verbally attacking the Soviet Union, the Cold War had virtually ended. East and
West, communism and capitalism had struck a secret bargain. Since the early 60's, Leninist and Stalinist confrontation with
the capitalist block had been replaced by the Gramscian revolutionary strategy of penetration, infiltration, seduction, and
domination so well described and prophetically analyzed in the 60's and 70's by Anatoli Golitsyn.
From the balance
of two hostile blocks, the leaders of the world were moving in the direction of a joint directorate of world affairs, which
would unify the planet under a single atheistic, socialist, and pantheistic government. From the communist perspective, this
reorientation took on the names of Eurocommunism (in Italy); the Prague Spring (in Czechoslovakia); communism with a human
face (all over); and finally, the coup de gras, perestroika, and glasnost.
In the West, the major turning point
was 1968, when all the vital institutions of Western society -- the media, the universities, the major churches, the judiciary,
the educational organizations, etc. -- were penetrated by Gramscian methods of cultural revolution. The results have been
spectacular. It is instructive to draw up a short list of this New Class, this universal nomenclatura: Prodi, Solanas, Jospin,
Blair, Shroeder, Mandela, Mbeki, and last, but not least, William Jefferson Clinton. The convergence of East and West was
symbolized by that extraordinary display of Russian communist flags over Washington at the end of the Reagan era. The new
form of international communism had taken over the levers of command. Ecologists and pacifists (the German Greens, for example)
could now, without a qualm, rain death and destruction on the Balkans because they held the reigns of power. For their purpose,
in the end, it was not ecological stability or the promotion of peace, but a new revolutionary agenda. And the maintenance
(and exercise) of the most brutal power was no obstacle in advancing such aims.
Communism, unlike fascism or Nazism,
is not a national phenomenon, but a long-term international enterprise. After communism totally exhausted the human resources
of Russia, the revolution nimbly transferred to a relatively healthy organism: the United States of America. Washington replaced
Moscow as the center of world revolution. This, it would seem to me, is one of the basic lessons we can draw from the Clinton
era.
What else explains why such men as Augusto Pinochet and Helmut Kohl have become objects of judicial persecution?
Why not attack left-wing figures, who, by their utopian ideology, are far more liable to become political killers or candidates
for corruption? The answer is simple. The socialist axe now being wielded by the governments of the West has fallen into the
hands of our new-style revolutionaries. And such men are determined to exact revenge on men who, in various ways, destroyed
the communist revolution. One of the reasons Yugoslavia has been subjected to such astonishing disinformation, calumny, and
brutality in recent years is the simple fact that this nation had (under Tito) committed an unforgivable crime: It had escaped
the domination of the Comintern.
To accuse a person or a nation of being "communist" or "Marxist"
bears little opprobrium. If one wants to demonize a nation or a political adversary, the current gambit is to identify him
with Hitler, with genocide, or with diverse crimes against the human race. This has obviously been the case with Jorg Hader,
the leader of the Austrian Patriotic Freedom Party, whose political program includes a vibrant opposition to the anti-patriotic
bureaucratic socialism of the European Union. No one would have batted an eyelid if he had been called a communist or been
compared with Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, even though the viciousness of these totalitarian leaders far outstripped, at least
in numbers, the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis.
One of the reasons for this strange partiality is the international
character of communism. Both the defunct Comintern and the Gramscian New World Order are explicitly "internationalist"
movements aimed at the disintegration of independent nations. Nazism, on the other hand, was a particularly nationalist movement
exalting, to the point of idolatry, one nation at the expense of every other. But for the one-world socialist and pantheistic
order, individual nations, or groups of nations, are an obstacle to its grand design, and they must either be absorbed into
the greater whole or, if they resist such assimilation, face utter destruction. Thus, the independence of individual nations
who seek to defend their national sovereignty must be broken and, if they resist, their autonomy must be destroyed by force.
The internationalist conglomerate, now visibly headed by the United States, waged a Thirty Years War against the
independent Republic of South Africa. This war of attrition saw the final defeat of the beleaguered Boer Republic through
the betrayal of the country's own government. South Africa thus became a willing victim to the seductions of the New World
Order. But no one today seems bothered by the fact that violence in that country has increased to unprecedented levels and
the present condition of the black majority population is (in spite of a very real social liberation) much worse off than
it was but a few years ago under white tyranny.
The Gulf War, waged by the first American president openly to proclaim
the virtues of the New World Order -- George Bush, Sr. -- let the Muslim nations know what would happen to them if they succumbed
to the temptation of resisting the apparently irresistible might of the new Pax Americana.
The government of my
own country, Switzerland, long known for its love of freedom and of an independence strongly buttressed by a foreign policy
of armed neutrality and active diplomacy, was in three short years brought to heel by a media-driven war waged by an unholy
alliance made up of the American government and certain rapacious (and thoroughly mendacious) international Jewish organizations,
the latter contemptuous of the moral standards of the Torah. This international hijacking of the Swiss banks was conducted
under the pretext of certain (in part genuine) injustices suffered by survivors of the holocaust and their descendants. The
indecent abuse of the great sufferings of their own people by certain Jewish publicists in order to attack Switzerland provoked
the indignation of the Swiss Jewish community and vehement protests from a number of Israeli journalists, who could not understand
how their fellow Jews could turn the sufferings of their ancestors into a money-making racket. Our total capitulation to this
American-led international cabal was only prevented by our system of direct democracy, under which all major issues are decided
by referendum. The leader of the patriotic resistance is a successful businessman of strongly antisocialist convictions from
the Grisons, Christophe Blocher, who -- for his love of the independence of his country -- has been publicly identified with
Adolph Hitler by members of our Federal Council who are short on rational arguments. The intellectual, business, and political
nomenclatura of my country has largely been won over to the ideology of our American-led international socialist ruling elite
(Internazis, for short).
Even a cursory glance at the foreign policy of the present government of the United States
reveals its inherently anti-Christian character. This is evident at least as far back as 1945 and comes out very clearly from
the actions undertaken in the past ten years by the United States in the Balkans. In this cultural and international disaster,
the United States has sided with the forces of Islam against all other parties in the conflict (with the exception of the
Croats) who in any way reflected the slightest Christian heritage. Since NATO's occupation of Kosovo, which contains the highest
concentration of Christian churches in the world, more Christian monuments have been destroyed than during the many centuries
of Ottoman occupation of the Balkans.
United States policy in this region follows a two-pronged geopolitical strategy,
the crucial element of which is the use of Islam as a battering ram. One prong aims at the soft Muslim underbelly of Russia
- its interminable southern frontier - while the other counts on the abundant Islamic migrant population in most of the nations
of Western Europe as a potential fifth column. The center pin of this strategy is the establishment of a strong Islamic political
base in the Balkans - Bosnia and Greater Albania - under strict U.S./NATO patronage. The tragedy is that most of the governments
of Western Europe have gone over to the enemy, becoming willing allies -- or satellites -- of the United States. One of the
rare statesmen to have understood the U.S. threat to the independent existence of the European nations was the late Francois
Mitterand who, in his Political Testament, explicitly stated that the U.S. government was effectively, if not openly, at war
with France.
In attempting to account for the persistently anti-Christian slant in American foreign policy, Robert
A. Pois' path-breaking book, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature is of great use. According to Pois, the Nazi religion
of nature rejected all distinctions, e.g., between man and animals, good and evil, God and man, truth and lies. It also rejected
traditional morality and elevated the emotional and instinctual at the expense of the rational. This neo-pagan religious ideology
can be compared to certain aspects of the hyper-emotional and illuminist, irrational and antinomian religion so prevalent
in important segments of American Christianity, especially in its charismatic expression. One is struck by the number of fundamental
similarities: an accent on a monistic unity; a refusal of the controlling use of reason; a defense of emotion and instinct
at the expense of intelligence and wisdom; an antinomianism and a passionate justification of the authentic as source of the
true and the good; a continual confusion of God and man, of the spiritual with the material; an ignorance of the true nature
of sin and of evil in the world.
This religious state of affairs in part explains the absence of real resistance
to among American churches to the totally amoral - but no doubt authentic -- public and private actions of your current president.
It also explains the contempt for law, for established rules of conduct, for solemnly signed and ratified international treaties,
for any kind of decency, for truth itself, so rampant in the behavior of the current administration. Woe to the nations of
the world that have to submit to such a nation!
It is the amorality - standing as they do beyond good and evil -
of such public men as Ted Turner and William Jefferson Clinton which explains the brutal, immoral, and viciously self serving
character of much of American foreign policy today. This attitude gives the policies of this great, but disfigured, nation
their anti-Christian character.
An important difference between today's Western atrocities and those of the communists
and the Nazis is to be found in the hypocrisy in which Allied brutality clothes itself. Armaud-Aaron Upinsky, in a masterly
study of the nature of modern politics, La Tete coupee, points out that the model for the modern politician is not Machiavelli
or Robspierre, nor even Lenin, but Tartufe. For, like Moliere's professional hypocrite, the modern politician conceals his
brutal, amoral, and totally self serving conductof public affairs under a mask: not Tartufe's mask of Christian purity and
piety, but the mask of humanitarian concern. The politics of Uncle Tom's Cabin has become universal.
These considerations
lead us to reexamine the phenomenon of modern totalitarianism, which belongs to the very warp and woof of modern civilization,
at least since the Enlightenment. For the refusal of divine transendence, central to the Enlightenment, leads either to the
domination of the One, unity and totality being concentrated in the state; or the absolutization of the Many, which is the
pluralism of social anarchy. The French Revolution, communism, and Nazism were in fact but the tip of the iceberg, its mass
being constituted by the inexorable movement of a godless civilization toward a monolithic social order. Such a perspective
leads us to revise our understanding of the Weimar Republic and of Nazi Germany itself. Far from being aberrant exceptions,
these cancerous growths represented the norm. They were only ahead of their time, too modern at that time to be easily assimilated
by they rest of the West, which was still too attached to the transcendent norms of Christian civilization to be seduced.
In fact, the totalitarian modernity of Nazi Germany foretold what Alexander Zinoniev calls the "totalitarian
West." In both, we find the cult of science and technology; an obsession with biological and social evolution; an obsession
with the occult and with death (e.g. abortion and euthanasia); pantheistic ecological naturalism; the extraordinary development
of propaganda, disinformation, and the total infatuation of the public with lies; the almost total secularization (i.e. atheization)
of the Christian faith; the fascination with power and violence; the cult of youth; and the cult of homosexuality.
Most
of these elements are found within Western civilization today. Not only do we see throughout the West a cult of "life,"
that self-justifying vitalism which was so precious to the Nazis, with its exaltation of nature at the expense of man, but
also a generalized immanence excluding divine transcendence from all political, social, and cultural realities. This rejection
of God, this universal, practical and democratic atheism, leads to the loss of intellectual clarity, with dramatic consequences;
the incapacity to distinguish between femininity and feminism, between human sexuality and bestiality and homosexual behavior,
between animals and men, between God and mankind. The atheization of the culture leads to chaos and death.
Italian
philosopher Augusto Del Noce drew our attention to this progressive atheization of Western civilization, noting that the West
has, in the past century, overcome its two totalitarian rivals, Nazism and communism, as "religious systems", but
not as systems of organized atheism. In fact, for Del Noce, the victory of the West over its totalitarian rivals has led to
a radical reinforcement of its inherently atheistic orientation. This is seen in the adoption of rampant materialism (what
Del Noce calls "Western opulence") as a universal way of life.
Even the churches - by their rejection
of the divine inspiration of the word of God; by their exclusion of the general revelation of God through every aspect of
creation; by their adoption, in a variety of ways, of the evolutionary dialectics of process theology; by their putting subjective
human experience above God and His Creation - have reinforced the fundamentally atheistic tendencies of modern civilization.
This rejection of all transcendence, of all ontological rooting of the affairs of men in true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Author and Maintainer of creation, is at the root of our modern totalitarianism.
Basic to all totalitarianism is
the loss of perception of any kind of difference between the temporal and the spiritual. This distinction is marked in the
Western political tradition by the distinction between the material sword (our penal law) applied by the state when it accomplishes
its divinely ordained mandate, and the spiritual sword, the definition of justice and truth, contained in the Law of God taught
by the Church. In the past, this confusion had either from the domination of the temporal by the spiritual (caesaropapism),
or by the spiritual by the temporal (Erastianism, in all its forms). But our time has discovered an even more radical form
of the abolition of the spiritual element in society: the seduction and penetration of the Church of God by that very spirit
of error and injustice which it was instituted to dispel. To the extent that the Church has disappeared as a significant force
for truth, charity, and justice by its betrayal of its Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, it has ceased to be a light to a world
engulfed in darkness and salt to a rotting earth. It then disappears into insignificance: " It is good for nothing but
to be cast out and to be trodden under the foot of men" (Matthew 5:13).
St. Paul, in 2 Thessalonians, addresses
the question of the totalitarian West in his account of the Antichrist. He sees two elements heralding the apparition of the
Antichrist. The first is drawn from the very name of the final enemy of God: He is anomos, the lawless one. He is the representative
of a fundamental antinomianism, a rejection of God's Law. No doubt his antinomian system will include a certain rule of law
- no society can exist without law - but this "law" will be a constant contradiction to the specific moral demands
of the commandments of God. Such laws will include the legalization of abortion and euthanasia; the legitimization of so-called
homosexual "marriages"; the contempt for any kind of binding legal obligation; the dissolution of marriage and the
establishment of "sexual satisfaction" as the social norm; the encouragement of debt at the expense of saving .
. . Such antinomianism, already rampant in Western society, is encouraged and recommended by our antinomian governments.
The other element which must precede the advent of the Antichrist is what St. Paul calls "apostasy," which
literally means the changing of one?osition. Here is the abandonment of the Catholic, Apostolic, Orthodox biblical faith.
A general apostasy is an observable phenomenon throughout the formerly Christian West. In Europe, it takes the shape of the
emptying of the churches. Elsewhere, the churches remain full, but the void. The spiritual emptiness, has all too often taken
up its lodging in the minds and lives of those who attend such religious ceremonies. Elsewhere, we see experience opposed
to doctrine; freedom to law; emotion, to the commandments of God; subjective criticism, to the objective authority of the
Bible; arrogant innovations, to the humble submission to the Word of God. Men refuse their God-given responsibilities, and
women are illegally exalted to positions of authority. Finally, we see the arrogant substitution of illusions, dreams, prophesies,
and visions to the written, inspired, and infallible Word of God.
Now St. Paul, in this text, indicates that an
obstacle will, for a time, prevent the advent of the Antichrist. The text does not explicitly define the nature of this obstacle,
but it is easy to deduce its character. The outward application of the law to the public domain is the affair of the magistrate.
The public exercise of piety is the affair of the Church. What our text tells us is that the time will be ripe for the advent
of the Antichrist when the state has radically separated itself from justice, from the application of God's law to the ills
of society, and when the Church has forsaken orthodox piety, both in its life and in the public worship it renders unto God.
When these two factors appear in combination, then it is time to read the writing on the wall! Then the legitimate state will
have been replaced by the Satanic beast and the Bride of Christ turned into a prostitute. The evil alliance between these
aberrant factors will then take its stand against all who hold to true piety and who fear to offend God's Holy Law.
In a parallel passage of Scripture, Revelation 8, St. John shows us the true character of this beast. We find ourselves
in the presence of three strange animals: a Dragon, a Beast coming up from the sea, and another Beast, similar to the first,
but coming out of the earth. The Dragon, we are told, is the Devil. In opposition to the normal two-tiered spiritual structure
of power (God and the authority to whom he delegates his power), we here have a three-tiered structure: the Dragon; the first
Beast, which holds its power from the Dragon; and the second Beast, which acts on the authority of the first and in its presence.
So, all three are contemporaneous in their action.
Throughout Scripture, the image of the Beast is applied to huge
empires which, in their pretension to absolute power, place their sovereign authority above that of God himself. These are
political systems with totalitarian pretensions. It is interesting to note that, in Hitler's thinking, the normal structures
of state power, with its limitations and controls and the traditional exercise of justice, were in fact considered as "moral"
obstacles to the exercise of the absolute power of the party and the fuhrer. Rousseau's General Will also stands above the
normal, God-given institutions of society. In the communist system, real power is the domain of the organs of the party, which
act with all the legal institutions through the noyau dirigeant their "directing core," made up of men totally subservient
to the party, from which they take all their orders. The biblical Beasts symbolize this anti-Christian power structure. The
empires of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, of the Medes and Persians, of Alexander the Great and the Romans all, to various degrees,
fit into this category. Thus also, and here equally in varying degrees, do the modern attempts at world conquest, from the
medieval papacy and empire, to the empires of the Hapsburgs, Napoleon, the British, the Germans, the Russians, and, today,
the Americans.
Every day, it is becoming more and more evident that the great power of the 20th Century was neither
the British or French Empires, nor that of Germany or Russia (whatever their pretensions to universal power might have been)
nor that of the nascent European Union, incapable as yet of any kind of coherant and independent policy. The really great
power today is that of the United States of America. It is also abundantly clear that the control of this nation has been
taken over by an oligarchic clique, at least from the inception of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. The distinction between
the real country and the occupied country is plain for anyone who has eyes to see.
With the semi-public Davos Conference
(established in 1978) and with the speeches of President Bush in favor of the New World Order, these men have begun to come
out of the closet. It is becoming a matter of public knowledge that such secret organizations are the true source of the power
of our visible institutions. And from those who have left these organizations and recounted what they have witnessed, we learn
that the Devil himself manifests his will and communicates his power. These are the citadels of Satan, the assemblies of the
Devil, to which St. John refers in Rev. 2:9 and 2:13. The wiles of the prince of this world have come to be recognized. But
what is equally plain is that every attempt to oppose this growth of totalitarian power has resulted in defeat and failure.
Why? How are we then to resist and overcome such a system of unlimited and uncontrolled power?
Politics is nothing
if not a struggle for power, the greater power being always in the long run, victorious. We know that Jesus Christ at the
Cross overcame the powers of Hell. We also know that all power in Heaven and on earth has been given Him by His Father. We
know that the faithful Church has received custody of this divine power, having in the accurate teaching of the Word of God
the authority to bind and release. It has been promised, by the One who holds in His hand all the power in Heaven and earth,
that the very gates of Hell would not prevail against the divine authority of the Church. It is also said that the power which
dwells in individual Christians - the very power of our Lord Jesus Christ - is greater than that which dwells in the world
and that if Christians come near to God and resist the Devil, the latter will be forced to flee from their very presence.
Then why such defeat, such disarray in our ranks, such lamentable weakness? Is it because the power of God has been
nullified by our spiritual, doctrinal, moral, and political compromises? Has God been silent in our midst for so long because
we have largely forsaken Him? Have we - despite our pretensions to faithfulness - gone over to the enemy, become so much his
friend that we no longer even have the desire to fight him?
Let us return to God, to simple faith in His Son, our
Lord Jesus Christ, to a persevering faith and obedience to His inspired Word, in every aspect of our thought, our actions,
and our emotions, both in our personal lives and in our public obligations. Let us strive to clean our churches of all that
dishonors God's Holy Name and drive out of our pulpits and denominational administrations those who have encrusted themselves
into self-serving ecclesiastical power. And then we shall find restored in our midst not our own power - God forbid! -- but
God's irresistible might. This restoration of Almighty God to His rightful position of authority will also restore true and
irresistible power and authority to the forces of good in our nations; this restoration of God's Church in our land will affect
every aspect of the life of our societies; even in the political and military fields, we shall see that the powers of evil,
which, for far too long, have occupied posts of illegitimate authority in our nations, will be forced to flee before the Word
of Almighty God, put into practice by the obedience of His faithful people.
May our Almighty God, the God of battles,
Whom we have the honor and great privilege to serve, have mercy on us all and accomplish in us, for His sole glory, this mighty
work to His eternal praise.
Jean-Marc Berthoud is a Calvinist theologian and bookstore owner from Switzerland
|
