Bold Witness to the Truth

Muhammad and Islam’s Sex Slaves

by Raymond Ibrahim
FrontPage Magazine
October 16, 2014

Once again, Islamic State Muslims are pointing to Islam in order to justify what the civilized world counts as atrocities.

According to an October 13 report in the Telegraph,

Islamic State jihadists have given detailed theological reasons justifying why they have taken thousands of women from the Iraqi Yazidi minority and sold them into sex slavery. A new article in the Islamic State English-language online magazine Dabiq not only admits the practice but justifies it according to the theological rulings of early Islam. “After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Sharia amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated,” the article says.

As for “theological reasons” for sex slavery “according to the Sharia,” these are legion—from male Muslim clerics, to female Muslim activists. Generally they need do no more than cite the clear words of Koran 4:3, which permit Muslims to copulate with female captives of war, or ma malakat aymanukum, “what”—not whom—”your right hands possess.”

The article continues:

But most of it [Islamic State “article” or fatwa] is devoted to theological justifications for Islamic State behaviour, citing early clerics and the practices of the Prophet Mohammed and his Companions during the early years of Islamic expansion.

Indeed, while many are now aware of the Koran’s and by extension Sharia’s justification for slaves, sexual or otherwise, fewer are willing to embrace the fact that the prophet of Islam himself kept and copulated with concubines conquered during the jihad.

Muhammad seized for himself as rightfully earned booty (or ghanima) a young woman, after killing everyone dear to her. According to authoritative Islamic sources, she hated him for it. If that is not rape, what is?

One little-known story is especially eye-opening:
During Muhammad’s jihad on the Jews of Khaybar, he took for himself from among the spoils of war one young woman, a teenager, Safiya bint Huyay, after hearing of her beauty. (Earlier the prophet had bestowed her on another Muslim jihadi, but when rumor of her beauty reached him, the prophet reneged and took her for himself.)

Muhammad “married” Safiya hours after he had her husband, Kinana, tortured to death in order to reveal hidden treasure. And before this, the prophet’s jihadis slaughtered Safiya’s father and brothers.

While Islamic apologists have long tried to justify this account—often by saying that Muhammad gave her the honor of “marriage” as opposed to being a concubine and that she opted to convert to Islam—they habitually fail to cite what Islamic sources record, namely Baladhuri’s ninth century Kitab Futuh al-Buldan (“Book of Conquests”).

According to this narrative, after the death of Muhammad, Safiya confessed that “Of all men, I hated the prophet the most—for he killed my husband, my brother, and my father,” before “marrying” (or, less euphemistically, raping) her.

So there it is. Muhammad seized for himself as rightfully earned booty (or ghanima) a young woman; he took her after killing everyone dear to her—husband, father, brothers, etc.  And, according to authoritative Islamic sources, she hated him for it.  If that is not rape, what is?  In fact, this incident is regularly cited by former Muslims as one of the greatest anecdotes that convinced them that Islam and Muhammad are not of God.

Nor, as expected, was Muhammad alone in this sort of rape. For example, Khalid bin Walid—the “Sword of Allah” and hero for aspiring jihadis around the world—raped another woman renowned for her beauty, Layla, right on the battlefield—but only after he severed her “apostate” husband’s head, lit it on fire, and cooked his dinner on it.

If this is how Muhammad—whom Koran 33:21 exhorts Muslims to emulate in all ways—behaved towards conquered female “infidels,” should there be any more surprise concerning the Islamic State’s behavior?

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a CBN News contributor. He is the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007).

The Assyrian Has Come Down . . .

. . . Like a Wolf on the Fold

There are few slave states left on the earth at the present time.  North Korea most certainly is one such state–one of the worst in recent history. 

If ever the world needed an an object lesson in how limited government, the rule of law, and private property rights can lead to rising standards of living one needs only to compare the trajectories of North and South Korea after the cease-fire in 1953.  People of the same ethnicity, history and cultural background were divided by an artificial border.  The only substantial difference since that time has been  in political, economic and legal systems.  South Korea is today an economic powerhouse, with rapidly rising living standards, and its people both industrious and vivacious.  North Korea is grindingly poor, with a starving population, and a government maintained only by means of fear and enslavement. 

Below is a summary of the UN indictment of the North Korean regime.  It charges the regime with “crimes against humanity” which means very little, except that when the regime finally collapses, as it inevitably will, North Koreans and others will be warranted sending their present tormentors to international courts for judgment. 

United Nations says North Korea should face ICC trial for crimes against humanity 

news.com.au

NORTH Korea’s leaders should be brought before an international court for a litany of crimes against humanity that include exterminating its population, the United Nations says.

A hard-hitting report on the nuclear-armed totalitarian state also strongly criticised its denial of basic freedoms of thought, expression and religion, and its abduction of citizens of neighbouring South Korea and Japan.

“Systemic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, its institutions and officials,’’ said the report by the Commission of Inquiry on North Korea set up in March 2013 by the UN Human Rights Council.  “In many instances, the violations of human rights found by the commission constitute crimes against humanity. These are not mere excesses of the state; they are essential components of a political system that has moved far from the ideals on which it claims to be founded,’’ the report said.  “The gravity, scale and nature of these violations revealed a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.’’

Commission chair Michael Kirby said the world could no longer plead ignorance as an excuse for a failure to act.  “At the end of the Second World War, so many people said: If only we had known … Now the international community does know,’’ he said.  “There will be no excusing of failure of action because we didn’t know.’’ . . .

Kirby wrote to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — the third ruler of the communist dynasty founded by his grandfather in 1948 — to give him a last chance to put his country’s response.  In a January 20 letter, Kirby told Kim he could face justice personally for the crimes committed by the system he runs.  “Any official of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea who commits, orders, solicits or aids and abets crimes against humanity incurs criminal responsibility by international law and must be held accountable under that law,’’ Kirby wrote.

The report said options included the UN Security Council referring the country to the International Criminal Court or setting up an ad hoc tribunal. . . .

North Korea’s crimes against humanity entail “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation,’’ the report said. It condemned a system of throwing generations of the same family into prison camps under guilt-by-association rules, given testimony from former guards, inmates and neighbours. . . .

North Koreans’ daily lives were marked by constant “surveillance, coercion, fear and punishment to preclude the expression of any dissent,’’ the report said.  It estimated 200,000 people from other countries had been abducted by North Korea or disappeared after going there willingly.  Most were South Koreans stuck after the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War, and ethnic Koreans who arrived from Japan after 1959.  But hundreds of South Koreans, Japanese and nationals of countries including Thailand, Malaysia, Lebanon, Romania and France have also been pressganged as language teachers or even spouses.

North Korean defectors have also been kidnapped from countries including China, it said.  “These international enforced disappearances are unique in their intensity, scale and nature,’’ the report said.

Who Can Say?

Accepting Slavery

One of the great classics of the mid-twentieth century is Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon [London: Jonathan Cape, 1940].  It is rarely read now–probably because the West thinks it has moved beyond the tyrannies of Naziism and Communism.  But the work remains as fresh and as powerful and as relevant as when first written.  If we need an explanation of why the grotesque monstrosity of the North Korean regime is able to command such mass loyalty, for example, Koestler provides it for us. 

Human beings are malleable creatures.  When men reject God, as Chesterton pointed out, they do not believe in nothing.  On the contrary, they come to believe in everything and anything.  Which is to say that anything can be framed as good and right–even the most extreme and monstrous of human tyrannies. 

Koestler’s anti-hero is N. S. Rubashov, imprisoned, awaiting torture and execution.
  He had been a leader, a colleague of “No 1” (Stalin) for many years.  Now, fallen out of favour, he awaits his fate.  But part of him  cannot help agreeing that the regime is right and that he is truly guilty.  In his cell

He smoked and thought of the dead, and of the humiliation which had preceded their death.  Nevertheless, he could not bring himself to hate No.1 as he ought to.  He had often looked at the colour-print of No. 1 hanging over his bed and had tried to hate it.  They had, between themselves, given him many names, but in the end it was No. 1 that stuck.  The horror which No.1 emanated, above all consisted in the possibility that he was in the right, and that all those whom he killed had to admit, even with the bullet in the back of their necks, that he conceivably might be in the right.  There was no certainty; only the appeal to that mocking oracle they called History, who have her sentence only when the jaws of the appealer had long since fallen to dust.  (op cit., p. 15f.)

 Those who reject the all governing, all providential God have nothing but the fate of perpetual imprisonment to existence and circumstances.  There can never be any certainty about anything–definitely not about the rights and wrongs of things.  Even what may be considered the most grotesque of human actions may be proven to be right by History in future retrospect.  This is the ultimate expression of the fatalism of the enslaved. 

At the end of the day, such a people find totalitarian dictatorships condign.  They conform because who is to say, at the end of the day, that No.1 and his team are not right.  Slavery is of the soul before it encapsulates the body.   The West is well down the track.  It will come easily and with frightful rapidity. 

Freedom For the Privileged

Virginian Heresies

Much negative commentary has been issued on the New England Puritan settlements in the seventeenth century.   Most of it is misleading.  Much less negative commentary has issued forth on the English settlements in Virginia.  This is surprising in some respects, but on the other hand, maybe not unexpected.  After all, if one had to compare the two settlements: New England and Virginia, why the latter would be superior in every respect. 

It is true that they were different.  The New England Puritan settlements (and the Quaker settlements in what later became Pennsylvania) were animated by principles of freedom from persecution and oppression.  Virginia’s animus, however, was a replication of royal prerogative and aristocratic privilege.
 

Ideas of liberty and freedom in Cavalier Virginia were different from those in New England–less communal and more hierarchical. . . . In a Cavalier utopia, Virginians possessed liberty in proportion to their rank.  Gentlemen had many liberties.  Yeomen had some liberties.  Labourers and servants at the bottom had new liberties, or none.  This hierarchical system was firmly in place by 1660. 

The great growth of African slavery came later.  Slavery did not create this system in Virginia, but was created by it.  Hegemonic liberty in Virginia was thought to be entirely consistent with the keeping of slaves, which was justified in terms of a freeborn master’s right to enslave others (laisser asservir).  Edmund Burke wrote that “freedom is to them not only enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. . . . [I]n such a people, the haughtiness of dominion combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.”  [David Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p.43f.]

Slavery in the United States did not grow out of a vacuum.  It was helped along by the Tudor and Stuart and Cavalier notion that aristocratic bloodlines were inextricably linked to the blessings of freedom; those with lesser privileged blood did not deserve or warrant freedom.   To that extent, the lower orders were sub-human. 

There lies an indictment of the seventeenth century settlements in Virginia that is rarely heard today.  But as for those Puritan settlements, why, they were tyranny incarnate. 

We suspect that Voltaire’s cynical observation–that history is a trick the living play upon the dead–is true in this case. 

Reality Checks

Taking the Hit

Detroit has filed for bankruptcy.  To those who have followed such things it will come as no surprise.  It is not the first and it will not be the last–but it is notable, just the same.  It is the biggest US city ever so to file.  According to The Guardian,

The filing sets a new record for municipal bankruptcies and dwarfs the previous record filings by Jefferson County, Alabama, and Stockton, California. No other city of Detroit’s size has ever gone bust.

The causes of this final act are strikingly obvious.  But because the end has come after a lingering terminal decline folks assumed that because it did not happen quickly, it would never happen.  The bigger fools of the next generation would always be there to take the accumulated burdens of their predecessors.  What was the problem?  Municipal overspending led to growing debt which the city can no longer service, nor repay.  It was passed on to bigger fools.  It is like every bankruptcy.
 

There are two major classes of creditor: municipal bond holders (who lent the city money) and workers who are “owed” pensions.  Neither will ever see much, if any, of their money again.  The buck passed to others for decades has finally stopped with them.  They will take the fall.  Then, possibly, a new city will emerge.  But only if lessons are learned, and learned well.
 

[Michigan Governor] Snyder said he hoped the bankruptcy would be the beginning of the end of Detroit’s woes. “This decision comes in the wake of 60 years of decline in the city, a period in which reality was often ignored. I know that many will see this as a low point in the city’s history. If so, I think it will also be the foundation of the city’s future,” he wrote.

Where has the problem lain?  Clearly and most obviously, the US auto industry has been challenged by cheaper, better vehicle competition, particularly from Asia.  But the auto-industry is heavily unionised and has resisted change.  Competing auto companies preferred to set up manufacturing plants in states where unions could not dominate.  The resulting lower wage costs meant lower costs of production, which meant a growing market share for Toyota, Honda and the like.  The city of Detroit could no longer count on the Big Three US automakers being the geese to lay golden eggs for the city.  Repeatedly the US auto industry has gone begging to the taxpayer for handouts and bailouts.  Venal politicians, with eyes upon the next election and their career, were willingly complicit.  

But in the meantime, the city had committed to golden handshake payouts to municipal workers, along with high remuneration.  Retirement at middle age, with golden pensions, became the norm for police, firemen, and other municipal employees.  This has been the result of a city’s work force controlled by labour unions over decades.  The strike-threat system worked a treat.  The city began to run deficits.  Its losses had to be funded by borrowing.  Spend, borrow, hope became a way of life. 

Meanwhile, the city began to shrink as citizens migrated to other cities and other states for work.  But the costs, being locked in through labour contracts, did not diminish much.  Result?  Lower tax revenue, bigger deficits, more borrowing.  The circling, downward spiral became vicious.  No way out. 

All of this was easily predictable.  It was foreseen by many.  But only fools and horses think they can defy financial and fiscal common-sense forever.  If the city and the unions and the politicians had acted responsibly and sooner, it would never have come to this.  But ultimately the folly and irresponsibility was sanctioned by the citizens themselves.  Debt is a form of slavery.  Perpetuating debt is perpetual slavery.  Detroit and its citizens were perpetually enslaved a long time ago.  But the chains were invisible to them, such has been their moral torpor.  No longer.  They are now clearly visible.  They are heavy.  They cannot be unshackled–at least, not without gnawing, lingering pain. 

But for Detroit’s poor, bankruptcy is likely to make life even harder in the short term. About 60% of Detroit’s children live in poverty. Orr had planned to bus creditors to some of the city’s poorest areas so they could see what was at stake. Armed security would have gone along for the ride.

“If they can see what it’s like for Detroiters, what they endure every day in this city, I think they’ll begin to understand what’s at stake,” Orr told the Detroit Free Press. The tour was canceled as bankers became worried about the PR impact of captains of finance touring the city’s poorest neighbourhoods.

Detroit screams out to us all: “Look on my works, you mighty and be afraid.” 

Slave Traders’ Lobby

Gosnell, Abortion, and Slave Trading

One of the finest pieces yet to emerge about convicted murderer, Dr Gosnell’s House of Abortion Horrors has been published by The Witherspoon Institute.  It has been written by Matthew J. Franck who is Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute. 

The thing about the Gosnell case is this: you can get outraged over the death of innocent women who died at the hands of Gosnell’s ministrations due to the squalor, filth, and brutality of his surgical interventions.  Plenty of people have.  Or, you could get angry over the purposive and deliberate actions of Gosnell and his staff to murder babies who had emerged from wombs alive (Gosnell “specialised” in late-term abortions).  People have.  But if you then go on to assert–as millions do–there are no problems whatsoever provided those same babies died whilst still in the womb due to Gosnell’s actions, then your conscience has become as dead as one of Gosnell’s victims.
 

Franck, drawing on arguments from Lincoln against slavery, makes abortion politically and morally equivalent to nineteenth century slavery, and abortionists equivalent to slave traders. Firstly, Lincoln’s position on slave trading:

Abraham Lincoln addressed part of his argument to his southern fellow citizens. He was convinced that their own social customs gave evidence of a moral principle against slavery half asleep in their souls:

[Y]ou have amongst you, a sneaking individual, of the class of native tyrants, known as the “slave-dealer.” He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave, at a speculating price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer’s children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave-dealer you avoid the ceremony—instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family. Now why is this? You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cattle or tobacco.

Of course, if the right to own and traffic in slaves was protected by the Constitution—as the Supreme Court was to assert in 1857—then the slave-dealer was doing absolutely necessary work. But Lincoln was right: Decent people instinctively recoiled from contact with someone whose business was the despoliation of others’ human dignity.

Those in the business of despoiling other human beings are contemptible indeed. 

Franck concludes by addressing our own modern “slave-dealers’ lobby”.

In statements issued immediately after the Gosnell verdict, the slave-dealers’ lobby—Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America—reacted as though the real problem with Gosnell is that he preyed on women and endangered their health. To be sure, he did just that. But Gosnell victimized these women as the logical extension of these groups’ moral reasoning and public policy goals, which they have advocated for decades. They have devoted themselves to teaching American women that their unborn children simply don’t count in any moral calculus, and horrors like Gosnell’s clinic are the fruit of their diligent work.

There is no alchemy, no magic spell that can tell us how to distinguish, in terms of their moral claim on us, between the children aborted in Gosnell’s Philadelphia abattoir and the ones who were delivered and then killed. In certain respects, Kermit Gosnell has a right to be the most surprised man in America right now. We, on the other hand, who have not wanted to notice the slave-dealers in our midst, have no such excuse.

Diabolical Alternatives

In Chains, Everywhere

The ethic of freedom has become the engine of oppression.  At first blush, this seems nonsense.  How could the ideal of being free from compulsion, constraint, and restraint become the instrumental cause of force, compulsion, and oppression?  Unless we work this out, freedom is a dangerous concept.

Let’s start with Jean Jacques Rousseau–one of the more pathetic figures in Western annals.  He famously proclaimed that man was born free, but is everywhere in chains.  The image is powerful.  We know what  being in chains means.  We have seen dogs on a leash or chained.  We have seen them leap forward only to crash to the ground as the chain restrains.  Rousseau’s idea intuitively conveys the idea of human enslavement; freedom is being released from constraints.  But for Rousseau, freedom meant being released from constraints of any sort. 

If you were to come into your neighbour’s house and he asked you to remove your shoes, Rousseau would have us believe that chains were rattling.
  If you complied, you would be enslaved to your neighbour.  Being free, according to Rousseau, meant that you could (and should, if you wished) walk through your neighbour’s house tramping mud on the carpet with complete disdain of his request.  If you complied against your wishes, you would be be in chains.  You would not be free.

There is a straight line to be drawn between twentieth century existentialism and Rousseau’s idea of freedom.  Jean Paul Sartre was once discussing the concept of being free.  Very much like Rousseau, the essence of freedom is to have an authentic existence, which means to act in a manner true to oneself.  If someone were to be suddenly crossing the road in my path, should I run him down in my car?  Is it right to hit him, or avoid him?  Which is the genuinely free act?  Sartre argued that it mattered not what you did.  You could either run him down, or avoid him as long as you were doing what you genuinely wanted–as long as you were being authentic to yourself at that instant.   

He is reported as saying: “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”  Running the guy down or avoiding him is something you alone must decide.  That is freedom.  Straight from Rousseau.  

But this creates an immediate dilemma.  Since men are everywhere in chains (living and acting according to customs, conventions, commands, expectations, traditions, directions, and rules of others) who will set them free from this body doomed to slavery?  A Redeemer.  Someone or something sufficiently powerful and effective to roll back all the chains that shackle us, liberating us from their constraints.  Modern Western minds know of only one Redeemer potentially powerful enough to liberate.  The state.  And like all liberators and redeemers, the Redeemer has the right to command and compel total allegiance: to deny subservience to one’s Redeemer is to return again to slavery.  

. . . Rousseau did not define freedom as the assertion of rights against the state;  freedom meant liberation from the forms and institutions of society–family, church, class, and local community.  The state, in fact would be the liberator.  By destroying all social ties, the state would release the individual from loyalty to anything except itself.  “Each citizen would then be completely independent of all his fellow men,” proclaimed Rousseau, “and absolutely dependant upon the state.”  [Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), p. 171. (Emphasis, authors’).]

To be both redeemed and free, one has to be completely dependant on someone or something.  That is the essence of what it means to be a creature.  Dependence is the name of the game.   To be free is to be under a yoke.  This is what Rousseau understood–and understood profoundly, albeit it wrongly.  To be free is to be enslaved.  An overlord must first liberate, then command.

This was the first time that the state was actually portrayed as a liberator.  For Rousseau, the state “is the agency of emancipation that permits the individual to develop the latent germs of goodness heretofore frustrated by a hostile society.”  And so was born what one historian calls “the politics of redemption,” the idea that politics can be the means not only of creating a better world but of actually transforming human nature, creating “the New Man.”  (Ibid.)

But in this Rousseau was correct: the Redeemer will liberate from slavery, but by right of redemption has the authority to command and control the liberated hereafter.  This is precisely what the Scriptures reveal to be the case.  Israel was in slavery: God redeemed them from Israel by a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm.  Thereafter they were to be in bondage to Him.  But–and here is the big qualification–His burden is easy and His yoke is light.

Returning to our example of the fastidious neighbour, the redeemed of the Lord honours the request of the neighbour to remove shoes.  He is freed from being enslaved to self.  His Redeemer commands him to love his neighbour as if he were himself.  The Redeemer has liberated him from the chains of sin to be what he was created (and therefore commanded) to be.  He was created and liberated to be a grateful and thankful bondslave of the Creator.

We grant that  such notions are highly offensive to modern Western minds.  But the alternative is diabolical.  We will either be enslaved to the Christ who did all things according to the will of His heavenly Father, or we will be enslaved to the state.  One or the other.  Choose you this day, said Joshua, whom you will serve.  If we do not choose God, we will be forever racked with the dialectic that has riven the West for over three hundred years:  wanting to be freed from all constraints, we are left enslaved to the state as our only hope to make it so.

The thus the ethic of freedom has become the engine of oppression.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Froward 

Money, Love, Desire – The Good of Affluence
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 08 October 2012

I have written many times that free markets are for a free people, and that only a free people can sustain them. But slaves to sin cannot be a free people. And the only way to be liberated from slavery to sin is through the gospel that brings new life.

Another problem is that when slaves to sin spiral down into the civic slavery that is their natural civic condition, their masters will also be slaves to sin, albeit usually somewhat shrewder — at least for a short while. At some point the whole thing blows up for everybody, but the bottom line is that sin is the fundamental set of chains. You cannot hope to be enslaved by them, and yet be free in any sense that matters anywhere else.

Hayek, Friedman, and von Mises cannot keep people loving the freedom of markets any more than the wisest geologist who ever lived could have kept Cain from hitting Abel with that rock. Knowledge of the world is not the same thing as knowledge of the human heart.

Other foolish observers within the Christian tradition have seen that this is true, and concluded that the problem lies with Hayek, et al. “We need to have values other than free market values, etc.” This is to say that since sinners cannot produce the fruit of the Spirit, we need to haul out the chains of compassionate statism. Make ’em do compassionate stuff and everything. And at the top of this atrocious pile is someone with a brightly doctored O on their Froward bumper sticker. But that campaign theme just makes me think of Prov. 3:32, and I don’t know why Obama picked it.

There is no salvation without a savior, and Jesus is the only savior. And how will they hear without a preacher? What we need is the gospel, what we need is a reformation, what we need is revival.

But in the meantime, Christian statists need to stop telling us that since unbelievers cannot manifest love, joy, peace, patience, etc. in their lives, that this must mean that love, joy, peace, patience, etc. are optional. “Let’s work around not having them.” What kind of sense does that make? Preach the gospel. Free markets are a fruit of the gospel, and you cannot praise free markets without praising the work of the Holy Spirit of God.
Someone once said that real capitalism is easy to defend, but hard to praise. I understand where that sentiment comes from, but I want to lean against it, hard. Adam Smith’s invisible hand (whether he knew it or not) was and is the right hand of the Lord Jesus, and marvelous are all His works.

If we preach the gospel in power and truth, the result will be a free people. And when we have a free people, we will have free markets. Only a free people will be able to trust the hand of God in their financial affairs and market choices, which is what the free market is — people trusting God. That is the only way we can have free markets for any length of time.

What we have now, crony capitalism, or what I call crapitalism, is how sinners try to cheat the system. But you don’t blame football when someone cheats at football. You don’t blame math when people get their sums wrong. You don’t blame gravity when you trip and fall on your nose. Or at least you shouldn’t.

Every form of Christian statism, regardless of how it is packaged and sold, is a sly attempt to arrange for the cheaters to be given control of the game. And the only way we can stop that — you guessed it — is to preach Christ crucified and risen.

Enslaved to Everything

Under the Ban

We posted yesterday about the PC madness that now swirls around breast feeding.  Nanny-state is rising up in an attempt to control every part of the human anatomy, except (for the moment) the rear end.  Oh, wait.  Given enough time it will even attempt to control human methane emissions–to prevent the earth from destruction, don’t you know.

This madness illustrates a corollary of G. K. Chesterton’s bon mot: “When people cease to believe in God they do not believe in nothing; they begin to believe in everything.”  The corollary is this: when people cease to submit to God they do not remain at liberty; they become enslaved to everything.  Human rules replace God’s rules; and human rules crush.

Here is an apt example: playdough.  “What,” we hear you ask?  For generations mothers and early childhood educators have baked playdough out of flour to create a wonderfully malleable, colourful substance to entertain and develop young children.  No longer it seems.  Playdough is coming under the ban.

Career Choices

Our Version of Child Slavery

The following appeared in a recent edition of Sunday News.  As you read this, please bear in mind that what is described here is officially fictional.  The line from the Commentariat is that this sort of thing never actually occurs and certainly could not exist.  The official Commentariat talking points are that human beings are not like this, and are incapable of acting and thinking as this article describes.
  If, by scintilla of remote probability, there may be some truth in the construct narrated below, it would only be because something (certainly not Unbelief of course) has made victims of  these unfortunates.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>My Old Friend, Controversy

Engaging the Culture – Moscow Diversity Cleansing
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Inside Higher Ed has published a fair-minded piece on the resurgence of classical Christian education at the college level, which you can read more about here. Since New St. Andrews is featured prominently in that piece, and since NSA has among its founders a controversial figure (three guesses), and a portion of the article was dedicated to that particular item of interest, I thought to post just a few words on my old friend, controversy.

First, anybody who thinks that genuine reformation of education is possible without exciting this kind of controversy is like the person who wants to raft down the Grand Ronde without encountering any white water.

>The Tangled Webs We Weave

>Onwards and Upwards!

The borrower becomes the lender’s slave, says the Scripture. This is true, both for individuals and corporate entities–including nations. A nation in debt is a nation enslaved. A government is debt is a government enslaved.

At first blush this sounds preposterous. If a government spends more than it takes in taxation, it raises money on the open market (usually overseas). It borrows to cover the short-fall. If there is any enslavement occurring here it is upon the future citizens who will have to stump up with the cash in taxes. The government, and the legislators and administrators that constitute it, get away scot free.

But the reality remains–a government in debt is a government which is enslaving its people to the state. More and more money is going to have to be exacted in taxes to pay back current borrowings and interest, and continue to fund ongoing operations. Since most government spending goes upon so-called entitlement programmes, the appetite for spending does not abate. It can only grow. The Oliver Twist syndrome kicks in. Dependence upon the State creates an insatiable demand for more support. Expenses always rise to meet “income”, non? Nice-to-haves turn into necessities. The dependant electorate clamours for more with the regularity of a ticking clock. Ongoing operational (distribution costs) rise; more borrowing is required to fund the beast; interest payments compound; and the miracle of compound interest grinds the faces of future citizens into the dust.

Moreover, since governments inevitably end up raising finance offshore they subject the country to economic and market forces over which they have diminishing influence. They–and all their citizens– become price takers. The currency is where this shows up most immediately. In the end an insolvent country will have its currency devalued, pushing up the price of borrowing and gutting the tradeable sectors of the economy. The circle becomes vicious.

Another facet of national slavery is that denial becomes endemic. Mendacity becomes part of national life. Right now, the United States is the most powerful illustrative example of the perils of national indebtedness, in general, but of the attendant mendacity, in particular. Mark Steyn removes the shroud, exposing the necrotic flesh beneath.

Discredited
The Fed’s policy is quantitatively accelerating American collapse.

The other day Paul O’Neill said that . . .

Oh, wait. I suppose I ought to explain who Paul O’Neill is. A decade ago, he was President Bush’s first Treasury secretary. I have no very clear memory of him except that he toured Africa with Bono and they were photographed in matching tribal dress looking like Colonel Qaddafi’s Mini-Me twins at a Tripoli sleepover. Other than the dress-up fun, I’ve no idea why they were in Africa, but you paid for it, so I’m sure there was a good reason.

Anyway, Secretary O’Neill popped up the other day on Bloomberg Television to compare debt-ceiling holdouts to jihadists. “The people who are threatening not to pass the debt ceiling,” he said, “are our version of al-Qaeda terrorists. Really.”

Really?

Absolutely.

“They’re really putting our whole society at risk by threatening to round up 50 percent of the members of the Congress, who are loony, who would put our credit at risk.”

But hang on, generally speaking, when you hit your “debt ceiling,” your credit is at risk. If you’ve got a $10,000 credit card, and you run it up to the limit, but you need a couple more grand right now, pronto, because you outspend your earnings by 50 percent every month and you have no plans to change that anytime soon, well, the bank might increase the limit to $15,000, or $20,000. Or they might not. There is a question mark over your credit because there is a question mark over your credit worthiness: It is at risk.

Paul O’Neill seems to regard that attitude as unhelpful. So does Timothy Geithner, his successor at what is still laughingly known as the United States Treasury. Secretary Geithner says that even to be discussing the debt ceiling is “a ridiculous debate to have.”

Ridiculous?

Absolutely.

“I mean, the idea that the United States would take the risk that people would start to believe we won’t pay our bills,” continued Geithner, “is a ridiculous proposition, irresponsible, completely unacceptable.” The best way to convince people to believe we’ll pay our bills is to borrow up to our limit, and then increase the limit and borrow a whole bunch more. This would be the 75th increase in the debt ceiling in the last half-century. Let’s just get it done, and resume the party.

But if Geithner thinks that even discussing the question is “ridiculous,” then, as my colleague Jonah Goldberg put it, why have a debt limit at all? What’s the point?

Well, because it gives us more credibility with our creditors, right? Even if we set the debt ceiling way up in cloud-cuckoo land to a bazillion trillion gazillion dollars and 83 cents, even a debt limit entirely unmoored from reality still gives the impression we haven’t quite flown the coop.

Yes, but why does the U.S. government need to maintain credibility with its creditors when increasingly it’s buying its debt from itself? Every month there’s more and more U.S. Treasury debt and fewer and fewer people who want it. The Chinese are reducing their exposure. The investment behemoth Pimco, which manages the world’s largest mutual fund, recently dumped U.S. Treasuries entirely. To avoid the failure of U.S. bond auctions, or an increase in interest rates to make them more attractive to rational lenders, the U.S. government’s debt is bought by the U.S. government’s Federal Reserve.

I tried up above to come up with a real-world comparison for the debt ceiling — imagine you’ve got a credit-card limit of 10K, etc. — but it’s harder to do that with the Fed’s policy: Imagine your left hand issues an IOU to your right hand in return for an e-mail with a large number on it . . . oh, never mind, it’ll only make your head hurt. “Quantitative easing” is extremely quantitative if not terribly easing, so raising the debt ceiling would enable us to issue more debt for us to buy from ourselves. You can see why Secretary Geithner thinks that’s a no-brainer.

While Jonah Goldberg was asking why have a debt limit at all, Michael Kinsley took it to the next stage: “If the national debt doesn’t matter, why have taxes at all?” Particularly when you no longer have to “print” money, you can just quantitatively ease yourself into it. Once we raise the old debt ceiling, we’ll be pretty much at the point where the U.S. government is spending $4 trillion but only taking in $2 trillion: For every dollar we raise in taxes, we spend two. No surprise there: The “poorest” half of the population pay no federal income tax. They’re not exactly poor as the term would be understood in almost any other country, but in federal-revenue terms they’re dependents, so in order to fund government services for the wealthiest “poor” people on the planet we borrow money from a nation of subsistence peasants where pigs are such prized possessions they sleep in the house.

But, if you can spend $4 trillion of which $2 trillion is borrowed, why not borrow $3 trillion and make even more Americans dependent? Hell, why not borrow the whole lot? After all, the sums we’re borrowing right now — $188 million every hour of every day — are unprecedented. Wouldn’t it be easier if we just made them even more unprecedented? That way we could have a federal budget of $6 trillion, of which, say, $5 trillion is raised by issuing Treasury bonds for the Federal Reserve to buy. That would stimulate the economy by creating 17 jobs for any remaining Americans who still feel the need to leave the house every morning.

Now I think about it, I seem to remember Secretary O’Neill and Bono were swanking around Uganda and Ethiopia in tribal garb as part of the Irish rocker’s campaign for African debt-forgiveness. Now there’s an idea. And, if it works for Africa, why not closer to home? After all, Bono supported the IMF’s Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, and America is way more “heavily indebted” than Uganda will ever be.

Under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day the government of the United States spends a fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have.

Who does have it?

Er, the Federal Reserve?

A few years ago, I raised the ceiling on my own house. You can do that — up to a point. It depends on whether your foundation is solid and your framing is structurally sound. But, even if they are, you take it too high and the roof falls in. We’re structurally about as screwed up as you can get, and the foundation is badly cracked. But hey, let’s just jack the roof up a little higher one more time. What could go wrong?

At this stage, nothing does more damage to our “full faith and credit” than business as usual. If you’re going to bandy glib, witless al-Qaeda analogies, the conventional wisdom Paul O’Neill represents is the real suicide bomb here. Men like O’Neill and Geithner think they’re quantitatively easing American decline. They’re not. They’re quantitatively accelerating American collapse.

Onward and upward!

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2011 Mark Steyn.

>Evil Before Our Eyes, Glory From On High

>To the Ends of the Earth

The Associated Press has carried a story which is horrifying, to say the least. It is a story of man’s inhumanity to man, of evil, of what happens when sin is left unchecked, and when men set themselves up as the only and final reference point. Yet it is also a story of God’s love and grace to the world, mediated through His people. 

It concerns the Chinese and North Koreans trafficking in women. There is a shortage of women in China, due to the benighted One-Child policy causing abortion of girl babies (since women are less likely to be able to support their parents in old age–and remember the Chinese get only one shot at this, since they are officially allowed only one child). Chinese men are now buying North Korean women as chattel-wives.

Young female refugees from North Korea are increasingly becoming a commodity in China, where they are sold to farmers for up to 1,500 dollars a head, according to a Seoul campaigner.

The human trafficking is far from new but has become more prevalent as prices soar amid a shortage of Chinese women in the countryside, said Reverend Chun Ki-Won, head of the Durihana Association. Young female refugees from North Korea are increasingly becoming a commodity in China, where they are sold to farmers for up to 1,500 dollars a head, according to a Seoul campaigner. The human trafficking is far from new but has become more prevalent as prices soar amid a shortage of Chinese women in the countryside, said Reverend Chun Ki-Won, head of the Durihana Association, which offers aid to refugees, which offers aid to refugees.

Chinese bribe the border guards, who let the North Korean women in. A large number of them are then on-sold to Chinese men looking for a “wife”.

About 20-30 percent are destined for marriage and are resold to another broker for about 2,000 yuan. They are then sold to farmers, normally for 5,000-10,000 yuan, but the trafficking does not necessarily end there.

If the customer does not like his wife, he can resell her and add about 2,000 yuan to the original price. Some women are sold seven or eight times, Chun said.

The women rarely know what is in store for them, Chun said. “Most of the time, they are just told they will get a good job in China and will be able to earn a lot of money.”

Of course, the women cannot complain or they risk being sent back to North Korea where punishment and even death awaits them. Any children coming from such marriages are not recognised by the Chinese government. This leaves the child a refugee in the country of its birth.

Children fathered by Chinese men and North Korean women are the biggest problem, Chun said.

“The Chinese government does not recognise children whose mother is not registered. If the mother runs away or is taken back to North Korea, the children are left with nothing — no nationality, no parents and no identity.”

The children can be officially registered if the father pays a fine but most cannot afford this.

Some North Korean women are put to work in internet chat rooms for sexual voyeurism. Some South Koreans try to contact them, befriend them, and help rescue them by putting them in contact with missions such as Durihana.

We thank God for Durihana and similar Christian ministries. In the face of such terrible inhumanity and depravity, we see again the wonder and glory of Christ’s redeeming work.

Post Script: a history of the Durihana mission can be read here.

>How Much is Too Much?

>Rejecting the Spirit of a Quisling

It is impossible to rebuild Christendom in New Zealand without the regeneration of a majority of souls. Regeneration is God’s business: no creature, not even angels, can will it, or effect it. One is born again by the Spirit of God, and the Spirit alone (John 1:12-13). Now we firmly believe that days are coming when the vast majority of people in New Zealand will be truly Christian, from the inside out. This will occur in God’s time, when He is pleased to stretch forth His hand, to honour His Son in this land.

Until that time, we Christians live as exiles in an alien land. These are the days of a Babylonian captivity, or of the Northern Kingdom under Ahab, or of Israel under the Seleucids. But God’s call to live faithfully in such times remains clear, true, and valid.

How should we then live? On this there is much that could be said. Another way of expressing the question would be, In the light of exile, what ought to be our focus and our service priorities? Personal and family sanctification, to be sure. Pure, biblical corporate worship, essential. Strong, essentially separated covenant communities where we maintain faithful churches, families, schools, charities, and businesses–vital. Proclaiming the Gospel of God’s grace to this Unbelieving generation, critical.

In being faithful to God in these things, the Christian community acts as salt and light in the world. It preserves our country from greater, more precipitous decline. With respect to the outside world, one of our frequent themes must be “leave us alone”. Like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, we often find ourselves petitioning the powers-that-be to leave us alone so that we may serve our God, and in return we will be loyal citizens, insofar as conscience permits. And the Christian conscience permits a great deal in this regard, since we are allowed to obey either out of conscience, or out of pragmatic considerations (Romans 13: 5).

But–and it is a big “but”–it is essential that Christians in our day recognise that we are in a time of captivity and that we Christians, therefore, are enslaved in our own country–which really belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, we live subject to interlopers. If we are not clear upon this, we will end up thinking that the conditions under which we labour are the “new normal”. We will end up siding with Pharaoh, supporting, cheerleading, congratulating, and abetting his tyranny. We will betray the Kingdom and be little more than quislings.

This is precisely the trap into which the Anglican church in Australia has fallen in its call to limit having children so as not to steal from forthcoming generations. This is the propaganda of Pharaoh, not faithfulness to our God. That it should come out of the mouth of God’s people is shameful and disgraceful.

How do we know we are enslaved? Undoubtedly, there would be more than a few Christians and churches who would find the allegation of being enslaved extraordinary, inflammatory, and extreme. There are two ways to answer this question: the first is to compare the dominion and extent of interference and control of our government over our lives in the light of God’s prescription for the role and responsibility of the State. This is the bottom-up, inductive approach. It leads us to identify all the illicit activities of the government–such as running health, education, and welfare systems, and reject such arrogations as idolatrous, simply because they are power grabs not allowed by Holy Writ.

The second is to use a top down argument of blunt-force trauma. The Scriptures make plain that if a civil government takes more in taxes than ten percent, it is oppressing and enslaving its people, period. (I Samuel 8: 15–17) Moreover, if the government takes our sons and daughters to be its servants, it is acting tyrannically (I Samuel 8:10–13. Think, for example, of the modern tyranny of compulsory state education–the government extracting money from us by force to pay for its education system, then using the system to indoctrinate our children according to its pleasures).

In biblical terms, our government in exacting far above ten percent, is many times over a tyrant and has enslaved its people. We are indeed living in a Babylonian captivity; hundreds of thousands depend for their daily food upon Pharaoh; others find themselves plundered at every turn. How much above the ten percent benchmark that identifies an ungodly tyrant, you ask? This graphic from the OECD tells the story.

The State in New Zealand expropriates and extracts over 35 percent of our national domestic earnings.  That is three and a half times more tyrannical and enslaving than what the Scriptures present as an ungodly exaction and tyranny on the part of government. 

Living in New Zealand as an enslaved Christian in 2010 is not a new-normal, but an ancient condition. It is as old as the Egyptian enslavement of Israel, and the Babylonian captivity by the River Chebar. If we get this straight, Christians will understand far more clearly how they must live in order to please God in our day. It will help us identify and banish the spirit of the quisling amongst us.

>Slavery as Propaganda

>Misusing History

Inhumanity, like humanity, is universal.

Thomas Sowell

Many years ago, I was surprised to receive a letter from an old friend, saying that she had been told that I refused to see campus visitors from Africa. At the time, I was so bogged down with work that I had agreed to see only one visitor to the Stanford campus — and it so happens that he was from Africa. He just happened to come along when I had a little breathing room from the work I was doing in my office.

I pointed out to my friend that whoever said what she heard might just as well have said that I refused to go sky-diving with blacks — which was true, because I refused to go sky-diving with anybody, whether black, white, Asian, or whatever.

The kind of thinking that produced a passing misconception about me has, unfortunately, produced much bigger, much longer lasting, much more systematic, and more poisonous distortions about the United States of America.

Slavery is a classic example. The history of slavery across the centuries and in many countries around the world is a painful history to read — not only in terms of how slaves have been treated, but because of what that says about the whole human species — because slaves and enslavers alike have been of every race, religion, and nationality.

If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings — no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history.

But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people.

It is true, just as it is true that I don’t go sky-diving with blacks. But it is also false in its implications for the same reason. Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans — more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United States or in the 13 colonies from which the nation was formed. The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves who picked cotton. But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to Roots, and our schools and colleges don’t pound it into the heads of students.

The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole human species around the world are presented as special defects of “our society” or the sins of a particular race.

If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilizations, it is in that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery — including, in some cases, by armed resistance.

Only the fact that the West had more firepower put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery — on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment.

It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who mine history in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire, or similar atrocities in other times and places.

Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.

An ancient adage says: “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.” But apparently it is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia, or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past.

>Property at the Pleasure of the State

>Begging To Be Left Some Crumbs

New Zealand has a shockingly bad history of property rights. It stems, in part, from the arrogant hubris of wanting to lead the world in applying Fabian socialist doctrines–socialism without violent revolution–since the end of the nineteenth century. The political and religious culture of the country has looked to the gummint as the solution to all problems, and has welcomed the gummint expropriating property from citizens to pay for it. It’s all part of the Faustian bargain.

Couple this with a strong streak of egalitarianism, where I am as good as my neighbour by dogmatic creed. In a materialistic culture (the established religion of New Zealand, where the only reality that matters is, well, matter), being “as good as my neighbour” can only be measured in a materialistic sense–that is, in terms of property. It’s the only “currency” that is meaningful.

Materialistic egalitarianism creates a drive for having the same house, car, income, wide-screen TV, health care, and education as others. This leads to a universally held belief in the gummint needing to take property of some and redistribute it to others to make things more equal. Virtually without exception, all people in New Zealand believe in this doctrine–from raving greenie socialists right through to the hardest hard-core of right wing ideologues. The only debate is one of degree or extent. To all intents and purposes, New Zealand is a socialist country by the willing consent of the governed.

“So, what’s the problem, then?” we hear you say. If people want it, it must be OK. It has achieved a certain legitimacy, has it not? The problems are legion. Right up at the head of the queue is an inevitable overreaching, smothering, controlling, nannying and smothering government. The arrogations of its power expand gradually and ineluctably: there is no stopping it until the State dominates everything. In the end, the government will tell us how to raise our children, how we are to eat, what we are to think, how we are to spend our time, and what level of private income and property it will tolerate. In a word, the State will progressively decide the value to be imputed to our lives.

Now, it is a truism that such a state will succeed to incompetence; grounded upon greed, envy, and theft, wrapped up in ever expanding corruptions and injustice, the fruit rots from within. Need it be this way? No, but it is inevitable as long as the established religion of secular materialistic humanism remains regnant.

Years ago we were participating in a discussion amongst Christians on creeping apostasy and unbelief amongst certain churches and Christian denominations. One of the protagonists asserted that, like his whiskey, he preferred getting Unbelief straight. Rather the wolf, than the wolf in sheep’s clothing. This is a fair point.

There is something sneaky and dirty about a so-called “property rights” political party such as National speaking out of both sides of its mouth. It continues to borrow over $250m per week to keep the government afloat and sustain its egalitarianistic redistribution of wealth. But, of course, it is politically unpalatable to pay for this largesse by putting taxes up. So, it prefers to push the burden and expropriation out into the future. Our children, many yet unborn, will have to pay for it. They will come into the world in debt–born into slavery to the self-indulgence and self-gratifying covetousness and envy of our generation. For the rest of their lives they will have to pay for our indulgence. Slavery indeed.

By “moving to the centre” John Key and his National hucksters have become more than Labour-lite. At least Labour had the “courage” of its socialist convictions and was prepared to tax “rich pricks” to fund its egalitarian madness. Key and his mob have cowardly decided that they would rather tax the silent, the yet unborn, for they can’t vote.

But egalitarianism and Fabian socialism is the established religion that grips the hearts and minds of almost all in the country. So, all governments in the foreseeable future will continue to act in disregard of the freedom rights of individuals, will continue to expropriate and steal, and will continue to appeal to envy to garner popular support.

Bring back Helen Clark and Michael Cullen. At least with them we got the poison straight up. There was a modicum of integrity there, non?

>North Korea: Expect the Worst

>Dwarves in Caverns

Christopher Hitchens has recently written a piece arguing that North Korea is much worse than most people think. It was published in Slate magazine and consisted of a review of a book recently published entitled, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, by B.R.Myers–which Hitchens calls “electrifying”.

The thesis is that North Korea has to be regarded as “pathologically right”–which resembles far more National Socialism than communism, references to which have been dropped by the North Korean government long ago.

The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent “Constitution,” “ratified” last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian “military first” mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.

The implication is that the regime is not uttering “posturing” or “framing” statements of crass hyperbole when it speaks of making war: it means exactly what it says.

These conclusions of his, in a finely argued and brilliantly written book, carry the worrisome implication that the propaganda of the regime may actually mean exactly what it says, which in turn would mean that peace and disarmament negotiations with it are a waste of time—and perhaps a dangerous waste at that.

Hitchens concludes with these graphic observations:

Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. (See this famous photograph.) Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.

But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

>The Virulent Cancer of Soft-Despotism

>Bureaucrats To Do Home Inspections

A recent article in the Times of London tells us the next step the British government is taking to usher in a better world. We promise you that it will eventually be adopted in New Zealand as well. There is an ideological logic to these things that is relentless and will not be denied. We will not escape–at least as long as we continue to bow down to the State as our saviour and redeemer god.

Firstly, the UK.

Health and safety snoops to enter family homes

Robert Watts

Health and safety inspectors are to be given unprecedented access to family homes to ensure that parents are protecting their children from household accidents.

New guidance drawn up at the request of the Department of Health urges councils and other public sector bodies to “collect data” on properties where children are thought to be at “greatest risk of unintentional injury”.

Council staff will then be tasked with overseeing the installation of safety devices in homes, including smoke alarms, stair gates, hot water temperature restrictors, oven guards and window and door locks.

The draft guidance by a committee at the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) has been criticised as intrusive and further evidence of the “creeping nanny state”. . . .

The guidance aims to “encourage all practitioners who visit families and carers with children and young people aged under 15 to provide home safety advice and, where necessary, conduct a home risk assessment”. It continues: “If possible, they should supply and install home safety equipment.”

Could you see something like this happening in New Zealand? If you don’t, you must be either an incurable Pollyanna or blind, or both. It will inevitably come here. We have seen the beginnings already. Family visits by state bureaucrats are already being conducted in this country where children are considered to be living in “at risk” families. This programme was started by the National government in the late 1990’s. National also gave us the Health and Safety legislation.

The Labour appointed Children’s Commissioner, Cindy Kiro called for a nation wide database of all children and regular home visits to monitor progress and identity “at risk” children. It was not followed through for reasons of cost only. The Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) tells us that one in three accidents in New Zealand occur in the home. The ACC also is under the kosh to contain costs–which includes any and all efforts to reduce accidents as much as possible.

Put all these together and it is inevitable that bureaucrats will eventually start visiting families on a regular basis, representing the interests of health, safety, and welfare. There is broad consensual support, laying aside the de rigueur posturing of parties when in opposition. It could be legislated for either by National or Labour: both major parties believe in an intrusive paternalistic soft-despotic state that is to order our lives, save us from harm, and redeem us from all ills in this world. The only restrictions they face are economic ones at the end of the day.

Until New Zealanders repent of their idolatrous worship of the state such extensions of state power and instrusive regimenting of our lives are inescapable. What now seems horrific when proposed in the UK will be viewed here as normal, natural, and entirely appropriate within ten years. It’s only a matter of time and taxes. Nations that hate God end up being enslaved in one way or the other. We, in New Zealand, are well down that road.