Heresy

We’re fighting a faith that’s lasted for centuries.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

A pervasive foreboding has enveloped the world, a feeling that we’re on the verge of something traumatic and epochal. The feeling has been stoked by overlords at the World Economic Forum and other globalist groups, promising us a miserable future, ostensibly to fight germs and changing temperatures, but actually to institute global governance and totalitarian control. That the overlords no longer hide their agenda, and that their bleak program has made the remarkable headway it has, hints at some sort of sinister, unrecognized force at loose in the world. Some say it’s satanic, though the world has been here before.

The historical analogue is Europe in 1517, just before Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints Church and launched the Reformation. That epochal movement involved a crisis of faith in a human institution—the Catholic Church—and a wrenching reexamination of belief that led to centuries-long intellectual ferment and sectarian violence across Europe. The Reformation sparked the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and eventually a belief that was stronger than faith in the Catholic Church: faith in government. As that latter faith falters, the new reformation will be just as wrenching and violent as the old one, probably more so.

The testament to the newer faith’s strength is its persistence despite governments’ myriad and manifest failures. Government grants itself a monopoly on the right to initiate force. Violence is a dubious foundation for religious faith, but the legal privilege to force others to do what one wants casts a spell impervious to logic or reality. To the contrary, governments’ failures feed the devout’s desire for more government and increases the determination of its high priests to maintain their power.

Government itself, not facts, logic, or argument, is destroying the faith, in part because it’s destroying the faithful. Nothing demonstrates that more clearly than the COVID vaccines. Millions believed propaganda and lies, dutifully lining up for their shots, and are now severely injured or dead. More research is necessary on the vaccines’ lethal mechanisms—research that is officially discouraged—however, their lethality has persisted since mass vaccination began and could persist for many more years.

An institution whose foundation is violence destroys and kills, and attracts those drawn to destruction and death. The outcome of violence is not order and safety, it’s chaos. Chaos may appear to be a “bottom up” phenomenon, but it’s usually the result of decisions and actions from the top. At the bottom, most of us want to peaceably live our lives and pursue our happiness. At the top, our overlords make it impossible for us to do so.

We get tyranny, war, destructive laws and regulations, government interference in every facet of life, deceit, propaganda, censorship, and corruption. After a century in which governments killed an estimated 100 to 200 million, you would think people would be disabused of their belief in it. Such is the strength of faith that they are not. Consequently, this century’s death toll may exceed last century’s.

Will the U.S. government avoid the blame for the chaos it has created, thus preserving the faith? It has so far and will continue to try to do so. However, the flip side of a government that wants to control every aspect of American life and preserve a global empire is that there is so much that can and will go wrong. The Biden administration is a demonstration in real time.

The faithful blame the unfolding domestic catastrophe on the enemies of the faith—the deplorables, aka right-wing extremists. How that group is responsible for central bank manufactured inflation, rising interest rates, financial collapse, the border crisis, ruined Democrat-led cities, or the COVID vaccines’ death toll are questions that answer themselves—they’re not—but never underestimate the destruction stemming from not asking or answering questions. The faithful believe in the same way as end-of-the-world cultists after the world fails to end on the predicted day.

Faith in government is behind what so many of us have observed or experienced: the inability of the faithful to engage in rational discussion. They will belittle, shout down, walk away from, physically assault, censor, imprison, execute, or otherwise evade those who ask questions or state facts. Philosophers and theologians have gone back and forth on the compatibility of true religious faith and reason for centuries. There is no doubt about the incompatibility of faith in government and reason; never the twain shall meet.

In foreign affairs and global empire maintenance, faith in the U.S. government runs into problems. Europe’s cowardly leaders have refused to publicity consider the possibility that the U.S. government sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines, shutting off cheap and plentiful Russian natural gas to Europe, although the usual cui bono question and Seymour Hersh’s investigative journalism say that it did. Nor have the Europeans rebelled against the U.S.’s proxy war in Ukraine that’s all pain and no gain for Europe. Ostensibly, the U.S. government still enjoys the support of a good portion of the “Golden Billion”—the U.S. and Europe, with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Israel throw in.

The other seven billion have discovered that they have no use for a rules-based order whose rules apply only to them. After decades of depredations and hypocrisy, the U.S. has managed to create a coalition of the unwilling who reject its crap out of hand.

Israel has herded 2.2 million Palestinians into the Gaza strip. It controls their entry and exit, their ability to work, and the flow of food, water, fuel, electricity, medicine, and other essentials into Gaza. High walls topped with razor wire surround this de facto concentration camp. The Israeli government knows this situation fuels seething resentment. The Palestinians periodically express their frustration through nonviolent demonstrations and violent terrorism targeted at both Israeli’s military and civilians. Israel’s government responds with outrage and disproportionate force.

Hamas, the officially designated terrorist organization that acts as the Palestinians’ nominal “government” in Gaza, recently launched a surprisingly successful incursion into southern Israel and kidnapped or slaughtered hundreds of Israelis and citizens of other nations, including the U.S.

There are two contending explanations for Hamas’ success. The first is that notwithstanding Israel’s extensive control, intelligence, and surveillance of Gaza and the Palestinians, Hamas took it by surprise. The second is that Israel allowed the Hamas attack to justify launching a retaliatory attack on Gaza that would essentially obliterate it. So, the Israeli government is either incompetent or has disregarded the well-being and lives of its own people. (That disregard was already demonstrated in the government’s COVID vaccination campaign.)

There has been rhetoric from Israeli officials that Palestinians are animals, and that by the time Israel is done with Gaza it will be a tent city (looking like parts of urban Democrat strongholds in America). Israel has imposed a full blockade of Gaza—no food, water, fuel, or electricity. To concerns expressed that and its impending military action will be genocidal, Israeli officials offer assurances that their intelligence on the Palestinians will allow them to pinpoint Hamas hideouts.

As Caitlin Johnstone recently pointed out, you can believe that Israel intelligence’s incompetence enabled the Hamas incursion, or you can believe that Israel intelligence is so good that they’ll selectively annihilate Hamas, but you can’t believe both. Either way, Hamas had to know that Israel’s retaliation would be brutal and kill thousands of innocents. It’s another government disregarding the safety and lives of its own people; it’s what governments do.

To believe that the U.S. government, fresh off another stinging defeat—in Ukraine—could somehow make this volatile situation “better” is yet another triumph of faith over reality. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Among the potential unintended or intended consequences of U.S. intervention: a potential war against Iran (a long-time neocon dream) and its allies in the Middle East, as well as Russia and China; a war that engulfs three continents; a war that engulfs the entire world, and a nuclear conflagration. Even then, someone will emerge from the radioactive rubble and say that what the world needs is more government. The faith never dies.

However, the faith is receiving its biggest challenge in centuries. The U.S. and the world’s best hope is the Heretics—the ever-increasing group who have rejected faith in government and its noxious narratives. Heretics is a better label than “Deplorables,” a label given to U.S. heretics by an acolyte who despises us but wants to rule us. As Ants at the Picnic (Part One here, Part Two here), we must challenge the faith at every turn with our words and weapons. We must fight the overlords who would turn the world (other than their own posh enclaves) into one big Gaza Strip. And we must defeat them, or meet the fate of so many heretics back in that first Reformation.

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