“Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books. Roman tyrants invented a further refinement. They often provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble, always more readily tempted by the pleasure of eating than by anything else. The most intelligent and understanding amongst them would not have quit his soup bowl to recover the liberty of the Republic of Plato. Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, ‘Long live the King!’ The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them.” – Etienne de La Boétie – Discourse on Voluntary Servitude 1548
“Why of course the people don’t want war… That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” – Hermann Goering, Nazi officer
Or you can denounce the peacemakers as “isolationists”. That seems to work as well.
“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?” – Frederic Bastiat
“…The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.” – John Swinton, Chief Editorial Writer, New York Times
With the concentration of ownership of mainstream media outlets by a hand-full of corporations – all of which are large donors to political agents – all with lobbyists and agendas of their own, you can assume that the news is manipulated to manage politicians and laws rather than inform the public as a primary agenda. Where the truth conflicts with a financial, PR, or political agenda, the story will be sanitized or buried.
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You Bastard!!!
“The average government bureaucrat couldn’t organise a dogfight with two starving dogs and a raw steak.” ~ Kaptain Kanada
Christianity is not a religion, but a faith. The treatment of it as a religion has opened the door to man’s drive for power rooted in his corrupted nature. Every institution shaped by man, whether a Christian college, missionary society, “sponsoring church,” or lectureship carries in its veins the poison of power. Power and countervailing power in the secular world may be treated as a necessary evil to prevent some greater evil or achieve some modest good. But power in religion is wholly evil. We have stressed the fact that Christ at the beginning of his ministry rejected Satan’s offer of power. At the end, he refused to bow to power: No man taketh my life; I lay it down! His people were to be a commune, a koinonia of equals, each voluntarily subject to all others. And the greatest among them would be the servant of all!
Understanding a Christian’s relationship to power and authority, and how it should be exercised in the church is critical if you call yourself a Christian. Read the whole essay here.
Sir, I know the uncertainty of human affairs, but I see, I see clearly, through this day’s business. You and I, indeed, may rue it. We may not live to see the time when this Declaration shall be made good. We may die; die colonists; die slaves; die, it may be, ignominiously and on the scaffold. Be it so. If it be the pleasure of Heaven that my country shall require the poor offering of my life, the victim shall be ready at the appointed hour of sacrifice, come when that hour may. But while I do live, let me have a country, or at least the hope of a country, and that a free country.
An excerpt from an oration of Daniel Webster titled “Independence Forever”, where he imagines the response that John Adams would have made to states that would object to the Declaration of Independance.
The prevailing illusion of our age is that it is possible to enrich all classes at the expense of one another—to make plunder universal under the pretext of organizing it. Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways; hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest-free credit, etc., etc. And it is the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of socialism.
Frédéric Bastiat – Selected Essays on Political Economy – The Law (1848)
