THE NEW AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

"... Nichts ist schwerer und nichts erfordert mehr Charakter, als sich in offenem Gegensatz zu seiner Zeit zu befinden und laut zu sagen: Nein!        - Kurt Tucholsky, Germany, 1934 [Nothing is more difficult, and nothing requires more character than to find oneself in open opposition to one's time (and those one loves) and to say loudly: No!] "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."        - George Orwell

There are countless numbers of people throughout the world who refuse to come to grips with the reality of American economic and military preponderance today. This is particularly true in left-wing, intellectual circles in the United States, and ESPECIALLY IN EUROPE - to say nothing of American Christian circles that stubbornly [and very foolishly (or maybe just stupidly)] refuse to see what America has become - "...a BEAST, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly ... that ... devoures and brakes in pieces, and stamps the ... (people of the earth) with its feet ..." (Dan. 7:7).

The talk in these circles dwells incessantly on the "coming demise of U.S. economic power," and "overstretch" insofar as American military might is concerned. One popular scenario that is making the rounds - a scenario that is being purveyed by MICHAEL RUPPERT - goes something like this: There is a growing world-wide lack of confidence in the international economic system which is today dominated by America. The downturn in the DOW and the NASDAQ has exposed corporate America, and the weaknesses of the U.S.-run international economic system.

What has kept the U.S. supreme over the past fifty years is the primacy of the U.S. dollar - i.e., the fact that (1) most countries in the world use U.S. dollars as their reserve currency, and (2) most of the world's trade is carried on in U.S. dollars; all that coupled with the fact that - because of the strength of the U.S. dollar - over $1.5 trillion in foreign investments flow into U.S. asset markets a year, contributing mightily to "propping up" the "American system."

But if the economic crisis worsens, so the scenario goes, this massive flow of foreign investment into the United States will stop, the dollar will sink in value, and countries that hold their reserves in U.S. dollars will begin to switch to other currencies, sending the United States into an economic tailspin from which it will not be able to recover. Indeed, one so-called "financial expert" at Britain's Independent says,

"If the dollar's decline turns explosive, this could compound the problems of the U.S. asset markets as currency losses raise fears of MASSIVE FLIGHT OUT OF THE U.S."

That, in a nutshell, is the scenario that large numbers of people are buying into today. And it's not just Ruppert that's pushing this kind of thinking, there's also George Soros. However, the fact that Soros - who is certainly no left-wing intellectual and most assuredly no Christian - has been linked to this scenario should give anyone pause who knows anything about this wretched, little European gnome. You can bet that anything Soros is pushing is cloaked in deceit and dishonesty, and that he is involved in it for his own SELFISH pecuniary reasons. Soros says:

"I attribute (the decline of the dollar) to lack of confidence in the management of affairs by the United States, its UNILATERALISM, its pursuit of NATIONAL SELF-INTEREST, and not living up to the responsibility of being the dominant financial power in the world, not taking care of the system."

[What Soros is probably really angry about here insofar as the United States is concerned is that U.S. "UNILATERAL" policies (especially as they have been connected to the currencies of Indonesia, Russia, Thailand, Brazil and several other countries where Soros has been "invested" - I use the tem "invested" facetiously) have had a lot to do with losses he has been sustaining in the currency markets in the past few years. In addition Soros has bet a lot of money on the hope that the euro will rise above its original valuation against the the dollar - and so there is a good deal of self interest in all of this talk on his part. The fact is, however, fluctuations - both positive and negative - between the dollar and the currencies in Europe and Asia are normal in the regular course of events, and have very little to do with the currency speculations of George Soros and his ilk; they result rather from policies set by the U.S. Federal Reserve. In the final analysis, Soros is nothing more than a self-interested currency speculator (currency gambler) who is very "full of himself." He is the Jay Gould of his time, and, in the end, he will probably go the same way Gould went - into bankruptcy. Like any man in a game of blackjack, one's luck eventually runs out; no one ever wins IN THE LONG RUN when he "bets against the HOUSE," which in this case is the U.S. dollar.]

The fact is, all this talk by Soros, Ruppert and the rest of their cabal (i.e., the "goldbugs") concerning American decline is so much NONSENSE! - and the nonsense of it all is not that difficult to unmask. THERE MAY INDEED BE A COMING ECONOMIC MELTDOWN (THIS IS A REGULAR FEATURE OF THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM), BUT IN THE END, IT'S NOT THE UNITED STATES (AND THE DOLLAR) THAT'S GOING TO BEAR THE BRUNT OF THIS DISASTER, BUT EUROPE AND JAPAN. [Please see our articles on this subject, "The Coming Economic Meltdown: Are You Ready?" - which we published in the early summer of 2000; please also see our article, "Ponzi Schemes, The Investment Craze, and The End Of Days," which we published way back in 1998).]

[In all of this, however, Ruppert is right at least on one point: the "little investors" are going to be hurt. Ruppert rightfully points out: "It's a simple scheme really. The Mafia knows it quite well. By whatever means necessary, drive a stock's price higher and higher. Make it look like a mover, even if it is a dog. Cook the books and get the suckers to buy in, helping to drive the price even higher. When you think the balloon will pop, call all your buddies and sell your shares. That effectively steals all the money that the suckers put in. When the stock crashes, the suckers who weren't part of the scheme will take the loss, whether they be individual investors or the New York City police and fire pension funds." "Wall Street bilks Main Street" - that's the name history has given this phenomenon, and it has been going on for years and years.]

The fact is, the scenario that Ruppert is "pushing" concomitantly with Soros - i.e., that the U.S. will "tank" vis a vis Europe and the rest of the world - is just plain wacky! Where, for example, is all this foreign investment (which is really nothing more than American money that is being repatriated back from the rest of the world into the United States) - money that is presumably sustaining the U.S. economy - supposed to go if not to the United States? Where? - to Europe?

Is Europe supposed to be a safer haven than America? Really? - anyone that says that is not familiar with the history of Europe, and is revealing himself as an IGNORAMUS! The fact is, Europe is a very dangerous place for capitalism these days. The great "unwashed masses" there are angry. And they have reason to be! - Europe's unemployment rate is TRIPLE what it is in the United States, and the safety net that used to mitigate the plight of the unemployed in Europe has been reduced to tatters as the elites in Europe have adopted the harsh American-style of capitalism designed to make European "industry" more "competitive" in world markets. All this has led to massive right-wing and left-wing street demonstrations throughout the continent, and as the masses increasingly take to the streets (as they are doing in France, Holland, Germany, etc.) Europe is being threatened with a kind of civil war between Right and Left that makes anything that's been going on in the United States look like "children's play." And if there is anything that capital markets hate more, it is the specter of "demonstrators in the streets."

Furthermore, anyone who says that Europe's equity markets are safer than those in the United States "have been living on the other side of the moon." While it's true that the DOW (the DJI) and the NASDAQ have declined precipitously in recent months, the DAX, the CAC, the NIKKEI, the HANG SENG and the rest of the exchanges in Europe and Asia have weakened even further. And the same is true insofar as GDP is concerned: While the huge growth in GDP that the United States had been experiencing during the 1990s has slowed, the growth in GDP in Europe, Japan, and the rest of the world has slowed even more (with some even showing negative growth). Moving money from the United States into Europe or Japan, or from U.S. equity markets into European and Japanese equity markets is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Nonetheless, this kind of talk - i.e., the ceaseless chatter about America's coming demise - has become particularly faddish in Europe, and there it has been interlaced with a very affected disdain for Americans as "simpletons" and "bunglers" who don't really know what they're doing. If only Americans would learn from their "betters" in Europe, and act as just one other member of "THE TEAM," everything would be okay." For example, Sam Parry, a member of the effete intellectual Left in Great Britain, writes:

"Europeans were aghast at Bush's go-it-alone foreign policy and RETROGRADE economic plans. Many Europeans regarded Bush as a swaggering BUFFOON, making ill-informed comments about complex international affairs (about which he obviously knows nothing) ... Europeans widely opposed Bush's unilateral decision to waive the Geneva Conventions in dealing with captured Taliban and al-Qaeda combatants in Afghanistan. Europeans also recoiled at his black-and-white view of the war on terror as Bush announced that he alone would give a thumb up or a thumb down to governments and political movements in the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere."

Parry continues:

"Bush's 'axis of evil' speech drew sharp criticism from diplomatic observers around the world. They saw Bush as INCAPABLE OF GRASPING NUANCES and LACKING A BREATH OF KNOWLEDGE about global hot spots ..."

The European disdain for Bush is palpable and unmistakable here. If only Bush would acquiesce to his "superiors" in Europe, and kowtow to them intellectually, everything would be better - or so Parry thinks. Parry goes on:

After meetings with Bush, foreign leaders offered pointed, though polite, critiques of his competence. [The disdain for Bush is fairly dripping here.] 'He is the type of person who sleeps at 9:30 p.m. after watching the domestic news', Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah told Okaz, a Saudi newspaper. 'In the morning, he only reads a few lines about what is written on the Middle East'."

Wow! - one would think that Parry had made his point by now, but he persists in his haughty criticism (and thinly-veiled contempt) of Bush (and, ipso facto, the United States):

"Europe's disdain for this un-elected American president crystallized with his trip to the Continent in late May. During that rocky week-long tour of Europe, intended to rally U.S. allies, Bush faltered badly ... Bush's behavior was described as CLOWNISH. Published reports examined Bush's LIMITED INTELLECTUAL ABILITIES. Europeans also expressed amazement at his high standing in U.S. opinion polls ... Bush's insistence on U.S. exceptionalism from international laws governing other nations also infuriated Europeans. While insisting that U.S. adversaries such as former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic be tried for war crimes, the Bush administration demanded a special waiver from the U.N. Security Council to shield U.S. forces from the authority of a new global war-crimes court.

What Parry fails to mention here is that Bush - in closed-door meetings with his European counterparts - told them that they had better get on board in his "war on terrorism" or lose out COMPLETELY in the "oil rush" that's going on in Central Asia - that America would "lock them out" of the area if they didn't acquiesce to its wishes. Shortly after that, France dispatched fighter aircraft to America's huge base at Manas in Kyrgystan, and the Dutch and the Germans pledged more troops to garrison Kabul with. Parry's naiveté here is palpable. Nonetheless, he blithely continues on, revealing himself to be the REAL naïf, not Bush:

"Diplomats also objected to Bush's new military doctrine of preemptive invasions of countries , such as Iraq, deemed by Bush to threaten U.S. security. 'What member states find most irritating is this perennial argument that the United States is a special case, is that rules are for everybody else', one UN diplomat told the New York Times. 'Even close friends are very, very nervous. This is really a serious assault on the international legal order'."

It's all so pathetic! - the fact is, AMERICA IS THE "INTERNATIONAL LEGAL ORDER." WHAT IT SAYS GOES - AND NOTHING MORE. Let the Europeans rage on about Kyoto, the Hague, the Middle East, etc.; it makes no difference to the Americans. In the end, what they determine to be the "legal order" is what counts - and nothing more.

Parry's posturing against Bush (and, ipso facto, America) is kind of like the wrath expressed by rock-throwers in Afghanistan against an American B-52 bomber seven to ten miles high in the sky overhead; IT'S THE FRENZY OF THE POWERLESS AGAINST THE POWERFUL, and nothing more - and most Europeans recognize it as such in their saner moments. For example, the London Observer holds its nose and acknowledges that the U.S. now -

"... enjoys military and cultural power unrivaled since the days of the Roman emperors."

And Luigi Barzini, the well-known Italian author, admits that -

"We Europeans have been reduced to the role of the Greeks in the Roman Empire. The most useful function an Italian or a Frenchman can perform these days is to teach an American the proper temperature at which to drink his red wine."

Finally, Oliver Wormser, the former president of the Bank of France, confesses that when everything is said and done -

"We (i.e., the Europeans) are about as relevant to the Americans as a bunch of Caribbean banana republics."

And Wormser is right here! - AND IT ENRAGES MOST EUROPEANS. Thomas Donnelly, Deputy Executive Director of the Project for the New American Century, writing for the magazine, Foreign Affairs [a CFR publication], says:

The fact of American empire is hardly debated these days. Even those who fear and oppose it - in this country, the libertarian right and the remnants of the new left; abroad, a variety of voices from Paris to Baghdad to Beijing - define international politics almost entirely in relation to U.S. power, and especially U.S. military power. The 'unipolar moment' has become a unipolar decade and, with a little effort and a little wisdom, it COULD LAST MUCH LONGER."

Yale historian Paul Kennedy, who in the mid-1980s predicted U.S. "imperial overstretch," has also belatedly become a believer in American preponderance, and a convert to the idea of "empire." He writes:

"Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power before; nothing. The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap. Britain's army was much smaller than European armies and even the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies - right now all the other navies in the world COMBINED could not dent American maritime supremacy. Napoleon's France and Philip II's Spain had powerful foes and were part of a multipolar system. Charlemagne's Empire was merely western European in its stretch. The Roman Empire stretched further afield, but there was another great empire in Persia and a larger one still in China. There is no comparison."

Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, both of Dartmouth, write:

"To understand just how dominant the United States is today, one needs to look at each of the standard components of national power in succession. In the military arena, the United States is poised to spend more on defense in 2003 than the next 15-20 biggest spenders COMBINED. The United States has overwhelming nuclear superiority, the world's dominant air force, the only truly blue-water navy, and a unique capability to project power around the globe. And its military advantage is even more apparent in quality than in quantity. The United States leads the world in exploiting the military applications of advanced communications and information technology and it has demonstrated an unrivaled ability to coordinate and process information about the battlefield and destroy targets from afar with extraordinary precision. Washington is not making it easy for others to catch up, moreover, given the massive gap in spending on military research and development (R&D), on which the United States spends THREE TIMES more than the next six powers COMBINED."

"No state in the modern history of international politics has come close to the military predominance these numbers suggest. And the United States purchases this preeminence with only 3.5 percent of its GDP. As historian Paul Kennedy notes, 'being Number One at great cost is one thing; being the world's single superpower on the cheap is astonishing'."

Brooks and Wohlforth continue,

"America's economic dominance, meanwhile - relative to either the next several richest powers or the rest of the world combined - surpasses that of any great power in modern history ... California's economy alone has risen to become the fifth largest in the world ... ahead of France and just behind the United Kingdom."

The two Dartmouth professors continue relentlessly pressing their point insofar as America's technological prowess is concerned over and against the rest of the world:

"U.S. military and economic dominance, finally, is rooted in the country's position as the world's leading technological power. Although measuring national R&D spending is increasingly difficult in an era in which so many economic activities cross borders, efforts to do so indicate America's continuing (HUGE) lead. Figures from the late 1990s showed that U.S. expenditures on R&D nearly equaled those of the next seven richest countries COMBINED.

They sum up:

"Measuring the degree of American dominance in each category begins to place things in perspective. BUT WHAT TRULY DISTINGUISHES THE CURRENT INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM IS AMERICAN DOMINANCE IN ALL OF THEM SIMULTANEOUSLY. Previous leading states in the modern era were either great commercial and naval powers or great military powers on land, never (all three together) ... Today, in contrast, THE UNITED STATES HAS NO RIVAL IN ANY CRITICAL DIMENSION OF POWER. THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A SYSTEM OF SOVEREIGN STATES THAT CONTAINED ONE STATE WITH THIS DEGREE OF DOMINANCE."

There are some in Europe, however, who think that eventually other states will band together to restrain the United States. This is the way German political commentator Josef Joffe has put it,

"The history books say that Mr. Big (i.e., the United States) always invites his own demise. Nos. 2, 3, 4 will gang up on him, form countervailing alliances and plot his downfall. That happened to Napoleon, as it happened to Louis XIV and the mighty Hapsburgs, to Hitler and to Stalin. Power begets superior counterpower; it's the oldest rule of world politics."

However, Brooks and Wohlforth disagree. This is the thinking of a bygone era - and they suggest that any country or combination of countries that might be thinking about a "serious run at the United States" would be advised to think again. They write,

"What such arguments fail to recognize are the features of America's post-Cold War position that make it likely to buck the historical trend. Bounded by oceans ["O thou that dwellest upon many waters, abundant in treasures ..." (Jer. 51:13)] to the east and the west, and weak, friendly (or at least cowered) nations to the north and the south, the United States is much less vulnerable than previous ... hegemons ... The main potential challengers to its unipolarity, meanwhile - China, Russia, Japan, and Germany - are in the opposite position. They cannot augment their military capabilities so as to balance the United States without simultaneously becoming an immediate threat to their neighbors ... Were any of the potential challengers to make a serious run at the United States, regional balancing efforts would almost certainly help contain them, as would the massive latent power capabilities of the United States, which could be mobilized as necessary to head off an emerging threat."

Brooks and Wohlforth write that when analysts refer to a historical pattern of other lesser powers rising up and banding together to challenge potentially preponderant powers, they rarely note that the cases in question - the Hapsburg ascendancy, Napoleonic France, the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and so forth - featured would-be hegemons that were vulnerable ... centrally located, and dominant in only one or two components of power ... American capabilities, by contrast, are relatively greater and much more comprehensive than those of past hegemonic aspirants, (and) they are located safely offshore ... U.S. power is also at the command of ONE government, whereas the putative balancers would face major challenges in acting collectively to assemble and coordinate their military capabilities.

Brooks and Wohlforth continue:

"Previous historical experiences of balancing, moreover, involved groups of status quo powers seeking to contain a rising revisionist one. The balancers had much to fear if the aspiring hegemon got its way. Today, however, U.S. dominance is the status quo. Several of the major powers in the system (i.e., Germany, Japan, Britain, etc.) have been closely allied with the United States for decades AND DERIVE SUBSTANTIAL BENEFITS FROM THEIR POSITION. Not only would they have to forego those benefits if they tried to balance, but they would have to find some way of putting together a durable, coherent alliance WHILE AMERICA WAS WATCHING. This is a profoundly important point, because although there may be several precedents for a coalition of balancers preventing a hegemon from emerging, there is none for a group of SUBORDINATE powers joining to topple a hegemon once it has already emerged, which is what would have to happen today.

"The comprehensive nature of U.S. power, finally, also skews the odds against any major attempt at balancing, let alone a successful one. The United States is both BIG and RICH, whereas the potential challengers are all either one or the other."

Lastly, Brooks and Wohlforth write that while some might argue (as many Christians do) that the European Union is an exception to the big-or-rich rule, that simply isn't true. While it is possible that if the EU were in fact a UNITARY STATE, and did, in fact, possess a UNIFIED economy, and a UNIFIED military capability, and could, in fact, elicit the ALLEGIANCE of its disparate parts, the EU would have at least the potential of constituting something of a challenge to U.S. world-hegemony. But none of this lies in the realm of reality. None of it!

At the most basic level, the peoples that make up the various populations of the EC countries on a "gut" level HATE and DESPISE each other - and this hatred and loathing is not a surface thing, but reaches back thousands of years and cannot be easily breached, largely because of language differences. LANGUAGE IS SOMETHING THAT IS VERY FUNDAMENTAL, and people make a big mistake in trying to minimize its divisive nature. And while these differences (and hatreds) have been contained for these past sixty years, the only thing that has been holding the storm back (as it were) is the hegemonic control that the United States NOW wields over the area. Should the U.S. withdraw from the region, you could be certain that the French would be at the Germans throats again (and visa versa), the English would be calling the French "Frogs," everyone would disdain the Italians, the Germans would be plotting and planning to re-annex their lost territories in Poland, the Czech Republic (i.e., the Sudetenland), Alsace-Lorraine, and on and on and on.

Finally, and more ominously - it wouldn't be long for a line (a queue) to form at Washington's door consisting of all the nations of the area begging America to re-enter the continent and save them from German control - and FRANCE AND BRITAIN WOULD BE AT THE HEAD OF THE LIST.

The fact is, the hatred and petty jealousy these peoples and nations have for one another hasn't disappeared, it has just been suppressed. That's all. And should the U.S. withdraw from Europe, these nations and peoples would as surely break down into bickering and fighting as did the various nationalities in Yugoslavia once Communism was lifted from off their necks.

Finally, one should understand that the EU is not the creation of Europe itself; it is an American construct, and it would have collapsed long ago if the U.S. had not pushed and prodded it along. In this connection, moreover, it should be noted that THE U.S. CREATED THE EU NOT OUT OF ANY REAL OR ALTRUISTIC CONCERNS FOR THE PEOPLES AND NATIONS OF EUROPE, BUT AS AN INSTRUMENT THROUGH WHICH IT COULD ADVANCE ITS OWN SELFISH HEGEMONIC ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, AND MILITARY INTERESTS IN EUROPE.

The very real fact of the matter is, the concept of a "united Europe" was advanced as a means through which the U.S. could strip the various European member states of their sovereignty [and ipso facto, the ability of the "common people" in these countries to oppose elite power on the "continent" (which by 1955 had fallen totally under the control of the U.S. elites and had been integrated into the U.S. system)] and place this sovereignty in the hands of "nameless bureaucrats" in Brussels (purposely chosen by the United States because of its third-rate status as a capital compared to Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, etc.) -bureaucrats which were beholden not so much to the various populations they supposedly served, but to corporate and financial interests that in the end kowtowed to U.S. power.

The ability of the U.S. elites to proceed in this direction had resulted out of the CATASTROPHE of the Second World War which had left Europe - including both Britain and France - in ruins. There was nothing left. EVERYTHING had been destroyed; the destruction was almost TOTAL - a fact that most people today, given Europe's recovery, fail to truly appreciate. The factories were gone, the industries were gone, the cities were gone, the money was worthless, and the continent was filled with displaced persons that wandered aimlessly from DP (Displaced Person) camp to DP camp trying merely to live from day to day. THE VERY BASIS OF ELITE POWER IN EUROPE HAD BEEN DESTROYED. IF THEY (i.e., the European elites) WERE TO EVER RISE AGAIN, THEY WOULD HAVE TO DO SO ON THE SHOULDERS OF THE AMERICAN ELITES.

Into this vacuum flowed American money - and not only as public funds in the form of the Marshall Plan and other similar government to government programs, but MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF PRIVATE CAPITAL as well. American businessmen swarmed over Europe buying up everything they could find in "fire" sales from European businessmen (elites) desperate for capital, and willing to sell their souls in order to get it - WHICH IS PRECISELY WHAT THEY ENDED UP DOING.

Using these public and private funds, Americans soon reduced Europe to an economic fiefdom - and the genius of it all is that to a large degree they successfully hid what they were doing by posing their greed behind a facade of benevolence, and by retaining the "European character" (management and names) of the industries they were buying up. For example, Volkswagen (or at least controlling shares of it) was bought up by Americans; Siemens, the giant German electrical firm, also came under the control of American shareholders; Daimler Benz was similarly brought under American domination - and the list goes on endlessly. [Interestingly, this is EXACTLY what the Americans are doing today in Russia, in the Ukraine, in Poland, in the Czech Republic, in Lithuania, etc. - but that's another story.]

Of course, some people in Europe "caught on" early to what was happening, mainly the socialist Left, and tried to protect their industries through legislative action of one sort or another which aimed at halting the American onslaught. They also championed the nationalization of large swaths of their national economies in order to keep them from falling under the control of American capitalism. [Just as Venezuela is trying to do today, especially insofar as its oil industry is concerned - which is exactly why the U.S. has been trying to topple Chavez; more about this in upcoming issues.] In all these instances, these efforts emanated out of the "common people" of Europe (i.e., the so-called proletariat) who were loath to see their industries gobbled up by the Americans.

ON THE OTHER HAND, THE EUROPEAN ELITES WERE ON THE AMERICAN'S SIDE (the elites have no allegiance to anything other than their own greed) - and this was so not just because they had been "bought off" by American money. The fact is, as the very real threat of "nationalization" grew in Europe and threatened to strip the European industrial elites of what economic standing they had left, THEY BEGAN TO REASON AMONG THEMSELVES THAT IT WAS BETTER TO PLAY "SECOND FIDDLE" TO THE AMERICANS AND STILL RETAIN SOME OF THEIR POWER THAN LOSE IT ALTOGETHER TO THE "UNWASHED MASSES" - i.e., THE EUROPEAN PROLETARIAT.

The Common Market (as the EU was known early on) became the means through which the European and American industrial elites stripped the "grubby masses" in Europe of their ability to influence economic events by moving the power to make economic decisions away from the various national legislatures in Europe (where in 1955 socialist majorities prevailed) to Brussels where "unelected bureaucrats" controlled by the elites could make the economic decisions necessary to their survival as a class outside the influence of the "unwashed masses."

In other words, while the Common Market was ostensibly formed to create a "free trade area" in Europe and promote the general welfare of the people, what it really aimed at was stripping the people of Europe of their power to regulate their own economies, and placing that power in the hands of what has popularly become known is Europe as the "nameless bureaucrats of Brussels" who were beholden in the end to American corporate power.

There are, of course, a whole host of "devices" surrounding the EU that have been created to lend it a "democratic appearance" - the European Parliament, for example; but all these so-called "democratic institutions" are nothing more than facades to mask the real impotence of the masses in the decisions-making that goes on in Brussels. Indeed, so powerless do the institutions of the EU render the people of Europe insofar as Europe's economy is concerned (and so artfully are they contrived), that the EU was used as a model after which the WTO (the World Trade Organization) was patterned - which is nothing more than the EU "writ large." And if anyone thinks that the WTO is a democratic institution, I have some swampland in Florida I would like to sell them.

The fact is, all these institutions - the EU, the WTO, the IMF (the International Monetary Fund), the World Bank, NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Area which is soon to be enlarged to encompass all of Latin America as the "Free Trade Area of the Americas" - i.e., the FTAA) are all AMERICAN institutions hiding behind an "internationalist" facade.

Like the United Nations - another American creation - all these institutions possess an "internationalist mask" and proclaim themselves to be "democratic institutions," but their real power rests in the hands of the American oligarchy (plutocracy). Thus, while the General Assembly of the United Nations can rant and rave against America and propose anti-American programs till the "cows come home," the real power of the UN rests safely in the hands of the Security Council and its "Five Permanent Members" - the U.S., Britain and France (which are nothing more than U.S. puppets), Russia (which is fast becoming a U.S. puppet as American capitalism continues to gobble up that unfortunate country), and China - which like Russia is rapidly coming to a realistic understanding as to just exactly which side of the toast the butter is on.

Now in all of this, one needs to be cognizant of the fact that it is not what the "common people" in these countries - i.e., Britain, France, Russia and China - think about the United States; the only thing that matters is what the elites (that really govern these countries) think - and they are slavishly devoted because of their own pecuniary self-interest to the United States. To be sure - given the amount of genuine anti-American feeling in all these countries - the elites must from time to time give some reign to these feelings, but NEVER anywhere where it really counts. For example, despite the way Britain and France (especially France) carry on against American policies in Iraq, the Balkans, Central Asia, Israel, etc., when was the last time any of these countries exercised their veto against the United States in the Security Council? - NEVER! And more than just that, when was the last time either Russia or China exercised their veto against the Americans in the Security Council? - not for a very, very long time!

And it is the same thing with NATO. While the CIVILIAN institutions of NATO are almost always held in the hands of Europeans, the MILITARY side of NATO is - BY LAW - PERMANENTLY and EXCLUSIVELY held in the hands of an American; it CANNOT be held by a European. And it is here, on the military side, that the REAL power in NATO resides. The civilian institutions of NATO - headed up by Javier Solana, the NATO secretary-general - are nothing more than "window dressing."

NATO's military head is called the SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander, Europe), and he is answerable ONLY to the Pentagon, AND ULTIMATELY TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. The European military chiefs may "advise" the SACEUR, and they may even opt their militaries out of a particular NATO mission, but they cannot command those missions. The ability to command NATO forces in Europe resides only with the SACEUR, and for that reason, the SACEUR is known commonly in diplomatic circles as "THE PRINCE OF EUROPE" - "THE MOST POWERFUL MAN ON THE CONTINENT," as David Halberstam puts it (Vanity Fair, September, 2001, pg. 236). In other words, the strongest man in Europe is not the head of the EU, the WEU, the president of the European Parliament, or even Javier Solana, it is the SACEUR - i.e., "THE PRINCE OF EUROPE."

Yes! - the very real truth of the matter is, as Thomas Donnelly puts it:

"THE FACT OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IS HARDLY DEBATED ANYMORE THESE DAYS ..."

And - make no mistake about it - this empire is BENT ON WORLD-CONQUEST, like "...a BEAST, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly ... that ... devoures and brakes in pieces, and stamps the ... (people of the earth) with its feet ..." (Dan. 7:7).

And the Business Right, together with their lapdogs in the Christian Right, are pushing this concept with all their might. This is certainly what Max Boots, the editorial features writer for the Wall Street Journal, has been doing. Boots says:

"Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in Jodhpurs and pith helmets."

Richard Lowry, editor of the National Review, has also joined the pro-imperial chorus with a call to establish a U.S.-sponsored "protectorate" over Iraq after U.S. troops oust Saddam Hussein's regime. Lowry writes:

"The entire effort would represent a return to an ENLIGHTENED PATERNALISM TOWARD THE THIRD WORLD, premised on the idea that the Arabs have failed miserably at self-government and need to start anew."

ENLIGHTENED PATERNALISM? - in the end, this kind of thinking is predicated on the assumption that all men are NOT equal; that the people of the Third World are not the intellectual equals of "white Christians;" that just possibly, over the past sixty years, "white Christians" have - supposedly under the impress of "foreign, Marxist ideologies" - made a big mistake when they accepted the "silly" and somewhat "inane" notion that all men are equal, thereby relinquishing their burden to be their less "well-endowed" brother’s keeper - the "White Man’s Burden," as British statesman (and diamond merchant), Cecil Rhodes put it. This is certainly the kind of thinking that Max Boots and Richard Lowry are pushing. It is also the kind of thinking that Paul Johnson, a British conservative, is advocating - i.e., ENLIGHTENED PATERNALISM!

Johnson has long advocated an American Imperium. Following the U.S. invasion of Somalia in 1992, for instance, he published a then-controversial article called "Colonialism's Back: And Not a Moment Too Soon" in the New York Times Magazine in which he wrote:

"The basic problem is obvious but is never publicly admitted: SOME STATES ARE NOT YET FIT TO GOVERN THEMSELVES. THERE IS A MORAL ISSUE HERE. THE CIVILIZED WORLD HAS A MISSION TO GO OUT TO THESE DESPERATE PLACES AND GOVERN THEM."

But Americans had better be careful here. This is the kind of talk - i.e., the kind that says some people are fit to rule, while others are not - that inevitably leads to OLIGARCHIES and DICTATORSHIPS, because IF it can be said that the various peoples of the Third World are "NOT FIT" to govern themselves, it is but a short step to the belief that there are certain classes in this country that are "NOT FIT" to govern themselves either. And if that's the case, democracy as we have known it (or at least presumed it) is on very shaky ground. Nevertheless, this is certainly what Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray meant to convey in their 1994 best-seller, The Bell Curve, when they wrote:

"The Founders wrote frankly about the INEQUALITIES OF MEN. For Thomas Jefferson, it was obvious that ... (people) were especially unequal in virtue and intelligence. HE WAS THANKFUL FOR A 'NATURAL ARISTOCRACY' THAT COULD COUNTERBALANCE THE DEFICIENCIES OF OTHERS, an ‘aristocracy of virtue and talent, which Nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society' ..."

Herrnstein and Murray continue,

"The other founders, including Madison, Hamilton, and Washington - ruminated in the same vein (as Jefferson) about the INEQUALITY OF MEN and the political implications of that inequality ... The perversions ... (implicit) in the egalitarian ideal that began with the French Revolution and have been so plentiful in the twentieth century are not accidents of history ... Egalitarian tyrannies, whether of the Jacobite or the Leninist variety, are worse than inhumane. They are inhuman."

But before white evangelicals adopt wholesale the paternalistic attitudes toward the Third World (and the minorities in this country) which are purveyed in The Bell Curve and in the kind of thinking that undergirds the "rush towards empire" that Boots, Lowry, Johnson, etc. are advocating - there are a number of very good reasons why they should pause and take thought of what they are getting themselves involved in. In embracing the idea of ENLIGHTENED PATERNALISM - Christians, whether they want to admit it or not, are embracing ideas that have their roots in evolutionary concepts. Make no mistake about it, the concept that some people are "fit to govern," while others are "not fit to govern" is predicated on evolutionism: on genetic HEREDITY.

And if that is so, then the Genesis story of creation is just that - a quaint story - BECAUSE A MERE 6,000 YEARS OF HUMAN HISTORY CANNOT POSSIBLY ACCOUNT FOR THE HEREDITARY (GENETIC) DIFFERENCES THAT ALL "EMPIRE BUILDERS" CLAIM ELEVATES SOME PEOPLE TO MEMBERS OF THE "RULING CLASS," WHILE \REDUCING OTHERS TO THOSE CLASSES THAT NEED TO BE SUBJECTED TO "ENLIGHTENED PATERNALISM."

Evangelicals (i.e., so-called "Biblical literalists") can’t have it both ways. Either the Bible’s account of Creation is true or it isn’t! - and if it’s true, then the entire intellectual premise that undergirds the thinking of Johnson, Lowry and Boots collapses. Either blacks and Latinos and the populations of the "Third World" are our brothers and sisters in Adam or they’re not! Again, Christians can't have it both ways.

Sadly, however, the irrationality of it all has never stopped Christians before from embracing such ideas. For example, before embarking on the BRUTAL and SAVAGE subjugation of the Philippines at the turn of the last century - which was fueled by the concept of "ENLIGHTENED PATERNALISM" - President William McKinley spent many a sleepless night on his knees. McKinley wrote later:

"I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance ... And one night late it came to me ... that there was nothing left for us to do but take them all, and educate the Filipinos and uplift them and civilize and CHRISTIANIZE them and by God's grace do the best we could by them ..."

By the time it was finished, the so-called "Christianization" of the Philippines cost the lives of more than 1,000,000 native Filipinos. Wow! - now that's something that Christ must have been really "into" - slaughtering 1,000,000 people in the Name of the PRINCE OF PEACE." Are we in Antipas the only ones that see the incongruity of all this?

Obviously McKinley thought of himself as a dedicated Christian - he said so. But he - like so many other "Christians" of his era - had clearly "bought into" the ideas that were eventually ensconced in Madison Grant's 1916 best-seller, The Passing of the Great Race, a book which posited the idea that white Christians were genetically superior to the rest of mankind, and thereby entitled to "rule over" them. This is what Henry Fairfield Osborn, a zoologist and president of the American Museum of Natural History believed too - as did most other academicians and scientists of the time - men like Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University; David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, Alexander Graham Bell, etc. - all men given over to evolutionism and who predicated their ideas of empire on such thinking. SURPRISINGLY, MOST CHRISTIANS OF THAT ERA SAW LITTLE OR NO INCONSISTENCY BETWEEN WHAT GRANT WAS SAYING AND THE IMPERATIVE OF THEIR FAITH - AND THAT'S TRUE TODAY. Consistency has never been a "hallmark" of the way most Christians think.

As a result, today's Christian Right presses on toward empire with the Economic Right. Indeed, both groups believe that the "IMPERIAL MOMENT" has arrived. This is certainly what Sebastian Mallaby, another elitist who considers himself to be a "Christian," thinks. Writing in the pages of Foreign Affairs, Mallaby writes:

"Empires are not always planned. The original American colonies began as the unintended byproduct of British religious strife. The British political class was not so sure it wanted to rule India, but commercial interests dragged it there anyway. The United States today will be an even more reluctant imperialist. BUT A NEW IMPERIAL MOMENT HAS ARRIVED, AND BY VIRTUE OF ITS POWER, AMERICA IS BOUND TO PLAY THE LEADING ROLE. The question is not whether the United States will seek to fill the void created by the demise of European empires but whether it will acknowledge that this is what it is doing. Only if Washington acknowledges this task will its response be coherent."

This is certainly something the Christian Right in this country can say "Amen" to; and it is also something that Christian leaders can subscribe to - leaders like Harald Bredesen, Paul Crouch, David and Justin Du Plessis, Jack Hayford, Cardinal Krol, Father Dene Braun, Father Tom Forrest, Dr. Kevin Ranaghan, Ken Metz, Charles Stanley, D. James Kennedy, Tim LaHaye, the late John Wimber, Juan Carlos Ortiz, C. Peter Wagner, Beverley LaHaye, Ern Baxter, Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth Hagin, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Chuck Colson, David Yonggi Cho, Robert Stearns, Mike Bickle, Reuven Doron, Che Ahn, Frank Hammond, Cindy Jacobs, Bill Hamon, John Eckhardt, Bobbie Byerly, Dutch Sheets, Jim Goll, John Paul Jackson, James Ryle, Frank Damazio, Ed Silvoso, Carlos Annacondia, Claudio Freidzon, Roger Mitchell, Ted Haggart, Paul Cain, Chuck Pierce, Rick Joyner, Kingsley Fletcher, Jim Laffoon, Barbara Wentroble, ad infinitum.

It fits so nicely into their eschatology, an eschatology that postulates that the Lord will bring revival to the church, which will end the church’s divisions and result in "turning the nation back to Christ." The "Gospel of the Kingdom" (which is essentially the spread of Christianity throughout the world under the rule of the "Apostles and Prophets") will then be preached to the whole earth, WHICH WILL LEAD TO THE CONVERSION OF ISRAEL, the conquest of the world (WHICH THE GUNS OF THE AMERICAN MILITARY WILL NICELY FACILITATE), and the judgment of those who refuse to convert. Then the Lord will return.

And the fact that those who subscribe to this eschatology will not find it incongruous that the "Gospel of the Kingdom" will rely on the GUNS OF THE AMERICAN MILITARY should not surprise anyone given what the late R.J. Rushdoony said in his many pronouncements concerning the necessity of such "Christian conquest:"

"In winning the world to the Gospel, THE SWORD AS WELL AS THE PEN MUST BE USED."

Lance Selfa and other members of the Left like him have taken note of all this talk concerning an American Empire, and he is frightened by it. And he should be! With American troops swarming all over the world, what else should people think other than Pax Americana is here to stay, and the world had better get used to it. American troops are already occupying Afghanistan, providing a bodyguard for the U.S.-backed puppet regime it has installed there. The Americans have also established innumerable other bases throughout Central Asia - i.e., giant ones at Khanabad near Qarsi in Uzbekistan (just west of the ancient city of Samarkand) and another huge base in Manas in Kyrgystan. Furthermore, work has begun on bases in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, and also in Kazakhstan. In addition the United States is feverishly working on (or expanding) bases in Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, along with Oman, in preparation for its planned attack on Iraq.

Selfa says that all this is being done under the rubric of "bringing order and organization" to those portions of the globe "whose territories have become bases for drug, crime, and terrorist syndicates."

Of course, as Selfa points out, what hegemonic nations say they are doing, and what they are really up to are always two different things. The history of empire is anything but benign. For example, in the 1880s, when Belgian King Leopold II seized the Congo - a country 77 times the size of his own - he won a reputation in the West, and particularly in Europe, of being a great humanitarian. Ostensibly, he decreed the end of the slave trade in the territory and declared his intention to bring "civilization" to the indigenous people. Meanwhile, the king's armies were impressing thousands of Congolese into forced labor (slavery by any other name) on rubber plantations. Indeed, the Belgians subjected the indigenous people there to the most horrific tortures and brutalities, ultimately driving down the region's population by 10 million.

The very real fact of the matter is, imperial powers destroy the societies they conquer because they inevitably reorganize the economies of the nations they subjugate to serve their own capitalist needs. For example, in the 19th century, Britain DELIBERATELY flooded the Indian market with factory goods from Britain, destroying Indian handicraft industries like metalworking and cloth production. At the same time, British imposition of cash relations and huge land taxes on the Indian peasantry led to famines or food shortages in 20 of the 49 years between 1860 and 1908. [This is precisely what companies like ABM and Cargil are doing to the peasantry in Mexico and Central America today under the impress of American "agri-business."]

Before conquest, India suffered a famine only once every fifty years. But British authorities, devotees to Malthusianism, let tens of millions starve to death rather than provide them with relief that might "dull their work ethic" - and that's after laying waste to India's indigenous farming community, the land of which had been then seized, taken out of the production of food, and given over to the production of "cash crops" destined for the markets of Europe. Lord Salisbury, British secretary of state for India, summed up British policy pithily when he said, "India must be bled." In the last quarter of the 19th century, as many as 61 million people perished from famines in India, China, and Brazil whose root causes lay not in weather patterns, but in the BRUTAL colonial re-engineering of these societies to the detriment of the native populations, and the advantage of European and American capitalism. And this is precisely what the Americans have in store for the people of Central Asia as U.S. oil companies move in there to rob and pillage these areas to the great disadvantage of the indigenous populations.

Conquest and maintenance of imperial rule entailed mass slaughter - what Kipling called "Savage Wars of Peace." In a forerunner of today's U.S.-led "casualty free" wars, British troops with automatic weapons lost 49 soldiers while killing 11,000 Sudanese in the 1898 battle of Ombdurman. Germany organized genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples of South West Africa (today Namibia) in 1904-1907, purposely setting out to exterminate them. And in the 1898-1902 U.S. war to subjugate the Philippines, Americans slaughtered more than 1 million people. U.S. forces fought Filipino guerrillas and employed all the techniques of "pacification" later used in Vietnam: concentration camps, crop destruction, scorched earth and biological warfare. "They never rebel in Luzon anymore, said a U.S. congressman, "BECAUSE THERE ISN'T ANYBODY LEFT TO REBEL."

That's how all imperial hegemons usually deal with unrest and rebellion within their realms. God help us all as Christians if we get involved in this kind of thing - BUT THAT'S EXACTLY WHERE THE CHURCH IS HEADED UNDER THE IMPRESS OF PEOPLE LIKE C. PETER WAGNER, DUTCH SHEETS, MIKE BICKEL, PAT ROBERTSON, D. JAMES KENNEDY, ETC.!

And what of colonial education and social reform, the imperialists best advertisements for their self-proclaimed civilizing mission? Perhaps it goes without saying that colonial education systems aimed only to train a small elite in the colonial populations for work in the colonial bureaucracy. The colonizers viewed the majority of the colonized population as cheap labor for whom literacy skills were a luxury. Colonial regimes in early 20th century Africa spent less than 5 percent of tax receipts on education. In Portugal's African colonies, African children bore only a 1 in 100 chance of receiving schooling past the third grade. The Belgian government and the Catholic Church that controlled education in the Congo did not believe that the Congolese had the capacity to handle education beyond the primary level. Only in 1948 did a Belgian commission advise creating high schools for Africans. On the eve of the Congo's independence in 1960, there were only 16 Congolese high school graduates out of a population of 13 million.

AND IF ONE THINKS THAT AMERICA'S RECORD HERE WITH REGARD TO WHAT IT IS DOING THROUGHOUT THE WORLD IN THOSE NATIONS IT HAS SUBJECTED TO ITS "NEW WORLD ORDER SYSTEM," HE IS NUTS! One needs only to examine what's going on in Central America, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, etc. to disabuse himself of such a notion.

Now the elites (together with many Christians in the United States) want to bring all this back - or at least bring it back into the open the way it was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They ignore what really happened in the British, French, Dutch, and Belgian empires of the time - re-writing history to make all that horror seem like a "golden age," while at the same time pointing to the half-century of mass poverty, social breakdown and dictatorial government that the nations of the Third World have sunk into since gaining their independence, and saying - like Boots, Lowry and Johnson - that these people are not ready for democracy. But the truth is, the miserable condition of these so-called "failed states" did not result from the fact that they were "not ready for democracy," but because THEY EXIST IN A WORLD ECONOMY PURPOSELY RIGGED AGAINST THEM (more about this in upcoming issues).

The very real fact of the matter is, the current Western obsession with "failed states" reflects an elitist attempt (primarily an American one) to absolve itself from the catastrophe it has created in the Third World. For example, Somalia fell into lawlessness after the U.S.-backed Siad Barre dictatorship collapsed in 1989. For two decades before, the rival Cold War superpowers had treated the country as a political football. They fueled its war with Ethiopia, and armed Siad Barre as his regime killed 12 percent of the population and forced almost one-quarter of its population into exile. Afghanistan's state and society collapsed after a U.S.-backed jihad, and civil war destroyed the country. Massive debt to the International Monetary Fund and Western banks impelled the 1980s economic crisis that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia and its descent into nationalist barbarism. Bangkok Post journalist Martin Khor correctly explains the blame-the-victim theory of "failed states:"

"The theory of the 'failed state' not only puts the blame onto the country concerted, BUT OPENS THE WAY TO POLITICAL AND EVEN MILITARY INTERVENTION ..."

Listen, dear brothers and sisters in the Lord, it is utter folly for us to fail to recognize what the United States has become - "...a BEAST, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly ... that ... devoures and brakes in pieces, and stamps the ... (people of the earth) with its feet ..." (Dan. 7:7). If we are not to fail our God in this crucial time, we must rouse ourselves from out of the stupor we have fallen into - a dream-like world which, as we have suggested in previous articles, is filled full of phantoms and ghosts and is haunted by such bizarre and mysterious shadows as the "Bildeburgers," the Illuminati, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, black helicopters, road signs written in Chinese, and strange "goings on" in the United Nations; a universe in which it is difficult to separate fact from fiction, and reality from fantasy, and that makes us BLIND TO WHAT IS ALL TOO OBVIOUS.

The very tragic fact of the matter is - when we fail to admit to what the United States has become, we cannot help but allow ourselves to be reduced to a state of inactivity. Prophecy becomes a matter for someone else; it doesn't touch us. We are free to go our own way - AND THAT'S PRECISELY WHY CHRISTIANS ARE SO INCLINED TO ACCEPT A BELIEF IN "AMERICAN DECLINE" as purveyed by countless numbers of Christians throughout the country, as well as by people like Michael Ruppert and George Soros. It gets us off the hook. But the fact of the matter is, to buy into such thinking is, as we just indicated, to "deny the obvious" - and you will find that if you do so, you will be caught up in the events of the "end of the age" ON THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY (and eschatology), and when you finally wake up, it will be too late for you to do anything about it.

The sad fact of the matter is, CHRISTIANS TODAY ARE BEING MADE CO-CONSPIRATORS WITH THE BUSINESS ELITES IN THEIR EFFORT TO CREATE A "NEW WORLD ORDER SYSTEM." THEY ARE RIDING THE BEAST - AND ARE (UNBEKNOWNST TO THEM) FULFILLING THE PROPHECY OF REV. 17:1-8:

"And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:

"With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.

"So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: AND I SAW A WOMAN SIT UPON A SCARLET COLOURED BEAST, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.

"And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:

"And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

"And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.

"And the angel said unto me, Wherefore didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns.

"The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is. (Rev. 17:1-8)

There is only one thing for us to do - and that is to COME OUT OF HER! [Please see our article, "Come Out Of Her."] And there is a way for you to do so - it's by opening your mouth and speaking forth the truth that God is showing you. BECOME A WITNESS FOR GOD - YOU WILL NEVER REGRET YOUR DECISION TO DO SO. BEGIN BY PASSING OUT OUR ARTICLES. IT'S FREE! There are over 200 articles, including the ANTIPAS PAPERS. You can download in PDF format or just print it out. Then pass it out to your friends and distribute them in your church. THAT'S WHEN THINGS WILL START HAPPENING! From that point on, your journey out of today's apostate church WILL BEGIN IN EARNEST. Yes, there will be persecutions! But persecutions are the lot of any real Christian in this life. If you are not persecuted for your faith, you should stand in fear as to its veracity. Jesus said:

"Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you ..." (John 15:20)

But be of "good cheer" - there will be people in your churches watching what you do. They will take note of your courage and read the material, and, eventually - IF you are PERSISTENT enough - they will come to you and ask questions; some will even "rally to your cause."

As we said in our last article, take these people, and begin meeting with them. There doesn't have to be many. Meet in your homes - in your living rooms. This is what the churches in China do! In the early church, meetings rarely numbered more than twelve people or so. Remember what Jesus said:

"For where TWO or THREE are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." (Matt. 18:20)

AND IT IS HERE - IN THESE SMALL MEETINGS THAT WILL EVENTUALLY DEVELOP AROUND YOU AS YOU PERSIST IN DISTRIBUTING THIS MATERIAL - THAT YOU WILL FIND THAT - READY OR NOT - GOD HAS MADE YOU A SHEPHERD IN HIS FLOCK. YOU HAVE THE WORD (i.e., the BIBLE); AND YOU HAVE HIS SPIRIT IN YOU - and if such is the case, you can say with Paul -

"I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." (Phil. 4:13)

The hope of the church now rests with people like YOU - the kind of people who possess vision and the capacity for self-sacrifice - to get involved!

Please see our articles, "A Plan of Action For Antipas Ministries," and "The Aliya Foundation.

God bless you all!

S.R. Shearer
Antipas Ministries