NOW IS THE TIME TO DO SOMETHING;
IT MAY BE TOO LATE TOMORROW

INTRODUCTION

As I look around today - even among those who are biblically oriented and seem to genuinely grasp what's happening insofar as the unfolding events of the "end of the age" are concerned - I am UTTERLY appalled at how ill-prepared people are both psychologically and spiritually for what awaits them. There seems to be no way to get through to people; to convince them that NOW is the time for action, not tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. Most Christians today seem to be helpless prisoners of the "here and now," and though from time to time they may be excited by a particular calamity that augurs for the "end of the age" such as 9-11 or the American invasion of Iraq, once the commotion of the event dies down, they tend to gravitate back to their old habits of doing things and their old ways of thinking.

Yes, they understand how hopelessly apostate today's Christianity is; how inextricably bound the church is to George Bush's American New World Order System (please see our article, "A Woman Rides the Beast"); and yes, they're planning on leaving their churches and starting a house church in their homes - but not today; maybe tomorrow.

And yes, they're planning on passing out our literature and our flyers - that is, when they get a convenient opportunity to do so. And yes, the Lord has been telling them to begin re-ordering their lives (and their priorities) in the light of the prophetic Scriptures and even helping the ministry out financially so that it can continue on with its work - but that too must wait until a more opportune time. Not now. Not today. There are more pressing "responsibilities" to be taken care of: there are payments to be made on visa and mastercards, mortgages to be met, businesses to run; there are "responsibilities" to children and aged parents - and on and on and on; and in taking care of all these things they forget the admonition of the Scriptures concerning "Last Things:" that we who "know His will" concerning the "end of the age" are to "prepare ourselves for it" just as Noah did with regard to the Flood (cf. Luke 12:45-47). The fact is, it was the little, routine "responsibilities of life" that hindered the people of Noah's day from responding to God's warning, and so it is with Christians today:

"But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

"For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark,

"And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be." (Matt. 24:37-39)

Listen dear brothers and sisters in the Lord, none of these things - "eating," "drinking," "marrying" and "giving in marriage" - are "bad things." They're not sins - they're the legitimate "responsibilities of life" - but, again, it was precisely these things that prevented the people of Noah's time from responding to God's warning; and it is exactly these things that are hindering Christians today.

God help you if you are letting these kinds of things prevent you from taking action now. The people of Noah's day weren't spared, and I somberly warn you (no! - not I but the Lord) neither will you be spared either. As I said in the Antipas Papers:

"Prophecy is nothing more than a roadsign telling us of the danger that's ahead and warning us to take corrective action BEFORE we get to the danger. If we do nothing until we finally get there, it will be too late. Thus, if the only reaction the ANTIPAS PAPERS can elicit from someone who has read the book is 'Wow! - what a wonderful book' - then we have utterly failed in what we set out to do, and that person has missed the point of the book altogether. KNOWLEDGE WHICH DOES NOT PRODUCE ACTION IS WORTHLESS. [We URGE you, if you have not already, to take the time to read the ANTIPAS PAPERS.]

AN EXCUSE FOR INACTION

Still, God's people procrastinate. Take action? - yes, someday; but not now: That's the all too common answer we get - if not in word, than in deed; and in their failure to act, what these Christians are doing is evincing a kind of thinking toward themselves which suggests, sadly, that they are nothing more than a leaf in a river that is flowing down to the sea; a helpless captive of the stream's relentless current; an object which has no will of its own and which cannot act in its own right, but can only be acted upon.

Though they probably would never admit it, what they have done is to surrender themselves to a kind of pseudo-spirituality that makes "fatalism" a virtue and "choice" a sin - hence to do nothing is "spiritual" (Christians call it "trusting in the Lord") and "to act" betrays a "rashness" that is not only carnal, but "ungodly" and "untrusting."

But this is pure nonsense! Fatalism is nothing more than AN EXCUSE FOR INACTION, a pathetic reason for Christians to avoid uncomfortable choices and to put off hard decisions which might inconveniently impact the way they live and cause their friends and loved ones to disassociate themselves from them. Fatalism is a dissimulation - an hypocrisy which allows Christians to cheat insofar as their responsibility to God is concerned.

The sobering fact of the matter is, when Christians "buy into" this kind of mindset - purposefully or perhaps unconsciously and willy-nilly - they have submitted themselves to the "PROCESS" of a SLAUGHTERHOUSE, like -

"... natural brute beasts, made to be taken and DESTROYED ..." (2 Pet. 2:12)

I SOMBERLY WARN YOU

Listen to me here, dear Christians; you need to understand something in all this: this PROCESS that you are calling "fate" and to which you have surrendered yourself and are naively calling "God's will" (but which is really nothing more than your pathetic excuse for inaction) AIMS AT YOUR DESTRUCTION. And it is truly a terrifying PROCESS: without feeling, accountable to no one - at least no one you will ever be able to discover and question. And when it finally takes you captive - and it will eventually if you continue to delay in preparing for it - it will pounce on you just as surely and as suddenly as it pounced on "K" in Franz Kafka's frightening but very "prophetic" novel, Der Prozess ("The Process") - without warning, in the middle of the night when you least expect it.

Commenting on the force and energy of Kafka's famous book, George Steiner writes:

"The thought that there is anything fresh to be said of Franz Kafka's Der Prozess is implausible ... This short novel (written originally in German) has passed into far more than classical literary status ... Countless are those who have not read it, who may not even have seen stage, film, or television versions (of it), but who are familiar with its main outline and situations ... Kafka has become an adjective. In more than 100 languages, the epithet "kafkaseque" attaches (itself) to the central images ... (and) absurdities of our time ..."

Der Prozess is the terrifying tale of "Joseph K.," a respectable functionary in a bank who is suddenly arrested and must defend his innocence against a charge about which he can get no information. It's a charge which leads him by degrees into a nightmare world of specters, shadows and unseen forces that thrust him down a path past a vast army of anonymous bureaucrats, petty officials, and opaque judicial proceedings - all answerable to an authority which "K" can by no means discern or comprehend - to a bestial death in a gravel pit outside Prague, Czechoslovakia. And all the while he is receiving assurances from those who are pushing him inexorably toward the gravel pit that "everything will work out in the end." Is that what you think? - that everything will work out for you insofar as the "end of the age" is concerned? If you continue to do nothing, don't be so sure that it will.

Kafka's character "K" was the product - like most of us are today - of a polity and a society encompassed about and directed by unseen forces that had reduced him (i.e., "K") to the menial status of a "cog in a giant, unfeeling socio-economic machine" over which he had no authority nor even the slightest bit of influence. As a result, he was not used to taking matters into his own hands, but instead was used to letting "things take care of themselves," just as we are today. [Please see our article, "Cogs in a Machine."]

And make no mistake about it - the maze in which "K" operated and in which he was ultimately trapped, the mind-numbing routines he was a part of, the pathetic absurdities that he was involved in, and the wretched pretenses in which he participated and which he mistakenly thought lent some measure of importance and meaning to his life are exactly those same mazes, routines, absurdities and pretenses which entrap most of us today - EVEN AS CHRISTIANS: paying our bills on time and maintaining a good credit rating; keeping a clean and neat house, and a well-mowed lawn; having a good job; presenting a proper personal appearance; having the right friends; being a good church member, and so forth and so on.

All these things, it is supposed, will "get us ahead" in the "machine" we serve - and that's what's important, isn't it?

THE ABSURDITY OF IT ALL

Most of us, of course, don't like to think about the absurdity of it all - as if Christ on THAT DAY is going to check our credit rating and ask us whether or not we kept our lawn trimmed and well-maintained, and our bathrooms cleaned and scrubbed; or whether we were too fat, our hair was too long, or our clothes weren't "just right."

Who the heck makes up these rules anyway? - rules that keep us toiling and struggling day in and day out trying to impress people who really don't care that much about us anyway. But that's what cogs do! - they just keep whirring and spinning away; their sole purpose is to keep the "machine" humming along while keeping their mouths shut and their noses clean. After all, it's not the purpose of a cog to inquire about the aims of the machine it serves or to ask where it's going. And it's extremely important to "look good" while we're doing it. "Looking good," and being "pleasant" - that's what it's all about; that and "going along to get along."

KAFKA'S TALE

So also with Kafka's character "K;" but something went wrong. Kafka writes:

"Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. His landlady's cook, who always brought him his breakfast at eight o'clock, failed to appear on this occasion. That had never happened before."

Ah! The routine of "K's" life is broken, and not for good, but for evil - and everyone seemed to know what was happening (even his landlady's cook) except "K." Obviously, an unseen hand was being raised against him - a hand that "K" could neither see nor fathom. Kafka continues:

"At once there was a knock at the door and a man entered whom he (i.e., "K") had never seen before in the house ... 'Who are you'? asked K ... But the man ignored the question, as though his appearance needed no explanation ... 'Anna is to bring me my breakfast', said K, and then studied the fellow, silently and carefully, trying to make out who he could be.

"The man did not submit to this scrutiny for very long, but turned to the door and opened it slightly so as to report to someone who was evidently standing just behind it: 'He says Anna is to bring him his breakfast'. A short guffaw from the next room came in answer ... 'It can't be done'."

"K" never sees the person who orders his arrest - standing always just out of sight.

WE ARE NO MORE THAN HUMBLE SERVANTS

"Here are my identification papers," "K" says to the official. But the official is unimpressed. He explains:

"'What are your papers to us? ... You're behaving worse than a child. What are you after? Do you think you'll bring this fine case of yours to a speedier end by wrangling with us ... over papers and warrants? We are humble subordinates who can scarcely find our way through a legal document and have nothing to do with your case except to stand guard over you for ten hours a day and draw our pay for it.

"That's all we are, but we're quite capable of grasping the fact that the high authority we serve, before they would order such an arrest as this, must be quite well informed about the reasons for the arrest and the person of the prisoner. There can be no mistake about that.

"Our officials, so far as I know them, and I know only the lowest grades among them, never go (aimlessly) hunting for crime in the populace, but, as the Law decrees, are drawn toward the guilty and must send out (us to arrest them). That is the Law. How could there be a mistake in that'." [This kind of thinking, of course, is precisely the same kind of thinking that impregnates the lackeys who do the bidding for Attorney General John Ashcroft's new National Security State: please see our articles, "The Birth of a Christian Police State," "Ashcroft: Making a List of Dissenters," and "John Ashcroft, Theodore Olson and the New National Security State."]

What kind of a retort could "K" give to that? None, of course! "K" recognized himself in them: "humble subordinates" to the "powers that be;" "cogs" in the same machine that he served. "K" knew that it was useless to get an answer out of any of them. They had no real power; they answered to a loftier authority.

All that these state functionaries wanted was to do their job, to be paid for it, and to return each night to the comfort and safety of their own homes and the love of their own families. Besides, they were doing nothing more than what "K" would have done if he had been in their place. What's more, they were armed with "official documents" - though "K" was never allowed to see them. Obviously, if there had been a mistake, the smooth functioning of the "Process" would eventually discover it, and the truth would come out. Over and over "K" was assured of that!

THINGS DON'T ALWAYS WORK OUT

But, again, that isn't what happens; and so, Kafka writes -

"... on the evening before K's thirty-first birthday - it was about nine o'clock, the time when a hush falls on the streets - two men came to his house (where he had been held for almost a year under 'house arrest' during which time he had suffered through numerous, mind-numbing and extremely opaque judicial proceedings, the judgments and conclusions of which 'K' was still not certain). K said to himself, 'The only thing for me to do is to continue to keep my intelligence and be calm and analytical ...

"K submitted himself to the guidance of his (new) escorts. In complete harmony ... all three ... made their way across a bridge ... (and) out of the town ... to a small stone quarry, deserted and desolate with a single house close to the edge ... After an exchange of courteous formalities regarding which of them was to take precedence in the next task ... one of them came up to K and removed his (i.e., "K's") coat, his waistcoat, and finally his shirt. K shivered involuntarily, whereupon the man gave him a light, reassuring pat on the back. Then he folded the clothes carefully together, as if they were likely to be used again at some time, although perhaps not immediately.

"Not to leave K standing motionless, exposed to the night breeze, which was rather chilly, he took him by the arm and walked him up and down a little, while his partner investigated the quarry to find a suitable spot. When he had found it he beckoned, and K's companion led him over there. It was a spot near the cliffside where a loose boulder was lying. The two of them laid K gently down on the ground, propped him against the boulder, and settled his head comfortably upon it. With a flicker as of a light going up, the casements of a window (in the nearby house) suddenly flew open; then a human figure emerged from the doorway, faint and insubstantial, walked over to K and leaned abruptly far forward and stretched both arms still farther.

"Who was he? A good man? Someone who sympathized? Someone who wanted to help? Was it one person only? Or was it mankind? Was help at hand? Were there arguments in his favor that had been overlooked? Of course there must be ... All would now become plain ... But suddenly the hand of one of the figures was at K's throat, while the other hand thrust a knife deep into his heart and turned twice."

A PROPHETIC BOOK

The "Process" was now finished - an absurd process, always opaque (at least insofar as "K" was concerned) and indefinite (that is, up until the final act of butchery and slaughter). It had been staffed by petty bureaucrats and small-minded government minions who were "just following orders" and doing what they were told. They (i.e., these minions and bureaucrats) were not necessarily evil men - at least as we usually understand that word. Most of them were "family men" who just wanted to do what was "right" and get on with their lives - and this blasé nonchalance lent to the PROCESS that finally butchered "K" a certain kind of horror that is hard to duplicate in other more "arranged" systems; A PROCESS THAT HAD BEEN DIRECTED BY UNSEEN FORCES AND SPECTRAL AGENCIES FROM WHICH THERE SEEMED TO BE NO ESCAPE.

"K" had submitted himself to these forces and these agencies partly because he believed that "everything would work out in the end," and partly because he believed he had no choice in the matter - which is precisely what so many Christians are doing today insofar as their own lives are concerned and the impact the "end of the age" is having on them. Like "K," what they are really doing is blindly and very, very STUPIDLY submitting themselves to a "course of events" that will ultimately culminate in their destruction.

Der Prozess was first published in 1925. It was written in German, and the German Jews should have read it before submitting themselves - kafkaseque-like - to the merciless, cold-blooded "Process" of Hitler's "Final Solution" just as "K" had done with regard to the "Process" that finally consumed him.

Commenting on the book, Steiner - a Jew like Kafka - writes:

"Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a PROPHECY, this hauntingly believable story stands out as one of the great novels of our times. Kafka's unsurpassed nightmare vision rings with chilling truth as it foreshadows the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the mad agendas of ... totalitarian regimes."

GERMAN JEWS REFUSE TO HEAR THE PROPHECY

But the Jews of Germany didn't read Kafka in 1925; he was too NEGATIVE (which, of course, is exactly what Christians say about us in Antipas). Or if the Jews did read Kafka, they refused to believe that such a "Process" was possible, and that in seven short years they would be made the singular object of it. Steiner calls the book PROPHETIC. And he's right. Certainly for the Jews it was mercilessly PROPHETIC, even to the point where most Jews in Hitler's Germany believed - like Kafka's character "K" - that ultimately everything would work out; and besides, they were powerless prisoners of a "Process" over which they had no control. For these reasons, they submitted themselves to it, and refused to take any meaningful action which might deliver them from it.

Moreover, the book is PROPHETIC not only in these larger matters, but also in the way that it foreshadows even the minutiae and details of Hitler's Final Solution: for example, in the way Kafka describes the rock quarry where "K" was killed (a favorite place of killing in the early days of the "Final Solution"), and in the way "K" was told to carefully fold his clothes before proceeding at last to the place of butchery, etc.. This is exactly what happened to the Jews as they - with only a few soldiers guarding them - proceeded to the gravel pits (and later the death chambers) where they were slaughtered.

If they had decided to do something then - to revolt or make a "break for it" - they probably could have. But taking matters into their own hands was a concept that was completely foreign to them. They were too used to letting things "work our for themselves;" of seeing themselves as nothing more than a leaf carried forward by a current over which they had no control; as objects with no wills of their own, and which could not act in their own right. Is this the way YOU think? - then God help you!

KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED

We think that because we are Christians things will work out for us, or that we will be sustained if we are ultimately entrapped in this PROCESS; that somehow or other, "we will rise to the occasion" when the "occasion" demands it.

But that's not necessarily the case at all. The truth of the matter is, we will probably acquit ourselves under the pressure of this PROCESS about as well as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the former chief of operations for al-Qaeda, has done while he has been held as a prisoner in the hands of his American captors: Not very well!

Now I know that most Christians would object here. Sheikh Mohammed is not a Christian; he is a Moslem. But what difference does that make to a Christian who has failed to take seriously his Christianity all his life long - and I mean to take it seriously, "really" seriously! Does that person think that somehow or other he will rise to the occasion now? Ha!

And then when that day finally comes - and it will - suddenly and without warning, we think that we will be prepared? Hardly! We will be about as prepared as Sheikh Mohammed was when the soldiers of the American New World Order System came for him - and, sadly, probably much less so.

THE PROCESS BEGINS FOR
KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED

That day came for Khalid last March, when he was roughly awakened by a raiding party of Pakistani police (acting like the "good little minions" and "toadies" they are to their American masters) and American commandos (i.e., CIA and Delta Force operatives). Mark Bowden describes what happened in the Atlantic Monthly. Bowden writes:

"Anticipating a gunfight, the commandos entered loud and fast. Instead, they found him asleep. He was pulled from his bed, hooded, bound, hustled from the house, placed in a vehicle, and driven quickly away ... In the first hours of his captivity, the hood came off and a picture was taken ... There is an anxious, searching quality to his expression in that first post-arrest photo. It is the look of a man awakened into a nightmare. Everything that has given his life meaning, his role as husband and father, his leadership, his stature, plans, and ambitions, is finished. His future is months, maybe years, of imprisonment and interrogation; a military tribunal, AND ALMOST CERTAIN DEATH. You can practically see the wheels turning in his head, processing his terminal predicament. How will he spend his last months and years? Will he maintain a dignified, defiant silence? Or will he succumb to his enemy and betray his friends, his cause, and his faith?

"On the third day (of his captivity), once more hooded, Sheikh Mohammed was driven to Chakala Air Force base in Rawalpindi, and turned over to U.S. forces. From there, he was flown to the CIA interrogation center in Bagram, Afghanistan, and from there, some days later, taken to an 'undisclosed location' - a place the CIA calls 'Hotel California' - presumably a facility in another cooperative (client-state) nation, or perhaps a specially designed prison aboard an aircraft carrier.

"It doesn't matter much where, because the place would not have been familiar or identifiable to him. Place and time, the anchors of sanity, were about to come unmoored. He might as well have been entering a new dimension, a strange new world where his every word, move, and sensation would be monitored, and measured, where things might be as they seemed but might not; where there would be no such thing as day or night, or normal patterns of eating and drinking, wakefulness and sleep; where hot and cold, wet and dry, clean and dirty, truth and lies, would all be tangled and distorted.

"... He would most likely have been locked naked in a cell with no trace of natural daylight. The space would be filled night and day with ... artificial, blinding light and loud noise, and would be so small that he would be unable to stand upright, to sit comfortably, or to recline fully.

"He would be kept awake, cold, and probably wet. If he managed to doze, he would be roughly awakened. He would be fed infrequently and irregularly, and then only with thin, tasteless meals ... On occasion he might be given a drug - heroin or sodium pentothal ... These drugs could be administered surreptitiously with food or drink ...

"Then would come the torture ..."

And so Bowden's report goes on and on for many more terrifying pages. It's enough to make one wretch in disgust. No need to go further here - you get the idea. [If you want to know more, we refer you directly to Bowden's account, "The Dark Art of Interrogation: a survey of the landscape of persuasion" in the October 2003 edition of the Atlantic Monthly.]

CHRISTIANS DON'T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT ALL THIS

Now in all of this, you should understand that Sheikh Mohammed is a very hardened individual, one which none of us could be favorably compared to, at least not psychologically and physically. And spiritually, most of us are dwarfs, the products of a Christianity that is soft and feminine in a very "squishy" and "cry-baby" way; a Christianity devoted to the "FELT NEEDS" of our "inner child" [that's how the prissy, sissified IDIOTS at Saddleback Church in Southern California refer to such "privations" (so called)] and other such nonsense. And we think that this kind of Christianity will sustain us? Hardly!

Most Christians, of course, don't think that any of this is REAL; that these things don't happen in the modern world, or at least here in America; and most assuredly Americans are not involved in them, at least not on any kind of routine basis. Americans just don't act in such a brutal fashion; they don't torture their prisoners. But that's simply not true. We have been doing it for a long time now to maintain order in our client states. Just ask the poor peasants of Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Argentina, the Congo (Zaire), Angola, Malaysia, the Philippines, etc.

The fact is, what's happening to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been going on now for years and years throughout America's system of client states. We are EXPERTS at it. [Please see our articles on this subject, "The Death Squads: Bringing in the Kingdom of God through Terror, Torture, and Death," and "Christian Evangelicals and the Death Squads: Oh What a Tangled Web We Are Weaving for Ourselves."]

And now these techniques are about to be turned on us, on YOU - and when this PROCESS finally comes for you, it will pounce on you as suddenly and as brutally as it did on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

EVERYTHING IS CHANGING

Listen to me, dear brothers and sisters in the Lord, we don't have to share in "K's" fate (at least on a spiritual level), or suffer the same kind of humiliation that Sheikh Mohammed is suffering now. But if we don't act quickly, we most assuredly will. Don't think - even for a minute - that you can escape the fate of "K" or Sheikh Mohammed if you fail to act. The day is almost gone, and the night approaches when no man can work (cf. John 9:4). The very real fact of the matter is, EVERYTHING IS CHANGING NOW. NOTHING IS STAYING THE SAME - and if you want to stay true to God, YOU MUST ACT - AND DO SO QUICKLY!

One has only to open his eyes to see what's happening. We are fast being reduced to the same status as "K" in Franz Kafka's Der Prozess - cogs in George Bush's American New World Order System; cogs which are as defenseless as "K" if the system for some inexplicable reason decides to turn on us. WE MUST STRUGGLE WITH ALL OF OUR MIGHT FROM BEING SUBSUMED IN THIS SYSTEM - of being made a cog in it, and of surrendering ourselves to the kind of "fatalism" that "K" resigned himself to.

THE SITUATION IS ALREADY FAR ADVANCED

And just how far advanced we are as a society and as a church in the PROCESS of being reduced to the status of an android in the "American New World Order System" and a robot in its "PARTNER IN SHAME," today's "lackey Christian church" (i.e., the church of C. Peter Wagner, D. James Kennedy, John Hagee, Charles Stanley, etc.), is plain enough for anyone to see who really wants to see. For example, Kevin Baker, the chief historical researcher for the series, The American Century, writes in Harper's Magazine:

"Our (American) democratic culture ... is fading away ... (and) we are slowly becoming conditioned to a MILITARY style of discipline (insofar as our everyday lives are concerned). We live in a country now where anyone can be banned from flying, or detained and searched, or browbeaten and humiliated, or arrested and hauled off to prison for as long as the Supreme Commander (i.e., Bush and his toady Ashcroft) says so - and where soon Americans may even be stripped of their citizenship at his discretion. We have become a nation of secret police raids that never make the papers, and of permanent gag orders; of military tribunals and perhaps even drumhead death sentences that cannot be appealed."

BECOMING A "GRUNT" IN THE "SYSTEM"

It's almost as if we - having spent most of our lives as civilians who could pretty much go where we wanted to go, and do what we wanted to do - suddenly find that we've been drafted into the army, and not as officers, but as "privates" and "grunts" where everything we do and say is subject to the whim of a higher authority, and a very self-serving, mean-spirited authority at that.

This is what's happening! No kidding around! - and I pray that God would open your eyes to the REALITY of it all; that somehow or other you would begin to recognize what's happening: that forces are working on you which aim at reducing you to android status in both the church and the state, and if you don't somehow or other disassociate yourself from both these entities, you will most assuredly end up as an android in this system. Now, if you are not alarmed by all this - really alarmed - then it hasn't really seeped into your head what's going on. You see, but you don't really see; you hear, but you don't really hear.

Baker continues:

"We have not yet arrived at a point where we receive letters ordering us to cut our hair or our grass. But we may well be told, in the very near future, what private firms we are to trust with our retirement savings and our health care; and what ... (churches) the administration will turn us over to if we fall upon hard times." [Please see our article on the effort by the Bush administration to turn over the management of much of our social programs and even our schools to church organizations, "Creating a Common Partnership Between the Moneyed Elites and the Religious Elites" - a nightmare scenario that will tie our churches irrevocably to George Bush's American New World Order System and make us slaves to a Christian religious system that has NOTHING to do with Christ, and everything to do with CONTROL (please see our article, "Today's Church: Making Zombies out of Christians - the Prophets and Apostles Movement").]

THE ARMY: AN INSTRUMENT OF CHANGE -
CREATING A NATION OF ROBOTS

And, again, make no mistake about it, we are closer to becoming a nation of foot-soldiers and "grunts" than most of us realize - "grunts" and soldiers whose sole purpose is to stand guard over the world-wide commercial interests of U.S. multinational corporations like Halliburton and ExxonMobil, and to serve as cannon fodder in their defense if it becomes necessary. The transformation that is in view here is to create a situation where (in the words of an old German proverb) - instead of a nation that possesses an army, America becomes an army that possesses a nation. And this is not as laughable as one might suppose; the fact is, such a transformation has become absolutely necessary to America's elites.

What's happened is this: the United States has created a vast empire of client states that is ruled over by toady-like indigenous elites in the employ of U.S. multinational corporations whose interests are so predatory and grasping that the indigenous elites that serve the interests of these American multinationals can be maintained in power only at the point of a gun - an AMERICAN GUN. [Please see our articles, "The Versailles Phenomenon" and "The American Empire: the Corporate / Pentagon / CIA / Missionary Archipelago."]

The problem is, the American military is now stretched so thinly around the world holding this vast empire - which is inherently unstable - together that it is about to fracture. More than 140,000 troops are now deployed in occupied Iraq; 40,000 more are in Kuwait or other countries in the region. We have about 10,000 additional troops fighting and trying to hold things together in Afghanistan, to say nothing of the troops that have been surreptitiously deployed in places like Central Asia and Colombia. Then there are the troops we still have stationed in Europe, Korea, Japan, etc. There seems to be no end to it. Indeed, American forces are now deployed in over 120 different countries around the world. That's one hundred and twenty countries; ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY!

The very real fact of the matter is, between our occupation forces, replacements for those troops, and troops being held in abeyance for emergency deployment in North Korea, there are only three active-duty Army brigades (brigades, not divisions) available for potential new missions.

This is putting an extreme amount of pressure on our reserve and National Guard troops who have been forced to pick up the slack. Indeed, Colbert King of the Washington Post writes:

"The active-duty regular armed forces can't keep up with the Bush administration's foreign commitments. So now constant deployment is falling on the shoulders of members of the reserves and the National Guard, thousands of whom are mobilized and on duty in Iraq. And recently, they received the unwelcome news that they were going to have their tours of active duty extended, which is not what either they, their families, or their bosses back home expected when the orders came. Happy campers they are not."

REINSTATING THE DRAFT

The truth is, we have reached the same "Crisis in Military Manpower" that the Roman Republic reached shortly before it transformed itself into a military dictatorship. An "All Volunteer Army" will no longer suffice to hold the American Empire together. It simply can't generate the number of soldiers needed. And it's not possible to go back to the "way things were;" GLOBALIZATION has proceeded too far down the path to be stopped now. Our corporations are by now far too invested in the Third World to ever pull out. To do so would spell disaster for them as commercial entities, and it would mean the total collapse of the American New World Order System, and the melt-down of the world economy. And make no mistake about it, THE DEMOCRATS ARE AS INVESTED IN THIS SYSTEM AS ARE THE REPUBLICANS.

A change in government (as unlikely as that might be in the 2004 election) would not halt the steady march of GLOBALIZATION now, which is ENTIRELY dependent on American arms to sustain it. It might change the direction of certain domestic social issues like "prayer in the schools," abortion, affirmative action, etc., but it would have no effect whatsoever on the process of GLOBALIZATION itself - and if one doubts that, one should remind himself that it was Clinton that forced NAFTA and the WTO on an unwilling American people who opposed it by majorities as high as 80 percent. Hence, even if Bush is defeated in 2004 (which, again, is highly unlikely, we will probably have another 9-11 event before that happens) the requirement for a HUGE army will not be diminished. THE DRAFT IS COMING; ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, IT IS COMING. [Please see our article on 9-11, "The Events of September 11, 2001: What's Going On?"]

Baker writes:

"We simply cannot go on occupying vast swaths ... (of the world) ... without resorting to a military draft."

NO ONE CAN SHIRK THIS DUTY

To this end, a bill has been introduced into Congress called the Universal Service Act of 2003. It proposes that all Americans aged 18-26 be called up to "active duty." Not some, but ALL. This is much more than what was called for in the drafts of World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. This is something NEVER before contemplated in this country or - for that matter - in any other modern Western nation with the sole exception of Israel, which is another matter (and another dynamic) altogether. King writes:

"(No one would be able to shirk this "duty") using college deferments or appeals. The only deferment would be for the purpose of finishing high school, and that wouldn't extend beyond the age of 20. The only exemption from service would be for those who have a physical or mental disability which prevents them from serving. All others - male or FEMALE, rich or poor, from the cities, suburbs, or rural areas - must serve ... What's more, the bill would require those citizens and permanent residents not selected specifically for military service to fulfill their national service obligations in a civilian capacity for at least two years."

My heavens! Think about that: EVERY young person in the country a member of the military - in one stroke! This has enormous implications for REAL democracy in the United States, and for hurrying along the "Process" which aims at reducing us all to cogs in a machine - cogs which no longer think for themselves and are incapable psychologically of taking action on their own initiative.

Thinking for ourselves and taking action on our own initiative are not qualities that are inherent to us; they are learned, and once learned, they must be patiently cultivated WITH OTHERS OF LIKE-MIND. It is NOT something you can do on your own. You must associate yourself ACTIVELY with others of like-mind who will encourage you in this direction.

DICTATORSHIP

Yes! Dictatorship! That's where we are headed; a dictatorship that frowns on any kind of activity that would challenge its effort to subsume all of us into a "clump society" where no deviation is allowed in either the state or the church, and where the sole purpose of the church is to morally undergird the activities of the state and to justify those activities to the population - just as D. James Kennedy, John Hagee, Charles Stanley, Ted Haggert, etc. are doing right now.

The Roman Republic did not survive its "Crisis in Military Manpower;" it was transformed into a dictatorship as a result; and that is PRECISELY what is happening to the United States now - it too is being transformed into a dictatorship, right now before our very eyes!

The fact is, "Universal Service" cannot help but foster anti-democratic sentiments in the United States - after all, the army is not a democratic institution. The world that a soldier lives in is one in which nearly every aspect of his life is carefully controlled, and the code to which this world adheres is not a democratic one, but one that emphasizes "order and discipline," and honors the kind of blind obedience that sent Tennyson's Light Brigade off on its suicidal charge into the teeth of the Russian guns at Sebastopol in the Crimean War. Baker writes:

"It is - ironically, considering our victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War - the closest thing in America to the COLLECTIVIST ideal: millions of men and women working toward the same end, under the same, all-intrusive discipline. Grow your hair too long, and you will receive a threatening letter. Let the grass grow too long around the house you live in on base, and you will get another letter. Our servicemen and women shop at the same PX or BX monopolies ... (etc.). Even the personal behavior of their spouses is carefully scrutinized, and can be cause for official reprimands and other punishments."

CHRISTIAN WARRIORS

And be clear here, when you receive your sons and daughters back from their stints in the military, you will probably NOT be receiving the same sons and daughters who left you two years earlier. They've now been transformed into "Christian Crusaders" for the American New World Order System - soldiers like those at Fort Hood, Texas, "Home of America's Hammer," who greeted President Bush recently with shouts of "Hu-AH, Hu-AH" - a primal war cry that one would have expected to hear from the Spartans or Franco's Falangist street demonstrators in Madrid in the 1930s.

I know that this must seem offensive to those of you who may have sons and daughters in the military; but if you don't think that this danger is very real insofar as your children are concerned, then you are greatly underestimating the power of the "propaganda machinery" of the American military.

A NEW ORDER OF TEMPLARS

And it is happening right now. For example, President Bush - in a speech permeated with a kind of "Christian-speak" that even a secularist like Baker could easily detect, and which looked like it had been lifted straight off the pages of one of D. James Kennedy's Sunday sermons at his giant church in Coral Gables, Florida - told the wildly cheering men and women of the First Cavalry Division and the Fourth Infantry Division at Ft. Hood:

"Our country is in a great contest of will and purpose. We're being tested ... We must, and we will, protect the American people and our friends and allies from catastrophic violence wherever the source, whatever the threat."

This is the kind of rhetoric that created the Templars, the Knights of St. John, the Teutonic Knights and all the other "Crusading Orders" that the West sent hurtling against the Islamic world 1,000 years ago to take back the Holy Land for "Christ and the church." And now Bush is using it again to incite his new Templars - i.e., the soldiers of the First Cavalry Division and the Third and Fourth Infantry Divisions - in his present-day Holy War against Islam. And make no mistake about it, that's what most of America's soldiers in Iraq believe the war is all about: battling back the forces of evil. For instance, one soldier in Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell's 1st Battalion, 22nd Regiment says:

"We are fighting darkness here, we are fighting the devil."

And that's what most of Russell's men think too. For example, Xuan Tran, a Vietnam refugee, a Christian, and a captain in Russell's unit, distributes books to his men entitled "Bullet-proof Faith" and thanks God for protecting the unit.

Russell says:

"I truly believe we are protected by God."

These are not the words that one would have found on the lips of those soldiers who came trudging dejectedly back from Vietnam (and I know because I am one of those who came back from there); they are the words of a new kind of soldier - a Knight Templar fighting to expand the "Kingdom of God on earth" (which means, of course, the American New World Order System).

YOUR CHILDREN BELONG TO THE SYSTEM NOW

No! - these won't be your kids you're getting back - at least not the way you gave them up to the draft two or three years earlier. They no longer belong to you; they belong to the "Empire" now as Templars in the service of "Christ and the church" - and so much so that you would do well to carefully guard what you say in their presence lest you be delivered up to the machinery of Ashcroft's Inquisition - fulfilling the words of Christ when He said:

"... and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death." (Matt. 10:21)

Hitler Jungend (Hitler Youth): that's what they've become - ready, after stints in the military, to persevere as "good toadies" in the "System" by taking their places in the pews of America's "lackey churches" and soldiering on slavishly in the service of the American New World Order System that they mistakenly think is dedicated to building a world that is safe for "Christ and the church," but which is really dedicated to piling up cash in the coffers of the ultra-rich using the American military as the "hammer" to get the job done.

And my-o-my! - won't the pastors of America's "lackey churches" love to get these programmed Christian androids back from the military; Christian robots programmed as "stooges" to the "say so" of their pastors and willing to suffer through their pastor's nauseously boring Sunday morning services quietly and in "good order," and to obediently put money in the basket when it is passed.

A HORRIBLE THOUGHT

"Cogs in a giant machine" - that's what you will become if you don't get out now, and get your children and your loved ones out as well! And that's a horrible thought, or at least a very uncomfortable one: that you are now nothing more than a "cog in a machine." It's not the kind of thought that one readily accepts. It takes a certain kind of EPIPHANY - a kind of "awakening" - to accede to such thinking, the kind of "awakening," for example, that President Eisenhower had at the end of his presidency: that there existed in the United States a "complex of forces" that even he - as president - could by no means direct or even influence; one that he recognized had a SPIRITUAL dimension as well as a physical one.

And make no mistake about it, these are TERRIFYING forces indeed; UGLY, UNSIGHTLY, and REPULSIVE - and so much so that they must dwell in ANONYMITY lest the Christians they are deluding catch a glimpse of them and ask themselves:

"ARE THESE THE PEOPLE WITH WHOM WE HAVE MADE COMMON CAUSE? ARE THESE THE FORCES THE CHURCH HAS ALLIED HERSELF TO?

No! - best to hide their identity and surround them in anonymity.

ANONYMITY

Anonymity in such circumstances is a very, very useful thing; it lends to those who possess it a phantom-like quality that is hard to "draw down on;" hard to "target;" and it makes it difficult for "outsiders" to fathom the REAL purposes of the PROCESS that has entrapped them. And why is that? - because if once one discovers who the real leaders are, it is easy from there to discern what the "movement" (in this case, the American New World Order System) is really all about: which is MONEY.

So long as the leaders remain hidden from view, their real purposes remain hidden as well, which makes it all but impossible to effectively challenge them. One is left like Don Quixote alone in a field tilting at windmills, or like a lone madman armed with a wooden sword stabbing at phantoms that no one else can see.

Yes! - it's best that the people behind the American New World Order System remain hidden. It would not do to reveal them to the world, and most especially to the members of the church. Their ugly malevolence, their hateful spite, their vile rancor and their bloody appearance are too much to bear - like the monster in the movie Predator removing its mask and revealing its terrible, insect-like visage.

These are the "monsters" against whom Professor C. Wright Mills of Columbia University raged in his book, The Power Elite (please see our article, "The Elite, Money, and the End of Days"), and the people that the Apostle Peter called -

"... wells without water, clouds that are carried (about) with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever." (2 Pet. 2:17)

EISENHOWER

So thoroughly have these men cloaked themselves in the robes of anonymity that there is very little possibility that most men can find them out - let alone someone like Kafka. But unlike Kafka - who had existed his whole life long at the very bottom of the "scheme of things" - Eisenhower, as President of the United States, was high enough up in this same "scheme" that he could discern, at least marginally, the locus of these vague "forces" in a shadowy NEXUS of power which encompassed the elites of (1) the American business establishment, (2) the American military establishment, and (3) the inner sanctums of American party politics (especially Republican Party politics, and most especially in the Republican Party's growing relationship with the conservative Christian community).

These elites, Eisenhower felt, were no longer responsive to the cares and desires of ordinary Americans and were entirely devoted to their own selfish interests and their own grasping purposes. [Please see our articles, the "Religious Right and the Business Right: An Alliance Made in Hell" and "Political Christianity;" please also see our article, "The Cedars: The House on 24th Street - Laying the Foundation for a New Holy War against the Poor of the Earth" for a "working description" of just how the American evangelical church impacts this nexus of power. ]

EISENHOWER'S WARNING TO THE NATION

The dark, phantom-like (though, nonetheless, very real) power of these elites so concerned Eisenhower that - alone and without the knowledge of his heretofore most trusted advisors (Secretary of the Treasury George M. Humphrey, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA Chief Allen Dulles and Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams) - he took to the air on January 17, 1961, three short days before the end of his presidency, to warn the nation against them. The warning was especially striking coming from Eisenhower, a product himself of the military and a good friend of "Big Business." He warned:

"A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. But we must remember that our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment ...

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, EVEN SPIRITUAL — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society."

This sounds very much like the description Mills gave of this same "elite of power:"

"... in this particular epoch a conjunction of historical circumstances has led to the rise of an elite of power ... the men of the circles composing this elite, severally and collectively, now make such key decisions as are made; and that, given the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power now available, the decisions that they make and fail to make carry more consequences for more people than has ever been the case in the world history of mankind."

DEADLY CONSEQUENCES

Plainly, Eisenhower was frightened by this new "complex of power" which he was bequeathing to JFK - a dark and evil force that in three short years would fall on Kennedy with deadly force; and four years after that on Martin Luther King, and eventually on Kennedy's own brother, Robert.

Eisenhower had been the faithful servant of this "conjunction of power" and it was precisely as its servant that he had become frightened by it - LIKE A DEVOTED MINION WHO HAD ADMIRED HIS MASTER FROM AFAR, BUT WHO, AFTER BEING DRAWN CLOSER TO HIS EMPLOYER AND INTO HIS SECRET CONFIDENCES, HAD BEEN TERRIFIED BY WHAT HE SAW.

Again, this is what happened to "K" in Kafka's novel. Like Eisenhower, Kafka's character "K" had been the devoted servant of a similar "convergence of power" - one that had comfortably organized and guided his life and which he had felt lent meaning to it. But suddenly and without warning that "convergence of power" that "K" had so dutifully devoted himself had inexplicably turned on "K." No explanation was given; no reason was offered.

THESE SPECTRAL FORCES EXIST

Yes, dear Christian, there do exist in the "real world" the shadowy, spectral forces that Kafka alludes to in his novel, Der Prozess, and against which Eisenhower rightly and fairly raged in his Farewell Speech to the Nation in 1961 - AND THEY ARE PRECISELY THOSE FORCES THAT ARE LEADING THE NATION INTO WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST TODAY; THE SAME FORCES THAT THE CHURCH HAS ALLIED HERSELF TO. Doesn't that horrify you? - it should! [Please see our articles, "The Coming War in Iraq," and "Israel and the Renewed Struggle for the Holy Land."]

These "forces" are now directed at YOU; double-dealing, duplicitous, always on the verge of stabbing you in the back. Venomous, lethal, and very, very vicious! But though they dwell behind closed doors and drawn curtains as hidden phantoms and unseen ghosts, they do emerge from time to time from the gloom they inhabit, and if one is quick enough, it's actually possible to catch a glimpse of them as they scurry about on their deadly business. AND WHEN ONCE ONE CATCHES A GLIMPSE OF THEM, THEIR CONNECTION TO THE AMERICAN EVANGELICAL CHURCH BECOMES PAINFULLY OBVIOUS.

FOLLOWING "VAPOR TRAILS" IN ORDER TO CATCH
A GLIMPSE OF AMERICA'S "HIDDEN MASTERS"

And just how deadly and venomous these forces are, AND HOW CLOSELY THEY ARE ALLIED TO THE CHURCH, is easy enough to see - and if you don't see, it's because you don't want to see, fulfilling the words of Christ when He said,

"Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not?" (Mark 8:18)

For example, when these forces conspired against JFK on November 22, 1963 to slaughter him in front of his wife and a horrified nation because he had refused to do their bidding in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, was planning to pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam, was considering the possibility of ending Big Oil's 27.5 percent oil depletion allowance, and - worst of all - was threatening to "tear up the CIA (the elite's "enforcer") and scatter it to the winds," many of the "leading lights" of this malevolent clique brazenly assembled together the night before the assassination in the home of Dallas oil magnate Clint Murchison to put an end to him.

H.L. HUNT

Ostensibly, it was an event to honor J. Edgar Hoover, the mean-spirited, maniacal, "cross-dressing" head of the FBI, who was a close friend of Murchison; and H.L. Hunt, another Texas oil baron and the "MONEY-MAN" behind what was then the Christian Right's leading "TEMPLE" to the "god of wealth" and the "American Free Enterprise System" in the country, Rev. W.A. Criswell's First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. IT'S HERE - IT'S PRECISELY HERE - IN THE CONNECTION BETWEEN HUNT AND CRISWELL THAT THE LINK BETWEEN THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ELITES (ON THE ONE HAND) AND THE AMERICAN EVANGELICAL CHURCH (ON THE OTHER HAND) BECOMES PLAIN.

The guest list included most of the "Who's Who" of the oil elite. In addition, John McCloy, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank; Richard Nixon, the former vice president and a "card-carrying member" of the "McCarthy Wing" of the Republican Party; George Brown of Brown and Root - a Texas construction company with a Nazi past that is linked inextricably to both Bush senior and Bush junior; R.L. Thornton, president of the Mercantile Bank (a bank with powerful ties to the Texas oil industry); and Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, brother of General Charles Cabell, former Deputy Director of the CIA, who had a BURNING hatred for President Kennedy who had fired him for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. [For a detailed discussion of the Bush family's ties to Brown and Root and the Nazi connections of both the company and the Bush family, please see Part II of our article, "A Woman Riding a Beast Going Forth Conquering and to Conquer" and the article by Jack Calhoun "The Family that Preys Together" in Covert Action Quarterly (http://mediafilter.org/CAQ/CAQ_Contents.html)];

THE MEN BEHIND THE
KENNEDY ASSASSINATION

Now I suppose that if one is prepared to believe that the moon is made of blue cheese and tooth fairies exist, it's possible to believe that it was a mere coincidence that all these men of wealth (and rabid "Kennedy-haters") - each from different parts of the country - were in Dallas the night before JFK was assassinated. But there is something more that lifts the convergence of all these men in "Big D" the night before Kennedy's assassination above coincidence: toward the end of the party, LBJ - Kennedy's vice president and a Kennedy-hater like all the rest of them - made an appearance, and he wasn't as "out of place" at this party as one might first imagine. LBJ was as beholden to Texas Oil (in LBJ's case, to Clint Murchison) as was W.A. Criswell (in Criswell's case, to H.L. Hunt), and though both men (i.e., Criswell and Johnson) inhabited "different planets" insofar as their political and religious lives were concerned, the souls of both men had been "bought and paid for" by Big Oil.

William F. Pepper, author of An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King (a book that Ramsey Clark, United States Attorney General in the Johnson Administration, calls one of the best books he has ever read on the subject of King's assassination), says that Madeline Brown, LBJ's beautiful mistress with whom LBJ had a son, was at the party that night too. Pepper says that Brown told him that near the end of the party, all the "big shots" disappeared behind the closed doors of Murchison's study. After a while, the meeting broke up, and Johnson - anxious and red-faced - emerged from the meeting and went up to Brown, embraced her and whispered in her ear something she would never forget:

"AFTER TOMORROW THOSE G-DDAMN KENNEDYS WILL NEVER EMBARRASS ME AGAIN - THAT'S NO THREAT, THAT'S A PROMISE."

DON'T BE SO NAIVE

Obviously, some of the more hateful and spiteful "phantoms" and "ghosts" of the American New World Order System had "materialized" in Clint Murchison home that long-ago evening in Dallas - and (surprise! surprise!) just 12 short hours before Kennedy was assassinated near the Texas Book Depository. And for someone to discount this meeting as mere coincidence and discard what LBJ whispered to Madeline Brown - i.e., "after tomorrow those g-ddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again" - as the psychotic musings of a "trailer trash whore" is so naive that one cannot help but suspect that those who say such a thing are hiding behind a PURPOSEFUL show of naiveté - which usually is the last refuge of those who have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

The fact is, this meeting happened, and Brown had no reason to lie about what LBJ told her - she was his devoted mistress, and there is every reason to believe that he was as devoted to her (and his son by her) as she was to him - and not only then, but until the day he died, even to the point of providing for the support of his illegitimate son after his (LBJ's) death.

It wasn't much - a dinner party and a "whispered confidence" - but like the "Vapor Trails" left behind by an all-but-invisible, high-flying stealth bomber on its way to deal death and destruction to some far off and distant enemy, these were the ghostly "Vapor Trails" left behind by those "conjunction of powers" that were responsible for JFK's assassination; "Vapor Trails" which one - if he is quick and discerning enough - can follow back to that shadowy "conjunction of power" that President Eisenhower had warned the nation against three years earlier - a "conjunction of IMMENSE power" that, according to Eisenhower, had wormed its way into -

"... every city, every statehouse, every office of the Federal government."

And which threatened -

"... the very structure of our society."

Now stop and think about this for a minute. These are not the words of some loony, but the words of the 34th president of the United States - the man who had led the Allies to victory in Europe in World War II.

This gives some indication of how truly EVIL the forces are that the church has allied itself to, and connotes the reason why we must get out as soon as we can. We must not delay. If they were willing to kill a president, then they are surely willing to kill you, and not only you, but everyone connected to you - a favorite terror tactic of the death squads the CIA sponsors in the client states of America's New World Order System.

OTHER "VAPOR TRAILS:" THE MLK ASSASSINATION

And there are many other such "Vapor Trails" across America's skies - indeed a plethora of them by now - all of which lead back to the same ghosts, the same specters and the same phantoms that butchered JFK in Dallas - THE SAME ONES THAT THE EVANGELICAL CHURCH HAS MADE COMMON CAUSE WITH. Eeee gads! How is it possible? How could the church be so blind? If you are not horrified by all this, if you are not appalled, then there is something wrong with you. You are beyond feeling, and there is no love of God in your heart!

Take another example: the many "Vapor Trails" left behind in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination - trails that are particularly important BECAUSE THEY NOT ONLY SERVE AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE UGLY MALICE AND EXTREME VIOLENCE OF THESE FORCES, BUT THEY ALSO SERVE TO DEPICT THEIR GREED AND AVARICE

One of these "MLK vapor trials" appeared over Atlanta, Georgia a few days after King's assassination in Memphis. William Pepper describes it: according to Pepper, shortly after the assassination of King, FBI special agent Donald Wilson, who was assigned to the Bureau's Atlanta Field Office, received a request from the Atlanta police to check out a white Mustang in the parking lot of the Capitol Homes Housing Project. The suspicion was that the car, with Alabama plates, had been involved in the King assassination. It turned out to be James Earl Ray's white Mustang. [Ray was made a "patsy" for the MLK assassination, just as Oswald and Shiran-Shiran were the "patsies" or "throw-away assassins" for the JFK and RFK assassinations (please see our articles on MK-Ultra for the definition of a "throw-away assassin").]

"RAUL:" LINKING THE MURDER OF
MLK TO THE JFK ASSASSINATION

Wilson recounted that when he opened the car door on the passenger's side, an envelope and some papers fell out. Wilson bent over, picked them up and put them in his pocket. Later, when he had the opportunity to examine the papers, he was shocked by what he found. One piece came from a 1963 Dallas telephone directory. It was part of a page which had been torn out. The telephone numbers on the page included those of the family of H.L. Hunt - again, the MONEY-MAN for W.A. Criswell's First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas.

Moreover, in handwriting at the top of the page, was the name "Raul," the letter "J" and a Dallas telephone number, which turned out to be the phone number of the Vegas Club, which at the time of the JFK assassination had been operated by Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald.

"Raul" is a name that over the years has appeared again and again in connection with both the JFK assassination, and the murder of MLK - a man that Pepper later discovered has been living under "government protection" in New York for almost thirty years. [The question that fairly begs to be asked, of course, is What is it that "Raul" did that earned him "government protection."]

In the early 1960s Raul lived in Houston and was involved in smuggling guns that had been stolen from U.S. military bases to Cubans who had been involved in the Bay of Pigs fiasco and were still deeply embroiled with the CIA in secret efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro. The "mob" hated Castro for throwing them - along with their gambling casinos, their prostitution, and their drugs - out of Cuba with Fulgencio Batista, the corrupt former dictator of Cuba. [One should remember in this connection that before there was Las Vegas, there was Havana, and that it was only after the "mob" had been thrown out of Cuba by Castro that Las Vegas took off - a fact that is depicted in Al Pacino's Godfather II.]

Raul was involved with the Mafia "Don" Carlos Marcello of New Orleans - a crime syndicate deeply implicated in the CIA's efforts to overthrow Castro. [We urge you to read Pepper's book, An Act of State; you will be shocked by what it reveals; the book may be purchased at Amazon.com.; we also URGE you, if you have not already, to read our articles on the JFK, MLK, and RFK assassinations, "MK-ULTRA: The Search for the Manchurian Candidate; A Study of the Mindset Behind Today's New World Order," and "Conspiracy Theories."]

There was also a second piece of paper that contained several names, alongside each of which were sums of money. It appeared to be some sort of payoff list, and at the bottom, it also contained Raul's name and a date for payment.

Wilson said that he also recovered a third piece of paper on which was written the telephone number of the FBI's Atlanta field office. This raises the serious issue of collusion between Raul and the Atlanta field office, or at least collusion with someone in that office who had had access to James's white Mustang.

"Vapor Trails" - all these things; but while they might be ethereal and fragile, they're, nonetheless real, AND, AGAIN, THEY ALL LEAD BACK TO THAT SAME KAFKASEQUE "CONVERGENCE OF POWER" THAT HAD BUTCHERED JFK IN 1963 AND ABOUT WHICH EISENHOWER WARNED IN 1961 - a "convergence of power" that these "Vapor Trails" suggest included H.L. Hunt (and "Big Oil), the CIA and the American intelligence community, Marcello (which was linked to the CIA in the agency's efforts to dislodge Castro), etc. [We will have much more to say about this "convergence of power" - and the sad connection it has with the conservative Christian community, specifically with W.A. Criswell's First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas - in Part II of this article. You will be SHOCKED by what you read.]

WHY WAS KING MURDERED? THE
MINDSET BEHIND THE ASSASSINATION

Why was King murdered? Pepper explains, almost if he had been a devotee of Antipas:

"(Dr. King) ... was emerging as a key figurehead in a powerful coalition of growing peace and civil rights movements, which were to form the basis of a 'new politics'. The National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) was established to catalyze people nationwide ... Dr. King was planning to move into mainstream politics as a potential candidate on a presidential ticket with Dr. Benjamin Spock in order to highlight the anti-poverty, anti-war agenda. He called for conscientious objection, political activity, and a revolution in values to shift American society away from its raw materialism to ... (something more compassionate)."

Now wouldn't that be horrible? - at least for the elites: an anti-poverty crusade; a crusade that aimed at the more equitable distribution of the nation's wealth. This was something much more than "civil rights" for blacks, which the elites could live with, especially if all that meant was "elevating" "token" blacks to positions of power and prestige (which is what "black civil rights" has come to mean in the years since MLK's assassination - a "civil rights" program that lifts "Uncle Toms" like Vernon Jordan and Maynard Jackson to a modicum of wealth and prestige while continuing to leave the vast majority of blacks poor and destitute). But lifting ALL the poor out of poverty? - and not just blacks, but poor whites, and Latinos, and Indians, and Asians, etc. That was too much!

How did King propose to pay for all this? - by taking it out of the country's military budget? That would mean weakening the American military to a point where it could no longer act as an "enforcer" for the elite's developing "client-state" system (please see our articles, "The Third World as a Model for the New World Order," and "The American Empire and the U.S. System of Client States") and with it, of course, the disintegration of the American New World Order System that the elites were bending every effort to construct at the time [a system which by now has been all but completed (please see our article, "Inside the American New World Order System")]. That was too much! Pepper continues:

"... There was great concern in the halls of power in America that this most honored of black Americans had decided to use the full force of his integrity, moral authority, and international prestige to challenge the might and moral bankruptcy of the American state, which he freely characterized as the 'GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE ON EARTH'."

BABYLON THE GREAT: "THE GREATEST
PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE ON EARTH"

"The greatest purveyor of violence on earth?" - sounds like Antipas, doesn't it? Sounds very much like the Bible's description of BABYLON THE GREAT, a nation that is -

"... DREADFUL and TERRIBLE, and STRONG EXCEEDINGLY with great iron teeth: that DEVOURS and BRAKES IN PIECES, and stamps the residue (i.e., those who remain) with its feet ..." (Daniel 7:7)

And a nation that Isaiah describes as an "OVERFLOWING SCOURGE" (Is. 28:18); a "BEAST-NATION" (Dan. 7:7) that aims at gaining mastery over the entire earth and establishing a ONE-WORLD EMPIRE that brings ruin and poverty to the peoples and nations of the world. [For a detailed Scriptural identification of this great "Latter Day" nation, please see our article, "In Search of Babylon" What Does the Bible Say?]

THE CHILDREN OF THIS WORLD ARE
WISER THAN THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT

One would think that Pepper, who is a secularist and no Christian, had read the Bible concerning the elites who would come to power at the "end of the age," and the condition of things they would cause to prevail as a result of their terrible rule. Pepper continues, as if he had been a member of the ministry:

"His (i.e., King's) formal announcement of opposition and condemnation of his government generated serious apprehension in the boardrooms of the select list of large American corporations which were receiving enormous profits from the conflict. These, of course, included the range of armament, aircraft, and chemical manufacturers as well as favored construction companies like Texas and Lyndon Johnson's own Brown and Root company which had multi-billion-dollar contracts, and the oil companies, again including those owned by Texans Johnson and Edgar Hoover's friends, H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison ... This list, of course, should not omit the powerful multi-national banks, who are the bankers to these corporations and which arrange financing so that they themselves greatly profit from the loan syndications and leasing contracts. And there are the large law firms who advise and provide legal services on every aspect of every deal, contract, lease, and sale.

"When one assesses this awesome array of privately established, non-governmental institutional power, it is eminently reasonable to consider those in government decision-making positions as being COMPELLED to listen, to protect, and serve the unified interests of this corporate establishment. When business speaks with one voice, as it did in respect of the war or the purported extreme threat of war at the time when Martin King set himself up in opposition, the relevant government agencies and their officials become mere footsoldiers for the mighty, economic interests. Out in front in time of war are the armed forces, the intelligence and law enforcement communities. Not far behind are the executive, the legislative and judicial legitimizers, who sanction the necessary actions, and the media conglomerates who, as the publicists of government policy, posing as independent voices of the people, vigorously support and defend the official policy in serious national security instances of significant concern to the corporate establishment. [Please see our article on these elites, "The Elite, Money, and the End of Days."]

KING MUST GO

Pepper now recounts what happened to King as the elites began to marshal their shadowy forces against him:

"Virtually unanimously, and with one voice, the mass media condemned Dr. King's opposition to the war. In the shadows were the forces they serve. [Please see our article on the mass media, "The Corporate State and the Mass Media."]

"When one understands this context and those times, more than three decades ago, it is understandable that when Martin King began to crusade against the war, he would cast a long shadow over the economic forces of America. Little wonder that they shuddered at the possibility that his efforts might result in the tap of the free-flowing profits being turned off. Should the American people come to demand an end to the war and should the war end, the losses were not something they could accept. [The same thing, of course, could be said today about Bush's endless "War on Terror."]

"Perhaps it was for this reason alone that King had to be stopped."

But Pepper believed that there was more motivating the elites against King than just the war. Pepper explains:

"If this was not reason enough, Dr. King gave these awesomely powerful forces another inducement to eliminate him. He had been wrestling with the problem of economic injustice for some time. It was, he said, one thing to gain the civil right to eat at a formerly segregated lunchroom counter but quite another to be able to pay the bill. This was the next and, in a capitalist society, an essential component of freedom and equality, and one which was the essence of the movement for social justice. The war had made things worse. Not only were a disproportionate number of blacks being sent 10,000 miles from home to serve as cannon fodder, but the cost of the war increasingly required that essential social services and programs in their communities be curtailed. The poor knew better than anyone that the commitment to 'guns and butter' could not be fulfilled. In effect there was an undeclared cease-fire in the 'war on poverty'.

"So, for Martin King, opposition to the war against the people of a poor, non-white ancient culture (i.e., Vietnam) was in harmony with, and a natural extension of, the civil rights struggle against oppression and the denial of basic freedoms and essential services at home."

THE POOR PEOPLE'S CAMPAIGN:
THE FINAL NAIL IN KING'S COFFIN

Pepper continues:

"By mid-1967, he began to formulate a strategy to address the widening gap between the rich and the poor. The project gradually took the form not of a march by itself but an extensive Poor People's Campaign and mobilization culminating in an encampment in the shadow of the Washington Memorial. The projection was for the establishment of a tent city of some 500,000 of the nation's poorest and most alienated citizens, who would regularly lobby their elective officials for a range of socio-economic legislation. They would remain as long as it took to get action from the Congress."

Now stop and think about that for a minute! King was planning to erect a "tent city" of the poor and dispossessed of the land on the mall in Washington D.C. HE WAS PLANNING TO LAY SIEGE TO THE CAPITAL OF THE UNITED STATES! 500,000 people camped out on the mall indefinitely! And to do it, King was marshaling more "soldiers" in his "Poor People's Army" than the U.S. had in Vietnam. And make no mistake about it - King was well able to do it - and the elites knew it. Pepper writes:

"If the wealthy, powerful interests across the nation would find Dr. King's escalating activity against the war intolerable, his planned mobilization of half a million poor people with the intention of laying siege to Congress could only engender outrage - and fear.

"They knew that it was not going to be possible for the Congress to satisfy the demands of the multitude of poor, alienated Americans led by Dr. King, and they believed that the growing frustration could well lead to violence. In such a situation with the unavailability of sufficient troops to control that mass of people, the capital could be overrun. Nothing less than a revolution might result. This possibility simply could not be allowed to materialize, and neither could Martin King's crusade against the war be permitted to continue."

IGNORING THE TRUTH

Now one can ignore all these facts if he wants to; and most people do - although all the "original" government "findings" on the JFK, MLK and RFK assassinations have been by now exposed as the LIES they really are. (Again, we URGE you, if you have not already, to read our articles on the JFK, MLK, and RFK assassinations, "MK-ULTRA: The Search for the Manchurian Candidate; A Study of the Mindset Behind Today's New World Order," and "Conspiracy Theories;" please also see our follow-up report on MK-Ultra entitled, MK-Ultra and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy - More Evidence."]

The fact is these government fabrications have been revealed as such, not just once, but over and over again - for example, in the work of the Select House and Senate Committees on the Investigation of the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, the "Church Committee" reports, the civil trial of Lloyd Jowers (brought by the King family in 1999) that established conclusively that the government had lied about almost everything insofar as the assassination of Martin Luther King was concerned, and so forth and so on. But despite all this, it's still fashionable in certain "educated circles" (so-called) to dismiss this kind of talk as the prattle of uneducated naïfs. This is certainly what the mainline media and "establishment" pundits would have us think. But why is it so hard to believe that the government would lie about such things. The government does it all the time - from Watergate, to the Pentagon Papers, to the Contra fiasco, to Irangate, to the MIA controversy, to the so-called presence of "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq - all deliberate government fabrications (and recognized as such by most civil libertarians)!

William Schapp, an expert on the government's use of the media for disinformation and propaganda purposes explained that a Harvard neurologist had helped him to understand the power of the neurological impact upon human cognizance, intellectual functioning, and reasoned decision making when the same story is told over and over again. That impact makes the story a knee-jerk part of the people who are exposed to it. Even if they are convinced on one occasion by powerful evidence to the contrary, the next day will usually find them reverting back to their long-held beliefs, which have become a part of themselves - often integral to their very identity. Nothing less than some sort of intense deprogramming experience with ongoing reinforcement is required to free such people of these habits of thinking.

ATTITUDES TOWARD ANTIPAS

This, no doubt, has a lot to do with people's attitudes toward Antipas. It seems sometimes that no matter how often we expose the truth concerning the church today and the illicit relationship it has with George Bush's American New World Order System, after we're gone and they've returned to their churches, they revert back to their "old ways of thinking" and their "old ways of doing things" as if we had never been there and they had never heard a word of what we had to said.

It is a horrible situation! - and, as Schapp says,

"Nothing less than some sort of intense deprogramming experience with ongoing reinforcement is required to free such people of these habits of thinking."

That's the truth!

THE PURPOSES OF SATAN

What Satan has done in all this (and especially in linking the church with the spectors, phantoms and ghosts we've been discussing) is to befoul the church, and by doing so, he has rendered the church's TESTIMONY ineffectual insofar as the poor and destitute of the world are concerned, making it in their eyes a rich, white man's religion having nothing to do with them; a religious system that is irrevocably tied to their hated oppressor, the American New World Order System. THIS IS THE CRUX OF THE MATTER.

The truth is, whether you want to believe it or not, unbelievers can no longer see the Savior because of the church. Never before - not even in Luther's day - has the church been as polluted as it is now - AND SO MUCH SO THAT THE BIBLE DEPICTS IT AS A WHORE THAT HAS SOLD HERSELF OUT TO THE FORCES THAT WE'VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT FOR MONEY.

A WHORE! - that's what the Bible calls her:

"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:

"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 ..." (Rev. 17:1, 4) [Please see our article, "A Woman Rides the Beast;" please also see Chapter XV of the Antipas Papers, "The Woman of Revelation 17."]

Don't think - even for a minute - that the poor of the earth can see Jesus while standing in the shadow of this WHORE. They can't. A whore can't love; she's far past all of those kinds of feelings. All she cares about is MONEY. But money is not what the church is supposed to be all about. It's supposed to be about LOVE.

The Bible says:

"By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have LOVE one to another." (John 13:35)

But, again, there's no love with a whore - only raw sex, and that only WHEN ONE PAYS FOR IT. And isn't that the case in today's church, where - for example - in some churches people have been charged money for the seats they sit in: $5,000 for a "front row" seat, and $50 for a seat up in the "bleacher" section; my heavens, you would think that the "saints" were paying for "sky seats" at Three Rivers Stadium. [Please see our article, "The Rich Have Seized Control of the Church".]

Where is there any testimony to the love of God here? There is none, of course. THIS IS PRECISELY WHY WE MUST DISASSOCIATE OURSELVES FROM TODAY'S EVANGELICAL CHURCH - the church of Paul Crouch, Jack Hayford, 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. [Please see our article, "A Woman Rides the Beast;" please also see our article, "The Organized Church and the End of Days."]

This is why the Bible says:

"COME OUT OF HER, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues." (Rev. 18:4)

Brothers and sisters, listen to me. We are standing as Christians in the middle of a raging river, the current of which is growing in strength minute by minute, and hour by hour. Five miles down from where we are standing is a great waterfall, and if we lose our footing and are unable to make it to shore, we will surely be swept over the falls to our death. Some of our friends and loved ones have already lost their footing and have been swept away.

What are we to do? We have really only two choices. The first is the easiest - or at least it seems to be: to just "let go" and trust ourselves to the current like a leaf that's fallen into the stream; to surrender ourselves to the current, and like Kafka's character "K" hope for the best. It sounds so spiritual. "Think of the current as God's will for our lives," our friends tell us. "Just abandon yourself to it; that's the thing to do. God will save; He won't let anything happen to you. Just 'go with the flow'." This is certainly what "K" would have done. This is surely the course he would have recommended.

Problem is, on closer examination, this river doesn't look quite like the "River of God" that our friends have been advertising it to be. It doesn't look quite right. There's the faint smell of death to it - and maybe we should ask ourselves about that dim sound of thunder we hear down river (i.e., the waterfall). What if, by surrendering to the powerful current of this river, you find that you have not surrendered to God's will at all, but to something else altogether; and once you give yourself up to its current, you have surrendered all possibility of independent action. You are now nothing more than an object which can no longer act in its own right, but can only be acted upon by others - or in this case, by the current.

Is that what you really want? - to give up your own will? Better be careful before you let go. The current your friends are saying is the "will of God" may not be His will at all. It may be the "COURSE ("CURRENT") OF THIS WORLD" that you are feeling -

"Wherein in time past ... (you had your being) according to the COURSE OF THIS WORLD, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience ..." (Eph. 2:2)

Come on now, it's not that hard to tell what you are getting yourself into - but you have to decide quickly, or the river you are sanding in will decide for you as it steadily rises around your feet. Come on now, ask yourself whether what we have been telling you about the American New World Order System is the truth or not. Ask yourself about the REAL condition of the church, and its attachment to America's New World Order System. We have presented you with over 3,000 pages of evidence on this website with regard to these matters. You have more than enough evidence to make a choice.

The truth is, most of you have already made a decision as to the veracity of the information. Either act on it, or wait around until the force of the river you are standing in sweeps you away. And remember here, by not making a choice, you have made a choice: the force of the current will eventually make the decision for you. BUT REMEMBER KAFKA, and don't be surprised if you end up in a gravel pit by yourself someday, just like "K" hoping till the end that everything is going to work out.

Please read our articles, "The Aliya Foundation" and "I Am Utterly Amazed," on what Christians in the US ought to do.

God bless you all!

S.R. Shearer
Antipas Ministries

IT WON'T BE LONG BEFORE ANTIPAS WILL BE SHUT DOWN and many of us arrested. I'm not kidding around here. So we have to hurry. Take, for example, what happened the other day to SHERMAN AUSTIN, a webmaster for a so-called "anti-government" website connected to recent anti-WTO and anti-World Bank demonstrations. In one of the government's first attempts to exercise the new US Patriot Act, Austin's home was surrounded on January 24, 2002, and raided by approximately 25 heavily armed FBI and Secret Service agents. He was interrogated for several hours while agents ransacked his house and seized the computers he used to run his website with. Evidently a protest guide had been posted on one of the site's discussion boards which contained information on explosives. Who posted the information remains a mystery to this day, although it's not a stretch to believe that the FBI was responsible (please see our latest article, "Greed, Avarice, and the Coming Dictatorship"); but leaving aside the question of who was or was not responsible, the fact remains that the information itself was legal and is easily available on any number of other websites on the internet or in any number of Right Wing publications or scientific journals throughout the country.

So how could the information have been a concern to authorities? It wasn't a concern; it was simply used as an EXCUSE to take down his "left-wing," "anti-government" website. During the whole process, Austin was repeatedly told that he was not going to be arrested - and he wasn't, at least not then. But he was told to "watch it." Plainly, Austin was being INTIMIDATED. Nonetheless, Austin went ahead with plans he had already made to attend the demonstration against the World Economic Forum in New York City, a demonstration that we at Antipas also attended and demonstrated at. THAT WAS EVIDENTLY A MISTAKE! - AUSTIN HAD REFUSED TO TAKE THE FBI'S "ADVISE" AND "FADE INTO THE WOODWORK" - which is what the government wants all of us to do: to "shut up" and "do what we are told."

At the demonstration against the World Economic Forum, the police repeatedly swarmed over the demonstrators and harassed them, despite promises that they would let them demonstrate peacefully. They did demonstrate peacefully, but still the police refused to leave them alone - after all, the mere fact that one would have the nerve to demonstrate against the "richy riches" of the world and disrupt them in their deliberations on how to squeeze more money out of the poor and downtrodden of the world was reason enough for the police (the elite's flunkies) to make life miserable for the demonstrators. Indeed, we at Antipas were lucky not to be arrested ourselves, although at ALL times we were non-violent and peaceful - we were passing out salvation tracts and "flyers" to the demonstrators, and they were being taken and read - with a hearty thanks, both for the tracts and also because we had had the courage - as Christians - to stand with them against Bush's American New World Order System. Indeed, as a result of our efforts in passing out flyers at this and other demonstrations across the country, hundreds of unsaved "lefties" are now regular readers on our website.

Austin (whom none of us know personally) wasn't so lucky. He was evidently arrested in a police "sweep" a few blocks from where we were standing and taken to the Brooklyn Navy Yard Jail and held there incommunicado for 30 hours. Finally, he was taken out of his cell and put into a backroom in handcuffs and leg irons where he was interrogated by the FBI and the Secret Service. Finally, he was driven to the Federal Court House and released. As he was waiting for someone to come and pick him up, five FBI agents entered the courthouse and re-arrested him for "distribution of information related to explosives over the internet" - a charge that the FBI had dropped against him the month previous. AUSTIN HAD REFUSED TO TAKE THE HINT! - TO "SHUT UP" AND BACK AWAY FROM HIS ANTI-GOVERNMENT ACTIVITIES. And now he was going to pay the price.

He was hurried out of the courthouse into a black SUV and driven to a federal building. At Austin's bail hearing, the FBI claimed that Austin was a "man on a mission" and that he had driven 3,000 miles from California to the east coast to carry out his "mission." The "mission" that he was supposedly on was not specified by the government. The judge denied Austin bail and after eleven days he was shackled and taken to an airforce base where federal inmates are bordered onto planes surrounded by guards with M16s and shot guns and flown to a federal jail "hub" in Oklahoma where he was finally released after a thirteen-day imprisonment.

Now, again, what was the purpose in all this: the purpose was, as it was in the beginning, to INTIMIDATE Austin; to shut him up - and the FBI was accelerating the INTIMIDATION: the initial arrest; then the re-arrest (after they found out who he was when he was "netted" in the police "sweep" in New York - i.e. that he had already been "warned" back in California to cease his "anti-government" activities, and that he had refused to "knuckle under"). Now the INTIMIDATION was being broadened: moving him from jail to jail, interrogating him for hours on end, arresting and re-arresting him, and finally letting him go free out in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma - with no money and no way to get back home. This is what the government can do now to a "dissenter" - all without any FORMAL charges ever being leveled against him. This is Nazism! - plain and simple, AND THE MAN (JOHN ASHCROFT) WHO STANDS AT THE VERY CENTER OF THIS NEW POLICE STATE IS A "BORN-AGAIN" CHRISTIAN - A "LAY PASTOR" IN THE ASSEMBLIES OF GOD - a man who thinks that by doing all this he is "DOING SERVICE FOR GOD" (John 16:2). Does that tell you anything? - it should! It most assuredly should! (Again, I urge you to please see our "current article," at www.endtimesnetwork.com, "Greed, Avarice, and the Coming Dictatorship.")

Six months later, after Austin finally made his way back to California, prosecutors contacted his lawyer and said they had found nothing with which to prosecute him, BUT THEY DIDN'T WANT TO "LET HIM OFF THE HOOK." That would never do; what kind of an example would that be to other "dissenters" throughout the country. No, they had to make an example out of him. They would "hound" him to death. Make life miserable for him; grind him into the dirt, and bury him in legal fees. The government can do that, you know! What chance does a poor person or someone of modest means have in confronting the government? - regardless of the question of guilt or innocence. Not much! - about the same kind of chance a poor black man has when he is arrested: None! Sure, there is the "public defender" - who is so buried in work that she has about five minutes in toto to spend with you before you come to trial. And then there is always the matter of "manufactured evidence." White, suburban Christians, of course, would deny that that ever happens; but the "denizens of the underclass" know better!

What inevitably happens in this kind of a situation is the government "persuades" the defendant to "cop" a plea under the threat that if he refuses to do so, the government will "go after him" with everything it has, including a maximum prison term in the company of sodomites (which situation the government could "clean up" if it wanted to: it doesn't want to) and the unspoken threat of "manufactured evidence." No one wants that! At first, Austin rejected the plea - he was guilty of nothing. But the thought of being "cast down into the pit with the sodomites" for twenty years is enough to make almost anyone "re-think" his position - which is exactly the threat the government held over his head: his lawyer informed him that the government would seek a "terrorism enhancement" on his charge which would make him eligible for an added 20 years on his sentence. As a result, Austin took what he thought was a binding pre-indictment plea agreement - which was initially one month in jail, and five months in a "community corrections facility," but the government reneged on the plea - after getting Austin to "admit" "guilt" insofar as the charge was concerned. Now the government had him by the proverbial "you know what." He had pled guilty to a felony, and he was sentenced to one year in federal prison and three years of supervised release with the stipulation that he would cease and desist from all his "anti-government" activities.

Austin last words to all of us are these: "I think Bush made it clear when he said, 'you're either with me or against me'. Remember, fascism and a police state doesn't come all at once, it comes piece by piece. How far will we allow it to go until we are all locked up in concentration camps."

We need your help to spread the word concerning Antipas Ministries and the eschatological viewpoint it represents; WE NEED YOUR HELP BECAUSE WE DO NOT "LINK" WITH OTHER SO-CALLED "CHRISTIAN" WEBSITES which are, for the most part, "in the tank" insofar as their loyalty to the United States is concerned - a loyalty that has made them partners in the BLOODY trail the American military has left in its TERROR-RIDDEN rampage throughout the world, as well as making them partners in the abject poverty that American corporations have imposed on the peoples and nations the American military machine has ravaged - A BLOODY, TERROR-RIDDEN RAMPAGE THAT HAS TO A LARGE DEGREE BEEN CARRIED OUT IN THE NAME OF THE "PRINCE OF PEACE." [Please see our articles, "The Third World as a Model for the New World Order," Inside the American New World Order System" and "The American Empire: The Corporate / Pentagon / CIA / Missionary Archipelago."] YOU CAN HELP BY EMAILING THIS ARTICLE TO YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS PRESS HERE If you wish to SUBSCRIBE to our website, please feel free to do so; the subscription is free; all you need to do is give us your email address. There is no need for you to give us any other information. Your email address will NEVER be shared with others. PRESS HERE PS Have the courage of your convictions! Contribute to the ministry by making out a check to "Antipas Christian Ministry" and sending it to - Antipas Ministries 1112 Long Rd., #40 Centralia, WA 98531 Or donate through Paypal by clicking the Paypal image below: We DESPERATELY need your continued SACRIFICIAL financial help. Time is short - and we need to be about the Lord's business as quickly as possible. If you have any questions, please email us at staff@antipasministries.com.