Paul Craig Roberts – paulcraigroberts.org Dec 24, 2020
Dear Donors,
Thank you for your support in 2020. Although you have kept me working yet another year, I find it encouraging that there are still some Americans who can think independently and who want to know. As Margaret Mead said, it only takes a few determined people to change the world. Perhaps some of you will be those people.
My traditional Christmas column goes back to sometime in the 1990s when one of my occupations was being a newspaper columnist. It has been widely reprinted at home and abroad. Every year two or three readers write to educate me that religion is the source of wars and persecutions. These readers confuse religion with mankind’s abuse of institutions, religious or otherwise. The United States has democratic institutions and legal institutions to protect civil liberties. Nevertheless, we now have a police state. Shall I argue that democracy and civil liberty are the causes of police states?
Some readers also are confused about hypocrisy. There is a vast difference between proclaiming moral principles that one might fail to live up to and proclaiming immoral principles that are all too easy to keep.
In the days of my youth Christianity was still a potent force in America. It was part of most people’s lives, whether they were believers or not, and it regulated their behavior. That is why in Atlanta during the 1940s and 1950s we did not have to lock our door at night, and boys and girls could be gone all day without parental supervision and be completely safe. It is why I, as a 5-year old, could walk a mile safely to school and return home safely. Today parents who allowed such independence would be arrested for “child endangerment.”
The power of Christian morality over behavior has faded substantially. Nevertheless, even today in the remains of our civilizational foundations many, if not most, people are still guided by Christian morality. As Christian tradition fades as the basis of behavior, barbarity will gather more strength and reign over us.
Liberty is a human achievement. We have it, or had it, because those who believed in it fought to achieve it and to preserve it. As I explain in my Christmas column, people were able to fight for liberty because Christianity empowered the individual.
The other cornerstone of our culture is the Constitution. Indeed, the United States is the Constitution. Without the Constitution, the United States is a different country, and Americans a different people. This is why assaults on the Constitution by the regimes in Washington are assaults on America that are far worse than any assaults by terrorists. There is not much that we can do about these assaults, but we should not through ignorance enable the assaults or believe the government’s claim that safety requires the curtailment of civil liberty.
In a spirit of goodwill, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a successful New Year.
Paul Craig Roberts
The Greatest Gift For All
Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of the season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national Christmas tree on the White House lawn.
Gifts are another shared custom. This tradition comes from the wise men or three kings who brought gifts to baby Jesus. When I was a kid, gifts were more modest than they are now, but even then people were complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. We have grown accustomed to the commercialization. Christmas sales are the backbone of many businesses. Gift giving causes us to remember others and to take time from our harried lives to give them thought.
The decorations and gifts of Christmas are one of our connections to a Christian culture that has held Western civilization together for 2,000 years.
In our culture the individual counts. This permits an individual person to put his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle, to become a reformer and to take on injustice.
This empowerment of the individual is unique to Western civilization. It has made the individual a citizen equal in rights to all other citizens, protected from tyrannical government by the rule of law and free speech. These achievements are the products of centuries of struggle, but they all flow from the teaching that God so values the individual’s soul that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so elevating the individual, Christianity gave him a voice.
Formerly only those with power had a voice. But in Western civilization people with integrity have a voice. So do people with a sense of justice, of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform, investors can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial enterprises, new products and new occupations.
The result was a land of opportunity. The United States attracted immigrants who shared our values and reflected them in their own lives. Our culture was absorbed by a diverse people who became one.
In recent decades we have lost sight of the historic achievement that empowered the individual. The religious, legal and political roots of this great achievement are no longer reverently taught in high schools, colleges and universities or respected by our government. The voices that reach us through the millennia and connect us to our culture are being silenced by “Identity Politics,” “political correctness” and the war against “white culture.” Prayer has been driven from schools and Christian religious symbols from public life.
Christianity is being gradually marginalized. Each year it becomes more difficult to find a Christmas card that says “Merry Christmas” instead of “Seasons Greetings.” In place of Christmas carols we get Hollywood Christmas songs. In some churches Christianity is being transmuted into Christian Zionism and the worship of Israel. Others fly LGBTQ and BLM flags. We are approaching a time when a Christian Christmas cannot be celebrated as it is not inclusive in a diverse society and therefore is politically incorrect if not a hate crime.
Constitutional protections have been diminished by hegemonic political ambitions. Indefinite detention, torture, and murder are now acknowledged practices of the United States government. The historic achievement of due process has been rolled back. Tyranny has re-emerged.
Diversity at home and hegemony abroad are consuming values and are dismantling the culture and the rule of law. There is plenty of room for cultural diversity in the world, but not within a single country. A Tower of Babel has no culture. A person cannot be a Christian one day, a pagan the next and a Muslim the day after. A hodgepodge of cultural and religious values provides no basis for law – except the raw power of the pre-Christian past.
All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we are individually believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral doctrine that has curbed power and protected the weak.
Power is the horse ridden by evil. In the 20th century the horse was ridden hard, and the 21st century shows an increase in pace. Millions of people were exterminated in the 20th century by wars that served the ambitions of political leaders and ideological movements. Many were murdered simply because they were members of a class or race that had been demonized by intellectuals and political authority. In the beginning years of the 21st century, hundreds of thousands of Muslims in seven countries have been murdered and millions displaced in order to serve the neoconservatives’ agenda of extending Washington and Israel’s hegemony.
Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is not limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin made this clear when he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as “unlimited power, resting directly on force, not limited by anything.” Washington’s drive for hegemony over US citizens and the rest of the world is based entirely on the exercise of force and is resurrecting unaccountable power.
Christianity’s emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such power as Lenin claimed, and Washington now claims, unthinkable. Be we religious or be we not, our celebration of Christ’s birthday celebrates a religion that made us masters of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.
As we enter into 2021, Western civilization, the product of thousands of years of striving, is in decline. Degeneracy is everywhere before our eyes. As the West sinks into tyranny and degeneracy, will Western peoples defend their liberty and their souls, or will they sink into the tyranny, which again has raised its ugly and all devouring head?
My traditional Christmas column now appears in Russian newspapers, but no longer in American ones — https://svpressa.ru/society/article/285252/
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Christmas is about the return of the sun and the celebration of this, and it developed away from the Equator, which does not have winter. Genocides are not happening much except to White people, with the help of 24/7/52/10/10 defamations of Whites and admiration of non-Whites, despite what the facts about abilities, achievements and dispositions of the various types of people might be.
Good morality does not depend on December the 25th but on eugenics, which used to be called good breeding, a genetic and not educational practise.
Paul Craig Roberts is spot on! The onslaught on white man, is an onslaught on Christianity. Lewis Jones doesent understand that. He long for heathen times, and think he could be what he is now. A naive person, or a telaviver, I would say he is this Lewis Jones.
Paul Craig Roberts does a wonderful work here, laying out the basics of common Christianity, and its blessing for the World.
The war on white society, is a war on Christianity, and it is done by the same old (((culprits))), who wants us become heathen, just as Lewis Jones wants!
R2b–No, I meant that Christmas is very old and is all about the seasonal change that is so important at high latitudes and unimportant at the Equator. The Jews accept any Christianity that worships them, and make it impossible to have one that does not. Notice that I have replied in English even though you were too lazy to learn it.
“Good morality does not depend on December the 25th but on eugenics, which used to be called good breeding, a genetic and not educational practise.”????
The people behind all of the good breeding and eugenics efforts in the world are those whose morality comes down to the survival of what they deem to be the fittest. They are those who are presently running the world after having walked over the faces of everyone else. They are the very ones whose alleged superior breeding has led them to be the foremost advocates in getting rid of about 6.5 billion people whom they regard as the world’s surplus population. These elites would breed the remainder like they breed horses or cattle, and when it comes to their own, they select mates which will enhance the qualities they believe will secure the dominance of their progeny either through family connections or through what they believe will give them superior genes.
For those who says that people are “morally good” by breeding and not by education then it is incumbent on them to say what they regard as morally good. Jesus rocked the establishment milieu of his day and was rejected for his teachings and his example of what good in the sight of God really is. He came by way of lowly birth to common people and although rich and poor were drawn to him, it was clear that those most receptive to him were the poor, the low cast, and rejected of the world.
If both salvation and world are the preserve of those of good breeding, then it is not one of Christ, for he came mainly to sinners who were truthful enough with themselves to see the vast difference between themselves and the real goodness of God. If the elites of good breeding are to define what that goodness is, no one could be considered a sinner and there would be no need of anyone with the grace of God transforming their lives.
Maybe you are fluent in modern hebrew, Lewis Jones. which would have helped nothing.
Point is, Christianity is the only effective antidote to Talmudic Pharisaism.
Truth was also revealed by her.
As Christ was born on 25/12, it symbolizes light conquering darkness.
Jesus of Nazareth, born in Bethlehem, was the fullfilment of the Scriptures, long awaited, to the benefit of both the jew and the greek.
Now you Lewis Jones, in unison with the iewes, deny he was the revelation of truth, and the Messiah.
Of course you must realize, you Lewis Jones, are on a par with the iewes.
I have just seen more R2b and the other anonymous poster. Jesus is very lucky when he gets respect from intelligent people. We can find fault easily. Rome had lost its high-class people when Christianity came in. “Symbolise” is a meaningless word, R2b, and I have nothing to do with the Zionists and other Jews and, on this occasion, I lasted 35 months as a Christian. Yukon Jack and Neo made it difficult to keep going, with their perspective that is well-known to me. YJ might be a boozer, since his name is from a whiskey and he has the sadness of someone lamenting his liver, and Neo is some spikey weirdo, but facts are facts and the Holy Jew Book says Jesus called the Gentiles dogs, and the end of the book makes 12000X12 Israelites important. Only Paul sells it to Gentiles and he is hard-core priesthood at first. We have to take his conversion on trust. Fred B–try getting good morality out of hyenas without selective breeding. Judaism has a dysgenic programme for us. Your other statements are generally confused, and you blamed it on cider, I think.
I can only be Christian now by being Israelite like Peter J Peters, very easy when your dad looks like a Welsh Rabbi Schneerson, but Abraham was Celtic anyway. He is recent. Some Jews looked like my mother sometimes did. She was a good example of a Christian but my dad gave it up at fifteen. With his brother he beat up the paedo choir-master and stayed faithful to Darwinism after 1938, but was a depressive and no example for the doctrine. At fourteen I began to write seriously because I could see the world was all in the dark and in 1987 began to fashion an ideology from Taoism, which had surprised me by having awareness. The Chinese lived close to us 4000 years ago. They grew from a nucleus inland from the North-east, so Taoism need not be Chinese.In 1996 I met an associate of Icke and he had good books. I could relax a bit when I saw how much I did not need to say. This is to R2b.