by
Thomas A. Droleskey
We are sixteen days away away from the annual observance of Independence Day in the United States of America. There will be hooting and hollering and all manner of fireworks celebration as people celebrate American "liberty" without noticing the nasty, inconvenient little fact that we have never been quite as "free" as our national mythology teaches us, to say nothing of what has been a logical descent into a form of what can be called "invisible tyranny" that has been dismissed as irrelevant or unimportant or even "necessary" by so many fun-loving, beer-chortling Americans eager to enjoy their bread and circuses. This nation has been led by men and, more recently, women who have been just as thin-skinned and power hungry as King George III, whose personal foibles and acts of political repression pale into insignificance.
Efforts on the part of naturalists of the false opposites of the "left" and the "right" to suppress all opposition have much precedent right here in the United States of America. The twenty percent or so of the colonists in the thirteen English colonies who remained loyal to United Kingdom of Great Britain were harassed and hounded by self-styled "patriots" in the decade or so prior to the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This harassment was even more pronounced during the Revolutionary War.
It was within a decade of the inauguration of the first President of the United States of America, George Washington, that a Congress controlled by Federalist Party members during the administration of Washington's successor, the Catholic-hating John Adams (see A Founding Hatred for Christ the King), who was, of course, the first Vice President of the United States of America, that Alien and Sedition Acts were passed on July 14, 1798, made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious" writing against the government of the United States of America and its officials.
The sixteenth President of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln, did not exactly "cotton" to political opposition during the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865, as he intimidated judges, shut down newspapers, suspended the writ of habeas corpus without an Act of Congress, held opponents in prison without trial and put civilians on trial in military courts at a time when civilian courts were open. And this is just a partial listing of what led John Wilkes Booth to cry out, "Sic temper tyrannous!" as he jumped onto the stage of the Ford Theater in Washington, District of Columbia, on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, from the balcony where he had just shot Lincoln in the head, a wound that would take Lincoln's life early the next morning, Holy Saturday, April 15, 1865.
Suppression of opposition to American involvement in World War I under the administration of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson was so extensive that Senator Hiram Johnson of California, who had run as former President Theodore Roosevelt's Vice Presidential running-mate on the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party ticket in 1912 when Wilson was running for his first term as President against Roosevelt and then President William Howard Taft, who had defeated Roosevelt, to say on the floor of the United States Senate: "It is now a crime for anyone to say anything or print anything against the government of the United States. The punishment for doing so is to go to jail" (quoted in Dr Paul Johnson's Modern Times). (See also my Fascists for Freedom.)
Suppression of opposition to the policies of statists of one stripe or another is nothing new, you see. It has been around for a long, long time. There is even a certain "logic" to the efforts on the part of naturalists to suppress opposition as those committed to their own acquisition and retention of personal power as an ultimate end/or who are committed ideologues of one system of "secular salvation" or another ape, pervert, invert and distort the Catholic Church's teaching that the civil state is is "acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue" (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.) Statists believe their anyone who opposes their schemes and their firmly-held ideological beliefs is leading "minds away from truth" and must be denounced and threatened with fines and imprisonment.
You see, good readers, those who believe n the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity that must degenerate into full-blown statists (see Welcome to the U.S.S.A ) who cannot ever "coexist" peacefully with Catholics who believe in the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King and who are devoted to the restoration of Our Lord's Social Kingship as the fundamental precondition of a rightly ordered civil government that pursues the common temporal good in light of man's Last End. These statists must seek to make war upon believing Catholics, especially those who reject the Modernism of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that has made its "reconciliation" with the diabolical principles of Modernity.
As I have noted many times on this site, one of the reasons I am not employable in my chosen field of political science despite stellar evaluations of teaching effectiveness from peer evaluators is because of my long record of teaching political science as a Catholic and my work in defense of the Faith outside of the Catholic, including my campaigns for public office on the Right to Life Party line. The open and undisguised hostility that met me in some of the places where I taught was indicative, of course, that the very people who claim that they are "tolerant" and "open-minded" are actually the most bigoted, intolerant people imaginable. Numerous are the instances of organized bands of leftist thugs attempting to disrupt lectures that have been given by naturalists of the "conservative" bent on college and universities campuses so as to prevent any "dissenting" voices from interfering with the transmission of "leftist truth."
This degenerative process is unstoppable by merely natural means. Only a very tiny percentage of people in the United States of America understand even the rudimentary elements of the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King, no less accept the truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. No matter where they fall along the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide, most Catholics in the United States of America have had their worldview shaped by the naturalism of Americanism, a naturalism that has been aided and abetted by the view of Church-State relations held and advanced by the lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, who are rather tyrannical in their own right in seeking to obliterate opposition to their own revolutionary schemes.
The minions of Caesar Obamus, however, do not consider it "good enough" that most of those who belong at least nominally, to what they know should constitute their principal source of opposition, Catholicism, are either supportive of their statism or indifferent about it. No, the minions of Caesar Obamus want to eradicate all opposition by whatever means necessary, including the use of slogans and labels to disparage anyone who would dare to raise their voices in opposition to their "magisterial" statements. We must remember it that those who do violence to reason and truth must first violence to language. The constant repetition of slogans to discredit opponents by the use of invectives is meant to create an atmosphere where the relatives, neighbors, coworkers and other associates of the "oddball" "bigots" who dare to criticize the policies of government officials are viewed with constant suspicion.
Barack Hussein Obama, who is busy telling us that Automated Teller Machines (ATM's) are responsible for high unemployment figures and that his war in Libya is not a war, thereby obviating the need for Congressional authorization of the expenditure of funds and use of American forces in that North African nation, is as thin-skinned as, say, any thin-skinned president of the past century, including such prima donas as Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Milhous Nixon, James Earl Carter, Jr., George Herbert Walker Bush, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and his immediate predecessor, George Walker Bush. Bush the Lesser despised criticism of the needless wars he undertook in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he had his minions use the so-called "Patriot Act" to harass known critics of those wars and his own administration in general.
It was under Bush the Lesser's administration, you know, the one that sought export American "liberty" to Iraq and Afghanistan as measures were undertaken to monitor dissent and criticism here, all in the name of "national security" and the "global war on terror," quite of course, that a well-known constitutional law professor, Walter Murphy, found his name placed in 2007 on the Transportation Security Administration's infamous "no-fly" list:
One of the most prominent names on the Transportation Security
Administration's 44,000-person no-fly list is that of constitutional law
scholar and emeritus politics professor Walter Murphy. Whether the ban
is a case of mistaken identity or a reaction to Murphy's recent public
criticism of the Bush administration, as Murphy alleges, is unclear.
Murphy
tried to check in at the curb after arriving at the airport in
Albuquerque, N.M., where he lives in retirement. An airline employee
told him he couldn't be issued a boarding pass because he was on the
TSA's no-fly list and put forth some conjectures on why.
"One of
the two people I talked to said, 'Yes, you're on the list. Did you
participate in any speech or marches?' " Murphy said in an interview.
"And then before I could respond, he said, 'We ban a lot of people from
flying for that.' "
Murphy told the employee that he had recently
given a speech criticizing the Bush administration. "That'll do it," the
employee replied.
Murphy then offered proof that he is a former
U.S. Marine colonel, showing his retirement card to TSA officials. Ten
minutes later, he was on his way.
Murphy's initial reaction was one of rage.
"I
didn't [go public with the information] for three-plus weeks because
the steam was coming out of my ears, and I did not want to simply shout
invectives," he said. "I waited until I could laugh at parts of it;
there is, after all, a comic value to a group of draft dodgers telling a
war veteran that he can't get on an airplane."
The government
could not "confirm or deny whether an individual is on the consolidated
terror watchlist," FBI spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan said in an email,
citing the sensitivity of the intelligence on which the list is based.
Milhoan
declined to address whether public dissent against the administration
could land someone on the list or whether the TSA frequently sees cases
of mistaken identity.
The incident could be a case of mistaken identity, but Murphy attributes it to a September 2006 speech on campus in which he blasted the Bush administration for "systematically undermining the Constitution." The lecture was televised and posted online.
Murphy added that it could be a coincidence — "if you believe in the Easter bunny, yeah" — but said he doesn't think that it is.
"The
coincidences are multiplying," he said. He cited the "outing" of CIA
agent Valerie Plame immediately after her husband's public questioning
of the rationale behind the war in Iraq and two of his personal
acquaintances, who are critics of the Bush administration and are also
on the no-fly list.
"It begins to strain credulity," he said.
The
no-fly list was radically expanded and put under the aegis of the TSA,
part of the Department of Homeland Security, as one of the new airline
security measures instituted after Sept. 11, 2001. There have been
several high-profile cases of mistaken identity in the past, including
those involving a Marine returning from Iraq and at least two elected
officials.
Computer science professor Ed Felten, who was part of a
government advisory group on airline security, said that the no-fly
database has to be matched with the relatively scarce information on
passengers collected by airlines.
"Given a name like Walter Murphy, which is not a highly unusual name, it was most likely a mistake," Felten said.
Felten
added that airlines are not told why a passenger is placed on the
no-fly or watch lists and said he interpreted the airline employee's
remarks as "a sort of guess ... rather than an authoritative statement
on why he got on the list."
Murphy doesn't think that his name —
which, he points out, is half-German, half-Irish — is common enough to
suggest a case of mistaken identity.
"I've only known of one other Walter Murphy, and that was a rock guy back in the '70s," he said.
Ultimately,
Murphy said, there's little doubt in his mind that the airline ban is
an annoyance deliberately devised for him by the government, albeit one
that he has found amusing. "I was always sorry I didn't make Nixon's
hit-list, but making Bush's hit-list is almost as good," he joked.
On his flight back from Newark to Albuquerque, Murphy said that he had no problems checking in, but his luggage was lost. (Constitutional law scholar on no-fly list.)
Professor Walter Murphy was far from the only person to have felt the sting of Bush the Lesser's White House during the forty-third president's prosecution of the "global war on terror." Evidence is now emerging that, contrary to Federal law, the Bushies sought to use the Central Intelligence Agency to "get dirt" on a critic of the Iraq War:
WASHINGTON — A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging
personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in
order to discredit him.
Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a
top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush,
said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to
gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan
professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.
In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National
Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted
“to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to
collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months
later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of
another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle
said he contended at the time that such actions would have been
unlawful.
It is not clear whether the White House received any damaging material
about Professor Cole or whether the C.I.A. or other intelligence
agencies ever provided any information or spied on him. Mr. Carle said
that a memorandum written by his supervisor included derogatory details
about Professor Cole, but that it may have been deleted before reaching
the White House. Mr. Carle also said he did not know the origins of that
information or who at the White House had requested it.
Intelligence officials disputed Mr. Carle’s account, saying that White
House officials did ask about Professor Cole in 2006, but only to find
out why he had been invited to C.I.A.-sponsored conferences on the
Middle East. The officials said that the White House did not ask for
sensitive personal information, and that the agency did not provide it.
“We’ve thoroughly researched our records, and any allegation that the
C.I.A. provided private or derogatory information on Professor Cole to
anyone is simply wrong,” said George Little, an agency spokesman.
Since a series of Watergate-era abuses involving spying on White House
political enemies, the C.I.A. and other spy agencies have been
prohibited from collecting intelligence concerning the activities of
American citizens inside the United States.
“These allegations, if true, raise very troubling questions,” said
Jeffrey H. Smith, a former C.I.A. general counsel. “The statute makes it
very clear: you can’t spy on Americans.” Mr. Smith added that a 1981
executive order that prohibits the C.I.A. from spying on Americans
places tight legal restrictions not only on the agency’s ability to
collect information on United States citizens, but also on its retention
or dissemination of that data.
Mr. Smith and several other experts on national security law said the
question of whether government officials had crossed the line in the
Cole matter would depend on the exact nature of any White House requests
and whether any collection activities conducted by intelligence
officials had been overly intrusive.
The experts said it might not be unlawful for the C.I.A. to provide the
White House with open source material — from public databases or
published material, for example — about an American citizen. But if the
intent was to discredit a political critic, that would be improper, they
said.
Mr. Carle, who retired in 2007, has not previously disclosed his
allegations. He did so only after he was approached by The New York
Times, which learned of the episode elsewhere. While Mr. Carle, 54, has
written a book to be published next month about his role in the interrogation of a terrorism suspect, it does not include his allegations about the
White House’s requests concerning the Michigan professor.
“I couldn’t believe this was happening,” Mr. Carle said. “People were
accepting it, like you had to be part of the team.”
Professor Cole said he would have been a disappointing target for the
White House. “They must have been dismayed at what a boring life I
lead,” he said. (Ex-Spy Alleges Bush White House Sought to Discredit Critic.)
As noted in King George III Is Owed An Apology two years ago last year and in endless other articles over the years, including
From The Potomac to the Tiber and Back last year, 2010, the gradual triumph of statism here in the United States of America, as well as elsewhere in the Western world, is the inevitable result, proximately speaking, of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt and institutionalized by the complex inter-related, multifaceted forces of naturalistic ideologies and philosophies that can be termed properly as Judeo-Masonry as it is the goal of both Talmudic Judaism and its close ally, Freemasonry, to eliminate belief in the simple fact that human life, both individually and collectively, must be centered in a recognition of the fact that the Word, the very Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, became Incarnate in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother by the power of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost. There is no need, according to the lords of Modernity in the world and of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, to subordinate all human activity to the binding precepts of the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. It is "enough," according to the these enemies of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Queenship of Our Lady for men of "good will" to work together as "brothers" as they put aside denominational differences that should never get in the way of the pursuit of the common temporal good.
No, it is not enough for the true God of Divine Revelation for men to put aside any article of His Deposit of Faith as irrelevant to personal and social order as Catholicism is the one and only foundation of such order. Our Lord did not become Incarnate and die on the wood of the Holy Cross and rise again from the dead on Easter Sunday so that men could be content in a fuzzy belief in some generic concept of God or in a belief that mere natural virtue is enough to provide for the common temporal good. Our Lord did not become Incarnate and die on the wood of the Holy Cross and rise again from the dead on Easter Sunday so that men could organize themselves collectively without referencing First and Last Things, without acknowledging the authority that He has vested to Holy Mother Church to sanctify and to teach men in all that pertains to the good of their immortal souls. The only thing that can result from the semi-Pelagianism of naturalism is state-sponsored tyranny of one form or another. It is that simple.
It is only for natural for naturalists to govern as tyrants even though they claim to be veritable beacons of "liberty" and "justice."
What is our excuse for being thin-skinned in our lives?
Why do we take such umbrage at every slight, real or imagined, factually accurate or heavily exaggerated, going to great lengths to scour the internet to see what has been written about us or telephoning everyone imaginable in order to give others "their" side of a particular conflict that has occurred?
How can we complain about the thin-skinned fascists of the false opposites of the naturalist "left" and the naturalist "right" when we refuse to accept humiliation, no matter how unjust it may appear to us or that it may be in actual point-of-fact, as coming from the loving hand of God to purify us as He seeks to crush out our overweening pride and to weed out our grossly disordered self-love that leads us to believe that we are the center of everyone else's universe as well as our own?
Do we not understand that we deserve to be so chastised by the loving hand of the good God, that it was our sins that caused Our Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, to be humiliated and condemned as a criminal on Good Friday as He was spat upon and jeered by the multitudes on the Via Dolorosa as He walked to Mount Calvary?
Unlike the thin-skinned fascist of naturalism who belong to both sets of organized crime families in the United States of America, the Republicans and the Democrats, we must accept criticism and backbiting as calumny and slander as a just punishment for the times that we have engaged in these sins, and only a rare few and most chosen souls are not guilty of such sins of the tongue. I am not one of those chosen souls, which is why it is necessary for me to accept without complaint whatever is said about me as coming from God Himself for His greater honor and glory and my sanctification. Everything gets revealed on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the living and the dead. Why not wait until then to see the just judgment of God from which no one can appeal and that no one will be able to "explain away" with a series of excuses and rationalizations?
Sure, it is difficult to be mortified against one's pride. It can take a lifetime to accept with serenity, joy and gratitude even the most unjust, baseless charges against us, especially if such baseless charges are made in a public forum so as to make of us a thing of derision before almost all other men. Who cares? Our Lord is just. He permits us to suffer nothing in this life that is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Him to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion Death and that caused His Most Blessed Mother's Immaculate Heart to be pierced through and through with those Seven Swords of Sorrow. None of us suffers as his sins deserve. God is most merciful. And Our Lady, she who is the Queen of Mercy and the Mediatrix of All Graces, sends us all of the graces that we need to prosper under each and every cross that her Divine Son asks us to bear?
Why do we complain so much when we get criticized or people speak ill of us unjustly? This is a cause of great rejoicing, not sorrow. This is the means that God has chosen to purify us. Deo gratias!
The example of Saint John of God, who was misunderstood his entire life, starting when he left his parents' house at the age of nine for reasons that he himself never fully understood, should inspire us to love the humiliation endured by Christ the King, Whose very Kingship was mocked as the Roman soldiers plaited the Crown of Thorns and hammered it deep into His skull. Saint John of God accepted humiliation and misunderstanding as he forgave those who spoke ill of him. Why can't we?
Consider the following example, drawn from the book Brother Zero that was used as the foundation of Understood By God Alone, which was posted originally on March 8, 2010, the Feast of Saint John of God:
Brothers Anthony and Dominic, two members of the
Hospitallers founded by Saint John of God, had been reconciled to each
other by our saint after a bitter feud. They spoke to each other. They
forgave each other after they had been forgiven in the Sacred Tribunal
of Penance. Imagine such a thing. And ever grateful to the man who
reconciled them to each other, the man who brought them into religious
life so that they could better sanctify and save their souls, they were
very concerned when the bishop, Don Pedro, had had to call Saint John of
God, weakened by years of penance and selfless service to the poor,
after another round of complaints shortly before our saint died in 1550:
"Slanderers again?"
"Yes."
"Strange," said Anthony, "that's what Dr. Raxis
was talking about. The slander and abuse that are suffered by great and
isolated men of science, for no better reason than that they accomplish
good for humanity. Well, what are the faultfinders crying about now?"
"The usual. Fray Cero supports the undeserving,
helps those who ought to be made to help themselves, encourages idleness
by giving alms; he doesn't ask questions, doesn't inquire into the past
of the women and girls to whom he has given refuge; his night-shelter
is a den of thieves; his hospital is a haven for hardened sinners; et
cetera. Don Pedro quieted the accusers with difficulty and found himself
compelled to promise that he would investigate their charges." Dominic
waited a moment. "It isn't in Fray Cero to appease the exaggerated pride of snobs. Humility is the essence of him. Merely as a matter of principle, Don Pedro had to question him."
"I hope he wasn't too ill to defend himself."
"He defended his work, not himself. All his
strength was used up by the time he reached the Archbishop's palace, but
his zeal and humbleness are inexhaustible. 'If I received only the
good,' he told Don Pedro, 'our wards would be empty and I would have no
sinners to convert. I know that I do not perform my duty as I ought. I
have set a bad example. I am unworthy of the trust that has been given
me, an unworthy guardian of my Brothers. Were you to visit our hospital
you would not find the abuses and evil persons that Your Excellency has
been warned are in it, and you would realize that I am the only one who
ought to be driven out.'" Dominic was twisting his beads in his restless
hands."If His Excellency had not taken me aside for a moment," he
explained to Anthony, "I wouldn't have known what the summons was all
about, although I suppose I might have guessed it by something that Fray
Cero said to me when we came home. As we entered the vestibule, he put
his hand on my shoulder and looked at me. His eyes seemed to beg
forgiveness. I didn't know for what until after he had spoken. The
counsel that he gave me I am sure he was giving to every one of us. This
is what he said: "We are human, subject to error and
misunderstandings, and quick to judge. So let us pardon, yes let us
pardon as we wish to be pardoned. Judgment is God's alone. Let us serve
God faithfully, for it is to Him and to His Blessed Mother that we are
answerable." (Corville Newcomb, Brother Zero: A Story of the Life of Saint John God, Dodd and Mead and Company, 1959, pp. 286-287.)
No, we cannot be anything like the thin-skinned naturalists of the false opposites of the naturalist "right" and the naturalist "left." We must be Christs, and to be His we must forgive as we are forgiven, never wasting our time for one moment in any kind of self-justification to any of our fellow mortal beings. It is enough for us to seek out Absolution from the ministrations of a true priest in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance and then to give that forgiveness to all others, understanding that every injustice, whether real or imagined, that we suffer in this passing, mortal vale of tears is meant to humble us, who are, if we are honest with ourselves, the most unjust and charitable of people, so as to make it more possible for us to save our immortal souls as the consecrated slaves of Our Divine King through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Yes, each of us keep in mind at all times the simple fact that none of us is free from the guilt of sin, which is why we must be earnest about making reparation for our sins to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Mindful of our need to make reparation of our sins and relying ever more confidently upon the maternal intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Empress of the Americas, may we be emboldened to plant the seeds, starting with the enthronement of our own homes to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, for the conversion of each man and woman and child in this nation to the Catholic Faith, thereby ushering in a Christendom in that part of North America located between Canada and Mexico wherein the wonderful cry of the Cristeros, voiced so proudly by Father Miguel Augustin Pro, S.J., will be on the lips of all men at all times:
Viva Cristo Rey!
The Social Reign of Christ the King starts in our own souls. It starts in our own homes. It starts with how we treat all others as we would treat Our Divine King Himself. There can be no Social Reign of Christ the King in the world if we do not let Him reign as the King of our own souls, and He cannot be King of our own souls as long as we harbor any grudges or hard feelings against any other human being. We must have Masses offered for those we believe have done us injustices, and we must remember them in the Rosaries that we pray every day.
The fascists of Modernity, enabled by the theological and liturgical fascists of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism who brook no opposition to their abominable liturgical rites and their false doctrines, will decrease in the proportion that their haughtiness and arrogance decreases in our own souls for as go individual souls, so go the fate of nations. Put in other terms, we cannot expect to have anything other than thin-skinned tyrants governing us if we cannot accept humiliation and suffering with joy as coming from the very loving hand of God.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.
