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SUGGESTION = IF YOU BELIEVE IN THE ANTI-CHRIST - DEFINE ALL DATA AND YOU TELL ME WHO IT POINTS TO
THAT IS NOW ALIVE AND TAKING OVER. POSSIBLY A PERSON THAT IS FOREIGN BORN. (Note: = I am of a different belief but I respect all other people and their beliefs.)
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Analysis: A Mideast nuclear war?
By MARTIN WALKER (UPI Editor Emeritus)Published:
Anthony Cordesman may be the most influential man in Washington that most people have never heard of. A former director of intelligence assessment for the secretary of defense and director of policy and planning in the Department of Energy, he is now the top strategic guru at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Most serious politicians and journalists have for some years based their analyses of the Iraq war and its aftermath on his universally respected research. Cordesman is a facts man who likes and reveres good data and cool, clinical analysis as the keystones of policymaking.
He has now turned his laser-like research and forensic intelligence skills to studying the real implication of the endless diplomatic minuet at the United Nations over Iran's nuclear ambitions. In the real world, this matters mainly because an Iranian nuclear capability would transform the power balance in the wider Middle East, and leave the region and the rest of us living under the constant prospect of a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel.
This would mean, Cordesman suggests, some 16 million to 28 million Iranians dead within 21 days, and between 200,000 and 800,000 Israelis dead within the same time frame. The total of deaths beyond 21 days could rise very much higher, depending on civil defense and public health facilities, where Israel has a major advantage.
It is theoretically possible that the Israeli state, economy and organized society might just survive such an almost-mortal blow. Iran would not survive as an organized society. "Iranian recovery is not possible in the normal sense of the term," Cordesman notes.
The difference in the death tolls is largely because Israel is believed to have more nuclear weapons of very much higher yield (some of 1 megaton), and Israel is deploying the Arrow advanced anti-missile system in addition to its Patriot batteries. Fewer Iranian weapons would get through.
The difference in yield matters. The biggest bomb that Iran is expected to have is 100 kilotons, which can inflict third-degree burns on exposed flesh at 8 miles; Israel's 1-megaton bombs can inflict third-degree burns at 24 miles. Moreover, the radiation fallout from an airburst of such a 1-megaton bomb can kill unsheltered people at up to 80 miles within 18 hours as the radiation plume drifts. (Jordan, by the way, would suffer severe radiation damage from an Iranian strike on Tel Aviv.)
Cordesman assumes that Iran, with less than 30 nuclear warheads in the period after 2010, would aim for the main population centers of Tel Aviv and Haifa, while Israel would have more than 200 warheads and far better delivery systems, including cruise missiles launched from its 3 Dolphin-class submarines.
The assumption is that Israel would be going for Iran's nuclear development centers in Tehran, Natanz, Ardekan, Saghand, Gashin, Bushehr, Aral, Isfahan and Lashkar A'bad. Israel would also likely target the main population centers of Tehran, Tabriz, Qazvin, Isfahan, Shiraz, Yazd, Kerman, Qom, Ahwaz and Kermanshah. Cordesman points out that the city of Tehran, with a population of 15 million in its metropolitan area, is "a topographic basin with mountain reflector. Nearly ideal nuclear killing ground."
But it does not end there. Cordesman points out that Israel would need to keep a "reserve strike capability to ensure no other power can capitalize on Iranian strike." This means Israel would have to target "key Arab neighbors" - in particular Syria and Egypt.
Cordesman notes that Israel would have various options, including a limited nuclear strike on the region mainly inhabited by the Alawite minority from which come the ruling Assad dynasty. A full-scale Israeli attack on Syria would kill up to 18 million people within 21 days; Syrian recovery would not be possible. A Syrian attack with all its reputed chemical and biological warfare assets could kill up to 800,000 Israelis, but Israeli society would recover.
An Israeli attack on Egypt would likely strike at the main population centers of Cairo, Alexandria, Damietta, Port Said, Suez, Luxor and Aswan. Cordesman does not give a death toll here, but it would certainly be in the tens of millions. It would also destroy the Suez Canal and almost certainly destroy the Aswan Dam, sending monstrous floods down the Nile to sweep away the glowing rubble. It would mean the end of Egypt as a functioning society.
Cordesman also lists the oilwells, refineries and ports along the Gulf that could also be targets in the event of a mass nuclear response by an Israel convinced that it was being dealt a potentially mortal blow. Being contained within the region, such a nuclear exchange might not be Armageddon for the human race; it would certainly be Armageddon for the global economy.
So in clear, concise and chillingly forensic style, Cordesman spells out that the real stakes in the crisis that is building over Iran's nuclear ambitions would certainly include the end of Persian civilization, quite probably the end of Egyptian civilization, and the end of the Oil Age. This would also mean the end of globalization and the extraordinary accretions in world trade and growth and prosperity that are hauling hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians and others out of poverty.
Cordesman concludes his chilling but dismayingly logical survey with the warning: "The only way to win is not to play."
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Explosion severs Azerbaijan-Georgia-
Europe fuel railway link
DEBKAfile Special Report
August 24, 2008, 2:14 PM (GMT+02:00)
Fuel train on fire near Gori
The train hit a mine Sunday, Aug. 24 at the village of Skra, 5 km west of Gori, on the main track of the railway line linking Eastern and Western Georgia – a vital trade route for oil exports from Azerbaijan to European markets.
Responsibility for the sabotage has not been determined. The blast deals a serious blow to Georgia’s efforts to recover from its ten-day war over South Ossetia in the face of the continuing Russian military presence.
Georgian officials suggested Russian forces which pulled out of the area two days ago left a road mine on the railroad.
Azerbaijan restored its oil consignments via Georgia only two days ago; their interruption during the fighting robbed the Saakasvhili government of valuable revenue, which the attack has suspended again.
In another development Sunday, the guided missile destroyer USS McFaul docked at the Georgian port of Batumi carrying supplies such as blankets, hygiene kits and baby food. Two more US ships are due to dock later this week.
The American vessels were supposed originally to put in at the Black Sea port of Poti, 80 km to the north, but changed direction to avoid meeting Russian troops who are fortifying their positions at Poti further up the coast.
Russia says it entitled to keep its forces in a buffer zone around the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, citing the truce and other international agreements as covering unspecified “additional security measures,” over and above their pre-conflict positions. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Moscow claims, approved the buffer zones which they organized before the ceasefire was signed (as revealed by DEBKAfile on Aug. 17)
Russia acknowledges that Poti is outside the ceasefire’s terms and its peacekeeping mandate.
Saturday, the Russian missile cruiser Moskva returned to its base in Ukraine. DEBKAfile reported on Aug. 20 from official Russian sources that the warship was part of a large flotilla heading for the Mediterranean port of Tartus in Syria.
The defense ministry in Moscow later detached the Moskva from the contingent and sent it back to the Black Sea.
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Joe Biden on Gun Control
Democratic Sr Senator (DE)
Keep assault weapons ban; close gun show loophole
Q: How many of you, in your adult lifetime, have had a gun in the house? [Show of hands]: Senator Gravel, Senator Biden, Senator Dodd, Governor Richardson, Congressman Kucinich.
Q: Sen. Biden, what could the federal government have done to save those kids at Virginia Tech?
A: What they could have done is three things.
- In the so-called Biden crime bill, we put 100,000 cops on the street. I've worked with law enforcement for the past 30 years, with armor-piercing bullets, waiting periods, etc. But the one thing that's clear: We should not have let the assault weapons ban lapse.
- We should close this so-called gun show loophole, so you can't go into a gun show and buy a gun that you couldn't buy walking into a gun shop.
- We have let the country down in the way in which we have not focused on mental illness. We should know that your kid is safe at college. If teachers determine that a child is a danger, the school should be able to take them off the campus.
Voted NO on prohibiting lawsuits against gun manufacturers.
A bill to prohibit civil liability actions from being brought or continued against manufacturers, distributors, dealers, or importers of firearms or ammunition for damages, injunctive or other relief resulting from the misuse of their products by others. Voting YES would: - Exempt lawsuits brought against individuals who knowingly transfer a firearm that will be used to commit a violent or drug-trafficking crime
- Exempt lawsuits against actions that result in death, physical injury or property damage due solely to a product defect
- Call for the dismissal of all qualified civil liability actions pending on the date of enactment by the court in which the action was brought
- Prohibit the manufacture, import, sale or delivery of armor piercing ammunition, and sets a minimum prison term of 15 years for violations
- Require all licensed importers, manufacturers and dealers who engage in the transfer of handguns to provide secure gun storage or safety devices
Voted NO on banning lawsuits against gun manufacturers for gun violence.
Vote to pass a bill that would block certain civil lawsuits against manufacturers, distributors, dealers and importers of firearms and ammunition, mainly those lawsuits aimed at making them liable for gun violence. In this bill, trade groups would also be protected The bill would call for the dismissal of pending lawsuits against the gun industry. The exception would be lawsuits regarding a defect in a weapon or ammunition. It also would provide a 10-year reauthorization of the assault weapons ban which is set to expire in September 2004. The bill would increase the penalties for gun-related violent or drug trafficking crimes which have not resulted in death, to a minimum of 15 years imprisonment. The bill calls for criminal background checks on all firearm transactions at gun shows where at least 75 guns are sold. Exemptions would be made available for dealers selling guns from their homes as well as members-only gun swaps and meets carried out by nonprofit hunting clubs. Voted YES on background checks at gun shows.
Require background checks on all firearm sales at gun shows.Status: Amdt Agreed to Y)50; N)50; VP decided YES
Voted NO on more penalties for gun & drug violations.
The Hatch amdt would increase mandatory penalties for the illegal transfer or use of firearms, fund additional drug case prosecutors, and require background check on purchasers at gun shows. [A YES vote supports stricter penalties].Status: Amdt Agreed to Y)48; N)47; NV)5
Voted NO on loosening license & background checks at gun shows.
Vote to table or kill a motion to require that all gun sales at gun shows be completed by federally licensed gun dealers. Also requires background checks to be completed on buyers and requires gun show promoters to register with the Treasury. Voted NO on maintaining current law: guns sold without trigger locks.
Vote to table [kill] an amendment to make it unlawful for gun dealers to sell handguns without providing trigger locks. Violation of the law would result in civil penalties, such as suspension or revocation of the dealer's license, or a fine. Rated F by the NRA, indicating a pro-gun control voting record.
Biden scores F by NRA on pro-gun rights policies While widely recognized today as a major political force and as America's foremost defender of Second Amendment rights, the National Rifle Association (NRA) has, since its inception, been the premier firearms education organization in the world. But our successes would not be possible without the tireless efforts and countless hours of service our nearly three million members have given to champion Second Amendment rights and support NRA programs.
While widely recognized today as a major political force and as America's foremost defender of Second Amendment rights, the National Rifle Association (NRA) has, since its inception, been the premier firearms education organization in the world. But our successes would not be possible without the tireless efforts and countless hours of service our nearly three million members have given to champion Second Amendment rights and support NRA programs.
The following ratings are based on lifetime voting records on gun issues and the results of a questionaire sent to all Congressional candidates; the NRA assigned a letter grade (with A+ being the highest and F being the lowest).
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcYPSUK93M0
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(Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images)
For years, Britons were told not to worry as their nation’s most strategic and profitable corporations—energy companies, manufacturers, railroads, airports, seaports, banks, food processors—were sold to foreign competitors. It was all part of free trade and capitalism, which meant everyone would supposedly benefit.
“The bottom line,” as one investment analyst assured concerned Britons, “is that it is costly to be xenophobic in matters of economics.” All the while, the United Kingdom became an oddity in protectionist Europe. As countries like Germany, France and Spain erected barriers protecting their companies from foreign ownership, UK policies embraced the corporate sell-out.
The folly is now being exposed, and Britons are beginning to pay the price for selling off their corporate crown jewels for short-term profit.
The most recent example comes from the energy sector. Foreign utilities have been accused of “picking the pockets” of 11 million British customers, while keeping prices in their home countries stable.
French-owned edf has announced that its 5.5 million British customers will pay on average 22 percent more on their gas bills and 17 percent more on electricity this year. Some users will be hit with a whopping 75 percent increase.
The price increases in Britain are in sharp contrast to France, where the government has ordered the utility to cap all increases to 2 percent for electricity and 5 percent for gas.
Most of Britain’s energy sector is now foreign owned, and several other companies have been jacking up rates too. According to Ed Mayo, chief executive of the National Consumer Council, foreign-owned power companies—such as edf, rwe, npower and e.on of Germany, and Iberdrola of Spain, which owns Scottish Power—should be required to show that they are not raising prices in the UK to keep prices lower in their home market.
These recent developments within the energy sector are a harbinger of what is coming in other industries. Over the past several years, corporate Britain has been plundered as no other country on Earth.
The implications of this massive wave of foreign takeovers of British companies and its root cause are explained in the article “Selling Britain’s Corporate Crown Jewels.” For more detailed information, read the free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy. •
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(Reuters)
The battle for the world’s largest airport operator, British-owned baa, is over. After months of beating back the hostile takeover attempt by Spanish construction giant Grupo Ferrovial and bids by an American-led Goldman Sachs consortium, baa fell to the Spanish predators.
London’s Independent is calling the $19 billion deal “the most dramatic example yet of the way in which strategic UK assets are falling to overseas bidders” (Associated Press, June 7).
Many considered baa one of Britain’s crown jewels because it owns and operates airports that handle 63 percent of travelers going in and out of Britain. In Scotland, baa handles 86 percent of all air travelers and manages airports at Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In London, the number of air travelers through baa airports rises to 92 percent.
Besides providing jobs for thousands of employees, baa has played a strategic role facilitating the movement of goods and people into and out of Britain and around the world. In essence, baa was the keeper for the United Kingdom’s air gates.
Last year, another British airport operator, tbi, was purchased by an international consortium which included Aena, the Spanish state-owned airports group (Financial Times, June 7).
And it is not just Britain’s air gates that are being sold.
According to the Guardian, “Britain is being sold off at a rate unprecedented in modern times. If the foreign takeover bids announced or hinted at over the past few months all go through, airports, ships, banks, gas pipelines, stock exchanges, chemical plants and glass factories will fall into foreign ownership. Yet there is no debate; scarcely an eyebrow is raised. In any other country there would be uproar” (February 17, emphasis ours).
The London Times says “[b]ig British companies are falling into foreign ownership almost daily,” with few protests (June 8). It calls the sell-offs a “mass asset-stripping of the UK’s corporate infrastructure” (ibid., March 3).
“[W]ith this rate of takeover, within a generation most British workers outside the public sector will be working for foreign companies,” the Guardian reports. “The scale of what is happening is truly breathtaking compared with even five years ago” (op. cit.).
As reported by the Economist, the value of British companies purchased by foreigners doubled to a record $91 billion last year from $41 billion in 2004 (March 4). The worry is that the current rate and scale of foreign takeovers is “a sign of weakness, not strength” (Guardian, op. cit.).
A quick news search reveals a list of former British-owned corporate crown jewels that stands out like a treasure chest of sparkling gems atop a desert sand dune.
Automotive sector: Once British manufacturers, Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Bentley, Jaguar, and mg Rover are now all foreign owned. American companies purchased Aston Martin and Jaguar; the Chinese, mg Rover; and in a cruel irony, Rolls-Royce and Bentley were bought by German companies (Independent, April 12). bmw purchased Rolls-Royce, the company that produced the engine that powered the World War ii Spitfire fighter that was so effective in combating the German bmw-built opposition.
Gas and Electricity: Many of Britain’s largest conventional power utilities are already foreign owned. In 2002, German energy giant rwe Power bought Britain’s third-largest energy supplier, npower, which supplies electricity and gas to approximately 6 million customers. Another German energy giant, E.On, owns even more of Britain’s energy distribution system. Through its subsidiary Powergen, E.On provides power and gas to 9 million British customers, making it Britain’s second-largest electricity and gas provider. edf Energy, the French state-owned energy giant, is Britain’s fifth-largest electricity and gas provider.
Until recently, very few have even questioned the wisdom of putting the nation’s heat and electricity in the hands of foreign corporations. In commenting upon the recent proposed takeover of British utility Centrica by Russian state-owned Gazprom, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown warned it could raise political issues. Gazprom is the company that cut off the gas supply to Ukraine and consequently much of Europe early this year in what was seen as a political spat between the two governments. Centrica is Britain’s largest gas utility, supplying gas to 13 million homes.
Nuclear Power Generation: On February 6, British Nuclear Fuels (bnfl), the British state-owned nuclear power manufacturer, announced it had sold its power station construction arm, Westinghouse, to Japan’s Toshiba corporation. The Prospect union, which represents several thousand engineers, scientists and managers at 22 sites, attacked the sell-off for “robbing Britain of new-build expertise” (Morning Star, February 7). The government is also considering selling its stake in the nuclear power firm British Energy, which manages eight of the UK’s nuclear power stations and is the nation’s largest electricity generator.
Water: Britain’s largest water utility, Thames Water, is foreign owned, though it is up for sale once again by its German owners. Thames Water supplies water and wastewater services to millions of Britons and other customers around the globe. French-owned Veolia Water also owns and operates several UK utilities.
Telecommunications: Communications providers have also been gobbled up. Last year, O2 plc, a mobile-phone company, was sold to Spain’s Telefonica for $31.7 billion. On January 23, Marconi Corporation plc, the last remaining British telecom manufacturer of any size, was purchased by Sweden’s Ericsson. Marconi was a British institution whose roots could be traced back to 1897. It was also considered a heavyweight in the British defense industry.
Industrial manufacturers: Founded in 1886, British-owned boc Group, the world’s second-largest industrial gases group, is in the process of being purchased by a smaller German rival, Linde. This deal will make Linde the world’s foremost producer of industrial gases.
Another old imperial UK company that built parts for the Spitfire, Pilkington, was also recently taken over. The 180-year-old glass company manufactured the windows that fighter pilots used to peer through. The company has been bought by Nippon Sheet Glass, a comparatively smaller Japanese company. The merger creates the world’s largest glass manufacturer.
Shipping and Trade: Once the dominant global power in trade, today many of Britain’s ports and shipping companies no longer belong to the British. P&O (Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company), a company founded 169 years ago during Britain’s superpower days and one of the world’s largest shipping companies, having an unparalleled infrastructure of container ports and ships, was purchased in March by the United Arab Emirates state-owned company Dubai Ports World for $6.8 billion.
Finance: British banks have also been targets. In 2004, Abbey National, Britain’s sixth-largest bank and second-largest mortgage lender, was purchased by Spain’s Banco Santander for ₤9 billion (us$16.7 billion). This past May, France’s Credit Agricole sa confirmed that it was looking at another British bank, Alliance & Leicester plc, as a possible takeover target.
Even the London Stock Exchange is currently fighting off a hostile takeover attempt by Nasdaq.
Sports: It might be surprising to some, but Britain’s probably most well known, if not most adored, soccer team, Manchester United, is also foreign owned.
When it comes to protecting their own nation’s goal, are British politicians running down the field in the wrong direction?
Tomorrow we will examine why Britain is allowing this unprecedented sell-off of British businesses, and some of this trend’s larger ramifications. •
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As a primary-school lad in Australia, one of the great dominions of the British Commonwealth and Empire, I can well remember the impact which King George vi’s death had around the world in 1952. That was seven years after the defeat of the German-led Axis powers in World War ii. We were still sending food parcels across the seas to Britain and lending special support to our pen friend, young Jean Irwin, of the bomb-blasted city of Bristol. When the day of the king’s funeral arrived, we children went to school wearing black and purple ribbons—the black signifying sympathy for the royal family’s grieving, the purple being the color of royalty. Our whole school stood in silence for two minutes together with the entire nation at the appointed time, paying tribute to the king. The pedestrian traffic came to a halt on the sidewalks and in shops across the country as police doffed their helmets and stood in reverent silence for the required period.
The whole nation mourned with a genuine sense of the loss of a king who had called the British nation to prayer on more than one occasion to either implore God for merciful intervention to save it in battle, or in thanks to God for giving it the victory. Multiple millions the world over, from Canada to India, from New Zealand to South Africa and throughout the whole vast British Commonwealth and empire, followed suit. For a brief moment in time the silence was profound, as the mightiest empire that ever was remembered its king. It was a time when the British crown still enjoyed almost universal respect.
Then, in 1965, once again, Great Britain and its commonwealth of nations, no longer an empire, were bound for that moment of silence in memory of a singularly great man of the empire. Worldwide television and radio broadcast the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill. As a young man courting my future wife, I remember those black-and-white images of the funeral cortege as it wove along the route to deliver this old warrior’s remains to the boat that would convey them to their final resting place. The feeling in my country, in the midst of that decade of great social upheaval in the West, was as of an era brought to a close.
“The final days of imperial Britain are bracketed—appropriately enough—by the funerals of an old man and of a beautiful young woman. The first, of Sir Winston Churchill, reached into a past of grandeur and certainty, while the second, of Diana, princess of Wales, foreshadowed a future of doubt and decline” (Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain, p. 1).
A well-known British journalist sees an overarching connection between Churchill’s funeral and that of another eminent Briton. Watching that other funeral, the great media-managed display surrounding the death of Princess Diana, one of my generation surely had to be struck by the vast difference in the public image of a Britain mourning for its last king and its greatest prime minister, and that of this divorced wife of the prince of Wales. The old traditions had crumbled; old taboos were lauded. A homosexual performed a song in the great cathedral of Westminster, a song originally devoted to a former actress of loose reputation who died in questionable circumstances. Far from honoring the dead in silence, the assembled mourners applauded the performance. Such a queer mood gripped liberal Britain and rippled around its polyglot commonwealth on this occasion that it could only be described as a mania. Indeed, the strange and unprecedented Dianamania that gripped Britain at this time was but symptomatic of a deeper illness.
“Among young people unprecedented rates of suicide, drug-addiction and crime are plain signals of distress and fear. The Dianamania is another indication of those anxieties and disorders at large in society” (Hal Colbatch, Blair’s Britain, p. 140).
End of the Imperial Age
Thus it was that, as Peter Hitchens mused on Churchill’s funeral procession of 35 years ago, the uniformed men of the three services who comprised the funeral escort “all knew or suspected that their great imperial age was over. In less than two years, a pitiless series of spending cuts would abolish or merge ancient regiments, condemn dozens of ships to the scrap yard and close a string of hard-won (and recently recaptured) bases east of Suez” (op. cit., p. 18).
That great reversal of Britain’s national blessings was forecast in the prophecy of Isaiah 17.
The imperial age of Great Britain had been founded upon the institution of royalty. This is what gave Britain and its far-flung possessions a vision of continuity, which many understood, up to the time of and including Queen Victoria, attested to a regal genealogy which stretched back 3,000 years to the ancient royal throne of King David of Israel. (Request your own free copy of our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy for the exciting exposé of this startling truth.)
It was George Orwell who wrote in his 1941 play, The Lion and the Unicorn, that it would take more than World War ii to change the deeply set character of the British. Perhaps the great trauma of that war laid the groundwork to destabilize this one great nation, even in the midst of that which Churchill termed Britain’s “finest hour.” However, post-war Britain up to 1965 had changed little, culturally, over the previous 30 years. At the time of Churchill’s death, 93 percent of British marriages lasted to the grave. Apart from a small liberal-socialist “elite,” such as the infamous Bloomsbury set, the sexual revolution had not begun!
Divorce was still anathema, illegitimacy a rarity and homosexual acts illegal. “Loitering with intent” (a euphemism for hanging around, waiting to commit a felony) and offensive language were criminal acts. The concept of worshiping a singular providence, God, still underpinned British society up to the mid-1960s. The queen was honored, the national anthem sung with gusto, and the beloved old Union Jack, under which the empire had fought and gained the victory in two great wars, was saluted with solemnity.
Birth of the Ugly New Britain
Thirty years on from Churchill’s death, a sea change had emerged in Britain which had shaken its culture apart. Peter Hitchens encapsulates that change brilliantly: “In 1965, the people of Britain may have been poorer, smaller, shabbier, dirtier, colder, narrower, more set in their ways, ignorant of olive oil, polenta and—even—lager. But they knew what united them, they shared a complicated web of beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, loyalties and dislikes. By 1997 they were unsure and at sea. Those over 40 no longer felt they were living in the country where they had grown up…. Those under 40, for the most part, had only the sketchiest notion of who they were and of how or when their surroundings had come to be as they were…and despised much of what the previous generation had admired” (ibid., pp. 23-24; emphasis mine here and throughout).
Britain is at grave risk of losing all concept and memory of its rich and glorious God-given heritage. As Mr. Hitchens opines, “A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation” (ibid., p. 35).
Last June, Britons were treated to a shocking demonstration of this loss of the nation’s history to its current generation. It was the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Old airmen who fought in dogfights against Herman Göring’s Luftwaffe visited a British primary school. They were aghast at observing that schoolchildren had never heard of the Battle of Britain! One old serviceman approached a teacher and asked her if the history of the Battle of Britain would be taught as a component of the children’s education curriculum. To his astonishment the old spitfire pilot received the response, “The battle of what?” Less than three generations from the British victory in the 1940 battle which turned the tide of war for that country, the knowledge of its heroes, the quality of the nation’s valor, the loyalty and devotion to the crown that bound the nation together amid great sacrifice and hardship, have largely disappeared from the nation’s schools!
How did this happen? Author Hal Colebatch declares, “There is something very strange about the attempt to forcibly destroy a country’s past traditions and institutions when that country has been one of the most stable and advanced of major nations” (op. cit., p. 140).
Perhaps the course was set for the eradication of true history from British education curricula during the 1960s. But the deathblow has followed since 1997. In that year, when the queen was observed to shed a tear at the paying off of the Royal Yacht, a symbol of a greater imperial age (towed to rest by a German tugboat), the funeral of a princess gauged the extent of the fever that heated the brow of a culturally abased, morally sick Britain, and a new British administration took over the reins of government to steer the nation into a moral and cultural abyss.
Revealing a frightening parallel to the process that Professor Alan Bloom described in his 1987 best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, a process that has degraded the collective American mind over past decades, Mr. Colebatch declares that the present British administration “shows an affinity with the rock-music culture celebrating drug-taking, law-breaking and physical violence and aggression, as well as occasional suggestions of a kind of commercial satanism.” Colebatch, referring to the British government’s use of pop music as a model for “New Britain,” then quotes the Daily Telegraph: “But what educational worth is there in an activity that thrives on abusing core values?” (ibid., p. 18).
The New Government
Yet the most insidious aspect of the deliberate destruction of the heart of all that was regarded as quintessentially British for centuries has been the stage-managed nature of the present British government’s enforcements of its new order. Witness the snide crowd management at 10 Downing Street, when special passes were issued to Labor Party employees and British flags handed to them to wave in a show of sham crowd support playing to the camera upon the election of the present leader of the British government. Then there was the deliberate flouting of convention by the prime minister and his wife walking out to meet the cameras and the crowds during a state opening of Parliament (deliberately stealing the spotlight from the queen). The present British leadership has cynically used a powerful media cabal to control, in Goebbellesque fashion, the filtering of news to the public. Peter Hitchens states that the carefully choreographed arrival of the prime minister and his wife at 10 Downing Street upon his election to office “was the first example in British history of a fake spontaneous demonstration” (op. cit., p. 333).
Since then, the spin doctors of the liberal-socialist left (dressed, as that segment of British politics is, in its present centrist clothes) have carefully managed the communication of the party line to the public on such things as the drive to lower the age of consent for homosexual acts to 16 years, the destruction of the House of Lords (Britain’s parliamentary Upper House), the denigration of Parliament as an institution, the mockery of British culture in the form of the infamous Millennium Dome, the release of murdering, unrepentant killers from Irish jails, the managed destruction of the British farm economy, and the promotion of subculture to replace traditional high culture. This unprecedented radicalism presently extant in British government is most in evidence in its bearing on basic constitutional and institutional change.
In all of this the media moguls of Britain are complicit. “We should not neglect the active role of opinion-formers and the media in encouraging us to repudiate the culture that made us” (Salisbury Review, Summer 2000, p. 3).
What is quite profound is the congruency which exists in the year 2000 between the ways of the current U.S. administration and that of Britain. Both are led by men who embrace a “third alternative,” a Third Way, in politics. Both actively attack traditional institutions. Both administrations have powerful friends in the mass media. Even as American commercial TV news is sanitized to the extent where only one politically correct point of view is expressed and the U.S. appears as the center of the world, the British leadership’s close liaison with a media multimillionaire who espouses an intense dislike of the institution of royalty has largely contributed to shaping public opinion in Britain against its most regal institution, sucking the nation into the vortex of Europeanization.
Modernism and ethics are the catchwords of the current British administration. “There is some vague idea that change itself is good and that long-established institutions such as the hereditary principle [respecting the House of Lords and the monarchy] or the countryside are unacceptable” (ibid., p. 10).
The cult of the modern envelops this administration. As Digby Anderson, writing for the Salisbury Review, states, “The promotion of sodomy is definitely modern.” Here is a direct link with the philosophy which drives the present U.S. administration. “Traditional smacking of naughty children is not modern.” Another link across the Atlantic. Then there is “New Britain’s” situation ethics.
Having worked like the devil to destroy the traditional value base of Britain, the old Ten Commandments, British political leadership gropes in the resultant vacuum to establish a coherent national value system while at the same time perpetually reminding the nation that today’s Britain is a multicultural society where different groups within the nation have different values. This fragmentation of British society into a mess of differing communities with different languages, religions, cultural practices and traditions is profoundly exacerbated by the diminution of the importance of the “mother of all parliaments” resulting from the Blair government’s creation of separate parliamentary bodies for Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland.
Mr. Anderson, director of the Social Affairs Unit in Britain, declares that “both government and culture have no place for God in their ethical blunderings. Yet they nowhere identify a new authority for their moral imperatives” (ibid., p. 11).
Britain’s present leadership is a government for the times. The time is ripe for the changing of the nation’s mind, and mass media, in particular television, is the prime medium through which this national mind change is being effected. It is a time when “over 90 percent of the population does not care to meet God, on a regular basis at any rate; they’d rather watch TV” (ibid., p. 11). Mr. Anderson poses the intriguing question, “Could it not be that the trivia and filth of the media do not so much corrupt culture as feed an already corrupted culture?” (ibid., p. 11).
Commenting on the media-managed, politically motivated onslaught on the foundations of British culture, Hitchens observes, “This was how the modern men, the men who had grown up with color TV and the Beatles, stormed Britain’s gates” (op. cit., p. xviii).
No More Artisans—No More Orators
The prophet Isaiah forecast a time when Britain would see its rich stock of leaders in every major field diminished. “For, behold, the Lord, the Lord of hosts, doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread, and the whole stay of water, the mighty man, and the man of war, the judge, and the prophet, and the prudent, and the ancient, the captain of fifty, and the honourable man, and the counseller, and the cunning artificer, and the eloquent orator” (Isa. 3:1-3).
Compare Isaiah’s prophecy with Mr. Colbatch’s turn-of-the-millennium observation: “The old right [traditional conservative bastion of moral certitude in Britain] has seen the apparent great weakening of such social and moral certainties as monarchism, patriotism, and military and civil values like honor, pride, dignity and tradition…” (op. cit., p. 11).
Both authors of the recently published books quoted in this article, Hitchens and Colebatch, agree that 1997 saw something much more than a change of government in Britain. It was Emperor Constantine who noted in the vanguard of the imploding cultural collapse of Rome that the empire had reached a point where the stone-carvers had lost the talent to carve impressions of reality and had to resort to copying earlier works. Britain may have momentarily revived the art of the stonemason and the carver through the post-1970s effort to restore some of its finest old buildings and monuments. Yet it is the artisans of words, the great orators, the prudent judges, the wise administrators (once unmatched in the world) that have disappeared from its cultural scene, as Isaiah prophesied. With their loss has gone the sense of honor, duty, fidelity, courage, self-sacrifice and personal responsibility which underpinned the reputations of its greatest leaders.
The contrast between the Profumo and Cooke affairs makes this great loss powerfully evident. In 1962, British government minister John Profumo’s affair with call girl Christine Keeler led to his voluntary resignation and an inquiry chaired by a high-court judge, and brought down the conservative government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Forty years later, the current British minister for foreign affairs, Robin Cook, consorting with a civil servant, adopting her as his mistress and housing her in swank Carlton Gardens raises hardly a ripple from the nation, and the country’s present leader turns a blind eye to this shoddy affair.
The Europeanization of Britain
Perhaps the most insidious part of the government’s covert agenda for massive cultural and institutional change in Britain is its underground drive to divorce the United Kingdom from its sovereignty and independence as a nation and merge it into the hybrid mix of the European Union.
The British people were sold a lie by conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath in the 1970s, when he told them that no federal ambitions lay behind those who ruled the European common market. The British were then sold down the drain acquiring membership of the EU (then the European Economic Community) under his government in 1973. The move wrecked the most successful agrarian economy in the world, sacrificing it to mountains of inefficiency in the farm-destroying market of the European Union.
With the collapse of the Soviet political economy, the way was cleared for an emerging European phenomenon, described by Peter Hitchens as “a new battle against German domination of Europe, advancing behind the smoke screen of European Union, and armed with the weapons of supranational statism”(op. cit., p. xvii).
Then the Europhiles set about to Europeanize the minds of the British people. Lately this has culminated in the most insidious and seditious project of brainwashing imposed by the EU and willingly cultivated by Britain’s current administration: “Euroquest.” The Euroquest venture is a blatant effort by Eurocrats and Third Way British politicians to inject into the minds of the nation’s schoolchildren acceptance of the grand Eurodream.
British political economist Rodney Atkinson, in his pamphlet “European Union Propaganda in British Schools,” states, “‘Euroquest’ is their latest venture into the ‘education’ of our children about the obvious advantages of sacrificing our nation, Parliament and democracy on the altar of the European Union.”
Atkinson explains that such propaganda goes directly against Britain’s Education Act, which specifically forbids, in the words of section 406, “the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject in schools.”
A curious thing is happening in Britain. On the one hand we have a pop-culture government espousing a “cool Britannia,” promising a repackaged national identity founded upon the cult of the young, the modern and the “ethics” of political correctness. On the other it appears that the whole of British heritage is finished—sovereignty, national identity, history, the general conventions, systems, institutions and standards that made Britain world leader for over 200 years.
When seen in the context of European Union, it seems that “the government is trying to reshape the national identity and consciousness not in spite of the coming European Union but because of it. A Britain whose historic culture has been destroyed may not find the loss of sovereignty such a great matter” (Colebatch, op. cit., p. 59).
Choose Now
The present British political establishment has hastened the regression of that country which, in the words of Aldous Huxley, once exuded a “prestige, which the other people would like to deny but can’t” (Luigi Barzini, The Europeans, p. 36). Today’s Britain is but a poor reflection of those halcyon days when “the adoption of English ways…was in the end so widespread as to go practically unnoticed and unquestioned. People automatically chose the best and the best was British” (ibid., p. 38).
The Philadelphia Church of God is doing its utmost to explain to the British and American peoples the reason for their moral and cultural collapse, a portent of coming socio-economic implosion on a far greater scale than the collapse of the Soviet system.
The best of the commentators on the state of “New Britain” knowingly declare that its present cultural and moral collapse is without precedent. Warning bells are sounding.
“I ask the Left to begin to reconsider its own record, especially in damaging the family, ruining the schools and making Britain a land fit for pornographers. If the decay of obligation, duty and morality continues, danger and misery will soon be hammering at the front doors of all of us, Left and Right alike” (Hitchens, op. cit., p. 350).
The threat of that “danger and misery” is a lot closer than most Britons realize. When the threat becomes a reality, the shock will overwhelm the British people.
“Like an avalanche, cultural or systemic collapses can have consequences far in excess of their apparent causes. And when an avalanche—or a guillotine—falls, it falls very fast” (Colebatch, op. cit., pp. 141-142).
This comment is reminiscent of God’s end-time prophecy for Britain, the land of biblical Ephraim, contained in Hosea 5:4-5. “They will not frame their doings to turn unto their God: for the spirit of whoredoms is in the midst of them, and they have not known the Lord. And the pride of Israel doth testify to his face: therefore shall Israel and Ephraim fall in their iniquity; Judah also shall fall with them.”
The book of Hosea mentions Ephraim 37 times. For proof that biblical Ephraim is the Britain of today, write for The United States and Britain in Prophecy. Much of Hosea’s message is a revelation of the massive correction facing Britain if that nation does not repent and turn back to worship the God who originally endowed it with the greatest empire in man’s history. The prospect of this once-great nation’s national repentance before receiving that correction looks very bleak indeed.
“The people do not question their own actions. ‘The spirit of whoredoms’ has thoroughly perverted their minds. People like to act religious, but they have no desire to truly know God. The people are growing worse and worse. So Ephraim is going to ‘fall’ hard and fast ‘in their iniquity.’ And the nation of Judah, or the modern-day nation called Israel, and Manasseh (America) are going to fall with them” (Hosea and God’s Adulterous Wife, p. 22; write for a free copy).
Our warning to those nations must become even more powerful, urgent and insistent. There are powers working against this, seeking to block and stifle this message. They will not succeed! God prophesies that Britain and America will be warned. And when that warning of powerful national correction for their massive national sins comes, all face a choice to either heed and respond to that message or to reject it. This will affect your future whether or not you like it—whether or not you believe it. Which course will you choose? •
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SO GOES RUSSIA - SO GOES THE WORLD
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