Professor Gary Burge was a New Testament professor at Wheaton College
Professor Gary Burge
for many years. He is also a good friend of mine and is now a dean at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, MI.
Gary has written three excellent books about the errors of Christian Zionism and the real-world fallout that it helps to create.
Thus, I was quite happy when Gary agreed to write the forward to my new book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People (Wipf and Stock, 2021).
I recently discovered that a website called ChristianZionism.org, which Gary helped to organize, is promoting my book by reprinting Gary’s very kind forward.
If you haven’t yet purchased your own copy of the book, I encourage you to read Gary’s forward here.
John Pilger is an independent, British war-journalist and documentary
Independent journalist and documentary film maker, John Pilger
film-maker who does journalism the old-fashioned way: he goes to the scene and talks to the people involved.
His article, posted today at Consortium News, is entitled “War in Europe & the Rise of Raw Propaganda.” He ably discusses both the tsunami of warmongering propaganda about Ukraine that has swept across American media, as well as the needlessly reckless behavior — principally from the American side — unfolding around Ukraine.
Did you know that Ukraine has been in the midst of a civil war since 2014, a war where the US is backing the side that includes neo-Nazi, fascist militias?
Did you know that the US was a major player in overthrowing the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014, an action that helped to stir the civil war ravaging eastern Ukraine today?
Below is an excerpt of Pilger’s article:
Russia’s security proposals ought to be welcomed in the West. . . But who understands their significance when all the people are told is that Putin is a pariah?
Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened. Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the U.S. and Britain. . .
On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” The lie is the message now.
But is this new? It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream. . .
The No-Evidence Rule
The Russians are coming. Russia is worse than bad. Putin is evil, “a Nazi like Hitler,” salivated the Labour MP Chris Bryant. Ukraine is about to be invaded by Russia – tonight, this week, next week. The sources include an ex CIA propagandist who now speaks for the U.S. State Department and offers no evidence of his claims about Russian actions because “it comes from the U.S. Government.”
Jack F. Matlock served as US ambassador to the USSR from 1987 to 1991, which means that he witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain and watched the
Jack F. Matlock, former US ambassador to the Soviet Union
emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev, glasnost, and perestroika from a ringside seat inside Russia.
This means that he is better informed than most when it comes to the post-Soviet history of Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, Ukraine, and Russia.
Mr. Matlock is now a member of the board of directors of the American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA).
In 1997, Ambassador Matlock was asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When asked about whether or not more member states should be added to NATO, he said that it was unwise; that, in fact, “it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War.”
Several days ago Matlock penned a wise and compelling op-ed about the current crisis involving Ukraine, Russia, and the US.
He is thoroughly familiar with all the countries involved. His analysis is rooted in history not hysteria. If only he were inside Biden’s White House.
Below is a selection of excerpts from one of the best analyses of this situation you will find anywhere:
Today we face an avoidable crisis [in Ukraine] that was predictable, actually predicted, willfully precipitated, but easily resolved by the application of common sense. . . Maybe I am wrong—tragically wrong—but I cannot dismiss the suspicion that we are witnessing an elaborate charade, grossly magnified by prominent elements of the American media, to serve a domestic political end. Facing rising inflation, the ravages of Omicron, blame (for the most part unfair) for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, plus the failure to get the full support of his own party for the Build Back Better legislation, the Biden administration is staggering under sagging approval ratings just as it gears up for this year’s congressional elections. Since clear “victories” on the domestic woes seem increasingly unlikely, why not fabricate one by posing as if he prevented the invasion of Ukraine by “standing up to Vladimir Putin”? . . .
. . . So far as Ukraine is concerned, U.S. intrusion into its domestic politics was deep—to the point of seeming to select a prime minister. It also, in effect, supported an illegal coup d’etat that changed the Ukrainian government in 2014, a procedure not normally considered consistent with the rule of law or democratic governance. The violence that still simmers in Ukraine started in the “pro-Western” west, not in the Donbas where it was a reaction to what was viewed as the threat of violence against Ukrainians who are ethnic Russian. . .
Things got worse during the four years of Donald Trump’s tenure. Accused, without evidence, of being a Russian dupe, Trump made sure he embraced every anti-Russian measure that came along, while at the same time flattered Putin as a great leader. Reciprocal expulsions of diplomats, started by the United States in the final days of Obama’s tenure continued in a grim vicious circle that has resulted in a diplomatic presence so emaciated that for months the United States did not have enough staff in Moscow to issue visas for Russians to visit the United States. . .
. . . What President Putin is demanding, an end to NATO expansion and creation of a security structure in Europe that insures Russia’s security along with that of others is eminently reasonable. He is not demanding the exit of any NATO member and he is threatening none. By any pragmatic, common sense standard it is in the interest of the United States to promote peace, not conflict. To try to detach Ukraine from Russian influence—the avowed aim of those who agitated for the “color revolutions”—was a fool’s errand, and a dangerous one. Have we so soon forgotten the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis?
I am sure that the majority of Americans are aware by now of the controversy stirred by Whoopi Goldberg’s comment about the Holocaust on the TV program The View.
Whoopi Goldberg on The View
During this discussion, Ms. Goldberg had the temerity to say, “The Holocaust was not about race. It was about man’s inhumanity to man.” Of course, the feathers began to fly.
In a late-night conversation with Stephen Colbert, Ms. Goldberg clarified what she meant, referring to her experiences as a black woman in America. She made it clear that her reference point for understanding racial discrimination was skin color, whether a person was black or white. This was not surprising. Most people rely on their own personal experiences, their own subjectivity, to lay the initial foundation for how they view the world around them.
Whoopi’s comments could have provided a useful opportunity for a broader, public conversation about the history and meaning of racism. We all could have discussed the fact that skin color is only one of numerous characteristics that have been used to make “racial” distinctions throughout history. Oh, but wait. I forgot. This is America. We don’t do serious thinking in public (or in precious few other spaces) here in this great nation of ours.
In another follow-up interview Ms. Goldberg corrected herself further by adding that she should have said “both” when she spoke out on The View. In other words, the Holocaust was about both Hitler’s extermination of the Jewish race as well as man’s inhumanity to man, implying that the former was an example of the latter.
Unfortunately, Whoopi’s attempts to reframe our conversation about the Holocaust – a very worthy project, in my opinion – has been completely squashed. She knows that she has been silenced. Her most recent statement states that she has now decided simply to never talk about the Holocaust again.
Three cheers for our Holocaust cancel culture!
Yet, this entire affair has been highly unfortunate for a number of reasons.
Quite predictably, Ms. Goldberg’s original statement on prime-time television prompted pro-Israel and pro-Zionist apologists to attack her like sharks after red meat. The leader of this pack has been Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. Fortunately, after discussing the issue personally with Goldberg, Greenblatt came to her rescue, extended a special dispensation by insisting that the now chastised and enlightened TV host not be criticized too harshly for her former ignorance.
Yet, even Greenblatt’s intervention could not save Ms. Goldberg from a two-week suspension from her hosting duties on The View. Luckily for us, her network’s corporate virtue-signaling has saved us all from any more of Whoopi’s “inappropriate” comments about the Holocaust.
Boy, am I relieved!
The supreme irony found at the heart of this ridiculous controversy, however, is the simple fact that Whoopi was not wrong, at least not in the sense that her critics have derided. Let me explain.
I begin with a short bibliography that will allow my reader to make sense of the parenthetical notations included below. I strongly suggest that you read at least one of these important books if you hope to understand what is going on in this contrived controversy:
Avraham Burg, The Holocaust Is Over We Must Rise From Its Ashes.
Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry.
Shlomo Sand, How I Stopped Being a Jew.
Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust.
Beginning with the 1961 trial of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, pro-Israel/pro-Zionist advocates have worked steadily to conjure a global amnesia about the full diversity of victims in the Holocaust. Frankly, the goal has been to make the world forget that anyone other than Jews were exterminated by the Nazis.
And they have largely succeeded, at least in public discourse. Whoopi Goldberg is only the latest victim of this monolithic Zionist-Israeli Holocaust-management network.
Dr. Norman Finkelstein is an American-Jewish historian whose parents were Holocaust survivors. He has written an important book entitled, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Quoting the Israeli writer Boas Evron, he explains, “Holocaust awareness is actually an official, propagandistic indoctrination, a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present” (Finkelstein 2000: 41).
Avraham Burg, a former speaker in the Israeli parliament, called the Knesset, traces the beginning of this manipulation process to the Israeli trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. In his book, The Holocaust Is Over We Must Rise From Its Ashes, Burg laments Israel’s decision to make the Eichmann trial a strictly Jewish, Israeli affair rather than opening up the proceedings to an international judiciary.
He describes Eichmann’s trial as “an initiation ritual” in which Israel (and world Jewry) reasserted their unique status as the eternal victims of never-ending gentile antisemitism (Burg 128). “We must always feel like perpetual victims,” he writes. “When we tried [Eichmann] for genocide, we meant only genocide against ourselves (Burg 129) …We took the Shoah to be exclusively our own. Thus, we missed the option of turning it into a much more meaningful, universal event…We nationalized the Shoah, monopolized it and internalized it, and we do not let anyone get closer” (Burg 143).
According to Burg, the Holocaust can best be described as “a crime against creation” (126) – a description that is in the same ball park as Ms. Goldberg’s reference to “man’s inhumanity against man.”
Romanian born author Elie Wiezel (1928 – 2016) appointed himself high-priest of this now all-pervasive Holocaust mysticism, an exclusive realm where non-Jewish victims are erased from historical memory, while exclusive racial curators conjure the Holocaust an utterly unique, incomparable event that only properly trained Jews are capable of discussing appropriately.
It is worth remembering that when the American Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. was in the planning stages, it was Wiesel who “led the offensive to commemorate Jews alone.” Finkelstein explains, “Deferred to as the undisputed expert on the Holocaust period Wiesel tenaciously argued for the preeminence of Jewish victimhood” (2000: 75).
Fortunately, the Jewish historians listed above have all called out this Israeli, Zionist game for what it is: inaccurate, unhistorical twaddle.
It’s malicious imposition on the rest of us, illustrated now by Whoopi Goldberg’s experience, is something that Norman Finkelstein calls “intellectual terrorism” (2000: 47).
He’s right.
We must begin with the simple fact that, despite Israel’s eagerness to obscure this part of the story, Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust. This fact cannot be forgotten, no matter how hard the Zionist lobby tries to make us forget.
The Nazi extermination campaign began with the nation-wide euthanizing of the mentally handicapped and physically deformed. These “unfit” German victims were the first to warm up Hitler’s ovens.
Then they eliminated the communists, socialists, and all other anti-Nazi dissidents, many of whom were Christians.
Then there were the Gypsies, the Roma. As a ratio of total population size, the Nazi extermination of at least half-million Gypsies was roughly equal to the Jewish genocide (Finkelstein 2000: 76; Sand 58). European Gypsies, who remain persecuted to this day, ought not be forgotten.
(Read Finkelstein for the details of how Jewish representatives fought to exclude any mention of the Gypsies from the US Holocaust Museum. Or read Sand for his story about attending a Holocaust conference where Jewish representatives demanded that a Gypsy attendee be excluded).
Then there were the homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses, together with two and a half million Poles. The Nazis exterminated five million Poles, half of them were Jews. The other half were Roman Catholics.
So, in this crucial sense then, Whoopi Goldberg is absolutely correct. The Holocaust was not fundamentally about the Jewish race. The outrage unleashed against her is cruel testimony to the effectiveness of fifty years of Zionist-Israeli propaganda with its shaming, cajoling, ridiculing, and guilty-tripping the rest of the western world.
It is, indeed, intellectual terrorism.
However, recalling the great diversity represented among the Nazi’s many victims, we are also reminded that Ms. Goldberg is not entirely correct. We cannot forget that this disparate collection of Nazi victims were all captured in the net of Hitler’s primary racial concern – his obsession with a (fictitious) purified Aryan race.
Only from this perspective can the Holocaust be seen as exclusively about race, although I doubt if Whoopi had this consideration in mind. I am certain that Jonathan Greenblatt and his pro-Israel co-conspirators do not.
The guiding principle directing Hitler’s bloodlust was the protection of Aryan racial purity. His designs to conquer Europe were an attempt to garner an enlarged “homeland” (Lebensraum, living space, it was called) spacious enough to accommodate the perfected Aryan population he intended to produce.
The fact that Hitler hated the Jews was contingent on his own Aryan, racial priorities. He was serving his vision of “the master race.”
The fact that European leaders in the political Zionist movement were also searching for a new homeland large enough to provide for an exclusively Jewish population should not be forgotten. The parallels between National Socialism and political Zionism are no coincidence. Both movements were drinking from the same stream of blood-and-soil, ethnic-nationalism swirling throughout Europe at the time.
So, Ms. Goldberg is both partly right and partly wrong, but not the way that either her detractors or belated defenders imagine.
As far as I am concerned, the important lesson to be learned from this recent tempest is the depressing effectiveness it reveals about Israel’s pro-Zionist propaganda machine. Once again, it has managed to squelch legitimate historical debate by intimidating the hearty few courageous enough to raise a hand and say, “Uh, excuse me, but the Jews were not the only ones who suffered. In this sense, the Holocaust was not about race.”
Another potential scenario is that Russia draws on the Cuban Missile Crisis and positions offensive weapons within the borders of Latin American allies. Whatever the outcome, the crisis has underscored the perils of a second Cold War between the world’s top nuclear powers.
If the path forward is unpredictable, what got us here is easy to trace. The row over Ukraine is the outgrowth of an aggressive US posture toward Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, driven by hegemonic policymakers and war profiteers in Washington. Understanding that background is key to resolving the current impasse, if the Biden administration can bring itself to alter a dangerous course.
Russia’s central demands – binding guarantees to halt the eastward expansion of NATO, particularly in Ukraine, and to prevent offensive weapons from being stationed near its borders – have been publicly dismissed by the U.S government as non-starters.
In rejecting Russian concerns, the Biden administration claims that it is upholding “governing principles of international peace and security.” These principles, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken says, “reject the right of one country to change the borders of another by force; to dictate to another the policies it pursues or the choices it makes, including with whom to associate; or to exert a sphere of influence that would subjugate sovereign neighbors to its will.”
The US government’s real-world commitment to these principles is non-existent. . .
. . . The standard narrative of the origins of the current Ukraine crisis, as the New York Times recently claimed, is that Ukrainians revolted in street protests that ousted “pro-Russian leader” Viktor Yanukovych, “prompting [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to order the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and instigate a separatist war in eastern Ukraine.” In reality, the US backed a coup that overthrew Ukraine’s elected government and sabotaged opportunities to avoid further conflict.
The immediate background came in the fall of 2013, when the US and its allies pressured Yanukovych to sign a European Union association agreement that would have curtailed its ties to Russia. Contrary to how he is now portrayed, Yanukovych was not “pro-Russian”, to the point where he even “cajoled and bullied anyone who pushed for Ukraine to have closer ties to Russia,” Reuters reported at the time. . .
This article from the Washington Post was published in April 2014, however I doubt very much if the correlations have changed. It’s date also shows how long the US has been flirting with the idea of military intervention in Ukraine.
The article is well worth reading. Below is the article final paragraph:
However, the further our respondents thought that Ukraine was from its actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily. Even controlling for a series of demographic characteristics and participants’ general foreign policy attitudes, we found that the less accurate our participants were, the more they wanted the U.S. to use force, the greater the threat they saw Russia as posing to U.S. interests, and the more they thought that using force would advance U.S. national security interests; all of these effects are statistically significant at a 95 percent confidence level. Our results are clear, but also somewhat disconcerting: The less people know about where Ukraine is located on a map, the more they want the U.S. to intervene militarily.
The American Establishment is feverishly propagandizing us into preparing ourselves for a confrontation with Russia over Ukraine.
Day after day more anonymous sources – who never provide any evidence to substantiate their “frightening” revelations, and are never asked by the corporate media to produce whatever evidence they may have – drop another scary soundbite into our vapid, undiscerning public discourse.
Fear-mongering among the uninformed is one of propaganda’s most useful strategies because the uninformed are easy to mislead.
Fortunately for energetic propagandists, the average American imagines that world history began yesterday, which makes the general public a sucker for lies and disinformation about that scary world looming beyond our glistening shores.
This time-dishonored tactic is now being exploited with wild abandon by every major American news outlet, without exception. I am urging you: do not believe a word of what you hear on this subject from ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, FOX, or Newsmax.
Now that the US is firmly rooted in a “second Cold War” with Russian – a needless and very dangerous antagonism manufactured out of whole cloth by our military-industrial-media complex – its time to beat the drums of war again. Or so the Establishment believes.
Why? Because war always makes a lot of money for the military-industrial complex, including US corporations.
The beast must be fed. It’s hungry. It can’t devour Afghanistan anymore, so it needs fresh meat. God help us all.
Here is what every American needs to know, remember, or investigate concerning the history of US, Russian, Ukrainian relations:
(By the way, for one of the best, most sensible discussions of the current
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (retired). Former chief of staff for Colin Powell during the George W. Bush administration
problems, please watch Medea Benjamin’s informative conversation with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson – a man who knows his stuff inside and out — right here.)
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 much of eastern Europe was thrown into turmoil. Two events were particularly troubling for Russia as it watched its empire disappear.
First, the Warsaw Pact, the eastern European counterpart to NATO which had served as the guardian of Soviet security, was quickly disbanded.
Second, East Germany reunited with West Germany, creating a unified German republic as a part of NATO.
Russia, quite reasonably, saw these two developments as an immediate threat to its national security.Not only had NATO, Russia’s historic antagonist, expanded, it had just taken a monumental step eastward towards the Russian border. And many other formerly Eastern-bloc countries were lining up to follow suit.
Mikhail Gorbachev (Photo by: Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images)
The Russian leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev – who was responsible for the new openness that led to the collapse of Soviet communism – quickly asked for a US guarantee that NATO would not invite any former members of the Soviet Union to join its western alliance.
President George H. W. Bush agreed.
Bush promised that NATO would stop in its tracks, moving no further east
George H. W. Bush
towards the Russian border. (I have always held that NATO should have immediately disbanded along with the Warsaw Pact. I was once arrested for demonstrating for this cause. But no one in Washington D. C. listens to me. Alas.)
Unfortunately, Bill Clinton quickly ignored Bush’s pledge to Gorbachev. By manhandling the easily manipulated Boris Yeltsin, Clinton began to expand NATO further eastward.
NATO membership requires that new entrants must possess a certain level of military capability. After all, NATO members all pledge to defend one another in case of an attack.
US weapons companies make a bundle of cash selling new, advanced, American-made weaponry to these fledgling member states. And, of course, all of those missiles, rockets, and guns are generally pointed, you guessed it, towards Russia.
For 30 years, then, Russia has watched its old nemesis, NATO, moving further and further east, coming closer and closer to its western border, in direct violation of the promise given by an American president.
Most recently, NATO invited Ukraine, which borders Russia, to join its
Vladimir Putin
military club. The US wants to begin selling advanced weaponry to Ukraine. Is it any surprise that Russian president Vladimir Putin sees NATO and the United States as a direct threat to Russia’s national security?
Of course, not. He would be stupid not to, and one thing Putin is not, is stupid.
In the current negotiations, Putin’s primary demand is that president Biden not allow Ukraine into NATO. Behaving like a typical American politician, Biden told Putin to drop dead.
And here we are. Unnecessary, dangerous escalation on every front.
Let’s stop and put ourselves in Putin’s shoes.
How would the US respond if an antagonistic country, let’s say China, began to move its military into Canada or Mexico, cheek-to-jowl with the US border?
We all know the answer to that question.
Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis?
President Kennedy learned that the Soviets were moving nuclear missiles
President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, June 3, 1961. (Photo by Underwood Archives/Getty Images)
into Cuba. He immediately told Soviet president Nikita Khrushchev that the US would not tolerate Soviet weapons near its borders. We came close to a nuclear war over this, and Khrushchev withdrew the missiles.
Why should we expect Putin and the Russians to react any differently?
What we need right now is an American president who will demonstrate the wisdom and humility of Nikita Khrushchev.
There are no two ways about it folks. In this current “confrontation,” the United States is the threatening aggressor. We have always been the mangy wolf salivating at Russia’s western doorstep. We are the ones causing these problems. Not Russia. Not Putin.
No wonder Putin has become antagonistic!
All of the blame – all of it! – falls on the US and now onto president Biden.
Recall that war-mongering is a bipartisan habit in this country. The US loves to be at war. Powerful people make a lot of money, billions of dollars, from it.
But American saber rattling must stop! Please call or write your senators and representatives. Tell them that you strongly oppose this administration’s position on Russia and Ukraine.
Tell them you do not want a new Cold War with Russia, and they need to stop bad mouthing president Putin in public. It doesn’t help. Putin is not the bad guy in this particular drama.
Tell them that Ukraine has no business joining NATO. The US has no business sending American troops into Ukraine or the surrounding nations.
Perhaps you have heard or read about some recent confrontations between Israeli soldiers and Bedouins living in the Negev in southern Israel.
Below are two video clips of the same incident. The first is from i24 News, an official Israeli news outlet. The second is from Middle East Eye, a London-based news outlet covering news in the Middle East and North Africa.
Notice the differences. How is the same story being relayed in each clip?
First, notice the inflammatory language used in the i24 News clip:
Bedouins are not protesting; they are “rioting.”
Soldiers are only responding to Bedouin “crimes.”
That Bedouins would object to trees being planted (without consultation) on their property is part of “Israel’s crazy reality.”
The only person allowed to speak is a representative of the Jewish-only settlements replacing Bedouin homes and families.
Now notice the language and storyline in the second clip:
Bedouin protesters are allowed to speak for themselves.
The protests are placed within their broader context, which (quite tellingly) is never explained in the i24 clip.
The bigger narrative goes like this.
[a] The Israeli government unilaterally expropriates (i.e., steals) land on which Bedouins have lived for generations; it is now called “disputed land.” The Bedouin village is labeled as “unrecognized,” making it easier to eradicate.
[b] The Zionist process of ethnic cleansing and colonization moves forward.
The Jewish National Fund (the largest land owner in Israel, which prohibits Palestinians from living or working on JNF land) plant trees (probably non-native) on Bedouin grazing land.
The Bedouins are told they must move out.
Bedouin homes are demolished.
The people resist and demonstrate against their expulsion.
The colonizers call the Bedouin resistance “criminal” and “crazy” while their invasion brings “noble” results. (A common technique used by settler-colonizers).
These stark differences in how the story is framed and described illustrates both the construction and the power of propaganda.
It also reminds us of how we should doubt and question every news story presented to us by the media.
Watch the clips again. Who is providing a more accurate version of the actual events?
Some time ago I blogged about the public complaints made by some of Dave Ramsey’s (former) employees. Most of their charges accused him of an authoritarian, even dictatorial, management style that intruded into employees’ private lives.
Most recently Mr. Ramsey has come to the attention of several independent news podcasts because of his advice to landlords about raising rent and evicting tenants from their homes because “the market” is dictating rent increases.
Watch the video below called “Should Landlords Feel Guilty.” I offer my reaction below:
The most important thing to notice in this video is the way Mr. Ramsey has surrendered his conscience and his behavior to the requirements of our capitalistic “marketplace.”
When it comes to his economic, investment decisions the marketplace is sovereign over Mr. Ramsey’s financial life. If the market “demands” that he, as a landlord, evict families from their rental homes, then he apparently has no choice.
The rules of capitalism and the “free market” command his allegiance.
Never mind that the country is experiencing a housing crisis with its dire lack of affordable housing.
Never mind that large corporations are in a buying frenzy scooping up foreclosed properties in order to rent them out at top dollar prices, thus maximizing their bottom line and the profits paid to corporate shareholders.
Never mind that the homeless population continues to grow at a shocking rate.
Oh sure. Mr. Ramsey assures his listeners that they need to be kind and thoughtful in their personal relationships with other individuals. But this is a disingenuous smokescreen typical of American evangelicals whose morals are so enslaved to American individualism that the larger, collective questions of system evil never cross their minds.
Ramsey flippantly throws out Christian sounding language that serves only to distract from the colossal compromise of both character and conscience revealed by his abject submission to the laisse faire market forces that obviously have gained Lordship over his life.
At this point, Mr. Ramsey’s economic advice is more demonic than it is Christ-like.
Not long ago I argued that the primary way in which we experience “demonic temptation” is through the corrupt power structures that surround us. To catch up on that analysis I urge you to revisit my blog post.
It’s important for the current discussion.
Because he exists within a supposedly free-market, capitalist, economic environment, in which anyone who questions the system is vilified as a Marxist (or worse), Ramsey obviously accepts this system as, at least, morally neutral, and perhaps even, virtuous.
Thus, surrendering to the dictates of the market, and behaving as any good capitalist would, obviously has no bearing on Ramsey’s Christian confession. He can remain a “good Christian” while ejecting people from their homes into an uncertain, competitive, laisse faire, dog eat dog housing market.
Yep. It’s a cruel world, but that’s the way the capitalist, cookie crumbles.
On the other hand, as I have argued extensively on this blog and in other writings, if we understand the Christian life in terms of our citizenship in the kingdom of God, then Mr. Ramsey has made himself the poster child for the besetting sin of American Christianity: Cultural Captivity.
Rather than critiquing our cultural environment; rather than analyzing, evaluating, and then criticizing the various power structures in which we find ourselves — as serious citizens of God’s kingdom should — we have a lamentable tendency to roll over and play dead in the face of society’s structures of power.
We accept our corrupted, and corrupting, systems of power and control as normal, inevitable, unchangeable, and even preferable to their alternatives. Yet, I am convinced that it is through these normalized systems of power, control, and domination that the Evil One is more successful in tempting and corrupting humanity.
In the face of “what is normal,” the ethics of Jesus and the lifestyle required of every citizen in the kingdom of God all become “unrealistic and unmanageable” given the nature of the world we live in.
I am sure that this is what Mr. Ramsey will say were anyone to challenge his highly dubious ethics of landlordship. Making people homeless when I have the opportunity of higher income in the face of higher expenses is, after all, normal.
We need to take a lesson from the early Christian church about how to deal with such ideas of “normal.”
For the first several centuries of Christianity, church leaders insisted that no church member could ever work for the police, the military, or the judiciary. (For more on this issue, check out my book I Pledge Allegiance.)
Anyone in the church who did happen to work for any of these three power structures had either to quit their job or be excommunicated from the church.
Why?
Because the early Christians understood — far better than most Christians do today — that Jesus taught his disciples to live lives of non-violence. Thus, no follower of Jesus had any business being party to violence or coercion.
And anyone serving in the police, the military, or the judiciary would eventually have to be involved with violence and/or coercion in the course of fulfilling their “normal” responsibilities.
But early Christian leaders insisted: It does not matter what society and its power structures have normalized for this world. Certain behaviors are always unacceptable for Christians because the Lordship of Jesus Christ always defeats the secular attempts at material lordship this fallen world tries to impose upon us.
I suspect that Mr. Ramsey’s cultural captivity may have begun with his extraordinary success which led to his great wealth and influence.
For all of these things, wealth, success, and power, have a sly, corrupting, acidic effect on the conscience if we do not guard ourselves against them.
Consequently, I want to suggest that it is time to excommunicate Dave Ramsey from the Christian church. Or, at least, to depose him from any leadership or teaching roles.
Future Israeli Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, recently announced, “When I am prime minister, we still won’t hold negotiations with the Palestinians.”
In one sentence, Lapid brazenly let the proverbial cat out of the bag. For the truth is that Israel has never been an honest negotiating partner in the Palestinian/Israel peace process.
Israel’s Likud party, which has been the nation’s dominant political party since the time of Menachem Begin (Israel’s sixth Prime Minister, 1977 – 1983), has it written into its party platform that Israel’s eastern border must extend to the Jordan River denying any possibility of a Palestinian state.
You can read the Likud party platform here in an article by Jonathan Weiler. Items one and three in the platform declare:
a. “The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel.”
c. “The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.”
So much for all the gibberish we have heard over the decades about Israel’s willingness to “exchange land for peace.”
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy
Gideon Levy’s new article in Haaretz discusses the real world consequences of Israel’s historic hostility towards peace with the Palestinians. His piece is entitled “The Truth Will Set You Free.”
Below is an excerpt (all emphases are mine):
. . . This item [Lapid’s statement] didn’t make big headlines, which isn’t surprising, since there is nothing new here – aside from the spectacle of a minister telling the truth, if
Yair Lapid said he will not negotiate with the Palestinians when he is Prime Minister. Credit. Gil Eliyahu
only for a moment. Lapid deserves credit for revealing something that has long been known: There is no Israeli partner. No Israeli partner for ending the occupation, no Israeli partner for any solution, nor even an Israeli partner for negotiations. In truth, there never was, but now official Israel, for the first time in its history, is acknowledging as much. The explanation, as usual, comes from internal politics. “The coalition agreements prevent progress in this channel,” the prime-minister-in-waiting explained. . .
If an Israeli foreign minister had said something like this years ago, the sky would have fallen. No negotiations? None? The Americans would have issued condemnations, the Europeans would have been furious, the UN would have passed a resolution, Labor and Meretz would have threatened to quit the government. But now – no one bats an eyelid.
Lapid spared us all of that. He announced the end to the peace process ritual that has facilitated the many years of occupation. No one really thinks that Israel will get a more moderate government than this one in the coming years, and anyway the 50 years of moderate peace governments should have been enough to make us see that there is no one to talk to in Israel, no matter who is in power. Lapid is advancing one small but important step towards recognition of this fact. Now it needs to really sink in: There will be no solution, definitely not a two-state solution.
The possibility that the Palestinians will be doomed to another hundred years of apartheid cannot be dismissed. In fact, it is the most likely possibility. For who is going to extricate them from this apartheid, and how exactly can they extricate themselves from it? They’ve tried everything already. Now they at least understand, and the world too, that there is no chance of them having a partner, because Israel has coalition agreements.
The Americans won’t keep bugging us with their special envoys, the Europeans won’t keep issuing hollow statements of condemnation, nor will the UN, and the Quartet will die too. World leaders will no longer have to waste their time and honor on pointless talks about the Palestinian issue; for there’s no one to talk to about that in Israel. . .
For anyone is interested in learning more about the reality of past “peace negotiations” and the dishonest coverage they receive in western media, here are a few good books to read:
Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo.
Naseer H. Aruri, Dishonest Broker: The U.S. Role in Israel and Palestine.
Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East.
Clayton E. Swisher, The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process.
Zalman Amit and Daphna Levit, Israeli Rejectionism: A Hidden Agenda in the Middle East Peace Process.
book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People (Wipf and Stock, 2021).
authoritarian, even dictatorial, management style that intruded into employees’ private lives.
no church member could ever work for the police, the military, or the judiciary. (For more on this issue, check out my book 
