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Thursday, March 28, 2024 - 08:01 AM

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

First Published in 1994

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF
UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

Cycles of Human Government

Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee glorifies ancient Greece and replicates original in Athens, Greece.
Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee glorifies ancient Greece and replicates original in Athens, Greece.

“Those whom Jupiter would destroy, he first makes mad” is an ancient Greek proverb quoted in various forms by later Greek and Western authors. It seems to have the meaning that whom the gods would destroy, they first relieve of their common sense. This is very close to a Greek sentence in the play, Antigone, by Sophocles (497-405 BC):

"Evil appears as good in the minds of those whom [the] gods lead to destruction."

There seems to be a cycle in human government in which some system of virtue propels nations to rise for a time and then to collapse when those virtues are corrupted or fall prey to the various varieties of human depravity. Reverence for truth declines and falls to lies of personal or political expedience.  Big lies spring from little lies and require increasingly strict political correctness to defend them and finally unspeakable violence to defend lies that become more and more self-evident.  Societies descend from just laws to lawless bullying and brutal despotism. Democracy and Constitutional government descend into mob rule. Reason succumbs to the exaltation of anti-reason.

Is that not the same situation we now see in 2018 American politics?  Are we not seeing a full court press of evil against traditional American values and concepts of just government? Against truth itself?  

Readers of Scripture will recognize the pattern. When reverence for God prevails, truth is honored and respect for the life, liberty, and property prevails.  When truth is discarded for political or social fashion, the venom of false idols, false ideologies and fashionable isms begins to destroy virtuous traditions, social cohesion, and trust.  Even the concept of truth is often lost for awhile; although truth remains truth no matter how hard misguided ideologues try to bury it. 

“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again; The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes with pain, And dies among his worshippers
”—William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878).

In the Russian historian and novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 literary sensation about the political prison camps in the Soviet Union—the Gulag Archipelago—the author relates one of his early experiences with the Soviet Communist regime and an explanation of how that regime came to power and perpetrated so much injustice and misery. Beneath the political explanation was a spiritual explanation. Solzhenitsyn was loaded on a freight car with other political prisoners headed to a Siberian political work camp. Along the way, the prisoners began to lament how such a calamity could have happened to them and to Russia.  Why has this happened?” they repeatedly asked. Finally, an elderly man spoke and said, “Because we have forgotten God.”  

Solzhenitsyn makes another profound point after wrestling with how the Communist State Police could commit the horrible crimes of murder, massacre, torture, and starvation that became common during Joseph Stalin’s reign over the Soviet Union—the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He believed they could only do these terrible things, because they had convinced themselves they were doing right.  Of course, there was a heavy load of Communist doctrine and propaganda constantly telling them that the evil they were doing was right.   Under Communism and all its Leftist forms, truth and right are whatever advances Communism. This is actually also true of both Nazi and Islamist ideology. Whatever advances their ideology is truth and right.  This is the ultimate end of all philosophies and religions in which the means are justified by the end.  These terrible losses of moral compass are the result of “forgetting God,” and Solzhenitsyn means by this, forgetting the authentic God of Judeo-Christian Scripture.

This is also true of societies or religions that have dual ethical systems.  Dual ethical systems proclaim peace and brotherhood within their own group, but are allowed to treat those outside the group as inferior or even sub-human. The Judeo-Christian standard, although often violated by weak humanity, is a singular ethical system “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the “Golden Rule.”  In corrupt societies, the Golden Rule is increasingly replaced by the selfish rule, the rule of fashionable isms, and the rule of the totalitarian state and the lies necessary to sustain it.

The cycle of human depravity is not inevitable, however. Truth and virtue often rise against accumulating corruption and errant philosophies, renewing authentic faith, virtue, and harmonizing culture. But the salvation of truth, virtue, and just government will not happen without revolutionary sacrifice of labor, time, and money among the people. Apathy and thinking someone else will save your country, your children, your freedom, the altars of your faith, and your dwindling rights are surrender to a dark totalitarian future.

Let me now be blatant in the truth. While many Republicans have been too weak in opposing the evils that have been corrupting and destroying our country, the Democrats have evolved from a party that once revered the Constitution and defended due process in our courts into a Stalinist-Marxist hate machine that routinely and pervasively uses character assassination, slander, lies, voter fraud, mob bullying and violence, and ignorant and hysterical demagoguery

to win elections and legislative battles. They have become a house of deceivers and the lunatic Left.   In economics, national security, immigration policy, and public safety, and on jobs, taxes, and healthcare, they have obviously been relieved of common sense. They are following insane doctrines and foolish isms that would surely lead the whole nation to destruction. No one outside of madhouse votes for their own destruction.  Let us not be caught up with the wicked in the schemes they have devised (Psalm 10:2).  

Too few Americans realize the political and cultural disaster and the losses in freedom and prosperity that would occur if the Democrats capture the U.S. House or Senate. Because of the Democrats open door immigration plans, these losses would not easily be reversed and would be disastrous to our children and grandchildren as well as ourselves.  The coming election is of critical importance to the survival of American freedom and prosperity.  We are surely on the brink between victory and tragic disaster. We must every one of us vote, but we must have better sense and honor than to vote for any Democrat in this election.  Patriotic, common-sense Democrats have become as rare as hens’ teeth.  

On October 21, 1805, during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain was threatened by the combined French and Spanish navies. They were intercepted and confronted by a British fleet under Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar off the southwest coast of Spain.  As the battle commenced, Admiral Nelson signaled from his flagship HMS Victory, this simple but courageous command to his fleet, outnumbered 41 to 33: “England expects every man to do his duty.”  Using innovative maneuvers and tactics, the British fleet inflicted casualties on the French and Spanish fleets at a ratio of more than 8 to 1. Unfortunately, Nelson was killed by sniper fire from a French ship near the end of the battle, but his victory assured the dominance of British sea-power and British national security for a century. This has an application to the battle American patriots must fight in the next few weeks. 

To paraphrase Nelson’s famous signal to the British fleet in terms of America’s present internal threat by powerful, deceptive, and ruthless Leftist enemies and their captive media: Let every patriotic American citizen do their duty for honor and country in the November 6 elections.

 

 

 

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Mike ScruggsMike Scruggs is the author of two books: The Un-Civil War: Shattering the Historical Myths; and Lessons from the Vietnam War: Truths the Media Never Told You, and over 600 articles on military history, national security, intelligent design, genealogical genetics, immigration, current political affairs, Islam, and the Middle East.

He holds a BS degree from the University of Georgia and an MBA from Stanford University. A former USAF intelligence officer and Air Commando, he is a decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War, and holds the Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart, and Air Medal. He is a retired First Vice President for a major national financial services firm and former Chairman of the Board of a classical Christian school.

Click the website below to order books. http://www.universalmediainc.org/books.htm.