The author of articles like Political Opportunism Doesn’t Fight Tyranny, It Perpetuates It, Marinov pens such gems as It’s Time to Start Teaching Our Kids Disrespect To “Authority” (warning: strong religious language). You may not agree with everything he says, but he sure makes a powerful case for everything he writes about. You may not like the religious tenor of his words, but he sure makes a case for Christians, and for their pastors, being (or, rather, having been in the past) the strongest revolutionaries the world has even seen.
Here are a couple of excerpts:
• Political Opportunism Doesn’t Fight Tyranny, It Perpetuates It:
The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate … would be completely useless outside the US, where local “magistrates” are simply employees of the central government. In the UK, for example, the resistance of local officials to tyranny would be nothing less than rebellion no different than the rebellion of private individuals;a lesser magistrate is simply not a magistrate anymore if he fails to obey the will of his sovereign, the centralized state. Thus, in its pure form, the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate works as a deterrent to tyranny only where tyranny has already been pushed back and thus room for independent action has been legally secured; and in our modern world, this means only a few polities in the world, limited to the US, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, and may be South Africa – and these polities trace their liberties back not to bloodless reforms but to violent revolutions which forced the central government to agree to limit its powers.
… The words of Mather Byles – a nephew of Cotton Mather – should always be before our eyes before we rush to support a local official who is allegedly putting up resistance to higher authorities:
Which is better – to be ruled by one tyrant three thousands miles away, or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?Therefore, before we decide that a local magistrate’s resistance is an application of the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate, we need to ask ourselves two questions: […Read the whole thing™]
• Comparing Ferguson, November 2014, with… Boston, December 1773 (!)
— Hypocrisy Is the Worst Possible Policy:
By 1773, about half of the colonists had adopted a rebellious attitude towards the British government, and even against their local governments which happened to be loyal to the Crown. This rebellious attitude didn’t come from reading John Locke or the French Enlightenment; both Locke and the French philosophes did not exercise much influence among the common folk in the colonies; and even among the educated elite, their influence was not felt until the late 1760s.
It was the Reformed preachers in the colonies who denounced the British tyrannical government and built the ideological foundation for armed rebellion.
According to the commonly accepted theology at the time, borrowed from Calvin and the English Puritans of the previous century, tyrannical government was not a lawfully established government and therefore all acts of resistance against such government were Biblically justified. Sermons like the following, from Jonathan Mayhew, a Congregational minister at West Church in Boston in the 1760s, were commonplace:
It is blasphemy to call tyrants and oppressors, God’s ministers. They are more properly the messengers of Satan to buffet us. No rulers are properly God’s ministers, but such as are just, ruling in the fear of God. When once magistrates act contrary to their office, and the end of their institution; when they rob and ruin the public, instead of being guardians of its peace and welfare; they immediately cease to be the ordinance and ministers of God; and no more deserve that glorious character than common pirates and highwaymen. So that whenever that argument for submission, fails, which is grounded upon the usefulness of magistracy to civil society, (as it always does when magistrates do hurt to society instead of good) the other argument, which is taken from their being the ordinance of God, must necessarily fail also; to person of a civil character being God’s minister, in the sense of the apostle, any farther than he performs God’s will, by exercising a just and reasonable authority; and ruling for the good of the subject.…. When magistrates rob and ruin the people, instead of being guardians of its peace and welfare, they immediately cease to be the ordinance and ministers of God, and no more deserve that glorious character than common pirates and highwaymen.… We have become heartless Romans in our thinking, and we think about justice as children of Caesar: in terms of legal technicalities, not in terms of real justice and righteousness. We have become statists, turning the legal statutes of godless governments into moral imperatives. We have taught our children to do so as well. It is only a matter of time before they start being herded to concentration camps because “you don’t resist a cop.”
In order to return to the Biblical view of justice, we need to start thinking ethically, not legalistically. We need to lay the ax at the root of every law the governments in the US impose on us, and compare it to the Bible.
We need to start every discussion about laws or crimes or policies with the question: “What does the Bible say about it?” And we need to ask this question first and foremost of what the government does and what its officers do. The righteousness of a nation depends on the spiritual maturity of its individual citizens, but let’s not forget that the spiritual maturity of a person is measured by his ability to judge and discern good and evil based on God’s Law (1 Cor. 2:15; Heb. 5:14), not by his willingness to submit to godless governments.
… We need to restore our Black-Robed Regiment and they need to thunder from our pulpits condemnation on our tyrannical government and its brutal henchmen. We need them to lead us in re-asserting the rights given to us by our Creator, which we have allowed to be re-defined by the State. We need to demand that the special rights for government employees be canceled and cops be just as subject to scrutiny and resistance when they are outside the boundary of the law as any private citizen out there …
… The more we refuse to do these things, the farther away we are from the spirit of the Founders of this great nation, and the closer we are to even worse tyranny than what they fought against. And the more we refuse to do these things while celebrating those Founders, the more we reveal ourselves as hypocritical, and the less able we are to influence our culture.
• How Far Back Are America’s Pastors Willing to Roll the Ball?:
For the last 100 years not only have the pastors refused to challenge unjust laws, they have refused to even bring the Bible to whatever laws the different levels of civil government have passed and enforced, to check whether they were unjust or not.• It’s Time to Start Teaching Our Kids Disrespect To “Authority”:In fact, worse than that, for the last 100 years the pastors in this country have openly declared that the Bible doesn’t have anything to do with the political realm, that the Gospel is limited to the individual soul and the institutional church, and therefore has nothing to say about the powers of the land. “It’s not the pastors’ job to talk politics,” has been the refrain. And since politics is where the issues of justice and injustice have been discussed and resolved, this has effectively barred the church from any authoritative voice in discussing justice or injustice.
Note well: it was not the civil government that barred the church from speaking justice. It was the pastors themselves.
… If the pastors in this nation were faithful to the historical example of the Black-Robed Regiment of the Revolutionary Era, the pulpits in this country would have been thundering with denunciations of all these government violations of the Ten Commandments, from the public school system, taxation, and regulations, to police, immigration restrictions, and foreign wars. Civil disobedience and rebellion against unjust laws would have started much earlier, a century ago, or, at the very least, 40 years ago.
I can almost hear God’s sarcasm. “Ya like that conservative idol of yours, ‘respect to authority,’ don’tcha? Let Me see how you like living under its legislative and executive power.”
And this is not the first time. We all remember Nancy Pelosi and her arrogant claim that “Obamacare is now the law, you will obey it.” Or, “Roe v. Wade is the law, we must all obey it.” Etc., etc.
The more conservatives bow before that idol, the more their enemies in the political arena use that same idol to impose more tyranny, and the more God laughs at their idolatry.
You want more “respect to authority”? Here, have government-protected and sponsored abortions. Have government-enforced and sponsored sodomy. Have Islam in government schools. Have gun regulations and control. Have higher taxes. Have inflation. Have business regulations. Have IRS and control over pulpits. Have FEMA camps. Have the NSA and the TSA and invasion of privacy.
And . . . don’t forget to “respect authority” every time you protest against those. You have the right to not like all these, but as long as you obey and “respect authority” – which means your local cop who will arrest you if you don’t obey – everything will be good, and you are safe, and you won’t suffer the consequences.
And teach your kids to obey and “respect authority.” This way, they will always be safe. Especially when some day they are told to board the cattle cars.
God has a way to mock those who trust in idols. He has the time to wait until Americans – and especially American Christians and conservatives – feel the full burden of the “respect to authority” idol on their backs. They are beginning to feel it, but they are still unwilling to smash the idol to pieces. It’s so attractive, after all, and it promises all this security and prosperity – and it sounds so, er, “conservative.” So God has more of it for them.
Until one Fourth of July they wake up and remember that this country was not founded on respect to authority but to the contrary, on disrespect and distrust of any authority that has not proven itself worthy of respect. It was founded on enthusiastic popular resistance against authority. It was founded on the sermons of men who used the pulpits to declare null and void any authority that violated the rights of the free citizens.
From those religious dissenters, the Pilgrims and the Puritans, to the Battle of Athens TN (1946), this country was driven by a spirit of defiance to men in power who violated the rights of private individuals. For 45 years, during the Cold War, it was this tradition of defiance that inspired the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. The same tradition was at the foundation of Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall!” speech. The same tradition inspired hundreds of American movies from before Hollywood went socialist and statist; and these movies taught people around the world that there was a country in the world where the individual citizen can stand up to government bureaucrats and even shoot them, if they acted illegally.
And when they wake up and remember this, they will clearly see that the advance of tyranny in the last 20 years was based on one single factor:
The Christian and conservative worship of the idol of “respect to authority,” an idol their forefathers detested, despised, spit upon, and actively opposed, and thus built the freest nation in the world.
• When They Come for the Smaller Groups…:[The tactics of Germany's Nazis] was clear:
The government never has the resources and the manpower to terrorize the whole society. State terrorism, therefore, is done by separating and marginalizing social groups: first smaller groups, then larger groups, until each group is subdued.
This is the old Roman principle of divide et impera: divide your enemies so that neither of them associate with the others. Thus, none of them will come to each other’s aid. Then your hand is free to conquer them one by one.
… The Soviet Communists did the same. They also started with a broad appeal to all the “classes,” marginalizing and demonizing only small groups. The “capitalists.” Then the priests. Then the “intellectuals.” Then the rival leftist parties, like the Mensheviks. Then certain ethnic groups were demonized: Ukrainians, Georgians, Chechens, the German Anabaptist rural communities along the Volga River. Then the kulaks (the wealthy Cossack peasants of Ukraine and South Russia) were singled out and exterminated. Then the category of “kulak” was expanded to include the not-so-wealthy peasants – until whole regions in Ukraine were starved to death (the Holodomor), while the rest of the country watched passively. Then came the military elite.
World War II put a temporary stop to it. But it also created a new class of men who were trained to fight and suppress their fear – the veterans. So the NKVD started targeting veterans even before the war ended. (Solzhenitsyn was taken from his artillery unit in February 1945, three months before the end of the war.) Thousands of veterans went to the GULags straight from the front lines, not even having the chance to see their families again. It was Solzhenitsyn who later realized that if the people didn’t remain passive but united to shoot at government agents when they came to do arrests, millions of lives would have been spared.
The Chinese Communists did the same with their minorities. In the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge, people with glasses were singled out as enemies and shot or worked to death.
I still remember the way the Bulgarian Communist government treated the ethnic Turkish minority in Bulgaria in the 1980s. (I was born and grew up in a predominantly Turkish part of my town, so I knew the truth about the Turkish minority, and I knew the propaganda was lies.)
Everywhere, totalitarian governments do the same: one group after another, singled out, marginalized, demonized, and then safely destroyed or brutalized. And the rest of the population remains silent. Why? Because “I am not a Jew, or a Ukrainian, or a Menshevik, or a kulak, or a person with glasses.”
The massacre in Waco [of May 2015] bears all the marks of this tactics. A group is picked so small and marginal that most people won’t associate with them. The group is then marginalized and demonized, and all kinds of false accusations are said about them – violence, illegal drugs, illegal weapons, etc. Then, when the group is so marginalized that the majority of the population won’t trust them, and won’t take their word for anything, the government ambushes them and guns them down. The group is scared and subdued. The police are trained and conditioned to not question orders – they will need that conditioning for later, when the “enemy” is moms, or old people, or kids.
And the public? The public is conditioned to disengage. “I didn’t say anything because I was not a biker.”
… The pattern is clear: Since the American public is too large an elephant to eat, it must be subdued in small bites: black inner city kids, bikers, off-the-gridders, Christian activists, gun-owners, etc. Every time, the group must be small enough and marginalized enough so that the general population find it easy and safe to disengage.
