Lessons from the Gulags – Part 3

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Introduction

Just before Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West, he left his motherland with a world-class essay called “Live Not by Lies”. It was his parting exhortation to his Soviet brethren, imploring them to refrain from cooperating with the lies of their leaders. This bold and confronting piece has some brilliant lessons to teach us today. The lesson I learned from Solzhenitsyn here was that the first and most basic step towards our liberation from tyranny is to refuse to participate with the lies.

What Lies?

Over the past two years, our nation has been bombarded with lies from our government and its media. Back in September of 2020, our Prime Minister said that there would be no forced vaccinations and that those who chose to opt-out would face no penalties. Newshub even said that it was “conspiracy theorists” who were promoting the idea that there would be mandatory vaccines.[1] In August of 2021, Auckland went into a “one-week” lockdown in order to “go hard and go early”, in response to one COVID case in the community.[2] That “one week” was a lie. It actually ended up being more than fourteen weeks before restrictions were lifted. Then in November of 2021, there was the secretive passing of COVID legislation without consultation[3] and the complete curbing of the Bill of Rights.

While all this is happening, throughout the past two years, there has been vicious censoring of any and all dissent. World experts are being banned from Twitter and we are unable to even link to their material,[4] doctors are fired and punished for rejecting the mainstream narrative.[5]

Now, I know enough about human nature to see what is going on here. Every other time I see one side trying to viciously silence opposing views, it is always because the ones doing the silencing have no ability to respond to their objections. This is why the Critical Theory loonies want to label all conservatives as racist, homophobic bigots, and why our government wants to pass its Conversion Practices Bill. This is why the doomsday climate folks want to cancel any scientists who challenge their false prophecies. This is why the elites want a monopoly on the narrative regarding everything from elections down to gender.

People in power always find it easier to silence their opposition through the exercise of force. The last thing they want is for everything to be exposed in the light and for people to make up their own minds. If that isn’t what is going on here, then why are they acting like it is?

The Problem of Cowards

In New Zealand in 2022, human nature is not so different from that of Russia in 1974. People are much the same. Like them, people here have willingly gone along with the foolish mandates and become state actors. Punishing and disciplining the non-compliant. Out of cowardly self-preservation, men have abandoned principle and embraced the lies. They have thrown people to the crocodiles, hoping to be the last ones eaten. Men have capitulated and compromised hoping that they would not have to pay the price. But there is always a price to be paid. The cowards of our day won’t pay the price of straying from the herd, or social exclusion, or losing their job. However, they will pay the price of losing any strength of character that they might have had. They will squander the liberty and freedoms that their ancestors fought and died for. They will pay the price of diminishing their own soul.

“We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender up all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants—anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence. We have lost our strength, our pride, our passion… We hope only not to stray from the herd, not to set out on our own, and risk suddenly having to make do without the white bread, the hot water heater, a Moscow residency permit. We have internalized well the lessons drummed into us by the state; we are forever content and comfortable with its premise”

The price one pays by making himself complicit with the sins of the state is not worth it. What does it profit a man to gain the world and forfeit his soul? This is not the time for cowards. Our children are watching us. They are learning from us. Unfortunately, many men are teaching the next generation to have spines of jelly.

No Excuses

“We cannot escape the environment, the social conditions; they shape us, “being determines consciousness.” What have we to do with this? We can do nothing… Some will counter: But really, there is nothing to be done! Our mouths are gagged, no one listens to us, no one asks us. How can we make them listen to us?”

Counterfeit masculinity excels at making excuses whereas true masculinity voluntarily takes on responsibility. In our climate, there is no shortage of excuses. “This shouldn’t be the hill to die on”, “It’s not a gospel issue”, and “It’s the law, we have to obey”. Oh, and let’s not forget the ol’ faithful “but Romans 13”.

Weak people love excuses, and they love pointing to the fact that they have not been given any specific command to address this specific injustice. Many who recognise the wickedness of the vaccine mandates will glibly go along with them, reasoning to themselves that it is not their problem to deal with. Or hoping that it will pass before too much damage is done.

This mindset is the exact opposite of what was modelled to us by our Lord. From his example, we see that men are called to imitate him by willingly giving of their strength for the sake of others. Christian men should voluntarily spend themselves, give of themselves, face harm for the sake of others. Christian leaders should be the first to face retribution for the sake of their people. This is the example given to us by Christ. Yet today, countless churches and Christian institutions have played ball with the state. Countless good people have lost jobs and faced social exclusion while their leaders have folded and bended to meet the ever-changing standards.

If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small. Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work? (Proverbs 24:10-12)

By God’s common grace, there are many everyday people who are doing the right thing and refusing to participate in the two-tiered discrimination of our government. Gym owners, café owners, and restaurant owners. In God’s kindness, many non-Christians have seen through the deceit before our church leaders. At this point, there is no excuse for Christian leaders to be participating with the lies.

“And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me! And this is the way to break out of the imaginary encirclement of our inertness, the easiest way for us and the most devastating for the lies. For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.”

Don’t be Cattle

For anyone wishing to live by principle and protect the integrity of their soul, life will be difficult. If you have principles that you have resolved to live by, then severe punishment can always be right around the corner. Those who have such principles will know exactly what I’m talking about when I say this. If you have resolved never to support or promote the LGBT agenda in any way, then your career could implode when HR asks you to wear the rainbow badge for all of June. If you have resolved never to discriminate in your church or Christian institution, you are now stuck facing the wrath of the state. A thousand other examples of potential danger exist for those of us who seek to live by our principles. Compromised men know nothing of this for they will constantly bend and mould their principles to fit their current situation so that they too never “technically” violate them. In reality, they never violate their principles because they have none.

Yes, at first it will not be fair. Someone will have to temporarily lose his job. For the young who seek to live by truth, this will at first severely complicate life, for their tests and quizzes, too, are stuffed with lies, and so choices will have to be made. But there is no loophole left for anyone who seeks to be honest: Not even for a day, not even in the safest technical occupations can he avoid even a single one of the listed choices—to be made in favor of either truth or lies, in favor of spiritual independence or spiritual servility. And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.

In sum, the third vital lesson from the gulags is this; don’t be cattle, don’t be a coward, don’t seek only self-preservation. Live not by lies. Let the rule of lies hold not through you!

[1] https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2020/09/coronavirus-jacinda-ardern-confident-enough-kiwis-will-get-covid-19-vaccine-for-herd-immunity-without-being-forced-to.html

[2] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/coronavirus-go-hard-and-early-than-light-and-long-new-zealand-pm-on-snap-lockdown-2512930

[3] https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018822626/rushed-laws-a-constitutional-disgrace-law-prof

[4] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10364679/YouTube-Twitter-delete-Joe-Rogan-interview-scientist-helped-invent-MRNA-vaccines.html

[5] https://nzdsos.com/2021/10/13/irresponsible/

At Least We Aren’t In North Korea

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Introduction

During these crazy times, there is one objection that has been made to me on several occasions. It is an objection that I have been thinking about a lot lately. It normally comes up when I am voicing my objection to the current state of affairs regarding the COVID hysteria or criticising the incompetence and wickedness of the fools running the show. The objection normally goes something like this, “Well, at least we aren’t in North Korea” or “Things aren’t as bad as they were during the time of the early church. If you were complaining like this, you’d be dead”.

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Deluded Slaves

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Everyone is religious. Everyone is a worshiper. It’s not whether you bow before a god, it’s just a matter of which god you worship. The modern western secularist pretends they are above worship. They delude themselves (and regrettably not a few Christians) that they are neutral on the religious front. This is strategic gold as it has allowed them to promulgate the lie of separation of religion and politics, thus removing all their other competition from the public sphere and proclaiming their faith as the only permissible faith and the lingua franca of the public realm. Yet the secularist is not neutral. Sure they say they are atheists and they may write ‘non-religious’ on the census form, but they are as much worshippers and adherents of a faith as those primitives who kneel before an unseen deity.

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Wisdom and Gravity

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Introduction

Government permissions are not the same thing as freedoms. In a Christian worldview, our freedoms are natural rights granted to us by God, and civil governments are obliged to recognise these rights. In the modern secular worldview, our freedoms are gifts bestowed upon the obedient by government. The state gives and the state takes away.

The only time one person grants freedom to another person is when one of them is a slave. Since I am a citizen and not a slave, I do not wish to concede my freedoms so easily.

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Irrational Fear

Propaganda works. It really does. For near enough to two years, we have had covid (deliberately non-capitalised, as I do not deign to give it a capital like it is some kind of deity) splashed across our screens non-stop day in day out. And this has taken its toll on everyone, but particularly the weak-minded and emotionally unstable. These poor petals are scared stiff of covid. They think our government has done us a favour by locking us up like prisoners and treating us as their slaves by forcibly vaccinating us. They believe the propaganda, not backed up by science, that the unvaccinated pose a huge risk to them and ought to be shut out from civil society.

Once again, the New Zealand Herald, part of the government harem of media whores, continues to spread fear through ignorant and emotionally unstable women. While I should not need to add a rider to the previous sentence, for the sake of the overly sensitive, note we are not talking about all women. We are talking about ignorant and unstable women. This is a subset of women which incidentally includes not a few men! There are plenty of women who are fighting valiantly on the side of freedom at the moment. Take for instance the women behind VFF.

But policy of late has been dictated by the fearful and those who would mother us to death. Last week we had a precious mother who was up in arms about an unvaccinated young man passing on covid to her daughter who then proceeded to get a cough and a runny nose. This week we are presented with ‘Kaye’ another ‘useful idiot‘ in the government’s media-aided campaign of fear. She has epilepsy and therefore is forced to use public transport. She is terrified that when covid spreads she will be at risk from the unvaccinated who are using public transport. This could trigger a seizure. Kaye is angry that she is ‘put in this position.’ It seems like many other scared witless New Zealanders, she would be quite happy to see the unvaccinated banned from yet another aspect of public life. But while insufferable self-righteous petals like Kaye winge on about the position they’ve been put in, there are families who have lost their livelihoods due to government tyranny. There are people who struggle to find a place to rent because our government has introduced a new apartheid. But poor dear Kaye, she has to share public transport with members of the public she doesn’t want to share with. They should be forced to move out of the white clean section of the bus to the coloured unclean one or better still, they should not be allowed on at all – the filthy Jews vermin. Little do foolish women like Kaye care for the fact that vaccinated people can also pass on the virus, and indeed given that one needs to be vaccinated or have a negative test to fly these days, all of the omicron cases in New Zealand at this point in time are most likely vaccinated people. Our own Ministry of Health pointed out that when vaccination coverage is high, (above 80%) transmission is more likely to occur from a vaccinated than an unvaccinated individual. But Kaye and other hysterical attention-seeking drones will not let the facts get in the way of their 15 minutes of media fame.

Finally, take Janine who rang Kerre McIvor’s talkback show on Newstalk ZB. Janine is clearly terrified of the virus. She believes that many more would have died if our government hadn’t taken the disastrous approach that it has, and wants us all to be grateful for the way we have been ‘looked after’ by our government. I agree with Kerre. Who wants to be looked after by the government? If looking after is taking away the livelihoods of my friends and colleagues through endless lockdowns or because they have the temerity to make medical choices for themselves then I don’t want to be looked after. I actually think I can do a far better job of running my life than they can. I’ve got along quite nicely without the government thus far thank you very much. Besides, why would you trust these incompetent clowns to look after you? After all, they promised to fix the housing issue and instead have overseen a median house price rise of $395,000. Their KiwiBuild policy was supposed to supply 100,000 houses over 10 years. Stuff reported in May last year that at their current rate they would take 400 years to achieve this goal. For a list of broken promises from their first term, see a useful summary here. Whatever they touch they ruin. These are the incompetent idiots that unstable and fearful chicken littles sitting at home watching the one o’clock daily press conferences and the six o’clock news trust to ruin our lives. Again I ask, would you trust these people to run a booze-up in a brewery, let alone our health system, our education system, our housing and infrastructure, media and our very lives? What we need in New Zealand is a movement toward freedom. Hopefully, what we are seeing is the beginning of this. Less government, more individual independence and freedom. God did not make us to be slaves of a tyrannical and out of control prissy mother with delusions of deity attempting to treat us like a school prefect would third form students.

What do we need to do? Get the fearful and emotionally unstable women of both sexes out of decision-making positions. We cannot lead our society with fear. We must have leaders of hope and vision who will encourage (give courage) to our citizens and lead us toward freedom and prosperity without meddling in our lives like anxious mothers trying to prevent Johnny from getting a scraped knee. We don’t want to be the societal equivalent of a 30-year-old son stuck at home under his domineering mother’s loving care.

Pfizer Side-Effects

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In recent weeks it seems that a few people have begun to talk about adverse reactions to the Pfizer covid vaccine. A US court has ordered Pfizer to release a damning document that highlights over 100 different adverse reactions to the vaccine from around the world. Curiously there were a few others that were not listed which I think are common enough. Unlisted side-effects of the Pfizer covid vaccine are self-righteousness, stupidity, heartlessness and the loss of critical thinking skills.

Let’s take Duncan Garner as our first example. Having just received his second dose of the vaccine, he gets covid. Initially surprised he assumed it couldn’t be covid because he was already vaccinated. His religious faith took a hit when he discovered it was, but he managed to overcome this spiritual attack and move to comfort himself with the thought that things would have been far worse had he not been vaccinated. Conclusion? Get vaccinated says Garner. So he thought the vaccine prevented him from getting Covid. It didn’t. And now he expects us to get this marvellous vaccine because he thinks it will reduce the effects of the virus. Don’t take up a job in sales mate.

Then there are the clowns who complain about the protests. Newmarket’s retail boss Mark Knoff-Thomas labelled those protesting by marching down Broadway as ‘utter dickheads’ because it apparently ruined one of the busiest shopping days of the year. I wonder what he calls the people who shut down the shops for about a quarter of the year and who now are banning unvaccinated people from many shops around the country.

On a related note, we have Inangahua Community Board chair John Bougen frustrated with supposedly irrational attitudes of anti-vaxxers. Let’s leave the ‘anti-vaxxer’ slur alone this time. People who haven’t got the Pfizer vaccine are not all anti-vaxxers. If you don’t know this, it’s probably due to the little known adverse reaction of stupidity.

So what’s Bougen’s problem? Why are those choosing not to take the vaccine irrational? Well, unfortunately for him, it’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The only irrational one is Bougen. He is annoyed because those who have refused the vaccine are having a negative impact on business. Cafes have apparently lost staff and can’t open on certain days of the week. Chefs are no longer working at restaurants. The worst of all for Bougen is that employers have to foot the bill for four weeks pay for the staff who have refused the vaccine and are losing their jobs. How dare these people get four weeks pay? They’ve only been pushed out on their arse because our ever benevolent overlords have decided to mandate an experimental vaccine before they can continue in their employment. Why should they get four weeks pay as they begin to look for jobs that will allow the modern-day leper to apply? How dare we give them anything? They should be dismissed immediately. Who do they think they are trying to make their own medical choices? Bastards. They should be tossed on the street without a cent. Better still, they should have been held down and forcibly vaccinated so John Bougen can enjoy a flat white at the cafe of his choice.

This is a clear case of the damage the Pfizer vaccine is doing to the critical thinking skills of a number of New Zealanders. We treat people abominably and then we blame them for the results of our treatment. We accept the government’s injustice like docile sheep, and then instead of blaming the government for its evil stupidity, we turn on the poor sods who have already suffered job losses and then blame them for minor inconveniences to ourselves. We say they are ruining the economy because now we don’t have enough workers. We blame them for putting lives in danger because they are no longer working as St John’s volunteers because of the mandate.

I’ve even heard this sort of stupid thinking even amongst some Christians who think unvaccinated people need to just resign and let employers get on with hiring someone else. There is no compassion, no love, no care, no sense of the great wrong that is being done right now. No desire for justice. No understanding that not only are brave people losing their jobs, but they are also losing their rights to be free citizens in their own country. No haircuts, no date nights, no clay shooting club, no weddings, no family Christmas and the list keeps going on and on. There is only a sense of frustration that these people won’t just disappear and stop ruining our society.

And finally to the mainstream media for their stupidity. The New Zealand Herald had a recent headline: Young girl gets virus after hug with unvaccinated adult. The lead paragraph reads. “An 11-year-old girl got Covid-19 after “a fleeting hug” with an unvaccinated adult at a family dinner, leaving the family’s lives “disrupted” for three weeks, her mother says.” Sounds absolutely appalling, doesn’t it?

So the story? A young girl hugs a young man who was unvaccinated and carried the virus. Interestingly he did not know he had the virus, so it can’t have been bad – not like Duncan’s version eh?! The poor girl contracted the virus and ended up with covid and had to isolate. It was very disruptive apparently. Then we get the usual self-righteous lecturing about how the mother always follows the rules like a good little sheep, as well as the obligatory throwing the unvaccinated family member under the bus and the altar call to accept the gospel of vaccination. Then we are regaled with the fact that poor Shakyra had a compromising health condition and was born premature.

By this stage I was truly worried, I can tell you. In typical mainstream media fashion, my fears were only relieved 3/4 of the way down. Shakyra only had a runny nose and a cough. One wonders how this made it into our supposed premier newspaper. Imagine trying this 3 years ago. My daughter was hugged by her uncle who hadn’t got his flu shot. She got a runny nose and a bit of a cough. That would have been front-page news that. Riveting stuff. The real question is, why isn’t the headline “Two unvaccinated young people unaffected by Covid”?

Keep your eyes peeled my friends. As you do, you will surely see that these vaccine side effects of stupidity, self-righteousness and loss of critical thinking skills are worryingly common.

Calvinist Political Theory

In his study of Puritan political theory, Richard Flinn discusses the important work of Samuel Rutherford and his classic work, Lex Rex. Rutherford was confronting in his time a similar question about the source of law. Some of the papists of his day had argued that the king as a man was subject to God, but in the practice of his office as king, he was not subject to God’s law. Rutherford saw that this meant that the king was either above God, or co-equal with God, which are both “manifest blasphemies.” Flinn points out that at the heart of the Calvinist view of biblical political theory is that the civil government must be under God’s law, or be blasphemous. Furthermore, “unless we are willing to grant this doctrine and build upon it, there can be no Christian politics; there can only be humanistic politics, which, when practiced by Christians, is idolatry.

Joseph Boot on Richard Flinn’s study of Puritan political theory in The Mission of God