Standard-Examiner, Ogden, Utah

Thursday, August 25, 1977

Two North Ogden men and six young companions said today they watched a "gorilla-like" creature in the High Uintah Mountains that matched reports of “Big Foot.” Jay Barker of 1350 E. 2600 N., who has hunted big game animals for years in the area, said the creature was estimated at being 10 feet tall.

He said it was covered with a white mantle of hair over its shoulders and halfway down its huge body. The lower portion of the creature was dark colored, said Mr. Barker who said after it spotted his party it ambled off on its hind legs.

Hikes To Ridge

Mr. Barker and his two sons Brent, 12, and Danny, 6, had hiked to the top of the ridge between Pass Lake and Cuberant Basin at the head of Weber River drainage. They reached the top of the ridge at noon Monday and made contact with Larry Beeson and his three sons, Scott, 14, Michael, 11, David, 5, and Paul Carling, 14. About that time, they looked down upon a small alpine lake about one half mile below them and saw the creature standing on its edge.

Creature Turns

At first, Mr. Barker thought he was looking at an elk. Then the creature turned to look up at the party after a couple of the boys had knocked rocks loose that rolled. "What are we looking at?" said an amazed Mr. Beeson as the creature turned and walked off on its hind legs. Mr. Barker said the distance was too far to get a good look at the creature's face, but he said it moved through scattered trees, turning its head back to look at them from time to time.

Four Minutes

He said they watched it for some four minutes while it covered about one half mile through the scattered trees and then disappeared into heavy timber. Startled and almost dumbfounded, the group stared. "That thing is standing on two legs," said one member of the amazed party as they looked. Mr. Barker said the party went down to where they had seen the creature after it disappeared. They found "paw-like" imprints in the earth, but the ground was too hard and dry to leave a clear imprint. He said the paw mark was "huge" and resembled that made by a palm and toes. The party followed the path of the creature to the timber and found other scruff marks on the rocks and in the dry ground and grass.

Heavy Timber

Mr. Barker said the group thought better about following the hairy creature into the heavy timber. Excited and unable to sleep, Mr. Barker said he and his boys were too tired after their experience to make the return trip of over six miles back to their camper near Pass Lake. They spent Monday night huddled about a campfire at Fish Lake near where the creature had been seen and came out Tuesday. Mr. Barker estimated the elevation of the small lake where the creature was seen at about 12,000 feet. It was above the timberline.

Sheep Scared

He also said a sheepherder in the Gold Hills area below, Arlo Fawcett of Roy, reported he has been unable to get his sheep to stay in the area where the creature was seen. Mr. Fawcett reportedly said he would take his sheep into the area to graze, and they would beat him back to camp, apparently filled with fear. The herder also said it's the first summer this has happened. It's also the first summer that he has failed to see or hear coyotes in the area. Utah wildlife officials, informed of the incident, said they would ride into the area on horses to check the area.

Fits Grizzly

Jerry Dahlberg, conservation officer, northern region, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, when informed of the creature, said the description fits a grizzly bear "to a T," all except walking upright for such a long distance. Officer Dahlberg says he plans a horseback trip into the area over the Labor Day weekend. Mr. Beeson said when they reached the area where the hairy creature was seen, they found the carcass of a rabbit that had been completely "skinned as by a human" and partially eaten.

1. One of God’s most important warnings to the Gentiles in the western hemisphere, particularly that nation among these Gentiles that has become mighty “above all other nations,” (1 Nephi 13:30; 3 Nephi 20:21) is this declaration set forth in the Book of Ether:

“And he had sworn in his wrath… that whoso should possess this land of promise… henceforth and forever, should serve him, the true and only God, or they should be swept off when the fullness of his wrath should come upon them.

“And now, we can behold the decrees of God concerning this land, that it is a land of promise; and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall serve God, or they shall be swept off when the fullness of his wrath shall come upon them. And the fullness of his wrath cometh upon them when they are ripened in iniquity.

“For behold, this is a land which is choice above all other lands; wherefore he that doth possess it shall serve God or shall be swept off; for it is the everlasting decree of God. And it is not until the fullness of iniquity among the children of the land, that they are swept off.

“And this cometh unto you, o ye Gentiles, that ye may know the decrees of God – that ye may repent, and not continue in your iniquities until the fullness come, that ye may not bring down the fullness of the wrath of God upon you as the inhabitants of the land have hitherto done (the Jaredites and Nephites)…

“Behold, this is a choice land, and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall be free from bondage, and from captivity, and from all other nations under heaven, if they will but serve the GOD OF THIS LAND, WHO IS JESUS CHRIST.” (Ether 2:8-12)

2. This scriptural warning says the present inhabitants of the United States will imperil themselves if they allow a wave of wicked, anti-religious, anti-Christian sentiment to arise among the people which denigrates the work of Jesus Christ who is the God of this land.

1. 1. All experience demonstrates that people tend to behave according to the way they believe. What if traditional values and beliefs are neglected or even suppressed? And what if this suppression of morality and standards of Christian values becomes a policy of the government itself?
   2. Consider the present situation where the courts of the United States have come out in open hostility against religion in general and Christianity in particular. For example:
   3. The Supreme Court has held that it is a mandate according to the Court’s interpretation of the supreme law of the land, that Americans cannot mention Jesus Christ, pray to Jesus Christ, or read or discuss the teachings of Jesus Christ in the tax-supported schools of the United States. In fact, no reference to religion of any kind can be made in these schools.
   4. This has occurred in spite of the specific provisions in the First Amendment that the government shall make no law nor issue any edict “respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

3. The federal courts justify their constant intermeddling with religious issues on the ground that the Constitution requires the government to maintain a strict “separation of church and state.”

1. 1. The facts are that there is no provision in the Constitution giving the federal government authority to enforce the separation of church and state.
   2. There was an historical reason for this. At the time the Constitution was being adopted, seven states had official state churches. They would not have signed it if there had been any suggestion that the government could intermeddle with their religious faith.
   3. Of course, the Founders realized there were important religious issues to be worked out, but each state wanted to handle these delicate matters themselves. In Virginia, for example, the Constitution came very close to being rejected, and one of the main reasons was the fact that the people were afraid the national government might become involved in their religious affairs. James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, gave them this absolute assurance:

“There is not a shadow of right in the general government to intermeddle with religion. Its least interference with it would be a most flagrant usurpation.” (Quoted by Skousen in The Making of America, p. 681)

1. 4. Thomas Jefferson hammered home this same principle in his second inaugural address when he said:

“In matters of religion I have considered that the free exercise is placed by the Constitution independent of the powers of the General (i.e. national) Government.”

1. 5. At the close of his second term, he wrote:

“I consider the government of the United States as interdicted (prohibited) by the constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting an establishment or free exercise of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the power not delegated to the General government (10th Amendment). IT MUST THEN REST WITH THE STATES.” (Quoted by David Barton in The Myth of Separation, p. 42)

6. Then how did the federal government get jurisdiction over all these religious issues now coming before the courts?

1. 1. The strategy was as follows: the Supreme Court decided to just simply ignore the intent of the First Amendment, and base the court’s federal jurisdiction on the Fourteenth Amendment. This Amendment says no state can abridge “the privileges or immunities” of a citizen or “deprive any person life, liberty or property without due process of law.” This amendment was designed to give the federal government the power to protect the civil rights of the recently liberated slaves.
   2. But of course the First Amendment made cases involving religion, free speech, free press, and freedom to assemble an exception to the Fourteenth Amendment. These issues still rested exclusively within the jurisdiction of the states.
   3. After 160 years, the Supreme Court decided to more or less ignore the restrictions of the First Amendment on the federal government and treat it as a restriction on the states!
   4. The first case involving a religious issue which the Supreme Court assumed it had jurisdiction was the case of Everson v. Board of Education in 1947. (330 U.S. 18) The state of New Jersey had elected to furnish transportation to all schools including charitable parochial schools. The majority decided in favor of the New Jersey statute but not on the grounds that it was the exclusive right of the state to handle such issues. They decided the case on the presumption that the federal courts had complete jurisdiction to determine the merits of the case. The judges said the Fourteenth Amendment made religious issues a matter for the federal courts to decide in spite of the First Amendment. Thus, by twisting the original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court virtually repealed the First Amendment. This became the precedent for all future state cases involving religious issues. The results speak for themselves:
   5. Today, a verbal prayer offered in a school is unconstitutional, even if it is both denominationally neutral and participation is voluntary. (1962, Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421; 1963, Abington v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203; 1971, Massachusetts Commissioner of Education v. School Committee of Leyden, 404 U.S. 849)
   6. Today, freedom of speech and press is guaranteed to students unless the topic is religious. In the public schools all religious freedom of speech and all religious freedom of press is prohibited as unconstitutional. (1965, Stein v. Oshinsky, 382 U.S. 957; 1981, Collins v. Chandler Unified School District, 454 U.S. 863)
   7. Today, if a student prays over his lunch, it is unconstitutional for him to pray aloud. (1965, Reed Hoven, 237 Fed. Supp. 48)
   8. Today, it is unconstitutional for kindergarten students to recite: “We thank you for the flowers so sweet; we thank you for the food we eat; we thank you for the birds that sing; we thank you for everything.” Even though the word “God” is not contained in this poem, it was construed to be a prayer to something or somebody. (1967, DeSpain v. DeKalb County Community School District, 390 U.S. 906)
   9. Today, it is unconstitutional for a war memorial to be erected on public property in the shape of a cross. (1969, Lowe v. City of Eugene, 434 U.S. 876)
   10. Today, it is unconstitutional for students to arrive at school early to hear a student volunteer read prayers which have been offered by the chaplains in the chambers of the United States House of Representatives and Senate, even though those prayers are contained in the Congressional Record published by the U.S. government. (1970, State Board of Education v. Board of Education of Netcong, 1970, 57 New Jersey, 172; 262 Appellate Court, 2d, 21)
   11. Today, it is unconstitutional for a Board of Education to use or refer to the word “God” in any of its official writings. (1976, State v. Whisner, 47 Ohio St. 2d, 181; 351 N.E. 2d, 750)
   12. Today, it is unconstitutional for a kindergarten class to ask during a school assembly whose birthday is celebrated on Christmas. (1979, Florey v. Sioux Falls School District, 619 F. 2d, 1311)
   13. Today, it is unconstitutional for the Ten Commandments to be displayed in a school or classroom on the ground that this might lead the students to read them and be impressed to obey them. (1980, Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39)
   14. A bill becomes unconstitutional, even though the wording may seem constitutionally acceptable, if the legislator who authored it had a religious activity in his mind when he introduced it. (1984, Wallace v. Jaffrey, 472 U.S. 38)
   15. Today, it is unconstitutional for a kindergarten class to recite, “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food.” (1984, Wallace v. Jaffrey, Ibid.)
   16. Today, it is unconstitutional for a school graduation ceremony to contain an opening or closing prayer. (1986, Graham V. Central Community School District of Decatur county, 608 F. Supp. 531)
   17. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6 to 3 decision that an 18-foot Jewish Menorah erected on the steps of the Pittsburgh city hall did not violate the First Amendment because there was a large decorated Christmas tree nearby, together with a snowman, reindeer, Santa’s house and other secular symbols. However, down the block at the Pittsburgh courthouse, a nativity scene was ruled by the court 5-4 to be unconstitutional because it represented a single establishment of religion. (“Intolerant ACLU Bags Another Creche,” George Will, Deseret News, Salt Lake City, July 11, 1989)

5. Since the original Everson case in 1947, hundreds of suits have been pouring through the courts to determine precisely what religious rights Americans can still enjoy under the “Free Exercise” clause. Public officials have felt compelled to use the guidelines of the courts in making decisions as new situations arise. So far, the prospects for the future have looked rather dismal. For example:

1. 1. In the Alaska public schools during 1987, students were told that they could not use the word “Christmas” in school because it had the word “Christ” in it. They were told they could not have the word “Christmas” in their notebooks, or exchange Christmas cards or presents at school. (William Murray, “America without God,” The New American, June 20, 1988, p. 19)
   2. In Virginia, a federal court ruled that a homosexual newspaper could be distributed on the school campus, but religious newspapers could not. (Ibid.)
   3. Recently public schools were forbidden to show a film about the settlement of Jamestown because the film depicted the erection of a cross at the settlement. (John Eidsmoe, Christianity and the Constitution, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1987, p. 406)
   4. In 1987, a 185-year-old symbol of a Nevada city had to be changed because of its “religious significance,” and a fire station was forced to remove a cross in remembrance of a fellow fireman who lost his life in the line of duty. (Tim La Haye, Faith of our Founding Fathers, Brentwood, Tenn., Wogemuth and Hyatt Publishers Inc., 1987, p. 27)
   5. In December, 1988, an elementary school principal in Denver removed the Bible from the school library and an elementary school music teacher in Colorado Springs stopped teaching Christmas carols because of alleged violations of the separation of church and state. (“Parent Silences Teaching of Carols,” Washington Times, December 12, 1988)
   6. In 1989, at an Omaha, Nebraska, school, a 10-year-old boy, James Gierke, was prohibited from reading his Bible silently during free time… The boy was later forbidden by his teacher to open his Bible at school and was told that reading the Bible in school was against the law. (“Fifth Grader Sues for Right to Read Bible,” IFA Newsletter, February 1989)

QUESTIONS

1. In the first three verses of the Lord's warning quoted on the first page, a certain two-word phrase appears in each verse. What is it?
2. Can you summarize in a single sentence how hostile the courts have come toward religion in the public schools?
3. What are the two provisions in the First Amendment which this policy violated?
4. What principle do the federal courts feel they are protecting? Does the constitution require the federal government to provide this protection?
5. Can you describe briefly why the Founders did not want the national government to have any authority over religious issues in the states?
6. What did James Madison say to assure the people of Virginia that it was safe to adopt the Constitution? What did Thomas Jefferson say?
7. How did the U.S. Supreme Court get around the restrictions in the First Amendment forbidding the federal government to intermeddle with religious questions arising in the states?
8. How many anti-religious decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court can you recall?
9. Can a student read the Bible in school? Can you say a silent prayer over the food at a school? Can you read out of the Bible on your own time in the public schools? Can you discuss the 2 ½ minute talk which you are preparing for next Sunday, in the public school?
10. Do you believe this situation will improve or deteriorate during the coming years? What is the basis for your opinion?

Address given to the “California Constitutional Crusade” (a gathering of Latter-day Saints) at the Anaheim Convention Center (Anaheim, California) on Tuesday, October 9, 1979

Contributor’s note: very minor changes to spelling and grammar have been made from the original document to this one.

My fellow Americans. You accord to me a great honor by inviting me to be with you on this occasion. You have aptly named this convention a Constitutional Crusade. Now, as never before in our nation’s 200-year history, the times demand a crusade to return to the Constitution in the tradition of our founding fathers. I commend Cleon Skousen, the Freeman Institute and supporters for their great efforts toward this purpose – a goal which must be achieved if America is to be saved.

It is not easy for me to stand before you and deliver a message which I have been pondering for some time. But I do so out of love for America and allegiance to the God of heaven who made us all. Because of the nature of the message I bring, I have committed most of it to writing. I am not here to tickle your ears – to entertain you. I shall speak to you frankly and honestly. The message I bring is not a particularly happy one, but it is the truth and time is on the side of truth.

I have concerns about the future of our nation. All is not well in this land. I am concerned about its declining spirituality. I am concerned about the apathy which allows political parties and government officials to take more and more control over the lives of our people. I am concerned about the concessions made by government leaders to foreign powers whose objective it is to destroy all that we hold dear. In all candor, I am concerned about the survival of this great nation as we, as fortunate citizens, have known and enjoyed it.

As Americans, we share a serious citizenship responsibility. The Prophet Joseph Smith declared, “It is our duty to concentrate all our influence to make popular that which is sound and good and unpopular that which is unsound.” (HC 5:286)

God has told us that the United States Constitution was divinely inspired for the specific purposes of eliminating bondage and protecting the rights which belong to “all flesh.” (D&C 101:77-80)

If we believe in God and His works, it is up to each one of us to uphold and defend our Constitution which guarantees our precious freedom. For God states unequivocally:

“Let not that which I have appointed be polluted by mine enemies, by the consent of those who call themselves after my name.

“For this is a very sore and grievous sin against me, and against my people in consequence of those things which I have decreed and which are soon to befall the nations.” (D&C 101:97-98)

Hear again the words of the late President David O. McKay, who declared:

“No greater immediate responsibility rests upon members of the Church, upon all citizens of this Republic and of neighboring Republics than to protect the freedom vouchsafed by the Constitution of the United States.” (CR, April 1950, p. 37)

Today, we are witnesses to a world struggle that is but an extension of the war in heaven. We have seen a system of slavery, Communism, imprison the minds and bodies of over one billion of our Father’s children. Today, 45 percent of the people of the world, in 65 nations, live under totalitarian dictatorships, or forms of government which deny people most, or all, of their political and religious freedoms.

We are witnesses to deception in high places. We are witnesses to an erosion within our own country of the ideals of our Founding Fathers which are embodied in the Constitution. We are seeing more and more power being concentrated in the federal government, all to the deprivation of the liberties of individuals. Yearly we observe our government going further in debt, debauching our currency and thereby fueling inflation.

We are witnesses to pronouncements of atheism, agnosticism, and immorality in our midst. Sadly, we are witnesses to the truth that as a nation, we have forgotten God. I ask myself, how long can we remain under heaven’s benign protection?

We tend to forget how America became the greatest, most prosperous and powerful nation in the world, blessed with an abundance of everything needed for the good life.

It didn’t just happen. It wasn’t an accident. It was all an integral part of the divine plan for America. In the early frontier days of this country a special breed of men and women came here from all over the world seeking not only opportunity, but freedom. They were strong, proud, and fiercely independent. They believed that the surest helping hand was at the end of their own sleeves. They shared one thing in common – an unshakable faith in God, and in themselves. And that, without doubt, is the secret of success which is as applicable today as it was then.

With little but raw courage and indomitable purpose, those intrepid pioneers set forth into the unknown by covered wagon, on horseback, and sometimes on foot. The land demanded iron men with steel in their backbones. Nature did the weeding out. But they didn’t whine or bleat because things were tough. They asked no favors from any man. They knew what they were up against and they accepted the challenge. All they wanted was to be left alone to do what had to be done. They were wrenching a civilization out of the wilderness.

America soon blossomed into a rich, fertile, productive nation. Individual initiative – free enterprise – paid off, and American ingenuity flourished in a climate of freedom. Very soon our technology, our inventiveness, and our business know-how became the envy of the world. America had reached maturity, a giant among nations, a glowing example of free enterprise in action, and a perfect demonstration of what free men can do when they are left alone to do it.

But, as those affluent years slipped by, voices were heard in the land singing the siren songs of socialism. And many Americans tapped their feet to the beat of the music. Politicians were already promising something for nothing – that elusive free lunch. Thus, gradually, the people let the government infringe upon their precious freedoms and the preliminary signs of decay began to appear in our young Republic.

Our economic situation today, I believe, is precarious. Reality has descended on us. Inflation, like an insidious disease, is weakening us.

We reached this position because we lost our national pride, our sense of independence. When we wanted something, we went crawling to the government instead of doing it ourselves. We, like Esau of old, exchanged God-inspired principles, for a mess of shoddy values. No wonder our structures of freedom are cracking.

It is my sober warning to you this day that if the trends of the past 40 years continue, especially the last 15 years, we will lose that which is as precious as life itself – our freedom, our liberty, our right to act as free men. And if we lose our God-given freedom, only blood – human blood – will bring it back.

It can happen here. It is happening here.

It is time we recognized, as a people, that this country rests on divinely inspired and uniquely formulated principles. Until 1789, no nation had all basic rights guaranteed and recognized by written contract. That is what the Constitution is – a contract between a sovereign people and their elected officials. It’s high time these principles were not just acknowledged, but carried out. Indeed this is the only real hope for our survival as a free nation.

What was the philosophy behind this document that made it divinely inspired?

It embodied the collective attitude and spirit of the founders of this Republic. Keep in mind that they recognized that all men’s rights for life, liberty and property were unalienable. In other words, they came from God. This is the underlying principle that distinguishes our form of government from all others. This was in opposition and contrast to the European philosophy which for centuries had declared that man’s rights could be given or withheld by a king, dictator or ruler.

The founders had healthy mistrust of government. They accepted the maxim that “government is like a fire: a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” They emphasized that government had to be controlled in the interest of man’s liberty. Because of a fear of the omnipotent power of the State, they provided for a separation of powers which limited the various branches of the government. They declared that the powers of government should be decentralized, that the power not delegated to the federal government belonged to the states, and that the power not delegated to either the states or the federal government inherently belonged to the people. They also provided checks and balances in our constitutional system that are, or should be, well-known to every school child.

They warned that government could become legalized plunder. They emphasized that government should be frugal, that debt would bring a nation to its knees just as much as an invading foreign power. They provided for the protection of private property rights and acknowledged that government exists to provide such protection. The founders advanced a system of unique representation so that the will of the people would be manifest through representatives, but that the rights of minorities would be protected from a more powerful majority which was regarded as just another form of tyranny. Now, that is what the founders believed. That’s the spirit and tradition which they gave to us.

How far are we removed from that philosophy? Should Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, and others visit us today, would they recognize by the practices of our government those ideals which were so nobly enshrined under their auspices? Let’s consider a comparison of what they taught to what we practice today.

John Adams, our first vice-president and second president, said: “Our Constitution was made for only a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” God is the source of man’s rights and the ultimate authority for society’s basis of law. Thus the Constitution, was not conceived as an expression of man-made law, but was a recognition of a higher law from God. That is why Madison wrote on completion of the Constitution, “It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty Hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical state of the revolution.” (The Federalist, No. 37)

How is it today? Too many Americans have lost sight of the truth that God is our source of freedom, the Law Giver, and that personal righteousness is the most important essential to preserving our freedom.

What does morality have to do with maintaining good constitutional government? Here is the Lord’s commandment to us today: “Wherefore, honest men and wise men should be sought for diligently, and good men and wise men ye should observe to uphold; otherwise whatsoever is less than these cometh of evil.” (D&C 98:10)

Only a virtuous citizenry can elect good, honest, and wise representatives. A virtuous citizenry demands moral government. They will not give their consent to spending programs which enlarge the function of the federal government. They will not vote money to agencies which have no legitimacy under the Constitution. They will not vote to permit government to take the wealth of the laborer and transfer the fruits of his labors to another.

Honest legislators will not spend money they do not have, thereby mortgaging future generations to debt. Honest legislators will remember the words of Jefferson, “We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts.”

Honorable legislators will not permit government to multiply unbacked printing press money, creating the cruelest tax of all, inflation. They will not vote themselves pay increases without consent of the governed. They will refrain from demagoguery, (promising what they can’t deliver or pandering to the covetousness of those who demand what they have not earned.) In short, elected officials will not assume prerogatives they do not have nor which you, the citizens, have not expressly granted to them.

When you have wise, good, honorable representatives, you have effective constitutional government. When you don’t have this kind of representation, constitutional government will fail. It is as Edmund Burke said, “Men of intemperate habits cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

These early Founders had a genuine mistrust for entanglements, alliances, and treaties with foreign nations. Said George Washington, first President and Father of our country, “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Jefferson echoed that sentiment when he advised, “Honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.”

It is apparent to all that their advice has been ignored. Today the United States is bound by multifarious treaties with Europe, Asia, South America, the Mid-East and the Soviet Union.

Why did our forefathers advise against entangling alliances? They recognized that every entanglement with a foreign country would deprive the United States of the power to determine its own course at the moment of implementation of a treaty and, therefore, it would impair the sovereignty of our country. Every treaty, every alliance requires a surrender of rights since mutual aid and strictly nonsovereign interest are the purpose of the alliances.

President J. Reuben Clark warned us about the danger of entangling alliances when we became a member of the United Nations. He predicted that a portion of our sovereignty would be lost. He correctly forecast that the United States would lose the right to unilaterally make treaties with other nations that are out of harmony with the United Nations charter, that we would have no right to adjust our own international difficulties without being in disagreement with the U.N. charter. He told me personally that we would rue the day we became a member of the U.N. I have lived to see his prediction fulfilled.

Summit conferences, not authorized by our Constitution, are a recent 20th Century innovation of treaty-making by the President. Our President has recently signed the SALT II pact with the Soviet Union. It is both unwise and immoral to sign a treaty with a country that has no respect for treaties and is dedicated to our destruction. We must not be in a position of military inferiority to a nation determined to enslave the world. Recall that Washington said, “to be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving the peace.” The Prophet Joseph Smith said that those words of Washington were good advice. (HC 6:199)

Now the Soviet Ambassador held an unprecedented news conference and declared that if we changed a sentence or paragraph in that treaty, the whole process of “detente” would fall apart. What an affront to our democratic process!

On more than one occasion I have said that detente was a fraud. The philosophy behind detente is a relaxation of tension, hopefully a reduction of conflict in the world. Detente assumes good faith on the part of each nation, an assumption of trust so that mutual negotiation, trade, and diplomatic exchanges may occur between the two countries.

If the Soviet Union were sincerely interested in the freedom and the human rights of all nations, would we not see on their part a relaxing of tension worldwide, and the release of their captive nations? Would there not be less conflict as an indication of the success of detente? Does the mention of these countries inspire confidence in the word of the Soviets: Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Rhodesia, Afghanistan, Cambodia ? Everyone of these countries is a symbol of Communist aggression and the contempt by the Soviet Union for the free world and the rights of men everywhere. No one with common sense and integrity can really say that the “detente” process has brought about a relaxation of tension, or has contributed toward the betterment of the world in general.

Now I sincerely believe that the United States has an interest in and an obligation to make friends of leaders of all nations. I do not believe, however, that we are obligated in the interest of peace to barter away our sovereignty, nor to export our technology to a nation that has as its declared purpose the subjugation of free men of all nations. It is a matter of record that the Soviet Union has violated almost every treaty that she has made with the United States. You recall the commitments of the Helsinki Conference in 1975 which pledged the signatory countries to uphold human rights and fundamental freedoms? What has happened to such commitments by the Soviet Union?

Further, our own government officials have acknowledged serious violations on the part of the Soviet Union to the SALT I pact. Is it not time for Americans to ask, “Is it really in our national self-interest to place confidence in the word of a nation determined to destroy us?” So I conclude, detente is a fraud! It is simply not in the interest of the sovereignty of this nation.

But there are two sides to mutual trust. The record of the United States has not been good. There have been moments, I must confess, when I have been ashamed of the actions of the leaders in this nation. If the United States makes treaties, they must honor their word. I tell you that our record in recent years has been one of betrayal to our friends and allies. It’s a shame what we have done to Taiwan and Rhodesia, South Korea, and South Africa. Our so-called “human rights” policy is folly because of its discrimination. Under this policy we come down hard on our friends, but remain conspicuously silent on the ruthless mass-murders that have occurred under Communist regimes. We grant to the latter “most favored nation” trade agreements. We honor them as guests of State, while former friends are ignored. Now that kind of foreign policy doesn’t make sense. I want to tell you, from my visits with heads of State in other countries, it doesn’t inspire confidence toward the United States.

How much can the word of the United States really be counted on? Do you think other nations have taken notice of the way we have treated Taiwan and conveniently scrapped the Mutual Defense Treaty? There is a lesson to be learned from this – a reminder that a nation’s character is summed up by the old fashioned word called “honor.” When nations dishonor their commitments, obligations, and treaties to their friends, incalculable consequences occur.

Winston Churchill has reminded us of what too often is forgotten today:

“The Sermon on the Mount is the last word in Christian ethics… there is… one helpful guide (for future action), namely, for a nation to keep its word and act in accordance with its treaty obligation to allies. This guide is called ‘honor.’” (Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, pp. 320-21)

Yes, we have made concession after concession to the Soviet Union. One of their own people, an exile from the Soviet Union, the Nobel Prize Winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, confirms how the Soviet Union has gained a stranglehold on one-third of the world’s population. He said, “It was because of a process on the part of Americans which has been in progress for more than 30 years of short-sighted concessions, a process of giving up and giving up, in hope that at some point the wolf will have eaten enough.” His appeal to American leaders and politicians is to “stop the senseless process of endless concessions to aggressors, these clever legal arguments for why we should make one concession after another, give up more and more and more.” (U. S. News and World Report, July 14, 1975)

Then in one of the most humiliating requests ever made to American leaders Solzhenitsyn plead: “When they bury us… please do not send them the shovels… or the latest earthmoving equipment.” (Warning to the West, p. 84)

How many warnings do we need to have? How much more humiliation must we suffer?

Let’s return to our domestic situation. In his Farewell Address, President George Washington said: “The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus create whatever the form of government, a real despotism.”

An inherent principle to constitutional government, the American tradition, is that governments are to derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed.” Checks and balances were wisely devised to make it difficult for the majority of people to control government. The purpose was, as Adams expressed, “To create, develop, and multiply diversities of interest, by which the tendency on a sudden to violate them may be counteracted.”

In the past 40 years, we, the people, have permitted the principle of separation of powers to become almost negligible. We have permitted Congress to fund numbers of federal agencies under the executive branch. An issue in the last federal election campaign was over “big government.” We became more aware that a giant, invisible bureaucracy had arisen with broad discretionary powers. Since that time, we’ve added one more department and two Cabinet positions to the federal government.

Many citizens do not realize that many, if not most, of the federal agencies are unconstitutional. Why? Because they concentrate the functions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches under one head. These agencies have power to make rulings, enforce rulings, and adjudicate penalties when rulings are violated. They are unconstitutional because they violate the doctrine of the separation of power. They are unconstitutional because the people have no power to recall administrative personnel by their vote. And we, the people, have permitted it.

Commenting on this usurpation of power by the administrative agencies, President J. Reuben Clark once said:

“We the people have accepted all this. The courts have not condemned it. As to matters affected, we are now a despotism. If it is established and extended in one field, it is easily extended over others. It is only a matter of time and our complacency. It is not possible to condemn too strongly this growing perversion of our constitutional principles.”

President Clark said that in 1952. What would he say today? I think he would echo James Madison’s words:

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

It is past time we recognize that we now have government by regulation rather than by representation!

Originally, the Constitution permitted few powers to the federal government, these chiefly being the powers concerning “war, peace negotiation and foreign commerce.” All other powers were “reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

In other words, the Founders further provided for the limitation of power by decentralizing government to the state and local levels. This principle of decentralization constitutes one of the fundamental principles of our system of government. The intent of the framers was to preserve maximum “home rule.”

One of the more ominous efforts toward further concentration of power in Washington Is the new Department of Education. Twenty-three thousand employees and approximately an $18 billion dollar budget! The control of education at a national level was abhorrent to the founders. Hear one warning by James Madison:

“If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, they may take the care of religion in their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every state, county and parish, and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the union; they may assume the provision of the poor … Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of limited Government established by the people of America.”

I believe that statement has proved prophetic.

I firmly believe that giving Cabinet and department status to education will further endanger the freedom of our Republic. Is there any doubt that within a few years, we will have more federal control over education – that the curriculum would be controlled to propagandize students ever more toward humanistic viewpoints? We must preserve control of education at the local board level.

For forty years now, we have transferred responsibilities which constitutionally belong to the individual, local and state governments to federal agencies. If this trend continues, the states will become hollow shells, operating primarily as field districts of impersonal government departments, and individuals will have lost their right to self-government. When that happens, freedom is gone.

This process of federal government intervention into local concerns can, of course, be reversed. How? When state and local governments say “no” to federal grants and insist on their right to manage their own affairs. To the extent we permit the government to finance our affairs and municipalities, to that extent we permit government to control our lives.

States and local governments not only have recognized constitutional rights, they have responsibility to assert these rights. This is not a matter of protecting one government entity from another; it is a matter of protecting the individual rights of the people – your rights! If we lose sight of this, we may as well scrap the Constitution.

If we could retain one lesson from history, a most profitable one would be: When local self-government exists, there is liberty; when local self-government vanishes, liberty goes with it.

Thomas Jefferson warned of this danger in these words:

“The way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions he is competent to … What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body.”

Again, a warning that must be heeded today!

These usurpations of power represent only a few of many examples, but they represent trends which are taking this nation down the path toward tyranny and soul-destroying socialism, philosophies alien to our Founding Fathers. We stand as witnesses to this decline.

If you have any question about the trend of our government today, I would urge you to compare the policies and actions of our present government to the philosophy of our founding fathers. Then compare them to the objectives of the American Socialist Party. Then you determine which direction our government is heading. I have done so and have reached my own conclusions.

So, what can we do?

Frequently I am asked, “What can I do? I recognize the trend, but what can I do as an individual?” May I urge the following steps:

1. Pray for the blessings of God on our nation and its leaders. Pray that God will guide them to make wise decisions. Pray that His influence will be on our nation’s leaders to preserve the Constitution of the United States. Pray that legislation will be enacted in the tradition of the Founding Fathers. Pray that God will hedge up the way of the adversary that he may have no power to destroy our God-given freedom. These should be the prayers in every Latter-day Saint home and in the home of every citizen of this nation.
2. Study the Founding Fathers. Study the principles of the Constitution. Be conversant with those principles so you may recognize whether legislation is in harmony with them. Urge your Congressmen to stop giving others what they have not earned. Urge your Senator to reject any treaty which would impair our sovereignty or weaken us militarily.
3. Remind your legislators that they took an oath of office to uphold the Constitution. They did not take that oath with you and me. They took an oath before God. And they will stand liable before Him for transgressions in office.

I fully believe that we can turn things around in this country if we have the determination, the morality, the patriotism, and the spirituality to do so.

I love this nation. To me, it is not just another nation. It is a great and glorious society with a divine mission to perform for liberty-loving people everywhere.

My single-minded concern today is for the freedom and welfare of my countrymen and my posterity, the freedom of all men. God has granted us a great heritage of freedom brought about by sacrifice and blood of our forefathers.

Here in this privileged land we hold in our hands the best hope of mankind; and it will be to our shame and disgrace before God and man if we allow that hope to wither and die.

I testify to you that God’s hand has been in our destiny. He expects us as members of the Church to do all we can to preserve our liberty. I pray His blessings on us toward that end. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

President, Arizona State University, Tempe

THE IMPROVEMENT ERA, OCTOBER 1962

“Congress shall make no law respect­ing an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; ...” – First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

ln a statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, August 2, 1962, Bishop James A. Pike, an attorney qualified to practise before the US Supreme Court, suggested that the words “establishment of religion” in the First Amendment be replaced with “the recognition as an established church of any denomination, sect, or organized religious association.”

The press has reported that Senators Robertson (D. Va.), and Stennis (D. Miss.), thought the suggestion the best yet received since the so­-called “prayer decision.”

There can be a great many differ­ences between religious practices and “an establishment of religion.” This much has been clear for many years. By judicial interpretation, the words “establishment of religion” have come to include a variety of religious attitudes and expressions – as well as the concept of organization.

The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles (3d ed., revised, 1955) notes the word “establishment” migrating into English about 1481 AD. A 1596 meaning was “the action of establishing.” As usage ­developed, the word quickly came to mean (“establishmentism”) the principle of a state church.

The words in the First Amendment undoubtedly were meant to signify that Congress shall make no law establishing a state church to administer and prescribe official, legally enforceable religious practices. On the other hand, the remainder clause clearly indicated that neither was Congress to pass any law prohibiting the free development of churches, religious bodies, and religious practices. Lawyer-Bishop Pike’s suggestion would produce the following result:

“Congress shall make no law respecting the recognition as an established church of any denomination, sect, or organized religious association, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty, June 16, 1786, disestablished the Episcopal Church in Virginia. The bill was introduced in June 1779. It was strenuously opposed but passed after seven years of battle. James Madison, George Mason, and Thomas Jefferson secured its passage. Jefferson was author of the bill. Some language from the Virginia statute suggests that interest may have run towards modern problems, as well as those of eliminating the state church.

The eighteenth century phrase, “an establishment of religion,” implies an organized, duly established, religious body. If the First Amendment is amended to attempt restoration of earlier intent, some problems will remain.

The Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty, June 16, 1786, disestablished the Episcopal Church in Virginia. The bill was introduced in June 1779. It was strenuously opposed but passed after seven years of battle. James Madison, George Mason, and Thomas Jefferson secured its passage. Jefferson was author of the bill. Some language from the Virginia statute suggests that interest may have run towards modern problems, as well as those of eliminating the state church.

Here are some phrases from the bill (which Jefferson believed to rank in importance with his authorship of the Declaration of Independence):

“ ... Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall re­main by making it altogether in­susceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, ...

“ ... the impious presumption of legislators and ruler, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such en­deavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time ...

“ ... to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical ...

“ ... forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his con­tributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness ...

“ ... our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the prescribing any citizens as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or re­nounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right ...

“ ... to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own ...

“ ... it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order ...

“ ... finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

Most thoughtful men and women today will agree with the Jeffersonian views which underlay disestablishment in Virginia, and, the First Amendment.

However, many today will seriously question the practicality of the idealistic notion of civil rights being able to stand alone, rationally maintained and supported. Have “civil rights ... no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics and geometry”? Perhaps this could be true in the eighteenth century Virginia wilderness. But today it has been demonstrated in world wars and more local circumstances that the better doctrine was expressed by another Virginian, George Washington. In the Farewell Address, September 17, 1796, fortified, not doubt, by the excesses of the French Revolution (which occurred after the Virginia Statute’s passage) (when the “Goddess of Reason” failed to stop emotional, irrational forces – read Carlyle’s History on Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities), Washington said:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain will that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness – these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”

The free establishment of religion is, therefore, seen as an important object of the First Amendment, without establishing state churches in these times. If any further sober recollection is needed, merely consider the established state “religions” of the communist nations – and the prohibition of free religious bodies, attitudes, practices, and worship in these times.

An Arab with a Different Point of View

One evening an Arab who was assigned to us as one of our drivers came to me privately and said in rather good English, “You are not being told the whole truth. I am one of the Arab refugees from Israel, I will tell you what really happened.”

A conversation then took place which I later attempted to recapture and reconstruct for my diary notes. Essentially, this is what the Arab said:

“When Israel was made an independent nation by the U.N., the Palestine Arabs were also given territory for an independent nation. But instead of accepting this plan which was supposed to go into effect in 1948, the Palestine Arabs decided to get six other Arab nations to join them in declaring war on Israel so they could drive them out. That way they would get all the land.

“The leaders of these Arab nations sent word to us Arabs living in Israel that we should move over into Jordan territory so we wouldn’t get hurt during the war against the Jews. The Arab leaders promised us that we would be away from our homes only a short time, not more than three weeks at the longest. Then they said we could return and possess not only our own property but the land and buildings of the Jews as well.

“Most of the Arabs in Israel moved over into Jordan just as soon as they could, although some stayed because the Israeli government promised them good treatment if they would remain.”

“How many stayed?”

“About a hundred thousand, mostly those up around Nazareth.”

“Then what happened to the million who came out?”

“We had a holiday at first. Everyone expected the Jews to be defeated quickly. But they fought hard. They were stronger and better fighters than the Arab leaders had expected. After awhile the Arabs had to give up because the Jews were beginning to win more territory than they had in the first place. In a few months an armistice was signed. This left all of us Arabs from Israel without any homes. The Jews said they would hold our land in trust for us, but they said that since we had joined the enemy we could not return until the Arab nations had agreed to recognize Israel and sign a permanent peace treaty. This never happened, so the next thing we knew all of us Arabs from Israel were confined to special camps set up by the Arab governments. Most of us were confined in Jordan but some were located in Egypt and Lebanon. A lot were held by Egypt in the Gaza strip.

“We were not allowed to seek jobs, farm the land or become citizens of these countries. The refugee camps became prison camps with our Arab brothers standing over us as guards.”

“How did you happen to get this job as a driver?”

“For fifteen years my wife and I and our children lived like animals in the camp. Our lives were wasting away. I pleaded with the officials to let me go out and get a job, but they would not. They said we must wait until we could be sent back to Israel. But as the years went by the tourist business began to get very good. Last year the officials said they badly needed any Arabs who could speak English, French or German to serve as guides and drivers. I could speak English, so they let me out to have one of these jobs which no other available Arab could fill.”

“What happened to the Arabs who remained in Israel?”

“They say they are doing very well. They elect their own representatives. They use their own language in the schools. They are allowed to study the Moslem Koran instead of the Jewish Bible. Some of them come to Jordan on business or to visit so we get to talk to them. They sometimes complain that the Jews compete for their business. Still, they tell me about their new houses and about buying new cars so I guess they are doing all right.”

“What about the story that the Israelis drove thousands of the Arabs from their homes?”

“Yes, I think this happened to some, especially around Jaffa and Haifa and later along the border of Jerusalem. But what your guide told you was not the whole story. During the winter of 1947 and 1948 the British were angry at the Jews, and the Arabs in Israel found that they could make raids on the Jews without any interference from the British. I was against it because the Jews had been storing up weapons and I knew they are mean fighters when they get mad. Eventually they did get mad and they attacked Jaffa and Haifa. A lot of Arabs fled from these main centers but they did not have to leave Israel unless they wanted to.

“Later, when the Arab leaders ordered us to leave Israel the Jews had sound trucks go up and down the streets for several days asking us not to leave. They told us that if we stayed we would not have to fight to help the Jews and that we would be treated well as long as we were neutral and didn’t help their enemies.”

“But most of them left?”

“Yes.”

“Did you go at that time?”

“No. I moved over near the Jerusalem border so I could cross if things became hot. And that’s what happened. During the war there was a lot of bombing along the border between Old Jerusalem and the Israeli Jerusalem. I decided to move my family into Jordan where I thought we would be safe until the war was over. I wouldn’t have come if I had thought the Jordanians would put us in a prison camp for fifteen years.”

“Why do you think they did that?”

“They were afraid we would get their jobs or take away their business. Some of us had good educations and had been very successful in Israel before we became refugees.”

“But couldn’t they put you to work? The Jews have absorbed a million refugees and used them to make their country productive and prosperous.”

“Of course, and the Arabs could have done the same.”

The Beginning of Arab-Jewish Friction

I was anxious to get the point of view of this Israeli Arab on the earlier history of the Arab-Jewish conflict, so I asked him, “When the Jews first came to Palestine, did the Arabs resent them?”

“No,” he replied, “They welcomed them. The Jews had money to buy land and there were only a few at first.”

“When did the Arabs start resisting the Jewish migration?”

“When World War I was over and the Jews began talking about setting up a national home in Palestine.”

“Who did this territory belong to before World War I?”

“It was part of the Turkish Empire, but Arabs were living on most of the land.”

“And the Palestine Arabs wanted to become an independent nation in the same territory the British had promised to the Jews for their national home?”

“Yes, the British had promised the Arabs independence if they would fight against Turkey and the Germans.”

“And the British had promised the Jews a national home in Palestine also?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t the Jews later offer to organize the new government of Palestine on a biracial basis with representation based on the respective populations of both Arabs and Jews?”

“Yes, providing the Arabs would agree to let additional Jews migrate as fast as the Jewish agency could afford to buy land for them.”

“Didn’t the Arabs want this?”

“No. The Jews were organized. At the time there were several Arabs for every Jew but in time they would probably outnumber us. You know how the Jews are.”

“But the Arabs wouldn’t have to sell land to the Jews unless they wanted to. Couldn’t you control the territory and the population by continuing to retain most of the land?”

“No. The Arabs are not that united. Always some Arabs will sell if the price is right. Especially the Arabs from Lebanon who owned a lot of the swampland along the coast and up around Megiddo (Jezreel Valley). No Arabs dared to try to farm any of this region because they got sick (malaria, etc.) So the Jews were able to buy this land very cheap. They worked for many years and finally they learned how to drain off the water and it became some of the best farming land in the country.”

“What are the Jews doing with all the property that was abandoned by you Israeli Arabs after you left and came over to Jordan?”

“The Jews are using it.”

“Have they offered to pay for it?”

“We heard that they did but none of us have ever received anything.”

I subsequently learned that since no permanent peace agreement could be worked out with the Arabs, the U.N. Conciliation Commission for Palestine put a value of $336 million on the former Arab holdings in Israel and asked the Israeli government to pay that amount.(7) The Israeli government accepted the principle of giving the Arabs compensation but nothing else came of it because the Arab nations began quarreling among themselves as to just what the compensation should be and they never could agree on a specific amount. In fact, they later refused to consider any settlement short of complete restoration of all properties to the original owners themselves. The Israelis said this would be possible only when the Arab nations agreed to officially recognize Israel as a legal entity and sign a permanent peace treaty. The Arabs refused to do this so the compensation issue was stalemated.(8)

Footnotes: 7, 8-Robert J. Donovan, Israel’s Fight for Survival, pp. 43-44.

The book can be found on Amazon.com.

Once upon a time there was a very happy couple. Their names were Freedom and Capitalism. They married and had many wonderful children. Their names were Independence, Self-worth, Hard work, Dignity, Charity, Faith and Hope.

They all lived happily for many years and the children respected their parents and loved them both very much. But Freedom and Capitalism later had several naughty children, very naughty. They weren’t so respectful and never appreciated their parents. Their names were Wealth envy, Environmentalism, Animal rights activism, Racism, Feminism, and Ultra liberalism.

These evil children blamed their parents for everything and hated their parents, Freedom and Capitalism. In fact, these unappreciative children didn’t realize their parents gave them everything they had and didn’t realize that they wouldn’t even exist without their parents.

They hated their parents so much that they began to plot with their neighbor to kill their parents and take their house. Their neighbors’ names were Socialism and Communism who on the outside were a very lovely couple but inside they were very, very ugly. They and their children, whose names were Despair, Poverty, Suffering, and Repression, had been welcomed into every neighborhood they had lived in, but then thrown out after years of suffering and the loss of many lives.

So late one night in total darkness, because Socialism and Communism did everything in darkness and away from the light of the truth, while everyone was asleep, Wealth envy, Environmentalism, Feminism, and Animal rights, led by their younger obnoxious brother, Hollywood, disguised by Socialism and Communism, let them into the house of Freedom and Capitalism. It wasn’t hard; for the two parents, Freedom and Capitalism, always left their gates and their door open for everyone.

Wealth envy led the way because he knew the house oh, so well. The evil children led Socialism and Communism throughout the house, one room at a time. And one at a time they killed Hard work, then Dignity, then Independence, Self-worth, Charity and Faith. They finally found the room of Freedom and Capitalism and killed them as well. It wasn’t hard to do, since Freedom and Capitalism always left their door unlocked and open for everyone.

Only Hope survived, by hiding in the closet. She ran out during the ensuing celebration.

After Socialism and Communism moved in, things went well for a while but then they decided they didn’t like Freedom and Capitalism’s evil children, either. They wanted their own children to have the rooms in their new house. So late one night in total darkness, because Socialism and Communism did everything in darkness and away from the light of the truth, they sent their children to kill Freedom and Capitalism’s remaining evil children.

Poverty and Suffering killed Environmentalism and Animal rights first, for they were so hungry, they had to kill all the animals for food and the trees for wood. And besides, why should animals have rights if people don’t? Hopelessness killed Liberalism, the retarded brother of Communism. Then Poverty, Suffering, and Repression killed Feminism, the retarded sister of Liberalism. And Hollywood, the young obnoxious son of Freedom and Capitalism, was also killed. Finally, Wealth envy, who led the attack on his parents, died at the hands of poverty since there was nothing left to envy.

So Socialism and Communism and their children, Poverty, Despair, Hopelessness, Suffering, and Repression lived in the once beautiful home of Freedom and Capitalism which was now in great disrepair.

And they all lived sadly ever after.

All that was left of the family of Freedom and Capitalism was Hope, who was quietly hiding in the woods.

May 1979

An almost unbelievable victory for President Carter and the National Education Association occurred on April 30, 1979, when the Senate voted 72 to 21 to approve a monstrous 14-billion-dollar Department of Education with its chief executive sitting on the President’s cabinet. The proposed department will employ 22,000 people the first year, according to the Government Operations Committee of the House.

Americans on the homefront who love their children and have already seen what a contaminating influence federal funds and federal meddling has had on the schools, were dismayed.

Bill Violates Carter Pledge and Republican Platform

It was bad enough for President Carter to sponsor this gigantic addition to the burden of taxpayers, because he campaigned for the Presidency on the ground that he would “cut bureaucracy.” But it was even worse for the Republicans as the “loyal opposition” to Carter’s proposal because this violated a specific provision of the Republican platform. It reads: “Primary responsibility for education, particularly on the elementary and secondary levels, belongs to local communities and parents. Intrusion by the Federal government must be avoided…”

How can the local schools possibly avoid “intrusion” by a 14 billion-dollar federal agency manned by 22,000 people?

Republican Senators who voted for this massive new government agency were:

Baker, Bellmon, Boschwitz, Chaffee, Cochran, Danforth, Domenici, Durenberger, Garn, Hatch, Hatfield, Heinz, Javits, Mathias, McClure, Packwood, Percy, Pressler, Roth, Simpson, Stevens,

Thurmond, Weicker, and Young. This makes a total of 24.

Republican Senators Who Voted Against the Bill

Those Senators who held to their campaign commitments and voted against this bill were:

Armstrong, Cohen, Dole, Goldwater, Hayakawa, Helms, Humphrey, Jepsen, Kassebaum, Laxalt, Lugar, Schmitt, Schweiker, Tower, Wallop, and Warner. This makes a total of 16. In addition, there were four Democrats and one independent who voted against the bill: Byrd of Virginia, Exon, Morgan, Moynihan and Proxmire.

Had the 24 Republican Senators who voted for the bill combined their strength with the 21 who voted against it, the final tally would have been 48 to 45. The bill would still have passed but the approval would have been by such a narrow margin that it would have given tremendous courage to the resistance forces in the House. One can imagine what the Senate’s overwhelming vote of 72 to 21 did to the morale of the resistance forces who must now handle this bill in the House of Representatives.

Senator Hatch Comments on His Vote

Because Senators Jake Garn and Orrin Hatch have been such stalwarts in holding the line in the past, I put through a telephone call to Senator Hatch to see what in the world had happened. He said, “I now realize that vote was a terrible mistake.” When asked how it happened, he said the NEA people came to him back in 1976 when he first ran for the Senate and convinced him that the hodgepodge of federal agencies administering educational funds should be put under one department and thereby get educational funding out in the sunshine by removing it from the mess in HEW.” He therefore committed himself to support what he says “I naively thought at that time would be an improvement.” He said, “Back here things move so fast that while trying to keep past commitments you sometimes make a mistake and this was one of mine.”

Senator Hayakawa Points Out Dangers of Federal Funding to Schools

During the debates on an amendment to the bill which would have made the Department of Education merely a 6-year experiment rather than a permanent department (but which was defeated), Senator Hayakawa of California said:

“I was an educator for 43 years before coming to the Senate. During those years, I saw our educational system grow and develop. But progress was in the hands of the teachers, the local school boards, and the states. Teachers taught; children learned. But in recent years, Washington has pushed its foot into the schoolhouse door and created new, sophisticated priorities. Teachers have been given new rules, regulations and mandates to deal with. They have had to expand from the basics to include sex education, bilingual education, driver education, health education, and Washington-knows-best education.” He said that as a result we now see many “semi-illiterates” applying for admission to our colleges or seeking employment in the business world. (Human Events, May 12, 1979, p. 5)

NEA Engaged in a Powerful Drive to Federalize American Education

When Joseph J. Standa of the National Education Association Political Action Committee was asked about the top priorities of his organization, he replied: “The major legislative goals are a cabinet-level department of education, increased federal funding for education, and a national collective-bargaining law for public employees.” (Freemen Digest, Sept. 1978, p. 38)

The NEA interprets the creation of a federal Department of Education as recognition by the government’s of its legal right and responsibility to be involved in education.

Commenting on this, NEA president, John Ryor, said: “Creating a Department of Education, is, indeed, a profound step in which the federal government will be recognizing, for the first time, that it has a responsibility for education in and of itself.” (Conservative Digest, October, 1978, p. 38, emphasis added)

American Founding Fathers Warned Against Federal Funding of Education

Federal funding of the schools was specifically looked upon by the founders as an abhorrent violation of the rights of the people of the States and an illegal intrusion into the local control of the schools.

In the first session of Congress, following the adoption of the Constitution, James Madison pointed out the absolute necessity of preventing the national government from using the Welfare Clause to finance projects which were outside the authority of the federal government. He used education as an example, and said:

“If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare … they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish, and pay them out of their public treasure. … Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundation, and transmute the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America.”

But ever since the astonishing dictum of the Butler case in 1936, the Supreme Court has twisted the meaning of the Welfare Clause to allow the looting of the U.S. Treasury to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars for just such projects. It is the announced intention of the NEA to get a substantial quantity of these billions and fund at least “one-third of the cost” of all education throughout the United States. (Freemen Digest, Sept. 1978, p. 4)

The NEA Has Become One of the Most Powerful Lobbies in America

In 1978, Michael Loyd Chadwick, Editor of the Freemen Digest, went to Washington to interview the top officers of the NEA and study their official policy papers. His findings  were published in the Freemen Digest for September, 1978, and constitute one of the best documentaries on the NEA in print. Copies of this issue may be obtained for $2.00 by writing to the Freemen Institute, P.O. Box G, Provo, Utah, 84601. Here are some of the facts taken from the interviews with NEA officers and from their official publications:

The NEA is a private organization to which teachers and educators are required by State law to pay dues if they join their State education association. The NEA is supported by a 1978 budget of $56,628,495 and has a membership of 1.8 million. It is not only the largest professional organization in the country but has become one of the most powerful and best-financed lobbies on Capitol Hill.

The NEA Drive For Political Power

Terry Herndon, NEA executive director, has stated, “We desire NEA leaders to be so powerful that they might shake the White House and command the attention of each member of the press.” (Freemen Digest, Sept. 1978, p. (11) John Ryor, President of the NEA, wrote: “We must become the foremost political power in the nation. Anything less than that would be unsufficient to place education at the top of the nation’s priorities.” (Todays Education, Nov.-Dec. 1975, p. 5)

The announced policy of the NEA is to work for the defeat of any candidate for President, the Senate, the House or local and State offices, who do not subscribe to NEA’s educational goals. That this has had an intimidating effect on some candidates can be assumed from the fact that among the 350 Senatorial and Congressional candidates who were supported by the NEA in 1976, 83% were elected. (Freemen Digest, Sept., 1978, p. 38)

In the 1976 election, the NEA broke a 119 year-old tradition in educational circles by publicly endorsing Carter and Mondale because they had both come out for a federal Department of Education. That year 265 teachers were delegates to the Democratic National Convention and 55 teachers were delegates to the Republican Convention. (Ibid.)

NEA Educational Goals Disturbing to Many Parents and Teachers

As the long-range policies and goals of the NEA are becoming better known, many parents and teachers find them genuinely disturbing. Here are some of those which were revealed in the official NEA literature and interviews with NEA’s top leaders:

At least one-third of all educational costs must come from the federal government. (Ibid., p. 54)

Educate youth for a global community. (Ibid., p. 61-62)

Promote a stronger United Nations. (Ibid., p. 15)

Promote the Declaration of Interdependence. (Ibid., p. 72)

Promote the adoption of the metric system. (Ibid., p. 72)

Insure freedom of educators in setting policies for sex education. (Ibid., p. 18)

Use the schools to promote “social change.” (Ibid., p. 5)

Eliminate standardized intelligence and aptitude tests. (Ibid., p. 12)

Oppose Tuition Tax Credits. (Ibid., p. 12; 57-58)

Oppose voucher plans allowing students to select the school of their choice. (Ibid., p. 15)

Reject tests to evaluate teachers. (Ibid., p. 13)

Continue using forced bussing to insure proportional integration. (Ibid., p. 31)

All responsibilities for public welfare should be assumed by the federal government. (Ibid., p. 15)

Oppose legislation to reduce federal control of broadcasting. (Ibid., p. 17)

Decriminalize marijuana. (Ibid., p. 18)

NEA or some non-governmental agency should have exclusive authority to grant accreditation to teacher-training institutions. (Ibid., p. 19)

Eliminate laws which restrict the schools in deciding what books will be placed in libraries and used in classes. (Ibid., p. 20)

Promote adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment. (Ibid.,p. 22)

Establish a federal Department of Education. (Ibid., p. 50-51)

NEA should appoint the panel which selects or screens all “Presidential appointments of federal education officials.” (Ibid., p. 23)

NEA should “control the qualifications for entrance into the profession and for the privilege of remaining in the profession.” (Ibid., p. 25)

NEA President urges public education for all children beginning at age 3. (Ibid., p. 25) Others say age 2.

Schools should operate day and night, seven days a week, all year long. (Ibid., p. 25)

There must be a new monetary system. (Ibid., p. 32)

“In certain areas National sovereignty is not that important.” (Ibid., p. 34)

NEA supports the drive for a National Health Plan. (Ibid., p. 39-40, 52-53)

NEA will oppose any legislation designed to benefit private schools. (Ibid., p. 46)

NEA supported the Carter-Mondale ticket because “the GOP platform opposed the right of the federal government to enact a federal collective bargaining bill for public employees or set a minimum wage and working conditions for teachers and public employees.” (Ibid., p. 49)

Basics (the three R’s, history, civics, and geography) should not occupy more than one-fourth of the student’s time. (Ibid., p. 12)

NEA disciplinary control should be established over local educational organizations through an “unbreakable compact” so as to guarantee adherence to NEA policies. (Ibid., p. 12)

Strong Opposition Developing Toward NEA Policies

The NEA has dramatically demonstrated what an organized minority can accomplish in capturing political power. However, it was undoubtedly the warm support which Americans feel toward education in general which allowed the NEA to operate without challenge for so long. No doubt that will now change.

The NEA boasts 4,000 to 6,000 members in each Congressional district, but there is a rapidly growing number of citizens who have been trained in Constitutional principles and when these are combined with the number of parents and teachers who have become alarmed by the unhealthy zeal and ambitions of the NEA, their voting strength is beginning to outnumber the forces of the NEA several times over.

Conservative Senators Were Elected to Oppose These Policies

It is obvious from a review of these principles and policies that the leadership of NEA is out of focus with traditional American values and the best interests of teachers and educators who want to maintain local control of the American educational system.

Many of us who are teachers and parents have been fighting against these NEA trends for many years. We fought against federal funding of education when it first began, and we have watched the corruptive influence of federal intervention in the nation’s schools ever since. Many of us have worked hard and contributed more than we could afford in order to elect people into office who would stand up and fight against this creeping contamination of our schools. The worst thing that could happen in this struggle would be the creation of a massive bureaucratic Department of Education on the federal level. That is why, regardless of the explanation, the vote on April 30 was such a tremendous let-down.

The Political Fiber of the American People Must be Strengthened

It is important for those in elected positions to realize what has been happening to the political climate of the nation. When men and women have expressed their trust in a candidate and elected him to office, a breach of that trust does something to their souls. It breaks their political spirit. It causes many of them to phase out of political activity altogether.

That is why it is a tragic mistake for any conservative politician to do what some are known to have done, and that is to compromise his position for a few liberal votes on the assumption that he will be able to retain the backing of conservative voters because “they have nowhere else to go.” They do have somewhere else to go. OUT! And that is where millions of them have gone. They completely fade out of the picture – frustrated, disillusioned and disappointed. I can point to dozens of them in my own neighborhood who were once front-line political participants, but not any longer. They lost heart. They were let down too many times.

Today it is difficult to get a creditable number of Americans to even get out and vote. In a  recent election in Salt Lake City where the people were asked to vote on a completely different type of municipal government, it was expected that the importance of the issue would bring out a heavy vote. In fact, the newspapers called it a “heavy vote.” And how many were there? Less than 17% of the registered voters participated. That, of course, is not democracy. At least, it is not decision-making by a majority. It is government by a mini-minority. And our politicians of the past must assume the blame for creating such a scandallous credibility gap between the people and their government.

It is the task of our present politicians to demonstrate that it does make a difference whether or not we put Constitutionalists in office. More than anything else in the world right now, people want leaders they can really depend upon.

Sincerely,

W. Cleon Skousen

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/01/bilderberg-trump-administration-secret-meeting

The storm around Donald Trump is about to shift a few miles west of the White House, to a conference centre in Chantilly, Virginia, where the embattled president will be getting his end-of-term grades from the people whose opinion really matters: Bilderberg.

The secretive three-day summit of the political and economic elite kicks off on Thursday in heavily guarded seclusion at the Westfields Marriott, a luxury hotel a short distance from the Oval Office. The hotel was already on lockdown on Wednesday, and an army of landscapers have been busy planting fir trees around the perimeter, to protect coy billionaires and bashful bank bosses from any prying lenses.

Perched ominously at the top of the conference agenda this year are these words: “The Trump administration: a progress report.” Is the president going to be put in detention for tweeting in class? Held back a year? Or told to empty his locker and leave? If ever there’s a place where a president could hear the words “you’re fired!”, it’s Bilderberg.

The White House is taking no chances, sending along some big hitters from Team Trump to defend their boss: the national security adviser, HR McMaster; the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross; and Trump’s new strategist, Chris Liddell. Could the president himself show up to receive his report card in person?

Henry Kissinger, the gravel-throated kingpin of Bilderberg, visited Trump at the White House a few weeks ago to discuss “Russia and other things”, and certainly, the Bilderberg conference would be the perfect opportunity for the most powerful man in the world to discuss important global issues with Trump.

The US president’s extraordinary chiding of Nato leaders in Brussels is sure to be chewed over at Bilderberg, which takes its name from the hotel in the Netherlands where its conference first met in 1954. The Bilderbergers have summoned the head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, to give feedback. Stoltenberg will leading the snappily titled session on “The transatlantic defence alliance: bullets, bytes and bucks”. He’ll be joined by the Dutch minister of defence and a clutch of senior European politicians and party leaders, all hoping to reset the traumatised transatlantic relationship after Trump’s galumphing visit.

The invitation list for this year’s conference is a veritable covfefe of big-hitters from geopolitics, from the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, to the king of Holland, but perhaps the most significant name on the list is Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the US.

According to the meeting’s agenda, “China” will be discussed at a summit attended by the Chinese ambassador, the US commerce secretary, the US national security adviser, two US senators, the governor of Virginia, two former CIA chiefs – and any number of giant US investors in the country, including the heads of the financial services firms the Carlyle Group and KKR. Oh, and the boss of Google.

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s holding company, has just come back from a trip to Beijing, where he was overseeing Google AI’s latest game of Go against puny humans. He declared it “a pleasure to be back in China, a country that I admire a great deal”. Three days spent chatting to the Chinese ambassador certainly won’t harm his ambitions there.

All this is the kind of thing that should be headline news, but with the president of Turner International attending, we can be fairly sure Bilderberg won’t make many ripples at CNN. And British readers should not expect much coverage at the London Evening Standard either: their new editor and longtime Bilderberg attendee George Osborne is on the list, despite a general election looming in a week’s time.

You could of course complain about a lack of press coverage of Bilderberg in the UK, but with the head of the media watchdog Ofcom at the conference, you may not get an immediate reply.

So will Trump be given his marching orders at Bilderberg, or will he be kept on as a useful doofus? There’s a small but worrying clue for what Bilderberg might have in mind for Trump tucked away on the invitation list: one of the guests this year is the UK’s former chief of the defence staff, Sir Nicholas Houghton. His new role? Constable of the Tower of London.

The Thomas Jefferson Center for Education

Behind the Scenes… At Home and Abroad

Volume 1:1

February 1999

I think it is particularly appropriate at this perilous time in our nation’s history to look across this broad land of ours  and  ask  the  question,  “America, quo vadis?” America, where goest thou?

During some of the earlier years of our republic, there were two kinds of prophecies concerning our future. The first type were warnings of what might happen, the others were prophecies of what it would be like if it did happen.

In this report, I would like to share with you a sampling of these prophecies because the great men of America who preceded us knew that if we did not stay within the parameters of the Constitution we would arrive exactly where we now are. Our nation is beset with many serious problems that could have been avoided, and the Founders gave ample warning of what would happen if their warnings were not heeded.

What If the Bible Were Our Only Law Book?

But before talking about where we now are, perhaps it would lift our spirits to first set forth the vision of America as one of the Founders hoped it would become. The following quotation is from the writings of John Adams, the man who was trained to be a Congregational minister, but who felt compelled to make his contribution by turning to what he called the “divine science of law and good government.” He wrote:

“Suppose a nation [and he was thinking of our nation] … should take the Bible for their only law book, and every member [or citizen] should regulate his conduct to the precepts there exhibited. Every member [or citizen] would be obliged in conscience to temperance and frugality and industry, to justice and kindness and charity toward his fellow men, and to piety and love, and reverence towards almighty God. In this commonwealth, no man would impair his health by gluttony, drunkenness, or lust – no man would sacrifice his most precious time to… any… trifling amusement [and become a couch potato] – no man would steal or lie or in any way defraud his neighbour, but would live in peace and good will with all men – no man would blaspheme his Maker or profane his worship, but a rational and manly, a sincere, and unaffected piety and devotion would reign in all hearts… What a paradise would this region be!”1

Why the Founders Were Very Familiar With the Bible

Today most politicians know very little about the Bible, but that was not true of the Founders. Practically every one of the Founders except Benjamin Franklin and Roger Sherman had graduated from ministerial colleges. This is true because every college or university in the Thirteen Colonies was sponsored by some denomination to train ministers. This meant that those who attended were expected to read the New Testament in Greek, the Old Testament in Latin and many of the Founders could read it in Hebrew. In fact every Baccalaureate sermon at Harvard was given in Hebrew up until 1817.

When it came to the Bible, the Founding Fathers were scholars – real scholars.

Now what most Americans in our day have not been taught is the fact that the Bible and its moral requirements once dominated the lives of the American people just about the way John Adams described it. This pleasant interlude of congenial righteousness was called “the New Awakening” and it occurred about the time the Founders were coming into their maturity. It began about 1720 and extended in a series of waves right up to the time of the Revolutionary War.

The principal leaders in the New Awakening were Jonathan Edwards – a Congregational minister from Massachusetts, John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement who came from England to Georgia, and George Whitefield (pronounced WHIT-field) who was converted by Wesley in England and then came to this country seven different times to stir up the American people.

How Jonathan Edwards Knew God’s Zion of the Latter Days was America

To help us understand what the New Awakening did to the thinking of the Founding Fathers as well as many Americans, let me begin with Jonathan Edwards. In addition to his principal emphasis on repentance he reminded Americans that God’s great Zion of the latter days is America, and he said Americans must prepare themselves for their manifest destiny.

He pointed out that Isaiah who lived around 700 B.C. identified the Zion of the latter days as being in a distant land beyond the rivers of Ethiopia or Africa, and inhabited by a people who were… “scattered and peeled.”2 Isaiah said this land would have to be reached by boats. From this land an ensign would be lifted upon the mountains and when God’s trumpet was sounded from this place all nations should listen.3 Isaiah then said this land occupied by the people who were scattered and peeled was actually “the place of the name of the Lord of hosts, the mount Zion.”4 Zephaniah went on to say that these people who were “scattered and peeled” were actually the children of the dispersed tribes of Israel and that they would eventually bring a “present” to the Lord.5

Jonathan Edwards was not the first scholar of the Bible to conclude that these prophecies pointed to America. The Puritans recognized it and that is why they called American the “new Israel.” Bishop George Berkeley of Ireland wrote a beautiful poem about America as the site for the latter day kingdom of God seen by Daniel. In fact, Professor Conrad Cherry wrote a whole book about God’s New Israel which was published by Prentice-Hall of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, in 1971.

Jonathan Edwards believed America was the land of Joseph that would feed and save the world in the latter days.6 He said it would be from America that the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Church of God would be restored in America and “true religion” would go from America to the rest of the world.7

Jonathan Edwards also felt the prophecies concerning the “wilderness” that would become a fruitful field and blossom as a rose was referring to America in the latter days. He even thought the Second Coming of Christ would be in America.8

Many people had thought these prophecies referred to Jerusalem and the land of Israel, but there are 34 passages of scripture which clearly delineate the new Zion as being separate from the old Zion or old Jerusalem. Jonathan Edwards was not only convinced that these words from the Bible applied to America, but he said:

“We cannot reasonably think otherwise than that the beginning of this great work of God must be near. And there are many things that make it probable that his work will begin in America.”9

John Wesley

Now this was about the time John Wesley came to Georgia to tell the people how to become “methodical students of the scriptures and live methodical Christian lives.” Wesley was a member of the Episcopal Church all his life but he started the Methodist movement. He also had a strong message of repentance and told Americans to rise and shine for the glory of God.

George Whitefield

Finally we come to George Whitefield who had been converted by Wesley in England and who came to America to help Wesley and carry on the Methodist movement. Whitefield was the greatest preacher of them all.

Benjamin Franklin was amazed at the capacity of this man to stir the hearts of the people and change the spiritual temperature of thousands in a single sermon.

Franklin said this man was blessed with a voice like a trumpet. When Whitefield came to Philadelphia in 1739 he was refused a pulpit by the local churches and so he spoke in the parks or open fields. Someone told Franklin he could be heard by 25,000 people at one time, but Franklin doubted it. He therefore went to an open air meeting to see for himself. As an experiment he walked backwards away from the speaker’s platform as long as he could hear plainly and then calculated that Whitefield’s voice could be readily heard by even more than 25,000.

Franklin described what this man’s message did to Philadelphia. He wrote: “The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons were enormous… It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants. From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk through the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street.”10

Franklin also describes what happened to him the first time he heard George Whitefield preach. He said:

“I happened… to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he would get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and [I] determined… to give the silver. And he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.”11

The New Awakening Helps Prepare America for Independence

The surge of the New Awakening we have just described was a critical factor as the Thirteen Colonies approached the time when they felt compelled to declare their independence. Their one fear was that they were not good enough to govern themselves. Three of the Founders even approached the brother of Frederick the Great to see if he would come over and be king of America. It was a good thing he did not accept because it turned out that he was one of the most debauched homosexuals in Europe. But it illustrated how insecure the people felt as the time drew near when they would have to govern themselves.

Historians tell us that in an effort to prepare themselves, they began a universal reform movement to gear themselves up to the level of virtue and morality which the ministers of the New Awakening had urged them to achieve.

But even as late as 1776 many felt they were not yet good enough. It is interesting that Thomas Paine had arrived from England a short time before and he believed they were amazingly good people. In fact, he wrote a pamphlet called Common Sense which became a best seller overnight and told the colonists they were not only good enough to govern themselves, but they should immediately break away from the British Empire before they had been corrupted by the pompous manners and immorality of the English.

The  Constitution Designed Only For A Virtuous People

So the Americans made the greatest bungee leap in our entire history when they set up the first free people in modern times. But notice that after the Revolution, when they wrote the Constitution, they designed it exclusively for good people. As John Adams afterwards wrote:

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”12

And Benjamin Franklin added: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."13

These Founders were warning us that if we lost our Biblical standards of morality and respect for God’s law, the Constitution would cease to be the supreme law of the land. They were talking about conditions as they now exist in America.

A Warning From One of America’s Greatest Admirers – Alexis de Tocqueville of France

No one appreciated what the American Founders had accomplished more than a French judge who came to America in 1831 to tour the country. His name was Alexis de Tocqueville, and he soaked up more of the American scene in ten months than most travelers absorb in years. He went home and wrote his two famous books entitled, Democracy in America. No author ever caught the original vision and spirit of the American founders better than Alexis de Tocqueville.

But toward the end of these books he inscribed a profound warning to future generations of Americans. He said there is a danger that they might lose their spirit of rugged individualism and begin to ask the government to manage “their principal concerns… [and] spare them all the care of thinking and the trouble of living.”14

“The supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform,, through which the most original minds and the most energetic character cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.”15

Almost as though de Tocqueville were watching developments in America today, he continues:

“The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent, and guided – men are seldom forced by it to act, they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy… it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, [debilitates], extinguishes, and stupefies the people, till [the] nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”16

The Leading Founders Had the Same Concern

Thomas Jefferson was also fearful that this might happen. He even saw some of the trends drifting in this direction in his own day. Therefore he warned the people by saying:

“When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks [and balances] provided… and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”17

James Madison, who is sometimes called the father of the Constitution, felt exactly the same anxiety. He seems to have projected a prophetic eye into our own generation as he declared:

“If Congress can employ money indefinitely for the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare… they may take into their own hands the education of children… they may assume the provision of the poor…  Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America."18

A Warning from Abraham Lincoln When He Was 28 Years Old

Finally, let me tum to Abraham Lincoln. When he was 28 years old he gave one of the greatest speeches of his life to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. He began on an optimistic note as he said:

“We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.”19

Then Lincoln turns to the signs of the times, even in his own day, and says:

“There is even now something of ill omen amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country – the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts, and the worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice.”20

Lincoln then addressed the prospect of the nation allowing these destructive forces to escalate until its very existence might be threatened. Then he said:

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be the author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide."21

I wonder what President Lincoln would say today if he knew that mobs had over 100 American cities burning in 1968 and only recently the whole south section of Los Angeles was burned and ransacked by mobs.

What would he say about a crime wave so violent and widespread that the majority of the states do not have enough prisons to house the convicted criminals. What would he say about a President who wants to welcome sexual perverts into the armed services. And what about a million abortions per year legalized by an order of the Supreme Court?

Here is what he said would happen if the people ever allowed their affairs to be dominated by the federal government. He wrote:

Would he be shocked by a national debt that now exceeds the debts of all other nations of the earth combined? What would he think about the Federal Reserve System that now operates with pieces of paper that cannot be redeemed in either gold or silver? Then there is the phenomenal breakdown of the family with the number of divorces equal to the number of marriages and millions of children being born each year out of wedlock and millions of others having to be raised by single parents.

I think we know what Lincoln would say as well as the rest of the great leaders who first established the foundations of this nation. After all, the United States became the first free people in modern times and it was hailed around the globe as the “hope of the world.” I think the Founding Fathers would be horrified with what is happening today.

Of course, none of this should have happened. And it would not have happened if the past six or seven generations of Americans had remained a virtuous people and required their leaders to stay within the parameters of the Constitution.

Let me repeat again the words of John Adams when he said: “This Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”22

But what if America had remained a moral and a religious people? Supposing the whole nation had used the Bible as John Adams suggested and insisted that their leaders in Washington operate strictly within the requirements of the Constitution? How different would things be today if that had happened?

That will be the subject of “America, Quo Vadis? PART 2” in next month’s “Behind the Scenes...At Home and Abroad”.

References:

1. Quoted by Adrienne Koch, The American Enlightenment, p. 167.
2. Isaiah 18:1.
3. Isaiah 18:3.
4. Isaiah 18:7.
5. Zephaniah 3:10.
6. Jonathan Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England. New York: S. Converse, 1830, vol. IV pp. 128-33. This is also covered in Cherry's God's New Israel pp. 55-59.
7. Jonathan Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England. New York: S. Converse, 1830, vol. IV pp. 128-33. This is also covered in Cherry's God's New Israel pp. 55-59.
8. Jonathan Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England. New York: S. Converse, 1830, vol. IV pp. 128-33. This 1s also covered in Cherry's God's New Israel pp. 55-59.
9. Comad Cherry, God's New Israel, p. 55.
10. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, New York: The Viking Press, 1938, p. 136.
11. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, New York: The Viking Press, 1938, p. 137.
12. W. Cleon Skousen, The Making of America, p. 53.
13. W. Cleon Skousen, The Making of America, p. 53.
14. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:336.
15. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:337.
16. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:337.
17. Quoted by W. Cleon Skousen, The Making of America, p. 187.
18. Quoted by Thomas James Norton, Undermining the Constitution, Devin Adair, New York, 1950, p. 188.
19. Lincoln’s entire speech appears in The Freemen Digest, February, 1984, pp. 38-42; this quotation is on p. 38.
20. Lincoln’s entire speech appears in The Freemen  Digest, February, 1984, pp. 38-42; this quotation is on p. 38.
21. Lincoln’s entire speech appears in The Freemen Digest, February, 1984, pp. 38-42; this quotation is on p. 38.
22. W. Cleon Skousen, The Making of America, p. 53.

Published by Textbook Publishers copyright 1999

The Thomas Jefferson Center for Education

P.O. Box 775, West Jordan, UT 84084

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971… before computers, before e-mail, before cell phones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land… all because of public pressure.

I’m asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise.

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

1. Term Limits – 12 years only, one of the possible options below.
2. Two Six-year Senate terms
3. Six Two-year House terms
4. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms
5. No Tenure / No Pension – a Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
6. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security – all funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.
7. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
8. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
9. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
10. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
11. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.

The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. Maybe it is time.

LET'S FIX CONGRESS!!!!! If you agree, pass it on. If not, just delete. You are one of my 20+. Please keep it going.

Yasser Arafat was the man who wanted too much. He equipped his people with a sense of victimhood, a rhetoric of hate, and a cult of violence that ultimately put his objectives beyond reach. Often a master of maneuver to international acclaim, Arafat’s doing, and his undoing, proved to be his penchant for terrorism. Embattled to the end, he had hoped to duplicate Saladin’s triumphal recovery of Jerusalem. But Allah had other plans and he died in the bosom of the French.

Who was this short man in khaki, symbol of the Palestinian cause and consummate survivor?

The Lose/Win Generation

Arafat shrouded his personal biography in myth. Distantly related to the famous al-Husseini family of Jerusalem, who gave the Palestinians their first leader, the Mufti Haj Amin, Arafat himself was born in Cairo in 1929. His mother died young and the boy spent some time in Jerusalem at an uncle’s house during the Arab Revolt, 1936-1939. Although Arafat’s Egyptian-accented Arabic gave away the education of his youth, he would always describe himself as a son of Jerusalem who shared in the tribulation of the refugees of 1948.

Arafat studied engineering in Cairo but his real vocation was politics. These were the heady days of pan-Arab nationalism, a generation of leaders skilled in “lose-win” politics whereby military gambles gone bad became political victories through defiance of the foreigner. Nasser was the master; battlefield defeats in 1956 and 1967 left him more popular than before. Arafat, like others of the class such as Hafez al-Assad of Syria and Saddam Hussein, became skilled practitioners of “lose-win.”

Arafat proved eclectic in his choice of allies. He began with the Muslim Brotherhood, then gravitated to nationalist ideas, moving to Kuwait where he founded the Fatah Party (“Conquest,” a reverse acronym for Palestine Liberation Front;) with four others in 1959. Over the next decade Arafat sided with Syria, then with Egypt, courted Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union, supplicated the King of Jordan before nearly overthrowing him. Arafat was always up for rent but never for sale.

In March 1968, Arafat successfully exploited an Israeli raid against his forces in the Jordanian village Al Karamah that went wrong when a Jordanian unit intervened. The Palestinians lost the battle, but an Arab world thirsting for heroes after the 1967 disaster found its votary in Arafat.

Arafat vainly called himself a general. His real forte, however, was something else: terrorism, the use of civilians both as target and shield. Shocking acts of violence and disruption were Arafat’s way of declaring that the world would not know peace unless the Palestinians were placated.

Only two years after 1967, Nasser’s patronage, Arafat’s own mythmaking, and a series of sensational, international airplane hijackings propelled him to the Chairmanship of the Egyptian-sponsored Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the main address for the Palestinian cause. To consecrate the occasion a new “covenant” was written. This expressed another element of Arafat’s strategy. Less a formula for government than a tract promising to destroy Israel and uproot Zionism, the document served to unite the feuding Palestinian factions. Economic, religious, and political quarrels should be deferred until after victory. Arafat thereby surmounted personal identification with any sectarian cause, symbolizing only the simplest of goals – a Palestinian state in place of Israel.

From this period, too, one can date Arafat’s ability to address several audiences simultaneously. He endorsed the idea of a single secular Palestinian state of equality for all its citizens in order to rally European “progressive” opinion to his side. But to his Arabic-speaking audiences he offered the religion-infused language of the peasants and small towners who comprised the bulk of the Palestinians. To them, Palestine would be Arab and Muslim, the Christians and Jews relegated to their proper place of Dhimmi, protected but inferior residents in the classic Muslim polity. In short, the way it was before the British and the Zionists arrived but without the Turkish overlord.

Evaluating the enemy, Arafat always stressed the inherent evil of Zionism. In his view, the Zionists were the successors of the Nazis and often worse, committing unprecedented crimes against the Palestinian people. This encouraged Holocaust denial and European-style anti-Semitism. Arafat also stimulated a Palestinian sense of tragic heroism and victimhood. It was for others to offer redress.

Arafat also shared the larger Arab nationalist view of Israel’s place in the world. The Jewish State could be explained best as a residue of European imperialism able to survive only because the West – specifically the United States – supported it. Arafat opposed the United States for the simple reason that American power (in his view) was the main obstacle to his goal. As for Nasser, so for Arafat, the Soviet Union proved a necessary ally. Perpetually dressed in the military uniform immortalized by Che Guevara, Arafat quickly obtained the support of Third Worlders and Western sympathizers for national liberation movements then in their heyday. Arafat and the Palestinian cause joined the pantheon of the Algerian revolution, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and the “big men” of Africa, among whom he counted Nelson Mandela.

The Quest For Legitimacy, 1969-1993

By 1970, Arafat had assembled key elements in his struggle: demonizing the enemy; ennobling the victims; unity over ideology; double-speak; multiple partners; terrorism. It took him nearly thirty years to become a political force recognized by the Arabs, the U.N., the United States, and finally, Israel, as he swung between victory and defeat in a dizzy oscillation. He controlled part of Jordan by 1969, but overplayed his hand and was forced out. A dozen years later, he lost a mini-state in Lebanon, after an Israeli invasion. A year after that, Syria’s Assad aborted his return. Yet, Arafat’s “lose-win” politics still brought him increasing international acclaim. The Rabat Arab Summit in 1974 gave him sole custody of the Palestinian cause and later that year a triumphant appearance at the U.N. international intervention led by the U.S. saved him in Beirut. Sidelined after 1983 in Tunis, he was rescued again by the Palestinians themselves in Gaza and the West Bank four years later through the intifada. Then in December 1988, buoyed by the intifada’s success and Israel’s travails, he secured American recognition of the PLO.

Arafat had to pay a price for all this legitimacy. In 1974, he launched the “stages theory”; the PLO would take authority over any territory vacated by Israel, leaving a single, all-Palestinian state to be achieved at a later stage. This suggested a possible two-state situation. Was Arafat compromising his goal? Some PLO factions thought so and broke violently with him. Israel thought not.

Arafat faced other difficulties with the United States. He was directly implicated not only in aircraft hijackings and the massacre of Israel’s Olympic athletes in 1972 but also the murder of U.S. Ambassador to Sudan (Cleo Noel) in March 1973 – crimes committed ostensibly by the mysterious Black September. He was armed and tutored by the Soviets or Soviet clients. And he joined the Iraqi-led Rejectionist Front opposed to the 1978 Camp David Accords and Egyptian-Israeli peace. Washington insisted that he swallow some bitter pills by adhering to UNSC Resolution 242 (recognizing Israel) and renouncing terrorism. Arafat did it his way, first declaring in a pompous ceremony at Algiers a virtual Palestinian state; then, as head of the new state, offering terms to the United States.

These new achievements were promptly jeopardized by old habits. The dialogue with the United States lasted only until Arafat fomented a terrorist raid. And then in 1990 he sided with Saddam when the “lose-win” master of Iraq seized Kuwait. That cost the Palestinians dearly. The Gulf States ejected a quarter-million who worked there and withdrew their financial support for the PLO.

Yet, Arafat still held important strengths. Only he could call off the war with Israel and thus ease American and Western relations with the Arabs. In 1993, he was rescued once more when Israeli Prime Minister Rabin gambled that Arafat would compromise his objectives to build a state in part of Palestine. The Oslo Accords created the Palestine Authority. Arafat was its Rais or Chairman or President (depending on the audience), and it was “autonomous” within negotiated rules. For this modest achievement, his critics argued, Arafat recognized Israel and (once again) forswore violence. Other critics pointed out that the Palestinians might have gotten something similar had they accepted the Camp David Accords in 1982 when only ten thousand rather than 120,000 Israelis were settled in Gaza and the West Bank.

THE CRONYCRACY

Lionized by the West after a glittering White House ceremony and Rabin’s reluctant handshake, Arafat duly arrived in Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho in 1994 amidst popular delirium. Arafat also won the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Israel’s primary negotiator, Foreign Minister Peres. At 64, the Rais had become a familiar international figure. Personally modest, “married to the revolution,” a teetotaler, he preferred the humble table of the “street” and even served meals to visitors himself. This was in deliberate contrast to other Arab rulers in the region who paraded their wealth and power. Of course, money had its uses; Arafat always corrupted those who could be corrupted, the better to bind them to his side. But he played the personal paragon of unsullied virtue.

Arafat also had his vanities. In 1990, he secretly married a secretary, Suha, from a wealthy Palestinian Catholic family. Thirty years younger, and eventually mother of his daughter, she lived a life of ostentatious luxury that her husband did not prevent. Arafat liked to describe himself as a general who never lost a battle. He relished international travel and advertised his willingness to mediate the quarrels of others.

Arafat also played the romantic revolutionary. Sporting a scraggly beard, perpetual military fatigues and the headdress draped to resemble the map of Palestine, he kept a conspirator’s hours, a late night ritual meeting preceded by exhausting hours of delay. Arafat’s conversation was a study in calculated affability punctuated by flashes of temper – every gesture intended to impress the high seriousness of a holy cause. Still there was something comical about it. The Israeli novelist Amos Oz said of Arafat that “He imagines himself as a combination of Che Guevara and Saladin.” But the would-be hero lacked Guevara’s physique and Saladin’s gravitas. He could appear ridiculous and he knew it. Arafat was jealous of Palestinian dignity of which he was the self-appointed symbol. Still, clowning had its uses if it led the opponent to underestimate him. And the clown had both sharp teeth to bite and the vaulting ambitions of a high-wire walker, skills he employed to the fullest.

Oslo itself was not a full peace treaty but rather an interim agreement that set up a Palestinian Authority, pending negotiation on final status. The biggest problems – borders, settlements, security, Jerusalem, refugees – were put off. While the complex phases of Oslo unfolded, Arafat was determined not to let his people relax or his cause be sidelined. Palestinian media and textbooks were saturated with images of Israel as the enemy. Arafat never doffed his military uniform nor the militant atmosphere that surrounded him; his rhetoric often resembled pre-Oslo days. Once he compared Oslo to a famous episode in the Koran when the prophet Mohammed reached a temporary treaty that allowed him to gain enough strength to overwhelm his enemies later. It sounded suspiciously like 1974’s “stage theory.” And it was amplified by Arafat’s insistence that the outcome of Oslo would be an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines, Palestinian control over Jerusalem, and the return of Palestinian refugees to reclaim their lost homes.

The Rais was not interested in good government or economic development. He quickly established a “cronycracy,” equal parts corruption and incompetence. The Old Guard from Tunis exploited the flow of foreign assistance, ran monopolies and local extortions. Elected President in early 1996, along with a Legislative Council intended to be the prototype of a parliamentary democracy, Arafat ignored and humiliated it.

Most seriously, Arafat deliberately diffused the crucial security forces among a dozen overlapping and competing organizations that quickly exceeded the Oslo limits. Nor did he suppress Hamas and other groups determined to oppose Oslo through terrorism. This was the “red line” for Yitzhak Rabin. The Israeli leader understood that Arafat might retain a terrorist option by allowing Hamas and other groups to function while denying any responsibility. In September 1995, Rabin publicly warned Arafat at the White House that everything would be lost if Arafat failed to suppress terror.

Arafat was loath to give it up. After Rabin’s murder but too late for Peres’ election campaign in the spring of 1996, Arafat finally moved to constrain Hamas. When he suspected the newly elected Likud leader Netanyahu did not want to negotiate seriously, he tried to stir popular outrage. And then Arafat was rescued once more when Netanyahu’s opening of an archaeological tunnel in Jerusalem that September inflamed Palestinian fears for the al-Aksa Mosque.

The old Arafat was unleashed. His propaganda accused the Jews of plotting to destroy the mosque while his policemen fired upon Israeli soldiers. These were the crudest violations of his Oslo obligations. Yet, Arafat was immensely gratified by the political results. A panicky Netanyahu and anxious President Clinton embraced him at the White House. Henceforward, he became Clinton’s most frequent foreign visitor while the Israelis remained on the defensive. Throughout the Oslo years, the United States, Israel, and the European donors to the Palestine Authority remained doggedly reluctant to penalize Arafat’s reversions or to discipline the cronycracy. They believed a final agreement ending the conflict would redeem all these travails.

But Arafat had exhibited all the warning signs of a man more interested in pursuing a violent struggle than in building a stable state.

A REACH TOO FAR

In 1999, Ehud Barak, former Chief of Staff and self-declared disciple of Rabin, routed Netanyahu and wagered his premiership on ending the conflict. A year later a reluctant Arafat joined Barak and President Clinton at Camp David in a final attempt to settle the matter. Arafat forewarned them that the Palestinians had not been prepared for compromise (he knew this better than anyone). Actually, Arafat had been working on another plan, a unilateral declaration of independence for September. He ran a violent rehearsal on May 15, Nakhba (Disaster) Day, the way Palestinians marked Israeli independence. That summer Arafat’s security forces were stocking supplies in anticipation of trouble.

All sides blundered at Camp David. Yet, Arafat’s refusal to make a counteroffer, his destructive fable that the Jewish temples had never been in Jerusalem, and his sanctification of the conflict after the summit “the al-Aksa Intifada”) shook confidence that he really wanted a deal. But he found little international support for a unilateral declaration of independence.

Arafat was spared the impending stalemate, courtesy of General Sharon, his old foe whose overreaching had rescued him in Beirut eighteen years earlier. On September 28, Sharon reasserted Israeli claims to the Temple Mount in a highly publicized, well-guarded walk on the Temple Mount. To Arafat, this must have seemed a repetition of Netanyahu’s 1996 gaffe. He encouraged deadly demonstrations throughout the Palestinian Authority and by Israeli Arabs in Israel itself.

Why did Arafat resist all international efforts to restrain what quickly became a guerrilla war punctuated by terrorism, unlike the first intifada? Why did he not seize either the Clinton parameters of late December – well beyond Barak’s original offer – or conclude a deal with Barak at Taba? Why did he insist on both Jerusalem and the Right of Return, guaranteeing the dissolution of Israeli public support for doing any deal with him?

Arafat simply thought he could win. On the surface, he had good reasons. Even if Barak lost the January 2001 Israeli elections to Sharon, it would be easy to isolate an Israel led by so highly unpopular a figure. George W. Bush, rejected by ninety per cent of the Jewish voters and son of a President who had quarreled with Israel, would be sympathetic. Israel might be forced into a “two-state solution” whereby Arafat got one state now and, after the return of the refugees, another larger state later… These proved fatal miscalculations.

The tricks and duplicities of the past caught Arafat with a vengeance. The Israelis were aroused, angry, and for a critical year, united in a Sharon-Peres government. Sharon himself had learned from the mistakes of 1982. He would conduct the war heedful of American limits. And, in Washington, Clinton warned Bush against investing in Arafat unless he stopped the violence and negotiated seriously. Suddenly, the Palestinians had lost vital American support.

Arafat compounded the blunder. By redoubling the violence and disturbing the international scene once more, he hoped to provoke an international intervention to save him. Then came 9/11 and Bush’s support for a Palestinian state as an incentive to call off the war. But Arafat played a double game. When the Israelis intercepted the freighter Karine A, full of Iranian arms that would have escalated the conflict, Arafat denied any connection to the vessel even though he knew that Bush knew he was lying.

Not to be outdone by Hamas, Arafat produced the latter-day version of Black September, the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade. When the suicide bombers finally inflicted an intolerable number of casualties in April 2002, the Israelis invaded the Palestinian cities successfully and confined him to his Ramallah headquarters, something Arafat was sure they would not do. His hopes rose when Bush dispatched Secretary of State Powell to Israel, then fell when he learned that American pressure on Sharon would only be triggered if and when he ended the terror. The Rais was visibly upset. His strategy had failed. He had no other plan.

“CADUC”

Once Arafat had called the 1969 Palestine Covenant caduc – “obsolete” in French. Ironically, Arafat’s own tactics in the last phase of his life rendered him increasingly caduc. He seemed not to realize his situation. In June 2002, Bush delivered the heaviest blow, calling for a reformed Palestinian partner free of a leadership “tainted by terrorism” before statehood could be achieved. Arafat now faced the loss of international legitimacy. He appeared increasingly the main obstacle to his own objectives. The rest of his life would be spent in a strange limbo of simultaneous relevance and irrelevance. Nothing could happen without him, but nothing could happen with him.

Arafat clung to the illusion that, like Beirut of twenty years earlier, Sharon would do something outrageous enough to compel an international rescue. After the war in Iraq, he skillfully evaded Washington’s grasp by crippling the Prime Minister forced on him, his old comrade-in-arms Abu Mazen. Meanwhile, he presided over the slide of the Palestinian Authority into chaos.

Arafat also sought to revive diplomatic pressure. He connived at an exercise called the Geneva Accords, an extension of the Taba negotiations by former Israeli officials, some of his trusted agents, and sympathetic Europeans. As usual, he endorsed only those parts he liked. When, partly in reaction, Sharon surfaced in December 2003 with a “unilateral” plan to withdraw Israeli forces and settlers from Gaza, Arafat saw it as another trick to bring the Palestinians into civil war or, at the least, subvert his authority. Still besieged in the ruins of his Ramallah headquarters, he danced for joy when Sharon’s Likud Party rejected the plan in a non-binding referendum. He opposed even the removal of Israeli settlements unless he, Arafat, became once more Israel’s and America’s negotiating partner.

In late summer of 2004, Gaza rioting and increasingly bold public criticism of his strategy and government forced Arafat to acknowledge errors – by others – and to promise “reforms.” That amounted to reshuffling his slate of the co-opted, corrupted, and coerced. Something might turn up. The Americans might need him for Iraq. Sharon could fall. Bush might lose the election. There was always an interview to give. But no one believed him anymore. Then his time ran out.

Gripped suddenly by severe illness, the cameras caught Arafat in an unwelcome pose, a shrunken old man wearing a Russian fur cap bundled against unnatural chills. He managed a feverish smile at the crowds on his way to Paris. Commentators noted that he had survived bullets, bombings, car accidents, and airplane crashes. Mortality seemed an anti-climax.

Yet, the drama refused to end. Mystery attended his symptoms, confusion his colleagues, hysteria his wife. His death was reported, then denied; denied, then reported. Arafat’s spokeswoman in Paris issued a statement worthy of the master: “He is between life and death. He is in a coma, which is reversible.” Options were still open! But Arafat had finally met a Power who could not be terrorized, bribed, or charmed. At last, on November 11, 2004, at age 75, his death was announced.

Where would he be buried? Arafat wanted to achieve in death what he could not in life, namely, the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. The Israelis refused. Instead, his birthplace, Egypt, would offer a lying-in-state at Cairo airport and he would find his rest – temporary of course – at the scene of his last headquarters, the Muqata compound of Ramallah. And there he was interred amid chaotic scenes punctuated by gunfire.

Among all the national liberation icons of his era, Arafat was most expert in working the interstices of the international system, his movement more than a conspiracy but less than a government. In the end he was never able to escape that limbo, to move from terrorism aimed at destroying Israel, the work of war, to the building of a real Palestinian state, the work of peace. Perhaps, he became too comfortable with the struggle, for achieving his end meant also the end of him.

Arafat might be compelled to step in someone else’s direction but, like his lifelong enemy Hafez al-Assad, he was expert at not reaching someone else’s destination. He would go down as the symbol of defiance. No one would say of Arafat, “He ceded Jerusalem to the Jews.”

As for diplomacy, what some thought enigmatic actually followed a well-worn pattern. It was the old “lose-win” maneuver of his youth. Win if you can, negotiate if you must until you think you can win again.

Regardless of the situation, Arafat made full use of victimhood and martyrdom. His nom de guerre, Abu Ammar, was that of an early martyr from the Koran. Of course, Arafat preferred the benefits of martyrdom to the rigor of the actual experience. The media would capture him time and again in his favorite scene, standing amidst the rubble, grinning, indomitable, and loquacious on his readiness for martyrdom. Fittingly, he would be buried in the carefully preserved ruins of the last scene, Muqata.

Arafat, father of his people, leaves the promise of a state he himself could not or would not fulfill. He begat violence throughout his life and his legacy of terrorism, deceit, and victimhood will not be easy to overcome. Burying that burden is the next and most vital step in the rehabilitation of the Palestinian hope.

Arafat leaves a broader international legacy as well. His career was a monument to Western weakness and ineptitude in dealing with international terrorists. Unwilling to disqualify him or hold him to account, unable to settle the conflict upon which he thrived, the democracies set a disastrous example for their enemies. The man who wanted too much finally overreached against an enraged Israel and an American President steeled by the 9/11 attack. But the damage was done. Many more lives may be lost before it is undone.

RELATED ESSAYS BY HARVEY SICHERMAN

Yitzhak Rabin: An Appreciation, November 1995

http://www.fpri.org/peacefacts/023.199511.sicherman.rabinappreciation.html

Hussein bin Talal: Soldier-King, February 1999

http://www.fpri.org/peacefacts/061.199902.sicherman.husseinbintalal.html

Hafez al-Assad: The Man Who Waited Too Long, July 2000

http://www.fori.org/peacefacts/071.200007.sicherman.assadwaitedtoolong.html

Student paper - Graduate Religion 540 at BYU, taught by Dr. Richard O. Coxan.

The Psalmist has written, What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor.” This passage is but one of many which refer to the ORGANIZATION OF MAN as though it were a great mystery – or something that could not be fully comprehended by the greatest winds while dwelling in earthly tabernacles. It is a matter of vital interest to each of us, and yet it is often farthest from the thoughts of the greater portion of mankind. Instead of reflecting upon and searching for hidden things of greatest value to them, they rather wish to learn how to secure their way through this world as easily and as comfortably as possible. THE REFLECTIONS WHAT THEY ARE HERE FOR, WHO PRODUCED THEM, AND WHERE THEY ARE FROM, FAR TOO SELDOM ENTER THEIR MINDS. (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourse VII, p. 282.)

ADAM: THE SON OF GOD

The physical origin of man has long been a topic of speculation and discussion among the philosophers, scientists, and sociologists of the world. It is the author’s belief that a correct understanding of man’s true physical origin will be gained ONLY from the Word of God through his servants, the Prophets, ancient and modern. It, therefore, is the aim of this work to bring together the statements of the Prophets to help clarify man’s relationship to God, to his fellow men, and to throw light upon his own physical origin. It is also hoped that a correct understanding of one’s physical heritage may also result in a significant change for righteousness in one’s life.

ADAM’S PHYSICAL BODY

Adam, as all of God’s children, was first created spiritually as a begotten son unto God, and afterward, physically. When Adam was in the Garden of Eden he was a spirit son of God tabernacled in a physical body. He was indeed a living soul: “And the Gods formed man from the dust of the ground, and took his spirit (that is, the man’s spirit), and put it into him; and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and MAN BECAME A LIVING SOUL” (Abr. 5:7). The union of spirit and body constitute the soul.1

The scriptures also state that Adam was created in the express image of God,2 which undoubtedly accounted for the fact Adam was physically perfect in shape, form, and features, and was a very handsome man. The Prophet Joseph Smith referred to this fact when he said, “…my brother Alvin. He was a very handsome man, surpassed by none but Adam and Seth, and of great strength.”3 The Doctrine and Covenants speaks of the physical attributes of Adam and his birthright son Seth: “…he (Seth) was a perfect man, and his likeness was the express likeness of his father, insomuch that he seemed to be like unto his father in all things, and could be distinguished from him only by his age.”4

Adam in the Garden of Eden was immortal physically, and not subject to physical deterioration. Lehi expressed this teaching when he said, ‘And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end.”5 Elder Orson Pratt adds this statement concerning Adam’s immortal condition prior to the fall:

Man, when he was first placed upon this earth, was an immortal being capable of eternal endurance; his flesh and bones, as well as his spirit, were immortal and eternal in their nature, and it was so with all the inferior creation – all were immortal and eternal in their nature…6

Another attribute of Adam’s physical body in Eden was that his body was not filled with blood, but spiritual liquid filled his veins to provide the life force: “Eating of the forbidden fruit subdued the power of the spirit and created blood in their bodies.” “The blood contained the seeds of death.”7 Not only was Adam’s body filled with this life-giving fluid before the fall, but his body was glorified to a degree, and he lived in a glorified environment. Brigham Young has stated that “When our father Adam came into the garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body…”8 Of course President Young did not mean a resurrected celestial body, but a body of celestial nature. Joseph Smith wrote that “…the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory,”9 which it lost when Adam fell. To dwell in such a state of glory, Adam had some degree of glory physically.

Father Adam was filled with intelligence as an immortal person in Eden, as demonstrated by this occurrence in the Garden:

God conversed with him (Adam) face to face. In his presence he was permitted to stand, and from his own mouth he was permitted to receive instruction. He heard his voice, walked before him and gazed upon his glory. While intelligence burst upon his understanding, and enabled him to give names to the vast assemblage of his Maker’s works.10

Notwithstanding the intellectual capacity of Adam’s mind in Eden there was another major factor present: Adam had the brilliant mind of a child.” Adam was in a state of child-like innocence, and had he not partaken of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, “…he would have remained forever in his innocence, without power of increase.”11 This doctrine was also taught by Lehi: “And they (Adam and Eve) would have had no children: wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery, doing no good, for they knew no sin.”12 Adam had not a “knowledge of good and evil” and, as a little child, knew not his nakedness.13 His eyes were not opened to this knowledge until he ate the forbidden fruit.14 Also, by tabernacling in the flesh, Adam’s pre-earth memory was voided.

THE TESTIMONY OF THE FATHER

“And I, GOD, CREATED MAN in mine own image, in the image of mine Only Begotten created I him; male and female created I them.” “And I, the Lord God, planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there I put the man WHOM I HAD FORMED.”15

The Almighty himself takes all credit for the creation of Adam and says that he was Adam’s Creator. The importance of this fact will be shown later. The Lord explains where the material came from for the formation of Adam’s physical body: “I, the Lord God, formed man from the dust of the ground…”16 He further states that Adam was fashioned in his own image and likeness.17 Before leaving the Father’s testimony of Adam’s creation it is important to note that no statement thus far considered has given us a positive declaration of HOW Adam was created, only that man was formed from the dust of the ground to be in God’s own “image” and “likeness.”

TESTIMONY OF THE ANCIENT PATRIARCHS

In the Book of the Generations of Adam was recorded the testimony of the Ancients with regard to Adam’s creation:

In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; In the image of his own BODY, male and female, created he them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created and became living souls in the land upon the footstool of God.18

The terms “likeness” and “image” are again employed to describe Adam’s creation. The following verse of scripture sheds interesting light upon the context in which the Ancients used those particular terms:

And Adam lived one hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his own image, and called his name Seth.19

It appears that a more personal and closer relationship is implied when these terms are used, than generally supposed.

One of the great scriptures explaining the process of Adam’s creation is found in Moses 6:58-59. The Lord gives Adam a commandment to teach his children that “inasmuch as ye were born into the world by water, and blood, and the spirit, which I have made, AND SO BECAME OF DUST A LIVING SOUL, even so ye must be born again into the kingdom of heaven…” This is the exact language the Father uses in explaining Adam’s creation, and this language is applied to Adam’s children who were created by NATURAL CHILDBIRTH, thus the terminology “from the dust of the ground”19 is scripturally defined as natural birth. It is this same passage of scripture that explains that the ordinance of water baptism is symbolic of man’s birth physically:

Therefore I (God) give unto you (Adam) a commandment to teach these things freely unto your children, saying: that by reason of transgression cometh the fall, which fall bringeth death, and inasmuch as ye were BORN INTO THE WORLD by water, and blood, and the spirit, which I have made, and so became of dust a living soul, EVEN SO YE MUST BE BORN AGAIN into the kingdom of heaven, of water, and of the Spirit, and be cleansed by blood, even the blood of mine Only Begotten; that ye might be sanctified from all sin, and enjoy the words of eternal life in this world, and eternal life in the world to come, even immortal glory;20

Having just learned that water baptism and receiving the Gift of the Holy Ghost, coupled with the sanctifying blood of Christ, was symbolic of MAN’S BIRTH INTO THE PHYSICAL WORLD, “Adam cried unto the Lord, and he was caught away by the Spirit of the Lord, and was carried down into the water, and was laid under the water, and was brought forth out of the water. And thus he was baptized…”21 which is being BORN AGAIN. The account of Adam’s baptism, or rebirth, being placed immediately after the Lord’s explanation of the symbolism of baptism cannot fail to draw strong applications that Adam’s baptism was no exception to the symbolism.

The classic statement of Adam’s creation (in scripture) is found in Moses chapter 6. The birthright line of Adam’s posterity is traced from Adam through Seth, Enos, Cainan, and so on, to the Patriarch Enoch. Having thus traced the physical genealogy, this authoritative statement is made:

And this is the genealogy of the sons of Adam, WHO WAS THE SON OF GOD, with whom God, himself, conversed.22

It is inconsistent with the text and the physical genealogy being dealt with to interpret this statement any other way than that of Adam’s physical descent. Had this statement been pertaining to Adam’s creation as a spirit son of God, a better rendition of this verse would have been:

And this is the genealogy of the sons of Adam, who was a son of God, with whom God, himself, conversed.

Or, since all the Patriarchs referred to in this verse were spirit sons of God, perhaps this would have been the best rendition:

And this is the genealogy of the sons of Adam, who were the sons of God, with whom God, himself, conversed.

As the text stands in the Holy Word, it is the author’s contention that this final position has no foundation. Adam, the scripture declares, was the son of God, physically.

These great Patriarchs were “preachers of righteousness, and spake and prophecied, and called upon all men, everywhere, to repent…”23 and as they went, they carried with them the true knowledge of the origin of Man, which they had received from their Father, Adam. Enoch came preaching in the land and appealed to his listeners upon this point, that they were of common physical origin, and God was their common Creator through the first man, Adam. (Apparently they had lost this knowledge through apostasy.) Said Enoch:

The Lord which spake with me, the same is the God of heaven, and he is my god, and your god, and ye are my brethren, and why counsel ye yourselves, and deny the God of heaven? The heavens he made; the earth is his footstool, and the foundation thereof is his. Behold, he laid it (and) AN HOST OF MEN NATH HE BROUGHT IN UPON THE FACE THEREOF. And death hath come upon our fathers; nevertheless, we know them, and cannot deny, and even the first of all we know, even Adam.24

Father Abraham was, as Enoch, in the Line of the Firstborn and sought for his appointment by ordination to the blessings that pertained to this lineage; … to possess a greater knowledge, and to be a father of many nations, a prince of peace (over his posterity), and … (to become) a rightful heir, a High Priest, holding the right belonging to the fathers.”25 Abraham explained that this right or blessing by birth was conferred upon him from the fathers:

…it came down from the fathers, from the beginning of time, yea, even from the beginning, or before the foundations of the earth to the present time, even the RIGHT OF THE FIRSTBORN, or the FIRST MAN, who is ADAM, our first father, through the fathers unto me.26

Not only did Adam experience a rebirth, but Abraham gave testimony that Adam was the ran upon whom the first birthright was conferred.

THE TESTIMONY OF MOSES

By the dawning of the Mosaic Dispensation the true knowledge of man’s origin had again been lost through apostasy, but was to be revealed through the great prophet Moses.

In after years, when Paradise was lost by sin; when man was driven from the face of his heavenly Father, to toil, and droop, and die; when heaven was veiled from view; and, with few exceptions, MAN WAS NO LONGER COUNTED WORTHY TO RETAIN THE KNOWLEDGE OF HIS HEAVENLY ORIGIN; then, darkness veiled the past and future from the heathen mind; man neither knew himself, from whence he came, nor whither he was bound. At length a Moses came, who knew his God, and would fain have led mankind to know him too, and see him face to face. But they could not receive his heavenly laws, Or bide his presence.

THUS THE HOLY MAN WAS FORCED AGAIN TO VEIL THE PAST IN MYSTERY AND, IN THE BEGINNING OF HIS HISTORY, ASSIGN TO MAN AN EARTHLY ORIGIN.27

Some traces of the true doctrine of man’s origin, however, are still found in Moses’ account of creation.

THE MERIDIAN OF TIME

Because the Church teaches that we are all God’s offspring as spirits, some Saints have assumed that God can only produce spirit offspring. This belief is erroneous. A counter-example that rejects this doctrine is a fundamental part of the LDS theology. God can and did produce a physical son: Jesus Christ. As a result he became the Savior. The question may be raised, “what was the difference, then, between the physical body of Adam and the physical body of Christ if God was the physical Father of them both?" The difference in their physical bodies was due to a difference in their respective mothers. Adam’s Mother was immortal, therefore Adam inherited physical immortality from both of his Parents, and could only die by partaking of the forbidden fruit. When Adam fell, he became TOTALLY subject to death. Christ’s physical body, however, was mothered by a mortal mother, and Jesus inherited from her the seeds of physical death. Jesus was then physically qualified for the role of SAVIOR and could choose to live forever, or voluntarily die,28 which choice Adam did not have simultaneously.

A further question might be asked about Adam’s position as the son of God: “What, then, is meant by the Savior’s title, The Only Begotten Son of God in the Flesh?” The explanation lies in the definition of the Lord’s terms. Elder Joseph Fielding Smith states that “…there was no blood in Adam’s body before the fall. He was not then ‘flesh’ as we know it, that is, in the sense of mortality. BY FLESH IS MEANT MORTALITY.”29 Elder Bruce McConkie also makes this clarification in explaining this title of the Savior:

Father Adam, the first man, is also a son of God (Luke 3:38; Moses 6:22, 59), a fact that does not change the great truth that Christ is the Only Begotten in the flesh, for Adam’s entrance into this world was in immortality: He came here before death had its beginning, with its consequent mortal or flesh-status of existence.30

In the author’s opinion, this title applies to Jesus’ position as Messiah and Redeemer. When Adam fell, he plunged himself and all his posterity into the valley of death, and it was necessary for the Father to sire another son, even Jesus Christ, who thereby would have power to redeem fallen man, including Father Adam. Jesus’ earthly role, then, is paramount, and HE ALONE, as the Only Begotten of the Father in the flesh, REIGNS SUPREME. The Savior taught fallen physical men that they were the children of God:

…Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, Ye are gods?’ If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; Say ye of him, whom the lather hath sanctified, and sent into the world, ‘Thou blasphemest;’ because I said, I am the Son of God?31

Upon His resurrection Jesus spoke to Mary Magdalene, saying, “I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father, and YOUR Father and to my god, and your God” (John 20:17). Of all the Prophets, the Savior knew of the divinity involved in the physical heritage of man. A parallel scripture to that found in Moses 6:22 is recorded by Luke:

Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was THE SON OF GOD.32

The Prophet Joseph Smith gave a slightly different rendition to harmonize with the phrasing in Moses:

“And of Enos, and of Seth, and Adam, WHO WAS FORMED OF GOD, and the first man upon the earth.”33 In other rendition, God is the Creator of Adam, and it has been shown that Adam’s creation was accomplished through birth.

Paul, the Apostle, explained in one of his letters that there was a difference in the flesh of man and of beasts, for “…God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body. All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.”34 In making this statement, it is obvious that Paul believed that man did not originate from the same source as the animal kingdoms, for they were of a different kind of flesh. Apparently speaking of Paul’s statement in Ephesians 5:30-31, President Brigham Young said:

The Apostles and Prophets, when speaking of our relationship to God, say that WE ARE FLESH OF HIS FLESH AND BONE OF HIS BONE. GOD IS OUR FATHER, and Jesus Christ is our Elder Brother, and both are our everlasting friends. This is Bible doctrine.35

Paul’s statement is not very clear, in the author’s opinion, however, President Young apparently had deep insight into what was really in Paul’s mind and took a literal interpretation of the text. Paul’s Mars hill address, when read in the context that Paul believed that man was the physical offspring of God, becomes a powerful sermon on this doctrine:

For in him (God) we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his OFFSPRING.’ Forasmuch then as WE ARE THE OFFSPRING OF GOD, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.36

THE DISPENSATION OF THE FULNESS OF TIMES

THE FIRST PRESIDENCY

The most authoritative statement explaining the origin of man in this Dispensation was issued as an official declaration by the first Presidency of the Church, November, 1909:

It is held by some that Adam was not the first man upon this earth, and that the original human being was a development from lower orders of the animal creation. These, however, are the theories of men. The word of the Lord declares that ADAM was the first man of all men (Moses 1:34), and we are therefore in duty bound to regard him as the primal parent of the race. It was shown to the brother of Jared that all men were created in the beginning after the image of God; and whether we take this to mean the spirit or the body, or both, it commits us to the same conclusion: MAN BEGAN LIFE AS A HUMAN BEING. IN THE LIKENESS OF OUR HEAVENLY FATHER.

True it is that the body of man enters upon its career as a tiny germ or embryo, which becomes an infant, quickened at a certain stage by the spirit whose tabernacle it is, and the child, after being born, develops into a man. THERE IS NOTHING IN THIS, HOWEVER, TO INDICATE THAT THE ORIGINAL MAN, THE FIRST OF OUR RACE BEGAN LIFE AS ANYTHING LESS THAN A MAN, OR LESS THAN THE HUMAN GERM OR EMBRYO THAT BECOMES A MAN.

Man, by searching, cannot find out God. Never, unaided, will he discover the truth about the beginning of Human Life. The Lord must reveal himself, or remain unrevealed; and the same is true of the facts relating to the ORIGIN OF ADAM’S RACE. – God alone can reveal them. Some of these facts, however, are already known, and what has been made known it is our duty to receive and retain.

THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS, BASING ITS BELIEF ON DIVINE REVELATION, ANCIENT AND MODERN, PROCLAIMS MAN TO BE THE DIRECT AND LINEAL OFFSPRING OF DEITY. God himself is an exalted man, perfected, enthroned, and supreme. By His almighty power He organized the earth, and all that it contains, from spirit and element, which exist co-eternally with Himself. He formed every plant that grows, and every animal that breathes, each after its own kind, spiritually and temporally – ‘that which is spiritual being in the likeness of that which is temporal, and that which is temporal in the likeness of that which is spiritual.’ He made the tadpole and the ape, the lion and the elephant; but He did not make them in his own image, nor endow them with Godlike reason and intelligence. Nevertheless, the whole animal creation will be perfected and perpetuated in the hereafter, each class in its ‘distinct order or sphere,’ and will enjoy eternal felicity. That fact has been made plain in this dispensation, (D&C 77:2-3).

MAN IS THE CHILD OF GOD, formed in the divine image and endowed with divine attributes, and even as the infant son of an earthly father and mother is capable in due time of becoming a man, so the undeveloped offspring of celestial parentage is capable, by experience through ages and aeons, of evolving into a God.

Joseph F. Smith

John R. Winder

Anthon H. Land

First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints37

A plainer statement by the First Presidency can hardly be imagined, but the things of God are only discerned and comprehended through the power of the Spirit. It is then stated that “the original man,” who is Adam, began life as a human germ or embryo that becomes a man. Further, Adam is “the direct and lineal offspring of Deity,” “the child of God.” “Lineal” is defined: “1. in the direct line of descent: A grandson is a Lineal descendant of his grandfather. 2. having to do with such descent; hereditary: lineal right.”38 Every man is the spiritual offspring of Deity, and physically he has descended from the Fountain of Human Life, The Father, Elohim.

PRESIDENT JOSEPH SMITH

Adam was certainly the father of the human race, and in this context it is revealing to analyze this statement by the Prophet Joseph:

If Abraham reasoned thus – If Jesus Christ was the son of God, and John (Revelator) discovered that God the Father of Jesus Christ had a Father, you may suppose that He had a Father also. WHERE WAS THERE EVER A SON WITHOUT A FATHER? AND WHERE WAS THERE EVER A FATHER WITHOUT FIRST BEING A SON? Whenever did a tree or anything spring into existence without a progenitor? AND EVERYTHING COMES IN THIS WAY.39

Adam was a father, and if a father, HE WAS A SON, and since God was the Being Who created Adam, Adam was one of the Race of the Gods and created as His Son upon the principle by which all Sons of God are created.

PRESIDENT BRIGHAM YOUNG

No latter-day Prophet has written as much as President Young upon the subject of man’s origin, or as specifically. “There never was a first world or MAN: there will never be a last," said President Young.40 This being the case, there never was a beginning to the race we call human. In reality, the “human race” is the Race of the Gods, which is endless. There are Gods above us, and there will be Gods below us. There is only one way, according to the Prophet Joseph’s reasoning, to bridge the “gap” between the Generations of the Gods, and that is by man perpetuating his own race through pro-creation, spiritually and physically. As Brigham Young has stated:

HE (GOD) CREATED MAN, AS WE CREATE OUR CHILDREN; FOR THERE IS NO OTHER PROCESS OF CREATION IN HEAVEN, ON THE EARTH, IN THE EARTH, OR UNDER THE EARTH, OR IN ALL THE ETERNITIES THAT IS, THAT WERE, OR THAT EVER WILL BE.41

President Young did not accept the “traditional” concept of man’s creation: “Here let me state to all philosophers of every class upon the earth, WHEN YOU TELL ME THAT FATHER ADAM WAS MADE AS WE MALE ADOBIES FROM THE EARTH, YOU TELL ME WHAT I DEEM AN IDLE TALE. THERE IS NO SUCH THING IN ALL THE ETERNITIES WHERE THE GODS DWELL.42 Speaking further of Adam, he said, “He was made as you and I are made, and no person was ever made upon any other principle.”43 There seems to be no question in President Young’s mind that Adam experienced a natural birth physically. How else would a Man and His Eternal Companion create another human being? What is more natural than that?

Brighan Young makes a positive statement to the effect that the Gods indeed can produce physical as well as spiritual offspring:

Another item: We have not the power in the flesh to create and bring forth or produce a spirit; but we have the power to produce a temporal body. And when our spirits receive our bodies (in the resurrection), and through our faithfulness we are worthy to be crowned, WE WILL THEN RECEIVE AUTHORITY TO PRODUCE BOTH SPIRIT AND BODY.44

It seems logical that through the resurrection man will receive additional powers to those he already possesses, as the resurrection is a process of being “added upon.”

One of the most misinterpreted sermons in Mormon literature is the “Adam-God” sermon or President Brigham Young. Many have claimed that in this sermon Brigham Young preached that Adam was Elohim. The author does not find this interpretation anywhere in the text, but rather one of the greatest sermons on the creation of man and the divinity of the Savior.45 Because of its significance, much of the text will be quoted:

I WILL TELL YOU HOW IT IS. Our Father in Heaven begat all the spirits that ever were, or ever will be, upon this earth; and they were born spirits in the eternal world. Then the Lord by his power and wisdom organized the mortal tabernacle of man. We were made first spiritual, and afterwards temporal.

Now hear it, O inhabitants of the earth, Jew and Gentile, Saint and sinner! When our father ADAM came into the garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body, and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him. He helped to make and organize this world. HE IS MICHAEL, THE ARCHANGEL, THE ANCIENT OF DAYS! about whom holy men have written and spoken – HE IS OUR FATHER AND OUR GOD, AND THE ONLY GOD WITH WHOM WE HAVE TO DO. Every man upon the earth professing, must hear it, and will know it sooner or later.

In the Patriarchal Order of the Gods, Adam, or Michael, stands next in authority to Jesus, the Beloved Son. As the scriptures state.46 Michael led the valiant Hosts in the war in Heaven, and he was one of the chief participants in the creation of this pianet.47 To Adam was given the dominion over all his posterity, therefore, all Priesthood keys come to man through Adam’s administration, and when angels minister, they act “under the direction of Michael or Adam, who acts under the direction of the Lord”48 Jesus Christ. Adam, therefore, stands in relation to his posterity as a God.

When the Virgin Mary conceived the child Jesus, the FATHER had begotten him in his own likeness. He was not begotten by the Holy Ghost. And who is the FATHER? HE IS THE FIRST OF THE HUMAN FAMILY; AND WHEN HE TOOK A TABERNACLE, IT WAS BEGOTTEN BY HIS FATHER IN HEAVEN, AFTER THE SAME MANNER AS THE TABERNACLES OF CAIN, ABEL, AND THE REST OF THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF ADAM AND EVE: FROM THE FRUITS OF THE EARTH, THE FIRST EARTHLY TABERNACLE WERE ORIGINATED BY THE FATHER AND SO ON IN SUCCESSION. I could tell you much more about this, but were I to tell you the whole truth, blasphemy would be nothing to it, in the estimation of the superstitious and over-righteous mankind. However, I HAVE TOLD YOU THE TRUTH AS FAR AS I HAVE GONE.

President Young begins this section of his sermon by stating that the physical Father of Jesus was in reality the Father, Elohim. It is the writer’s opinion that when he asks, “And who is the Father,” the answer is Elohim, who President Young then identifies as the first of the human family.” President Young continues by explaining that when He, Elohim, took a tabernacle, it was begotten by his father in Heaven, (Jesus’ Grandfather).49 This doctrine harmonizes with, and, in fact, sounds reminiscent of Joseph Smith’s statement that if John the Revelator “discovered that God the Father of Jesus Christ (Elohim) had a Father (Jesus’ Grandfather),49 you may suppose that He (Jesus’ Grandfather) had a father also (Jesus’ Great-Grandfather).50

The three presiding figures in the pre-earth Councils were the Father, Elohim, and His two most valiant Sons, Jesus the Firstborn, and Michael, or Adam. President Young states that these three formed a QUORUM, and the implication is made that the Trinity is patterned after that pre-earth Quorum:

It is true that the earth was organized by three distinct characters, namely, ELOHEIM, YAHOVAH, AND MICHAEL, these three forming a QUORUM, as in all heavenly bodies, and in organizing element, perfectly represented in the Deity, as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

This doctrine is also taught by the Prophet Joseph Smith in The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, pp. 167-169, 190, 312.

Since Adam was God’s son physically, and there was no Mediator between God the Father and man (Adam) PRIOR TO THE FALL, it was Elohim who was in the garden giving instruction to Adam.51 With this preface, President Young’s sermon concludes:

Again, they will try to tell how the divinity of Jesus is joined to his humanity, and exhaust all their mental faculties, and wind up with this profound language, as describing the soul of man, ‘it is an immaterial substance’. What a learned idea! JESUS, OUR ELDER BROTHER WAS BEGOTTEN IN THIS FLESH BY THE SAME CHARACTER THAT WAS IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN, AND WHO IS OUR FATHER IN HEAVEN. Now, let all who may hear these doctrines, pause before they make light of them, or treat them with indifference, for they will prove their salvation or damnation.

I have given you a few leading items upon this subject, but a great deal remains to be told. Now, remember from this time forth, and forever, that Jesus Christ was not begotten by the Holy Ghost.

Treasure up these things in your hearts. In the Bible, you have read the things I have told you tonight; but you have not known what you did read. I have told you no more than what you are conversant with, but do the people in Christendom, with the Bible in their hands, know about this Subject? Comparatively nothing.52

A powerful statement is made by President Young that God was Adam’s physical Father and therefore the Grandfather of Adam’s children:

How has it transpired that theological truth is thus so widely disseminated? It is because God was once known on the earth among his children of mankind, as we know one another. ADAM was as conversant with HIS FATHER as we are conversant with OUR earthly parents. The FATHER frequently came to visit his SON ADAM, and talked and walked with him; and the CHILDREN OF ADAM WERE MORE OR LESS ACQUAINTED WITH THEIR GRANDFATHER AND THEIR CHILDREN WERE MORE OR LESS ACQUAINTED WITH THEIR GREAT-GRANDFATHER; and the things that pertain to God and to heaven were as familiar among mankind, in the first ages of their existence on the earth, as these mountains are to our mountain boys…”53

The Prophet, Brigham Young, states that the Father lived in the flesh at one time, as man lives now, and eventually obtained HIS exaltation, and ascended to thrones, principalities and powers, and received the knowledge and power to create – to bring forth and organize the elements upon natural principles.54 He then explains that after finishing the spiritual creation, to provide physical tabernacles for his first spirit children upon earth, God “charged” his body with coarse element (which He obtained from the FRUITS of the earth):

Things were first created spiritually; the Father actually begat the spirits, and they were brought forth and lived with Him. Then He commenced the work of creating earthly tabernacle, PRECISELY AS HE HAD BEEN CREATED IN THE FLESH HIMSELF, BY PARTAKING OF THE COARSE MATERIAL THAT WAS ORGANIZED AND COMPOSED THIS EARTH, UNTIL HIS SYSTEM WAS CHARGED WITH IT. CONSEQUENTLY THE TABERNACLES OF HIS CHILDREN [ADAM AND EVE] WERE ORGANIZED FROM THE COARSE MATERIAIS OF THIS EARTH.55

A great debt is owed to President Brighan Young for providing mankind with such a vast wealth of information relative to man’s physical origin.

PRESIDENT JOHN TAYLOR

One of the most simple yet precise statements on the physical origin of man is contained in President Taylor’s book, The Mediation and Atonement:

…if we take MAN, he is said to have been made in the IMAGE OF GOD, FOR THE SIMPLE REASON THAT HE IS A SON OF GOD: AND BEING HIS SON, HE IS, OF COURSE, HIS OFFSPRING, AN EMANATION FROM GOD, IN WHOSE LIKENESS, WE ARE TOLD, HE IS MADE. He did not originate from a chaotic mass of matter, moving or inert, out came forth possessing, in an EMBRYONIC STATE. ALL THE FACULTIES AND POWERS OF A GOD. And when he shall be perfected, and have progressed to maturity, he will be like HIS FATHER – A GOD: BEING INDEED HIS OFFSPRING. AS THE HORSE, THE OX, THE SHEEP, AND EVERY LIVING CREATURE, INCLUDING MAN, PROPAGATES ITS OWN SPECIES AND PERPETUATES ITS OWN KIND, SO DOES GOD PERPETUATE HIS.56

A study of the beginning of the text will show that Adam’s physical creation is being considered, and later also the physical creation of the Animal Kingdom. It is the author’s opinion that President Taylor’s remarks apply to the perpetuation of the Races both physically and spiritually.

As an Apostle, Elder Taylor had taught that “Man was created in the image of God, AND HE WAS THE OFFSPRING OF DEITY HIMSELF, and consequently made in his likeness; AND BEING MADE IN THAT LIKENESS, HE WAS A SON OF GOD, and the very object of his being planted upon the earth was that he might multiply”57 and in so doing perpetuate his father’s race.

PRESIDENT JOSEPH F. SMITH

President Smith in an address delivered in the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Christmas day of 1910, stated that man’s physical origin was from his Father and Mother in Heaven:

We do not fully realize, it seems to me, the simplicity and naturalness of those great doctrines that are involved in the probation of man, in his mortal state. Many have sought for the ORIGIN OF MAN in his development from the lower animals or creatures, and it is very difficult, indeed, to persuade men who are supposed to be scientific, to believe that the works of God are one eternal round, and the MAN IS NOTHING MORE AND CANNOT BE ANYTHING LESS, WE BELIEVE, THAN THE OFFSPRING OF GOD. No man, however scientific, however learned, however deeply he may search into the secrets of nature, can ever find out more than is REVEALED already in the Scriptures of divine truth, with reference to MAN’S ORIGIN. Men may speculate, and guess, and suppose many things, and can argue themselves into queer notions and believe with reference to man’s origin, but after all it will only be their beliefs, or their imaginations or conclusions from human reasoning. It would be superfluous, no doubt, for me to cite my hearers to the GENESIS IN THE BIBLE, where an account is given of man being placed upon the earth, formed in the image and likeness of God, being made in His likeness NOT ONLY MALE BUT ALSO FEMALE, for the Bible plainly implies that in order that man should become like unto God, or be created in His image and likeness, he should be a dual being, that is, HE SHOULD BE NOT ONLY MAN BUT THAT HIS COMPLEMENT OF OTHER SELF SHOULD BE WOMAN, THUS HE WAS FORMED IN THE LIKENESS OF GOD. …the great commandment that was given to him was that he should multiply and replenish the earth, and have dominion over it, and over all living creatures upon the earth, for he was made lord of all and above all things that were created of God, or were placed here on the earth. MAN WAS PLACED HERE TO BE THE LORD AND MASTER OF ALL OF THEM. WHY? BECAUSE HE WAS GOD’S CHILD; BECAUSE HE WAS MADE OR FORMED AND CREATED IN THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS OF HIS FATHER AND SHALI, I ADD HERE, IN THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS OF HIS MOTHER? If I should say such a thing it would shock the Christian world, and they would ridicule the thought or the idea that the ORIGINAL MAN ADAM HAD ANYTHING BUT A FATHER, AND OWED NOTHING BUT TO HIS FATHER, FOR HIS PHYSICAL EXISTENCE.58

President Smith gave even a clearer statement that Adam was born into this world of a Mother in an article published in the Deseret Evening News, December 27, 1913:

…God is a being with body parts, and passions and… His Son [Jesus Christ] is in His own likeness, and… man is created in the image of God. The Son, Jesus Christ, grew and developed into manhood the same as you or I, as likewise did God, His Father grow and develop to the Supreme Being that He now is. MAN WAS BORN OF WOMAN; CHRIST THE SAVIOR, WAS BORN OF WOMAN, AND GOD, THE FATHER, WAS BORN OF WOMAN. ADAM, OUR EARTHLY PARENT WAS ALSO BORN OF WOMAN INTO THIS WORLD, THE SAME AS JESUS AND YOU AND I.

CONCLUSION

The First Presidency in 1909 stated that “some of these facts” pertaining to man’s origin “are already known, and what has been made known it is our duty to receive and retain.” The author has studied the writings of the Prophets of the Lord on the ORIGIN OF MAN and believes that it is a revealed fact beyond question or doubt that Adam was physically THE SON OF GOD.

Whether you receive these things or not, I tell you them in simplicity. I lay than before you like a child, because THEY ARE PERFECTLY SIMPLE. IF YOU SEE AND UNDERSTAND THESE THINGS, IT WILL BE BY THE SPIRIT OF GOD; YOU WILL RECEIVE THEM BY NO OTHER SPIRIT. NO MATTER WHETHER THEY ARE TOLD TO YOU LIKE THE THUNDERINGS OF THE ALMIGHTY, OR BY SIMPLE CONVERSATION; IF YOU ENJOY THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD, IT WILL TELL YOU WHETHER THEY ARE RIGHT OR NOT.” – PRESIDENT YOUNG (Journal of Discourse IV, p. 218)

FOOTNOTES

1. D&C 88:15.
2. Ether 1:2-3 and Hebrews 1:2-3.
3. The History of the Church, by Joseph Smith, Vol. V., p. 247 (hereafter cited as DHC).
4. D&C 107:43.
5. 2 Nephi 2:22.
6. The Journal of Discourses, by Brigham Young and others, Vol. I, p. 281 (hereafter cited as J of D).
7. Joseph Fielding Smith, Conference Report, April, 1967.
8. J of D, I, p. 50.
9. Article of Faith #10, Pearl of Great Price, p. 60.
10. Joseph Smith, Lectures on Faith. p. 15.
11. Joseph F. Smith, Scrapbook of Mormon Literature, Vol. II, p. 555.
12. 2 Nephi 2:23.
13. Moses 3:25.
14. Moses 4:13.
15. Moses 2:27; 3:8.
16. Moses 3:7, also 4:25.
17. Moses 2:26.
18. Moses 6:9.
19. Moses 3:7.
20. Moses 6:58-59.
21. Moses 6:64-65.
22. Moses 6:22.
23. Moses 6:23.
24. Moses 6:43-45.
25. Abraham 1:2.
26. Abraham 1:3.
27. Parley Pratt, Key to the Science of Theology, p. 55-56.
28. James Talmage, Jesus the Christ, p. 22,  663.
29. Doctrines of Salvation, Vol. I, p. 77-78.
30. Mormon Doctrine, Ed. I. p. 670, Ed. II. p. 72. (See also “First Flesh” in Mormon Doctrine.)
31. John 10:34-36.
32. Luke 3:38 KJ.
33. Luke 3:45 IV.
34. 1 Corinthians 15:38-39.
35. J of D., VI, p. 332.
36. Acts 17:28-29.
37. Man: His Origin and Destiny, p. 353-355.
38. World Book Encyclopedia Dictionary, p. 1133.
39. DHC, VI, p. 476.
40. J of D., XXVI, p. 27 (also IV p. 218).
41. Ibid., XI, p. 122.
42. Ibid., VII, p. 285.
43. Ibid., III, p. 319.
44. Ibid., XV, p. 137.
45. See Joseph Fielding Smith’s opinion of this sermon: Doctrines of Salvation, I, p. 96-106.
46. Revelation 12:7.
47. Joseph Smith, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 157.
48. Ibid., p. 168.
49. Revelation 1:6; also DHC, VI, p. 474.
50. DHC, VI, p. 476.
51. Joseph Smith, Lectures on Faith, p. 15.
52. J of D., I, p. 50-51.
53. Ibid., IX, p. 148.
54. Ibid., IV, p. 217.
55. Ibid., IV, p. 218.
56. Pages 164-165.
57. J of D., XVII, p. 370.
58. Joseph F. Smith, Scrapbook of Mormon Literature, Vol. II, p. 554-555.

NOTE – All capitals and underlinings in quotations added by the present author, unless designated otherwise.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• The Holy Bible, King James Version. Great Britain.
• The Book of Mormon. Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1965.
• The Doctrine and Covenants. Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1962.
• The Pearl of Great Price. Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1962.
• Smith, Joseph. History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, bd. B.H. Roberts. 7 vols. 2nd Ed. rev., Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1959-60.
• Young, Brigham, and others. Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. Photo Lithographic reprint of 1854 Ed., Salt Lake City: 1966.
• Lectures on Faith. N.B. Lundwall compiler, Salt Lake City.
• Scrapbook of Mormon Literature. Ed. Ben E. Rich, Chicago: Henry Etten and Co.
• Pratt, Parley. Key to the Science of Theology. IX Ed., Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1965.
• Smith, Joseph. Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Arr. Joseph Fielding Smith, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1970.
• Smith, Joseph Fielding. Man: His Origin and Destiny. Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1954.
• Smith, Joseph Fielding. Doctrines of Salvation. Comp. by Bruce McConkie, 3 vols., Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1954
• Talmage, James. Jesus The Christ. London: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1962.
• Taylor, John. The Mediation and Atonement of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1962.

Ezra Taft Benson
Sons of Utah Pioneers
Marriott Hotel, Salt Lake City, Utah
August 23, 1986 6:30 p.m.

My fellow Sons of the Utah Pioneers, I come to you with a message that has been close to my heart for a number of years. Because of the nature of the message I bring to you today, I have committed most of it to writing.

This evening I will speak to you about our beloved Republic, and the inspired agents who God raised up to establish the foundation upon which our liberty rests.

The destiny of America was divinely decreed. The events which established our great nation were foreknown to God and revealed to prophets of old. As in an enacted drama, the players who came on the scene were rehearsed and selected for their parts. Their talent, abilities, capacities, and weaknesses were known before they  were born.

As one looks back upon what we call our history, there is a telling theme that recurs again and again in this drama. As one who is vitally concerned about the perpetuity of our liberties, our freedoms, and the principles laid down by the founders of this country, I refer to some fundamentals – with which most of you will be familiar.

Secular scholarship, though useful, provides an incomplete and sometimes inaccurate view of our history. The real story of America is one which shows the hand of God in our nation’s beginning.

Why is it that this view of our history is almost lost in classrooms in America? Why is it that one must turn to the writers of the 18th and 19th centuries to find this view inferred or stated? The answer may perhaps be found in Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation:

“We have forgotten god. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that-made us.” (Abraham Lincoln, A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America, March 30, 1863.)

As a nation, we have become self-sufficient. This has given birth to a new religion in America which some have called secularism. This is a view of life without the idea that God is in the picture or that He has anything to do with the picture in the first place.

The first century of our nation’s history, the university was the guardian and preserver of faith in God. In this present century, the university has become ethically neutral, by and large agnostic. Our country is now reaping the effects of this agnostic influence. It has cost us an inestimable price.

For who can place a price on the worth of a human soul, or the cost of the cynicism that young people have toward our Republic and its leaders?

I would have you consider soberly how this secular influence has affected the treatment of our nation’s history in the textbook and classroom.

Today, students are subjected in their textbooks and classroom lectures to a subtle propaganda that there is a “natural” or rational explanation to all causes and events. Such a position removes the need for faith in God, or belief in His interposition in the affairs of men. Events are ONLY – and I stress that – ONLY explained from a humanistic frame of reference.

Historians and educational writers who are responsible for these movements are classified as “revisionists.” Their purpose has been and is to create a “new history.” By their own admission they are more influenced by their own training and other humanistic and scientific disciplines than any religious conviction. This detachment provides them, they say, with an objectivity that the older historians did not have.

Many of the older historians, I should point out, were defenders of the patriots and their noble efforts.

Feeling no obligation to perpetuate the ideals of the Founding Fathers, some of “new historians” have recast a new body of beliefs for their secular faith. Their efforts, in some cases, have resulted in a new interpretation of our nation’s history. May I illustrate a few of these reinterpretations:

First, the American victory in the War of Independence was only the result of good fortune, ineptitude by the British generals, and the entrance of France into the war. All these facts are evident, but what is significantly left out are additional explanations which could provide the student with a spiritual perspective of our history.

Why is it we do not read in our history of explanations such as this from George Washington?

“… The success, which has hitherto attended our united efforts, we owe to the gracious interposition of Heaven, and to that interposition let us gratefully ascribe the praise of victory, and the blessings of peace.” (To the Executive of New Hampshire, November 3, 1789, Writings, Vol. 30, p. 453.)

A second reinterpretation is that the political thought of the Founding Fathers was the result of borrowed ideas from the 18th century philosophers.

Again it is evident that the founders were men well schooled in the political thought of their times as well as ancient civilizations, but how does one account for the unity which came out of the impasse among the delegates at the Constitutional Convention?

It was at that point that Benjamin Franklin made his great speech. He solemnly counseled:

I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: That God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?

We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings, that ‘except the Lord build the House they labor in vain that build it.’ I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.

We shall be divided by our little partial local interest; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and byword down to future ages. And, what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing governments by human wisdom and leave it to chance, war, and conquest.

I therefore, beg leave to move that henceforth: prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service.

[See wallbuilders.com for a reference to the above quote]

Some historians have ignored this dimension because Madison, who reported the Constitutional Convention, said nothing about it. Others report that the motion was not acted on. Another member of the Convention, Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, who also reported it, said the motion was acted on favorably by the Convention.

Again, I would ask: Why is it that the references to God’s influence in the noble efforts of the Founders of our Republic are not mentioned?

Listen to the convictions of two of these delegates to the Constitutional Convention. First, Charles Pinckney:

“When the great work was done and published, I was … struck with amazement. Nothing less than the superintending hand of Providence, that so miraculously carried us through the war … could have brought it about so complete, upon the whole.” (P.L. Ford, Editor, Essays on the Constitution, p. 412.)

Here is another testimony, this from James Madison, sometimes referred to as the Father of the Constitution:

“It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.” (federalist, No. 37.)

Third, the charge has been made that the founders designed the Constitution primarily to benefit themselves and their “class” (property owners) financially, and that the economic motif was their dominant incentive. Such was the theses of the American historian, Dr. Charles Beard.

Jet Madison said, “There was never an assembly of men … who were more pure in their Motives.”

We must remember that these were men who had sacrificed, in many cases their fortunes and their sacred honor.

Shortly after the turn of this century, Charles Beard published his work, An Economic interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. This book marked the beginning of a trend to defame the motives and integrity of the founders of the Constitution. It also grossly distorted the real intent of the founders by suggesting their motivation was determined by economics – a thesis which had originated with Karl Marx.

Beard himself was not a Marxist, but he was socialist in his thinking and he admitted there was much we could learn from Marx’s ideas. Before his death, Beard recanted his own thesis, but the damage had been done. This began a new trend in educational and intellectual circles in the United States.

Not infrequently this penchant for historical criticism has resulted in the defamation of character of the Founding Fathers. It is done under the guise of removing the so-called ‘myths’ that surround their background. A favorite target of this defamation has been George Washington, our nation’s most illustrious leader.

Some of these so-called “new” historians have questioned his honesty, challenged his military leadership and executive ability, and impugned his moral character.

Others who have taken measure of the man have assessed matters differently. John Lord, author of the well-known work of the 19th century, Beacon Lights of History, wrote this of Washington:

“Washington … had … a transcendent character, … As a man he had his faults, but they were so few and so small that they seem to be but spots upon a sun. These have been forgotten; and as the ages roll on, mankind will see naught but the lustre of his virtues and the greatness of his services.” (John Lord, Beacon Lights of History (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert) 1884, Vol. 7, p. 168)

Winston Churchill also estimated Washington thusly:

“George Washington holds one of the proudest titles that history can bestow. He was the Father of his Nation. Almost alone his staunchness in the War of Independence held the American colonies to their united purpose … He filled his office with dignity and inspired his administration with much of his own wisdom. To his terms as President are due the smooth organization of the Federation Government, the establishment of national credit, and the foundation of a foreign policy.” (Winston Churchill, A History of the English Speaking People: The Age of Revolution (New York: Dod, Mead, and Company) 1962, p. 347)

General William Wilbur, author of the commendable little volume, The Making of George Washington, made this appraisal:

Greatness of moral character, forthright honesty, quiet modesty, thoughtful consideration for others, integrity, thoroughness, kindness, and generosity! During the American Revolution, and for more than fifty years thereafter, young Americans were inspired to attain these qualities by the vivid recollections of men who had served with George Washington, men who knew him from intimate daily association. As years went by, books, stories, living personal memories, all combined to present this great hero in such a way as to make him an inspiring and potent influence for good…

Unfortunately the last seventy-five years have produced a marked change. In these years it has come to be standard practice for Washington authors to proclaim it as their purpose to “humanize” the Washington image. Most of them have instead succeeded in belittling him. They have replaced a glorious, inspiring memory with a tawdry, warped picture.” (The Making of George Washington, pp 19-21)

That is a charge I would leave with you – leave Washington’s name “shining on.” May no one attempt to blemish Washington’s illustrious character.

If ever this country needed the timeless wisdom of the Father of our Country, it is today. How much our country could benefit by following the wisdom of our country’s first president. Here are a few among many maxims:

“Let the reins of government then be braced and held with a steady hand, and every violation of the Constitution be reprehended: If defective, let it be amended, but not suffered to be trampled upon whilst it has an existence.” (To Henry Lee, October 31, 1786, Writings, Vol. 28, p.34)

“To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” (First Annual Address, January 8, 1790, Writings, Vol. 30, p. 491)

“The love of my country will be the ruling influence of my conduct.” (Answer to the New Hampshire Executive, November 3, 1789, Writings, Vol. 30, p. 453)

“A good, moral character is the first essential in a man… It is therefore highly important that you should endeavor not only. to be learned but virtuous.” (To George Steptoe Washington, December 5, 1790, Writings, vol. 31, p. 163)

“Let us unite, therefore, in imploring the Supreme Ruler of nations, to spread his holy protection over these United States: to tum the machinations of the wicked to confirming of our constitution: ‘to enable us at all times to root our internal sedition, and put invasion to flight: to … perpetuate to our country that property, which His goodness has already conferred, and to verify the anticipation of this government being a safeguard to human rights.’ ” (To the Senate and the House of Representatives., November 19, 1774, Writings, Vol. 34, p. 37.)

It would profit all of us as citizens to read again Washington’s Farewell Address to his countrymen. The address is prophetic. I believe it ranks alongside of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Today we are almost engulfed by a tide of self-criticism, depreciation, and defamation of those who served our country honorably and with distinction. I know the philosophy behind this practice is “to tell it as it is.”

All too often those who subscribe to this philosophy are not hampered by too inany facts. When will we awaken to the fact that the defamation of our dead heroes only serves to undermine faith in the principles for which they stood, and the institutions which they established.

Some have termed this practice as ‘historical realism’ or moderately called it ‘debunking.’ I call it slander and defamation. And I repeat., that those who are guilty of it in their writing or teaching will answer to a Higher Tribunal.

It is the job of the historian and educator and citizens to help us as a nation to “pull ourselves together,” to help us regain perspective and vision and the respect of all nations.

This will not be done by showing that this is merely a phase through which we are passing. No, it will be done by men who possess a love of coutry, a vision of our country’s future, and the assurance of her divinely guided destiny.

Today I have spoken plainly to you. Lest there be some who get the impression that I am an antagonist to the discipline of history and historians, let me declare my feelings about that noble profession.

I love to read history and historical biography. I have great respect for the historian who can put into proper perspective events and people, and make history come alive.

I believe the maxim that “those who do not understand the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat those errors anew.”

I love history books that tell history as it was – as the Book of Mormon tells it – with God in the picture guiding and directing the affairs of the righteous.

I love to read history for its timeless lessons, and the inspiration I can gather from the lives of great leaders.

I have been privileged to know many in my lifetime who have made history both in the world scene and in the Church.

My purpose today is to help you discern a trend that has been destructive to the faith of many of our people in our nation’s founders, and our country’s divine origin and destiny.

I bear witness to you that America’s history was foreknow[n] to God: that His divine intervention and merciful providence has given us both peace and property in this beloved land; that through His omniscience and benevolent design He selected and sent some of His choices spirits to lay the foundation of our government.

These men were not evil men. Their work was in fulfillment of the ancient prophets who declared that this was a Promised Land, ‘a land of liberty.’

Yes, we are privileged to live in this choice land. When all these events are finished and written, we will look back and not be astonished to see that the prophecies, ancient and modern, about this land and these events were but our history in reverse. For that is what prophecy is.

May God bless us all to be faithful and true to this vision, and to uphold, sustain and defend this nation and its founders and the Kingdom of God is my humble prayer.

A testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ is the most sacred, the most precious gift in our lives, obtained only by adherence to the principles of the gospel, not by following the paths of the world.1

Introduction

President David O. McKay often taught about the importance of gaining a personal testimony of the gospel, promising that “the Lord never forsakes those who seek him.” While in his youth, David O. McKay desired to obtain his own witness of the truth. Recalling that period of his life, he wrote:

“Somehow in my youth I got the idea that we could not get a testimony unless we had some manifestation. I read of the first vision of the Prophet Joseph Smith, and I knew that he knew what he had received was of God. I heard my father’s testimony of a voice that had come to him, and somehow I received the impression that that was the source of all testimony. I realized in my youth that the most precious thing that a man could obtain in this life was a testimony of the divinity of this work. I hungered for it; I felt that if I could gain a testimony, all else would indeed seem insignificant.

“I did not neglect my prayers. I always felt that the secret prayer, whether in the room or out in the grove or on the hills, would be the place where that testimony would come. Accordingly, when I was a boy I knelt in prayer more than once by the serviceberry bush as my saddle-horse stood by the side of the road.

“I remember riding over the hills of Huntsville one afternoon, thinking of these things and concluding that there in the silence of the hills was the best place to get that testimony. I stopped my horse, threw the reins over his head, withdrew just a few steps, and knelt by the side of a tree. The air was clear and pure, the sunshine delightful; the growing verdure and flowers scented the air. …

“I knelt down and with all the fervor of my heart poured out my soul to God and asked him for a testimony of this gospel. I had in mind that there would be some manifestation; that I should receive some transformation that would leave me absolutely without doubt.

“I got up, mounted my horse, and as he started over the trail, I remember rather introspectively searching myself and involuntarily shaking my head, saying to myself, ‘No, sir, there is no change; I am just the same boy I was before I knelt down.’ The anticipated manifestation had not come.”2

Even though he did not immediately receive the manifestation he expected, President McKay continued to seek a personal witness. He later related that “the spiritual manifestation for which I had prayed as a boy in my teens came as a natural sequence to the performance of duty.”3

From his own experience President McKay taught that obedience to gospel principles was a key to receiving a testimony. He testified: “If you will undertake to embrace the principles of life everlasting, you will find it instilling upon your soul a benediction of the Holy Ghost which will give you a testimony beyond any possibility of doubt that God lives, that he is indeed our Father, and that this is his work established through the Prophet Joseph Smith. That is my testimony—the most precious thing in life!”4

Teachings of David O. McKay

A testimony of the truth is the most precious possession in the world.

There is nothing which a man can possess in this world, which will bring more comfort, more hope and faith than a testimony of the existence of a Heavenly Father who loves us, or of the reality of Jesus Christ, his Only Begotten Son, that those two heavenly personages appeared to the Prophet Joseph and established the Church of Jesus Christ, and that men are officially authorized to represent Deity.5

The most precious thing in the world is a testimony of the truth. … Truth never grows old, and the truth is that God is the source of [the] Priesthood … ; that He lives, that Jesus Christ, the great High Priest, stands at the head of this Church.6

We have had testimony of the Spirit that we are children of our Father in heaven. We have had testimony that God is a living being. We have had testimony that Christ, who was crucified and who rose the third day a resurrected being, is the head of his Church. We have had testimony of the Spirit that he has revealed in this dispensation the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is again established on earth in all its fullness. The gospel of Jesus Christ, as revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith, is in very deed in every way the power of God unto salvation [see Romans 1:16]. It gives to every man the perfect life here, and through obedience to gospel principles it gives us eternal life.7

Cherish in your hearts the testimony of truth; make it as solid and as firm and unwavering as the fixed stars in the heavens. May there come into everyone’s heart and into all our homes the true Spirit of Christ, our Redeemer, whose reality, whose inspiring guidance I know to be real.8

As we are obedient, we receive a testimony through the Spirit.

Purity of thought, and a sincere heart seeking the Savior’s guidance daily will lead to a testimony of the truth of Christ’s Gospel as sure and permanent as that which Peter possessed … after seeing the transfiguration of Christ, and hearing the voice of God testify to His divinity [see Matthew 17:1–5].9

I have wondered how many of us are showing … [the youth] how they may [receive a testimony]. Are we sufficiently emphasizing the fact that they will never know it if they indulge in sin; they will never find it out if they live to gratify their passions and appetites. “My spirit shall not always strive with man.” (Gen. 6:3; D&C 1:33; Moses 8:17.) His spirit will not dwell in unclean tabernacles. (“The Spirit of the Lord doth not dwell in unholy temples.” Helaman 4:24.) And you cannot have a testimony without the Spirit of God. …

… The question arises—How may I know? Jesus has answered it, as he has shown the way in every aspect of life. One day, when he bore testimony to his divinity, that his teachings were of God, the Pharisees and others around him said, “How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?” How do we know (that was their question), that you are divine? And he gave a simple answer: “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” (John 7:15, 17.) There is a definite answer—a clear-cut statement. …“If ye will do the will, ye shall know.” And, “to know God, and Jesus Christ, whom he has sent, is eternal life.” [See John 17:3.]10

It is given unto some, says the Lord in the Doctrine and Covenants, to know by the Holy Ghost that Jesus is the Son of God and that He was crucified for the sins of the world [see D&C 46:13].It is to these I refer who stand firm upon the rock of revelation in the testimony that they bear to the world. But the Lord says further there are others to whom it is given to believe upon the testimony of others’ words, that they may also receive salvation if they continue faithful [see D&C 46:14]. To all these, however, there comes the testimony also of daily experience.

The Latter-day Saints throughout the world find confirmation of their testimony in every performance of duty. They know that the gospel teaches them to be better individuals; that obedience to the principles of the gospel makes them stronger men, and truer women. Every day such knowledge comes to them, and they cannot gainsay it; they know that obedience to the gospel of Jesus Christ makes them better and truer husbands, true and honored wives, obedient children. They know that obedience to the principles of the gospel makes them in every respect ideal home-builders; the ideal is there, they sense it in their minds, they cannot gainsay it, they know it, and they know that transgression of these principles will have the opposite effect upon their individual lives and upon their home lives. They know that obedience to the gospel fosters true brotherhood and fellowship among mankind; they know that they are better citizens by virtue of obedience unto the laws and ordinances. So, as they go through their daily acts, and apply religion in their vocation, the truth of the Gospel becomes exemplified in their lives.11

You, no doubt, have met people who … wonder how it is that this Church manifests such vitality and growth. The secret is this, that every true Latter-day Saint possesses individually the assurance that this is the work of God, the same power that gave Peter and John strength to stand before their accusers and declare openly and boldly in the Sanhedrin that “Jesus whom ye crucified is the power by which this man was made whole,” that His name is the only name given among men by which they can be saved [see Acts 4:10, 12].

The secret lies in the testimony possessed by each individual who is faithful in the membership of the Church of Christ, that the gospel consists of correct principles. … This testimony has been revealed to every sincere man and woman who has conformed to the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ, obeyed the ordinances and become entitled to and have received the Spirit of God, the Holy Ghost, to guide them. Every individual stands independent in his sphere in that testimony, just as [the] thousands of incandescent lamps which [make] Salt Lake City … so brilliant at night, each one of which stands and shines in its own sphere, yet the light in it is produced by the same power, the same energy, from which all the other lights receive their energy.12

If we receive the witness of man, the witness of God is greater, for this is the witness of God which he has testified of his Son: “He that believeth on the Son of God hath witness in himself.” [1 John 5:10.] There is a witness of the Spirit. God does reveal today to the human soul the reality of the resurrection of the Lord, the divinity of this great work, the truth, the divine and eternal truth, that God lives, not as a power, an essence, a force, as electricity, but as our Father in heaven. … God reveals to the soul his existence. He reveals the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, who came to earth to give to men the great reality of the existence of God and his Son.13

With truth as our guide, our companion, our ally, our inspiration, we may tingle with the consciousness of our kinship with the Infinite, and all the petty trials, sorrows, and sufferings of this life will fade away as the temporary, harmless visions seen in a dream. That is our privilege through God’s blessing and guidance if we apply in daily activity the spiritual blessings and privileges of the gospel of Jesus Christ.14

A testimony of the gospel is an anchor to the soul.

The testimony of the gospel is an anchor to the soul in the midst of confusion and strife. …Knowledge of God and His laws, means stability, means contentment, means peace, and with that a heart full of love reaching out to our fellow man offering the same blessings, the same privileges.15

We cannot truly believe that we are the children of God, and that God exists, without believing in the final inevitable triumph of the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. If we believe that, we shall have less worry about the destruction of the world and the present civilization, because God has established his Church never to be thrown down nor given to another people. And as God lives, and his people are true to him and to one another, we need not worry about the ultimate triumph of truth.

… If you have that testimony [of truth] on your side, you can pass through the dark valley of slander, misrepresentation, and abuse, undaunted as though you wore a magic suit of armor that no bullet could enter, no arrow could pierce. You can hold your head high, toss it fearlessly and defiantly, look every man calmly and unflinchingly in the eye. … You will know that all will come out right in the end; that it must come; that all must flee before the great white light of truth, as the darkness slinks away into nothingness in the presence of the sunburst.16

Suggestions for Study and Discussion

What does it mean to have a testimony of Jesus Christ and His gospel? Why is a testimony the most precious possession we can obtain? (See pages 164–65.) Why is it essential that we each have an individual testimony?

What must we do to receive a witness of the truth? (See pages 165–68.) Why is obedience an integral part of a strong testimony? What part does the Holy Ghost have in our obtaining a testimony?

Why is it important to continue to strengthen our testimonies throughout our lives? What ways have you found to nourish your testimony?

What can we do to help our children receive a testimony of Jesus Christ and His gospel?

President McKay taught that a “testimony of the gospel is an anchor to the soul” (page 168). Why do we need a testimony to anchor our souls? (See page 168.) How has your testimony protected and strengthened you through the trials of life?

Why is it important that we share our testimonies with others? What blessings have you experienced as a result of bearing testimony?

Related Scriptures: Matthew 16:13–17; Luke 22:32; John 7:17; 14:26; Ether 12:4; Moroni 10:3–5; D&C 1:39; 93:24–28

Notes

1. Treasures of Life, comp. Clare Middlemiss (1962), 228.

2. Treasures of Life, 228–30.

3. Cherished Experiences from the Writings of President David O. McKay, comp. Clare Middlemiss, rev. ed. (1976), 7.

4. Treasures of Life, 232.

5. In Conference Report, Oct. 1953, 88.

6. In Conference Report, Apr. 1948, 172.

7. In Conference Report, Oct. 1966, 136.

8. In Conference Report, Oct. 1965, 145–46.

9. Ancient Apostles (1918), 49.

10. In Conference Report, Oct. 1953, 88–89.

11. In Conference Report, Oct. 1912, 121; paragraphing altered.

12. In Conference Report, Oct. 1912, 120–21.

13. In Conference Report, Oct. 1925, 111.

14. In Conference Report, Apr. 1958, 130.

15. In Conference Report, Oct. 1912, 122.

16. In Conference Report, Apr. 1969, 152.

The Constitution, September 6, 1986. (Possibly a publication by Foundation For The United States Constitution – see their business registry here).

(Article highlights:)

I remember the arguments and “facts” with which we made our case, and what the other side said, too. In every case, without exception, time has proved the Left wrong. And just as consistently the anticommunists were proved right.

The New Left, of which I was one of the founders, was repelled by the evils it was forced to see. It turned its back on the Soviet model of Stalin and his heirs. But the Sandinista  vanguard was neither embarrassed nor repelled.

My former comrades: You betray the tangible good around you for a socialist pie-in-the-sky that has meant horrible deaths and miserable lives for hundreds of millions.

In the turbulent 1960s, David Horowitz was a hero among campus radicals. He was an editor of the subversive Ramparts magazine and a founder of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, whose purpose was to help the Viet Cong thwart U.S. efforts to prevent the communist takeover of South Vietnam. His early books include Student (1962) and Empire and Revolution: A Radical Interpretation of Contemporary History (1970).

Those were the Berkeley years. Since then, the terrifying realities of life and death under the communist regimes he once applauded have wrought a complete change in his attitude toward Marxism. Recently he said, “In the abstract, it all sounds very good. Marxism is a religion, but it’s a religion in which the promise is not in the next world but in this world. And when you look and see what radicals do and what the actual record is, you see that in the name of some future paradise they create present hell.”

On April 4 of this year [1986], Horowitz returned to the University of California at Berkeley campus to deliver a speech, a somewhat different version of the article printed below. He did not get to finish. Shocked and outraged by his “betrayal” of the radical cause, his former comrades of the left shouted him down.

This article first appeared in the June 1986 issue of Commentary and is reprinted in edited and condensed form by permission of the publisher.

TWENTY-FIVE years ago I was one of the founders of the New Left. I was one of the organizers of the first political demonstrations on the Berkeley campus – and indeed on any campus – to protest our government’s anticommunist policies in Cuba and Vietnam. Tonight I come before you as the kind of man I used to tell myself I would never be: a supporter of President Reagan, a committed opponent of communist rule in Nicaragua. I offer no apologies for my present position. It was what I thought was the humanity of the Marxist idea that made me what I was then; it is the inhumanity of what I have seen to be the Marxist reality that has made me what I am now. If my former comrades who support the Sandinistas were to pause for a moment and then plunge their busy political minds into the human legacies of their activist pasts, they would instantly drown in an ocean of blood.

The issue before us is not whether it is morally right for the United States to arm the contras, or whether there are unpleasant men among them. Nor is it whether the United States should defer to the wisdom of the Contadora powers – more than thirty years ago the United States tried to overthrow Somoza, and it was the Contadora powers of the time who bailed him out.

The issue before us and before all people who cherish freedom is how to oppose a Soviet imperialism so vicious and so vast as to dwarf any previously known. An “ocean of blood” is no metaphor. As we speak here tonight, this empire whose axis runs through Havana and now Managua – is killing hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians to consolidate a dictatorship whose policies against its black citizens make the South African government look civilized and humane.

A second issue, especially important to me, is the credibility and commitment of the American Left.

In his speech on Nicaragua, President Reagan invoked the Truman Doctrine, the first attempt to oppose Soviet expansion through revolutionary surrogates. I marched against the Truman Doctrine in 1948 and defended, with the Left, the revolutions in Russia and China, in. Eastern Europe and Cuba, in Cambodia and Vietnam – just as the Left defends the Sandinistas today.

And I remember the arguments and “facts” with which we made our case and what the other side said, too – the Presidents who came and went, and the anticommunists on the Right, the William Buckleys and the Ronald Reagans. And in every case, without exception, time has proved the Left wrong. Wrong in its views of the revolutionaries’ intentions, and wrong about the facts of their revolutionary rule. And just as consistently the anticommunists were proved right.

Today the Left dismisses Reagan’s warnings about Soviet expansion as anticommunist paranoia, a threat to the peace, and a mask for American imperialism. We said the same things about Truman when he warned us then. Russia’s control of Eastern Europe, we said, was only a defensive buffer, a temporary response to American powerfirst, because Russia had no nuclear weapons; and then, because it lacked the missiles to deliver them.

Today, the Soviet Union is a nuclear superpower, missiles and all, but it has not given up an inch of the empire which it gained during World War II – not Eastern Europe, not the Baltic states which Hitler delivered to Stalin and whose nationhood Stalin erased and which are now all but forgotten, not even the Kurile Islands which were once part of Japan.

Not only have the Soviets failed to relinquish their conquests in all these years – years of dramatic, total decolonization in the West – but their growing strength and the wounds of Vietnam have encouraged them to reach for more. South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Ethiopia, Yemen, Mozambique, and Angola are among the dominoes which have recently fallen into the Soviet orbit. And to further expand its territorial core – which apologists still refer to as a “defensive perimeter” – Moscow has already slaughtered a million peasants in Afghanistan, an atrocity warmly endorsed by the Sandinista government.

To any self-respecting socialist, praise for such barbarism would be an inconceivable outrage – as it was to the former Sandinista, now contra, Eden Pastora. But praise for the barbarians is sincere tribute coming from the Sandinista rulers, because they see themselves as an integral part of the Soviet empire itself.

In all the Americas, Fidel Castro was the only head of state to cheer the Soviet tanks as they rolled over the brave people of Prague. And cheering right along with Fidel were Carlos Fonseca, Tomas Borge, Humberto Ortega, and the other creators of the present Nicaraguan regime.

One way to assess what has happened in Nicaragua is to realize that wherever Soviet tanks crush freedom from now on, there will be two governments in the Americas supporting them all the way.

About its own crimes and for its own criminals, the Left has no memory at all.

To the Left I grew up in, along with the Sandinista founders, Stalin’s Russia was a socialist paradise, the model of the liberated future. Literacy to the uneducated, power to the weak, justice to the Forgotten – we praised the Soviet Union then, just as the Left praises the Sandinistas now.

And just as they ignore warnings like the one that has come from Violetta Chamorro, publisher of La Prensa, the paper which led the fight against Somoza, and a member of the original Sandinista junta – “With all my heart, I tell you it is worse here now than it was in the times of the Somoza dictatorship” – so we dismissed the anti-Soviet “lies” about Stalinist repression.

In the society we hailed as a new human dawn, 100 million people were put in slave-labor camps, in conditions rivaling Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Between 30 and 40 million people were killed – in peacetime, in the daily routine of socialist rule. While leftists applauded their progressive policies and guarded their frontiers, Soviet Marxists killed more peasants, more workers, and even more communists than all the capitalist governments together since the beginning of time.

And for the entire duration of this nightmare, the William Buckleys and Ronald Reagans  and the other anticommunists went on telling the world exactly what was happening. And all that time the pro-Soviet Left and its fellow-travelers went on denouncing them as reactionaries and liars, using the same contemptuous terms with which the Left attacks the President and his supporters today.

The Left would still be denying the Soviet atrocities if the perpetrators themselves had not finally acknowledged their crimes. In 1956, in a secret speech to the party elite, Khrushchev made the crimes a communist fact; but it was only the CIA that actually made the fact public, allowing radicals to come to terms with what they had done.

Khrushchev and his cohorts could not have cared less about the misplaced faith and misspent lives of their naive supporters on the Left. The Soviet rulers were concerned about themselves: Stalin’s mania had spread the slaughter into his henchmen’s ranks; they wanted to make totalitarianism safe for its rulers. In place of a dictator whose paranoia could not be controlled, they instituted a dictatorship by directorate which (not coincidentally) is the form of rule in Nicaragua today. Repression would work one way only: from the privileged top of society to the powerless bottom.

Because the truth had to be admitted at last, the Left all over the world was forced to redefine itself in relation to the Soviet facts. China’s communist leader Mao liked Stalin’s way better. Twenty-five million people died in the “great leaps” and “cultural revolutions” he then launched. In Europe and America, however, a new anti-Stalinist Left was born. This New Left, of which I was one of the founders, was repelled by the evils it was now forced to see, and embarrassed by the tarnish the Soviet totalitarians had brought to the socialist cause. It turned its back on the Soviet model of Stalin and his heirs.

But the Sandinista vanguard was neither embarrassed nor repelled. In 1957, Carlos Fonseca, the founding father of the Sandinista Front, visited the Soviet Union with its newly efficient totalitarian state. To Fonseca, as to Borge and his other comrades, the Soviet monstrosity was their revolutionary dream come true. In his pamphlet, A Nicaraguan in Moscow, Fonseca proclaimed Soviet communism his model for Latin America's revolutionary future.

This vision of a Soviet America is now being realized in Nicaragua. The comandante directorate, the army, and the secret police are already mirrors of the Soviet state – not only structurally but in their personnel, trained and often manned by agents of the Soviet axis.

But the most important figure in this transformation is not a Nicaraguan at all. For twenty years, from the time the Sandinistas first arrived in Havana, they were disciples of Fidel Castro. With his blessings they went on to Moscow, where Stalin’s henchman completed their revolutionary course. Fidel is the image in which the Sandinista leadership has created itself and the author of its strategy. Its politburo, the comandante directorate, was personally created by Fidel in Havana on the eve of the final struggle, sealed with a pledge of millions in military aid. It was Fidel who supplied the arms with which the Sandinistas waged their battles, just as he supplied the Cuban general – Zenen Casals – who directed their victorious campaign (just as the Soviets supplied the general who directed Fidel’s own victory at the Bay of Pigs). Without Castro’s intervention, Arturo Cruz and the other anti-Somoza and pro-democratic contras would be the government of Nicaragua today.

And it was Fidel who showed the Sandinistas how to steal the revolution after the victory, and how to secure their theft by manipulating their most important allies: the American Left and its liberal sympathizers.

Twenty-five years ago Fidel was also a revolutionary hero to us on the New Left. Like today’s campus radical, we became “coffee-pickers” and passengers on the revolutionary tour, and we hailed the literacy campaigns, health clinics, and other wonders of the people’s state.

When Fidel spoke, his words were revolutionary music to our ears: “Freedom with bread. Bread without terror.” “A revolution neither red nor black, but Cuban olive-green.” And so in Managua today: “Not [Soviet) communism but Nicaraguan sandinismo” is the formula Fidel’s imitators proclaim.

Fidel’s political poems put radicals all over the world under his spell. But all the fine gestures and words with which Fidel seduced us and won our support – the open Marxism, the socialist humanism, the independent path-turned out to be calculated lies. Even as he proclaimed his color to be olive-green, he was planning to make his revolution Moscow red.

So cynical was Fidel’s strategy that at the time it was difficult for many to comprehend. One by one Fidel began removing his own comrades from the revolutionary regime and replacing them with Cuban communists.

Cuba’s communists were then a party in disgrace. They had opposed the revolution; they had even served in the cabinet of the tyrant Batista while the revolution was taking place!

But this was all incidental to Fidel. Fidel knew how to use people. And Fidel was planning a new revolution he could trust the communists to support: he had decided to turn Cuba into a Soviet state. And Fidel also knew that he could no longer trust his own comrades, because they had made a revolution they thought was going to be Cuban olive-green.

Although Fidel removed socialists and the Sandinistas removed democrats, the pattern of betrayal has been the same.

To gain power the Sandinistas concealed their true intention (a Soviet state) behind a revolutionary lie (a pluralist democracy). To consolidate power they fashioned a second lie (democracy, but only within the revolution), and those who believed in the first lie were removed. At the end of the process there will be no democracy in Nicaragua at all, which is exactly what Fonseca and the Sandinistas intended when they began.

To believe in the revolutionary dream is the tragedy of its supporters; to exploit the dream is the talent of its dictators. Revolutionary cynicism, the source of this talent, is Fidel’s most important teaching to his Sandinista disciples. This is the faculty that allows the comandantes to emulate Fidel himself: to promise democracy and organize repression, to attack imperialism and join an empire, to talk peace and plan war, to champion justice and deliver Nicaragua to a fraternity of inhumane, repressive, militarized, and economically crippled states.

“We used to have one main prison, now we have many,” begins the lament of Carlos Franqui, a former Fidelista, for the paradise that Nicaragua has now gained. “We used to have a few barracks; now we have many. We used to have many plantations; now we have only one, and it belongs to Fidel. Who enjoys the fruits of the revolution, the houses of the rich, the luxuries of the rich? The comandante and his court.”

To this grim accounting must be added the economic ruin that Fidel’s Marxism has wrought. Among the proven failures of the Marxist promise, this is the most fateful of all. The failure of Marxist economies to satisfy basic needs, let alone compete with the productive capitalisms of the West, has produced the military-industrial police states which call themselves socialist today. Nicaragua, with its Sandinista-created economic crisis and its massive military build-up, is but the latest example of this pattern.

Twenty-five years ago we on the Left applauded when Fidel denounced Cuba’s one-crop economy and claimed that U.S. imperialism was the cause of the nation's economic plight. It seemed so self evident. Cuba was a fertile island with a favorable climate, but U.S. sugar plantations had monopolized its arable land, and the sugar produced was a product for export, not a food for Cubans. The poor of Cuba had been sacrificed on the altar of imperialist profit. Whenever we were confronted by the political costs Castro’s revolution might entail, we were confident that this gain alone – Cuba’s freedom to grow food for Cubans – would make any sacrifice worthwhile. The same illusion – that the revolution will mean better lives for Nicaragua’s poor – underlies every defense of the Sandinistas today.

It is nearly three decades since Cuba’s liberation, and Cuba is still a one-crop economy. But the primary market for its sugar is now the Soviet Union instead of the United States. Along with this have come other economic differences as well. Cuba’s external debt is now 200 times what it was when Fidel took power. And it would be far greater if the communist caudillo had not mortgaged his country to his Soviet patron. So bankrupt is the economy Castro has created that it requires a Soviet subsidy of over $4 billion a year, one-quarter of the entire national income, to keep it afloat. Before the revolution, Cubans enjoyed the highest per-capita income in Latin America. Now they are economic prisoners of permanent rationing and chronic shortages in even the most basic necessities. The allotted rations tell a story in themselves: two pounds of meat per citizen per month; 20 percent less clothing than the allotment a decade earlier; and in rice, a basic staple of Cuba’s poor, half the yearly consumption under the old Batista regime.

The idea that Marxist revolution will mean economic benefit for the poor has proved to be the most deadly illusion of all. It is because Marxist economies cannot satisfy economic needs – not even at the levels of the miserably corrupt capitalisms of Batista and Somoza – that Marxist states require permanent repression to stifle unrest and permanent enemies to saddle with the blame.

This is also why Castro has found a new national product to supply to the Soviet market (a product his Sandinista disciples are in the process of developing in their turn). The product is the Cuban nation itself, as a military base for Soviet expansion.

Nicaragua is now in the grip of utterly cynical and utterly ruthless men, exceeding even their sponsors in aggressive hostility to the United States. The Soviets may be the covert patrons of the world’s terrorist plague, but not even they have had the temerity to embrace publicly the assassin Gadhafi as a “brother” the way the Sandinistas have. The aim of the Sandinista revolution is to crush its society from top to bottom, to institute totalitarian rule, and to use the country as a base to spread communist terror and communist regimes throughout the hemisphere.

The Sandinista anthem which proclaims the Yankee to be the “enemy of mankind” expresses precisely the revolutionaries’ sentiment and goal. That goal is hardly to create a more just society – the sordid record would dissuade any reformer from choosing the Communist path – but to destroy the societies still outside the totalitarian perimeter, and their chief protector, the United States.

Support for the contras is a first line of defense. For Nicaraguans, a contra victory would mean the restoration of the democratic leadership from whom the Sandinistas stole the revolution in the first place, the government that Nicaragua would have had if Cuba had not intervened. For the countries of the Americas, it would mean a halt in the communist march that threatens their freedoms and their peace.

In conclusion, I would like to say this to my former comrades and successors on the Left: you are self-righteous and blind in your belief that you are part of a movement to advance human progress and liberate mankind. You are in fact in league with the darkest and most reactionary forces of the modern world, whose legacies – as the record attests – are atrocities and oppressions on a scale unknown in the human past. It is no accident that radicals in power have slaughtered so many of their own people. Hatred of self, and by extension one’s country, is the root of the radical cause.

As American radicals, the most egregious sin you commit is to betray the privileges and freedoms ordinary people from all over the world have created in this country – privileges and freedoms that ordinary people all over the world would feel blessed to have themselves. But the worst of it is this: you betray all this tangible good that you can see around you for socialist pie-in-the-sky that has meant horrible deaths and miserable lives for the hundreds of millions who have so far fallen under its sway.