The Pharisees, angry at Jesus’ criticism of them and jealous of the crowds that followed him, sent clever men out to question Jesus while he was speaking in the hope of tripping him up.  But he confounded them time and again, as when they asked him if it was lawful to pay taxes to the hated Romans, and he replied: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but give to God what is God’s.”  Or when they asked if a woman caught in adultery should be stoned to death, and Christ said: “Let the man among you who has no sin be the first to cast a stone at her.”
      But Christians throughout the world believe that Jesus was more than just a good and holy man; they believe that he was the Son of God, the Messiah promised in the Old Testament.  As evidence of their belief, Christians cite the fulfillment in Jesus of Old Testament prophecies regarding the place and circumstances of the Messiah’s birth, the betrayal and suffering he endured, and the manner of his death.
      But the most convincing evidence of Jesus’ claim to be God was the spectacular miracles he performed before hundreds and even thousands of eyewitnesses (“These very works which I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me”).  He changed water into wine; cured the blind, deaf and lame; exorcised demons from people; fed thousands with only a few loaves of bread and fishes; and raised three people from the dead, including his friend Lazarus.
      The raising of Lazarus four days after he had died was the last straw as far as the chief priests and Pharisees were concerned. They wove a plot to kill Jesus, getting unexpected help from one of Christ’s own apostles, Judas, who was willing to betray his master for 30 pieces of silver.  Jesus was arrested late at night, put through the mockery of a trial, beaten and tortured, and then put to death on the orders of Pontius Pilate.
      The followers of Jesus thought they had seen the last of him when his body was taken down from the cross and placed in a borrowed grave outside Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago.  But, three days later, the tomb was found to be empty and more than a dozen people reported having seen Jesus alive that Sunday.  Over the next 40 days, Jesus was seen in different places at different times by small groups of people and by large groups, including a crowd of 500.  On the 40th day, according to reliable eyewitness accounts, he gave his apostles their final instructions, to carry his teachings “to the ends of the earth,” and then rose up into the heavens, not to return until the end of the world.
      Whatever attitude people hold toward Jesus Christ, whether they believe him to be God or not, there is no question that if his teachings were followed faithfully by everyone, the world would be a better and more peaceful place to live.
      The above summary of our Lord’s birth and life was written by James J. Drummey and first published in The Review of the News.

True and False Liberation Theology, part 2
by Ronald Nash

commanded to share that truth through evangelism.  “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel,” they are told.
      What kind of evangelism do liberation theologians practice?  What gospel do they preach?  To what message and cause do they seek converts?  While it is important to feed the hungry, this duty does not replace the church’s obligation to feed the spiritually hungry with the bread of life.  According to people with firsthand knowledge of the situation, the major emphasis of revolutionary Christians in Nicaragua is not conversion to Christ but conversion to the cause of the Sandinista revolution.  Consequently, one of these observers writes, “[I]t is not accidental that while in Nicaragua there is no available evidence of the conversion of Marxists to Christ due to the preachings of the revolutionary Christians, there is ample evidence of the opposite phenomenon.  Christians have become atheists through a process that began with their conversion to liberation theology.” Attempts to find samples of liberation writings that attempt to evangelize unbelieving Marxists and non-Marxists to the Christian faith always come up empty-handed.  So-called Christian Marxists it seems are more interested in converting Christians to Marxism than they are in converting Marxists to Christianity.  This failure with regard to Test Number Two brands all such efforts as false liberation theology.
      A true liberation theology will give priority to its gospel message.  Jesus commanded His followers to seek the kingdom of God first (Matt. 6:33).  Even if a self-professed liberation theologian accepts the truth of the New Testament gospel and fulfills his obligation to share that message through evangelism, his failure to give that gospel priority over his secular interests and ideology will mark his system as a false liberation theology.  The gospel message must not be subordinated to a political agenda.  But one of the more serious problems with liberation theology is its tendency to produce a reorientation (a conversion, if you will) within its followers where the historically essential concerns of the Christian faith are replaced by or subordinated to a revolutionary political agenda.
      Christians need to learn that there may be liberation theologies that are not liberating at all.  The case of Nicaragua shows that what has been advanced by many revolutionary Christians as the most advanced form of liberation theology has been nothing else than a justification for Marxism-Leninism clothed in a religious garment—a revolution that is not for Christ, nor even for the poor but for communism . . . in the name of Christ.

      As Humberto Belli goes on to explain, the revolutionary Christians in Nicaragua “have been instruments of a subtle ideological campaign to substitute for the Christian gospel the Marxist creed, and for the unconditional loyalty due to Christianity the loyalty to a political organization, totally secular and even atheistic.
      Since so many liberation thinkers are Roman Catholic, it is helpful to remember that the message of Pope John Paul II to the Third General Conference of Latin American Bishops held in Pueblo, Mexico (1979) contained a clear warning to liberation theologians.  The pope spoke of people who

Depict Jesus as a political activist, as a fighter against       Roman domination and the authorities, and even as someone involved in the class struggle.  This conception of       Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive from Nazareth, does not tally with the Church’s [teaching]. . . . Jesus unequivocally rejects recourse to violence.  He opens his message of conversion to all. . . . His mission . . .has to do with complete and integral salvation through a love that brings transformation, peace, pardon, and reconciliation.

      Clearly, the pope agrees that the gospel must not be made subordinate to secular ends.

Russian Meltdown: Don’t Blame Capitalism
by Stephen Moor and James Carter

      “Capitalism has failed.”  That’s the spin that European socialists and American liberals are attaching to the economic meltdown in Russia today.
      The Washington Post recently declared that Russians have “discovered the high costs of a free market.”  Left-wing economic commentator Robert Kutner has opined that the collapse of the Russian economy is a natural repercussion of thrusting free-market capitalist dogma on the Russian people.
      Apparently a large number of Russian citizens agree, with many complaining more loudly than ever that “things were better under Communist rule.”
      Whatever the cause of the Russian economic free fall, it is absurd to blame capitalism.  There has never been anything resembling capitalism in Russia over the past ten years.
      This is a nation that has no rule of law; no right of contract; no culture of capitalism; a currency of no value; and a government run by mafioso-type thugs.  That’s lawless chaos; not Adam Smith-style capitalism.
      Few Americans can fully appreciate the extent of the economic collapse in Mother Russia.  In today’s global economy, this is a country that has a comparative advantage in virtually nothing – other than arms production and vodka– and now the “reformers” in Russia want to nationalize the liquor industry.  The “Made in Russia” label is a pseudonym for junk.
      While in Silicon Valley recently, one of the authors spoke with a CEO from a major semi-conductor company who had recently visited a leading Russian chip maker.  He said the plant was an anachronistic joke.  It was producing purely copy-cat technology that was literally 5-10 years out of date.  This in an industry where a technology 18 months behind the curve is obsolete.

Mafioso Rule

      At the root of virtually every national economic crisis– whether in Asia, Europe, Africa, or Latin America– is a collapse of the currency.  So it is with the ruble today.  After several years of monetary prudence and tempered inflation, the Russian government has committed the age-old sin of churning up the printing presses.
      After the devaluation this summer, the ruble lost half its value relative to the dollar.  Latest reports are that inflation is running at nearly 40% a month.  A Washington Post report indicated that a “Russian peasant standing in a supermarket line saw the price of sugar rise three times before he reached the counter.”  Hyperinflation appears right around the corner.
      When the Soviet economy crumbled in the early 1990s,

communism was supposed to be replaced with a system of democratic capitalism.  It never happened.  Stalinist central planning was replaced with a political system that can be described only as mafioso rule.
      According to the Hudson Institute, “20,000 crimes connected with official corruption are recorded every year, but this is probably less than 1% of the real total.  A recent poll of Moscow businessmen revealed that several thousand bribes are given and taken in the capital every day.”  Corruption and crime act as confiscatory taxes and make normal, unfettered commerce an impossibility.
      Our assessment is that Russia is headed for a deep and protracted period of economic chaos and very possibly a return to more overt statist control.  Russian leaders are now talking of instituting a whole series of wrong-headed reforms: even more money creation to liquidate bad debts, renewed economic subsidies for favored industries, and higher taxes and stiffer tax collection efforts.
      Things will continue to get much worse before they get better (and there’s no assurance they will get better anytime soon).  Industrial production is down 9% in 1998.  GDP is down 8% this year, and will be down more before the year is over.
      The stock market has lost 80% of its value in a year.  (This would be the equivalent of the U.S. stock market falling from 8,000 to 1,600.) Store shelves are emptying.  One standing joke in Russia is that an elderly woman bought three bags of sugar “before the hoarders could get a hold of it all.”
      This winter could get ugly.

Social Statistics Bleaker Still

      Russia’s social statistics are bleaker still.  This is a nation that is regressing in terms of its vital health conditions.  Life expectancy has actually fallen by several years in Russia and now stands at 56 for males – lower than in most desperately poor Third World countries.  This is one of the few times in recorded history when a nation has had falling life expectancy!
      Leading causes of death are still alcoholism and suicide.  For seven straight years the Russian population has fallen.  This is arguably now the most miserable place on earth to live.
      So what should be the U.S. response to this Russian crisis?
      First, we should recognize that Russia is economically inconsequential.  Russia is America’s 32nd largest trading partner.   It ranks behind Ireland, Israel, Colombia, and even the Dominican Republic– and just a whisker ahead of Nigeria– in total U.S. exports and imports.
      In the global marketplace, Russia is also a nonentity.  In 1997 Russia accounted for 1.7% of world trade and about 3% of European trade.  Russia could catch pneumonia and the United States wouldn’t even sneeze.

      Second, we should recognize also that Russia matters to the United States and to the world economy for only one reason.  This is a nation, as Ronald Reagan correctly put it, that is good at only one thing: making war.
      Russia remains a large potential menace to the rest of the world because of its military capability – a dangerous bear that still lurks in the woods.  The Russian economic-political turmoil is precisely why the United States needs to invest in immediate deployment of a strategic defense initiative.  Russia is a country that quite literally has nothing to lose.

IMF’s Legacy of Failure

      Most importantly, stop pouring good money after bad into Russia via the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  The IMF wants another $10 billion for Russia, even though the last $20 billion was hijacked by the corrupt ruling elite.  The most recent $5-billion IMF payment to Russian has not lifted the economy, nor has it trickled down to the peasants and workers fighting deprivation.
      A high-ranking IMF official recently conceded in the Los Angeles Times that “we don’t know what happened to all the money.”  Here’s a clue: The money was stolen by Russian central bankers and transferred to Swiss bank accounts.
      Incredibly, despite the IMF’s legacy of failure in Russia, the Clinton Administration and many Republicans in Congress – most notably Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who thinks it will help agricultural exports – still favor another IMF rescue package.

      American taxpayers, however, should not be forced to fund a welfare safety net for U.S. banks and investment firms that foolishly dumped money into a country that is notoriously inhospitable to capital.  U.S. policy should not be encouraging new capital investment in Russia.  The correct policy is capital flight.
      George Soros recently admitted that he lost $2 billion in East Europe.  It is no wonder he favors an IMF bailout.

Profoundly Ineffective Foreign Policy

      Finally, the profoundly ineffective Clinton Administration foreign policy toward Russia should be discarded.  The Clinton White House has placed too much emphasis on democracy in Russia and too little on encouraging genuine capitalism.  Pseudo-democracy in Russia has led only to a game of political Russian roulette, in which one former Communist thief is replaced with another.
      Polls now show that a majority of Russians would favor a return of the Communists if an election were held today.  What they long for is the return of some sense of order to replace the current chaos.  It is critical for U.S. foreign policy makers to try to convince the Russians that the chaos and economic decline was not caused by capitalism– but its enemies.

Human Events, October 9, 1998,   P. 1

Who’s to Blame for Russia?
by Helle Bering

      On August 17, the day the Russian government devalued the ruble, froze banking assets and declared a debt moratorium, it all came crashing down as Russia’s public debt burden reached preposterous proportions.  By August, the Russian government had 40 billion rubles coming due in treasury bills; that compares with total government revenue of just 21 billion rubles.  Add to that servicing foreign dollar-denominated debt amounting to 6 billion to 7 billion rubles–and that was when the exchange rate was still six rubles to the dollar.  Now the ruble is close to 25 to the dollar, and the debt has increased fourfold since mid-August.
      The most incriminating evidence so far has come from former deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, the “reform” guru, who negotiated the latest loan of $4.8 billion from the International Monetary Fund in July.  In an interview with Kommersant Daily reprinted in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, Mr. Chubais said that the Russian government “conned” the international community to the tune of nearly

 $20 billion by lying about Russian’s fiscal problems.  “In such situations, the authorities have to do it,” so Mr. Chubais explained.  “We ought to.  The financial institutions understand.”
      Where exactly all that money went, needless to say, is a serious matter since none of it seems to have found its way to desperately needy Russians.  Swiss bank accounts?  The Cayman Islands?  Yachts on the French Riviera?  But equally outrageous is the idea, as implied by Mr. Chubais, that IMF economists knew what was going on.
      This view is reinforced by Russian economist Andrei Illarionov, adviser to Mr. Chernomyrdin in 1993-94, who is testifying this week on Capitol Hill.  “It is very unfortunate, but I must say it.  The IMF has supported the irresponsible policies of the Russian government.  In the spring and summer it was absolutely clear that the Russian government’s policies would lead to collapse.”  He also believes that the last thing the West should do now is to pour more money into Russia.  Enough damage has been done already.

The Washington Times, September 10, 1998, P. 23

The Marxist Revival
by Arnold Beichman             

      Whenever a left intellectual needs to get his disaffection with the United States out of his system, he utters the cathartic cry, “America is on the road to fascism.”  The latest example of this truism is the book by the philosopher Richard Rorty, a latterday but tamer version of Herbert Marcuse.  Professor Rorty’s book is Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America.
      The book is suffused with a contempt for the American people, so reminiscent of P. N. Tkachev, Lenin’s intellectual mentor, who put it in words of which Mr. Rorty would surely approve:
      “Neither in the present nor in the future can the people, left to their own resources, bring into existence the social revolution.  Only we revolutionists can accomplish this...social ideals are alien to the people; they belong to the social philosophy of the revolutionary minority.”
      But it is the cry of “fascism” which intrigues me.  Here we have the greatest democratic triumphs in history – the overthrow of fascism and communism and the spread of democracy throughout the world – and Mr. Rorty is worrying that fascism is around the corner.
      Of course the idea is to scare everybody like Dickens’ Fat Boy in Pickwick Papers, “I want to make your flesh creep.”  Marcuse tried that back in the 1960s with his warning of  “incipient fascism.” Tom Hayden, now a California state senator, back in the Marcuse decade announced that “we are now living in 1984.”  William L. Shirer warned that “we may well be the first people to go fascist by the democratic vote.”
      One of the most atrocious smears was by the then president of Howard University, James Cheek, who intoned, “We conquered Hitler, but we have come to embrace Hitlerism.”  And then there is that unforgettable line of then Sen. Walter F. Mondale in 1971: “The sickening truth is that this country is rapidly coming to resemble South Africa.”
      Even normally intelligent commentators joined in the “fascist” America chorus.  Walter Lippmann, no less, told an interviewer that while “the country’s too big for national fascism...I think there will be local fascism.”  Professor Bertram Gross warned of “friendly fascism.”

      The progressive left in America believes as does Mr. Rorty that America is fundamentally reactionary, and from reaction to fascism is but a short leap.  Another professor, Howard Zinn, wrote in the 1960s that “when the United States defines the Soviet sphere as ‘totalitarian’ and the West as ‘free,’  it becomes difficult for Americans to see totalitarian elements in our society, and liberal elements in Soviet society.”  All this was being said at a time when there were almost weekly marches on Washington, when the government’s Armed Forces Radio and Television Network was transmitting broadcasts against the war in Vietnam to our forces in Vietnam, when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers.
      Why this fear, these warnings – in 1998 – of fascism, which in any modern manifestation can hardly be said to exist anywhere since the fall of Hitler, Mussolini, Peron, Salazar, the Greek colonels and Spanish Falangism?   Why these continuing attacks from the left on the American people who, according to Mr. Rorty, are “sadists”?  Why this continuing attempt by left intellectuals to create America as Amerika, the Fourth Reich?
      As Meg Greenfield, The Washington Post’s editorial page editor, has written, “A Martian reading about it [the U.S. as depicted in the media] might in fact suppose America to be composed entirely of abused minorities living in squalid and sadistically run mental hospitals, except for a small elite of venal businessmen and county commissioners who are profiting from the unfortunates’ misery.”
      Mr. Rorty seems to be part of the movement among a sector of American academics who seek to resuscitate a moribund Marxified radicalism even though its defeat has been ratified everywhere in the world by victims and target alike.   I would go so far as to suggest, as Norman Podhoretz did in another context, that Mr. Rorty’s book is a reflection of the pathological state of consciousness among some leading American intellectuals.  While these intellectuals attribute an ineradicable meanness to the American people, they yet hope to persuade these trog-lodytes to embrace their ideas for a better America.  Good luck.

The Washington Times, June 4, 1998, P. 21

q    “If allowed to develop into a full scale regional war, the brutal conflict now raging across Laurent Kabila’s Democratic Republic of Congo threatens to destroy much of post-colonial Africa.  What is alarming about this situation is the extent to which other African states have become involved, seemingly eight directly and five more indirectly.  Essentially, what we have here is a broad coalition of Marxist-led states in support of Kabila, himself an old-time Marxist, while the states supporting the rebels are all Western-oriented.
      “Supporting Kabila are Angola’s Eduardo dos Santos, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Namibia’s Sam Nujoma.  Angola’s support (10,000 troops, artillery, tanks, and aircraft) is pragmatic. Sharing a 1500 km border with the DRC, it fears that if the Angolan civil war re-ignites (an odds-on likelihood) the Congolese border will once again become the chief avenue of support for UNITA.  Mugabe (deploying 3,000 troops) is mainly motivated by the desire to re-assert his leadership of sub-continental Africa, presently lost to Mandela.  Nujoma (a token 250 troops) seeks to stay in power indefintely and instinctively supports a fellow Marxist.
      “Troops from Chad, Sudan, and Mozambique are also reported to be backing Kabila.  Chad has sent in 1000 to 2000 men, the costs carried by Libya.  Sudan denies any involvement, but military sources report that Sudanese Antonovs have bombed rebel positions, and the presence of Sudanese military experts.
      “The rebels, intent on establishing a Tutsi homeland in Congo East, are backed by Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.  De facto if not yet de jure the DRC has already been partitioned into Congo East and Congo West.  Considering the line-up of forces, we might well ask:  Are we witnessing a resumption of the Cold War in Africa?  And, if so, with what result?”

The Aida Parker Newsletter, October 1998, P. 15

q    “The name of Stalin, that bloodthirsty Soviet gangster who succeeded Lenin and allowed millions to die in labour camps and during the deliberately engineered famine in the Ukraine in the early Thirties, may soon be back on world maps.  Communists (the largest bloc in the Russian Parliament) are demanding that the Duma rename Volvograd as Stalingrad.  The city, which witnessed one of the most significant battles of World War 2, bore the name Stalingrad till 1961, but was then renamed because of Stalin’s evil record.  The communists argue that even if Stalin was a ‘violator of human rights,’ he was also the Supreme Commander of the Soviet forces.  Human  rights activists are enraged at the move.  If successful, observe Russian commentators, the consequences of the move could be ‘grave’.”   

The Aida Parker Newsletter, October 1998, P. 15

q    “The leadership of the present [South African] government consists entirely of communists or self-proclaimed ex-communists.  They rule in spite of the fact that the SA media has banned the word ‘communist’ from their columns, in line with the global amnesia about the so-recently failed communist onslaught on humanity.  La luta

continua.  As they say.”

The Aida Parker Newsletter, October 1998, P. 16  

q    “Whether the death toll was 100 million, which is probable, or a “mere” ten million, which is implausible, is not the issue that threw French intellectuals into turmoil at the publication of The Black Box of Communism.  Some persist in saying of Marxism that the ideas were right but the people were wrong.  That, says Anne Applebaum, a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph of London who is writing a book about the Soviet gulag, simply will not do.  “In order to understand this, there is no need to compare Communist crimes with Nazi crimes.  It is pointless to argue over which philosophy, communism or fascism, is ‘worse.’  Both are evil; both should be condemned; those who perpetrated either should be punished; those who sympathized with either should be ashamed.”  Why are there still apologists for Marxism?  Applebaum answers: “Partly this attachment to a philosophy that has been responsible for eighty years of terror is explained by the outcome of World War II: We in the West still cannot admit to ourselves that we defeated one murderous regime with the help of another.  Partly it is a form of Western naivete: History still has not taught us to distinguish between truth and propaganda.  The Nazis committed acts of terror and were open about it, more or less.  Communists committed acts of terror in the name of the greater good, which is why such a substantial minority of people can still be offended by a book that sets out to condemn Marxist regimes.  But whatever the reasons, our inability to condemn left-wing acts of terror as forcefully as right-wing acts of terror does leave open a continued source of moral confusion in the West, one that will no doubt continue to erupt in uneasy and unresolved public debates such as the one that has just played itself out in Paris.  Until Marxism itself is widely seen as an abhorrent philosophy, so it will remain.”

First Things,  June/July 1998,  P. 73

q    “Three weeks in the premiership of Yevgeny Primakov, the honeymoon is over....In fact, 28 percent view Mr. Primakov’s ascension as the beginnings of a “communist coup.” ......real power now lies in the hands of Mr. Primakov and his Cabinet, an odd blend of communists, liberals and chameleons out to save their political skins.
      “The new prime minister, a former KGB spymaster and previously foreign minister, certainly fits the mold of a Soviet-era boss. And his economic plan, published last week in the respected business daily Kommersant, smacks of a return to Soviet-style controls.
      “Published proposals include foreign currency controls, nationalization of many banks, a government-set ruble rate and the creation of a Reconstruction and Development Bank to extend loans to domestic firms.  Only banks with special authorization would be allowed to bring hard currency into the country and ordinary Russians would be banned from buying U.S. dollars.”

The Washington Times, October 6, 1998,  P. A17