Contents

History’s Greatest Killing Machine
by R. J. Rummel

The Decline of Atheism
by Uwe Siemon-Netto

Biblical Christianity and Modern Science
by Tim LaHaye and David Noebel

Red Star Rising
by Bill Gertz

Zimbabwe’s Killing Fields

Brazil Moving Further Left
by Augusto Zimmermann

History’s Greatest Killing Machine
by R. J. Rummel

With the fall of the Soviet Union and communist governments in Eastern Europe, too many have the impression that Marxism, the religion of communism, is dead. Hardly. It is alive and well in many countries still, such as North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, a gaggle of African countries, and in the minds of many South American political leaders. However, of most importance to the future of democracy, communism still pollutes the thinking of a vast multitude of Western academics and intellectuals.
Of all religions, secular and otherwise, that of Marxism has been by far the bloodiest—bloodier than the Catholic Inquisition, the various Catholic crusades, and the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants. In practice, Marxism has meant bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and murderous forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and fraudulent show trials, outright mass murder and genocide.

In total, Marxist regimes murdered nearly 110 million people from 1917 to 1987. For perspective on this incredible toll, note that all domestic and foreign wars during the 20th century killed around 35 million. That is, when Marxists control states, Marxism is more deadly then all the wars of the 20th century, including World Wars I and II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

And what did Marxism, this greatest of human social experiments, achieve for its poor citizens, at this most bloody cost in lives? Nothing positive. It left in its wake an economic, environmental, social and cultural disaster.

The Khmer Rouge—(Cambodian communists) who ruled Cambodia for four years—provide insight into why Marxists believed it necessary and moral to massacre so many of their fellow humans. Their Marxism was married to absolute power. They believed without a shred of doubt that they knew the truth, that they would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness, and that to realize this utopia, they had to mercilessly tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and Buddhist culture, and then totally rebuild a communist society. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of this achievement. Government—the Communist Party—was above any law. All other institutions, religions, cultural norms, traditions and sentiments were expendable.

The Marxists saw the construction of this utopia as a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality—and, as in a real war, noncombatants would unfortunately get caught in the battle. There would be necessary enemy casualties: the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, “wreckers,” intellectuals, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, the rich and landlords. As in a war, millions might die, but these deaths would be justified by the end, as in the defeat of Hitler in World War II. To the ruling Marxists, the goal of a communist utopia was enough to justify all the deaths.

The irony is that in practice, even after decades of total control, Marxism did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the world’s greatest famines have happened within the Soviet Union (about 5 million dead from 1921-23 and 7 million from 1932-33, including 2 million outside Ukraine) and communist China (about 30 million dead from 1959-61). Overall, in the last century almost 55 million people died in various Marxist famines and associated epidemics—a little over 10 million of them were intentionally starved to death, and the rest died as an unintended result of Marxist collectivization and agricultural policies.

What is astonishing is that this “currency” of death by Marxism is not thousands or even hundreds of thousands, but millions of deaths. This is almost incomprehensible – it is as though the whole population of the American New England and Middle Atlantic States, or California and Texas, had been wiped out. And that around 35 million people escaped Marxist countries as refugees was an unequaled vote against Marxist utopian pretensions. Its equivalent would be everyone fleeing California, emptying it of all human beings.

There is a supremely important lesson for human life and welfare to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology: No one can be trusted with unlimited power.

The more power a government has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite, or decree the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives and welfare will be sacrificed. As a government’s power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all corners of culture and society, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens.

As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal wishes, or as today’s Marxists desire, to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. Here, power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite has full authority, other causes and conditions can operate to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres or whatever killing the members of an elite feel is warranted. But it is power—unchecked, unconstrained, uncontrolled—that is the killer.

Our academic and intellectual Marxists today are getting a free ride. They get a certain respect because of their words about improving the lot of the worker and the poor, their utopian pretensions. But when empowered, Marxism has failed utterly, as has fascism. Instead of being treated with respect and tolerance, Marxists should be treated as though they wished a deadly plague on all of us.

The next time you come across or are lectured by one of our indigenous Marxists, or almost the equivalent, leftist zealots, ask them how they can justify the murder of over a hundred million their absolutist faith has brought about, and the misery it has created for many hundreds of millions more.

—Worldnetdaily.com, December 15, 2004

The Decline of Atheism
by Uwe Siemon-Netto

Godlessness is in trouble, according to a growing consensus among philosophers, intellectuals and scholars.

“Atheism as a theoretical position is in decline worldwide,” Munich theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg said in an interview.

His colleague Alister McGrath agrees.

Atheism’s “future seems increasingly to lie in the private beliefs of individuals rather than in the great public domain it once regarded as its habitat,” Mr. McGrath wrote in the U.S. magazine, Christianity Today.

Two developments are plaguing atheism these days. One is that it appears to be losing its scientific underpinnings.

The other is the historical experience of hundreds of millions of people worldwide that atheists are in no position to claim the moral high ground.

British philosopher Anthony Flew, once as hard-nosed a humanist as any has turned his back on atheism, saying it is impossible for evolution to account for the fact that one single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Mr. Flew still does not accept the God of the Bible, but he has embraced the concept of intelligent design—a stunning desertion of a former intellectual ambassador of secular humanism to the belief in some form of intelligence behind the design of the universe.

A few years ago, European scientists snickered when studies in the United States—for example, at Harvard and Duke universities—showed a correlation between faith, prayer and recovery from illness.

Now 1,200 studies at research centers around the world have come to similar conclusions, according to Psychologie Heute, a German journal, citing, for example, the marked improvement of multiple sclerosis patients in Germany’s Ruhr District because of “spiritual resources.”

Atheism’s other Achilles’ heels are the acts on inhumanity and lunacy committed in its name.

“With time, [atheism] turned out to have just as many frauds, psychopaths and careerists as religion does. ...With Stalin and Madalyn Murray O’Hair, atheism seems to have ended up mimicking the vices of the Spanish Inquisition and the worst televangelists, respective,” Mr. McGrath wrote in Christianity Today.

The Rev. Paul M. Zulehner, dean of Vienna University’s divinity school and one of the world’s most distinguished sociologists of religion, said atheists in Europe have become “an infinitesimally small group.”

“There are not enough of them to be used for sociological research,” he said.

Mr. Zulehner cautioned, however, that the decline of atheism in Europe does not mean that re-Christianization is taking place.

“What we are observing instead is a re-paganization,” he said.

The Rev. Gerald McDermott, an Episcopal priest and professor of religion and philosophy at Roanoke College in Salem, Va., said a similar phenomenon is taking place in the United States.

“The rise of all sorts of paganism is creating a false spirituality that proves to be a more dangerous rival to the Christian faith than atheism,” he said.

After all, a Satanist is also “spiritual.”

Mr. Pannenburg, a Lutheran, praised the Roman Catholic Church for handling this peril more wisely than many of his fellow Protestants.

“The Catholics stick to the central message of Christianity without making any concessions in the ethical realm,” he said, referring to issues such as same-sex “marriages” and abortion.

In a similar vein, Mr. Zulehner, a Catholic, sees Christianity’s greatest opportunity when its message addresses two seemingly irreconcilable quests of contemporary humanity—the quest for freedom and truth.

“Christianity alone affirms that truth and God’s dependability are inseparable properties to which freedom is linked.” As for the ‘peril of spirituality,” Mr. Zulehner sounded quite sanguine.

He concluded from his research that in the long run, the survival of worldviews should be expected to follow this lineup: “The great world religions are best placed,” he said.

As a distant second he sees the diffuse forms of spirituality. Atheism, he said, will come in at the tail end.

—The Washington Times, March 4, 2005

Biblical Christianity and Modern Science
by Tim LaHaye and David Noebel

Don’t think for a moment that only the “common” man or one of mediocre intelligence finds faith acceptable. That is a misconception made popular by secularists. Historically, it just is not true! Some of the most brilliant, well-educated individuals in history have been men and women of faith.

Consider such luminaries as John Wycliffe (1320-1384), Martin Luther (1483-1546), John Calvin (1509-1564), Sir Isasac Newton (1642-1727), and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). Consider that nearly all the men who founded the various sciences—Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, Georges Cuvier, Charles Babbage, Lord Rayleigh, James C. Maxwell, Michael Faraday, Ambrose Fleming, Lord Kelvin, Jean-Henri Fabre, William Herschel, Gregor Mendel, Louis Agassiz, James Simpson, Blaise Pascal, William Ramsay, John Ray, Bernhard Reimann, Matthew Maury, David Brewster, John Woodward, Rudolf Virchow, Carolus Linnaeus, and Humphrey Davy—were men of faith. Modern-day Secular Humanists claim science as their own domain but fail to mention that the father of the modern scientific method itself, Sir Francis Bacon, was a committed Christian.

Dr. Francis Schaeffer calls Bacon (1561-1626) “the major prophet of the scientific revolution.” A lawyer, essayist, and lord chancellor of England, Bacon stressed careful observation and a systematic collection of information to unlock nature’s secrets. He took the Bible seriously, including the historic Fall.

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), a German astronomer known as the father of modern astronomy, was the first to show that the planets’ orbits are elliptical, not circular. His faith is clearly expressed in the preface of his book The Mystery of the Universe: “Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it befits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God.”

Robert Boyle (1627-1691), known as the father of modern chemistry, was renowned for his careful observation. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Boyle viewed nature as “a mechanism that has been made and set in motion by the Creator at the beginning and now functioned according to secondary laws, which could be studied by science.” He stressed that scientific research “helped to reveal the greatness of the Creator.” Though a member of the Royal Society and a dedicated scientist, he was equally committed to propagating the gospel abroad, translating the Scriptures into Irish and Turkish and writing material on the harmony of his scientific and Christian positions. Even the endowment provided in his will of the Boyle lectures stipulated that they persist “for proving the Christian Religion against notorious infidels.”

Sir Isaac Netwon (1642-1727) is famous for his discovery of the law of gravity. But we often forget that he also invented calculus and in 1687 published The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which became

one of the most influential books in the history of human thought. By experimenting in Neville’s Court in Trinity College at Cambridge University, he was also able to work out the speed of sound by timing the interval between the sound of an object which he dropped, and the echo coming back to him from a known distance.

Throughout his lifetime, Newton tried to be loyal to what he believed the Bible teaches. It has been said that seventeenth century scientists limited themselves to the how without the interest in the why. This is not true. Newton, like any other early scientist, had no problem with the why because he began with the existence of a personal God who had created the universe.

In his later years, Newton wrote more about the Bible than about science, though little was published. Humanists have said that they wish he had spent all his time on his science. They think he wasted the hours he expended on biblical study, but they really are a bit blind when they say this. As Whitehead and Oppenheimer stressed, if Newton and others had not had a biblical base, they would have no base for their science at all.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), a brilliant mathematician, invented the barometer and is considered by some a major writer of French prose.

An outstanding Christian, he emphasized that he did not see people lost like specks of dust in the universe (which was now so much larger and more complicated than people had thought), for people—as unique—could comprehend something of the universe. People could comprehend the stars; the stars comprehend nothing. And besides this, for Pascal, people were special because Christ died on the cross for them.

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) never had the benefit of formal education, yet he invented the electric transformer, motor, and generator. He developed the concept of electromagnetic fields. He engaged in experimental organic chemistry by separating benzene from heating oil. Faraday was a Christian who belonged to a small religious order that believed “the Bible, and that alone, with nothing added to it nor taken away from it by man, is the sole and sufficient guide for each individual, at all times and in all circumstances.” Faraday’s scientific but thoroughly Christian search for truth was based upon belief in biblical creation and salvation through Jesus Christ.

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), a physicist, is one of the most respected men of science. A man who extended Faraday’s research in magnetic fields and electricity, he united the concept of force fields (forces acting through a distance) into a set of four equations. His electromagnetic theory was instrumental in advancing experimentation in optics and electronics. Raised in a Christian home, by eight years of age “he memorized all 176 verses of Psalm 119. Maxwell lived during the period of Charles Darwin, when evolutionary faith was spreading rapidly. He saw through this counterfeit to true faith immediately, and opposed it.”

The advanced educational and technological levels unique to the Western world would never have occurred had it not been for the believing men who shaped the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions. Theistic scientists assumed the universe was designed to follow dependable, even rational laws. Imagine where we would be if atheistic humanists, obsessed with unguided and continual change, had been in charge! They would have sent us back to the Dark Ages.

Francis Schaeffer points out that many scientists acknowledge science’s debt to Christianity—rather than to theories of atheism and scientific naturalism and universal randomness.

Indeed, at a crucial point the Scientific Revolution rested upon what the Bible teaches. Both Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) have stressed that modern science was born out of the Christian world view. Whitehead was a widely respected mathematician and philosopher, and Oppenheimer, after he became director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1947, wrote on a wide range of subjects related to science, in addition to writing in his own field on the structure of the atom and atomic energy. As far as I know, neither of the two men were Christians, or claimed to be Christians, yet both were straightforward in acknowledging that modern science was born out of the Christian world view.

Oppenheimer, for example, described this in an article “On Science and Culture” in Encounter in October 1962. In the Harvard University Lowell Lectures entitled Science and the Modern World (1925), Whitehead said that Christianity is the mother of science because of “the medieval insistence on the rationality of God.” Whitehead also spoke of confidence “in the intelligible rationality of a personal being.” He also says in these lectures that because of the rationality of God, the early scientists had an “inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labors of scientists would be without hope.” In other words, because the early scientists believed that the world was created by a reasonable God, they were not surprised to discover that people could find out something true about nature and the universe on the basis of reason.

Schaeffer further argues that though not all the scientists of the Age of Enlightenment were committed Christians, all lived within what he call a Christian consensus. Consequently, their theories were heavily influenced by a universe of order and design. He says:

Living within the concept that the world was created by a reasonable God, scientists could move with confidence, expecting to be able to find out about the world by observation and experimentation. This was their epistemological base—the philosophical foundation with which they were sure they could know. (Epistemology is the theory of knowledge—how we know, or how we know we can know.) Since the world had been created by a reasonable God, they were not surprised to find a correlation between themselves as observers and the thing observed—that is between the subject and the object. This base is normative to one functioning in the Christian framework, whether he is observing a chair or the molecules which make up the chair. Without this foundation, Western modern science would not have been born.

Here one must consider an important question: Did the work of the Renaissance play a part in the birth of modern science? Of course it did. More than that, the gradual intellectual and cultural awakenings in the Middle Ages also exerted their influence. The increased knowledge of Greek thought—at Padua University, for example—opened new doors. Certainly, Renaissance elements and those of the Greek intellectual traditions were involved in the scientific awakening. But to say theoretically that the Greek tradition would have been in itself a sufficient stimulus for the Scientific Revolution comes up against the fact that it was not. It was the Christian factor that made the difference. Whitehead and Oppenheimer are right. Christianity is the mother of modern science because it insists that the God who created the universe has revealed himself in the Bible to be the kind of God he is. Consequently, there is a sufficient basis for science to study the universe. Later, when the Christian base was lost, a tradition and momentum had been set in motion, and the pragmatic necessity of technology, and even control by the state, drives science on, but…with a subtle yet important change in emphasis.

Men of Faith and Men of Science

It has taken a Hungarian refugee living in the United States to make the most obvious observation: “For the century ends as it began, and as the case has been for many centuries. It may be unfair; it may be cruel; it may be embarrassing; but the fact is that discoveries, inventions, creative activities of all kinds continue to pour forth from the accustomed source: the headliner countries of Western civilization.” He then says, “Goodness knows, everybody has been bending over backward to cover up the uncomfortable reality. We invented an entire mind game called multiculturalism. We wrote entire fictitious histories. We are ‘celebrating diversity’ day and night. Like children, we cover our eyes and pretend no one can see us.”

Few want to admit there is a relationship between Western civilization, Christianity, and science!

Daniel Lapin observed, “Virtually every major discovery in physics, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, electricity, nuclear physics, mechanics and just about everything else has taken place in Christian countries.”

His comment “and just about everything else” could well refer to the host of inventions made by Chrsitians and in Christian lands. For example, actuarial tables and the calculating machine by Charles Babbage; chloroform by James Simpson; the electric motor by Joseph Henry; the kaleidoscope by David Brewster; the discovery of inert gases by William Ramsay; pasteurization by Louis Pasteur; and the telegraph by Samuel Morse.

Space and time do not permit us to describe the many other scientists of faith, such as John Philoponus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Dietrich von Frieberg, Thomas Bradwardine, Nicole Oresme, Georgius Agricola, Jan van Helmont, Francesco Grimaldi, John Ray, Isaac Barrow, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, Niels Steno, James Bradley, Ewald von Kleist, Carolus Linnaeus, Leonhard Euler, John Dalton, Thomas Young, William Buckland, Adam Sedgwick, Augustin Cauchy, John Hershel, Matthew Maury, Philip Grosse, Asa Gray, James Dana, George Boole, Humphry Davy, Lord Rayleigh, Ambrose Fleming, Jean-Henri Fabre, George Stokes, William Herschel, James Joule, Georg Riemann; Bernhard Reimann, John Woodward, Rudolf Virchow, Edward Morley, Pierre Duhem, Georges Lemaître, George Washington Carver, Sir Arthur Eddington, and the hundreds of competent men of science today who believe in a personal God of design and order and who reject the false claims of atheistic humanism. Not until what Dr. Schaeffer calls the age of “contemporary science” did a number of scientists begin to sink into skepticism, atheism, amorality, and socialism.

Humanists love to identify the great scientists of the past as either their kin or as their forerunners. Particularly, they wish to claim credit for both the Age of Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. They fail to point out that the free thinkers—the true forerunners of atheism and ultimately of the humanists themselves—labored predominantly in the nonscientific fields of philosophy, sociology, psychology, the humanities, and behavioral studies. Few of them are to be found in the fields of “hard” science.

Yet even though this is true, millions today have been duped into thinking that only dim bulbs could swallow Christianity. In the past forty years alone, however, Christian men of science have founded several creationist organizations, such as the Creation Research Center, with more than six hundred scientists as members. Christian colleges have grown tremendously in the past five decades, and many of their scholars have gone on to secular graduate schools with such thorough undergraduate training in biblical truth that they have remained uncorrupted by humanist brainwashing.

This groundswell of Christian scholarship, so antagonistic to humanism, has served as the catalyst for many new books, magazines, and movies, all exposing man-centered religion as a fraud. Such exposés, disseminated at a time when the theories of humanism are proving themselves to be socially chaotic, are creating a tidal wave of national concern large enough to frighten the humanists. They realize that if enough Christian citizens become informed of the dangers implicit in the secularists’ unscientific theories, they will be challenged every day in their classrooms, until at retirement they will be replaced by a new generation of nonevolutionists who have decided it is time to regain their country and culture.

—Mind Siege, Appendix B

For those interested in the subject, we strongly recommend Alister McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism. See www.schwarzreport.org.

Red Star Rising
by Bill Gertz

China’s military buildup is “tilting the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait” in ways threatening to the United States, say U.S. intelligence officials, whose blunt comments contrast sharply to past intelligence assessments of the communist country’s capabilities.

“Improved Chinese capabilities threaten U.S. forces in the region,” CIA Director Porter J. Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Wednesday.

“China continues to develop more robust, survivable nuclear-armed missiles, as well as conventional capabilities for use in regional conflict,” he said.

Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in prepared testimony to the panel that China is adding numbers and more capable ballistic missiles to its arsenal to “improve their survivability and war-fighting capabilities, enhance their coercion and deterrence value, and overcome ballistic missile defense systems.”

“This effort is commensurate with its growing power and more assertive policies, especially with respect to Taiwan,” Adm. Jacoby said.

The officials’ testimony shows an apparent effort to define the dangers posed by China’s rising military power, which critics said have been minimized in the past, in part so as not to offend the country with markets coveted by U.S. businesses. The CIA, in particular, has been criticized in the past for underestimating Chinese military and security developments.

Sen. Susan Collins, Maine Republican, yesterday asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing about Mr. Goss’ testimony that “sounded the alarm about China’s modernization of its navy.”

Mr. Rumsfeld said China is boosting defense spending by “double-digit” rates and most of the buildup is being carried out in secret.

“They’re purchasing a great deal of relatively modern equipment from Russia,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, “and as you point out, they have been expanding their navy and expanding the distances from the People’s Republic of China that their navy ventures.”

Mr. Rumsfeld said “we hope and pray” China enters the civilized world “without the grinding of gears.”

“We don’t know that, how they’re going to shake out,” he said.

The communist government faces internal tension caused by “competing pressures between the desire to grow, which takes a free economy as opposed to a command economy, and their dictatorial system, which is not a free system,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.

On Wednesday Mr. Goss said China increased the number of missiles deployed opposite Taiwan last year and deployed several new submarines.

The Washington Times first reported in December that China rolled out the first of its 094-class ballistic missile submarines, and in July China revealed a new class of attack submarine that took U.S. intelligence agencies by surprise.

“If Beijing decides that Taiwan is taking steps toward permanent separation that exceed Beijing’s tolerance, we assess China is prepared to respond with varying levels of force,” Mr. Goss said.

Adm. Jacoby identified three new missile systems, the DF-31, DF-31A mobile intermediate range ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and JL-2 submarine launched missiles, noting that by 2015 China will have increased its nuclear warhead arsenal to several times the current level.

The DIA estimated in 2000 that China had a total of 157 nuclear warheads for long- and short-range missiles, and will have 464 warheads for its missiles by 2020.

—The Washington Times, February 18, 2005, p. A3

Zimbabwe’s Killing Fields

Although Zimbabwe previously exported food, now approximately 7 million Zimbabweans are dependent on external food aid. Seventy five percent of Zimbabwe’s population are now living below the poverty line. Out of originally 5,500 productive commercial farms, today less than 500 farms are in any way operational. So far the Zimbabwean government has targeted 6,897 farms, with a total area of almost 12 million hectares for what they term “resettlement.”

The economy in Zimbabwe is one of the fastest shrinking in the world. Unemployment is officially over 70%. Inflation is running at 440%. Although on the official exchange 1 British Pound is equal to 814 Zimbabwean Dollars, on the Black-market it takes 14,000 Zimbabwe Dollars to buy 1 British Pound and approximately 20,000 Zimbabwe Dollars for 1 US Dollar.

Ninety percent of food aid is not reaching those in need. People in Zimbabwe have been bluntly told that they will not get any food aid unless they voted for the party of Robert Mugabe, ZANU-PF.

Life expectancy in Zimbabwe has plummeted to 34 years for men and 33 years for women. Nearly 34% of the adult population has been recorded as being HIV positive. There are 700,000 AIDS orphans in Zimbabwe.

In the 2002 report by the European Communities Court of Auditors, it was recorded that 89% of aid money from the European Union had been embezzled by Robert Mugabe and his cronies.

Amnesty International has documented over 1000 cases of torture by the Zimbabwe government.

Nearly half of the Members of Parliament belonging to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) have been assaulted, mostly by the police. Many opposition Members of Parliament have been arrested, some imprisoned, and several have been murdered. A quarter of the opposition Members of Parliament say that they have survived assassination attempts. Not only have opposition Members of Parliament been assaulted, but even their lawyers. For example, Mr. Gabriel Shuma who met with his client, a Member of Parliament for the MDC. After meeting with his client, Mr. Shuma was seized by the police, hooded, stripped, bound, assaulted, thrown down flights of stairs, and subjected to torture and abuse. He has since fled the country.

Approximately 4 million Zimbabweans have fled the country. It is reported that 1.1 million Zimbabweans now live in the United Kingdom. One point two million Zimbabweans have fled to South Africa. One hundred thousand Zimbabweans are now in Australia. Botswana, Zambia and even Mozambique have growing Zimbabwean refugee populations, and a million more are scattered around the world elsewhere.

The Education Minister in Zimbabwe recently declared all private schools racist and had them closed. This despite 90% of the pupils in these private schools being Black. Even Peter House, one of the foremost and most successfully integrated schools in Zimbabwe was closed and the principal imprisoned.

Mr. Roy Bennet, an opposition Member of Parliament for the MDC who had been overwhelmingly elected by his constituency, has been imprisoned under the most degrading conditions with hard labour. Roy Bennett’s fluent knowledge of Shona made him a formidable debater in Parliament. Because of his steadfast opposition to the Marxist thuggary and lawlessness of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF under years of harassment, slander and violence and enduring the unprecedented hostility of the ZANU government—he is now crammed into a small and filthy, disease-ridden cell, forced to sleep on a concrete floor with 17 other inmates and subjected to degrading abuse.

Despite the lawlessness and tyranny in Zimbabwe, where even Supreme Court justices have been subjected to death threats and hounded out of office, where editors have been arrested and tortured, opposition newspapers blown up, journalists assaulted, arrested or murdered, farmers assaulted and murdered, and even thousands of human rights observers abducted, assaulted and tortured, the ANC government of South Africa continues to support the Mugabe regime.

Members of Parliament in Britain have also challenged the Queen over the honorary knighthood bestowed on Robert Mugabe, declaring that the whole honour system is disgraced by tyrants such as Mugabe. It is remembered that the Queen also bestowed an honorary knighthood on the Marxist dictator of Mozambique, Samora Machel, and the communist dictator of Romania, Nicoli Ceaucescu.

—All of the above facts were taken from the Victims of Communism, December 2004, newsletter of the Rhodesia Christian Group, PO Box 5307, Bishops Stortford, Herts., CM23 3DZ, England.

Brazil Moving Further Left
by Augusto Zimmermann

The Constitution of Brazil seems to fully protect freedom of expression for intellectual, artistic, scientific, and media activities. In its Article 220, the basic law of this nation explicitly says that manifestations of thought, expression, and information must not be subjected to governmental restrictions for political, ideological, and artistic reasons.

Regardless of what this Constitution says, the Workers’ Party (PT) government has decided to introduce a highly controversial bill on audiovisual affairs.

If approved, this bill creates a National Agency of Movies and Audiovisual Affairs, the Ancinav, with full powers to exercise control over radio and television stations, communication services with audiovisual content (including telephony and the Internet), as well as the production, distribution, and the showing of movies (including television films and news reports).

The President of the Republic, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, would be free to nominate board members of such a powerful agency, for a four-year term.

The Ancinav would be endowed with powers to investigate and restructure the strategic plans of cinematographic and audiovisual companies. The bill explicitly calls for the “planning, regulation, administration, and monitoring of cinematographic and audiovisual companies,” in their “production, programming, distribution, exhibition, and divulgation.”

It states that the Ancinav would preserve the ‘confidentiality’ of technical, operational, and even financial records requested from these companies, which also implies that this federal agency could force them to provide strategic and/or financial information.

The Ancinav would be financed by resources obtained from new taxes on advertisement, the rent and/or purchase of VCRs and/or DVDs, and a 10% increase in the price of movie tickets. This increase would obviously transform cinema into an even more elitist entertainment in this country.

Also, it would make it impossible for the majority of theatres to exhibit movies with small public demand, such as those produced by specialised film companies. In this sense, the bill violates Article 215 of the Brazilian Constitution, which declares that the state needs to support the maximum diffusion of cultural expressions.

In explaining why the National Congress should approve this sort of bill, the Lula administration suggests that the Ancinav would support the national filmmaking industry to promote ‘civic re-education’ towards a ‘better sense’ of Brazil’s ‘national identity’.

Since the idea is confessedly to control cultural expressions, including those with scientific and/or artistic value, a prestigious lawyer, Ives Gandra, has accused the PT government of willing to exercise its full control over artistic, cinematographic, and audiovisual activities, similarly to what happened in the past in places like the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

In fact, the first attempts toward an unduly control over freedom of expression have already been carried out. Since President Lula took office in 2003, state companies can only sponsor social and cultural projects in tune with the ideology of those who are in power.

A state oil and gas distribution company, Petrobras, has informed that ‘social views’ of the current administration must be taken into consideration for social and cultural projects to be funded. Other state companies such as Eletrobrás and Furnas communicated the same conditions for the financing of social and cultural activities.

In relation to the problem of the Ancinav, a prestigious member of the highly selected Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters), history professor José Murillo de Carvalho, wrote an insightful piece on the subject in daily newspaper Jornal do Brasil. He suggests that this law proposal creating the Ancinav constitutes an attempt to establish one the worst forms of censorship a government has ever produced in the whole history of this country.

A leading daily newspaper, O Estado de S. Paulo, commented in an editorial that the bill of Ancinav is authoritarian, bureaucratising, statist, and would result in a return to former instruments of censorship in Brazil.

The editorial also suggests that calling the law proposal ‘only’ authoritarian is too bland and small, as it reveals that President Lula is certainly not joking when he says that countries like Cuba and Venezuela are ‘models of democracy’ to be imitated.

—Brazzil magazine, February 2005