Tyranny in Our World

Wherever government fails in its basic purpose of protecting life, liberty, and property, and instead deprives its own people of those very things, you find tyranny.

We have too many examples in our world today.

North Korea

Kim Jong-un with missiles
image from here

According to the Human Rights Watch 2016 World Report, conditions in North Korea look pretty grim. Human rights violations include: “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortion, and other sexual violence in North Korea.” A UN Commission of Inquiry says the “gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”

What does that look like on the ground?

Food is scarce. People are on the verge of starvation. They have no communication with the outside world to back up suspicions that the rest of the world is not even worse off, as they are told. Those who try to escape into China are detained and returned to detention, forced labor, or public execution. Yet some are still willing to attempt to escape. Among women who “successfully” escape, chances are high they will be enslaved into forced marriages or the sex trade.

Dynastic dictator Kim Jong-un is presented as a god to his people. Apparently they don’t expect much from their deity, since he recently murdered his brother (older brother, who had the greater claim to leadership, if I understand correctly). There is no other deity allowed, since religious belief is systematically quashed.

While their leader must know better (he was educated in the West), they believe they are the most powerful force on earth—because that is what they are told, and they have no access to information to discredit that lie. North Korean indoctrination would put Orwell’s 1984 world to shame.

Meanwhile, they have developed nuclear capability and are attempting to move beyond rudimentary delivery technology.

There has been saber-rattling, as a rule, annually every spring. They have done this with impunity for years, because of the rest of the world’s unwillingness to put a stop to it. This year the difference is a new US President who is an unknown quantity, but not one to suffer bullying. China is stepping up, because they now know that, if they do nothing to control their rogue vassal, the US will. And China doesn’t want increased US power in their vicinity.

The North Korean situation wouldn’t be what it is, if the war had been completed back in the 1950s. It continues, in the form of a cease fire, with enemies remaining enemies, and no progression such as Japan and Germany made after WWII. Stalemate may not last forever.

Meanwhile, South Korea flourishes economically and in many other ways, creating a contrast with the northern part of the peninsula that ought to be instructive to all the world.

Venezuela

Venezuela is resource rich: oil, coal, bauxite, iron, gold, and natural beauty. Nevertheless, most of its population now lives in poverty.

No food. It has become a real problem. Millions have cut back to one or two meals a day. Millions have lost, on average, 19 pounds.

Inflation is at over 50%. Money is controlled, and its value too low to bring in much from the outside. Travel, particularly travel by citizens with money, is limited. There had been a practice of crossing the border to Bolivia to get better exchange rates, but that was quashed.

empty supermarket in Venezuela
image found here

Government is corrupt and ineffective. Crime feels similar to living in a war zone, with over 90% of crimes remaining unsolved, including murder.

Following the death of Hugo Chavez, his successor, Maduro, won election by only 2%, meaning nearly half of the people are still willing, so far, to say that they don’t like the way government is failing them.

We’ve known people from Venezuela. It wasn’t always like this. While it wasn’t America, it was livable and prosperous. Now people can’t get hold of toilet paper or bread, and there seems to be no way out. But, while it’s obvious from the outside that the fault of this swift demise of a country is socialism, government has done a pretty good job of claiming the fault lies with the business class.

Many radio and TV networks simply had their licenses revoked. The last remaining dissenting TV station was sold in 2013, and then announced its policies would be changing. Venezuelans have voted for socialism time after time, but you have to wonder whether they can be informed voters when they have no access to truth in the media or from their government.

Syria

It’s essentially impossible to be living in Syria during the ISIS war without participating. Everyone else is a refugee or target of genocide.

Getting basic food and shelter for the refugees is a worldwide problem. Many have crossed into Turkey. Others elsewhere. Some have been transported afar, to Europe or America. There’s a preference to stay nearby, as refugees, in hopes that the enemy will eventually be rooted out, and they could return to their homeland. Others have given up hope, and their best future lies in finding work and a new life elsewhere.

If there is one thing ISIS is certain not to do for people it governs, it is to protect their lives, liberty, and property. Murder, genocide, and rape are expected activities from this regime. The savagery is hard to imagine.

Sweden

By comparison, Sweden looks much less bad. But there are invading hordes of Islamic people—some are peaceful Muslims, even refugees, but others are Islamists who hate anyone not like them, and the Swedes are definitely not like them.

In an effort to welcome these people, and show openness and tolerance, the Swedes have over-tolerated their behavior, which includes rape with impunity. Government and media spin—remove demographic information from reports—so that it doesn’t look like it’s caused by the invading hordes. Because there is more fear of being labeled as bigoted than there is fear of its own population being raped.

A government, or media, who tells this lie—at the expense of the safety of its own people—is tyrannical. Add to that the corrupt control of businesses, and what seemed to be the world’s example of “successful socialism” is not so exemplary. Success, in business, in fact, comes only as they move away from the socialist model toward free markets.

There are other tyranny/savagery zones in the world. Anywhere there is war, you’ll find those conditions. But sometimes even without war.

Try France, which, like Sweden, has welcomed in enough Islamists that terrorism is becoming part of daily life.

Or, closer to home, Chicago, where murder rates make it look like a war zone. Or many parts of our southern border, controlled by drug gangs.

Tyranny goes hand in hand with savagery. And poverty.

The way out is toward freedom that comes from a government limited to its protective role, free markets and their attending prosperity, and civilization of people living corruption-free lives.

The way to freedom, prosperity, and civilization—all three together—is a known path. But the peoples of the world don’t seem to be aware. And the suffering continues, and spreads.

Ending tyranny for all the world will probably only happen when Christ returns to reign personally on the earth. In the meantime, we can at least spread the right way to our children, and our own circle of influence, and hope for better.

Swedish Story

Once upon a time there was a quaint, civilized northern kingdom, a culture of people living comfortably and gently. People were industrious and frugal, and enjoyed adding color in their homes and clothing, to the white that covered the land through much of the year, echoing the northern lights in the long night sky.

photo from here

Despite the cold and other natural challenges, the people remained gentle and constant for a good long time.

And then something began to change. The people experimented in centralized ownership. Taxes became extremely high, but the people tolerated this in exchange for long vacations and guarantees of food, housing, health care, and other things they thought they ought to have but were tired of struggling for.

They decided to be the example of society working together for the good of all. Things that had been tried in nearby countries, to massive failure. But that was with the wrong kind of people These gentle people would be the ones to make it work.

For a while the world looked on in wonder: “See, it can be done. We want to do it like them.”

But after a time, they faced some challenges. Motivation to excel may have been one of them. Without the necessity of hard work to guarantee a family’s survival and thriving, less innovation took place. Less work got done. Even working together, and sharing alike and evenly, the standard of living wasn’t as high as many had foreseen and wanted.

Another thing that happened was a weakening of family strength. If the collective was going to take care of offspring, that meant a mother and father were relieved of the necessity of overexerting themselves to provide for offspring. It even meant mother and father might not stay together. Or they might not get married in the first place. The negative consequences of living without marriage, whether or not children came, were mitigated by the collective.

In time, a higher portion of children were born outside of marriage. And a smaller portion of adults had children, or fewer children. The next generation lacked the inculcation of culture that used to be a hallmark of this peaceful people. The next generation was taught more about relaxing and avoiding stress (not a bad thing in its place and in moderation)—but with greater burden per person to provide the collective needs.

The wealth and the culture of past generations was being depleted. Something had to be done. The logical solution seemed to be to invite foreigners to move in, to contribute to the collective work.

What they did not foresee was that inviting almost unlimited foreigners was a risk to the culture. The new workers did not want to settle in and become like the northern society; they wanted a new place to work and live, and they wanted their share of the guaranteed food, housing, health care, and the rest, if they were the ones adding to the workforce. But they wanted to bring their own culture with them. They wanted to be who they had always been—even thought that included being a people who had not made their former countries thrive.

It was too late when the northern gentle people realized the danger to their way of being. They tried making laws that would limit the invasion of a foreign culture. They tried altering laws to lessen the power of the collective. But without the power of family—which brings with it financial stability and continuity of culture—there was no vitality to stand up against the threat. It would not be long before the northern culture succumbed to the influx of an entirely different people. The centuries-old culture would disappear. Without war. Because of their own mistakes.

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I haven’t really exaggerated. This is Sweden. The northern centuries-old culture is one I love; it is my heritage. My dad was the first generation born American instead of Swedish. We keep a few of the traditions during the Christmas holidays.

But I’m concerned that it’s disappearing. Socialism hasn’t worked. And lately the country seems to be realizing that, and making adjustments toward free enterprise. (Read here and watch here.) That’s a good thing. But it might not be enough.

The refugee/immigration problem reached crisis limits during 2015. According to a story earlier this week at PJ Media:

When the small, crumpled body of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on the Aegean coast Sept. 2, Europe’s humanitarian superpower sprang into action. Sweden’s prime minister headlined gala fundraisers, Swedish celebrities starred in telethons, and a country that prides itself on doing the right thing seemed to rally as one to embrace refugees fleeing for their lives.

But after taking in more asylum seekers per capita than any other nation in Europe, Sweden’s welcome mat now lies in tatters. Overwhelmed by the human tide of 2015, the center-left government is deploying extraordinary new border controls and slashing benefits in an unmistakable signal to refugees contemplating the long trek to Sweden in the new year: Stay out.

When the people you invite into your homeland turn you into the rape capital of the world and threaten you with suicide bombers, it’s time to pull up the welcome mat and bar the door.

Sweden welcomes Syrian refugees
Associated Press photo found here

An American Thinker piece from late December said this:

Despite their embrace of political correctness, the Swedes are at heart very decent, humane people, their main faults being a desire to please others in their community (which leads to silencing dissent and conformity) and self-righteous hypocrisy.  But these are minor blemishes considering the personal decency most people center their lives on.

Taking advantage of Sweden’s generosity, Muslim immigrants have been arriving in large numbers and, in recent months, catastrophically overwhelming the country’s budget and facilities to house and feed them.

That piece recommends watching this Pat Condell video from 2010 called “Goodbye Sweden,” showing the problem isn’t new; it’s just lately intensifying.

When I watched that video, YouTube next recommended a Pat Condell video from 2014, adding more evidence that the country is dying a sort of suicide by political correctness, called “Sweden Goes Insane.”

We should have seen this coming.

I’ve quoted British psychological researcher Daniel J. Unwin before. In the 1920s he did an exhaustive study of every civilization around the world through world history for which he could gather data. His purpose going in was to prove that marriage didn’t matter; that was his personal belief. But that was not his conclusion:

The evidence was such as to demand a complete revision of my personal philosophy; for the relationship between the factors seemed to be so close, that, if we know what sexual regulations a society has adopted, we can prophesy accurately the pattern of its cultural behavior….

Now it is an extraordinary fact that in the past sexual opportunity has only been reduced to a minimum by the fortuitous adoption of an institution I call absolute monogamy. This type of marriage has been adopted by different societies, in different places, and at different times. Thousands of years and thousands of miles separate the events; and there is no apparent connection between them. In human records, there is no case of an absolutely monogamous society failing to display great [cultural] energy. I do not know of a case on which great energy has been displayed by a society that has not been absolutely monogamous….

If, during or just after a period of [cultural] expansion, a society modifies its sexual regulations, and a new generation is born into a less rigorous [less monogamous] tradition, its energy decreases…. If it comes into contact with a more vigorous society, it is deprived of its sovereignty, and possibly conquered in its turn.

It seems to follow that we can make a society behave in any manner we like if we are permitted to give it such sexual regulations as will produce the behavior we desire. The results should begin to emerge in the third generation.[i]

It has been a decade since investigative journalist Stanley Kurtz wrote about “The End of Marriage in Scandinavia.” He referred to British demographer Kathleen Kiernan, who places Sweden in phase 4 of a 4-phase movement away from marriage, from which no culture has ever recovered.

There are some who would claim all of this concern is just homophobia, xenophobia, and/or Islamophobia. They shut down the discussion by saying so, and that is harming Sweden and its dying culture. It would be like shutting down discussion of cancer by calling a cancer patient cancerphobic.

A better solution would be to identify the problem with exact truth, and then do everything necessary to get rid of the problem(s) and recover. A dying patient who fears public opinion might call them “not nice” (as though that could ever stick with the people of the traditional Swedish culture) is not going to survive.

It’s likely that the language and culture of France will be gone within another generation as well. And quite likely the same is true of Germany.

But my main concern is my home—the United States. Just in the past decade we’ve been pushed from phase 2 toward phase 3 on Kiernan’s loss of marriage scale. I don’t know exactly how to fit Unwin’s prediction with Kiernan’s. I would guess that the US started to lose family strength with the implementation of no-fault divorce, court-legalized abortion, and the normalization of sex outside of marriage by media—at least by 1970. That puts us possibly 45 years into a 75-100-year death.

If there is a chance of recovery, we must take the healing actions right away. These are the simple, but not easy, principles that lead to civilization.

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[i] Joseph Daniel Unwin, Ph.D., “Sexual Regulations and Cultural Behavior,” address given to the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society. (Library of Congress No., HQ12.U52)