Year End; Time to Wake Up

It has become somewhat traditional for me to review the Spherical Model on the last post of the year. (Also at other times, such as early March, the anniversary of when I started the blog in 2011.) I’ll get to that eventually. But I want to lead into that by first talking about a podcast I was listening to the other day.

The host of Cwic Show is Greg Matsen, and the person being interviewed, Julie Behling, did her master's thesis on the underground Christian churches in the Soviet Union. She is the author of Beneath Sheep's Clothing and has a documentary with the same name coming out in January. 

screenshot from Cwic Show December 15, 2023

One detail I hadn’t known about the Soviet Union was that the KGB had infiltrated the churches. All of them. The clergy were either cooperating with the KGB, or they were KGB agents. Behling offers details about how they had done this, and why. But it came down to controlling what people believe, because that is what totalitarian tyrannies must do.

Then she added that, in her research, she was somewhat shocked to find that Communists had also infiltrated a solid half of American Christian churches, more than a century ago.

She mentioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor, who spent some time in the US in the 1930s (I wrote about him here), who was sad to come to the Union Theological Seminary only to find that they scoffed at the idea of Christ’s divinity and atonement for sin. Those were the same lapses he had found in the German clergy as they acquiesced to Hitler.

Back when I was attending homeschool conferences, more than a decade ago, I heard Pastor Voddie Baucham speak. He defined having a Biblical worldview as believing in Jesus, who lived a perfect life, died for us, and suffered for our sins as our Savior. That is what I believe, and that is doctrine in my religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. So I was shocked when he told us that less than 10% of professed Christians have this Biblical worldview, and only 51% of pastors have it. I think that’s evidence of the infiltration.

I heard a talk recently—I think it was Ken Ham telling a story from his childhood, but I could be wrong about who it was. Anyway, he recalled the pastor had been telling the story of the feeding of the 5000 with the loaves and fishes. The pastor had explained that, once a young boy had pulled out his meager amount of fish and bread to share, it had incentivized everyone else to share what they had, and then there was plenty. The storyteller’s father went up to the pastor afterward and told him, “That’s not what happened.” The pastor had taken the miracle out of the story, along with Jesus’ divine power. And he’d made the story pointless. If enough people had brought food and to spare, there was never anyone in need of being fed, so why would the story even show up in scriptures? More likely, it was remarkably miraculous, and that’s why it got recorded. Church leadership that doesn’t believe in the divinity of Christ means they are not Christian, and they are leading the flock toward something else that is not good.

What Behling said had taken place in the infiltrated churches was a replacement of the divine doctrine with the “Marxist construct of oppressed versus oppressor”; in other words, social justice—even though it took until recent decades for them to start using that term.

Matsen and Behling got into a section where they were discussing some various flavors of authoritarian tyranny.

I’ll share some of the transcript here, so you can see the attempts to define various forms of authoritarian tyranny. [GB is Greg Matsen, and JB is Julie Behling.]

GM: I’ve noticed in reading your book—obviously I don’t know about the documentary yet—but in the book you use the term Communism quite a bit. That’s kind of a term that isn’t used as much. It’s Marxist, maybe, or, moving on to 2.0 here with woke, etc. You have a background in studying Communism, right?

He asks her about the terms, so she begins with some definitions:

·        Socialism is when the government owns the means of production and is in charge.

·        Communism is when the government owns the means of production, and this government is instituted through a violent overthrow of the previous regime.

·        Marxism is the oppressed versus oppressor construct that's the playbook for preparing a society to fall to Communism.

JB: So if you can identify a group of people who either are oppressed or who can be made to feel oppressed, you can rile them up to anger and stoke the grievance and say, “Hey there's your oppressor. Tear down that system of power.” The systems of power are torn down and weakened, and now the Communists can come in and assume authority.

This caught my attention, because I have this in my basic article about the Spherical Model:

People tend to be afraid of the chaos of anarchy. Lenin saw this. One way to gain totalitarian power is to create chaos and then promise to solve the problems of chaos (crime, poverty, lack of safety on all levels) by offering government solutions, until the revolutionaries have managed to get themselves installed as dictators. This was the purpose of Trotsky’s idea of perpetual revolution: Place power in our hands, and we will see that you are fed and housed and protected—that is, if the dictator was so minded once the power was achieved. Everywhere that Communism has been tried, it took hold because people gave in to this desire for government to provide protection and food and shelter. It works on a people who do not trust their own ability to provide, and it works especially well when chaos reigns to make it difficult for people to provide for themselves. Revolutionaries therefore cause anarchy so that they can implement their own totalitarian tyranny.

I think Behling is right when she is saying that the oppressed versus oppressor tactic is to create chaos that will allow the tyrants to step in and take control.

Behling says, “What we have brewing here, it's not exactly like the type of Communism that the Soviets had. It's worse.” Matsen asks her why it’s worse.

JB: Because it's more crafty. And it's more like the Communist Chinese system, where it's this weird marriage of Communism and Fascism and then, honestly, a little bit of Monopolistic Capitalism thrown in for good measure. It's the most abusive forms of government fused together with this—what they're hoping for—Global Leadership with all the technocratic controls that they— we now have with being in the 21st century, and it's truly frightening.

The Spherical Model allows us to see the relative badness or goodness of a philosophy graphically. You can determine how close the ideas bring society to freedom, prosperity, and civilization, or alternatively how close they bring society to tyranny, poverty, and savagery. For a fuller discussion see this summary. Or, for more detail, see all the articles on the website, starting with "The Political World Is Round."

The political, economic, and social spheres of the Spherical Model

There are slight flavor differences between Communism, Socialism, Fascism, the overarching philosophy of Marxism, as well as what Behling calls Monopolistic Capitalism—another way of saying Oligarchy or rule by businesses and controllers of money. These are all southern hemisphere on the Spherical Model, mostly on the statist side, or controlled by the government, although some (oligarchs and organized crime possibly) on the chaos or anarchic side of tyranny. But they’re all bunched together, down toward the bad pole of tyranny.

Fascism, Socialism, and Communism are all statist tyrannies,
and thus they take up approximately the same location
on the Spherical Model.

There’s discussion about the way tyranny—Marxism, Communism—is being presented here in the West, particularly in the US. It’s like a virus, or a cancer, that spreads. But, because the West was healthy (not a lot of abject poverty), it was hard to convince a poor class to rise up in rebellion, allowing for the tyrannical takeover.

JB: Communism—you can see it as a virus, or as a cancer, and it spreads to various parts of the—different organs and different systems, and eats it up, and takes it over. And, you know, Antonio Gramsci, his whole plot, you know, he was back there in Italy as a Marxist, and very stressed out that the West was not falling to Communism, in the 1930s. And so he’s the one who came up with cultural Marxism, and said, “OK, we’ve got to infiltrate these cultures—the West has this cultural hegemony that is resistant to Communism; we’ve got to go in and take those things over.”

I mean, before the businesses could be taken over, our culture was already taken over to a good enough extent that that was possible. So, yeah. We’re in a very late stage, because it’s far beyond the culture at this point.

There’s a part of the book of Revelation that I’ve been looking at, in chapter 13, about the beast that rises up out of the sea. This beast has multiple heads and crowns. Symbolically, it seems to be the various powers reigning around the world, and interconnected together as one “beast.” One of the heads is mortally wounded—but then comes back to life. I have looked at this and wondered if this is Communism, or one of the other words we’ve listed and defined above. We fought a World War to wipe out this attempt at controlling all the peoples of the earth. We said, “Never again!” And yet, here we are, with our college campuses preaching the Gramsci version, cultural Marxism, where everyone is either oppressed or oppressor. There’s an attempt to control our ability to make a living, or to buy and sell, based on whether we have bought into this party line. It’s as ugly as it ever was. “We’re in a very late stage,” Behling says.

"La Bete de la Mer," a French tapestry showing
John the Revelator, Satan the dragon, and the sea beast
of Revelation 13. Image from Wikipedia.

Matsen, at one point, adds this:

GM: I really like that you said that they’re using Fascism, because that’s 100% true. It’s so funny, because they call anyone who leans right of them, which is almost everyone, a Fascist. What a Fascist really means, they’re using business; they’re using the current institutions, right, that are not owned by the state. And that is Fascism. And they’re using it better than any Fascist has ever used it before. And so, again, that’s the idea of adapting to the West and using their system, where now they are the Fascists that are, again, infecting and using and coercing the free enterprises to—and free organizations and institutions in the West—to tow the party line.

So, again, it isn't what you call it; it's how far into tyranny the idea is. If people used the Spherical Model, they couldn't be fooled into thinking anything "right" of cultural Marxism is Fascist; cultural Marxism is just a way of being Fascist—or totalitarian tyranny. 

Behling tries to give us some hope. I mean, why point out these things if there isn’t any hope of recovery?

JB: And I really do have hope—I mean, I’m a little bit doom and gloom here—but I do have hope that there are so many good people, so many good Christians, so many good people who love freedom that, if we can wake up enough people, we have this window of time right now—if we can wake up enough people—that these agendas will not be able to come to full fruition. That is my hope.

There is some reason to hope. I know so many good people, as she does, so many good Christians and also good people of other faiths, who love freedom, and truth, and want to preserve our God-given rights. Governments are instituted to protect those God-given rights, but government is fire, and it seems to fuel itself and grasp power unto itself that it hasn’t been given by the people.

One purpose of the Spherical Model is to clarify. It isn’t necessary to understand all the nuances and differences among the various words we use for tyranny. It’s only necessary to know whether something leads to Freedom, Prosperity, and Civilization, or whether it instead leads to Tyranny, Poverty, and Savagery. Those things are ascertainable with a few basic questions—and a lot of truth.

May this coming year be a year where we bring more people to an awakening, with truth—offered with love and caring, but always by giving and sharing truth.

Communism’s 100-Year War on Civilization

One hundred years ago this week (November 7, 1917) Communists took power in Russia. This is not a day to celebrate, but it’s a day we ought to be aware of.

I grew up during the Cold War, when people understood communism was an existential threat. But an entire generation has grown up now without ever having to do bomb shelter drills.

Some years ago I was teaching the Spherical Model way of identifying ideologies for some homeschooling high schoolers. I’m not sure how much sunk in, but I remember one young man thanking me, because he’d never understood what communism, and fascism, and socialism and all those -isms meant. These things aren’t common knowledge, as they used to be.

So we’ll use today’s post as a reminder. Here’s an official definition of communism, from my very old (1980) dictionary, which includes a bit of historical perspective:

Notice that socialism is a synonym. Sometimes people separate the two by saying socialism is a stage, working toward a total communist state; they are both based on Marxist ideas.

I’m noting this, because young people seem enamored with socialism as described by Bernie Sanders, who fails to understand basic economics and refuses to admit Socialism’s nasty history.

National Review provided on Facebook a short video of Communist history, with these words:

100 years ago today [November 7], the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, establishing the world’s first communist state, and unleashing the deadliest political system in human history. During the past century, communism has resulted in unparalleled oppression, terror, and genocide. From the Soviet Union to Mao’s China, to Castro’s Cuba, to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, millions were killed by the state, in the name of total control and the elimination of “class enemies.” And millions continue to be oppressed by Communist regimes worldwide. Vladimir Lenin and his successors all declared war on civilization. And the world is still living with its consequences.

screen shot from National Review photo essay

Yes, communism means war on civilization. The opposite of civilization is savagery, and that’s what they’ve wrought.

The Daily Signal did a video interview with Daniel Hannan, member of the European Parliament, who gave us this reminder:

Communism, in terms of crude numbers, must be reckoned the most lethal ideology ever devised by human intelligence. The Atlantic slave trade killed maybe 10 million people. The Nazis killed maybe 17 million. Communists killed 100 million people. Some of them were shot into pits. Some of them were arrested at night, and worked to death in Gulags. Some of them were starved as deliberate policy to enforce collectivization. You don’t get more murderous than that. So, why is it acceptable to wear a Che Guevara T-shirt now? Why isn’t that in the same moral category as wearing an Adolf Hitler T-shirt or an Osama bin Laden T-shirt?

Victor Davis Hansen wrote a piece reminding us of the good contributions of Russia during WWII—which shows that there can be good, courageous people even under a bad regime. But in that piece he mentions this data: 

Prior to the German invasion, Stalin was responsible for some 20 million Russian deaths through forced farm collectivization, planned famine, show trials and purges, and the murders of his own Red Army troops. More than 10,000 soldiers were likely executed at Stalingrad by their own officers.

These words, from Ezra Taft Benson[i] in 1962, sound pre-contemporary to our ears today, yet what he says is still pertinent:

The Communists bring to the nations they infiltrate a message and a philosophy that affect human life in its entirety. Communism seeks to provide what in too many instances a lukewarm Christianity has not provided—a total interpretation of life. Communists are willing to be revolutionary, to take a stand for this and against that. They challenge what they do not believe in: customs, practices, ideas, and traditions. They believe heatedly in their philosophy.

But our civilization and our people here in America are seemingly afraid to be revolutionary. We are too "broad-minded" to challenge what we do not believe in. We are afraid of being thought intolerant, uncouth, or ungentlemanly. We have become lukewarm in our beliefs. And for that we perhaps merit the bitter condemnation stated in the Book of Revelation 3:16: "So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth."

This is a sad commentary on a civilization which has given to mankind the greatest achievements and progress ever known. But it is ever a sadder commentary on those of us who call ourselves Christians, who thus betray the ideals given to us by the Son of God Himself. I ask, are we going to permit the atheistic communist masters, fellow travelers, and dupes to deceive us any longer?

There is a deception going on in our country this very moment which is just as dangerous to the United States as the false pretensions of Fidel Castro were to Cuba. It is amazing to me that some of our citizens seem to take special delight in ridiculing the warnings of government investigators and the cry of alarm which comes from Iron Curtain refugees when they see how the United States is being led carefully down the trail of disaster.

He's right. Here, in this nation so blessed with freedom—which has shared the ideals of freedom with much of the world—must not give up that heritage for lack of speaking up. Let’s be clear about this: Communism is a sure way to tyranny, poverty, and savagery. We must consistently head the opposite direction, toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

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[i] Ezra Taft Benson was at one-time Chairman of the Department of Agriculture, and later the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This quote is from The Red Carpet, Bookcraft, 1962, pp. 53-54.

There's No Such Thing as a Right-Wing Extremist

There’s no such thing as a right-wing extremist. There’s no such thing as a left-wing extremist either. Because the whole right-left model doesn’t work.

Yes, there are extremists. But communism (what we’ve been calling extreme left) isn’t the polar opposite of fascism (what we’ve been calling extreme right); they are almost the same. Both are nasty, misery-filled tyrannies. Trying to find some balance between two really awful things only gives us a really awful compromise.

I propose that we look at the actual polar opposites, and the world of positions between them, in hopes that we can make some better choices.

We want freedom, prosperity, and civilization. That’s our goal. We can judge an ideology or government form by how far it diverges from those political, economic, and social goal zones: near, far, or extremely far.

In the Spherical Model, the political sphere has freedom as the north pole; the south pole is tyranny. Overlaying that is the Economic Sphere, with prosperity north and poverty south. And overlaying the other layers is the Social Sphere, with civilization north and savagery south.

Lateral location on the sphere is neutral; it depends on whether the issue being looked at is relevant to local, regional, national, or larger interests, on a spectrum ranging from the individual and family all the way up to global. Lateral posistion only relates to tyranny if a higher level than necessary tries to take control.

When we look at the extremes of communism and fascism, they’re pretty close to one another. They may even overlap: the communist Soviet Union was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic. Nazi Germany was the National Socialist Party.

In this example Communism is blue, Socialism is red, Fascism is green

If we draw them on our Political Sphere, communism and fascism are both in the lower left quadrant, where you find statist tyranny, or totalitarianism. Socialism might overlap them completely. Or, as it is in some countries, there could be only partial socialism, so those versions might be less far south into tyranny. And there could be versions that are globalist, or only national or even more local. For example, Berkeley, California, has had a communist mayor and some citywide communist policies. And California is clearly more socialist than Utah or Texas. The latter two are much closer to Constitutional freedom than the current US as a whole.

From the perspective of the global interest extreme,
moving away from global interest either left or right

Communism and fascism can be different ideologies and still be right next to one another on the sphere. If we spin the globe a bit, so we’re directly facing the far eastern global line, we can place communism all the way south and next to global interests, and fascism can also be all the way south and next to global interests. It’s like being on either side of the international dateline. You might have come at the dateline from one direction, and your friend might have gotten there from the other direction, but you’re both within a couple of blocks from each other with an imaginary line between you.

Why does all this matter? Because ideas matter. Philosophies matter. That’s what determines what our governments are like.

And what our governments are like determines what our lives are like. How free we are to pursue our dreams, live our lives, enjoy the fruits of our labors and our property. Governments can either protect our life, liberty, and property, or they can limit our choices and prevent us from thriving.

And even if we, ourselves, figure out how to get to freedom, prosperity, and civilization, the government we live under is in part determined by the rest of society. So we need others to learn how to get there too.

Here’s the secret we keep trying to yell from the rooftops: Government needs to be limited to its proper role, the way it’s spelled out in the Preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

For prosperity, government gets out of the way of a free market and merely protects our lives and property. And for civilization, government that gets out of our way while encouraging good citizens to honor God, family, life, property, and truth.