Paul Craig Roberts

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» The Greatest Gift For All



By: Paul Craig Roberts| December 23, 2012 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: Christmas, | Print This Article
Christmas
is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush before
Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new
tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the
beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a
tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of the
season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national
Christmas tree on the White House lawn.

Gifts are another shared custom. This tradition comes from the wise men
or three kings who brought gifts to baby Jesus. When I was a kid, gifts
were more modest than they are now, but even then people were
complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. We have grown
accustomed to the commercialization. Christmas sales are the backbone of
many businesses. Gift giving causes us to remember others and to take
time from our harried lives to give them thought.

The decorations and gifts of Christmas are one of our connections to a
Christian culture that has held Western civilization together for 2,000
years.
In our culture the individual counts. This permits an individual person
to put his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle, to become a
reformer and to take on injustice.
This empowerment of the individual is unique to Western civilization. It
has made the individual a citizen equal in rights to all other
citizens, protected from tyrannical government by the rule of law and
free speech. These achievements are the products of centuries of
struggle, but they all flow from the teaching that God so values the
individual’s soul that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so
elevating the individual, Christianity gave him a voice.

Formerly only those with power had a voice. But in Western civilization
people with integrity have a voice. So do people with a sense of
justice, of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform,
investors can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial
enterprises, new products and new occupations.

The result was a land of opportunity. The United States attracted
immigrants who shared our values and reflected them in their own lives.
Our culture was absorbed by a diverse people who became one.

In recent decades we have lost sight of the historic achievement that
empowered the individual. The religious, legal and political roots of
this great achievement are no longer reverently taught in high schools,
colleges and universities or respected by our government. The voices
that reach us through the millennia and connect us to our culture are
being silenced by "political correctness" and “the war on terror.”
Prayer has been driven from schools and Christian religious symbols from
public life. Constitutional protections have been diminished by
hegemonic political ambitions. Indefinite detention, torture, and murder
are now acknowledged practices of the United States government. The
historic achievement of due process has been rolled back. Tyranny has
re-emerged.

Diversity at home and hegemony abroad are consuming values and are
dismantling the culture and the rule of law. There is plenty of room for
cultural diversity in the world, but not within a single country. A
Tower of Babel has no culture. A person cannot be a Christian one day, a
pagan the next and a Muslim the day after. A hodgepodge of cultural and
religious values provides no basis for law – except the raw power of
the pre-Christian past.

All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we are
individually believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral
doctrine that has curbed power and protected the weak. Power is the
horse ridden by evil. In the 20th century the horse was ridden hard, and
the 21st century shows an increase in pace. Millions of people were
exterminated in the 20th century by National Socialists in Germany and
by Soviet and Chinese communists simply because they were members of a
race or class that had been demonized by intellectuals and political
authority. In the beginning years of the 21st century hundreds of
thousands of Muslims in seven countries have already been murdered and
millions displaced, because their religion does not submit to
Washington’s hegemony.

Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is not
limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin made this clear when
he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as "unlimited power, resting
directly on force, not limited by anything." Washington’s drive for
hegemony over US citizens and the rest of the world is based entirely on
the exercise of force and is resurrecting unaccountable power.

Christianity’s emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such power
as Lenin claimed, and Washington now claims, unthinkable. Be we
religious or be we not, our celebration of Christ’s birthday celebrates a
religion that made us masters of our souls and of our political life on
Earth. Such a religion as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.

As we enter into 2013, Western civilization, the product of thousands of
years of striving, hangs in the balance. Degeneracy is everywhere
before our eyes. As the West sinks into tyranny, will Western peoples
defend their liberty and their souls, or will they sink into the
tyranny, which again has raised its ugly and all devouring head?


» Agenda Driven News



By: Paul Craig Roberts| December 19, 2012 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: Adam Lanza, assault weapons, Dr. Wayne Carver, Newtown, Orwell, russia today, Sandy Hook,
I
have known for a long time that US news is agenda-driven. Tonight
(December 18) I was made aware of the extent to which agenda-driven US
news drives the news of the rest of the world.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, Russia Today Moscow requested a live TV
interview via Skype about the Newtown, Connecticut, school shootings
that killed 20 young children and several adults. I was interested to
know what was Moscow’s interest in the shootings, and I agreed to the
interview.

I was surprised to see that RT Moscow’s interest was to spread the
official US story of the shootings and to ask me if I thought “assault
weapons” would be banned as a consequence.

Many things can be an assault weapon. A baseball bat, a knife, a fist, a
foot, a single shot .22 rifle, a double-barrel shotgun, a fireplace
poker, a six-shot revolver, a brick, a sword, a bow and arrow, a lance. A
person can add many items to this short list.

Gun-control advocates have defined “assault weapon” to be a
semi-automatic civilian version of military weapons, such as AR-15, the
civilian version of the military M-16, and AK-47. During the Clinton
administration the civilian version of these weapons was not permitted
to have various harmless features because the features made the rifles
have a military appearance, and the weapons were restricted to magazines
that held no more than ten rounds.

Today 20 and 30 round magazines are available. For a professional, the
capacity of the magazines is immaterial. With experience a person can
change clips in a second. A button is pushed, the clip drops out and a
new one is inserted. For reasons hard to follow, gun control advocates
think that a ten-round clip turns an “assault weapon” into something
else.

I told RT Moscow that the United States was the most complete police
state in human history. Thanks to modern technology, Washington is able
to spy on its subjects far beyond the capabilities of Joseph Stalin and
Adolf Hitler. Even George Orwell’s imagination in his dystopian novel,
1984, has been surpassed by Washington’s current practice. The “war on
terror” is the excuse for the American Police State.

A police state, I said, was inconsistent with an armed population, and
as all other constitutional amendments have fallen, the sole remaining
amendment, the Second Amendment, will not survive much longer.

But why RT Moscow’s focus on “assault weapons”? The accused, Adam
Lanza, was immediately declared guilty. According to the Associated
Press, the Newtown, Connecticut medical examiner, Dr H. Wayne Carver
said that “all the victims of the Connecticut elementary school shooting
were killed up close by multiple rifle shots.” http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/183651631.html

Yet Fox News http://www.fox5vegas.com/story/20346133/reports-of-multiple-dead-including-1-child-from-ct-elementary-school-shooting
reports that “A CNN reporter said police recovered three weapons at the
scene: a Glock and a Sig-Sauer, which are handguns, as well as a .223
Bushmaster rifle. The rifle was in the back seat of the car the gunman
drove to the school, the handguns were inside the school.”

The same Fox News report says: “Security measures implemented this year
at Sandy Hook [the school] kept doors locked during class hours, and
people have to be buzzed in before entering. There is a camera to view
whoever enters the building.” If this report is correct, how did an
armed Lanza gain entry to the school?

I tried to point out to RT Moscow that these news reports indicate that
the accused dead gunman, whom no one can interrogate, if he is indeed
the culprit, killed the children with handguns, not with an “assault
rifle” left in the car, but that the medical examiner said the children
were killed with rifle shots.

The discrepancy is obvious. Either the news reports are incorrect, the
medical examiner is wrong, or someone other than Adam Lanza shot the
children.

This was too much for RT Moscow’s news anchor. She cut me off with her
statement that the children were dead by whatever gun. Yet, the focus of
the program was on “assault rifles.” This focus was reinforced when I
was asked to stay online for a post-interview question.

The question from RT Moscow was whether I thought assault weapons would
be banned. I answered that I thought all guns would be banned. I had
already told the TV anchor that I thought that all guns would be taken
away from US subjects, but that I doubted the efficacy of the ban. I
told the news anchor that during the early part of the 20th century, the
US, in all its wisdom, had a ban on alcohol, but alcohol was everywhere
available. The alcohol ban was the origin of the crime syndicates’
fortunes. Today we have the drug ban, going back decades. The result
is that drugs are everywhere, and drug syndicates are making billions.
It will not be much different with a gun ban. England has a gun ban, but
criminals have guns, and today the formerly unarmed British police are
heavily armed. When I lived in England, guns were not banned and the
police carried nightsticks, not firearms.

The focus on “assault weapons” is puzzling for another reason. According
to news reports Lanza had a personality or mental disorder, or perhaps
he was just different.

Regardless, he was on medication. So does the blame lie with guns or with medication?

As the agenda is to ban guns, the blame is placed on guns.

In the previous mass shooting at the Colorado movie theater, eyewitness
accounts differed from the official account, and according to news
accounts the suspect was involved with the government in some sort of
mind control experiments and was found after the shooting sitting in a
car in the movie theater parking lot.

Similarly, the Connecticut school shooting has puzzling aspects. In the
real time report to the police, a teacher says that she saw “two shadows
running past the gym.” http://sgtreport.com/2012/12/so-many-questions-too-few-answers-was-the-sandy-hook-massacre-an-organzied-false-flag-operation/
The police radio recording also reports two men in a van at the school
stopped and detained, and various news sources report that the police
arrested a man in the nearby woods. The man says, “I didn’t do it,” but
how would a man out in the woods know what had just happened? There are
no TVs to watch in the woods; yet, the man denied doing the shooting.
Very strange.

What often happens is that there are a number of initial false reports,
such as in the Connecticut case the report that Lanza’s mother was a
teacher at the school and was killed at the school, that Lanza had also
killed his father, and that Lanza’s brother might have been involved.
Any discrepancies in the official story then get thrown out with the
false reports. As the media simply goes along with the official story
and does not investigate, it is impossible to know what really happened.
People just accept the official story.

It seems odd, however, that RT Moscow would uncritically follow the US
media in reporting the official story after experiencing, for example,
the US media’s intentional misreporting of the Georgian-Russian war,
which was started by the former Soviet republic of Georgia but blamed on
Russia. Does RT Moscow really believe the US media that the US missile
bases surrounding Russia are directed at Iran?

Americans have been well armed for several centuries, but “gun violence” is new. Why?

Are there more disturbed people? More medicated people? Have Americans
lost self-control, their moral conscience? Are Americans being molded
by violent movies and video games and by eleven years of their
government’s slaughter of other peoples? Have Americans lost empathy for
others?

Tom McNamara, a lecturer at the French National Military Academy, asks: “Do Arabs Cry For Their Children Too?” http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/18/do-arabs-cry-for-their-children-too/print

The Connecticut school shooting is a tragedy in more ways than one.
Children lost their lives, families lost their children, and the tragedy
is being used to disarm Americans faced with a police state growing in
power and menace. View Article Link