Saturday, April 27, 2013

More Reasons to Avoid Genetically Modified 'Food'


Once again, RT (Russia Today) is running a story that you’ll never see on American (and probably Canadian, British, Australian, or New Zealand TV, and we might be hard pressed to find it ins continental European media), and it concerns the nutritional value of GMO corn.

Now here’s the story as RT ran it, incidentally, on the same day as the Boston marathon bombing:


And if you’re one of those who mistrusts any report coming out of Russia on principle (I’m not, or rather, I am considerably more inclined to mistrust SeeBS, CNoNews, Faux News or PMSNBC than I am Russia Today), here’s the original report:


Now, before we get to what I think is the real news here, look at those figures again:

There is virtually no nutritional value to GMO corn, while, on the other hand, monsters at Duponzanto and other GMO agribusiness giants are feeding us:
  1. 60 parts per million (PPM) of chlorides;
  2. 60 PPM of unspecified “chemical content”;
  3. and a yummy 200 PPM of formaldehyde; and
  4. 13 PPM of glyphosate.
As the “leaked report” RT is referring to states: “Look at the levels of Formaldehyde and Glyphosate IN the corn! The EPA standards for Glyphosate in water in America is .7ppm. In Europe it is .2 ppm. Tests showed organ damage to animals at .1ppm of Glyphosate in water. This corn has 13 ppm!”

A Curious Decision

'Father X', a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, should be praised for his essay on technology at The Remnant web site, which begins thus:  'It has always been the effort of the City of Man to overthrow Gods empire and put man on His throne. And while the effort of the godless to become gods has always failed and always will fail, yet they will continue their attempts until the end of time. This essay, while not wanting to present modern technology as intrinsically evil, yet wishes to highlight its use by the godless as the most powerful tool for self-deification that has yet been seen.'

The See of Rome seems to have a different view of the matter:  'Vatican clergy and employees will be issued with an identity card complete with a microchip-tracking device in sweeping new security measures designed to prevent a repeat of the Vatileaks scandal.'

One hopes the Roman Catholic Church's use of these personal tracking devices will not embolden other organizations (schools, businesses, etc.) to begin using them also.

'O Technology, how beautiful is your potency!'

Friday, April 19, 2013

Addresses on Rural Life by Wendell Berry and Tom Landess

First a commencement address that is actually worth listening to by Wendell Berry on why our current economic model is doomed to failure, on the problems with 'upward mobility' and 'expert servitude' to big corporations, and so forth.

Part One:



Part Two:



And from the excellent Abbeville Institute, Tom Landess presents his hearers with first-hand stories about the Nashville Agrarians.

Worth Repeating - re:the Boston Bombing

From The League of the South's Rebellion blog, a post entitled 'A Short Tale of Two Nations':

'You can tell a lot about a nation when it faces a bit of trouble. The yankee nation has gone full-bore apoplectic over the Boston bombing. Several traits, none of them attractive, have surfaced. First, indignation. "How dare you attack us! We're innocent people who have never harmed anyone." Second, fear. "Stay in your homes, lock your doors and pull down the shades, and if someone knocks, don't answer it. Leave everything to the authorities." These are commands to a servile, effeminate people. And third, despair. I heard the former Mayor of Boston, Ray Flynn, say that this was the worst things that had ever happened to his city. How indeed will they ever recover? Perhaps they could look to Columbia, Charleston, Atlanta, or several other once-devastated Southern towns and cities for some historical advice on how to survive and recover from real tragedies.

'As a Southerner, I've had a belly full of all this whining, complaining, hyperbole, and fear-mongering from New England. Meanwhile, our Southern kinfolk in Texas are quietly going about the business of cleaning up and looking to the future amidst a much greater and more deadly disaster in the little community of West. We are indeed two very different nations. Michael Hill'

*

A portion of a post from the LRC blog:


'Consider: America is a nation begun, in large part, when its citizens raised arms against the Government. Citizens. Raised arms. Against the government. Fast forward, and those very same citizens, ironically in the area often thought of as the birthplace of that revolution, are forced to cower in their homes, while armored cars and police "protect them" from... What? Ostensibly, a couple Chechen terrorists? C'mon now!  (Never mind the fact that a U.S. drone probably killed a whole family of civilians last night, with nary a mention on the CBS Evening News.)

'What is particularly relevant here, and chilling from my point of view, is an observation Jeff Snyder makes in his powerful book, "Nation of Cowards." Snyder talks about the change that takes place, that must take place, in the psyche of a person who is protected by others as a matter of routine. He accepts that protection in exchange for some portion of his own sense of personal responsibility. As a result, he can often be more easily controlled by those protectors.

'We're well on our way.'

*

Alex Jones today during The Alex Jones Show:  'The New World Order has reinvaded Boston on Patriot's Day.'

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

First Amendment Failure: Why Every Town Needs an Established Creed

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . - First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution has failed.  It could do no other.  For a government cannot be neutral toward religion.  Its laws and actions will be based upon one religious creed or another, and it will direct its citizens - passively or actively, gently or forcefully - to follow that same creed, worship that same deity, which the government itself honors, when tolerance is prescribed by law.

Its original purpose - allowing those States with established churches at the time the U.S. Constitution was ratified to continue such arrangements without fear of interference by the federal government - was to allow for local decision-making regarding the relationship between the churches and the State and local governments. 

But as the different sections of the country began to drift further apart religiously, the thin veneer of federal neutrality toward religion (which, at times, did indeed become a friendship with a vaguely defined Protestant Christianity) wouldn’t last long.  Humanism - manworship - and nationalism - worship of the grand salvific empire - have filled the articles of the federal government’s creed for some decades now, and in the 20th and 21st centuries, the mask of nominal Christianity has mostly been removed to reveal it.

The reader will recognize the catalogue of proofs:  legalizing child-killing and pornography, inventing rights for same-sex couples and other perversions, breaking up families and encouraging sloth through ‘welfare’ handouts, banning Christian prayers and instruction in the Church’s teachings at public schools, now going so far as to force Christian organizations to pay for health insurance coverage of birth control drugs and abortions.  And the rest of it.

This is not to be wondered at.  For pretending that government at any level can be neutral toward religion will only make a people subject to its whims as to what should be worshipped, and how:

‘The famed tolerance or freedom of religion in democratic states is only apparent. Or rather, it can be real only for a time, until the State works out its own ruling ideology and applies it consistently. For, as Tikhomirov writes, “if a state, as law and power, removes itself from being linked with a determinate confession, that is, from the influence of a religious confession on its own religious politics, it becomes the common judge of all confessions and subjects religion to itself. All relations between the various confessions and the rights of them all must, evidently, be decided by the state that is set outside them, which is governed exclusively by its own ideas on justice and the good of the state and society. In this situation it evidently has the complete right and opportunity to carry out repressions whenever, in its opinion, the interests of a confession contradict civil and political interests”’ (Vladimir Moss, Autocracy, Despotism and Democracy, Part I: The Age of Faith (to 1453), 2013, p. 447; available at <http://www.orthodoxchristianbooks.com/downloads/386_AUTOCRACY_PART_1_4_.pdf>.  Quote of Tikhomirov from L. A. Tikhomirov, Religiozno-philosophskie osnovy istorii (The Religio-Philosophical Foundations of History), Moscow, 1997, p. 269.).

Furthermore, such tolerance or neutrality brings with it other problems of great moment:  ‘Of course, variety adds colour to life. We yearn for it. We cannot imagine life without it. But if diversity becomes the highest principle, then there can be no universal human values, and making one's own values the yardstick of another person's opinions is ignorant and brutal. If there is no right and wrong, what restraints remain? If there is no universal basis for it there can be no morality. 'Pluralism' as a principle degenerates into indifference, superficiality, it spills over into relativism, into tolerance of the absurd, into a pluralism of errors and lies. You may show off your ideas, but must say nothing with conviction. To be too sure that you are right is indecent. So people wander like babes in the wood. That is why the Western world today is defenceless; paralysed by its inability any longer to distinguish between true and false positions, between manifest Good and manifest Evil, by the centrifugal chaos of ideas, by the entropy of thought. 'Let's have as many views as possible - just as long as they're all different!' But if a hundred mules all pull different ways the result is no movement at all.

‘In the whole universal flux there is one truth - God's truth, and, consciously or not, we all long to draw near to this truth and touch it. A great diversity of opinions has some sense if we make it our first concern to compare them so as to discover and renounce our mistakes. To discover the true way of looking at things, come as close as we can to God's truth, and not just collect as many 'different' views as we can’ (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘Our Pluralists’, Survey, vol. 29, no. 2 (125), 1985, pp. 1-2; quoted in Vladimir Moss, Twelve Lectures on the Theology of Politics, 2009, p. 96; available at <http://www.orthodoxchristianbooks.com/downloads/168_TWELVE_LECTURES_ON_THE_THEOLOGY_OF_POLITICS.pdf>).

Neither will these problems be solved by electing the right Republican or Democrat to federal office or by packing the U.S. Supreme Court with so-called conservatives.  Most federal officials care not a wit about the greater part of the folk but about the opinion of a few elite, or about pleasing their large money donors.  There must instead be recognition of truths that will be difficult for some to accept.

Truth 1:  The sections of the United States are too different to be governed justly by one national government as it is currently constituted.  (The same holds true even for the sections within some individual States.)  Federal power must be dispersed to its proper place, person, organization, etc., or else the cultural clash between progressives and traditionalists across the continent will continue unabated for years to come.

Truth 2:  This dispersion effected, each community at some level (town, county/parish, state) must declare and establish its religion so as to allow every family to know whether they wish to live under thus-and-such a faith.

Since it is unlikely that the hoped-for dispersion of federal power will occur soon, it is perhaps best for locals to begin preparing their creedal declarations now, regardless of bluster about federal lawsuits, etc.

For Christians, the aim in all this ought to be what the Orthodox have usually termed the symphony between Church and state, in which there is not mutual antagonism among the two, each jealously vying for some paltry scrap of earthly power, but rather cooperation so that the soul of every man, woman, and child might find salvation in Jesus Christ through his Holy Orthodox Church. 

The role of the state in this one ‘divine-human communion’ (James L. Kelley, Anatomizing Divinity: Studies in Science, Esotericism and Political Theology, Walterville, Or.: Trine Day LLC, 2011, p. 106) of the Christian people ‘is to protect and strengthen the Orthodox Faith and Church, just as the purpose of the body is to protect the soul and carry out its will’ (Vladimir Moss, Twelve Lectures, p. 32.  For more details on the Orthodox perspective of the relationship between Church and state, see Moss, Twelve Lectures, pgs. 25-34, and Kelley, pgs. 103-8.). 

Whatever creed is chosen, however, let the people, ‘church’, and government of that place declare it plainly and forthrightly and hew to it, to gain for itself some measure of protection against the arbitrary decrees of exclusively state-imposed and -controlled religion and against a chaotic and lying society, which faithfulness even to an heretical religion like Hinduism or Confucianism can give in some degree.  

The First Amendment’s religion clause and similar clauses like it in state and local charters must be seen for the farce that they are, and fervently plucked out and rejected, and one faith clearly declared and defined in every town and village for the people therein - if ever there is to be peaceful life in and among the States of this unfortunate union again.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Neighborhood Nullification

The idea of nullification is making its way ever deeper into the political discourse of Americans.  One of the latest examples of this phenomenon is Curtis Coleman’s campaign for Governor of Arkansas.  (See the section entitled ‘Regaining the Intended Balance of Power’ at his web site.)

But despite such encouraging developments, there is also the downside of the current situation:  Most state and local officials don’t intend to follow through with their promises to check unlawful exercises of power by the national government, for they are of the same heart and mind as those who run the latter:  lusting after the possession and use of power, as much as they can lay hands on.

So rather than seek the protection of these untrustworthy guardians alone, it is time we looked closer to home for deliverance. 

In Anglo-Saxon England, there was an institution known as the folcgemot.  Among other duties, this regular gathering of locals protected individuals of the village from unjust demands of the rulers of their day:  The king’s representative was disputed with face-to-face by these sturdy peasants (Stenton, Frank.  Anglo-Saxon England.  3rd ed.  New York: Oxford UP, 2001, pgs. 297-9).

And so it ought to be again in our day.  Instead of placing our hope in corrupt legislators, judges, mayors, etc., let’s bring back into practice this forgotten form of nullification - neighborhood nullification. 

There is a great sense of dissatisfaction with modern suburban living because there are no longer any common tasks that bring us together, resulting in isolation and loneliness.  (See for example John Cuddeback’s essay of 28 Feb. 2013 at the Front Porch Republic web site, ‘Exurban Dream? What Exurbs and Suburbs Have in Common.)  Neighborhood nullification offers us a wonderful opportunity to throw aside this isolation and join together in the common work of defending the old order of decentralized government.

But we shouldn’t be under any illusions.  This is a path that could grow perilous very quickly.  Initially it will be easy and perhaps thrilling:  This is when the defiance of this or that federal ‘law’ is announced, along with the reasons for it, with the signatures of the subdivision/neighborhood residents affixed. 

What comes afterward is only for the brave of heart.  When the federal agents bring someone to poverty for not complying with their rules (through fines, forfeiture, etc.), we must be willing and able to help him and his family until they get back on their feet.  Should these jackboots come to arrest someone, we must be willing to stand between them and their prey.  And so on.

There is no need for violence; that would play right into the hands of our liberty-hating adversaries.  But, as was said above, for courage and stout hearts there will be a great need.

But we must not be discouraged.  Sauron and Saruman disregarded the hobbits, thinking them too weak and insignificant to thwart their grand designs.  The elite of D.C. no doubt see today’s neighborhoods the same way - small, disorganized, powerless.  Well then, let the Halflings of the shires from Maine to Wyoming to Hawai’i show them that we are just as dauntless as our cousins from Middle-earth!  It is time to turn off the television, put away the smartphone, and stand side by side with our neighbors in defense of the precious inheritance passed down to us by our forefathers, before the last of it is snatched away by the faceless insect hordes of the federal government.

With apologies to the Tenth Amendment Center, concordia res parvae crescunt.

***
 
For those who nevertheless wish to work with official local government bodies, here are some model bills you can present to your town council, mayor, sheriff, etc. dealing with indefinite detention, guns, and more.

The Kinsman-Redeemer of the South


‘And if a sojourner or stranger wax rich by thee, and thy brother that dwelleth by him wax poor, and sell himself unto the stranger or sojourner by thee, or to the stock of the stranger's family: After that he is sold he may be redeemed again; one of his brethren may redeem him: Either his uncle, or his uncle's son, may redeem him, or any that is nigh of kin unto him of his family may redeem him . . .’ (Leviticus 25:47-49, King James Version (KJV) of The Holy Bible).

‘And Naomi said unto her daughter in law, Blessed be he of the Lord, who hath not left off his kindness to the living and to the dead. And Naomi said unto her, The man is near of kin unto us, one of our next kinsmen’ (Ruth 2:20, KJV of The Holy Bible).

‘And the women said unto Naomi, Blessed be the Lord, which hath not left thee this day without a kinsman, that his name may be famous in Israel.  And he shall be unto thee a restorer of thy life, and a nourisher of thine old age . . .’ (Ruth 4:14, 15, KJV of The Holy Bible).

I. The Family and the Nation

A nation is more than an outward union of individuals, tied together superficially by a political or economic system or ideal.  A nation is a family - an extended family, but a family na’theless:  The family is older than the State. Man, husband, wife, father, son, mother, daughter and the obligations and virtues inherent in these names existed before the family grew into the nation and the State was formed. That is why family life in relation to State life can be figuratively depicted as the root of the tree’ (Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, Sochinenia (Works), 1848 ed., vol. 2, p. 169; quoted in Vladimir Moss, Autocracy, Despotism and Democracy: Part I, 2012, p. 12).

From the divinely established duties and hierarchies of family life come not democracies and republics resting on mythical Lockean contracts but monarchies, i.e., patriarchal societies.  Metropolitan Philaret continues, ‘ . . . from the pure elements of family there should arise similarly pure principles of State life, so that with veneration for one’s father veneration for the tsar [king - W.G.] should be born and grow, and that the love of children for their mother should be a preparation of love for the fatherland, and the simple-hearted obedience of domestics [children - W.G.] should prepare and direct the way to self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness in obedience to the laws and sacred authority of the autocrat…’ (Sochinenia (Works), 1848 ed., vol. 2, p. 169; quoted in Moss, p.12).

‘Again, Bishop Ignaty Brianchaninov wrote: “In blessed Russia, in accordance with the spirit of the pious people, the Tsar and the fatherland constitute one whole, just as in a family the parents and their children constitute one whole’ (Sobranie Pisem (Collected Letters), Moscow, 2000, p. 781; quoted in Moss, p.13).

Louis de Bonald, summing up Bishop Bossuet’s views, goes into more detail of this development of family into kingdom:  ‘Mankind descended from a first family.  Families multiply themselves, are held together by descent and by community of locale and needs, and form tribes in which an elder, under the modest title of judge, settles differences, unites the wills, and directs the powers.  Tribes, eventually joined together through alliances, treaties, and sometimes by conquest, become nations.  In this final stage of society, monarchical government arises as the only government that can preserve the tribes and that retains in this last development of the social body all the independence of the paternal power that existed at the beginning’ (‘On Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux’, Critics of the Enlightenment, 2004, p. 54).

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn adds, ‘Now we have to look at political institutions from the point of view of cultural harmony.  Since the patriarchal relationship dominates in the theological, ecclesiastic and biological sphere, it is psychologically not easy to organize political life along egalitarian and “numeralistic” lines.  . . . there is in our psyche the active and passive desire for “fatherhood”’ (Liberty or Equality, 1993, pgs. 139-40).  Hence, the importance of a king to a nation.

Such thoughts were deeply embedded in the South from her beginnings, being founded by Royalists (king-friends) and admirers of Sir Robert Filmer’s thoughts on the hierarchical family and patriarchy (David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 1989, pgs. 212, 274, 279-80).  We will see the importance of recognizing the paternal order of the family and the nation momentarily. 

II. ‘What Is a Nation?’

Though some, perhaps many, will try to deny it, the South is a distinct nation, a separate member in the body of humanity.  Following the definition of the Slavophile Vladimir Osipov, we see that this is undoubtedly true:  ‘What is a nation?  Faith, blood, language and the land’ (Quote from P. Walters, ‘A New Creed for Russians?’, Religion in Communist Lands, vol. 3, no. 4, 1976; quoted in Vladimir Moss, Twelve Lectures on the Theology of Politics, 2009, p. 102).

Her bent towards traditional Christianity; her descent mainly from the people of Wessex, Mercia, and other parts of the old Anglo-Saxon English realm; her Old English speechways; and the influence of the weather and land of the southeastern area of North America on the Southern people - all these mark the South as a true nation.

The United States Empire, by contrast, has been merely a mechanical assemblage of such authentic nation-regions (the South, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, Hawai’i, Alaska, etc.) held together by force, their true cultures suppressed by Washington, D.C. - or, rather, those who control its institutions.

The South being truly a nation, then, the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s words apply to her just as much as to Greece or New Zealand or Honduras:  ‘Recently it has become fashionable to speak of the levelling of nations, and the disappearance of peoples in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization . . . the disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all individual people were assimilated into one character, one person. Nations are the wealth of humanity, its social personalities; the smallest of them bears its own special traits, and hides within itself a special facet of the Divine plan...

‘It is precisely he who gives the highest value to the existence of nations, who sees in them not a temporary fruit of social formations, but a complex, vivid, unrepeatable organism that cannot be invented by men - he it is who recognizes that nations have a fullness of spiritual life, a fullness of ascents and falls, a range extending from holiness to villainy (though the extreme points are achieved only by individual personalities).

‘ . . .

‘Between a person and a nation there is the deepest similarity - in the mystical nature of the uncreatedness of both the one and the other’ (Quote from D. Shturman, Gorodu i Miru (To the City and the World), New York: Tretia Vol'na, 1988, pgs. 327, 333-4; quoted in Moss, Twelve Lectures on the Theology of Politics, p. 100).

Solzhenitsyn’s words must be emphasized in this day of utilitarianism and world-without-borders ideology:  A nation is not just a temporary construct established for the sake of usefulness, which can be deconstructed and reshaped or even discarded if the need arises.  It is not a garment to be worn for a time and then cast away in some utopian future when all differences among people shall disappear.  The nation is not temporary; it will not be abolished.  It is a permanent thing.  And it is permanent because it is good in the eyes of the Lord.  St John the Evangelist bears witness to its everlasting existence.  Speaking in the context of the new heavens and new earth that will come to be after Christ’s Second Coming, he writes, ‘And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it . . . And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it . . . and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations’ (Revelation 21:24, 26; 22:2, KJV of The Holy Bible). 

The nations are as eternal as the human soul itself; they last to the ages of ages with Our Lord in Heaven.  Each true nation therefore must be treated with the utmost dignity, for each is precious to the Holy Trinity in its own way.

III. The Kinsman-Redeemer

But this duty has often been spurned by fallen man.  Thus, nations have conquered other nations throughout the ages, and some have been destroyed completely, lost until history as we know it shall come to a close and all flesh resurrected.

The South, weak as she is, has not been so obliterated.  Yet neither has she been treated with the dignity due to her as a nation.  For she has been in thrall to another for almost 150 years - first, the civilization of the Northern States; now, a cartel of private bankers, national and international corporation owners, and the ‘creators of culture’ in New York City and Los Angeles.  She has been quite thoroughly dispossessed by these:  The banks own much of her land and homes; the corporations command the greater part of her labor; and the films, news, music, books, ways of speaking, and so on that bombard her are from the foreign societies of the Northeast and the West Coast.

Yet despite all this gloom, there is still great hope for our deliverance.  In ancient Israel when an Israelite fell into bondage to a fellow Israelite or to a foreigner, he could be rescued from it by a kinsman-redeemer, one from among his family who could pay the debts he owed and thus restore to him the land and freedom he had lost (see Leviticus chapter 25).

Undoubtedly the South has fallen into bondage to those mentioned just above.  But just as surely does she have a kinsman-redeemer:  The blessed and holy king of Wessex and all England, St Ælfred.

A king, as was alluded to above, is a father to his people.  Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn describes the relationship between a king and his nation this way:  ‘ . . . a father in a wider sense is a man with full responsibility over minors, and a position of respect, seniority and leadership in relation to mature persons.  This relation is intimate, emotional and affectionate.  . . . in a traditional monarchy the relationship between king and subject is that of a middle-aged father and his mature son, not that of a young father and an infant’ (Liberty or Equality, p. 138). 

The king loves his people deeply.  And just as an earthly father’s love would not be exhausted though he lived to see seven times seven generations of his children’s children, neither would the love of a king, being the father of his nation, wane toward his subjects, though age after age should pass.  With this kind of devotion and lovingkindness do departed Christian kings, from their abode in Heaven, look upon every generation born in their nations.

Recalling therefore that the main body of the Southern people comes directly from the kingdom that St Ælfred ruled in the 9th century A.D., it may be said in sooth that St Ælfred is the father of Southrons and Englishmen alike.  And so he continues his watchcare over the descendants of the Southern nation today and for all time to come - and with a love perfected by the Lord Christ:  However great a debt of sin his children in the South have amassed, he prays to the Lord that it be forgiven.  Though enemies oppress the Southland, he will help her overcome them.  Though she wander from the straight path of Orthodox Christianity, he, her shepherd, will guide her back to it.

See what torments Russia has withstood from the hands of Tartars, Communists, and more through the intercessions of the Mother of God, St Sergius of Radonezh, St Seraphim of Sarov, and her other holy saints.  Likewise Serbia by looking to St Lazar their great King-Martyr. 

So too will St Ælfred see the South through her troubles.  Because he was a zealous champion of the weak and downtrodden in his kingdom; because he abhorred injustice, and corrected it; because he rescued the Christian English nation from the pagan Vikings by his faith, his wisdom, and his sword; because St Ælfred did such things while in the flesh, and more besides (see for example Bishop Asser’s Life of King Alfred in Alfred the Great, 2004, pgs. 66-110), we know that he does such things for the South even now.  But how much more will he do if we but ask him!  Did Our Lord not say it was so?  ‘If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?  or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent?  Of if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?’  (The Gospel according to St Luke 11:11, 12, KJV of The Holy Bible)  Neither will the South’s kinsman, her father, her papa, St Ælfred, give her evil if she ask him for good.  (Yet she should by no means expect a magical escape from further suffering when she cries out to him, ‘for at times God grants blessed suffering, according to His mercy’ for the salvation of the soul (Archimandrite Irenei, The Beginnings of a Life of Prayer, 2012, p. 66).)

Thus the importance of recognizing the truth about nations, the nation as a family, differing ranks within the family, the authority of the father, and the legitimacy of the king and his love for the nation:  If the South were to deny them, she would quite literally deny herself a mighty deliverer in the person of St Ælfred and continue her descent into total slavery of body, mind, and soul to the modern pagans.

‘Truly, Holy Great-Martyr Tsar Lazar “travels” with his suffering people who need his intercessions due to their own sins as well as due to the trials and tribulations from those who persecute them.  He has never left them alone.  His commitment is eternal, just as the mention of his glorious name is synonomous [sic] with Kosovo and Serbian Orthodoxy . . . (Fr Daniel M. Rogich, Great-Martyr Tsar Lazar of Serbia: His Life and Service, 2001, p. 22).  So it is with the South and St Ælfred:  Like a devoted father, he will always be attentive to her and to her cries for help.  So it shall ever be.  Amen.


Work Cited

Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources.  Trs. Keynes, Simon and Michael Lapidge.  New York, Ny.: Penguin Putnam, 2004.

Bonald, Louis de.  ‘On Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux’.  Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition.  Ed. & tr. Blum, Christopher Olaf.  Wilmington, De.: ISI Books, 2004.

Fischer, David Hackett.  Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York, Ny.: Oxford UP, 1989.

The Holy Bible.  King James Version.  Nashville, Tn.: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1972.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Erik von. Liberty or Equality.  Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Press, 1993.

Moss, Vladimir.  Autocracy, Despotism and Democracy: An Historical Approach to the Relationship between Religion and Politics, Part I: The Age of Faith (to 1453).  2013.  <http://www.orthodoxchristianbooks.com/downloads/386_AUTOCRACY_PART_1_4_.pdf>.  Accessed 28 March 2013.

--.  Twelve Lectures on the Theology of Politics.  2009.  <http://www.orthodoxchristianbooks.com/downloads/168_TWELVE_LECTURES_ON_THE_THEOLOGY_OF_POLITICS.pdf>.  Accessed 28 March 2013.

Rogich, Father Daniel M.  Great-Martyr Tsar Lazar of Serbia: His Life and Service.  Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2001.

Steenberg, Archimandrite Irenei.  The Beginnings of a Life of Prayer.  Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2012.