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Subjective Truth: Artillery for Compulsion

Richard Barnes

The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his creation. – C. S. Lewis, 1943

Was C. S. Lewis right to believe that subjective truth is anathema to liberty?

Let’s just take the recent history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): 

  • Sent a swat team to the front door of a pro-life family and arrested the father of 8 for a charge so ludicrous it was thrown out of court.
  • Issued a memorandum identifying parents who opposed boys using girls’ bathrooms as “domestic terrorists”
  • Illegally queried data on 278,000 Americans
  • Stonewalled Congress on unclassified documents which allege corruption at the highest levels, including briberies from foreign countries to influence our foreign policies (the stonewalling had to yield once a leading member of Congress actually read from the document, thereby showing it actually existed)
  • Knowingly lied in a sworn affidavit to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) in order to spy on an American Citizen

Ad infinitum

The prevarications and misdirections employed to justify the above are breathtaking.

We can safely say this is not the FBI my generation remembers as synonymous with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.

But, lest the reader think that I trust Congress, let me say that it was Congress who authorized The Patriot Act (our founding patriots must be spinning in their graves) which further opened the barn door to these unprecedented intrusions into Americans’ lives and it is Congress who kept reauthorizing that infamous act until it finally was allowed to exhale it’s last pollutant in 2020.

What about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court? This was authorized by Congress to enable an orderly process for surveilling foreign agents operating within the United States. Is anyone surprised that it now routinely approves surveillance of American citizens? For example, during the Obama administration, the court secretly authorized a warrant which ordered Verizon to provide a daily feed to the National Security Administration (NSA) of comprehensive call detail records, including location data, about all calls in its system, including local telephone calls.

That alone should have ended the funding of this freakish tergiversation of our historic liberties. But Congress goes on funding these courts, year after year.

Examples abound.

For instance, on June 16, 2023, 20 armed IRS agents raided Highwood Creek Outfitters in Great Falls, Montana. The agents confiscated all the 4473 forms. These forms contain ZERO financial information. But they do contain sensitive personal information of all citizens who purchased firearms legally from the store.

Why would an agency whose raison d’être is to collect taxes seek to track individuals who exercise their Second Amendment rights? And the Congress recently funded billions more for that same agency, including the hiring of 87,000 more agents, in addition to funding military grade weapons for the “tax collection” agency.

Many posts could be drafted with similar examples of questionable (putting it charitably) activities by the State — federal, state, and local — including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Administration, ad infinitum.

None of this should surprise anyone with a passing knowledge of totalitarian regimes and their antecedents. 

In discussions with friends and family I often hear the riposte, that “this is America” or “Americans wouldn’t do that” or similar sentiments. 

(Sentiments, as in subjective truth.)

What makes Americans immune to the enticements of power over others? Are we not all sinners with an inherent bent to usurp authority and to seek power that does not belong to us? 

Did not our colonial fathers and mothers leave England precisely to escape the clutches of an increasingly totalitarian regime, which refused to acknowledge it was totalitarian? Did not our Constitutional founders struggle mightily to limit and restrain the reach and power of the central government?

Why would they do that if they believed that “Americans are different”?

They did it because Americans are sinners just like anyone else on any spot of the planet. And as sinners we need to be restrained from evil. Especially men and women who hold reins of power. They, more than most, need to be blocked from usurpations and despotisms.

Well, subjective truth allows (compels!) the bureaucrats who run the myriad federal and state agencies to consider American citizens as “foreigners” or even as “enemies”. Without batting an eye, they will classify anyone who does not toe the line — who does not conform — an enemy.

Based on recent incidents, we can now identify some of those who do not conform:

  • Parents who believe their children are either boys or girls, not something in between. In other words, most parents.
  • Folks who believe the state — whether federal or local — exists to serve, not lord it over, the citizenry.
  • People who love their country but are skeptical of powerful central governments; in other words, people like Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, etc.
  • Citizens who don’t look kindly on bureaucrats and judges usurping powers that belong to the legislature.
  • Americans who peacefully exercise their Constitutional rights, including the Bill of Rights.
  • Families whose first allegiance is to the Triune God, not Caesar.
  • In sum, anyone who loves ordered liberty.

Subjective truth is putty in the hands of men and women determined to impose their will on the rest of us. It does not matter what the Constitution, the law, the statute, or the regulation actually says; subjective truth runs roughshod over all written documents because it applies its own meaning to such, thereby deconstructing what has been understood for millennia.

Jack Gleason has given us a partial list of what subjective truth has given us:

  • Judges who refuse to judge
  • Anti-American American presidents
  • Prosecutors who don’t prosecute crime
  • Peaceful protests labeled as domestic terrorism and domestic terrorists labelled as peaceful protestors
  • Representatives who don’t represent
  • News reporters who do not report the news
  • Scientists who do not use the scientific method
  • Teachers who push pornography on children
  • Psychologists who push dysphoria onto children while keeping parents in the dark
  • Men playing against women in women’s sports and assaulting women in locker rooms
  • Doctors who don’t heal
  • Free speech that isn’t free

Ad nauseum

George Orwell in his 1984 had a good grasp of this phenomenon. His dystopian novel tells of newspeak and of memory holes and of erasing history and more, all the while a giant boot grinds the face of humanity.

Subjective truth is a weapon used throughout human history to enable the few to compel the many. It has always been and will always be so. Subjective truth is the artillery for compulsion.

To combat, restrain, and reverse our descent into hell, we must affirm objective truth and teach it to our children and grandchildren.

However this is not an overnight thing.

Nevertheless, we can at least begin that process by examining pivotal events which have been distorted beyond historical recognition and how looking at them rightly can yield a change in paradigms and enable a return to right reason. At least for our children and grandchildren.

In short, although this is a time for concern, it is nevertheless no time for despair.

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963). His observations were not directly political yet have great bearing on our political situation today

Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (1918-2014), actor who portrayed a straight arrow FBI inspector in the popular television series, The F.B.I.

Patrick Henry (1736-1799), drawn by Lawrence Sully a few years before Henry’s death; watercolor by James Barton Longacre, circa 1835. Henry, like many founders, had a firm grasp of man’s sinfulness. He distrusted the Constitution because he believed it would be abused to concentrate more and more power in the federal government and usurp the liberties of Americans. Others who supported ratification believed that American families would continue to teach their children properly and religiously. This would be sufficient to keep the federal government in check. 

A Nasty Business

Richard Barnes

As a matter of historical fact the legal systems of all the nations that are heirs to the Western legal tradition have been rooted in certain beliefs or postulates [which] have presupposed the validity of those beliefs. Today those beliefs or postulates — such as the structural integrity of law, its ongoingness, its religious roots, its transcendent qualities — are rapidly disappearing ….

The law is becoming more fragmented, more subjective, geared more to expediency and less to morality, concerned more with immediate consequences and less with consistency or continuity.

Thus the historical soil of the Western legal tradition is being washed away in the twentieth century, and the tradition itself is threatened with collapse. — Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution, Harvard University Press (1983)

To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots. — Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Disrespecting, disregarding, dishonoring, distorting, or otherwise dismissing objective Truth in history, is a nasty business whose sequel is violence, tyranny, and death (cf, The Black Book of Communism, The Theme is Freedom, Earthly Powers, Robespierre, The Secret Six for historical proof; see 1984, Brave New World, The Hidden Strength, The Possessed, for philosophical reasoning behind the certainty of such a sequel).

In recent posts, we’ve documented very real consequences of godless philosophies and also the phenomenon of seeing the same atheistic ideologies foisted on and by our academics, our politics, our commerce, our medicine, and more as if we by some magic can escape the repercussions such beliefs have engendered throughout history on any people who have indulged in such foolishness.

This blog is entitled “The Pull of The Land” in agreement with Whittaker Chambers who said, “No land has a pull on a man as the land of his childhood.” That is certainly true for this writer. I yearn for a day, should the Lord grant it, in which I can once again see Venezuela a freer country and a happier people such as I remember in my childhood and youth. I also long to see this country — its 50 states and outlying territories — a freer and happier country such as I knew in yesteryear, a country which my own children and grandchildren can enjoy as I did.

But Chambers’ aphorism runs even beyond the land of one’s birth. I have been very fortunate in that I have been able to visit, and in some cases live in, lands on all sides of the globe. My heart holds a keen appreciation for such lands. However, eerily, should you offer me a free trip to only one of them, I’d be very hard pressed to choose between Spain and England. Why? Because they both are strongly linked to the place of my birth: an American mining camp in Venezuela. My forebears on my father’s side came to Massachussets from England, and from my mother’s side, to Venezuela from Spain.

The pull is very strong and as much as I’d like to see Singapore or Croatia or New Zealand or Iguazú or any other land once again, it is Spain or England I’d choose if my choices were limited to one or two.

The pull is very strong and as much as I’d like to see Singapore or Croatia or New Zealand or Iguazú or any other land once again, it is Spain or England I’d choose if my choices were limited to one or two.

It is that special love and appreciation which impels us to understand what has happened; to understand in order to be able to address the question, especially for the sake of our children and grandchildren.

We must return to Truth. Not my subjective truth or your subjective truth. Rather, the Objective Truth. 

And this is very difficult because we are all “men of our times” and our times are characterized by constant, endless propaganda which insists on living subjectively and questioning anyone or anything which claims to know the Truth. 

Regardless, we must press on as best we can, knowing that liberty cannot survive on subjectivity. It requires objective truth, which is the most powerful means we have at our disposal in order to push back on those who would transmogrify us into something we never agreed to or otherwise intended to be.

The late Professor Berman said that our legal systems “have been rooted in certain beliefs or postulates [which] have presupposed the validity of those beliefs.” 

As we see elites and mobs tear down statues of men we have historically admired, we must ask whether the presuppositions we formerly believed and acted upon were actually true. By their actions for two or three generations now the destroyers and their abetters in media, academia, entertainment, and more, have been forcefully asserting that all our presuppositions have been lies at best, evil at worst.

What is their basis for their insisting upon their infallibility? Are they speaking and writing truthfully?

A major hint that they speak lies is very easy to see: they work overtime to silence anyone who dares to challenge them on the basis of historical fact or Truth.

That should encourage us. It appears we still have a leg up on them.

But we will lose that advantage unless we get a firm grasp on Truth. 

In future posts, we hope to look at a few pivotal epochs or events in our history and seek to understand the deleterious effects the deliberate distortion of such episodes has had on the course of our history down to the present. 

Girona, Spain

English countryside

San Francisco in the 50s

San Francisco today

Caracas in the 50s

Caracas today

Converting The Catastrophe Of The Revolution

Richard Barnes

[The left-wing Republicans] managed to convert the catastrophe of the [French] Revolution into a stirring and soft-focused myth, largely by downplaying, editing out, or explaining away its most sanguinary ‘episodes’, like the Terror, as deviations from the noble idea, a process in which the great historians of the Republic, some of whom achieved high office, were thoroughly collusive, and which has obvious echoes of subsequent events in Russia, although there, historians tended to be shot” — Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers, p. 339 [emphasis mine].

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “To destroy a people, you must first destroy her roots.” This observation has multiple applications of which two are primary. 

One application is to a country, such as The United States, where for more than a century now, her media and academia have utterly distorted her colonial and early Republic history. The effect of this has been to rear generations who have been taught not only to not know, let alone understand, but to actually hate their country for her racist, repressive, and utterly corrupt colonial past and founding. In effect, there was nothing good in our past and to “progress” we must “burn it down”, cast it aside, and start over. These generations not only despise their fathers, they refuse to listen to anyone with the temerity to show them, even from primary sources, that they have been taught bunk.

Another application is to apply it to a country, such as Venezuela (and much of South America) where for more than two centuries, her media and academia have utterly distorted her colonial [Spanish] history and mythologized and glorified her recent history, inaugurated by the godlike Simón Bolívar, who “liberated” her and initiated the birth of true liberty and civilization. The effect of this has been to rear generations who have been taught to not only scorn, let alone understand, but to hate their colonial past and to believe that all civilization began in the modern era. These are generations who ignore what even Bolívar admitted as he neared death, that centuries of civilization had been wiped out by his revolutions.

Both applications are nefarious and will surely precipitate utter ruin unless arrested. In the first case, they lead to a refusal to defend one’s people and home; in the second, they inspire a false valuation of one’s recent history. In both cases, they result in a headlong rush into ruinous policies and actions.

And, in both cases, an insufferable arrogance is birthed and encouraged: Job would say to them, “No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you.”

Dishonest historians and media are nothing new. Solzhenitsyn told about American correspondents who visited Moscow and reported back to America how the Russian people were filled with unspeakable joy and gratitude for Soviet Communism, this in the face of millions dying from hunger and torture in the Gulag network of concentration camps and prisons. Not to mention the dishonest and debunked “reporting” by such as Walter Duranty who lied with a straight face about the forced famines in Soviet Ukraine. He “won” the Pulitzer prize for his grim fairy tales and to this day, that honor has yet to be denounced, let alone recalled, by The New York Times.

Examples can be easily multiplied.

Jesus said, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

We do not need the media or historians to show us the very real, life-killing, tyrannical fruits of Communism and Socialism, by whatever names they may be called in any given era. Just a few observations here and there will suffice, assuming we are willing to see and listen. For example, we now have, in the United States, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of emigres who escaped the chains and gulags of Asian and Eastern European tyrannies. Many of them have been raising their voices and sounding the alarm, most acutely over the last three years. Sure, they are dismissed, ignored, or mocked by the bien-pensants who write from their ivory towers in commerce and academia and who despise the men and women who do the work and pay the taxes and actually love their country and her history.

But we ought not dismiss them, for in warning us, they reach back to the horrible truths of their past, and point to what our future will be if we do not change course, beginning with the very real, religious Foundation of liberty.

As for the “noble idea”, their pasts and our future are not “deviations” from it, but rather are intrinsic to it. 

For it is by no means a “noble idea”, but rather an ancient, demonic one, as is attested by millions of voices crying from their blood-soaked graves.

Although this study covers religion and politics from the French Revolution to the Great War, it demonstrates, once again, that there is nothing new under the sun

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) warned the west, as he observed her unwillingness to defend her heritage, her love of materialism, ease, and pleasure, and her blindness to the same systems of philosophy and government that created the Soviet Gulag Archipelago, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, and more.

Postscript

Richard Barnes

After publishing The Unquiet Death of Cetin Mert, I came across several reports about American teachers’ in-your-face determination to indoctrinate their students in Communist ideology.

From Fox News: “Rebeca F. Rothstein [works at North Bethesda Middle School in Maryland] also posted about providing ‘Marxist literature’ to kids and said, ‘F— capitalism.’ She shared in one instance that she was ‘tired after a long day of indoctrinating students.'”

“‘I had to un-brainwash myself from capitalism in order to fall in love with socialism and communism,’ she said. ‘If everyone had the same amount of money, then money wouldn’t be worth anything.'” [Do parents truly want their children to learn economics from low-wattage bulbs like this specimen?]

“‘Capitalism must go,’ she said. In that same video she said, ‘revolutions involve violence.'”

“The school district ignored multiple requests for comment about her quote on violent revolutions and whether they support the rhetoric.”

An article in Townhall reported on an event organized by the Colorado AFL-CIO, the parent organization of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second largest teacher’s union, where a Colorado teacher took the stage to call for a “forceful cultural revolution”, borrowing from that great humanitarian, Mao Zedong (formerly known as Mao Tse Tung). 

“Tim Hernandez is a teacher at Aurora West Preparatory Academy in the Aurora Public Schools District, according to its website. He announced in his speech at the Colorado AFL-CIO event that he advocates for Marxist-Leninism to be taught in schools, admitting that he teaches radical Communist doctrines in his classroom.”

As noted in my prior post, we must oppose this evil by affirming our love for Truth and for humanity. And those of us with school age children need to decide as to where, how, and by whom they are to be schooled.

And, no, I do not equate schooling with education.

Jesus said, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” The fruit of Communist ideology, by whatever name it might use to cloak itself, is death. Tens of millions of horrible deaths precipitated by the godless state. No amount of foolish, deceitful, and dangerous rhetoric can hide that fact.

Live not by lies.

George Meany, call your office.

George Meany (1894-1980) on Time’s cover in 1955

He was an old-time labor leader who genuinely understood and opposed Communist ideology. His introduction of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in June, 1975, was powerful and reverberates to this day.

The Unquiet Death of Cetin Mert

Richard Barnes

Earlier this year I wrote about Peter Fechter in The Unquiet Death of Peter Fechter. 

Mr. Fechter was 18 years old when he was shot and left to die, pleading for help which the Communist east refused to provide while forbidding the west to render assistance. His pleas went silent after 50 minutes.

Looking over that post in light of a recent re-reading of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s speeches to the AFL-CIO in 1975, I see that I was missing an insight: it is not sufficiently clear to be against Communism. Our need to speak truth requires more precision.

For example, consider one of the youngest to die along the wall, although in his case it was not technically along the wall, but in the Spree River. 

A little boy, on his fifth birthday, played with his new ball as his parents prepared to take him to the countryside for a picnic to celebrate with his friends.

The ball rolled down the embankment and fell into the river. The boy ran after it and lay down on his stomach stretching over the water seeking to retrieve the ball with a stick. He fell in the water and witnesses frantically sought help. However, none dared jump in the water, knowing they’d be shot, like Peter Fletcher. 

By some idiosyncrasy, the West Berlin side of the border went only to the river’s edge in that part of the city; the river itself was considered all East German territory.

West German guards and firemen came and sought permission to rescue. Permission was denied. Over an hour later, East German scuba divers arrived and fished the dead boy out of the water as hundreds of folks on the west side cried, “Murderers! Murderers!” 

That was not the end of it. Instead of immediately returning the boy’s body to his parents in the west, Communist East Germany kept the body for four full days. 

As a postscript, many years later, more information was learned from the Stasi files: East German guards had seen the boy falling into the water. They had watched with binoculars and took photos. But did nothing.

As one ponders such evil, the realization dawns that to say one is “anti-Communist” does not quite cut it. 

And here is where Solzhenitsyn’s insight is helpful: “Communism has managed to persuade all of us that these concepts [good and evil] are old-fashioned and laughable. But if we are to be deprived of the concepts of good and evil, what will be left? Nothing but the manipulation of one another. We will sink to the status of animals.”

I forget who said it, but after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Communism” was said to have disappeared, except in the faculty lounges of American [and Western] universities. That was good for a chuckle. But no one chuckles now, as we see the product of those faculty lounges in generations of students and careerists who laugh at the concepts of right and wrong, good and evil. They do not acknowledge that there is a God Who will not be mocked and Whose law is the standard by which we and they will be judged one day.

Meanwhile, our own country sees our city streets and highways consumed with rage and hatred, manifesting themselves in murder and mayhem.

Solzhenitsyn would tell us to not make Communism “appear as though [it] were something original, fundamental”. To say one is “anti-Communist” is to make Communism one’s point of departure.

He went on to say that the primary, the eternal concept is humanity. I believe he would not quibble with me as I modify his assertion a bit: the eternal concept is Truth. And Truth recognizes the reality of humanity as made in the image of God. I know he would not quibble because elsewhere he urged us to “not live by lies”, but rather to live by and for Truth.

So, we can say, that to be “against Communism is to be for humanity”. To reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. “It is a protest of our souls against those who would have us forget the concepts of good and evil.”

So as you see the detritus of Communism throughout the 20th Century and into our own; as you see it manifested on our own streets, by different names but the same godlessness and hatred and desire to destroy our own social order; as you confront folks who downplay the evil or who seek to finesse their arguments to in effect obfuscate the very real nefariousness of the lies being hurled at us; just remember: you are for humanity and therefore you are against them.

Cetin Mert (May 11, 1970 – May 11, 1975)

East German guards retrieving the boy’s body from the Spree River

East German guards remove the body of Peter Fechter who spent his last 50 minutes on earth pleading for help.