Divided We Fall
It was John Dickinson, composer of the Liberty song, who penned the words in 1768, “Then join in hand, brave Americans all—by uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.” Since then, the latter phrase has become a cliché.
As we survey the post-cold-war, post-presidential-impeachment, shortly to be post-Kosovo condition of the most powerful nation on earth, the words of John Dickinson’s refrain seem quite haunting. For, never in the recent history of the United States has so much division riven the country’s political parties, most particularly the conservative wing, traditionally protectors of morals, values, law, order and that basic building block of society, the family unit.
Across the Atlantic, in the United Kingdom, the same phenomenon prevails in the British “center left” government, but even more so in the ranks of its Conservative Party. The Tories, historically the traditional royalists, protectors of ancient heritage, bastions of business, upholders of morality and honor, are bitterly divided in many quarters, seemingly unable to mount a coherent resistance to the perceived destructive forces of socialism that continue to eat away at the British national character.
Why are these two nations, which have so dominated international politics over the past 200 years, so fractious and divided politically at this time?
If we analyze each one, we shall find a common thread which runs through each nation. It runs through Britain, ancient kingdom of seafaring, peace-loving and historically gentle folk. It runs through the United States of America, in her third century as a nation, a nation which once held out its arms to the world and cried, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Let us consider each in turn, ponder their present state, and judge the outcome toward which each of these nations is inevitably headed.
UNITED STATES
The past ten years have been a roller-coaster ride for the greatest single nation on earth. With the lowering of the red flag from the Kremlin on December 25, 1991, the United States stood alone as the world’s singular superpower. Previous to that, following the iron curtain clanging shut in 1949, splitting the political continent of Europe East from West through the heart of Germany, the world scene was dominated by two great nations. To the east, Russia and her Union of Soviet Socialist Republics held sway. The United States of America, supported by its traditional Western allies, dominated the Western world.
Then, in the spring of 1985, under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union started to present to the West a façade very different to that which had dominated their foreign policy since the revolution of 1917. This began the era in the Soviet Union which was to be termed by Gorbachev “perestroika,” meaning restructuring, and “glasnost,” implying more open government. Looking back on this era of fresh rapport between Russia and America, it is interesting to note that in his national bestseller, simply titled Perestroika, Gorbachev specifically highlighted the audience he wished to influence with this startling new concept. In the foreword to the book he writes, “In writing this book it has been my desire to address directly the peoples of the USSR, the United States, indeed every country.” Note that it is the United States which he specifically singles out.
This book, first published in 1987, rocketed to the top of the American bestseller lists. Curiously, in a series of now-published memoranda to the cia, ex-Soviet agent Anatoly Golitsyn, who defected to the West in 1961, warned the U.S. administration of the prospect of the USSR initiating a Gorbachev-style façade of overtures to America and its allies in order to lull them into a false sense of security, while the Russian communists restructured economically for the final phase of their plan for world domination.
We quote here from a memorandum sent by Golitsyn to the cia on July 4, 1984: “The Soviet strategists may replace the old leader, Konstantin Chernenko, who is actually only a figurehead, with a younger Soviet leader who was chosen some time ago as his successor, named Comrade Gorbachev. One of Gorbachev’s primary tasks will be to carry out the so-called liberalization” (Anatoliy Golitsyn, The Perestroika Deception, p. 183).
A clear two years prior to Gorbachev’s Perestroika being published in the U.S. and other Western countries, Golitsyn wrote to the cia in January 1985 warning of the developing strategy of the Soviet Union: “Now the Soviets can proceed with the implementation of their New Economic Policy and liberalization in the USSR under Gorbachev and can proceed with the next phase of their strategy in Poland—the creation of a coalition government made up of representatives of the Communist Party, priests and solidarity. Now they can resume their diplomatic offensive against West Germany…to lead to the reunification of Germany and the break-up of the nato alliance…. The Soviet strategists’ primary interim objectives will include the following:
• To divide the American nation.
• To increase pressure for defense cuts.
• To increase tension between the United States and its allies.
• To reactivate the anti-military movements in Britain and West Germany.
• To reactivate the nuclear freeze movement in the United States” (ibid., p. 185).
With the perestroika deception in place, all Russia needed was a compliant administration in the U.S. They made few inroads with the Reagan administration, some little headway with the Bush administration and have since made giant leaps in taking advantage of the current center-left Democratic administration in Washington. A case in point is the current Kosovo crisis.
It worked like this: Germany, the real “peace broker” under the table in the Kosovo crisis, was desperate to get Russia and America together to conclude a deal which would patch together a “peace process” for Serbia, Kosovo and Albania. Milosevic could not afford to lose his old ally Russia. Without Russia’s support, he’s out in the cold.
Russia needs money, truckloads of it, to help restore its ailing economy. But the imf, miffed at Russia salting away “billions” of “missing” aid, had taken a stand in January to not give any further aid to Russia until that country showed real proof of economic reform. Well, as they say, money talks. Realizing that the only way to get the Russians to bend to the West’s demands to lean on Milosevic and help nato save face in the Kosovo crisis, the U.S. squeezed the imf and suddenly came up with an offer of a couple of billion dollars to Russia.
That’s how deals are done in the age of center-left Western democracies. The result? Russia gains prestige on the world stage as it works to cobble together its old empire. Milosevic will be contained but saves face with his people and awaits the aid which the West will throw at Yugoslavia to restructure its war-torn economy. Germany wins, hands down, by strengthening its presence in Albania and gaining a foothold in Serbia, thus inching its hegemony eastward. The Albanian economy wins big-time; the UN regains a little of its battered prestige.
And the losers? America primarily, with Britain runner-up. So America’s pride takes a belly-blow, and her old isolationist tendencies well up as she licks her wounds and creeps home; albeit, her “flower power” educated administration whimpers a false cry of victory as they leave behind the whole sad and sorry mess, easy pickings for the rising Europower.
As the Spectator recently mused, “We now know how Liberals conduct a war.” In a matter of months, the U.S. has slipped from superpower status to perhaps great power status. It still possesses great power. But two petty dictators of two small nations, Iraq and Serbia, have proven that America no longer has the capacity or the will to use its might in defense of right to the point of victory. America is not willing to shed blood to protect and sustain the values for which it fought and bled to ultimate victory in two great world wars.
“Serbia’s Milosevic…must believe that the United States have lost their fighting spirit…. It is hard to imagine the nation that was born of the endeavors of Paul Revere and the Minutemen is the same modern America…. War is blood and sacrifice, especially if a nation wants to remain a great power capable of preserving its way of life” (The Spectator, April 28).
We predicted in our September-October 1998 edition that Kosovo would be the crisis point of Western leadership. Now we see the result. “Make love—not war,” they cried in the ’60s. It’s the ’60s generation, matured in the flower-power mentality, which leads the U.S., Britain and nato, which dominates the thinking of the foreign-policy strategists of the West, which drew 19 nations into supporting this ill-thought-out adventure in the Balkans.
A House Divided
The Democrats were in disarray. Should we continue to bomb Kosovo, should we not? Should we send in ground troops, should we not? The same confusion reigned in Republican ranks. As soon as the bombs began to rain down on Serbia, a high-volume squabble erupted within the Republican and conservative arena.
Why should we wonder that such confusion reigns? It is patently obvious to the general public that under the cloak of nato, the U.S. is at war with Yugoslavia. It is certainly obvious to Slobodan Milosevic! It is most obvious to 6 million Serbs in Yugoslavia! Yet the American administration and nato leaders cannot bring themselves to use the word “war” in the context of this horrible little affair. It is termed a conflict, a campaign, an operation, air strikes, anything other than its singular defining term—war! No wonder both sides of the House are divided. Was there ever an attack on a perceived “enemy” where the protagonist declared its goal was to “degrade” the power of the antagonist? What does it mean to “degrade” the opposition? This is a new term invented by center-leftist spin-doctors who can’t face up to the fact that blood and guts are spilled in warfare.
This war is being played out by the U.S. like a child playing a video game. Stand your distance, press a button, see the flash on the screen, switch off and walk away. Meanwhile, the real losers in this Balkan war, the masses of displaced Albanians and the disrupted Serbian population, are sacrificed on the altar of political convenience. The plain fact is that the U.S. administration saw the Balkan situation as subject to a quick fix. Get in, hit Milosevic, he backs off, we claim victory and everyone goes home, with Kosovo secured for its Albanian majority population. But the U.S. hit Milosevic and he didn’t back off. There will be no U.S. victory; Kosovo will remain insecure till the end of the age. There was no plan B. This must go down in history as the most ill-thought-out “campaign” ever mounted by a U.S. administration, perhaps even surpassing the Bay of Pigs fiasco during the Kennedy administration.
So! Kosovo turned into a crisis for the U.S. administration. “Now, Clinton is in the grip of a crisis with undeniably large implications—the fate of hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians and the credibility of the nato alliance—in which anything short of clear victory would be a policy disaster that no amount of political gloss could disguise” (The Washington Post, April 26).
The point is, not only has Kosovo become a crisis for the U.S., as we predicted in our September-October 1998 edition, it has become the crisis point for Western leadership.
BRITAIN
As many pundits have put it, the current leadership in Britain and the U.S. is not much interested in history. For the U.S. leadership, “war” is Vietnam. For the British leadership, it is the Falklands or the Gulf. Both the present British and U.S. governments have leaders who have no concept of the reality of the First and Second World Wars.
Similar to the U.S., the British tend to avoid the term “war” in association with the Balkan conflict. As Prime Minister Tony Blair informed the British public on April 13, in respect of the Kosovo crisis, Britain is involved in “military action for a moral purpose” (The Spectator, April 17).
The point is, we have a generation of leaders, in the U.S. and Britain, who have led 19 nations to commit to a war against Yugoslavia “for a moral purpose.” The problem we struggle with is defining that moral purpose. What is it? Is it to stop “ethnic cleansing” by Serbs of Albanians in Kosovo? If so, why did we not intervene to stop the rapacious, drug-running Kosovo Liberation Army from “ethnically cleansing” over 1000 Serbs in Kosovo in 1987? Why was the Croatian “ethnic cleansing” of Serbs, earlier this decade, largely hushed up and written out of Western journalists’ accounts of those horrors to become unmentionable by the current crop of leaders in the West? Where’s the consistency of moral purpose in all this? Something is amiss. Where is the sense of morality that a smiling British prime minister insists is the reason he has readily joined Britain with America in leading this grubby war against Yugoslavia?
The confusion in the ranks of the British Upper and Lower Houses on both left and right is reflected in Bruce Anderson’s comment: “This war is a mess. Inasmuch as they even had objectives, our ministers have regularly discarded them, inventing new ones as they go along.” Claiming that the confused British government has “ignored every historical precedent” in going about this war, Anderson seizes on a common thread of explanation for this U.S. and British division in their leaders’ ranks over the Kosovo crisis: “But we now have a post-historical set of ministers, for whom the world began in 1994, and who have no knowledge of or interest in the dim, distant pre-Blairite past” (The Spectator, April 10).
In a cynical headline to this article, The Spectator declared, “Mr. Blair’s War Policy: Staying 25 Percent Ahead of the Tories.”
Is that what it has come to? Is that how and why center-left liberal, anti-Vietnam, flower-power, “make love—not war” politicians of our day approach war? If that be so, and much evidence has been put forward in this age of media-spin to support that, then Britain has fallen far from the days of her erstwhile Esther-like leader, Margaret Thatcher. In a piece published in an earlier edition of The Spectator, Bruce Anderson mused, “At the beginning of the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher agonized for some hours before deciding to commit our forces. In contrast, President Clinton and Mr. Blair went to war in the most casual manner; we are now seeing the consequences of their insouciance. As for morality, a junior American officer once made an unwise comment during the Vietnam War. To save the village of An Loc, he said, we had to destroy it. Nato’s policy in Serbia/Kosovo is moral, in the sense that An Loc was saved.”
Far from this whole Balkans fiasco—from the earlier Bosnia debacle to the recent Kosovo crisis—being approached from a truly moral perspective, many arguments could be put to the contrary. Margaret Thatcher comments in her biography on “how the West’s moral failure allowed the rise of Hitler and the war which followed” (The Path to Power, p. 30). As far as Britain’s contribution to this moral failure, Thatcher pins this down to “the Left [who] were setting the political agenda throughout the ’30s and ’40s, even though the leadership of Churchill concealed it during the years of war itself” (ibid., p. 28). She alludes to the Left’s tendency for “skillful sleight of hand,” encouraged by left-wing intellectuals penetrating and taking over the country’s traditional seats of learning.
This takeover of academia by liberal-socialists consummated, as in America, in the student revolution of the ’60s. “Looking back, it is extraordinary that so much notice should have been taken of the kindergarten Marxism and ego-central demands which characterized it…. These rootless young people lacked both the authority which had been imposed on their predecessors in the 1950s and the discipline which the need to qualify for a good job would place on students in the ’80s” (ibid., p. 186).
From this generation has sprung today’s leaders in Britain and America. The generation which tore down that moral base of British and American society (the same moral base which underpinned these great nations’ drive to victory over national-socialist oppression in the greatest war known to man 54 years ago) now would have us believe that they are involved in an aggressive “campaign” against Serbia on moral grounds. Whose morals? Could we please have a description of the moral principles for which the British and U.S. governments fight against Serbia? By their own behavior, these leaders demonstrate that they certainly do not stand for the moral tenets of Britain and America upon which their societies fought two great world wars. Whose moral standards apply? From their respective government policies one can glean that these moral standards which compel us to war are those standards which promote perverted lifestyles, murder in the womb, same-sex marriages, the lowering of age for consensual homosexual relationships, the emasculation of the male gender, the feminization of society and the neutering of all gender forms in language—and that’s just for starters! Is that the sort of society American and British leadership in their sanctimonious, center-left self-righteousness would fight to impose on Kosovo, to force Slobodan Milosevic and the Serb nation to subscribe to?
Confusion! Strife! Division! That’s the fruit of this current crop of leaders in Britain and America. And it’s all polished up by the spin-doctors of the age, experts in their line of sleight of hand in the age of win-at-all costs domestic politics.
A Matter of Trust
Dr. George Friedman, chairman of Stratfor Systems and a political science expert, tends to pin down the current leadership vacuum in the U.S. to a simple matter of trust—or rather lack thereof. “Dwight Eisenhower had no problem landing troops in Lebanon in 1959, achieving what he wanted to achieve, and withdrawing them,” he said. Dwight Eisenhower was trusted by the American people.
“The problem with the leaders since Eisenhower, with the exception of Reagan, who was able to do these things, is that our presidents are simply not trusted. You know, you talk about the moral connection between character and behavior…. Well, [the current American administration] cannot be trusted to make the correct judgment in the simplest matter, and therefore…has no credibility in the broader ones….
“The reason the founders selected a republican form of government was the assumption that our leaders would have to take steps that are not fully understood by the people…. And the notion of republican virtue was that these men were wise and decent men, who could be trusted to take issues that you and I are not fully competent to discuss, and act wisely. And the problem with [the current administration] is that no one, [not even its] closest defender, would say that this is a [leadership] with moral instincts, that allows us to suspend judgment on anything.”
America is in the process of withdrawal from its position as global policeman. Terrorists have learned that a bomb placed near a U.S. embassy, or even a threat to bomb a U.S. consulate, will result in closure and withdrawal by the U.S. This happened in the wake of the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Under threat, the U.S. simply closed down and fled their embassies in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Kampala and Uganda. The world’s greatest power cannot be trusted to hold its ground, stand and fight in overt resistance to any terrorist menace.
Yet, this administration in America, which turns pale at the sight of any blood spilled by an American boy in battle, will not blanch one whit at the slaughter of 31 million American-conceived lives in the wombs of its mothers on its own national soil! It just doesn’t make sense!
Vatican/Germany Link
With the main players in this Balkan war, the U.S. and Britain, dragging along with them the baggage of nato to legitimize their role, in such disarray at their policy-formulation level, what is it going to take to bring the Kosovo crisis to conclusion? Already it is apparent that a seemingly unlikely “menage a trois” comprising Russia, Germany and the Vatican will influence the cobbling together of yet another patchwork, ill-fitting “peace process” in the Balkans. Consider the following.
The quiet players behind the scenes are the Vatican and Germany. Yet they are involved, and up to their neck in it. The pope even recently said the Vatican had been busy working for a solution to the Kosovo crisis. Germany’s role came to the surface in April when they proposed a peace plan. It resurfaced at the Group of Eight talks in May when Joschka Fischer publicly read a peace proposal to which they were actively seeking to draw both Russians and Americans into agreement.
On the religious connection, Eastern Orthodox patriarchs visited Milosevic in April to influence efforts for a settlement to the Kosovo crisis. Then on May 6 Pope John Paul II visited Romania, an Eastern Orthodox country, the first pope to do so for 1000 years! That was a historical occasion. Why? Why now?
Readers of this magazine will know that we have long supported the view of Herbert W. Armstrong, founded upon prophetic scriptural evidence, that the coming European federal government would exhibit both eastern and western legs (Dan. 2:41). No one has worked harder than this aging and ailing Polish pope, Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, to weld together the Eastern buffer states, lying west of the Caucasus, to Western Europe. In his recent visit to Romania, John Paul stated, “Thank God, after the winter of Communist domination, a springtime of hope has begun.” Expect to see the pope take on a more aggressive and higher profile role in cementing relations between Eastern and Western Europe as the Vatican reacts to current Russian efforts to rebuild its old empire.
German Peace Moves
Without the biblical perspective of God-breathed prophecy for these turbulent times which we are living through as we approach the nexus of the end of one millennium on the Roman calendar and the start of another, little sense can be made of world events. However, with the vision of inspired biblical prophecy, we can readily see the motives and read the inevitable outcome of such events as are occurring right now in the Balkans.
As our editor in chief wrote in his article in our May edition, “The Unseen Danger in Kosovo,” today’s Germany is ancient Assyria in modern clothes. Germany is destined to lead a power bloc in Europe which will dominate world affairs for 31/2 years. Following this world dominance, Russia, joined with China, will loom on the horizon and sweep down upon this fractious ten-nation European power bloc, on into the Middle East, in preparation for what Saddam Hussein never dreamed of when he uttered the phrase, the “mother of all wars” (Rev. 16:16).
The current, albeit laborious, seemingly confused and lumbering efforts of a domestically embattled Russian power bloc, painfully sticking back together its old empire, will continue. Its nuclear power, though rusting and ill-secured, is still breathtaking in its scope and extent of deployment. And Kosovo has provided the spark to ignite the flames of Russian nationalism such that the perception of aggression by a “warmongering” United States of America on a “helpless” Yugoslavia is enough to stir anti-U.S. sentiment within Russia to a point unheard of under the precarious peace of the cold war. Russia is back, albeit economically wounded, and swallowing its pride momentarily, to be used at the behest of “peacemaker” Germany, as the means of motivating Slobodan Milosevic to front the negotiating table and get nato off the Kosovo hook.
With Russia looming again on the horizon across the Polish plain, Germany gets the jitters. Germany will never trust nato in a European adventure again. Apart from this, Germany has never, ever trusted Russia! So—
revive the old Ribbentrop-Molotov pact! In 1939 the German foreign minister negotiated a non-aggression pact with Russia. We believe that a similar pact will soon be concluded between Russia and Germany.
Russia is concerned at Germany’s eastward push, under the umbrella of the European Union extending membership to Eastern European states, formerly members of the Soviet Union. Germany in turn is concerned at Russia’s resurgence and its increased initiatives in the affairs of the Ukraine, Belarus and the Caucasus region. Germany will want to secure an undertaking from Russia which clearly delineates the limits to Russia’s westward push. Russia will seek like security of mind by obtaining a clear understanding as to where Germany’s subtly initiated eastward hegemony will stop.
End Game
So, how did we get to this position just ten years on from the cessation of the cold war? Well, those socialists who took the Italian Communist Gramsci at his word and sought to turn the minds of a whole generation from traditional values to possession of the mind by philosophies and tenets expounding the very opposite of biblical morality, the traditional family unit and the rule of law, certainly contributed greatly to the education of the “baby boom” generation. Of such is our current crop of leaders in the Western democracies, in particular Britain and Europe. Russian Communists must be pleased with the success of their agents of influence in the institutions of learning within Britain and America. Yet they are concerned at their lack of success in efforts to successfully penetrate and dominate the Catholic Church and German politics.
The Vatican has moved very aggressively, under the reign of Pope John Paul, against communism. The battle was joined in Poland, with papal financing and support of Lek Walesa’s Solidarity movement. The papal-Polish wedge, driven under the old iron curtain, commenced the crumbling of the foundation of communism in the middle European states and consummated with a thundering crack in the Berlin Wall. From there on the dominos fell: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and, of course, the trump card planned by the Vatican in consortium with Germany, the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia as independent states in 1991.
Thus the Vatican and Germany cast the die that destabilized the whole Balkan Peninsula, making it ripe for the plucking by a German-Vatican-dominated European Union only too ready to take over from an embattled nato and a withdrawing U.S. and Britain in the very near future.
Note that it is Germany which has proposed a “Marshall Plan” for the reconstruction of the Balkans. It is Germany which has proposed the peace plan for Yugoslavia and Kosovo. It is Germany which has offered to administer Kosovo when the dust settles upon the signing of the peace accord by all parties.
Divided We Fall
Yes! Weak, inept, divided U.S. and British leadership has led us to this. All the smiling rhetoric of Gramsci-bent minds out of the ’60s flower-power campuses has, in just one decade, reduced the single greatest national superpower this world has ever seen to a lackey of the Vatican-Euro-Russian triumvirate which now dictates the conditions upon which U.S. and British-led nato will whimper a cry of “victory.”
Surprised? You need not have been. If you read, study, submit to and obey the basic instruction book which our Creator God gave to mankind to show these events in advance of them happening, you would not be surprised.
You would know that God says that He sets up over nations the very basest of men (Dan. 4:17). Not only that, you would know that God declares of Britain and America in particular that, in the times in which we live, those men who lead us would have the minds as of women and children (Isa. 3:12). A rightly balanced woman would not want to go to war. She would rather stay home and nurture her children. Warfare is traditionally a man’s job. God implies in this verse that we will be oppressed, in the end of this age, by leaders with minds that won’t fully commit to war. They will have minds immature, not fully developed, as of a child. And, as God says, “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child” (Prov. 22:15). Of such are the minds that enter, unthinking, into a moral morass such as the Kosovo crisis.
Yet, God says also, of that foolishness bound up in a mind that is immature, still thinking like a child, lacking wisdom, common sense and judgment—“the rod of correction will drive it far from him.”
That rod of correction is imminent. It will take the form of a nation, an aggressive nation of war-men, who are especially selected for that task—the rod of God’s anger (Isa. 10:5-6). That nation is rising fast. It will soon rule, from its ancient capital in the heart of Europe, a combined European force, which will descend on the soft-core, weak-willed, decadent nations of Britain and America to teach them the greatest lesson of their entire history—to submit to the will, the direction, the vision and the light of God’s word, obey it and come under its government, to mature into the fullness of the perfect character of Jesus Christ (Eph. 4:13).
Only then shall we turn, nationally, in deep repentance toward our maker and avidly learn to live the way of true peace, undivided in our efforts. Then we shall teach this peace, become its very ambassadors to all nations and work to bring them under its ambit forever. Then, truly, for the first time in this world’s history, by uniting, under that one global, godly government, we will stand, never to fall!