What Are Saul Alinsky's Real Rules for Radicals?

Conservative Bugbear - Leftist Saul Alinsky

And why are we using them ourselves?
How we fight is every bit as important as why we fight or even whether we win or not.  - TK

The great political debate of our times between the left and the right is fraught with lies, deception, hysteria and well-meaning fraud on both sides. What is disturbing about this is the assumption by the leadership and the movers and shakers on both sides that people are basically stupid and need to be herded about in their opinions like so many fat sheep. Both sides do it 

For instance, there is an old email running around that claims that Saul Alinsky wrote the following "8 levels of control" that must be obtained before you are able to create a socialist/communist state. The email goes on to say that the first is the most important.
  
1)       Healthcare "Control healthcare and you control the people”
2)       Poverty “Increase the Poverty level as high as possible." Poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
3)       Debt “Increase the national debt to an unsustainable level." That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4)       Gun Control “Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government." That way you are able to create a police state - total local control.
5)       Welfare “Take control of every aspect of their lives" (Food, Livestock, Housing, and Income)
6)       Education “Take control of what people read and listen to take control of what children learn in school.”
7)       Religion “Remove faith in God from the Government and school.”
8)       Class Warfare “Divide the people into the wealthy against the poor. Racially divide." This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to tax the wealthy with full support of the voting poor.
  
The email ends with this intentionally spooky statement:

     The bases are all covered!   We are ripe for the New world Order (World Communism)


It does sound familiar. It should. These "8 levels of control" are little more than a rehash of a hoax article back in the 40s called Communist Rules for Revolution. This isn't even original stuff and predates Alinsky. Alinsky had more than one set of "rules" outlined in his writing, but none were so nakedly radical as this hoax lays out. These 8 rules are nothing more than a crude attempt by ideologues on the right to link President Obama's policies to Alinsky. They probably think they are doing a service for their cause. 

They are not! One can make a clear connection between the president and the tactics of the radical left. This can be done if we compare Alinsky's actual "rules" to Obama policy, but it requires more thought to figure it out. The original author of this apparently thought we all needed help to understand how Alinsky's advice to radicals is being worked out by the current administration. There is a fatal assumption that we are too stupid to get it. I find that offensive.

Here's what Alinsky actually said. It's a primer for people seeking to capture and retain political power.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.

The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.

The seventh rule: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings.

The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.

The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.

The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying "You're right — we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us."

The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/alinsky.asp#rVShjCizoZYEBJT0.99

 Alinsky's Rules for Power Tactics:

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Alinsky was surprisingly sensitive to criticism that he wasn't ethical despite his nakedly amoral approach to politics. So he included a set of rules for the ethics of power tactics. These "ethics" are so bankrupt, it's little wonder his ethics were frequently called into question.


Alinsky's Rules to Test Whether Power Tactics are Ethical:

1. One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue.
2. The judgement of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment.
3. In war the end justifies almost any means.
4. Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.
5. Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.
6. The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.
7. Generally, success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics.
8. The morality of means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.
9. Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition to be unethical.
10. You do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral garments.
11. Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," "Of the Common Welfare," "Pursuit of Happiness," or "Bread and Peace."

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.

The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.

The seventh rule: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings.

The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.

The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.

The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying "You're right — we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us."

The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/alinsky.asp#rVShjCizoZYEBJT0.99

If you want to confront Alinsky's tactics and defeat them, you need to do so with truth. When we make up things to discredit the opposition, we sink to their level and it's little wonder our side is not doing well in the great debate of our time. We cast ourselves as being on the side of morality and yet, we've grown so desperately afraid because of their perceived power (Rule 1 - Power Tactics) that we have violated our own rules of moral conduct (Rule 4), which is just what the opposition wants and needs for us to do to discredit us.

Please can we stop this? We cannot fight the enemy using his own tactics. Deception works in war, but not so much in politics where we intend to avoid killing our opponents. The Communist and Nazi states could do this with impunity because when their political war was done, they had no moral compunction about eliminating those opponents who remained. That's why the communist/socialist death toll was so horrific in the 20th century. They were just cleaning house after the victory - mopping up the battlefield so to speak.

If we are not to be like that, we must start now by being scrupulously moral as to what tactics we employ in the struggle. I cite an example here of fraud by the right. I can cite as many, if not orders of magnitude more, examples of duplicity and outright lying by our friends on the left, who are generally not as bound by the strict moral code that most conservatives espouse, that is, if Alinsky's "ethics" are any indication of the state of morality on the left.

I do not intend this as a blanket damning of anyone right or left. There are individuals who possess a powerful sense of morality and ethics on both side, who find lying, fraud and calumny reprehensible and disavow any "ally" who uses such tactics.

It is the moral left and the moral right that have the power to save this country for all of us. In order to do so, we need to turn a hose on the hothead who have lost control of themselves and will say anything, forward anything or believe anything evil of their neighbor.  We are, at least those of us on the Christian right and left, are under strict orders to love our neighbors as ourselves. It's time those of us under such orders stepped up and led our own revolution - one in which love is that with which we charge cannons, rather than the naked hatred that bombards our media, our email boxes and our Facebook pages.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King © 2014

Looking at the President Through Different Eyes

Conservative Christians do not understand President Obama. He claims to be a Christian and to have America's best interests at heart and yet he does things that make no sense to us looking at it from a Christian perspective.

I'm not going to speculate on whether the president is a closet socialist or Muslim or member of the Illuminati, so all you conspiracy theorists calm down. I haven't been converted yet. My beanie with the propeller is still safely tucked in the garage next to my tin foil hat!

What I am going to challenge you to do is to look at this administration through the eyes of the Muslim world. Seen from their perspective, President Obama appears quite different than he does seen from an American or Christian perspective. Here are some things about this administration as they probably look to the nations of Islam.

• Immigration - The administration is busily releasing hardened terrorists from GITMO and has initiated a program to grant so-called "minor terrorists" admission to the United States. These include individuals who supported the Muslim Brotherhood takeover and who now are at risk from the military who stopped the takeover. Meanwhile, the Obama administration threatened to deport a family that fled here from Germany because they wished to homeschool their children and the German government (under a 1936 Nazi law that made homeschooling illegal) planned to take their children from them. If I were a Muslim, it would signal to me that the president was sympathetic to Muslim causes and unsympathetic to Christians. Also, this president has made no effort to grant emergency refugee status to Christians who faced systematic slaughter in Syria, Egypt and African Muslim states. As a Muslim, I would see this as an effort to open the United States in the same way that Europe has done, a move that will one day allow this country to be as thoroughly Islamicized as Britain, Sweden, France and other European nations..
• Foreign Policy - When Muamar Ghaddafi finally opened his borders and attempted to repair relations with the west, Islamic fundamentalists rebelled with aid from terrorist groups. The United States rushed into aid the pro-terrorist side of a conflict in which neither side was the side of the good guys. Then we stood aside on a second 9/11 and allowed an American ambassador and his security force to be brutally murdered. He's opened a dialogue with rogue states. bowed to Middle-Eastern kings and generally cast his own nation as the bad guy with his world wide apology tour. He has given lip service to our historic support for the nation of Israel while steadily distancing us from them. He has stepped back and let Russia begin the reconquest of Georgia, the Ukraine and other former Soviet bloc states with nothing more than a whimpered protest. Were
• Economic Policy - This president appears to be bankrupting his own country with his efforts to appease foreign nations through massive payoffs, to create a majority dependent class in America that can be depended upon to vote the status quo and to suppress the American economic engine through punitive taxation and over-regulation. Were I Muslim I would believe that Barak Hussein Obama was acting in the interest of the future worldwide Muslim State that is prophesied in the Koran, by weakening the nation that stands as the primary obstacle to the success of the coming jihad. His domestic policy appears to be intent on weakening the United States from within. At least that's what it would appear to me looking at it through the eyes of one who believes in the eventual world domination of Islam.
• Religion - None of what seems to be a pro-Islamic policy, would be possible if, as the president claims, he is a Christian. If he is a Christian, then, he has left the Islamic faith he claimed to embrace when he was training in Indonesian Muslim Schools. By all rights, as an ex-Muslim, he faces the death penalty for leaving the faith according to the tenets of the Koran. Yet, he gets a by from the Muslim world and there is a widespread belief that he is a Muslim in the Islamic world. Many believe he is a secret Muslim and see, in his actions, someone acting in the interests of the faith.Besides the Koran allows Muslims to lie to infidels for the sake of the faith, so it's easy for the Muslims to believe that his claim to being a Christians are all part of the plan.

I am not saying the president of the United States is a Muslim. Personally, I believe that it is the president's deep-seated belief in progressive socialism that drives him. I think he sees himself as leader of a world-wide socialist government one day. I don't think this man plans to ever step down from power and retire comfortably to his ranch in Texas to write his memoirs as his predecessors have done. I think he has ambitions for a larger role in the world once he's tamed and defanged the American Beast.  I believe his handlers find him useful and want to see him rise to such lofty heights.

If you search for those handlers, you will find them hiding in plain sight. They'll be on the boards of political action committees. They'll be donating billions to help get suitable politicians elected to high office. They'll help develop public relations and marketing strategies to support their chosen figureheads. They don't have a secret handshake or meet at secret mountain hideaways to plot the end of the world. They are not the Illuminati or the Bilderbergers. They laugh at the fools who fall for that distraction and make themselves look ridiculous in the eyes of their fellows.

They are people who crave power, but not the kind of fame or glory that the politician craves. They act together with other powerful men because they have interests that coincide with them. They believe they are smart enough to manipulate the leaders who manipulate the fools who make up the ignorant masses of the world. They pull their strings always from what they believe is a safe distance.

They do not look behind themselves. They do not notice the fine strings attached to their own limbs nor are they aware that there is a darker power than themselves at the other end of those strings, manipulating the manipulators who are manipulating the leaders who think they are manipulating the masses.

And those who disconnect from the strings are a threat to the whole nasty plan.

So how do you disconnect? How do you free yourself from the influence of all this manipulation and, to call a spade a spade, EVIL?  To escape, to see the world as it is, you must become free yourself. I, personally, believe that a daily walk with Christ will do that for you. Jesus said "The truth shall set you free." It will certainly open your eyes. Harry Nillson once said, "You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear. You dig?"  This is true if you see yourself as the center of your universe. And, in consequence of your ego-centric paradigm, you assume that everyone sees things the way you do.


But they don't! People who see things differently than you are not being deliberately oppositional. They truly see things from their own point of view. The more radicalized that point of view, the harder it is for you to see things through another man's eyes. It's little wonder our nation is so polarized. the fringes of opinion in our nation have grown so far apart that they are no longer able to see each other as human beings. We're so deeply inside of our own ideology that we can no longer empathize with anyone ourside the parameters of our deep-seated belief system.

The only way out of that trap is the simple rule that Christ articulated for his followers. Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.  As it turns out the act of bestowing love on others is the bit that teaches us to see things as they really are.  Rodney King whose beating by LA cops started a riot in LA saw the bloodshed and horror being perpetrated in his name and asked, "Can't we all just love each other?"

The horror that Rodney witnessed on television through the God's-eye view of helicopter mounted TV cameras, apparently shook him to the core. Perhaps he remembered his mom or grandma taking him to Sunday school. Whatever it was, it helped him see things as God sees them and he had to speak out; to call for the only thing that could end the hatred and bloodshed.

There remaineth three things, faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love. We may have faith that our ideology is correct. We may hope for change right down to our wishbones, but in the final reckoning, it will be love in action, not feelings or a vague sense of rightness  that will change the world. It will be love shown in our actions. You can't scream, "YOU MUST LOVE ME!" while burning down an appliance store or trashing a church.  You can't cry, "Love is all there is," while hounding anyone who disagrees with your lifestyle. You can't cry, "Jesus saves!" while spraying "God hates fags!" on an aids clinic wall.

Not if you don't want to be driven mad by the inconsistencies  between what you say you believe and what you actually do. If you believe in the Golden Rule, you really should practice it if you want to maintain your sanity. If you believe you should love everybody and you don't, your brain will make itself crazy trying to deal with the double bind you've placed yourself in.

We are living in an increasingly mad world. I don't know about you, but I'm ready to go home before the whole thing melts down.





Tom King © 2014

The Intolerance of the Collective

The key difference between a constitutional republic - one in which individuals have rights and the government has privileges granted by those individuals - and a progressive/socialist/Marxist/communist state - one in which human beings are but cells sublimated to the will of the state - is that the republic can tolerate the existence of the collectivist (Marxist) state but the Marxist state can NEVER tolerate the existence of a free constitutional republic anywhere on the same planet.  It is why Nikita Kruschev pounded on the table at the UN with his shoe and promised to "bury" us all.



It is for the same reason that sinners cannot tolerate saints, that the stupid and brutish cannot tolerate the intelligent and peaceful or that Democrats cannot tolerate Republicans.  I am only half-kidding on that last one.

It is also the fundamental difference between a Christian nation and an Islamic one.  It is no accident that wherever Christian nations spring up, inevitably the idea of the value of the individual over the nation-state becomes the law of the land.  In the early stages the nation accepts that the rights of the individual are granted him by the state or the sovereign.  But soon, it becomes apparent to all that if God so loved us that He gave His son for our salvation, then the individual must be important. If God Himself gives us the right to choose for good or ill and does not lift his hand to force us to do otherwise, then the right of the individual to choose his own destiny must, therefore, be the fundamental principle of the universe.

And before you complain about the ten commandments and all those laws in the Old Testament, let me point out that God tolerates disobedience to His law.  He could well squelch all sin and turn us into obedient robots which have no choice but to obey. He does not. Instead God offers to scrub our souls and help free us of all the negative habits, passions and lusts that hijack our free will and to deliver back to us ourselves - as we choose to be and free from all our demons. We are people of the law because we choose to be, not because we live in terror of the state.  That is an enormous difference.


Heaven will be heaven because it is the land of ultimate liberty, peopled entirely by those who believe utterly in the idea that one should treat his fellows as he himself would want to be treated.  I do not believe God will have to destroy evil men.  I believe that God need only withdraw the good from the Earth and leave them to their own devices.  Evil will destroy itself I believe and needs no help from anyone to do so.    

The progressive/socialist/Marxist/communist believe that man can be perfected by the law and punishment and that there are certain men who are destined to wield great power and to direct the collectivist state because of their talent and ability.  Those who believe in the Golden Rule also believe that no man can be trusted with absolute power or even permanent power of any sort.  Kings and princes, dukes and barons are not trust-worthy because they hold hereditary power and power tends to corrupt.  While I don't believe that power inevitably corrupts, I do believe that power inevitably attracts the corruptible. 

There is a scene in the Lord of the Rings at the edge of the volcano Mt. Doom where Frodo is supposed to complete his mission and throw the "One Ring to Rule Them All" back into the fires.  At the moment of truth, Frodo falters.  The temptation to power is overwhelming. It takes an act of God (in the form of Gollum's attack) to enable Frodo to complete his task. The temptation to power is terrible. Gandalf articulates that when early he says No to the ring when Frodo offers it to him. "Don't... tempt me Frodo! I dare not take it. Not even to keep it safe. Understand, Frodo. I would use this ring from a desire to do good... But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine."

It is why, inevitably, Christianity, despite its emphasis on obedience to God's laws (or more likely because of it), tends to produce the societies with the most personal liberty. The true Children of God do not believe any man can be trusted with power, especially absolute power over his fellows. It follows inevitably from the Golden Rule. Tolkien's life's work was retelling that to a post-modernist world that doesn't believe anything really matters so you might as well grab what you can get. Tolkien says, "Yes. There is something that matters."

Again as throughout history the great battle lines are drawn between Good and Evil.  That doesn't mean evil guys don't fight among themselves. They do.  They constantly vie for power and most wars are ambiguous to that extent.  But the great over-arching conflict in this world turns out to be between those who believe that Might is right and those who believe that Might must only used for the right.  You can always tell the good guys.  They are the ones that didn't choose to fight, but were drawn into it against their will and who do not keep their conquests when the war is over. Sometimes, however, both good and evil are represented within the same army. 

It makes the battle lines a bit muddy sometimes.

Tom King

Liberal Logic: Utopia by Pronouncement

(c) 2012 by Tom King

Liberals have always wished for a world in which poverty did not exist and, God bless ‘em, they actually believe it’s possible.

It is not. Jesus said that the poor would be always with us in this world. That’s because, so long as men lust for power over their fellows, there will be inequity.

The great liberal error is the belief that secular power can be wielded to force society to be kind and merciful and fair - that Utopia can be had by legal pronouncement.

Unfortunately, power corrupts, however much the left wishes to believe that it does not. By limiting the power of the new American government over the daily lives of its citizens, our founding fathers created an economy in which, not only was success possible, but also one in which success was more probable than virtually anywhere else in the world.

I remember when I was 4 years old I had a train set. My mother forbid me to plug in the transformer myself. One day I asked her to plug in my train set, but she was watching “As the World Turns” and told me to wait till it went off. I didn’t want to wait, so I grabbed the plug firmly with my index finger between the prongs and plugged it into a wall socket.

There was a loud pop, the lights flickered and Mom found me on the floor sprawled across the train tracks wondering who I was and why I'd been born.  I learned that day, the danger of putting too much power in the wrong hands.

Knowing politicians as we do, is there ANYBODY that truly believes that putting more power in their hands (what with their collective track record) is a good idea? Does anyone believe that giving massive power over our economy, our medical care, our housing, our jobs or the education of our kids to this incredible collection of massive egos is going to result in everyone being elevated to equal status with our elitist overlords?

Not bloody likely!

You can't create Utopia by declaring that you've created Utopia.  Utopia is only possible if it is peopled with perfect people. An Earthly Utopia will, therefore, never work. No amount of laws will accomplish it.  After all, Christ gave us one simple law - the Golden Rule. If we all obeyed it, there would be no more war, no more poverty, no more evil. What makes anyone think that adding a bunch of legal addendums to that one basic law will mean people are going to go, "Oh, that's what 'treat others the way you want to be treated' means!" and suddenly break out in goodness.

Won't happen. We're going to have to wait for heaven.  If you don't believe in heaven, then you're just waiting around trying to figure out how to make yourself relatively happy by grabbing your share before the whole thing goes to hell in the proverbial handbasket or you have a coronary and drop dead.

I'm just saying.

Tom King

It's Not About Race; It's Not Even About Politics.

Good vs. Evil on the Eve of the Apocalypse.

(c) 2012 by Tom King

Hiroshima 1945 - US Archives

It's not white people vs. brown as some claim.  It's not progressives vs. conservatives, East vs. West, Christian vs. Muslim, Jew vs. Gentile or even left vs. right..  It's a question of good vs. evil pure and simple. The agents of Satan are among us, insinuating themselves into every corner; using every means available to confuse, agitate and sabotage every decent thing we try to do. Left, right, Democrat, Republican and Libertarian, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, atheist and Jew. The devil has his representatives everywhere.

We are told by prophets of every stripe that the whole thing is coming to a bad end and we are at best fighting a holding action.  Throughout history we have seen the tide of the Great Controversy come to a bloody head in vast explosions of violence.  In the 1800s we had the Civil war.  In the 20th century it was two world wars. We've held off the coming orgy of killing that is the wages of sin now for more than half a century.  Small wars (by modern standards) have bled off some of the urge to violence, but not nearly enough. Organized mass murder in Russia, China, Cambodia, Rwanda and throughout the third world has reduced the population for a time, removing the meek by and large, apparently for the purpose of guaranteeing they do not inherit the Earth - at least not while it lasts.

You see it's a geometry not arithmetic.

If you have one person you have relative peace although that person may resort to suicide.
Two people and you have two possible vectors of aggression A against B and B against A
But add a third and you have 12  possible vectors of aggression

1. A against B
2. A against C
3. B against A
4. B against C
5. C against A
6. C against B
7. A&B against C
8. C against A&B
9. B&C against A
10. A against B&C
11. A&C against B
12. B against A&C

(c) public domain Striking workers circa 1922

For every extra person you add to this overcrowded world, you geometrically increase the number of vectors of aggression and possible combinations of aggressors.  Think about billions of people on Earth today and how much worse it gets when you add more people. Add into the mix the fact that many of those people choose to be evil and are thus unscrupulous about who they attack and periodically the whole thing builds up to an orgy of killing.  So far most of those orgies have merely reduced the number of trained killers along with slow-moving or slow-witted noncombatants who didn't see it coming and get out of the way in time - at least enough to take some of the pressure murder their fellows off the survivors.

Paul in Romans said, "The wages of sin is death." I think he was being literal.  I think the apostle was trying to tell us that choosing to serve yourself first (which is the essence of sin) leads inevitably to death. Every notice how vigilant self-lovers tend to come to a bad end rather earlier than one might expect.  Sadly and too often they take good people with them. The innocent may die. They may even fight to defend their home or loved ones, but it is inevitably the sinners who are behind all the death.

As Creedence Clearwater Revival once sang, "Two hundred million guns are loaded. Satan cries, 'Take aim!'"

It's not religions or political parties that do evil. It's people. Parties and religions are merely the tools bad people use to accomplish their aims.  To those who reject political parties, churches or even families, your withdrawal from these institutions won't help. They will do their bloody work without you if evil men are allowed to take them over. You can never change a church or an organization or party from without except by destroying it altogether and doing that makes you just another killer and robs you of your soul. If you abandon these institutions which may have been established for quite noble purposes, you merely hand them over to evil people.  You by your abandonment are as guilty as those who stayed and cooperated in the heinous actions of their leaders.

It remains best for us, I believe, to trust in God and treat our neighbors as we would wish to be treated and to stand for what is right wherever we are called to stand.  "They that wait upon the Lord," says the Psalmist, "shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles."

So wait and be strong. Help where you can. Do good so far as you're able. It'll all be over soon.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King