AMERICA HAS BEEN TOO BUSY

AMERICA HAS BEEN TOO BUSY - article from Destiny Magazine 1938-1967 by CR Dickey

George Washington, in his Farewell Address to the people of the United States said:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morals are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props to the duties of men and citizens.

“And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, both reason and experience forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle….

“It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period a great nation to give to mankind the magnanimous and, too, novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.”

That the revered Father of our Country referred to Christianity in particular, rather than to religion in general, we know from his record as a Protestant churchman and from such statements as the following which he made when appointing the hour for worship in the brigades:

“The Commander-in-chief directs that divine services be performed every Sunday at eleven o’clock. While we are zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of Patriot it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian.”

It is a well-known fact that Washington and his compatriots built our national structure upon the principles of Jesus Christ and the Common Law, both of which are rooted in the writings of Moses and the prophets. These notable statesmen were the instruments of Providence to lay the foundation of a unique nation in a new land. It has been said that “Washington was as divinely selected, endowed and blessed as any man in the world’s history.” One cannot find outside the Bible narrative a record of men so devoted to “exalted justice” as were these moral and intellectual giants who charted the course of our Republic and framed its Constitution. They trusted not wholly in their own wisdom, nor in the force of arms, nor in commercial genius; they knew, as did the Psalmist, that “Except the Lord built the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” (PS. 127:1).

We Americans in a world at war must think on our ways. We must re-examine our beginning if we would maintain those elements which guarantee life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In I Kings, Chapter 20, there is a strange little parable. It was directed to ancient Israel and yet, oddly enough, it is even more strikingly applicable to modern Anglo-Saxon Israel. Let us review it briefly.

One fateful day Ahab, king of Israel, traveled along the highway toward Samaria. A prophet in disguise met the king by the way and related to him this story:

“Thy servant went out into the midst of the battle: and, behold, a man turned aside, and brought a man unto me, and said, Keep this man: if by any means he be missing, then shall thy life be for his life, or else thou shalt pay a talent of silver. And as they servant was busy here and there, he was gone.” (I Kings 20:39-40.)

Quickly the stranger removed his disguise and the king discerned that he was of the prophets. Facing Ahab boldly the prophet gave an explanation that was also a stern accusation:

“Thus saith the Lord, Because thou hast let go out of thy hand a man whom I appointed to utter destruction, therefore thy life shall go for his life, and thy people for his people.” (I Kings 20:42.)

Then Ahab understood the parable. Israel’s king was the servant; Benhadad, the Syrian king and Israel’s deadliest foe, was the man whom God had delivered into Ahab’s hand for utter destruction. While Ahab dawdled --- busy here and there with peace negotiations and covenants --- Benhadad slipped through the noose and was gone.

“Thy life shall go for his life, and thy people for his people.” In anger and heaviness of heart Ahab continued on his way to Samaria.

Alas! America too has been busy --- here and there --- extending hospitality and undue consideration to the nation’s enemies. It would be most interesting to know how many malignant foes have slipped through the hands of our national administrators during the generation of which we are a part. Danger lurks in the fact that we can never get our foes deported, nor keep them in prison long enough to serve a sentence. They ought to be put to death; that is the Scriptural method and the only one ever known to work effectively. How much longer will the present laxity be tolerated? How many more of the nation’s youth will be sacrificed on the altar of criminal negligence? Their blood will be on the heads of those who protect the traitors among us; but that will not bring back the dead, nor mitigate the sorrow of wives, mothers and children. It is to our shame that, instead of punishing the betrayers in our midst, we persecute the men who point them out.

Again let George Washington speak these words of warning; “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens), the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy, to be useful, must be impartial.”

This same warning is stated innumerable times in the Bible as a safeguard to the Lord’s people. Israel was never known to win when in league with the enemies of God. We are not profiting as we should by our knowledge of Israel’s experiences. Unfortunately, many of the nation’s leaders are heeding neither Bible, nor the counsel of George Washington. Using the war emergency as an excuse, they are injecting totalitarian methods into our national life with increasing frequency. Yet is it logical to suppose that America’s treasured freedom can be preserved by adopting the methods of dictators?

Bishop James E. Freeman spoke wisely when he said: “Nothing alien to our traditions may assume to govern or control us in our course or determine for us our relation to problems at home or abroad….The recognition of the immutable laws of God, unfailing allegiance to those fundamental principles of life given to mankind by Jesus Christ, these we may not ignore or neglect, except to our peril.”

We have been too busy worshipping Mammon and chasing empty pleasures to see the totalitarian secret agents at work within our borders. While crafty masterminds were forging ahead in Europe and Asia with well-laid plans for world conquest, they kept us talking about disarmament, peace, reconciliation, brotherly love and international good will. And now our hearts stop a beat and a sickening horror fills our souls as we read that American boys --- precious boys like yours and mine --- are being captured and dragged into enemy camps to suffer a fate that we dare not contemplate. Like Ahab we are facing the results of our stupendous folly. Having disregarded God’s decrees for our national safety, we are now under the sentence of His irrevocable verdict: “Thy life shall go for his life, and thy people for his people.”

Many of America’s enemies have come from foreign shores; others were born in this country but maintain alien connections and loyalties; and still another group --- the most contemptible of all --- is composed of native stooges who serve as a smoke screen for the first two groups. World revolution, as a means to world dominion, is the program of certain internationalists who own allegiance to no nation and are traitors to the welfare of all. We are forgetting to watch them at the present moment. When the watchman sleeps, or is busy elsewhere, the betrayer has his opportunity. If we become too absorbed battling rats at the back door, we may not see the bear and the wolf when they enter the front door to take possession of the house.

Subversive workers find ridicule a most efficacious tool. They use it in season and out of season on everything that gets in their path. For some years they have directed ridicule toward the good old American virtue of patriotism. They know that the easiest way to produce disintegration in any country is to break down the affection and loyalty of its citizens; to convince them that there is really nothing worth fighting and dying for. Ridicule is a subtle and poisonous barb; many grew lethargic under its influence. That is why it took the Pearl Harbor stab in the back to wake us up.

A true patriot’s attitude is summed up in this terse sentence: “My country, right or wrong, when right to keep her right; when wrong to put her right.” Valiant men are going out now to die for our country. Do we, who remain on the home front, have the stamina to live for it and make it right? Have we the courage to overthrow every civil system that thrives by exploiting our citizenry and undermining our republic? If not, then we, like millions in occupied Europe, will pay dearly in blood for our cowardice.

Out of a glorious past comes this thrilling challenge from Daniel Webster: “I was born an American; I live an American; I shall die an American; and I intend to perform the duties incumbent upon me in that character to the end of my career. I mean to do this with absolute disregard of personal consequences. What are the personal consequences? What is the individual man, with all the good or evil that may betide him, in comparison with the good or evil which may befall a great country, and in the midst of great transactions which concern that country’s fate? Let the consequences be what they will, I am careless. No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffers, or if he fall, in the defense of the liberties and constitution of his country.”

What now constitutes the direst threat to our freedom and to what we like to call our American way of life? It lies in the fact that so many honest, true-hearted citizens do not realize what is happening to our republican form of government. Again we have been busy --- here and there --- too busy to notice what enemies within have been doing to our cherished liberties.

How naïve we are! What simple means serve to confuse us and blind us to elementary truths! A carefully designed misuse of a single word on the part of clever propagandists has led approximately 130 million people to accept a fundamental error: and that word is “democracy.” Perhaps no other word was ever used so much and understood so little. It adorns the pages of every newspaper, magazine, and book; it resounds in oratorical splendor across the continent from the little red school-house to the congressional and senatorial chambers of the national Capitol. “Our Democracy!”

Does no one remember that our Founding Fathers almost never used the word democracy? In their public addresses they talked about “our Republic” and “our republican form of government.” Democracy? The following paragraphs from Lawful Money Explained by Gertrude M. Coogan, answer the question briefly but adequately.

“The stock-in-trade of a demagogue in all controversy and confusion is the skillful bandying about of words. He artfully uses words in a way intended to convey different meanings to different listeners.

“A word now artfully and deceptively used in this country is DEMOCRACY . Democracy means rule by direct action of the people. Our Constitution did not provide for a democracy, and real democracies have ever produced nothing but chaos and slavery. They have always turned into mobocracies.

“The Founders of America established a Republic. Under a republic the power of government is vested in the citizens, but is delegated and exercised by the representatives of the people. The specific powers our representatives received from us (citizens) were granted to them in our Constitution and its amendments.

“In our particular type of Republic three branches were set up; the legislative could pass laws in accord with the power granted by the citizens and the States, the executive was to see that the laws were carried out, and the judicial was to interpret the laws in accord with the Constitution.

“In speaking of a Republic or Democracy, we are not referring to the Republican or Democratic political parties. The Republican party of today was born sixty-five years after the Constitution was adopted. Partisanship has nothing whatever to do with the fundamental principles underlying our government. All elected officials, whether Democratic or Republican, take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States. The immediate job is to get rid of all, regardless of party, who have not kept oath!

“The Constitution would not have guaranteed one form of government if those intelligent men who drafted it had another form in mind. According to Webster, a Republic is ‘A state in which the sovereign power resides in the whole body of the people, and is exercised by representatives elected by them.’ A Democracy is ‘A form of government in which the supreme power is retained and directly exercised by the people.’

“The word ‘democracy’ or any of its derivatives is not to be found in our Constitution but we do read in Article IV, Section 4: ‘The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government and shall protect each of them against invasion.’ The public utterances and writings of those who drafted the Constitution of the United States should be considered authentic evidence of their intent.”

George Washington, in his reply to the Senate, said that he was happy in the conviction “that the Senate will at all times cooperate in every measure which may tend to promote the welfare of this confederated Republic.”

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, said in his first inaugural address: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error or opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

James Madison, who is honored more today for the part he took in drafting and ratifying the Constitution of the United States than for his career as President, stated why he and his illustrious coworkers decided upon a Republic instead of a Democracy. Ponder these relevant words from the “Father of the Constitution”:

“Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. A Republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.”

Despite this irrefutable evidence that the United States of America is a Republic with a republican form of government, men and women, claiming the intelligence to lead their fellowmen, speak and write incessantly about the glories of our Democracy. That shows how dutifully they are following the path prescribed by our enemies!

Professor Harold J. Laski, who numbers among his faithful disciples most of the pseudo “liberals” of Britain and America, tells us that “Soviet Russia is the world’s hope of democracy, alongside of the United States.” There you have the key to the situation! Professor Laski does us a real service by pointing out the ultimate aim of the democracy now being foisted upon unsuspecting American citizens. This spurious democracy is exactly the same thing as Communism in Russia, Nazism in Germany, Fascism in Italy and military dictatorship in Japan. It is designed to undermine the form of our government and to negate the principles and rights guaranteed under our great Constitution. If allowed to complete its deadly course, it will turn our Republic into a totalitarian state and destroy the last vestige of freedom in America, just as it has scourged and desecrated the lands and people of Europe and Asia.

Doubtless unwary citizens in those conquered lands were busy --- here and there --- before the day of desolation and did not see what was happening to them until it was too late. Can it happen here? Will it happen here? It can and it will --- unless --- the populace rises in mighty indignation and rids the land of ALL traitors, regardless of nationality, race or sex.

Will the destroyers of freedom escape justice at our hands as Benhadad eluded Ahab? If so, we need no longer sing, “God bless America”, nor pray “God help America”, for God blesses and helps only those who help themselves.

Theorists who have spent a lifetime advocating various “isms” and the overthrow of representative constitutional government have nothing to offer in its place as a satisfactory way of life. Note the wistfulness in this confession of defeat by England’s veteran socialist, George Bernard Shaw: “I am ready to admit that, after contemplating human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the world’s misery but the way which would have been found by Christ’s will if he had undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman.”

Joseph Chamberlain was once asked why, in his opinion, so many fall short of the goal. He answered, “They come to the place where they turn back. They may have killed the dragon at the first bridge, and at the second, perhaps even at the third, but the dragons are always more formidable the further we go. Many turn back disheartened, and very few will meet the monsters to the end. Almost none is willing to have a try with the demon at the last bridge; but if he does, he has won forever.”

In conflict with satan, Jesus Christ won at the last bridge. His weapon was the Sword of the Spirit --- “It is written.” Today the United States needs more men who are acquainted with that Sword and not afraid to use it; more men who realize that the independence of our nation was established by statesmen unashamed to acknowledge their dependence on God; and more men who know our beginnings as recorded in the Holy Bible and in the annals of this American Republic.