Offensive Communist Lies

Communist dictators indoctrinate the masses with offensive lies on many subjects. In his book, Pinstripes and Reds, Ambassador Funderburk coined the term “Ceausescuisms,” referring to the peculiar lies spun by the communist dictator.

“Romania’s religious policy is more liberal than that of the U.S,” said the Romanian dictator. That was such a blatant lie, there was no liberalism in his communist society where “every institution or group had to be registered by the state.” Lecturing a U.S. Congressional delegation in 1983, Ceausescu told them that he “did not need any more American type of religious groups, such as a third Baptist cult in Romania.”

Religion in his police state was tightly controlled by the Communist Party which had infiltrated heavily its Orthodox Church ranks in seminaries. For Seminaries to be allowed to exist, they had to be approved by the state, and so did the church parishes. The priests had to be approved by the Communist Party, even in remote villages. Priests survived financially with a small monthly salary paid by the state and from parishioners’ donations.

There were some priests who were honest and did not comply with the communist party dictates on faith, but they were few and far between. Their sermons did not indoctrinate the faithful into submission to communist rule. Some were heavily persecuted for their religious beliefs which they imparted honestly to the faithful despite the discomfort their actions caused them. Some were tortured and even killed in the many communist prisons.

The church was allowed to exist because it was a convenient tool to control the population, for weddings, baptisms, and burials. Regular participation in services every week was discouraged except for old ladies in rural areas. Nobody cared how often they attended services.

I genuinely believed that, once the communists “fell” from power in 1989, the church will be free of the police state control and people will worship liberally. It is true that more than 6,000 churches have been built and many repaired, but the numbers of the faithful did not swell as much as expected. People, who had been severely brainwashed by decades of communist oppression, were resentful that the state was spending money to build and repair churches instead of building schools and hospitals.

Young generations were schooled in the west, some in the country, but all used curricula and textbooks written by George Soros’ NGOs that penetrated Romania right after the December 1989 revolution and Christmas 1989 execution of the Ceausescus.

Their education was saturated with globalist ideas and the new religion of environmentalism and Mother Gaia worship, to the detriment of humans. The youth, like everywhere else in the world, were encouraged to separate themselves from history, from who they were, from where they came from, and to become global citizens beholden to a globalist government at the U.N.

Milan Kundera wrote very aptly in his book,

“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

One story highlighted the level of brainwashing among young priests who were born and raised in the “free-of-communism” society, as members of the European Union since 2007.

While visiting Romania in 2015, I came upon a beautiful wood church in Poiana Brasov, near the famous ski slope where international competitions were held for many decades during the communist regime. Close to the church was a memorial to Liviu Cornel Babes, a 47-year-old Romanian electrician and painter, who committed suicide by immolation, coming down the Bradu ski slope at Poiana Brasov on March 2, 1989, to protest Ceausescu’s tyrannical regime. He was carrying the sign, “Stop Murder! Brasov = Auschwitz.” He lasted to the bottom of the slope where he fell off his skis, moaning in agonizing pain. He was not given any medical care at the hospital and died from his severe burns two hours later. He was not declared a hero until June 2007 (Law no. 93).

As I entered the beautiful but tiny Orthodox church, a young priest came over and started a conversation with me. I asked him about the memorial outside and, what the priest said, would not have shocked me during the communist regime when the Orthodox Church was heavily infiltrated by communists. Priests had to carry the Marxist indoctrination to the parishioners because they were paid by the police state and were allowed to be priests only with their permission. “If Liviu would have minded his own business and had done what the communist leaders told him to do, he might still be alive today.”

Here was this young priest, 26 years after communism “fell” on December 25, 1989, and yet he was advocating in 2015 that the population should have obediently embraced their oppressors and should have been submissive indefinitely to the communist tyranny.

Historically, if we study what happened in the communist colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts, we find that the religious men and women of the colony grew discontent with the commune life and resented each other; single men felt like slaves when they had to work for other men’s wives, and married women resented having to cook and do the laundry for their own husbands and for the single men in the colony.

It was clear, as W. Cleon Skousen wrote in The Naked Communist, “Communism cannot be practiced without setting up a dictatorship” because even religious men and women are not altruistic enough. Governor Bradford himself “concluded that Communism is not only inefficient but that it is unnatural and in violation of the laws of God.”

During the same December 1983 meeting with the U.S. Congressional delegation, the communist dictator asked of those present, “Don’t you wish you had only one political party in the U.S.?”

We have heard this same question uttered in the 21^st century speeches, by Democrat politicians who wished that the U.S. had just one party in control of the country, copying the Chinese model of governance, which they believed to be perfect.

Today we have more than 30 states with a “trifecta,” the one-party rule (Democrat Party) of the Senate, the House, and the judiciary. Such Democrat states are mismanaged and corrupt, in financial dire needs which require heavy federal cash infusions, gang-ridden, and plagued by high crime.

The question I have asked rhetorically many times, still troubles me; has communism really died? Or has it just gone underground after 1989 and regrouped to infest and capture western cultures without bullets, violence, and force, just by indoctrination in schools and in the media owned by six corporations and beholden to the Democrat Party? The honest answer is, yes.

 

 

 

The Climate Change Industry and the Religion of Green

We are so lucky that Al Gore’s “true planetary emergency” did not take place. He predicted it ten years ago at the Sundance Film Festival where his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” premiered.  It was the result of an environmental crusade he embarked upon that would make him a billionaire, a Nobel Prize and a Golden Globe winner  – “Educating the masses that global warming is about to toast our ecology and our way of life.” http://www.cbsnews.com/news/2006-al-gore-does-sundance

His dire predictions that the planet will be flooded, islands will be swallowed up by the melting of the glaciers, and the planet will roast did not happen.  The surface temperatures have increased in some areas thanks to El Nino, a natural event, not because of anthropogenic CO2, the gas of plant life. 

Dr. John Christy, Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama Huntsville, is quoted:  http://whatssupwiththat.com/2015/12/19/uah-un-climate-change-goal-new-trend-analysis-shows-were-there-now/

“The fastest warming place on Earth over the past 37 years has been in the Arctic Ocean north of the Svalbard archipelago, where temperatures have been rising 0.5 C (about 0.9 degrees F) per decade. The fastest cooling spot was over the eastern Antarctic near Dome C. Temperatures there have been falling at the rate of 0.41 C (about 0.74 degrees F) per decade.”

According to Dr. Roy Spencer, the global-average warmth during El Nino is caused by the solar energy but also by the vertical circulation of the Pacific Ocean basin.  http://drroyspencer.com/2016/01/what-causes-el-nino-warmth/

“The short answer is that, during El Nino, there is an average decrease in the vertical overturning and mixing of cold, deep ocean waters with solar-heated warm surface waters. The result is that the surface waters become warmer than average, and deeper waters become colder than average. The opposite occurs during La Nina.”

Non-scientists confuse weather events with climate and base their decision to support the anthropogenic global warming theory now termed climate change on “consensus science” which would be a derisive designation if the stakes were not so expensive for humanity. Consensus means agreement of opinion; science is based on fact, not opinion. Data seem to contradict supporters of the climate change industry but it does not slow down their rabid assault on civilization. Real scientists, labeled deniers and skeptics, are marginalized, ridiculed, fired, and even made subjects of inquiries resembling witch hunts.

Cashing in billions and trillions on weather and on climate that has been changing for millennia, on fear of planetary Armageddon, is just one aspect of the nefarious Agenda 21, a document signed in 1992 by 178 countries, including the United States, whose linchpin is Sustainable Development, controlling almost every aspect of business activity and human existence, now expanded into Agenda 2030, as some dubbed it “Agenda 21 on steroids.”

The fact, that Congress has not ratified the 40-chapter document, has not stopped every administration since to implement Agenda 21 through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who received grants from the federal government and then distributed those funds around the country to entice them to accept and implement Agenda 21 at the state and local levels.

Destroying capitalism and rearranging life in accordance with the dreams of elitist one world bureaucrats, rewilding the planet and reintroducing grey wolves, high-rise mixed- use buildings with tiny apartment living, population control, replacement of cars with light rail and biking, elimination of suburbia and of private property is truly the plan behind Agenda 21. Its environmentalist “useful idiots” supporters have not bothered to read the ample document released under the aegis of United Nations.

I wrote about the transformation of U.N.’s Agenda 21 into Agenda 2030 and explained the core goals of this lengthy document. http://canadafreepress.com/article/75315

Man has not been responsible for climate change over the millennia; the Vostok ice core samples have proven that; nor was man responsible for the Little Ice Age in the Middle Ages that had caused famine and death due to shortened food growing seasons and freezing temperatures that even affected Napoleon’s unprepared army in Russia. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/vostok.html
 

John Kerry told the crowd at COP21 conference in Paris that global warming is junk science yet they are still going to fleece us with the fake climate change industry fees and taxes.

“The fact is that even if every single American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels out of their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, guess what, that still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world.  If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions, it wouldn’t be enough. Not when more than 65 percent of the world’s pollution comes from the developing world.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAtiygrbTSg
 

As the planet did not cooperate to deliver the global warming they had hoped for, the radical environmentalists renamed it climate change – and it is a very profitable industry of renewables, carbon swaps, solar panels, biofuels, and wind turbines.

Even though the billionaire father of the global new world order Agenda 21, now renamed Agenda 2030, the Canadian Maurice Strong, passed away on November 27, 2015, there are important supporters who have picked up the fleecing torch of “climatism,” a potential cash cow worth trillions of dollars.  

In 1976 Maurice Strong was the head of the newly created Petro-Canada, advised the gas industry, and made billions in oil and carbon trade-offs. He was alleged to have been a member of the Board of Directors of the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emissions registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Fox News called Maurice Strong the “godfather of the environmental movement,” the founding director of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi.  It is interesting that China was the place where the “self-declared, life-long socialist” chose to live for a while and die, in “one of the world’s biggest producers of industrial pollution, [which] has been profiting from the trading of carbon emission credits – thanks to heavily politicized U.N.-backed environmental deals engineered by Strong in the 1990s.” http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/02/08/at-united-nations-curious-career-maurice-strong.html

The whole agenda pushed by the U.N. hurts the interests of the American people. Congressman Mike Rogers (R-AL) has introduced a bill to restore U.S. sovereignty and withdraw U.S. from the U.N., a corrupt organization dubbed the “dictators club.” The bill, titled The American Sovereignty and Restoration Act of 2015 (H.R. 1205), faces an uphill battle as Congress seems unwilling to make and pass laws that represent the interests of the American people. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/hr1205/text

In Siskiyou County, the fifth largest county by land mass in California, on the Oregon border, ranching has kept the area unspoiled but the environmentalists have decided to reintroduce the grey wolf, endangering 45,000 people and the ranchers’ herds of cattle grazing freely on the land. The city residents believe that the introduction of “majestic predators howling in some distant corner of their state” is romantic. Nobody really understands that rewilding at the expense of humans  is one of the goals of Agenda 21. http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/environment/article51700790.html

Andrea Hutchinson transformed herself from a housewife and mother to agricultural activist in Canton, Oklahoma, where her family homesteaded in Dewey County in 1893, after hearing many horror stories of farmers fighting to keep their farms, property rights, and their land under the assault of “visioning committees,” environmentalist NGOs, and U.N. Agenda 21’s ICLEI operatives who have infiltrated boards of supervisors and zoning boards across the country.  She wants her family to be able to continue the ranching tradition.  The stories she heard ranged from “drones, abuse of the EPA, to threats of Endangered Species destroying livelihoods.”  http://www.hpj.com/archives/concern-over-agenda-turn-cattlewoman-into-agricultural-activist/article_ca963ae3-5227-5f17-821c-4acaa37472e0.html?mode=jqm

In a period of natural drought, Save the American River Association advocated that “retiring and curbing water rights for 300,000 acres of contaminated land farmed in the San Joaquin Valley would cost approximately $1 billion” in compensation to farmers, “a reasonable price to pay to stop the poisoning of California’s environment” and it “would free up 455,000 acre-feet of water annually.” Would this “contaminated land” in San Joaquin Valley, asked Katy Grimes, be the 600 farms along I-5 that produce $1 billion worth of food each year? These are not unsustainable crops, retiring them is a war on agriculture, on our ability to feed Americans. http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/california-forum/article52319970.html

It is interesting that the water “rationers” are considering such drastic measures when, according to California officials, wet weather added 6.4 billion gallons of fresh water to Lake Tahoe (2 inches) and new snow is at “136 percent of normal levels.” The snowpack was measured in Sierra Nevada at 54 inches. http://www.capoliticalreview.com/top-stories/ca-snowpack-136-of-normal-how-will-water-rationers-spin-that/?utm_source=CAPoliticalReview.com&utm_campaign=2909021a1f-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b855a22bd3-2909021a1f-302742409

Destroying farms and taking as many out of production as possible, endangering food production and survival, would help achieve another goal of Agenda 21 – depopulation. We seem to have exceeded the planet’s “carrying capacity.” Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in 2015 that the entire global warming hoax was designed in order to destroy capitalism. “Really, we should make every effort to change those numbers [population] because we are already, today, exceeding the planet’s planetary carrying capacity,” Figueres claimed.  This is an outrageous statement, particularly when we look at the low fertility rates in the developed world, way below replacement values. http://www.jewsnews.co.il/2015/04/27/un-official-we-should-make-every-effort-to-depopulate-the-planet-2/

Once suburbia is destroyed and the land given back to wilderness, the population will be moved into high-rise, mixed-use micro apartments, stacked and packed, ranging from 150-360 square feet, mostly smaller than the average hotel room. It is like sticking people into closets. Promoting living in Mega Cities, Christiana Figueres praised the high-rise living because renters can grow their food on terraces, collect rainwater on the roof, and get their electricity from solar panels on balconies/roofs. What can possibly go wrong with such an unsustainable scenario? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seDpS2QEoNw

Speaking at the anti-COP21 climate summit in Paris, Dr. Istvan Marko, professor at Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium and co-author of The Bankruptcy of Climatism,  said, “All conclusions being reached by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] are actually flawed conclusions.” The dogma of “climatism” is perpetuated in spite of ample evidence to the contrary because governmental research grants come with strings attached to this fake religion of anthropogenic global warming.

Marko said, “It is almost like a religion, you know, you have the original sin, the original sin is carbon dioxide, and the one who committed it is the human being. So we all have to repent.”

In his speech at the summit, “The Nostradamuses of Climate Change and Their Erroneous Prophecies,” Dr. Marko repeated what all thinking humans already know, CO2 is the gas of plant life and our oxygen. “The worst thing that can happen is decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air.” Greenhouses add more CO2 in the air because their plants thrive on carbon dioxide.

Thanks to CO2, “there is a greening around the world.” According to Dr. Randall Donohue, findings of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU) revealed that during 1982-2010 an eleven percent increase in “CO2 fertilization” has increased the foliage in arid areas of Australia, North America, the Middle East, and Africa. http://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-co2.html

All this “climatism” is not about saving the planet, “It’s the slow erosion of your own individual liberty, that’s what is at stake with COP21.” He stated that for half the annual cost of the Kyoto Protocol ($150 billion), people in the third world could have running water, electricity, food, and education. http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/22232-at-anti-un-climate-summit-scientist-slams-alarmist-religion

Would it not be better to solve real problems instead of chasing problems that do not exist, creating a profitable climate change industry while enabling the U.N. bureaucrats to live a lavish lifestyle, jet-setting around the world to promote their hoax?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mindfulness, Another Method of Indoctrination

If you are regrouping, in the massive effort necessary to mount an opposition to the Common Core national “standards” that are socialized dumbed-down education for the masses, add to your watch list Mindfulness Training.

An invitation to attend “Managing Stress:  How Mindfulness Training in Our Schools Can Benefit Students, Educators, and Parents” at the local high school in Fairfax, Virginia captured my attention. Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio and author of “A Mindful Nation” is the featured speaker. The event on June 9, 2014 is advertised as a partnership between MINDS, The Josh Anderson Foundation, and Fairfax County Public Schools.

Various sites present mindfulness as a simple breathing meditation of 4-5 minutes at the start of every class, “replacing instant work demands with the expectations that students simply be.”  What is “simply be” and how do you replace work demands instantly by existing?  My indoctrination radar came on. I was not sure yet what “simply be” was but I did find out that you can get a Master’s Degree in Mindful Studies.

The “secular” practice of mindfulness is “rooted” in Buddhism. Jon Kabat-Zinn established a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979. Myla Kabat-Zinn and Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote, “Learning to Breathe:  A Mindfulness Curriculum for Adolescents to Cultivate Emotion Regulation, Attention, and Performance.” As a former educator, the indication that emotion must be regulated into a perfectly attentive automaton bothered me because every child is an individual with a certain attention span, interest, emotion, and level of curiosity. How would calming a person make them excel in life?

Patricia C. Broderick, in “Learning to Breathe,” wrote that “meditation skills help students improve emotion regulation, reduce stress, improve overall performance, and develop their attention.” The program was designed to be compatible with school curricula and could be used by mental health providers.

The six core lessons, Body, Reflection, Emotions, Attention, Tenderness, and Healthy Mind Habits are obviously not going to let students just “simply be.”  What are these mindfulness skills? A quote by the World Teacher, Krishnamurti (born in 1895 in India) and used in the “Mindfulness in Education, Learning from the Inside Out” video is quite telling:

“You want to have your own gods – new gods instead of the old, new religions instead of the old, new forms instead of the old – all equally valueless, all barriers, all limitations, all crutches. Instead of old spiritual distinctions you have new spiritual distinctions; instead of the old worships you have new worships. You are all depending for your spirituality on someone else, for your happiness on someone else, for enlightenment on someone else; … you must put them all away and look within yourselves for the enlightenment, for the glory, for the purification, and for the incorruptibility of the self…”

Amy Burke mentions in the video that we need to learn to listen to our hearts. Is that a good idea for young people to listen to their hearts when they are already confused and raging with hormones? She advises the use of a chime bar in class to center the students. “We know that it is going to take time to restructure education.” Do we really want or need to restructure education on the tenets Buddhism?

Debbie DeGroff discusses the video “Mindful Schools:  In Class Instruction,” in which she learned that in June 2010, Mindful Schools has indoctrinated over 8,000 children in 34 Bay Area schools, 74 percent of which were low-income. Children were told to keep a journal of “simply be” and of “notice their breath without judgment.” One entry is full of spelling errors. It appears that students should have spent more time on spelling and less on mindfulness indoctrination.  “what I lrend abo_ot mindfulness is when you have thogh just get your net an cach the buderfly that let it go away.”  Mindfulness is encouraged at bed time as well. (Debbie DeGroff, Catching Butterflies, February 26, 2014)

Mindful Schools boast 200,000 students in 48 states and 43 countries who were impacted by their program. One course is called Meeting Resistance. Mindfulness is not just a “particular way of paying attention, the mental faculty of purposefully bringing awareness to one’s sensory experience, thoughts, and emotion by using sustained attention and noticing experience without reacting,” it is a much more insidious form of indoctrination. Mindful Schools were even featured in a Time cover story. www.mindfulschools.org

Many schools are already using the “Learning to Breathe:  A Mindfulness Curriculum and William Glasser’s  Choice Theory.  “Students are motivated more by their internal needs rather than traditional external needs.” “Boss teachers” are the traditional teachers who use the method of rules and consequences, mandated curriculum, and standardized assessments.   “Lead teachers” instruct based on the basic needs of each student. Students actively choose how and what they are taught and the teacher structures the lessons around the student’s desires.  Only good grades are given and, if a student fails, the course is not recorded. What a formula for future failure!

The Mindfulness teachers are promoted as “quiet revolutionaries” who will change the education system by paying attention to the inner life of children and of their teachers. PBS is selling the DVD, The Buddha, a film by David Gruben. 

Dr. Amy Saltzmann describes Mindfulness in the context of global citizenship. “As a classroom teacher, you already know that many of your students are stressed… You have also most likely realized that student stress frequently inhibits their ability to learn, and that the emphasis on academics is neglecting the development of the social-emotional qualities essential for skillful world citizenry… “

She also describes a study of mindfulness group of students vs. a control group in which the mindfulness students showed a significant increase in global assessment of functioning (GAF) scores. GAF is used by mental health clinicians and physicians to rate subjectively the social, occupational, and psychological functioning of adults.

Shouldn’t  schools concentrate on academics instead on the “Still Quiet Place” of meditation found inside you? It is outrageous that, by using Buddhist meditation, our children are diagnosed and treated psychologically without parental consent and, as Debbie DeGroff aptly described, “exposing a wound that we don’t have the skill to attend to.”

The Department of Education spent $1.2 million on a grant to research mindfulness. Whatever happened to the separation of church and state that liberals scream about when the mere mention of God is made in schools? Why are we allowing Far East mystical practices to come into our public schools under the guise of stress management? Why are our children being constantly experimented on by the latest fad pushed by liberals/progressives who view the classroom and our children’s minds and future as their laboratory? Progressives hope to shape our children’s minds into a more “compassionate” society, brainwashed into overcoming suffering, and recognizing the natural wisdom of Gaia. “Mindfulness is pure religion” and our children are not lab rats.

NOTE

For further links and sources read
http://www.insectman.us/misc/creation/common-thread-mindfulness.htm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas, the Season of Faith, Family, and Charity

Christmas was my Dad bringing home proudly a scraggly fir with sparse branches - fragrant with the smell of winter, tiny icicles hanging from the branches, miniature crystal daggers, melting on my mom’s well-scrubbed parquet floor. I never knew nor asked how he could afford it from his $70 a month salary that barely covered the communist subsidized rent, utilities, and food. No matter how bare the branches of my Christmas tree were, it was magical to me.

We decorated it together with home-made paper baskets filled with hard candy, raisins, and small butter cookies, crepe paper garlands, small pretzels, an orange wrapped in fine tissue paper coming all the way from Israel, a few apples dangling from a string, and 12 red and green 3-inch candles clipped carefully away from overhanging branches that could catch on fire.

Mom’s hand-stitched table cloth made a convenient tree skirt. Two metal bars forged by hand helped Dad nail the tree to the floor at the foot of the couch where I slept in the living room that doubled as my bedroom.

I fell asleep and woke up every morning setting my eyes on the scented tree. It lasted two enchanted weeks before the dried needles fell all over the floor.

Christmas was lighting one of the 12 candles for a few minutes every night, careful not to set the tree on fire, basking in the soft glow while Daddy’s twinkly eyes were beaming with pride that he made his family happy once more. We were rich with love and God’s blessings.

Christmas was standing in shorter lines for freshly baked bread, butter, milk, cooking oil, flour, sugar, and the small pork roast mom always baked in the gas oven. Grandpa’s homemade smoked sausages with pretzels toasted on the stove top were always on the menu. Grandpa used to joke that life was so spectacularly good, even the dogs ran around with pretzels on their tails. Pretzels were sold by big bags, hard and stale, but toasting them on the stove made them taste just baked.

Christmas was Daddy opening the ceremonial bottle of red wine freshly brewed that year by cousin Mircea from Grandma Elizabeta’s vineyard grapes.

Christmas were the village carolers in hand-sewn folk costumes coming door to door, trudging through 3 ft. of snow, pulling a plough decorated with a real fir tree, singing traditional songs and snapping their whips in spite of the Communist Party moratorium, forbidding the observance of such religious traditions.

Christmas was sneaking at midnight to the village Orthodox Church with aunt Leana, the singing deacon, lighting candles and praying, surrounding the building when the crowd overflowed its tiny confines into the yard and the cemetery. The cold chilled us to the bone but the inside eventually warmed from our bodies, the candles, and the excitement of prayers and closeness to God.

Christmas was eating with my Mom and Dad, feeling full, happy, and loved in our tiny apartment, sometimes sharing meals with family members who had traveled far to be with us. The spare wool comforter aunt Nicuta had woven, a blanket, and set of sheets painstakingly hand washed would make cozy beds on the floor for the tired traveler – no fire place to light up, just the coils of steam heat which the government generously made sufficiently hot during Christmas to make up for the cold misery during the winter.

Christmas was peering in the shop windows at the glass ornaments we could not afford but I wished I had. They were made in Poland, whimsical fairy tale characters, no religious symbols of any kind, they were “verboten.”

Every Christmas I longed to have the same doll in the window at Omnia department store, dressed with miniature detailed  clothes, real curly hair, blue eyes, and eyelashes. I never asked my Dad because Mom said it cost three months of his salary. I still had my raggedy cloth doll aunt Stella, the village seamstress, had made for me when I was two years old. When my first child was born, Dad mailed her a large doll similar to the one I had longed for. The doll was so big, it stayed in a corner untouched. My spoiled children had too many other toys to play with and never appreciated the sacrifice their Granddad had made in sending such a gift of love.

On Saint Nicholas Day, December 6, I would put my boots outside the door, hoping that they would be filled with candy in the morning and not coals. Grandpa had a wicked sense of humor – he would sometimes fill one boot with switches and another with candy and a chocolate bar. Chocolate was always in short supply and hard to find.

Grandpa never bought a blue spruce - we cut a fir tree from the woods. We were careful not to cut down a tree that had bird nests in it. We decorated it with garlands made from shiny and multi-colored construction paper. We cut strips, glued them in an interlocking pattern and voila, we had our garland. For ornaments we used walnuts and shriveled apples from his cellar, tied with Grandma’s red knitting wool.

The warm adobe style fireplace built from mud bricks mixed with straw cast a dancing glow on the tree decked with  tokens of food, something our heathen Roman ancestors did during the celebration of Saturnalia. On December 17, the polytheistic Romans celebrated Saturnus, the god of seed and sowing, for an entire week. As Christians, we celebrated the birth of Christ and the religious traditions in our Orthodox faith, in spite of the communist regime forcing the transformation of Christmas into a secular holiday.

On Christmas Eve, after we ate Grandma’s traditional Christmas supper, roasted pork, sarmale (stuffed cabbage rolls with ground meat and rice), and mamaliga (corn mush with butter cooked in a cast iron pot), we went to the midnight service at the Orthodox Church not far from her house. Sometimes it was a sloshy trek and other times it was icy and slippery. If we got lucky, a heavy snow would turn our walk into a winter wonderland with dancing snowflakes shining in the weak street lights. We had to bundle up well – the church was not heated and we circled it three times during the procession with burning candles in our hands. I always wore my flannel pajamas under many layers of warm clothes. To this day, pajamas are my favorite garment – cozy and comfortable, keeping my body warm.

When my children were born, Christmas became a tradition of toys and happiness seen through squeals of innocence and twinkly eyes when unwrapping a favorite game, book, toy, stuffed animal, or bike. I taught my children to be charitable and to share with other children who were less fortunate than we.

I decorate my Douglas fir with beautiful lights and shiny ornaments now. My heart fills with loving and longing memories of glowing Christmases past and of family members lost who made our Christian traditions so special.

I hope and pray that American Christmas traditions will be passed on to future generations to light up the season of faith, family, and charity.

 

Appeasement and Redistribution of Wealth

From Pope Pius XII, the much beloved, anti-communist and anti-Nazi Pope, to the current overtly socialist Pope Francis, the 266^th pontiff of the Catholic Church, the church has undergone a lot of changes.

In his recently penned 224-page document, The Joy of the Gospel (Evangelii Gaudium), Pope Francis criticized the following.

-          The current capitalist inequalities

(Were socialism and communism ever equal, inclusive, kind to the people, and fair? No, there were two classes, the haves, composed of communist party apparatchiks and the have-nots, composed of the proletariat.)

-          “The idolatry of money”

(Who pays for the salaries of priests and the maintenance of the churches around the world for its 1.5 billion Catholics? The Holy See is quite flush with cash and wealthy beyond belief if you consider thousands of priceless works of art, marble statues, gold and silver icons, urns, crucifixes, chalices, and marble cathedrals around the world. Should they not follow their own direction and distribute all this vast wealth to the poor?)

-          “The inequality that spawns violence”

(Were violence and wars around the world borne by economic inequality or were there other reasons such as religion, land disputes, drug cartels, plundering, and natural resources such as oil, gold, coal, diamonds, silver, and power and control conquests?)

-          “Trickle-down economics” as a theory that “expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power.”

The Washington Post immediately included the papal criticism in its editorial and pointed out that Democrats and liberals have rejected the “trickle-down economics” theory and used the phrase derisively to define it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/pope-francis-denounces-trickle-down-economic-theories-in-critique-of-inequality/2013/11/26/e17ffe4e-56b6-11e3-8304-caf30787c0a9_story.html

“The phrase has often been used derisively to describe a popular version of conservative economic philosophy that argues that allowing the wealthy to run their businesses unencumbered by regulation or taxation bears economic benefits that lead to more jobs and income for the rest of society. Liberals and Democratic officials have rejected the theory, saying it is contradicted by economic evidence.”

As a matter of fact, “trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world,” have been proven correct.

There is a good reason why the United States citizens have done so well economically as opposed to centralized, socialist, and communist countries where indescribable poverty is rampant while the ruling, tyrannical elite live luxuriously at the expense of the masses. Even the poorest of the poor in the United States live far better than the rest of the world because capitalism works.

The Latin American Pope from Buenos Aires lamented that the masses are still waiting for “social justice.” United States is one of the first countries in the world to donate and help the poor and others when tragedy strikes and Americans give generously of their wealth, time, and expertise.  “Social justice” is an entirely different manufactured creature.

According to Gen. Pacepa, the Soviet communist-led idea of “social justice” was infiltrated successfully by the KGB into Latin America’s Catholic Church as a religious movement called “liberation theology.” The goal was to “incite Latin America’s poor to rebel against the ‘institutionalized violence of poverty’ generated by the United States.” (Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, Disinformation, Washington, D. C., WND Books, Inc., 2013, chapter 15, p. 106)

What kind of “social justice” are the masses waiting for when pining for socialism and communism? They are waiting to vote again and again for the same individuals and the same socialist or communist governments that brought them to the brink of poverty and kept them perennially downtrodden. They are waiting for socialist governments to give them welfare and free minimal health care through Castro clinics while they stay home and procreate more dependents. They are waiting for the redistribution of wealth from productive citizens. They are enslaved to their governments who decide their daily lives yet they are told it is the United States’ fault.

Robert Spencer wrote an article around the Pope’s statement that “Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”

The following is an excerpt from paragraph 253 of the papal document: …“We Christians should embrace with affection and respect Muslim immigrants to our countries in the same way that we hope and ask to be received and respected in countries of Islamic tradition. I ask and I humbly entreat those countries to grant Christians freedom to worship and to practice their faith, in light of the freedom which followers of Islam enjoy in Western countries! Faced with disconcerting episodes of violent fundamentalism, our respect for true followers of Islam should lead us to avoid hateful generalisations, for authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.” http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/francesco/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium_en.pdf

The Christian victims of jihad violence in Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria carried out daily by Muslims who use the Koran to explain the burning of churches and the killing of innocents certainly contradict his Holiness.

Based on prior history, we know neither appeasement nor reverse psychology works; on the contrary, appeasement creates war and more violence.

Robert Spencer explained that “The Bishop of Rome, by virtue of his position as successor of St. Peter, can, according to Catholic teaching, speak authoritatively about Catholic doctrine: he has the authority to delineate what is authentic Catholicism. This, however, is a statement about "authentic Islam." It would be interesting to know how he came to this conclusion, since the Pope of Rome has no counterpart within the Islamic world: there is no Muslim authority to which he can appeal in order to discover what ‘authentic Islam’ consists of, and many Muslim authorities would disagree with his statement that ‘authentic Islam’ is opposed to every form of violence." http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/11/pope-francis-authentic-islam-and-the-proper-reading-of-the-koran-are-opposed-to-every-form-of-violen.html

The Washington Post writer Reza Aslan stated in his November 30, 2013 column on faith, “If you don’t like the Pope, you won’t care much for Jesus.” That is because Jesus, he said, “is advocating a chilling new reality in which the rich will be made poor, the strong will become weak, and the powerful will be displaced by the powerless.” Following this redistributive logic, sloth should be rewarded while enterprise punished.

Pope Pius XII, the anti-communist and anti-Nazi Pope, saved many Jews and ethnic groups from pogroms. He was the voice of the Catholic Church to protest against Hitler’s attack on the Jews, the Polish people, and on the prisoners in the concentration camps.

He even used Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer home, to shelter thousands of refugees.  In fact, “his personal bedroom was converted into a nursery and birthing area, and about forty babies were born there during the war.” The World Jewish Congress estimated that 860,000 Jews were saved by the Catholic Church and the work of Pope Pius XII. (Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, Disinformation, Washington, D.C., WND Books, Inc., 2013, p. 66, as quoted from the testimony of P. Guglielmo Hentrich before the Ecclesiastical Tribunal of Rome)

Would the current Pope Francis succeed in “nudging” the Catholic Church into the direction of Latin America’s brand of “social justice” complete with wealth redistribution?

 

 

 

Do Young Americans Understand Thanksgiving?

 “Sure I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave? Sure I love my country with all her faults. I'm not ashamed of that, never have been, never will be." - John Wayne

While on errands today, I overheard shopkeepers telling customers happy holidays. One young woman who handled my purchase wished me Happy Thanksgiving. I was surprised and asked her why Happy Thanksgiving instead of happy holidays. Her answer disappointed me but it was not unexpected – we live in Washington, D.C. where the state-sanctioned religion is atheism.

Everyone displays their tolerance towards other faiths with COEXIST bumper stickers, but when it comes to Christianity, they make strong exceptions. She told me in a very confident voice that Thanksgiving is not a religious holiday and thus she would not be offending anyone with her wishes. It is just another holiday that everyone celebrates. I did not have the patience to tell her how wrong and ignorant she was.

According to Stanley Yavneh Klos, the Continental Congress and the Articles of Confederation Presidents issued National Thanksgiving Day Proclamations in 1776, 1777, 1779, 1780, 1781, and 1782. The first presidential proclamation was issued by John Hancock as President of the United Colonies Continental Congress on March 16, 1776. (Historic.us)

President George Washington, the first president of the United States under the Constitution of 1787 released his proclamation on October 3, 1789 in New York City.  Both Houses of Congress requested the President to “recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanks-giving and prayer, formally declared November 26 to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.”

Praising the “civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed,” President George Washington assigned Thursday, the 26^th day of November, as a day in which “we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions.”

President George Washington wished that through our prayers God would “enable us all,… to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue…” (www.heritage.org/initiatives/first.../washingtons-thanksgiving-proclamation)

Abraham Lincoln, our 16^th President (1861-1865) issued Proclamation 106 – Thanksgiving Day, 1863 on October 3, 1863. It begins:

“The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the every-watching providence of the Almighty God.”

President Lincoln described the wealth, the strength, the bounty, the population increase in spite of the civil war losses, the plows that have enlarged the borders and the settlements, have grown the crops,  the “large increase in freedom,” the mines of coal, iron, and precious metals that have enlarged their abundant production. “The laws have been respected and obeyed; harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.”

President Lincoln, a man of God, recognized that “No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”

In the last paragraph, President Lincoln pronounced that the American people should “solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledge, as with one heart and one voice,” these “gracious gifts of the Most High God.”

“I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”

Americans, he said, should not just be thankful for their blessings, but also humbly penitent for “our national perverseness and disobedience.” Widows, orphans, mourners, and sufferers should be commended to God’s tender care, he said. …” In the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, … fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.” (The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=69900)

The Thanksgiving holiday that we continue to celebrate today was established by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and was made law by Congress in 1941. It was rooted in religion and God. The fact that Americans, particularly young Americans, do not know our country’s history, is a sad reflection on our “progressive” education system that teaches revisionist history or none at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Religion

Most people do not understand what orthodox is - they think Jewish. I am not sure most orthodox people truly understand the mystical side of their religion. I can feel it when I enter a majestic cathedral in Europe, richly decorated with lavish columns, statues, icons, and symbols lost in translation and in our understanding. I was torn many times, upon standing inside St. Peter's Basilica, between my feelings of awe at the magnificent and opulent construction and my feelings of sorrow at the sacrifice so many millions of poor people had to make in order that such a jewel of architecture and art could be enjoyed by generations after generations. Did they starve in order to pay heavy taxes, what horrid living conditions had they endured, were they forced to work long hours for meager pay in order that this basilica be built?

Orthodox religion predates Catholicism by a year or two. If you ask a catholic, they will tell you Catholicism is the oldest organized form of religion in existence. Some historians and orthodox themselves believe The Orthodox Church to be the One, established 2,000 years ago by Jesus Christ and his Apostles. Daddy used to tell me that our family originated with the Apostles since our last name is Apostolescu, Romanian for "of the Apostles." Christianity struggled to exist during Roman times when they were forced to worship in tunnels underground Rome. Domitila's catacombs contain one of the first underground Christian churches.

The Orthodox Church is officially called the Orthodox Catholic Church and commonly referred to as the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Church is composed of several self-governing ecclesial bodies, each geographically and nationally distinct but theologically unified. Each self-governing body, often but not always encompassing a nation, is shepherded by a synod of bishops whose duty, among other things, is to preserve and teach the Apostolic traditions and church practices. As in the Roman Catholic Church, Anglican Church, Oriental Orthodoxy and some other churches, Orthodox bishops trace their lineage back to the Apostles through the process of Apostolic Succession.

The Orthodox Church claims to trace its development back through the Byzantine or Roman empire, to the earliest church established by St. Paul and the Apostles. After baptism, a person is blessed with the Holy Spirit and must embark on a spiritual pilgrimage of striving to be more holy and "Christ Like." Most babies are baptized shortly after birth and there is a God-mother holding the newborn at the altar while the ceremony is performed. She is a stand-in mom in case something happens to the real mom. The God-mother is revered, loved, respected, and celebrated through her entire life. My own God-mother, aunt Stela, passed away a month ago. Although I miss her and have not seen her since 1985, I feel blessed that I was able to speak to her weekly until her last five days of life when she was in and out of consciousness.

The Biblical text used by the Orthodox includes the Greek Septuagint and the New Testament. It includes the seven Deuterocanonical Books which are generally rejected by Protestants and a small number of other books that are in neither Western canon. These books are used in the Divine Liturgy. Icons adorn the walls of Eastern Orthodox churches and cover the inside structure completely. Countryside Orthodox homes have an area set aside for family prayer, usually an eastern facing wall, on which are hung many icons. City homes do not have such "altars."

The calculation of Orthodox Easter is very complex, the Sunday following Paschal full moon (PFM), pronounced, "Pas-kul." Easter Sunday is the date of the annual celebration of Christ's resurrection. The Easter Dating Method has to maintain the same season of the year and the same relationship to the preceding astronomical full moon that occurred at the time of his resurrection in 30 A.D. Easter dates vary and very seldom coincide with the Protestant Easter. There was a joke about a priest who kept kernels of corn in his jacket to be able to tell parishioners how many days were left until Easter. He would quickly count how many kernels he had left in his jacket pocket after he had carefully thrown one kernel out each day. His housekeeper had thought, upon discovering his stash of corn, that the Father liked corn, so she added a handful into his pocket. When he met with a parishioner and was asked how many days until Easter, he proceeded to count the corn. Exasperated, after he counted and counted, with no end in sight, he told the parishioner that there wasn't going to be Easter that year after all.

Certainly there was no Orthodox Sunday School to attend and nobody taught us lessons from the Bible. Older females in the family would tell stories each evening after supper, while we sat around on benches outside in the garden or by the side of the road. All homes were surrounded by tall wood fences and had a very large bench in front of the main gate, outside the fence. This bench was the gathering place for many villagers who happened to walk by on their way home. I heard many fascinating stories this way, sitting at my grandparents' feet.

Aunt Leana, who was a deacon at Popesti Orthodox Church, had a well-worn Bible from which she would read stories every time I visited. She had an oil lamp by her side, large magnifying glasses tied with a string, and a large bowl of fresh fruit and grapes from her orchard. We sat on the porch or in her tiny and cozy two-room mud brick house. When her eyes got tired, she would start singing Gregorian chants and nasalized humming which she often did, accompanying the readings during Liturgy.

We had no Bible lessons - 40 years or more of communist rule forbade the owning of a Bible, open prayer,Bible study in school, and church attendance. Believers were ridiculed as missing their marbles. Atheism was the state religion. The only people who were really semi-free to observe their religion were the elderly. The communists decided that they already had a foot in the grave and one on the proverbial banana peel, who cared if they went to church? Consequently, most of the regulars were little old ladies. That's because men died much sooner than women - men pretty much counted on being survived by their wives. These ladies helped the priest with daily chores, cleaned the church, polished the silver icons, mended the kneeling pillows, cleaned the candle wax off the floors and candle holders, tended the surrounding gardens, planted the flowers, the shrubs, and cut the grass around cemetery plots with a scythe.

Easter and Christmas were the only holidays when church attendance grew tenfold. The commie handlers allowed the masses to celebrate, but took notes cautiously and carefully. We carried lit candles at midnight around the church, sang Gregorian chants, prayed and celebrated our humanity from God. Food was brought to church and shared with everybody in remembrance of Christ and beloved family members who passed away.

There were Catholics in Transylvania in western Romania, among Swabians and Hungarians, a few Baptists here and there, Lutherans in western Transylvania, and Muslims in eastern Romania, at the Black Sea, close to the European side of Istanbul. I remember visiting a mosque with my aunt at the Black Sea - it was more like a museum visit, the mosque was empty. Neither faith enjoyed much freedom, they were on par with the Orthodox. The only concession made was the use of their own language, i.e., German, Hungarian, and Arabic.

The American Bible Society had donated Bibles to the state after a terrible earthquake - they wanted the victims to find comfort in the word of God. The state, however, decided to recycle them into toilette paper. The quality of print and material was so good and the quality of manufacture so poor that the words of the Bible were still legible on the rolls of toilette paper. I had just started studying English and I pointed that out to my dad. We were appalled and saddened by the offensive abuse of the Holy Book.

Baptisms, funerals, and weddings were certainly not frowned upon. Communist elites tried to replace weddings with civil ceremonies, but most people preferred to have both. The church ceremony was always viewed as more meaningful. Everybody had to be baptized and given a name, even commies accepted that. And, of course, funerals, nobody escaped death, and, since there were no funeral homes, churches were the logical place for the last rites and passage to the other world. The last ride to the cemetery was done with pomp and circumstance, a funeral band, and a horse-drawn carriage or a large truck bed, depending on the status of the deceased.