No Skin In The Game III
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This past week served as the locus of two of the most significant events where the God of the Bible gives promise and hope to His people. Those events are the now Jewish festival of Passover or Pesach, the commemoration of the fulfillment of that ancient Egyptian phenomenon, and the Christian, Resurrection Sunday or Easter.
In the Passover we see God beginning a true pilgrimage for the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob into a distinct nation. Passover is one of three pilgrimage festivals where pre-diaspora Jews were to journey to Jerusalem. The other two were Shavuot, or Pentecost or the Festival of Weeks and Sukkot or Tabernacles, The Festival of Booths.
In early Christian days, Passover was celebrated as the fulfillment of the typology where Jesus of Nazareth became the paschal Lamb of God, becoming the propitiation for all human sin, so that the judgment of God could pass over His people.
Because of the rise of Arianism in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, gradually this historic tradition was replaced with the celebration of Easter, renamed after Eastre the great mother goddess of the Saxon people of Northern Europe. Thus Easter became one of the first politically correct celebrations, which included not just Christian traditions but also a spring fertility festival of eggs and rabbits.
Then in the fifteenth century we see the rise of an Inquisition requirement for eating pork to celebrate this Easter occasion. Thus we have today the Easter Ham that has its heritage in separating Moslems and Jews from Christians.
The highlight of Passover is the Seder, a distinct liturgical meal that not only looks back at the Passover in Jewish history but also forward to the Passover celebrated with the coming of Messiah. The major difference between Christianity and Judaism is the belief that Jesus was the Messiah. To the Jews that event is still a future happening.
More importantly both faiths believe that there will be a triumphal coming of Messiah in the future and that it will occur in Jerusalem. Christians believe it is Christ’s prophetic Second Coming; otherwise the details are pretty much the same.
Today both Christians and Jews can celebrate Seders. The Christian version is only slightly modified from the original Jewish Haggadah.
The Seder is designed to be an in home activity. The reason for that is the sacrificed Passover lamb’s blood was sprinkled on the doorpost of individual homes. Consequently it doesn’t really scale well within the concept of modern Christianity. A few churches offer congregational Seders, but most of them are Messianic congregations where most of the members have true Jewish roots.
There is however a proverb that I think traces to the American Revolution. That saying goes, “Either we hang together, or we hang separately.” In out current world’s dislike for all things religious, one thing unites that opposition, and that is persecution of both Christians and Jews.
Christianity however is not a religion in the historic sense because it is based upon a well-documented real world happening; namely the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, almost two thousand years ago in Israel.
In that illumination, hostile anti Christian bias is based upon the premise, “Don’t bother me with facts, for I have already made up my mind.”
To counter this many, if not most Christian pastors use their Easter Sunday sermon to layout those facts, facts that most people in the United States and many Christians have never heard.
An excellent example of such an Easter sermon, I heard this past Sunday at Calvary Chapel Spokane. The sermon is called “Fact or Fiction?,” in which Pastor Ken Ortiz lays out the facts for the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ in a positive way. It doesn’t get better than this and well worth anyone taking the time to listen.
The message of this Passover — Easter season is the unmerited grace of God that has been poured out on humanity from before the beginning of time. We however choose to go our own way and just like Old Testament Israel, we believe in the power of our own arrogance.
For the last couple of weeks I have strongly criticized President Obama for his leadership abilities. The President is just reflecting a worldview unknown to many of us, and is attempting to maintain some semblance of his political paradigm within a nation in decline. The seriousness of the American empire situation however began before Obama’s birth as we will begin discussing shortly.
For the third time since he became president, Barack Obama celebrated a Seder at the White House. That is a good thing. He also issued a Passover message that can be found here. In the message however I believe you will find a political correctness quite similar to that commonly found in Easter. We have become the Pharisees and the leaders of Israel and Rome, who were directly responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. We are proud of our laws, in our own eyes, and have lost the humility of grace.
The Seder closes with the pronouncement of “Next year in Jerusalem!” These words could be shared with many of the rebels of what is now being described as the “Islamic Spring.” However the Islamic meaning is the true antithesis of this Jewish Passover hope. The Bible makes it clear that the Jewish proclamation will one day happen; the enemies of Israel will not prevail.
For his part President Obama closes his letter with, “Chag Sameach,” which literally translates “Happy Holiday.” This term could be used for any of the Jewish holidays or festivals, hence it is quite similar to use the term Happy Holidays to refer to the western winter celebrations instead of Happy Chanukkah or Merry Christmas.
The historic Passover is a miracle of God that looks forward to the culmination of time and either the coming, or the return of Messiah. To equate the current natural desires of people around the world and especially in the Middle East to be free of oppressive natural regimes is a natural common right of all humanity, part of we human’s natural God created personality.
When you link the Passover miracle to the exercise of these natural rights, you are being at best condescending to particularly the Jewish people, and even to Christians. At worst you are bringing the sacred attributes of God into the common affairs of humanity, which in less progressive times was known as blaspheme.
This however points us to what is currently happening not only in the Middle East but also around the world. There is nothing within the genre of global atheistic progressive materialism that can adequately describe these events, except the failure of its enlightened paradigm. Looking at it in that light doesn’t persuade many within the worldview, that when it naturally falls apart, they can’t but help quicken the collapse, and seek to replace it with something better in their own eyes.
Contrasted with this pompous illusion is the eternal Reality that performed the miracles of the Passover and the Resurrection. Within that reality, without these miracles you are dead, both temporally and eternally.
Since the President didn’t issue a related Easter letter, but only went to an Easter Service, we will let the commentators and the pundits enjoy that irrelevant playground.
Just like in Old Testament Israel, the demise of the nation and the eventual diaspora was brought about by people who had available the Godly workings of the universe and God’s law and His grace offered through the Abrahamic covenant, but they decided to go their own way. As the Book of Judges concludes: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
Today, around the world, we are seeing the fruit of the individual license with the demise of leaders without moral conscience. These leaders may have achieved control of their countries by nefarious or more civil means. However unless power truly comes from people exercising their God given moral conscience for the good of the greater community, the despotic tyrants will be defeated within any nation they have or seek control.
In the broadest sense we are seeing the end of human collective salvation, described in the Bible as Babylon, found both in Genesis and in Revelation. When I introduced the concept of the end of the Industrial Age and the rise of the Individual Age some time ago, what we are seeing in general terms is the collapse of stateism, which had become the basis for wealth and monetary stability. It will be replaced with more self-regulating Individual Age entrepreneurialism and diverse prosperity developed within natural laws and human creativity.
To see how this will work out we must return to where we left off last week to continue the historic background; to the 1960s where the Greatest Generation began to hand over leadership of the United States to the Baby Boomers. This similar transition occurred in other countries of Western Culture.
Perhaps the best final tribute to the work of the Greatest Generation, and a warning to Baby Boomers, would be the final speech given by President Eisenhower on January 17, 1961. In this address to the nation the President discusses the dangers of not maintaining American vigilance and the potential evils of the military-industrial complex. The video of the speech is found in its entirety in this ABC News archive and runs about 16 minutes. There are numerous edited versions available, but in the totality of his words, Eisenhower seems as relevant today as fifty years ago, with almost a timeless imperative.
America’s current national needs are leadership, discipline and a sense of purpose (mission). Obama and Republicans have mutually exclusive sense of purposes or missions. Neither has the discipline nor the leadership to achieve their specific goals. How can we achieve solutions to our growing problems when they can’t get or keep their own house in order?
To the victor belong the spoils in war and politics and until one group or the other wins, the future will become more chaotic. However we have arrogantly ignored or forgotten the Bible proverb about a house divided against itself — will not stand.
With the inauguration of President Kennedy, the old general Eisenhower was replaced with a publicly lauded Greatest Generation war hero. After the Kennedy assassination both of his replacements Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were veterans of the war also, but in the context of their understanding of true American political power, they were both real pros. Compared to Johnson and Nixon the American national political leadership of today, from the President on down would qualify at best as, “celebrity apprentices.”
The 1960s however had the Cold War and after the Cuban Missile crisis the threat to the United States of both the communists of the Soviet Union and China were taken very seriously.
Johnson chose to fight the Vietnam conflict in the historic American way, with a citizen military supplemented with constricted draftees. At the height of the war there were over five hundred thousand soldiers in theater, essentially fighting a counterinsurgency war, replacing the French who lost a counterinsurgency.
One of the significant positive attributes of the founding of the American republic was the establishment of a citizen military. It served the nation well for two hundred years until it all blew up in Vietnam.
As a consequence, without any national debate, the decision was made to advance enlightened civilization by developing an all-volunteer military. So the Vietnam service paradigm, if you could survive 364 days and a wake up in theater, you had no skin in the game, became the national game. In the context of what is now defined as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), war survival has become less relative, more like just walking an breathing.
Now the United States has approximately three million people in our military, about half in the regular forces, half in the reserves. That essentially is one percent of the population. These men and women are the only ones who have true skin in the game. To the rest of the American population, without direct contact with the military, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere in the world, military people and their mission are just abstract financial distractions.
When President Eisenhower gave his post Korean War military-industrial complex speech, the nation had 3.5 million people in the military about 1.9 percent of the population. On the surface it looks like we have made progress. However, in the process of those fifty years, especially during the thirty-five years post Vietnam, the military industrial complex has made the United States of America the world’s police and nation building force and converted the republic into a de facto empire.
As you can tell I am not a fan of the current American all-volunteer military. I gained and developed that view while serving in a somewhat strategic position on the European front of the Vietnam War. During that time Europe was beginning to come to grips with central planning as a “Road to Serfdom.” The Soviet Union and the precursor Czarist Russia was the true destination Serfdom and had been for four hundred years.
Russia and the Soviet Union has never won a war outside the boundaries of Mother Russia and those victories were as much about the Russian winter as their war prowess. If Hitler would have not opened prematurely a Russian front and instead finished off Great Britain, the world today would be a much different place. The Soviet contribution to ending World War II directly stemmed from de Fuhrer’s egotistical blunder.
A national military is by definition a bureaucracy historically designed with the sole purpose of waging war. Mission creep, the military-industrial complex, and neocons have somewhat broadened that mission, but killing people to achieve national or community interests is as old as tribes and nations themselves.
The true professional military is made up of a few highly skilled dedicated professional leaders and a whole lot of bureaucrats that like the power, glory, and the security of doing a job most people don’t want and many find abhorrent.
The first colonel I had in Germany, who described his World War II career as “a Second Lieutenant riding across Europe in a boxcar,” was one of the dedicated professionals. His replacement was a good looking, politically motivated, Ivy League, incompetent bureaucrat. He, along with another Ivy Leaguer of similar capacity, is the reason I could never look seriously at John Kerry as other than a Swift boat failure.
To summarize a whole lot of stuff, you really don’t want to read, the reason the United States was responsible for winning World War II in short order was we had to draft both officer and enlisted personnel, whose skin in the war, was to win and get back to civilian life as quickly and painlessly as possible. If you talk with any vet with true combat experience, if war is not hell on earth, then they are too mentally disturbed to be in the military.
In World War II and Korea if a bureaucratic leader didn’t, or wouldn’t, or couldn’t achieve that get it over mission, natural selection overrode their ineptitude, physically or in function. In Vietnam, that was never the case and that bureaucratic dereliction has a 99.9 percent probability of being still true in the military today.
Fast forwarding until the present, we have been in Afghanistan for over ten years, Iraq for about eight, and nobody really knows what is going on in Libya. Just like the Cold War, the Soviet Union fell because their economy could not continue to support the efforts required. Now the United States can no longer afford these expenditures.
The military-industrial complex and neocon pundits give Ronald Reagan the glory, for while his strong defense initiatives appealed to the American ego, they did little to achieve the ultimate Soviet downfall. In the process however defense contractors made lots of money. Today the war effort provides a true Keynesian stimulus to the economy, that really only our military personnel are paying for, with skin in the game.
In the history of warfare, insurgency wars generally succeed. Counterinsurgencies have no such positive record. When you insert a think tank bureaucratic concept of nation building, or creating western style national democracies, they may take decades before they fail.
Given the order to succeed in Afghanistan, where the Russians failed and left, the last of a long list of crusaders, a truly professional commanding general will say, “Yes Sir!” To repeat, the problem, is that the only people who have skin in the war game today, are the soldiers who are all in, blood and guts.
Over world history one of the precursors of the demise of a nation is when they cease to fight their own wars. The United States started down that wide path forty years ago. “Yes, Sir!” can’t change that direction and make the impossible happen.
The role of the military is one of the causative agents in the budgetary debate, but there is no person on the national political stage, as Eisenhower stated, who has the military experience of leadership, discipline and the understanding of the true mission of the country, to win the American war with itself. Until we understand the nature of that war and define a common mission our future is dismal indeed.
Historically in this series we have briefly arrived at the present day. Next week we will begin to set some mission values for this new frontier of the Individual Age and how we all will get some skin in the game if the United States will not become just another lesson in human history.