Abortion as Population Control: The Missing 2 Billion

From Life-News, a perspective on a depopulation project more successful than war and equal to any genocide:

At 40 million abortions a year, it would only take 25 years to eliminate one billion babies. Since the abortion business really took off around 1960 or so, we have probably eliminated nearly twice that number, or two billion unborn human beings.

Think about it. Over the past half-century, quietly and without fanfare, in ordinary towns and cities, in dozens of countries around the world, perhaps two billion children have been killed. They have died unknown, often unmourned, and acknowledged only from time to time.

The 20th century was violent by any measure. Thirty-seven million people were killed in World War I. Over 60 million perished in World War II. Six million Jews and another six million Catholics died in Hitler’s death camps. Twenty million died at the hands of the Soviet authorities. Sixty-five million Chinese were killed by the Communist Party, while forty-two million more starved to death during Mao’s Great Leap Forward. And so on.

But these numbers are dwarfed by the sheer volume of children who have been killed this past half-century.”

So those were the tiny, unimportant little lives that were snuffed out so that human beings could become sex-addicts and proud of it..

Something about a voice in Rama…

Father knew best: “The Silent Holocaust” (1981)

The author of “Abortion: The Silent Holocaust” (1981) was a man, and a celibate Catholic priest at that, yet his understanding of the moral import of abortion far exceeds that of feminist pro-abortion women who deny the nature of what they are doing, or, worse yet, understand it fully, but nonetheless elevate their own convenience above it at all times (Salon):

“I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.”

(Lila: my emphasis)

The author of these chilling lines, which could have come out of the mouth of some KGB chief or Nazi commandant, does get one thing right: Motherhood, devoid of elementary moral development, does not in itself confer humanitarian feeling or ethics. One can be childless and/or a male and have a far truer ethical compass than many of the malign mothers of modernity or the industry experts who brainwashed them.

For instance, contrast Father Powell, who quit his career for a year to write “Abortion: The Silent Holocaust,” with Dr. Nathanson, the godfather of the abortion industry who admitted that the pro-abort movement manufactured statistics to brainwash the population to accept the new laws.

Nathanson stated unequivocally that abortion was kept in place not by the needs of “women’s emancipation” – as feminism’s dupes believed and still believe – but by the self-interest of the abortion providers and the state.

National Right To Life News reviews Father Powell’s important book:

“(Father) Powell rhetorically asks himself why a heavily trained academic [Powell says he had so many degrees he felt like “Father Fahrenheit”] would be so burdened by Roe. He concludes it was because of two formative experiences that had left Powell with an “acute sensitivity to the value of every human life.”

One came about as a result of his short stint as a hospital chaplain in Akron, Ohio. He quickly realized that “scenes of suffering and raw grief had been quarantined out of my academic experience.” It dawns on him that he had never even seen someone die or be born.

[Lila: What changed me from pro-choice to pro-life was not a change in understanding of the nature of the act. I always understood abortion to be the taking of human life, but I was mesmerized by the propaganda that the child was somehow “more” the moral responsibility of the woman’s because of its residence in her womb.

This, of course, denies the man’s genetic contribution as well as the genetic contributions of the grand-parents of the child on both sides.

Previously, I’d also not seen pictures of the fetus or the evidence from new technology of  its complete humanity very early on in development.  As soon as I saw that evidence, thanks to the activism of Lila Rose (yes, I realize she’s Opus Dei but that’s another blog post), I changed my mind.]

“…..each of us has an absolutely essential part to play, that none of us are accidents, that God could have created the world without a place for us but didn’t want to.

“No one else can speak my message,” Powell writes, “or sing my song, or bestow my act of love. These have been entrusted only to me.”

The other formative experience for Powell, also before Roe, came when he went to Europe for further studies. While there, Powell visited the remains of the Nazi death camp at Dachau.

There he learned firsthand of the utilitarian ethic of the Nazi regime, its utter disregard for those who were frail or “unproductive,” and the silence of many Germans to the unspeakable monstrosities that were taking place.

He notes that the words “Never again” are printed on the gate in five languages. It’s a memory that haunts Powell when the U.S. Supreme Court unleashed the abortion holocaust.

Both experiences left him numb. One was too beautiful, too sacred. The other too violent, too shattering.

Yet troubled as he was by these experiences, it was something else that persuaded Powell to take a year’s sabbatical to serve as a pro-life speaker: his counseling experience with three young women.

The first had aborted and was deeply sorry. The life had seemed to have gone out of her eyes and as she left her visage seemed to say, “How can I ever forget?”

The second–a bubble gum-smacking teenager–represented the polar opposite extreme. She was as casual about her impending abortion as the first woman was devastated by the abortion she now bitterly regretted. But it was the third woman whose attitude nearly struck him dumb.

Laboratory tests had confirmed her pregnancy. In response, she told Powell that she had even stopped smoking and drinking; those “can affect the baby,” she remarked. Then in the next breath, she offhandedly remarks, “But I have an appointment to kill this baby next Thursday morning.”

While rocked back on his heels, Powell didn’t blame her for her wildly inconsistent statements. This new ethic of “utility and convenience” was in the very air she breathed, air remarkably like that which permeated Nazi-era Germany.”

Powell also grasps the fact that abortion is intimately connected with neglect of the weak and elderly. He describes what the last 24 hours of his mother’s life meant, absent any measure of “productivity”:

“During those many hours of conversation, characterized by “complete openness,” Powell was “introduced to parts of myself that I didn’t know existed.” He adds, “If I had to pick out the most humanizing, maturing, and life-transforming days of my life,” they would include his mother’s last 24 hours.

“What a terrible and personal loss I would have suffered,” he writes, “if she had been ‘put out of her misery’ because the supposedly meaningful and productive days of her life were over.”

Godfather of Abortion Inc. Converted to Pro-Life

At Catholic Education.org, the godfather of American abortion, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, confesses he’s had a change of heart:

“I am personally responsible for 75,000 abortions. This legitimizes my credentials to speak to you with some authority on the issue. I was one of the founders of the National Association for the Repeal of the Abortion Laws in the U.S. in 1968.

A truthful poll of opinion then would have found that most Americans were against permissive abortion. Yet within five years we had convinced the Supreme Court to issue the decision which legalized abortion throughout America in 1973 and produced virtual abortion on demand up to birth.

How did we do this? It is important to understand the tactics involved because these tactics have been used throughout the western world with one permutation or another, in order to change abortion law

The First Key Tactic was to capture the media

We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal enlightened, sophisticated one. Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60% of Americans were in favour of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority.

We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public.

The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.

Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1500% since legalization.

[Lila: Again, concealed from the public is the fact that the US has an abortion policy far more radical than many socialist countries, like India, where late-term abortions would be considered murder. Here, they are perfectly legal, and, as the Kermit Gosnell story shows, they are far more prevalent than the media admits.

Moreover, the Emily Letts  abortion snuff video shows that abortion is used instead of contraception or responsible prevention.

Indeed, the video was most likely disseminated to normalize and promote the practice of abortion as contraception. There is no doubt in my mind that the intention is not to sever and destroy the “stigma of abortion,” as the media claimed, but to sear and cauterize the mother’s conscience, to cut the umbilical cord of maternal affection, to pervert the energetic bond between mother and child.

In that sense, and in many others, the video was filled with “occult” religious clues, but it was the religion of black witchcraft, not Christianity or Judaism.]

The Second Key Tactic was to Play the Catholic Card

We systematically vilified the Catholic Church and its “socially backward ideas” and picked on the Catholic hierarchy as the villain in opposing abortion. This theme was played endlessly. We fed the media such lies as “we all know that opposition to abortion comes from the hierarchy and not from most Catholics” and “Polls prove time and again that most Catholics want abortion law reform.”

And the media drum-fired all this into the American people, persuading them that anyone opposing permissive abortion must be under the influence of the Catholic hierarchy and that Catholics in favour of abortion are enlightened and forward-looking. An inference of this tactic was that there were no non-Catholic groups opposing abortion. The fact that other Christian as well as non-Christian religions were (and still are) monolithically opposed to abortion was constantly suppressed, along with pro-life atheists’ opinions.

[Lila: A key element in this strategy was to infiltrate and subvert the Catholic church from within. Thus, the church was first demonized for excluding gays; then when the gays in the church contributed to the pedophilic abuse, the blame was shifted onto celibacy and Catholic teaching on celibacy, rather than onto the proclivities of the priests.

Celibacy was thus associated with a so-called pedophilic hierarchy of conservative males, thus discrediting it.]

The Third Key Tactic was the Denigration and Suppression of all Scientific Evidence that Life Begins at Conception

I am often asked what made me change my mind. How did I change from prominent abortionist to pro-life advocate? In 1973, I became director of obstetrics of a large hospital in New York City and had to set up a perinatal research unit, just at the start of a great new technology which we now use every day to study the fetus in the womb. A favorite pro-abortion tactic is to insist that the definition of when life begins is impossible; that the question is a theological or moral or philosophical one, anything but a scientific one. Fetology makes it undeniably evident that life begins at conception and requires all the protection and safeguards that any of us enjoy.

Why, you may well ask, do some American doctors who are privy to the findings of fetology, discredit themselves by carrying out abortions?

Simple arithmetic: at $300.00 a time 1.55 million abortions means an industry generating $500,000,000 annually, of which most goes into the pocket of the physician doing the abortion.

[Lila: Actually, because of the trade in organs and fetal tissue, abortion is probably far more lucrative than that.  Kermit Gosnell apparently made something like $1500, not $300, from each abortion performed. That means roughly five times the figure above, or over $2 billion. This is just an extrapolation from media figures, of course.

The largest advocate of family planning services and the biggest provider of them, Planned Parenthood, relies largely on providing abortion to the public, not “other family services”:

“According to Planned Parenthood’s own apologist, Media Matters, its “total revenue from abortion services was approximately $164,154,000,” a year. Accordingly, over 51 percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinic income comes from abortion.

In addition to its $320.1 million in clinic income and $223.8 million in private donations, Planned Parenthood receives $487.4 million dollars a year from taxpayers.

Lila (continued): The liberal-left darling, Planned Parenthood, dispenses abortion pills in addition to abortion procedures, making the outfit the killer of over 300,000 children every year.

It is not coincidental that those children are mostly black, brown, and from the underclass, given that the mother of family-planning, Margaret Sanger, was a devoted eugenicist who wanted to control the birth-rate of the population and weed out “undesirables.”

Bernard Nathanson (cont):

It is clear that permissive abortion is purposeful destruction of what is undeniably human life. It is an impermissible act of deadly violence. One must concede that unplanned pregnancy is a wrenchingly difficult dilemma. But to look for its solution in a deliberate act of destruction is to trash the vast resourcefulness of human ingenuity, and to surrender the public weal to the classic utilitarian answer to social problems.”

As a scientist I know, not believe,  that human life begins at conception. Although I am not a formal religionist, I believe with all my heart that there is a divinity of existence which commands us to declare a final and irreversible halt to this infinitely sad and shameful crime against humanity.”

The insanity of public debate in America

Consider the following,:

1. A woman has the absolute right to kill her baby until the moment it exits her uterus. She can also dismember it and torture it by burning it with saline fluid, plucking off its limbs, crushing its bones, or sucking its brains out.

These actions are guarded ferociously as her “right to privacy” by the entire intellectual establishment that silently blacks out or distorts descriptions of these killings. Some 50 million babies have been killed in the past few decades but this holocaust is left to private conscience only. Women or their doctors are not punished for it at all. In fact, they’re applauded and public funding is used to pay for it, even while that part of the public that doesn’t go along with abortion is demonized.

2. An eighty-year-old man makes a few untoward remarks to a girlfriend in the privacy of their bedroom. The tapes are recorded. and published. He is denounced as a disgusting racist with no right to his opinions and he is deprived of his property rights.

Leading “libertarian” activists  say nothing or defend the media’s position. They tell people they ought not to say anything in private they can’t say in public.  This is a thought-control much greater than that under Sharia law, which all these activists would denounce, correctly. None of them sees the contradiction.

No one thinks of simply ignoring and not linking the Sterling material. Instead, they all follow the media’s cue automatically, as though pulled by invisible strings. Then they call themselves “fiercely independent” and talk about “freedom,:” “free speech,” “free choice,” “self-ownership” and other flattering mythologies with a straight face.

Meanwhile, so-called “evil statists” are the only ones arguing that the the recordings are on their face illegal and should not be distributed in the public realm.

The parameters of debate in the much-vaunted “free press” are set by media barons who profit from cheap gossip and extortion (which lowers the cost of running a paper, since the public does the reporting for free or for small sums), pornographers, and paid operatives of the government posing as private actors.

No one considers this a gross conflict of interest. The media barons are presumed not to have political agendas and presumed not to manipulate in collusion.

Nor is this manipulation termed what it is – an extension of the state into the private sphere. It is all deemed “free market” unproblematically.

3. The same people attack anyone who criticizes a paid porn performer for her consciously public acts. They argue that she has a right to privacy even though she sold her porn pictures to a public company voluntarily.

I actually agree with that argument, but those who deny a Donald Sterling his privacy can surely have no justification for giving a Belle Knox hers.

With equal confusion, recording the private sexual behavior of Tyler Clementi (the gay Rutgers freshman who committed suicide)  is a vicious assault on his privacy and dignity (it is), but recording the speech of a Donald Sterling is a righteous act of public policing (it is not).

4. The same people who attack Donald Sterling’s private speech and hold it to an arbitrarily decided public standard also denounce theocracy (with its logically entailed blasphemy laws) as an insupportable and “medieval” intrusion into free speech and thought. And they declare themselves the embodiment of “reason” against the “irrationality” of the religious.

5. The same critics of Sterling who believe it is legitimate for him to lose his livelihood over private speech within his bedroom have a fit over the most minor constraint placed on their right to use speech in public to degrade, inflame, incite, defraud, mislead, or titillate. They even object to any constraint placed on their right to disseminate for commercial profit the vilest images, even where they would be accessible by minors.

They defend their right to view violent child pornography, even though that right supplies the demand that drives a global market of child abuse and murder and though the act of viewing itself has been deemed criminal.

But while the act of viewing child-porn is criminal, the act of dismembering a child is deemed “private” and protected.

The left also defends without any nuance or moderation the right to publish “art”  that inflames the public, even where major violence could result  as in the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, which, as it turns out, were a deliberate provocation from a neo-con flack.

Priapus: The God of Modernity

Update: Again, the needful clarification:

I don’t support Esolen’s position on gay marriage, just because I agree with the accuracy of his exposition of Christian doctrine.

In contrast to Esolen, I fully support the right of homosexuals to marry and adopt children and raise their own children in any way they want.

I go even farther.

I think polygamists, poly-amorists, and every other bi- or trans group should be free to form their own types of marriages/group couplings…or unions… and create churches that agree with them, if they want to.

But I do object to attempts to rewrite traditional Christian teaching to make it approve these practices and I affirm my right to state that those unions are not consonant with the traditional teaching of Christianity or the major religious traditions.

Apparently, in some circles, that still makes me a “bigot” and “hater.”

One thing is true. I am bigoted in favor of truthful statements and I hate falsification of history and mendacious media campaigns.

ORIGINAL POST

I just discovered an interesting conservative Christian magazine – Touchstone, which claims to be a defense of “mere Christianity” – C. S. Lewis’ term for unadorned traditional Christian teaching.  An article there argues that the real god behind the “environmental feminism or eco-feminism” of the New World Order is not the goddess Gaia, as its naive proponents believe, but the God Priapus.

Anthony Esolen on the real god behind Gaia – Priapus:

“We may never budge one inch on what is essential. We will not tell a lie, even to please the world and win us the accolades of faculty bishops and historians everywhere. We will not move.

In our day, the issue is not Christology. We’re not so sophisticated in our heresies. The issue is sex. We’re encouraged to pretend that the child-making act is not essentially ordered to child-making. We must pretend that it’s only the friction of erogenous flesh. We must pretend that a man can be made into a woman by a saw and a trowel, and a woman into a man by pinning the tail on the donkey, or by just thinking it is so. We must pretend that a child in the womb is just some stuff or other. We must pretend that boys and girls do not deserve a married father and mother, promised to one another for life. If we are Christian, we must say to Christ, “Thus far and no farther! You can have all the world, but these few inches are mine.”

Demands of the New Religion

Now let us be quite clear. We have not chosen this fight. The new religion has come to us, and it demands total submission. It demands that we cease to worship God, and that we cease to tell the truth. We have come to the cleft in the road, what Lewis called the great divorce. God will, if we allow him, heal our evil ways; Jesus came to call sinners. But God can no more accept evil in his household than he can cease to be God. He is holy. He will wash our grubby robes white in his blood, but Truth cannot lie. He cannot declare the unclean to be clean. He can only make it clean by his grace.

The new religion of sex requires us to take down the Cross and erect something else. We must not do so. It requires us to abandon our fellow men to lusts that destroy the common good, as even sociologists, often the slow kids on the block, have begun to see. We must not do so. It requires us to subject our bodies to the phantasms of homeless postmodern man. We must not do so. It requires us to avert our eyes as our little brothers and sisters are dismembered. We must not do so. It requires us to wink as the minds of children are subjected to confusion in order to ratify the choices of adults. We must not do so. It requires us to subordinate political liberty to sexual license. We must not do so.

It requires us to spit upon the Cross, to sink our fingers in the blood of innocent children, to harden our hearts against the crushed lives of brothers and sisters who learn to their dismay that Priapus is a stupid and stupefying idol. It requires us to like ourselves rather than love our neighbors. It requires us to tell a deadly lie.

Raise One Sword

We must not do so. We shall not do so. Truth is truth to the end of time. Even if the battle appears lost, let each Christian raise one sword at least against the lie. Even if the fight is fierce, the warfare long, let each Christian remember that our Captain triumphed in and through the hour of his utter defeat upon Calvary. We set our faces like flint. While there is breath in our lungs and blood in our hearts, we will not cease to tell the truth, and we will not bend one inch in homage to the idol.

The Lord does not require that we win. He requires that we be steadfast. The battle is not ours but his. Yet let us not suppose that we are doomed to lose this fight. The gates of hell are not iron; the gates of hell are straw. For a vanguard has gone before us that our opponents cannot see, whose very existence they do not suspect. It is that great cloud of witnesses—and they are armed in the full array of God.”

UK’s Cinderella Law: Jail for “Emotionally Abusive” Parents

The United Kingdom, already one of the most heavily surveilled states on earth, has decided that spying on its citizens with street cameras, shop cameras, cell-phone software, GPS tracking, email snooping, financial audits, welfare agency monitoring, and neighborhood snitches is simply not enough.

It wants to poke its nose into family life.

As usual, the pretext is a humanitarian one – the protection of children from abuse at home.

But child protection laws already punish physical/sexual violence and neglect of any kind severely.

So what’s left?

Now, parents face jail-time for convictions for emotional abuse, which can be anything from fighting in front of their children, blaming their children, being cold to them, or not paying enough attention to them.

Emotional abuse is real. And it is damaging.

But it’s also dynamic, complex and definitely not something a government official should meddle in.

Imagine the thousands of decent, loving families that are going to be ripped apart and destroyed by this malign law, as The Independent rightly points out:

“These days, parents who smoke or drink alcohol in front of children risk being characterised as child-abusers. Opponents of the tradition of male circumcision condemn Jewish and Muslim parents as abusers of children. Health activists denounce parents of overweight children for the same offence. Mothers and fathers who educate their children to embrace the family’s religion have been characterised as child abusers by anti-faith campaigners.”

Educating people about family interaction is one thing.

But there’s  already plenty of that going on.

What this law does is empower yet another empire-building department to pile up parental scalps in its quest for budgets, clout, and public profile.

Meanwhile, kids who tattle on their parents are losers too. They face the trauma of losing their parents to jail; losing their family life to endless days in court; and losing their own selves to a web of foster homes and government offices.

This isn’t a Cinderella law.

It’s a Cruel Step-mother (government) Law.

Telegraph.co:

“Changes to the child neglect laws will make “emotional cruelty” a crime for the first time, alongside physical or sexual abuse.

The Government will introduce the change in the Queen’s Speech in early June to enforce the protection of children’s emotional, social and behavioural well-being.

Parents found guilty under the law change could face up to 10 years in prison, the maximum term in child neglect cases.

The change will update existing laws in England and Wales which only allow an adult responsible for a child to be prosecuted if they have deliberately assaulted, abandoned or exposed a child to suffering or injury to their health.”

Once again, this is not about protecting children.

It is about giving the government the tools to intervene on behalf of  the “politically correct” agenda, which is the mask under which censorship of potentially disruptive political speech takes place.

It’s not about protecting a child who has sexual identity (or other) problems from harassment and cruelty.

Laws against physical abuse already do that.

It’s about using the accusation of “bigot,” “homophobe,” or “sexist” to jail human beings who are otherwise law-abiding citizens.

It takes no great imagination to see how universal surveillance plays into this.

Surveillance allows the government to surreptitiously target the people it wants to harass through analysis of their online activity, cell phone conversations, purchases, and social networks.

The guidelines for what constitutes a public threat have already been drawn up.

Provocateurs, agents, and civilian snitches, embedded in schools and welfare agencies, will then monitor the child of the  targeted person for investigation, coercive interviews, and direct threats.  Few children can stand up to such tactics.

Whatever they admit under pressure  then becomes the platform for a full-scale intervention into the targeted family.  Then follows jail-time, shrink sessions, and re-education camp  for the unlucky parent/s, whose entire private life now becomes public criminal record.

Criminalizing ordinary behavior and intimidating law-abiding citizens with an amorphous and expansive law is as good a way as any of politically gelding a large chunk of the population, hitherto beyond the reach of the criminal justice system.

The political use of “anti-Semitism” in the Ukraine

Tablet Magazine:

“It’s use the Jew day in Ukraine—again. For millennia, treatment of a country’s Jews has served as the canary in the coal mine, and now the canary is tweeting all over the American and Israeli media. According to reports, a leaflet, now basically debunked and yet still inspiring fury all over Twitter, was handed out in Donetsk, the heavily Russian-speaking town in Eastern Ukraine, instructing Jews to register with authorities.

According to Ynet, the flier read as follows:

“Dear Ukraine citizens of Jewish nationality, due to the fact that the leaders of the Jewish community of Ukraine supported Bendery Junta [Stepan Bandera] and oppose the pro-Slavic People’s Republic of Donetsk, (the interim government) has decided that all citizens of Jewish descent, over 16 years of age and residing within the republic’s territory are required to report to the Commissioner for Nationalities in the Donetsk Regional Administration building and register.”

The media response was predictable. USA Today, the Jerusalem Post, and others were quick to proclaim “Jews ordered to register in Ukraine!” cleverly omitting one important question: By whom? The word “Jews” is even trending on Twitter.

The flyer is both real, and not. It’s important to see this in the context of how the Jews have been used from the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine: as fodder for the provocation machine. Indeed, Julia Ioffe at The New Republic reached out to the Donetsk Jewish community, who dismissed the flier as an attempt by Western Ukrainians to delegitimize the pro-Russian sentiment in the Eastern part of the country, just as the Russians used accusations of anti-Semitism to delegitimize the Maidan revolutionaries.

As Ioffe puts it, “This may be just another tactic to smear the so-called anti-Maidan in the east of Ukraine: you think we’re fascists? Well, take a look at these guys.” The Jews of Ukraine are not registering.”

Vladimir Putin: The NWO’s man in Russia?

UPDATE:

Zahir Ebrahim in the comments questions the figure $75 billion.  Well, I used the term “apparently” because there’s not much concrete to go by, but that is the figure (or $70b) given out by critics.

How credible is it? No way to know for sure, but besides the Gazprom shares, Putin is said to secretly own shares in many other companies:

“While many previously state-owned industries were privatized, Putin allegedly has used his power to build large secret ownership stakes several multi-billion dollar commodity firms. His most vocal critics assert that Putin has leveraged his power to acquire a 4.5% ownership stake in natural gas producer Gazprom, a 37% stake in oil company Surgutneftegas and 50% stake in Swiss oil-trader Gunvor. Gazprom alone does over $150 billion in revenue annually, Guvnor does $80 billion and Surgutneftegas over $20 billion. Using their most recent market capitalizations, Putin’s combined ownership stakes would give him a personal net worth of $70 billion!So what evidence is there of Putin’s secret obscene fortune? Let’s start with the small stuff. Putin is known to sport a $150,000 Patek Philippe watch on most occasions and his total collection has been valued at $700,000. He also has full access to a $40 million ultra-luxury yacht that features a wine cellar, Jacuzzi, helipad and outdoor barbecue area. In terms of living accommodations, Putin has access to 20 mansions throughout the world including a lavish ski lodge and Medieval castle. The crown jewel of his property portfolio is a $1 billion palace overlooking the Black Sea that he allegedly owns through an anonymous trust. Furthermore, Putin makes frequent use of 15 Presidential helicopters and more than 40 private jets, many of which feature gold plated interiors.”

The reports are  based on an interview given by Stanislav Belkovsky to Die Welt, also described here.

Some other related links about Putin’s associations with the oligarchs:

Roman Abramovich once had close and privileged ties to Putin.

Abramovich fell out with one-time associate Berezovsky but stayed friendly with Putin.

Oligarchs like Abramovich, Fridman, and Miller are close to Putin.

The second plundering of Russia, according to Stanislav Belkovsky

More here about Putin’s business dealings.

Corruption alleged by Boris Nemtsov, Deputy PM under Yeltsin and an Opposition leader.

NOTE: I’m going to do another post about Putin because I think I might have swallowed some disinformation put out.  I didn’t realize that the $70-75b. figure only came from that interview, because I saw it repeated by another investigator, but I’m wondering now if there is some disinfo  in all this.

ORIGINAL POST

It’s been interesting to me to see the right regarding President Putin as some kind of Christian hero

Even Bill Lind has joined the chorus.

It’s certainly true that Putin says a lot of things that conservatives want to hear.

He’s outfoxed the Bolsheviks of the US State Dept.

But, as I’ve pointed out before, there’s plenty of  evidence that Putin himself is beholden to the right wing of the New World Order.

One can accept the secession of Crimea as a relatively peaceful process and an understandable reaction to the US’s own belligerent posturing and meddling in the region, but it doesn’t follow that one should then swallow the narrative of Patrick Buchanan that Putin stands for Christianity.

These are deep waters. Nothing is as it seems. Anyone who subscribes to black-and-white narratives can be easily manipulated by the powers-that-be.

A lengthy article on the Russian Orthodox church since the fall of communism argues that the Moscow Church was completely under the Soviets and acted as an agent of the KGB; that the transition to “democracy” in the 1990s was only a transition to criminality and a change in rhetoric not substance; that there is little real orthodoxy left under the Sovietized Orthodox Church; and that simony, occultism, paganism, and ecumenism reign in the present-day Russian church, not traditional belief.

The blog La Russophobe has a list of  what it calls “Putin murders” – assassinations of civil society figures – journalists and activists.

That list would be the Russian equivalent of the Clinton body count.

In India, The Hindustan Times points out that no world leader annoys America’s belligerent leadership more.

But the enemy of my enemy is…sometimes….just another enemy:

The red flags are there to see:

1. Vladimir Putin to revive Soviet Hero of Labor award (Daily Telegraph, Dec 11, 2012)

2. Vladimir Putin compares Lenin to holy Christian relics (Daily Telegraph, Dec 12, 2012)

3.  Vladimir Putin’s net worth

I am going to retract this assessment of Putin’s  net worth. The reason is that the origin of the figure comes from an interview by a Putin biographer, Stanislav Belkovsky, in Die  Welt, who claims Putin has never sued him. The estimate seems to be based on Belkovsky’s book on Putin’s finances and his research as head of a Moscow think-tank. It’s not improbable, given Putin’s career as a close associate of several oligarchs, himself a KGB chief, and allegedly involved in corrupt dealings following the death of Yeltsin, who passed on power to him.

However, I went back to look more closely and came across a retraction by the Economist of one of Belkovsky’s claims, on threat of suit.

($75 billion $40-70b, apparently from shares in companies including his 4.5% shares in Gazprom revenues). That makes him the richest man on earth

[Lila, added  on 4/8): He is said to own shares in several other companies, the total of which at market valuation in 2007 was $40b. I assume the $70-75 is accounted for by the valuation since then, but I didn’t calculate it myself.]

4. Vladimir Putin’s Jewish embrace: Is it love or politics?

QUOTE: “Putin has carefully cultivated relationships with Russia’s many subgroups and regions as a means of projecting his government’s authority.”

QUOTE: “Under Putin, harsh laws have led to a crackdown on ultranationalist groups that once had flourished in Russia.”

QUOTE: “Putin may be good for Jews, but he’s bad for Russia,” said Michael Edelstein, a lecturer at Moscow State University and a journalist for the L’chaim Jewish newspaper.”

QUOTE: “Freedom of expression has been severely restricted and politically motivated prosecutions remain widespread under Putin, according to Amnesty International’s 2013 report on Russia.”

QUOTE: “The preferential treatment of Chabad by Putin’s government “is creating a monolithic Jewish institutional life and preventing grass-roots development, which is the real key for Jewish rejuvenation,” said Michael Oshtrakh, a leader of the Jewish community of Yekaterinburg.”

5. Putin targets foes with zombie guns, which attack victim’s central nervous system

‘Such high-tech weapons systems will be comparable in effect to nuclear weapons, but will be more acceptable in terms of political and military ideology.” (Exactly the same rationale used by the CIA to justify “torture-lite,” radiation weapons, microwave weapons, etc.)

7. Putin is alleged to have been a Royal Arch Mason who trained with MI6, according to The Big Breach, a memoir by a disgruntled MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson.

The relevant material is summarized at this blog.

8. 9/11 insider job “impossible to conceal” says Vladimir Putin (Russia Today, August 2, 2011)

Why does Putin deny that 9/11 could have been an intelligence coup?

Perhaps, because he himself came to power in just such a KGB/FSB coup and has too many skeletons in his own closet…

Perhaps, because one way to fight the opposition is to lead it….

Vox Day: the gloves are off in America (note added)

NOTE ADDED:

I  don’t endorse Vox Day’s point about Christians “inventing” the Crusades and the Inquisition. A lot more was going on in both historical events, but that’s for another post.

UPDATE:

Oh…oh. This is the brouhaha that got VDay purged from his position. Apparently, he got into a verbal duel with one Ms. Jemisin, about the purpose of self-defense laws in the US.

Ms. Jemisin, probably a knee-jerk leftist on such issues,  made a snide remark that provoked Day’s undoubtedly racialist rant:

Guns, she said, exist so that people like Beale (whites) can “just shoot people like me , without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence.”

This run-of-the-mill articulation of a leftist bromide was apparently too much for Vox, who came unhinged and did his bit to get the boot from Science Fiction Writers of America…(he called her a “savage” and compared the IQ of her tribe unfavorably to the IQ of his).

Oh dear. Childish and offensive. But all day long English teachers teach texts, written in cold-blood, printed, and distributed to minor children, that make far more offensive statements, and it’s called “English Literature.”

Should we boot out half of our academic texts to save someone’s hurt feelings?

Or should Ms. Jemisin learn the art of racial riposte well enough that no one would dare trifle with her?

With black writing and art celebrated everywhere, it’s time for an accomplished professional to be able to shrug off that kind of thing, instead of calling for purges.  Thought-control is the last thing any writer should urge, for whatever reason, at this stage of the game.

ORIGINAL POST

From the comments on a post by VoxDay, a writer who has joined the list of “purged” bloggers on the net:

“Bigot, homophobe, racist,”- the words have been used up. All you had was shaming language and polite enemies. Now you have neither.”

And more here from Vox, the “brutalist”…

(Repeat: I do not endorse Vox Day’s views in toto, nor do I share his Arianism or his beliefs about genetics or cultural history):

“This is for the benefit of all the logical slowpokes. It is logic so basic that even those who are intellectually limited to the rhetorical level should be able to follow it:

  • If you have the right to demand that I bake you a cake, then I have the right to force you to attend church, mosque, or synagogue.
  • If you have the right to fire me because you don’t like my political position on the legality of homogamy, I have the right to fire you because I don’t like your political position on the legality of homosexuality.
  • If you have the right to deny me access to the news media because I don’t believe in climate change, I have the right to deny you access to the media because you don’t believe in God.

If atheists truly want a power struggle for the right to be intolerant, Christians will eventually engage and win. Because we will die before we will give up our beliefs and you will not. We invented the Crusade and the Inquisition, two institutions so historically intimidating that atheists still shiver and tell each other scary stories about them centuries after the event.

We will revive them before we will abandon our faith. And while we would prefer to live with both Christian and traditional Constitutional values, if we are forced to choose between the two, we will choose the former without even thinking twice.”

BBC: loud on ambiguous nun-rape, silent on verified swami-murder

Credit for the diagram of the dialectical struggle: http://www.al-ruh.org/hegelian.html

Note: I will be adding links to show the connection of the evangelizing of India to a long-term state-sponsored plan to Christianize India in the interests of Zionism and the global one-world government.

In this effort, Christian lobbies, like homosexual lobbies, are the shock-troops of  the global cartel (the New World Order), while their followers are dupes, set up to be the fall guys when there is the inevitable back-lash.

Gay “shock-troops” are one pincer leg of the culture-war; religious zealots make up the other leg.

I am not now talking of religious conservatives reacting to gay propaganda. I am talking about evangelicals who are actively engaged in political work.

Thus, in India, the Hindu right, reacting to the forced conversion of fellow Hindus,  looks to someone like Narendra Modi as their savior, whereas Modi himself seems to be in the thrall of the same Zionist billionaire to whom the entire Republican party leadership is beholden.

QUOTE:  “I would say that Sheldon (Adelson) has aligned himself with most Baptists in South Carolina.”

Thus the pincer analogy…..

ORIGINAL POST

On March 14, 2014, the BBC reported on the conclusion of the Orissa nun-rape trial:

“A court in India has found three people guilty in connection with the rape of a Catholic nun in Orissa state in 2008.

The nun was raped by a Hindu mob in Kandhamal district, days after riots between Hindus and Christian there.

Riots began after a Hindu religious leader was shot dead.

Although left-wing Maoist rebels in the state claimed responsibility for the killing, hard-line Hindu groups blamed the minority Christian community for the death.”

Comment:

No one would condone the heinous crime allegedly committed against the nun, but why gloss over the equally heinous and completely verified crime that provoked the rape of the nun?

[For the ambiguities and contradictions in the story of the raped nun, see reports here and here.]

Instead, the BBC reports blandly that a “Hindu religious leader was shot dead.”

Why doesn’t the BBC do the minimally ethical thing and report that  last October, seven Christians were found guilty of murdering the Hindu swami they mention, specifically because he spoke out against forced conversions?

For the same reason that the leftist media in India described the murderers  in its headline WITHOUT reference to their religion, although the body of their story showed that all seven were Christian and committed the murder because of their outrage at Hindu resistance to conversions:

“All of the convicts are Christians and they had committed the crime because according to them the swami was forcing Christians to convert to Hinduism, the lawyer said.”

Furthermore, why does the BBC depict the Maoists who took responsibility as simply “left-wing rebels,” while they depict right-wing Hindus with the  somewhat derogatory term, “hard-line,” and the addition of a religious label?

One would suppose that MaoIsts –  followers of Chairman Mao who killed some 45 million Chinese in the name of communism – would be better termed “hard-line” than a random mob of Hindus.

And Maoists who are Christians and allied with Christians are perforce “hard-line Christian groups,” aren’t they?

But no, this is the BBC, a known propaganda outlet of the West, so it must play semantic games.

Secondly, why not mention that Maoists are closely connected to the Christian churches and that many Christian leaders actively support them?

This has been admitted by Marxists themselves, long ago:

Prakash Karat in “Naxalism Today” (The Marxist, 1985) writes:

“The S N Singh minority faction in its document makes serious charges against Vaskar Nandy and company. “In our organisation also, Nandy’s close associates established contacts with a foreign voluntary agency and a native voluntary agency financed by Western monopoly capital, keeping it secret from the POC and the general secretary of the party, S N Singh. They established contact with Rural Aid Consortium of Tagore Society which is financed by West European countries and the USA and with one Danish Organisation on the Plea of providing relief to the people of Gobiballabpur in West Bengal and some areas in Bihar. Lakhs of rupees were received for digging tanks, constructing school building opening a sewing training center and distributing chickens and cattle to the needy. It also came to our notice that money was being received by some of our leaders from the Lutheran Church. When it came to light to the PCC members, an intense ideological struggle burst forth in the party on this issue.” (Our differences with Nandy-Rana group, PCC-CPI(ML), p. 29)

It goes on to state: “We thoroughly investigated (among the cadres and people) in Gobiballapur and Bhargora, where relief work was carried on through money from the “Tagore Society”, Rohtas Channpatia and Mushhari, where schools were built up by the Dabes, and party and doubted our bonafides … Several cadres have been exposed to these agencies.” It concludes with the damming indictment: “It does not require intelligence of a high order to find out why some of the former members of the PCC adopted particular policies on the question of caste, tribe, Assamese and non-Assamese.” Following a blind anti-Soviet line, Satyanarian Singh found out a few months before his death that the majority of his PCC members sided with Nandy and company in whitewashing its links with the imperialist funded voluntary agencies, most having been, corrupted with foreign money.”

At a website called Kandhamal Justice, Sandhya Jain, a Hindu activist,  has argued credibly that the rape case was concocted as damage-control in the wake of the murder of a Hindu priest, who was targeted for his resistance to crass proselytizing by Baptist ministers.

Many of his converts were also Maoists, none of which is mentioned in the BBC’s slimy report.

Kandhamal Justice reports:

“It may be appropriate to put the anti-missionary violence in context. The Kandhamal violence broke out after the murder of Swami Lakshmananda, whose tireless efforts to uplift the tribal communities and protect their religion and culture against aggressive proselytisation infuriated the evangelists and Maoist goons (mostly converts). The Swami was severely injured in an attack on Christmas Eve 2007, and had then accused a Congress MP and World Vision chief for the attack. He alleged a nexus between Maoist terrorists and missionaries; which is why when Maoists claimed responsibility for the killings, public ire was directed at the missionaries. Certainly the murders had a purely religious motivation; Orissa has in recent years seen an influx of rich American Baptists, for soul-harvesting purposes.

[Lila: Indeed, there is a close connection between the Maoists and the church in India.]

Kandhamal Justice:

“Beginning on December 26, 1970, Swami Lakshmananda was attacked  eight times before he was finally struck down by AK-47-wielding assailants in 2008, according to the fact-finding commission chaired by Additional Advocate General of Rajasthan, G.S. Gill. Soon after the multiple murders in the ashram, state police arrested World Vision employee Pradesh Kumar Das while escaping from the district. Later, two men, Vikram Digal and William Digal were arrested from the house of a local militant Christian, Lal Digal, at Nugaon; they admitted having joined a group of 28 assailants.

Then, in July 2009, a Maoist couple, Surendra Vekwara and Ruby, also allegedly involved in the killings, surrendered to the Orissa police. One does not know how the state government intends to prosecute the cases against these persons, especially as the sensational rape case is silently falling apart!

However, as I have previously argued, the murder of Swami Lakshmananda closely resembles the murder of Swami Shanti Kaliji Maharaj in Tripura in August 2000. The latter was also shot in his own ashram by gun-wielding goons after several dire warnings against his anti-conversion activities in the tribal belt were ignored. Swami Lakshmananda’s murder prompted Biju Janata Dal MP Tathagata Satpathy to insist that there was an urgent need for an anti-conversion legislation as aggressive proselytisation was hurting the social fabric.”

Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati had, just before his murder, demanded a national debate on conversions and an end to the foreign funding to NGOs. This is an urgent imperative.”