LARRY ROMANOFF -- The Theology of Politics

The Theology of Politics

By Larry Romanoff

Global Research, December 04, 2019

Theme: History

This is a serious discussion, so let’s be sure we are on the same page by ensuring we apply the same meanings to our words. “Democracy” is NOT government. It is not freedom, it is not human rights, it is not universal values, it is not free speech or free press. It is not capitalism or free markets. It is neither cabbage nor broccoli. Democracy, the fervent “we’ll invade your country and kill half your people” American kind, is nothing more than religion-based politics.

Let’s pretend for a moment we live in a normal world where people are not overcome by various political and religious insanities.

Now let’s imagine that our national economy develops, our country becomes richer and we all have more free time. American political theology tells us that as we reach some arbitrary threshold of income security, or some pre-determined level of progress from apehood to civilisation, our “natural yearnings of all mankind” will magically blossom, giving rise to an irresistible desire for US-style ‘democracy’.

And that does NOT mean US-style Republican government; it means US-style multi-party politics. These two – government and politics – are unrelated.

This is a popular American mantra that sounds good but has no basis in reality – this conviction, however it’s stated, that when a people develop to some undefined but higher spiritual level, the laws of God and nature will release an inborn desire for multi-party politics. According to these people, as we progress in our natural development toward American clones, we will experience a predetermined, perhaps genetic, impulse, to meddle in the national government of our country. This foolish claim doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

Note that this theology doesn’t state that our interest in politics arises as we become more educated, experienced, or competent, but as we become somehow more spiritually enlightened. A basic tenet of this American religion is that as we develop spiritually and become sufficiently enlightened – in other words, when we become more like Americans – we will then want what they want. On what do Americans justify such a conviction? They offer no rationale for their beliefs, and indeed none exists. There is no existing evidence of such a human state, and of course they offer none. As with every religion, you must believe because you are told to believe.

But surely this is just lunacy. It would make equally as much sense for me, once I become rich, to develop a magical yearning to go to the surgical ward and try my hand at a brain transplant, since I know as much about that as I do about government, in other words, nothing at all. But why focus on government? Why not on the nation’s space program, or putting our noses into the nation’s educational system? The answer is that most people are not so interested in any of these fields, nor do they harbor any illusions about their knowledge or ability to contribute. And in fact, this is true of government as well – most people are simply not that interested and in any case have no useful knowledge or ability. But again, the attraction is not government, but American faith-based politics.

I can scarcely imagine anything more dangerous to the well-being of a nation than millions of uninformed and inexperienced people suddenly wanting to get involved in something they know nothing about but on which the entire well-being of their nation depends. The most dangerous, and frightening, part of this mindless infection is that Americans have blindly and foolishly included it as one of the 1,001 “rights” in their all-encompassing democratic theology. That means it is not only my natural and irresistible, inborn human yearning, but part of my rights granted to me by my God, that I, hopelessly ignorant, inexperienced and incompetent, can now meddle in the government of my country. And if that isn’t crazy, I don’t know what would be.

There is no natural connection between rising income or economic development and an interest in a nation’s management, any more than in a corporate environment. If our company does well, demonstrated by increasing profits and salary levels, there is no natural law dictating that employees will suddenly develop a fanatical desire to get involved in the company’s management. There is no reason to expect such a desire for corporate ‘democracy’, and we have never seen evidence of it in any of the many examples of successful companies. If this were some natural law, we surely would see it first in our corporations and institutions – in our companies, our hospitals, our school systems, charities. But we don’t. In fact, the more successful a company and its employees, the more willing are the staff to leave management to the managers. Management doesn’t even enter their minds unless it’s incompetent and begins to exert considerable negative influence on their lives.

This propaganda that so many Americans preach is almost pathological in its religious fervor, and yet those same Americans appear totally blind to the immense failings of that same system in their own country. This is what we call Jingoism – a blind and unquestioned belief that my country, my system, my everything, are the one way, the right way, the ONLY way.

American political jingoism is a blind conviction that all living beings will gravitate by a natural law of the universe toward those values that Americans hold to be true. Most Western comment on this issue resolves from a blind worship of the multi-party political system with scant evidence that its proponents have ever seriously examined the reality of their own ideological beliefs which are all rooted in a primitive and simple-minded theology, an all-encompassing political-religious ideology producing a kind of simian team sport that would be perfectly at home in a zoo.

When writing of China, these same people tell us the Chinese haven’t yet wanted US-style multi-party politics because “their democratic yearnings have not yet developed.” What kind of nonsense is this? If I’m not Muslim and my name isn’t Mohammed, that’s because my ‘Allah-yearnings’ have not developed? If I hate McDonald’s, that’s because my ‘hamburger-that-tastes-like-greasy-cardboard’ yearnings aren’t yet developed? This mindless conviction makes no allowance for differences in culture or values of other nations, for their history or tradition, and indeed it disparages such differences and often treats them with open contempt. To Americans, any rejection of their democratic religion on the basis of cultural or other values is just a cheap excuse to avoid the inevitable. And of course, the ‘inevitable’ is for all peoples to become American. Actually, it’s a bit worse than that. No foreigners possess the spiritual gifts to become true Americans, even after centuries of colonisation. The best you can hope for, is to become a kind of imperfect clone – not really white, not really American – but having adopted American values and therefore suitable for colonisation.

In a recent article in the NYT, Eric Li partially identified the issue that gives so many Americans ants in their pants when discussing China’s government, when he referred to “faith-based ideology”. American ‘democracy’ is not about government, but about politics rooted in an evangelical Christianity. Eric wrote,

“Many have characterized the competition . . . as a clash between democracy and authoritarianism. But this is false. The fundamental difference between Washington’s view and Beijing’s is whether political rights are God-given and therefore absolute or whether they should be seen as privileges …”

He wrote further “The modern West sees democracy … as the pinnacle of human development. It is a belief premised on an absolute faith.”

But in part he missed the core point which is that the selection of a nation’s leaders is neither God-given nor a privilege but an enormous responsibility which should be entrusted only to the most competent. This is true in the same way and for the same reasons as performing brain operations. Nobody (except of course the FBI) has a God-given right to do frontal lobotomies, nor do we allocate this duty as a privilege to our favored friends. The responsibility is instead given to those most capable of handling it.

Multi-Party Democracy – A Substitute for Civil War

We’re having a birthday party and half of the children want to go to the zoo and half to the park. So we separate the two groups, give them sticks and let them fight it out. Whichever group wins, can make all the decisions. Would you do that? Well, why not? That’s multi-party democracy. Firmly separate your population on the basis of some ideology and let them fight. In a Multi-Party Democracy, there is no room for cooperation or consensus. We don’t talk; we fight. I win, you lose. That’s the system, inherently based not on harmony and consensus but on conflict.

Economic Upheaval and the Rise of the US Police State

It’s the cornerstone of the democratic system that the ‘winners’ control everything and the ‘losers’ are totally marginalised. In Western political society there is little apparent concern for the losers. After all, they are the losers and their wishes are unimportant even though they can form 50% or more of the population. Western multi-party democracy is the only selection system in the world designed to disenfranchise, isolate and betray at least half of the population. Perhaps that’s why sometimes 70% or more of the people don’t bother to vote.

If we wanted to separate our population politically into two ideological ‘parties’, the logical division would be a gender separation of men and women. Or maybe a sexual division – the homos and the heteros. That would at least make an interesting election campaign. Unfortunately for democracy, the deliberate cleavage of our societies for purposes of politics was done according to perhaps the most inflammatory of human characteristics, an irreconcilable simian-theological divide, creating two factions perpetually at each other’s throats.

We have many names for the ideological teams: Liberal-Conservative, Labor-Capitalist, and Democrat-Republican. We sometimes refer to them as the Left Wing and Right Wing, or Socialists and Corporatists, but the division is more sinister than these names suggest. The ideological rift that has been created for the sake of politics is really between the ideological left and the religious right – between the pacifists and the war-mongers. And it appears that, though I make no claim to sociological credentials, human society, at least Western society, will automatically cleave along these lines if given a fertile chance. When we look at the often vehement enthusiasm with which many Westerners embrace their political convictions, it is apparent that this separation, this cleavage of people according to their propensity for war-mongering, involves some of the deepest and most primitive instincts and emotions of the human psyche. What sane person would consciously divide a population based on this ideology? And for what purpose?

The ideological separations serve not to do good, but only to create conflict. And that conflict is not the same as what we might term ‘healthy competition’. Political conflict is exclusive, sometimes vicious, very often dishonest, forcing people to go against their own consciences and the good of the nation for the sake of the party. The ideological rifts inherent in party politics have been introduced into Western government – by design – solely and precisely because they induce the conflict so necessary to any team sport. How can we have a competition if everyone is on the same team, just trying to get the job done? The inescapable conclusion is that Western democracy – politics, in fact – was deliberately and cleverly designed not to select good government but to delude the peasantry into participation in a primitive, socio-theological rite of competition, conflict and victory. A useful substitute for a civil war.

But it’s all a cruel hoax. “The People” are lured into choosing sides, engaging in battle, then forced into a patently unfair resolution by voting. The losers have been browbeaten, bullied, propagandised and hoodwinked into believing and accepting that, because they are the losers, their wishes, rights and welfare are now irrelevant and they must remain silent. To the victor go the spoils. You lost the war; I set the terms. The winners, sated with the thrill of victory, are now also irrelevant, and the elites – and the parties they control – continue to remain in charge as they always have, while the people believe they are supreme. In fact, ‘the people’ are merely cannon-fodder in a pseudo-religious battle, joining the team, supporting, paying, protesting, yelling and screaming and, finally, voting. But then the game is over, everyone returns to their senses and their lives, and the elites continue with their agenda of controlling the government and running the country. Nothing has changed.

The combination of the primitive instincts and emotions that drive politics, team sports and religion is not only potentially explosive but essentially mindless; a kind of yearning herd mentality with a propensity for violence. It is clear that politics, in the Western sense, is seldom guided by reason. Reason can accommodate and withstand discourse; ideology on the other hand, cannot. Politics, religion, and team sports have a common root in the Western psyche. None can be discussed intelligently for very long; all raise violent emotions, all suffer from ideology that is blind to fact and reason, all possess the same primitive psychological attractions. People don’t join a political party from a commitment to good government, and they don’t join a Western religion to learn about God. In both cases, they do it to join a winning team.

In the individualistic, black and white Western societies, the multi-party democratic process is in no way intended as a method of problem resolution. It is instead consciously contrived precisely because it creates the problem, engaging an ignorant public in the debate of irrelevant issues while setting the stage for open conflict and a ‘law of the jungle’ political battle. The conflict resolution portion of this masquerade is the forced voting, which appeals to Western Right-Wing mentality because it is the only system short of physical battle that can resolve the issue on an all-or-nothing basis, creating the winners and losers these societies need.

Many years ago, the naturalist and scientist Charles Darwin proposed the (more or less accurate) theory we call “the survival of the fittest”, meaning that the strongest and most adaptable of all life forms will survive, while the weaker and the less adaptable will decline and eventually become extinct. Of course, a major part of this decline consists of the predators preying on the weak and killing them off, a process that applies as much to politics as to plants and animals. Social Darwinism is this philosophy and attitude applied to members of a society, meaning that the “winners” – the smartest, strongest and fastest, will not only survive but will do so by preying on those who are slower and weaker. This is otherwise known as “the law of the jungle”, perfectly reflected in American politics, and we see much evidence of this tendency throughout American society.

Most Americans will tell us – often, at the top of their lungs – that the multi-party electoral system is about freedom and choice and is “real democracy”. But the multi-party system is not about freedom and choice, and it is not about either democracy or government. It’s about a fabricated game of social conflict and competition, about playing in a team sport. In a multi-party democracy, the “game” is not good government but the election process itself. After my team wins the election, the game is over and we all go home. In the Western world, it is ‘politics’ that is the attraction, not ‘government’. I sincerely doubt that many people who are active in the political process give even a single thought to the quality of government that will emerge. Their only focus is winning the game for their team. The process has become so corrupted that Western democracy doesn’t even pretend to refer to the quality of government that might ensue as the end result after an election. And this is because the end result is the process itself – the competition, winning the election, nothing more. In a very real sense, the medium has become the message.

In every country with a multi-party democratic government, ‘the people’ are becoming increasingly aloof, disinterested and disenfranchised, one symptom of which is voter turnouts of as little as 30% in some major countries. That number is both astonishing and instructive, since it accurately reflects the dawning realisation that voters have little if any influence on either an election outcome or on the policies of any government so elected. People in Western countries are finally rejecting the delusion that they actually select their government. In any democracy, voters do not select the candidates, nor do they choose or nominate anyone – the Parties do that. Voters are then offered an after-the-fact opportunity to rubber-stamp one of two clones. Government “of the people, by the people and for the people” is pure fiction and has never existed anywhere.

Is there anyone today who will argue that the Democratic-Republican system is a great thing for America? Is this what produced the recent happy accord for the US Health Care Plan, or what is making the entire government today pull together to sort out its horrid economic mess after 2008? The US democratic system is universally recognised today (ignoring a few basket cases) as the most dysfunctional government in the world. One of the more distressing congenital deformities of US politics is that by the time all the special-interest groups – the lobbyists, senators, financiers, bankers and flakes have grabbed their share, nothing useful is likely to remain for the common good. The outcomes are preordained because elected US officials are too busy looking after the interests of AIPAC, Israel, the Jewish lobby, the CIA, the US military, the defense contractors, the international bankers and the big multi-nationals, to worry about the people and the nation. The welfare of the voters is increasingly irrelevant, which is why the US government spent $7.7 trillion bailing out the banks instead of the people. US-style Multi-Party Democracy is a formula for waste, inefficiency and corruption. It is the one form of government that will guarantee decisions will be made to benefit the elite’s private interest groups instead of the country as a whole.

How did the supposedly-great concept of participatory democracy descend to such a pathetic level? The fundamental issue is that Western democracy has never had as its objective the selection of outstandingly competent leaders, but was instead created as a way of sidelining ‘the people’, dividing them by ideology and engaging their attention in a game – in a team-sport competition. That is entirely the fault of the deliberate and cleverly planned creation of multi-party politics, and it is too late to reverse course, too late to eliminate dysfunctional ideologies and the curse of politics from government. The hole is too deep; we cannot return to the beginning and start again. To do so would require a social upheaval equivalent to a popular revolution, and any Western government would viciously put down any such attempt. In spite of all the propaganda to the contrary, no Western democracy would permit ‘the people’ to actually gain control of their government.

The Origin of Multi-Party Politics

We often credit ancient Greece for the conceptual creation of what today we term ‘democracy’, but that ancient form is not what manifests itself today. The transition from the European monarchies to a multi-party electoral selection process was not a spontaneous development, did not occur from natural evolution, nor because it was the epitome of the development of government. It was not a natural result of a desire for “choices” among the public, nor was it done consciously for the sake of what we term ‘checks and balances’. Rather than being a natural evolution, this system of dividing a nation on the basis of inflammatory emotional ideologies was deliberately created by a group of European elites as a method to pacify populations with the belief that they were in charge of their destinies while being controlled by puppet-masters in the parties, an enormous fraud perpetrated on unsuspecting populations.

Montagu Norman, who was the Governor of The Bank of England for several decades ending in the mid-1940s, came from a long line of bankers, with both his paternal and maternal grandfathers having also been the Bank’s Governors, and all of whom were agents and representatives of the Jewish Rothschild banking dynasty, had this to say about multi-party electoral democracy in 1924:

“By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance. It is thus, by discrete action, we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished.”

There is no way to misunderstand the man’s words. This is the principal reason the architects and proponents of the New World Order have been so determined for so long to indoctrinate populations in the religion of multi-party politics. No other system of governance provides as much opportunity for external control of nations and mass deception of the people as does democracy. This latter revelation should strike fear into the hearts of all thinking persons.

We have another excellent example of the above in Boris Berezovsky, once the most powerful of the Jewish Russian oligarchs, who almost completed plans to transform Russia into a fake two-party state of Left-Wing Social Democrats and Right-Wing Neocons, in which heated public battles would be provoked and fought on socially-divisive issues, while both parties would be controlled from the stage wings by the same small group of ruling elites and bankers.

“With the citizens permanently divided and popular dissatisfaction safely channeled into meaningless dead-ends, these puppet-masters could maintain unlimited wealth and power for themselves, with little threat to their reign.”

This clever scheme perfectly duplicates America’s own political history.

When these international banking elites spawned the European revolutions that removed all the monarchs, they accomplished many ends besides the removal of a person who had absolute power over them, including the power to expel them from a nation when they became too powerful or troublesome. As a replacement, they introduced a fragmented ‘government by the people’ with a political ideology that would bitterly divide societies and make the population subject to fear, and therefore easily manipulated and controlled. They created the opportunity to either found or take over the central banks of many nations, thereby obtaining financial, and effectively total, control of those countries. They did indeed secure for themselves ‘that which had been so well planned and so successfully accomplished’.

Dylan Ratigan, a best-selling US author, expressed it perfectly when he wrote, “Power, whether in an electoral system or a corporate boardroom, originates with the people who control the nomination of candidates, not with those who “vote” after this process is complete”. Those who nominate, dictate. Americans tend to think of political parties as a kind of ideological abstract, as a way of defining people’s attitudes, but political parties are not abstract; they are real, and they have all the power and control. The people enter the process only at the very end, in a pretense of choosing those whom the parties have already selected. This cannot change unless the parties themselves are eliminated, and that will never happen. The small elite groups who control the political parties from the shadows are far more powerful than the people, and they will never relinquish control.

Someone wrote that “The faceless plutocracy that controls the US government promotes an illusion of legitimacy by allowing the people to vote for a variety of political candidates … who have been bought and paid for by the plutocracy. The fiction extends to the “independent” judiciary, whose members are carefully selected by the plutocracy and who promote its agenda.” Richard Reeves wrote that “The American political system is essentially a contract between the Republican and Democratic parties, enforced by federal and state two-party laws, all designed to guarantee the survival of both no matter how many people despise or ignore them.”

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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. he is a frequent contributor to Global Research. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2019