Valuable historic footage of the CCP’s Land Reform (1949-1953). This is how it was done:
Send out a “work team” to villages to “help” the peasants to understand that exploitation of the rich was the root of their poverty and suffering. (DEI training?)
Mobilize the poor
Coach them on how to “tell their bitterness” (诉苦 or lived experience) against the landlords
Hold “ struggle sessions” to denounce the landlords as the “enemy of the people”. Note there were a lot of women activists.
Let the people decide the punishment. In the video the people spoke: execution!
Confiscate the land from the landlords and give it to the poor
Happy ending for the poor?
Not so fast. In 1958 all the land was taken back by the state through collectivization. Between 1959-1962, up to 50 million perished during the Great Famine.
This is a story of Communist dream turned into hellish nightmare. And history rhymes, doesn’t it?
China followed a path to totalitarian control similar to the Soviet Union and other communist regimes. In Russia, Bolsheviks went into villages with the goal of killing a predetermined percentage (10-15% or more) of their populations. This was done to wipe out natural leaders in order to eliminate all viable opposition. These public murders also terrorized the people who were not killed. In Russia, the mass murderers were primarily non-Russians who hated Russians and were envious of them. In China, the mass murderers were typically Chinese from other parts of China who were filled with ideological hatred. Throughout the West, we are seeing a softer version of this playing out today. ABN
Your paper illustrates the principle that in order to properly understand Christianity one must understand what Jesus actually taught. This requires that we focus on the earliest period of Christianity.
Your paper presents no conclusions about the Arian controversy and implies that the issue remains muddled even today. In my opinion, this is incorrect.
FYI, I am going to briefly summarize the Arian controversy as I understand it. I believe the controversy arose out of the church’s “need” to declare its institutional authority over Christians.
In the first centuries, there were many varieties of Christians, everything from Jewish Christian sects that continued to stress the importance of Jewish Law to gnostic Christians who in my opinion preserved the esoteric core of what Jesus actually taught. Soon after the Council of Nicaea, many of the various iterations (including the gnostics) came under fierce attack by the Roman church.
The roots of the Arian controversy date to the second century when certain theologians deviated from Jesus’ teaching about the immortality of the soul, i.e., immanence. Tatian was one of these, and he was followed by Gregory of Nysa, St Jerome, and Augustine. Each of whom added another brick to the new artificial construct. All of them taught that the soul is created from lowly dust along with the body at conception or birth.
The controversy ignited when a Libyan priest named Arius pointed out the flaw in the church’s new teaching. At issue was the human versus divine nature of Jesus. Arius merely pointed out that by this reasoning the soul of the God-realized avatar Jesus must likewise have been made of lowly dust. This was a problem because it meant that at some point in time the soul of Jesus did not exist. It followed that Jesus, while exalted, could not be on an equal footing with God the father.
Athanasius led the orthodox contingent at Nicaea. He insisted on the absolute equivalence of Father and Son. Even though a vast majority of Christians supported Arius, the anti-Arian bishops held a majority in Council and ruled in favor of Athanasius. No surprise that Arius was condemned as a heretic.
Athanasius gets credit for the new doctrine of the Trinity that emerged from Nicaea. The Trinity idea was not based on Scripture, however, nor divine revelation, but solely on logic. Given the equivalence of Father and Son, the Holy Spirit could not be left out, so its inclusion became a logical necessity. From its inception, the Trinity doctrine was and remains a purely artificial construct.
Despite the ruling, Arianism continued to be very popular because by affirming the humanity of Jesus Arius held out hope for ordinary people. Implicit in Arianism is the gnostic belief that ordinary Christians can follow in the footsteps of the savior. The views of Arius were perfectly compatible with the teaching of immanence, the indwelling of God in all of creation.
The real issue at the heart of the controversy, as the writer Elizabeth Claire Prophet has pointed out, was not the denial of the divinity of Jesus (as the church contended at Niceae and as the Catholic Church still contends) but instead the question: “How is man to be saved? By emulating Jesus? Or by worshipping him?” Today, the Catholic Church emphasizes worship (and obedience) when it should be inspiring Christians (as Jesus did) to pursue sainthood.
The personal triumph of Athanasius at the council was a hollow victory. By scapegoating Arius, the church only magnified its original error of embracing a doctrine of the soul that repudiates the divine presence in all matter.
By asserting the equivalence of Father and Son the church was in effect declaring that the soul of Jesus was different in kind from the souls of ordinary people. This was fateful because it undermined the mystical element in Jesus’ own teachings, and opened up a vast gulf between God and humans.
The new Catholic Encyclopedia clearly states the extent of this chasm: “Between Creator and creature there is the most profound distinction possible. God is not part of this world. He is not just the peak of reality. Between God and the world there is an abyss…”
The abyss was wholly artificial, the creation of the church, yet it was also a self-serving artifice, a means for institutional Christianity to vastly increase its earthly power. Today, Catholic doctrine holds that the church is the sole bridge over the otherwise unbridgeable chasm between God and men.
I would go another step and also argue that the outcome of Niceae was a serious devolution, a step back toward Judaism and the absolute patriarchal rule of the angry jealous god Yaweh. It appears that Christianity was undermined from within by church fathers bent on maintaining control over Christians. To me this smacks of psychopathy at work, namely, the Jewish revolutionary spirit.
This material is drawn from my 2004 book Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes. Hope it helps!
The definition or redefinition of words and concepts shows the profound importance of the human psycholinguistic complex or constellation. Changing just a few words or definitions can impact many centuries of human history. We can see many changes in our psycholinguistics today, almost all of which are imposed on our communities without our consent or understanding. Diversity is Our Greatest Strength is but one of many examples. It may seem as if nothing is happening when words and concepts change meaning or are weirdly asserted, but when those changes are imposed top-down and asserted by Big Media, you can be sure they portend a foul change is afoot and we will pay dearly for it within a short time. ABN
Last week I published an article noting that although technology industrialist Elon Musk probably ranks as the most powerful and influential individual in the Western world, he recently humbled himself, deeply apologizing for some of his casual criticism of Jewish activities and pledging to mend his ways.
Traveling to Israel, he met with that country’s president and posed for photo-ops with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, promising to combat “antisemitism” on his Twitter platform. A few weeks later he undertook a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, making even stronger commitments to Jewish leaders, denying that he harbored any antisemitism in his own heart, and publicly declaring that he regarded himself as “aspirationally Jewish.”
These remarkable events reminded me of that famous incident of the Middle Ages in which Emperor Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire had “gone to Canossa” and prostrated himself before Pope Gregory VII, seeking forgiveness for his challenge to the supreme authority of the Catholic Church:
Musk was only the latest and most extreme example of the many wealthy and powerful Gentiles who have publicly bent their knees in submission to Jewish power. Even if totally spurious, accusations of “antisemitism” have often proven fatal to the careers of even the highest-ranking individuals, and shortly before Musk’s submission, two presidents of Ivy League universities were politically brow-beaten and then forced to resign over their unwillingness to prohibit pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses, a sudden purge that was absolutely unprecedented in the history of American academia.
The Israeli army used chemical and biological weapons during the 1948 war, including poisoning water wells in several Palestinian towns, original documents stored in the Israel State Archive, as well as other archives revealed.
The documents showed that Israeli political and military leaders and some scholars were partners in the decision, and had even planned to poison the waters in Cairo and Beirut, but changed their mind at the last minute.
Haaretz reporter Ofer Aderet wrote on Friday that the poisoning was partially exposed decades ago by Arab sources when rumors and oral testimonies were reported in newspapers and books about an attempt by the army in 1948 to poison wells in Acre and Gaza by adding bacteria to the drinking water.
However, the details of Israel’s secret use of biological weapons and poison against Palestinians during the 1948 war was revealed in a recent article by historians Benny Morris and Benjamin Kedar.
Published by Middle Eastern Studies, Morris and Kedar’s research is a rarity because it was researched and published against the wishes of the Israeli security establishment, which has tried for years to block any embarrassing historical documents that expose war crimes against Arabs, such as murdering prisoners, ethnic cleansing and destroying villages, Haaretz wrote.
Contrary to what has long been believed, there was no peaceful transition of power from hunter-gather societies to farming communities in Europe, with new advanced DNA analysis revealing that the newcomers slaughtered the existing population, completely wiping them out within a few generations.
Researchers from Sweden’s Lund University analyzed skeletons and teeth found in what is now Denmark, and found that 5,900 years ago, the region underwent a swift and total population change. Prior to this, Danish Mesolithic people of the Maglemose, Kongemose and Ertebølle cultures – genetically related to other Western European hunter-gatherers – were prominent inhabitants. But when Neolithic farmers arrived, an abrupt shift can be seen in DNA records, with next to no genetic contribution from the local hunter-gatherers.
Tracing the DNA timeline, the researchers could see that the hunter-gatherers had been swiftly wiped out by the late Stone Age, in what they suspect was a very bloody and very thorough takeover.
“This transition has previously been presented as peaceful,” said Anne Birgitte Nielsen, geology researcher and head of the Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory at Lund University. “However, our study indicates the opposite. In addition to violent death, it is likely that new pathogens from livestock finished off many gatherers.”
However, it seems what goes around comes around. Some 1,000 years later, around 4,850 years ago, these farming communities suffered a similar fate, with the arrival of a ‘big-boned’ semi-nomadic group with origins tied to the livestock-herding Yamnaya of southern Russia. Again, DNA evidence suggests violent battles and the introduction of new pathogens caused another swift genetic shakeup.
The newest arrivals, who tamed animals, kept cattle and traversed the land via horse and cart, would prevail in the region; after this tumultuous period, the area was settled by a population tied to the Yamnaya and Eastern European Neolithic peoples. The genetic profile of these settlers remains dominant in Denmark today, with no trace of the first farmers, or the hunter-gatherers before them, at all.
With the rapid rate of distinctive DNA turnover and the a lack of mingling genetics, all signs point to overpowering conflicts that completely anihillated existing communities. Turning previous theories upside down, the researchers add that this new information also sheds light on migration and the movement of pathogens. Scientists have high hopes that advances in the sequencing of ancient DNA (aDNA) will soon lead to a better understanding and treatment of present-day disease.
Roman Catholicism, wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky “has proclaimed a new Christ, not like the former one, but one who has been seduced by the third temptation of the devil — the temptation of the kingdoms of the world: “All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me!”[1] This is the main reproach made by the Orthodox to the Roman Church. I find it entirely justified, and I would add that the Catholic false Christ is in fact Yahweh in disguise.
Unlike the Patriarch of Constantinople or later that of Moscow, who only claimed the “spiritual sword” (sacred authority), the medieval popes also claimed the “temporal sword” (secular power). Not only did they directly govern one of the richest principalities in Italy, but they claimed to rule over kings and emperors (read “The Failed Empire: the Medieval Origin of the European Disunion”).
UPDATE: Very good interview. Everybody should watch it. Putin clearly explains Russia’s position, something every well-informed person in the world should already know. I’ve said it before and will say it again: The US/NATO/ neocon/ European failure to form a deep, lasting, and mutually beneficial alliance with Russia after 1991 (and before) is the most serious foreign policy mistake in world history. ABN
American Buddhist Net 