Same Game, Different Players

by Al Benson Jr.

Have you ever gotten the feeling that when some event occurs that you’ve “seen this before someplace, that this isn’t the first time for this?” You can’t recall when or where this all happened before, but it’s somehow very familiar. Some might refer to this as deja vu , but it’s more than that. It’s really a repeated pattern, or maybe a repeated agenda might be a more appropriate term.

Recently, someone forwarded an article to me written in 2011 and posted on http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org  on September 26th of that year. The headline for the article read: “Immigrants Want Cross Removed from Swiss Flag.” Note that the headline did not specify who the “immigrants” were, but the article was forced to.

It began: “An immigrant group based in Bern has called for the emblematic white cross to be removed from the Swiss national flag because as a Christian symbol it ‘no longer corresponds to today’s multicultural Switzerland. Ivica Petrusic, the vice president of Second@s Plus a lobbying group that represents mostly Muslim second generation foreigners in Switzerland…says the group will launch a nationwide campaign in October to ask Swiss citizens to consider adopting a flag that is less offensive to Muslim immigrants.” Talk about gall, this is it! Move to someone else’s country and then chide them because they don’t do things your way and change their national culture to suit you. Has anyone given a thought to the not-so-remote possibility that this might be construed as Cultural Genocide?

In an interview at that time with a Swiss newspaper Aarguer Zeitung Petrusic noted that the cross had a Christian background and while the Christian roots of Switzerlalnd ought to be “:respected” it is also “…necessary to separate church and state because present day Switzerland “…has a great religious and cultural diversity.One has to ask if the State wants to continue building up a symbol in which many people no longer believe.” Does any of this sound familiar–separation of church and state, the use of symbols that many don’t believe in any longer? Are you beginning to connect some of the dots here? How many have heard almost identical rhetoric recently in regard to Confederate symbols and flags? The rhetoric could, literally, have been transported from one country to the other and, with minor changes, that may be the case. Which, for me, would occasion the question–how much real difference is there between the Muslim mindset and that of the NAACP?

Both are practitioners of Cultural Genocide, and work to see it practiced not only on the present generation but on future generations yet to come. If there were an ounce of genuine diversity in either of these groups they would not have that much of a problem with the flags and symbols of other cultures because that would represent true diversity, whether you agreed with all of them or not. The best you can say for these groups is that they give lip service to a pretended diversity while they really practice Cultural Genocide on any who dare to disagree with their agendas. The fact is that, in both cases, they seek to eradicate flags and symbols they don’t agree with and an astute person should be able to recognize that they are not about diversity–they are about changing the historical makeup of any country or group they do not agree with. They are, in effect, trying to culturally murder those they disagree with, most especially if they are Christians. We are not supposed to be smart enough to figure this out and we are supposed to be conned by their “diversity” chatter until we have sold out our faith, history, and heritage and accepted theirs in its place. A good description of Cultural Genocide–destroy your faith, enshrine theirs!

We have got to be discerning enough to recognize this and resist it, whether it be in Switzerland, the rest of Europe, or this country. We dare not remove Christian symbols just because other cultures don’t “like” them or are “offended” by them. If we do, we make ourselves like those Jesus described in Mark 4:17.

I have said this before and I still believe it holds true–that all this talk about “racism” being the result of Confederate symbols and because of that wanting to do away with those symbols, is promoted by those who want to remove any and all Christian symbols and the idea that the Christian faith had any effect on the South. If they are able to lay this major guilt trip on the South to the point where its folks won’t stand up and defend their flags and symbols, you can imagine where they will go from there. Christian crosses beware!

You have to understand that those people, whether Muslims, the NAACP, the Southern Poverty Law Center, or whoever, have, as part of their agenda the total destruction of your Christian faith, your history, culture, heritage, and ultimately–YOU! If they can rob you of your faith, heritage and culture, then they will have stolen all these from your children and grandchildren as well, and your descendants will eventually belong to them, because “He who controls the past controls the future.”

Will Another “Obama Lite” Replace Boehner? That’s the Game Plan

by Al Benson Jr.

From the Gun Owners of America, http://www.gunowners.org  I received an alert dealing with the resignation of Speaker of the House John Boehner. It said, in part, “Realizing he did not have the votes to remain in power, at the end of October John Boehner will resign as Speaker of the House of Representatives, and from Congress entirely,..But our fight has just begun…Sadly, the gears are already in motion to replace Boehner with another compromiser.” Does that really surprise anyone?

Back in 2014 on http://www.wnd.com Joseph Farah did an article in which he stated: “It’s not important that the House Speaker be perfect. He or she just needs to be faithful to the people who placed them all in office and in power.Otherwise our two-party system is a joke. Right now it’s worse than a joke. It’s a lie.” If the truth be known, Mr. Farah, it’s been a lie for a long, long time–and the joke is on the voters who think differently.

Farah noted that Boehner was an “Obama collaborator, an appeaser, a co-dependent. Maybe he’s being blackmailed…Maybe he’s just afraid to take on Obama.” I think Boehner is definitely an Obama collaborator, that he really shares the same vision for the country that Obama shares (socialism) but he can’t, as a Republican, come right out and say that and so he cloaks it with what he does (or doesn’t do) in Congress under the Republican label. He’s “Obama-Lite.” Socialism with a “conservative” twinge!

According to another article on http://www.gatewaypundit.com  talk show host and author Mark Levin is warning Republicans in Washington: Don’t replace outgoing House Speaker Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). The talk show host noted that Republicans need to learn a lesson and not repeat the same mistake they made after Eric Cantor’s “fall from power–namely that Republicans must replace Boehner with a ‘principled conservative’.” That’s solid advice, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. The Republican Establishment in Washington has no interest in “principled conservatives”–it is only interested in party hacks who will promote the One World Government line that Obama espouses but who will do it with standard Republican  rhetoric. At the national level there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. They are both controlled by the same people (Council on Foreign Relations/Trilateral Commission) and they both have an agenda that reflects the worldview of the people that really control them. The only real difference is the verbiage they spew out.

This “conservative” Congress we all voted for in the last election has been a laugh and now that the public is beginning to realize they were taken to the cleaners, the Elites in Washington have to make a few cosmetic changes–just enough to fool the rubes back home into thinking they really want reform and good government, when that’s the last thing they care about..

The real agenda in Washington, with both parties, is to merge this country into a One World socialist system where anything even remotely approaching national sovereignty has been jettisoned–let alone state sovereignty–that subject is totally beyond the pale, hence the ethnic cleansing now going on in the South. It’s all related folks. As the man says “connect the dots.” If you want some background material for all this then go on line and read None Dare Call It Conspiracy  by Gary Allen.

I would urge people to follow the advice of the Gun Owners of America and contact your Congress critters and let them know you want someone who will defend their Second Amendment rights as Speaker of the House. If enough people will do this it might, at least temporarily, help to assure that we don’t get another version of Obama-Lite as a House speaker, which, I get the distinct impression, is the game plan at this point.

It Can All Hang Out In Fort Smith Public Schools But the Confederate Flag

by Al Benson Jr.

The city of Fort Smith, Arkansas may be familiar to many people. It has been pictured in many Western movies. It is the city where Judge Isaac Parker, the “hanging judge” presided over his court. Judge Parker sentenced over 70 people to hang during his judicial career, and from what I have read over the years, they probably deserved it. Others who probably deserved it and didn’t get hung, through lawyers intervening in their cases one way or another. One movie I saw years ago, “True Grit” had one of Judge Parker’s marshals, played by John Wayne, referring to the legal representatives in Fort Smith as “pettifogging lawyers.”

I’ve only been to Fort Smith once, back in the 1970s, but I remember it as a distinctly Southern town. But that was then, not now. That insidious political disease known an Political Correctness (in reality it’s Cultural Marxism) has quietly seeped into many places in the South to the point where often you can hardly tell you are in the South anymore.

Suffice it to say that the public school system in Fort Smith has now imbibed in Cultural Marxism in regard to Confederate symbols like so many other places. Given the history of the public school system I guess we really shouldn’t be surprised. Untortunately, I am afraid that many who should know the real history don’t, and so they climb aboard the dumbed-down bandwagon also.

According to the Times Record a local attorney, Joey McCutchen (they aren’t all bad) is suing the Fort Smith School Board because of their decision to remove the Confederate flag, the “Dixie” fight song, and the school mascot from Southside High School in Fort Smith.

According to the Times Record article: “The move, according to a statement from the school district came after ‘giving great consideration to the continuing impact of perceived symbols of racism on the community, state, and nation’.” So we are removing all Confederate symbols all across the country now because they are “perceived symbols of racism.” They don’t actually have to be “racist” symbols–all they have to do is to be “perceived” as that and that’s more than enough for the usual knee’jerk reaction from all the politically correct types stepping out from under their leftist rocks.

McCutchen is suing the school board on behalf of a Fort Smith resident, Curtis Sorrells, and the suit cites violation of the open meetings provision of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.  The suit said that the publicized agenda for the June 23 School Board Committee of the Whole meeting called only for a closed meeting for discussion of Superintendent Benny Gooden’s yearly performance.  The purpose of this notice was to lead members of the public and media into believing that the meeting was solely to discuss a personnel issue and that the meeting would not be open to the public.”

It was at this closed meeting according to 5newsonline.com that “members voted to recommend changing Southside High School’s mascot and fight song. Fort Smith attorney Joey McCutchen filed the lawsuit claiming the school board violated the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act by holding a committee vote without notifying the public.” Well, yes, if you are going to work for the cultural demise of a large group of your students you obviously don’t want to do it openly. McCutchen said: “The school board did not say one word about why they were for or against, and that is concerning, so I think we, the voters, need to come out. We need to get a school board that will engage us in the process because that’s what our government stands for.” Actually it may be what government used to stand for. Nowadays it stands for whatever it can get away with! One Confederate flag supporter said “I’m tired of all the political bull.” Friend, you better hang onto your Confederate flag because all this ain’t going away any time soon.

We have to understand that all these incidents, and so many have been reported that you can’t cover them all, are all part of one fabric–one agenda–and most of these public schools are just itching to find a reason, any reason, to ban Confederate symbols of any kind. The only thing that will stop them is a massive turnout of local citizens protesting what they are trying to do, citizens telling them that if they remove Confederate symbols then their children will no longer attend that school but will find educational alternatives. They’d be better off finding educational alternatives anyway, but that’s the kind of thing school boards might respond to, as most local school districts get federal funding based on how many students attend their schools and if a particular school ends up losing 75-100 students that will adversely affect what they get from the feds. They can understand that.

The Fort Smith situation shows us a couple things. For one, there are some decent lawyers out there who do try to do the right thing. I have known, over the years, a handful of Christian lawyers who do strive to make their faith part of their law practice.

For another thing, we should start checking out on the Internet the number of these cases that have shown up since the Charleston shootings. I’ve done some of that and, believe me, they are legion and they all seem to follow a similar pattern, which means they are all part of a preconceived agenda. Hence they are not, in any way, locally spontaneous. All the people involved in different communities may not all know one another, but there is a common thread that runs through all these attempts at banning anything Confederate, whether it be in schools, whole towns, or wherever. These people are all operating off the same blueprint. So you have to ask–where did the blueprint come from?

As the Times Record article noted, Confederate symbols are perceived symbols of racism. That in no way makes the perception accurate, but then, the leftists and those who finance them really don’t care about that anyway. Their aim is to get people thinking in a certain direction that serves their purpose. Whether that direction is accurate or not (and it usually isn’t) makes not one iota of difference.

That this is a campaign of ethnic cleansing by the left should be apparent by looking at those who support it, the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center, along with a host of lesser leftist luminaries.  No one in their right mind could ever consider such groups as “objective” or “middle of the road” no matter what the “news” media tells us. So start checking out some of these outfits that promote ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide in regard to Confederate history and culture. You won’t like what you find if you do the homework. And when you do find it, you should heed the biblical admonition in Ephesians 5:11 and expose it.

Ken Burns’ Impressively Shallow “Civil War” series–conclusion

by Al Benson Jr.

I have been informed that Mr. Burns’ update for his “Civil War” series has been on public television this week (probably for the first rebroadcast of many) so I wanted to conclude my comments about it during this week. As readers can probably deduce from my comments in the first article, I have significant disagreements with Mr. Burns’ worldview.

One thing that bothered me was the way in which he dealt with some of the personalities, notably Stonewall Jackson.  In my original Christian News article back in October of 1990 I stated: “Other things in this series bothered me. Stonewall Jackson, one of the South’s ablest generals and a devoted Christian gentleman, was labeled  as a ‘cold-eyed killer, unloved by his men and fond of slaughter. I’m no expert on Jackson (though I have read two or three books about him) but I’ve read enough to know that such a description is utter hogwash!  Jackson’s Christianity was couched in terms that made him appear to be a religious fanatic. Robert E. Lee was dealt with somewhat more charitably, but probably because his own devotion as a Christian is so well-known that, like George Washington, he cannot be vilified with impunity.” (At least that was the situation when I wrote the original article. In the fanatical political correctness now afoot in the land I’m not so sure that norm holds anymore.)

“The series was very will done, artistically, with skillful use of old photos of the period, along with background music and sound effects of that time. All this was blended together in such a way as to make it all very watchable, particularly if you happen to be a history buff. All you had to watch out for were the conclusions drawn from the series.”

“The part of the series that dealt with the battles was well done and probably mostly accurate. The horrible bloodiness of the conflict was noted and not glamorized, and that was good.  Having visied several of the battlefields noted in the series, I would have to say that, historically, that was the best part of the series.” (Although now I understand that the National Park Service has gone around and changed all the plaques to state the the reason the war was fought was only over slavery, and that’s not good because it is totally erroneous. Slavery was one reason for the War, among many, and not the main reason no matter what these politically correct “historians” try to shove down your throats.)

“The program hinted at the fact that, after two years of ‘Civil War” Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, not out of a concern for slaves, but mainly as a political move, a ‘noble’ reason for the conflict to continue. Other historians have said it with more authority, though.”

“The final episode  dealt with the collapse of the Confederacy, Lincoln’s assassination, and the remainder of the lives of some well-known ‘Civil War’ figures. The birth of the Ku Klux Klan was mentioned, but NOT ONE WORD was said about the “reconstruction” period specifically, one of the most shameful periods in our history. That part of the picture was totally ignored. Down the memory hole if you will!”

“One thing admitted in this series was that the War Between the States changed the course of our history. One narrator in the series said we were never the same country after the war.  He seemed to feel that the change was for the better.” (Looking at what we have to deal with in our day, I’m not so sure of that. I think, in many ways, it’s worse.) “Another speaker summed it up by saying that, before the war, when the United States were spoken of, it was in the plural form ‘The United States are’ after the war the singular term  ‘The United States is’ came into usage. So much for the rights of and our recognition of individual states. These were swallowed up by a strong national government. Due to apostasy in this country (and most  of our troubles can be traced back to that cause) the War Between the States was truly the American Revolution (and our French Revolution) a revolution that most God-fearing Americans, both North and South lost!  Most have not realized that even unto this day.  Slaves were not freed in the truest sense of the word.  Care and ownership was just transferred from plantation owners to politicians who had big plans to use ex-slaves as a gigantic voting block  to keep them (the politicians) in power.  Many even said as much, though naturally, with less offensive terminology.”

“One of the concluding narrations was given by a lady “historian” who went so far as to say that as long as we have the downtrodden and the homeless on the streets the Civil War is never really over. One might translate that to mean “until the federal government is willing to provide cradle to the grave security for all citizens (socialism) the Civil War goes on!” And don’t we hear echoes of this same mantra today?

I have to agree with Mr. Burns on one point–the War never really has ended, but I don’t agree with his reasons. It has not ended because the Yankee/Marxist regimes that inhabit Washington have determined that the South and its Christian heritage and culture must be destroyed and they will not discontinue their war on us until they have accomplished that. We need to wake up and realize that. This latest planned and orchestrated attack on all things Confederate should be a wake-up call to Southern folks and all honorable folks everywhere as to the fact that the Ruling Elite expects you to surrender your history, faith, and culture to their minions and they will fight you until you do. Lets make sure they have a long, long fight!

Ken Burns’ “Civil War”–Impressively Shallow

by Al Benson Jr.

Twenty five years ago this year Ken Burns launched his supposedly epic series entitled “The Civil War.” One thing you have to understand about Mr. Burns going in, he is a modern day radical abolitionist. That is his mindset. Oh, he feigns objectivity but a quick look at his work will show you that he is anything but objective.

His original “Civil War” series lasted several nights on prime time television and to be sure I got it all I sat through the entire thing. Supposedly it took Mr. Burns five years of research and a ton of Rockefeller money, all to discover that, guess what, the war was really all about slavery! What a surprise! Knowing at least part of his funding sources could anyone who has followed any of this think his conclusions would be any different.

Well, that was a long time ago, you may say. However I’ve been told that Mr. Burns is about to redo and update this series and bring it back again. After all, almost a whole generation has gone by since this series was last presented and so it’s about time now, especially in light of all this planned fuss over Confederate flags and symbols, to reintroduce this generation to the “Civil War was only about slavery issue” so that people will not forget this holy mantra of the left.

Back in October of 1990 I did an article for The Christian News out of New Haven, Missouri about Mr. Burns’ series and the title of it was exactly the same as the title for this article. Mr. Burns probably has the financial backing to update and redigitalize his material. Unfortunately, I don’t have such, so all I can do is to go back to my original article and pull out some significant excerpts and hope this will suffice. Since I expect that most folks reading this will not have seen my original article this will probably not be repetitious to most. So please bear with me.

“Being a student of that period of U.S. history that encompasses the period from around 1820-1890, I was naturally interested when I saw several articles in newspapers touting public television’s “Civil War” series, shown the week of September 23rd for five successive nights. The series got such favorable  preview publicity in the media that I felt it might be the crowning achievement of propaganda in regard to the War Between the States.  Being somewhat forewarned, and being, though Northern by birth, basically of a Southern disposition in regard to the War, I was not, unfortunately, disappointed in my assessment of the series.”

“If, in some faint vein, I had hoped for objectivity in this series, such a vain hope was dashed on the first night’s broadcast. We were supposed to have the ’causes’ of the War outlined on the first broadcast. The ’causes’ all boiled down to the same stale abolitionist rhetoric that far too many of our ‘history’ books parrot today–the reason the war was fought was to free the slaves, a noble endeavor on the part of the North. The whole question of states’ rights and constitutional issues was given no more than a line or two, barely lip service. The theological implications of the War were totally ignored, as if they had never existed, and indeed, for the promoters of the program they probably did not, consciously. We were told that the man that put this series together spent five years researching his subject. That may be, but he surely didn’t read the same books I have!”

“The series hardly dealt with the Unitarian-influenced abolitionist movement in the North and the pressure that radical movement exerted on Northern politicians. It did not at all deal with the revival of reformation Christianity taking place in the South before the war.”

“John Brown, the abolitionist terrorist, was mentioned chiefly in his connection to the aborted raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. One got the impression from the program that Brown did all that he did on his own. Never was there a mention of the wealthy group of Northerners, one a Unitarian clergyman, called ‘the Secret Six’ that paid for a great deal of John Browns terrorism, both in Kansas and other places. Why weren’t these Northern financiers of Brown’s terrorism mentioned? They are mentioned in the National Park Service museum at Harpers Ferry. Their pictures are on the wall there.”

Lord willing, I will continue with these comments in another article. I don’t know when Mr. Burns’ updated series will be rebroadcast but it might not hurt to sit in when it is and make note of all the things that have been conveniently left out. I am sure you will find the list considerable.