ALMIGHTY GOD, CAESAR AND COMMON LAW

by Jeremy Lee
A basic Common Law right which few have thought about is being hemmed in, and in many cases eliminated - the right of free assembly. Among the first acts of tyrants are the disarming of the people and the banning of gatherings bigger than a few. In some cases even meetings of friends on street corners are illegal. In English-speaking countries free assembly has been taken for granted for hundreds of years. In the 12th century world of Chaucer up to 150,000 pilgrims traveled - sometimes for weeks at a time - to Canterbury. Markets, guilds, hunts, churches, political gatherings, all involved the assembling of people as a lawful right unless it was with the expressed intent of violence.

In Australia the same right has continued. Tens of thousands have assembled to watch Phar Lap win a race, or the Don score a century. They have gathered at agricultural shows, football matches, country race-tracks, camel races, regattas, Sydney-Hobart yacht races, protests, rallies and, of course, church services and public meetings across the land. All that is under attack. Country race meets by the score have been cancelled; sporting clubs have closed; pony camps and gymkhanas for children are no longer held; community halls lie unused, and agricultural shows which have been held since before Federation cancelled. Without any law specifically banning freedom of assembly, a gauntlet of barriers has been erected and is being tightened to make it impossible in a growing number of cases for people to follow customary pursuits.

The ostensible reason, obviously, is the cost of public liability insurance. But this is simply the end result of a series of attacks on the principles surrounding Common Law. There is always the risk of personal injury wherever people meet to act - from being crushed in a crowd to falling down a stair. Occasionally the causes are someone else's negligence or malignancy. But a large degree is due to the unexpected or unanticipated, without anyone else being intentionally careless or malign. This area came under the heading "An Act of God" and was duly recognized in law. But God has disappeared from our legal system. The only authority that is recognized is Caesar. Anything that ever happens is someone else's fault, and is actionable.

The laws of Caesar stipulate that any injury must be compensated - even where no culpable person can be found. For this to happen, any form of human activity must now be insured. This is so even where those wishing to assemble don't want insurance and are prepared to take some risk for the benefits of voluntary, free assembly. Insurance is compulsory, and if you can't pay, you can't play. There were always some provision in the law for negligence. A publican whose beer was toxic could have his licence removed. A race-course required a barrier between the track and the audience - and usually this was provided without law. But a large area of injury came within the province of "Acts of God", wherein it was sensibly recognized that not all risks and situations could be anticipated.

All humans who enjoy freedoms must also foresee some risks, and bear ultimate responsibility for their actions. It was also recognized that judges and juries were never infallible, and that there were certain circumstances where fair judgment was beyond human capability, and that many injuries were beyond the apportionment of blame. This large and indefinable area was termed "Acts of God". All that has gone. Caesar (the State) is now supreme and rampant. The protection it promises to all has no bounds. But for it to be exercised it must be obeyed. Everyone, it says, is entitled to compensation for anything - even when it is the victim's fault. Therefore, any form of activity must pay compulsory insurance. And in this one provision free assembly is put at enormous risk.

There was a time when, if you were hit on the head by a golf ball, or smitten in the crown by a Bradman six, it was just bad luck or an "Act of God" (not quite the same as the "immortal Don"). If you slipped and fell down a stair, or cut yourself breaking into someone else's house it was, as like or not, your own fault. But now we're all 'victims' and the result is an unhealthy 'compensation-culture' that threatens us all. Lawyers advertise for customers who might have the slightest claim for a compensation handout. People even think twice about helping someone else in trouble lest they make a mistake that might be actionable.

The premiums paid by doctors in insurance for claims that might not arrive for a decade are obscene - and have to be included in their charges, which put the services of private medicine beyond the reach of most. The smallest church meeting in a lowly hall once a week is now forced to pay an insurance premium which amounts annually to $1,000 or more. Those attending then meditate on the "Feeding of the Five Thousand" by our Lord, never asking whether the Pharisees had demanded compulsory insurance for such a gathering, or whether the disciples had a permit and public liability insurance for food distribution! Did the crowd on Palm Sunday have insurance for a public gathering? Had Pontius Pilate issued a licence for the gathering at Pentecost? And did Jesus carry indemnity for those He healed?

Today's churches seem to have no complaint about rendering to Caesar what really belongs to God before their services The modern insurance company is having a field day. The people have to pay their insurance tribute whether they like it or not. If they say they prefer to rely on their faith in God, there is no provision for such an attitude in Caesar's mountainous laws.

Politicians wring their hands. They know there is a back-lash in the community against the closure of so many functions and events. They wrangle with insurance companies, and try to start government insurance schemes that will mitigate the burden to some degree. But they don't challenge the basic premise under which they are operating - that they have allowed Caesar to intrude into areas that properly belong to God.

The answer is to get back to basic principles. Compulsory insurance is wrong. No matter how well intended, it is an attack on freedom. Governments should advise and warn. But they should not compel - not in this area, at any rate. And they should move to correct the current distortion in compensation. Not all wrongs can be righted by Caesar without creating more problems than it has solved. The old adage "The Government big enough to give you everything you want, is also big enough to take everything you've got." All this is but one more example of the evils of the Welfare State.

AUSTRALIAN CHRISTIAN LOBBY

We now have a body in Australia called the "Australian Christian Lobby". Led by a former Army Brigadier, Jim Wallace, who resigned his commission and his career to head the new lobby, it starts with the healthy recognition that laws from government are the concern of Christians and the Church. A process has been established to lobby politicians with the fact there is a legitimate Christian point of view that needs to be taken into account when legislation is contemplated. This point of view is shared with many who are not churchgoers.

On August 8 and 9 the Australian Christian Lobby is holding a conference in Parliament House, Brisbane.
The theme is "THE LAW, THE CHURCH, THE STATE"
It is a long time since anything so encouraging took place in Australia. Among others who will be addressing the Conference are three politicians - Mrs Liz Cunningham, Independent State Member in Queensland; Mr Kevin Rudd, Labor Federal spokesman on Foreign Affairs, and De-Anne Kelly, National Party Federal member. Speakers also include barristers and lawyers, and a number of pastors. It is to be greatly hoped that topics will go past those which have so preoccupied churches in the last 40 years, which have stopped at abortion and family issues.

The whole gamut of Common Law, the development of Parliament itself, and, most urgently, Finance, Technology, Full Employment, Usury, the Just Price, Banking and Distribution are essential areas of concern for the Christian church. We have no idea whether such issues will be discussed. The Australian Christian Lobby has a long way to go. The right of free assembly could with benefit be considered. But it has made a start.
(Address: The Australian Christian Lobby, P.O. Box 3266, Sunnybank South, Qld. 4109)

THE IRAQ SAGA GRINDS ON

Latest news is that US troops in Iraq are complaining that they want to go home. Despite the protestations of Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's Secretary of Defence, one military leader on the ground in Iraq is emphatic that what has now developed is classic guerilla war. Against such, American troops have no training and are in an invidious position. There is no way of telling who is friend and foe. There is no way of restricting the number of weapons in circulation. Every attack on American troops feeds the thirst for vengeance of those who suffered the bombing.

On top of this, both Americans and Iraqis are now faced with the effect of the massive use of Depleted Uranium ammunition. This devastated those affected after the first Gulf War. Hideous deformities, cancers and other diseases have struck Gulf War veterans and Iraqi civilians up to 10 years after the war. Enormous efforts have been made to stop the accumulating evidence from becoming public. Now it transpires as much as ten times Depleted Uranium as in the First Gulf War has been used in the latest bombardment. Some say the implications are 'catastrophic'. The radiation effects are being encountered by US troops on patrol every day, from wrecked tanks and buildings that still litter the area, each oozing deadly radiation in the form of toxic dust.
(See the July issue of The New Times Survey, due out shortly, containing two chilling articles on Depleted Uranium - $5 posted from The Heritage Bookshop, Box 1052 J, GPO Melbourne, 3001)

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

"Just before the war, when the WMD issue lost traction, a humanitarian argument was suddenly invoked by those who until then had never shown concern for the welfare of the Iraqi people. WMD have still not been found in Iraq, so the discovery of mass graves is now said to retrospectively legitimate the war. It's a tempting digression, as long as no one asks whether they had been dug when Saddam was an ally of the West in the 1980s. Or how many of those buried there were incited to rebel against Saddam by George Bush's father in 1991, only to be cruelly betrayed by Washington.

Mark Twain identified in 1917 the problem we are now experiencing: "The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
Taken from an article by Mr. Scott Burchill, posted on the Internet. Mr. Burchill lectures in international relations at Deakin University.
Email: burchill@deakin.edu.au

SUFFICIENT THE DAY THE EVIL THEREOF

by Betty Luks:
The flare-up of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV) over the likely screening of David Irving's video had me rather puzzled. Surely such a furore, as the one whipped up by them, would lead to the promotion of it rather than keeping the public interest to a minimum. More and more people would be curious to know what all the fuss was about and go along to the screening to determine for themselves.
After the theatre owner had "pulled the plug" on the showing, Dvir Abramovich The Australian Jewish News 18th July 2003, took the general public and politicians to task for not also protesting. "Somewhere along the line, I missed the storm of rebuttals and denunciations from the general public and politicians. In one sense, I thank Wolstencroft for reminding us that it is time for everyone (Jews and non-Jews) to reassess our standards, to reflect on the values that guide us".

To reassess 'our' standards we would need to determine what the standards are:
For Jews and non-Jews to "reassess standards", we would need to, not only "reflect on the values that guide us", we would need to be quite clear as to what are those values which "guide us"!

Judge ruled commentary presented to him was 'quite bland':
After all, the deputy president of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal refused the JCCV's application for an injunction against the screening, determining Irving's comments did not constitute racial vilification and in fact, he determined, the commentary presented to him was "quite bland." This included references to "traditional enemies" and "dining out on the Holocaust" and to "the testimony of Holocaust survivors being a matter of psychological or psychiatric interpretation." (The Age 8th July 2003.)

What then do these people mean?
What do they mean when they refer to "the Holocaust? Are they referring to the number of Jews killed during WW2? Or is the concern more to do with the fact that Jews, as an ethnic, racial group, were, starved, maimed, tortured and murdered rather than the numbers? Or both?
The twentieth century was (and now the twenty first) the most violent in recorded human history and Hitler's reign of terror waged against the Jewish communities (as well as other communities and nations), was far outweighed by the scope of the terror machines of the barbarous, bloodthirsty Communist regimes. It has touched - and continues to do so - the lives of at least one third of humanity on four continents.

All would have to agree on what values and standards:
But, for Jews and non-Jews to "reassess" standards, and "reflect" on the values, they would have to agree on the standards and values that guide them. Standards and values take us into the realm of religious beliefs; that is, the set of beliefs which guides an individual, a community, or a nation. A set of beliefs may encompass a belief in the supernatural and a Deity, but it may not.

To justify their actions against fellow human beings, it was necessary for communists to proclaim the victims were not human beings, merely 'matter in motion'. We now know, time and again the focus of terror was (and is) less on individuals than on groups of people - ethnic, racial and national.
The present dictator of Zimbabwe, Marxist Robert Mugabe, targets victims from both ethnic and racial groups; other Zimbabwean African tribes and the white population.
Atheistic communists continue to apply their 'set of beliefs' and the death toll keeps mounting: 25 million human beings in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on. Not only are the crimes of Communism 'against humanity', but "their crimes were (and are) against national and universal culture, from Stalin's destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescu's levelling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the wide-scale devastation visited on the Chinese culture by Mao's Red Guards." (The Black Book of Communism).The numbers of people tortured, brutalized, oppressed, murdered, under Soviet Communism alone would far surpass the numbers of Jews who suffered the same fate.

As stated in "The Black Book of Communism":
"Murder is murder whatever the ideological motivation and this is undeniably true for the equally dead victims of both Nazism and Communism - whatever their ethnic, religious or racial mix. Both systems massacred their victims not for what they did, (such as resisting the regime) but for who they were, whether Jews or kulaks."
For those readers who have the stomach, "The Black Book of Communism: crimes, terror, repression" catalogues and analyses the crimes over the last seventy years.

Further reading:
Rulers of Russia: Just as Americans are now becoming aware of the Zionist cabal surrounding their President, George Bush, the Reverend Denis Fahey first revealed, in 1936, to an unbelieving western world, the part played by Jews in the Soviet tyranny.
Uprising-One Nation's Nightmare: David Irving documents what really happened during the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, when the people rose up against their Soviet masters.
Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler: In 1976 Professor Antony Sutton proved World War II was not only well planned, it was also extremely profitable - for a select group of financial traders.
Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution: Professor Sutton's 1981 research concentrated on the role Morgan banking executives played in funneling illegal Bolshevik gold into the U.S. and wrote of the 'closet socialism' of leading businessmen who paraded publicly as champions of free enterprise. In this book, Sutton reproduces a cartoon first published by Robert Minor in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1911) featuring Karl Marx surrounded by an appreciative audience of Wall Street financiers.

All books are available from the League Book Services. Send for a catalogue or look up the full range of books on our website: www.alor.org/

QUAGMIRE ALERT (Part Two)

Permanent chaos in Afghanistan
And then there's that messy business in Afghanistan where the situation has atrophied into permanent chaos. President Hamid Karzai is basically a captive in Kabul while warlords and their well-armed militias control much of the countryside; intermittent U.S. patrols net a Taliban remnant here and there as well as an occasional American casualty; aide money is scarce and no one is clear on how it's being spent; and U.S. cluster bomblets continue to scatter the body parts of Afghan civilians around the landscape.

Come clean on Iraq
The Senators visiting Iraq weren't the only folks counselling the president on the mess in Iraq. Perhaps the weirdest bit of advice came from John Lott Jr., the now-discredited resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Lott, who believes the American people would be safer if we all are armed, suggested that trying to force Iraqis to turn in their guns was a mistake.

A monumental 'bog up'
Lott asks:
"Is it really clear that our soldiers are better off by attempting to disarm Iraqi citizens? ... If guns are banned, who would turn them in? Presumably the most law-abiding citizens -- not the terrorists and Ba'ath Party members whom our troops should be concerned about."
Guns don't kill U.S. soldiers, bad Iraqis do.
"There is no longer any way to tap dance around the responsibility of the administration for what more and more looks like a monumental bog up," Thomas Houlahan told United Press International in late June. Houlahan is a former paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division and staff officer with the 18th Airborne Corps, and is currently the Washington-based director of a military assessment program for James Madison University.

The CFR's 'serious' advice
For 'serious' advice, you can turn to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) -- the prestigious establishment foreign policy outfit -- which recently cranked out a policy paper suggesting ways to reverse the current downward spiral in Iraq.
Candidly admitting that the administration's post-war policy for Iraq has been a disappointment, former UN Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering and former Defense and Energy Secretary James R. Schlesinger, the co-chairs of CFR's Independent Task Force on post-war Iraq, recommend that President Bush give a "major address" to the nation and outline the U.S.'s long-term goals and objectives in Iraq. The president needs to explain to the American people "the importance of seeing the task through, as well as the costs and risks of U.S. engagement in postwar Iraq," they write.

"So much of the future effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, will turn on whether we can help Iraqis to a better future and whether others around the world see this is happening," Pickering and Schlesinger write in a paper called "Chair's Update," which is an addendum to the Task Force's.

CFR's Independent Task Force report "Iraq: the Day After" - a chilling read
Pickering and Schlesinger synthesize and update a series of recommendations that came from a late May meeting of the Task Force. They focus on a broad range of policy areas that are being either overlooked, mishandled or insufficiently dealt with by the administration. Included in their analysis are suggestions that the US: "Develop a clearer political vision and strategy"; "Employ a wiser approach to communicating with the Iraqi people"; "Promote security and the rule of law"; "Improve management and operations in the oil industry"; "Share the burden with international partners"; and "Prepare for the next peace stabilization and reconstruction challenge after Iraq."

In light of Bush's glaring post-war policy failures, the fact that Pickering and Schlesinger suggest that the US needs to get on the right track so that it will not jeopardize or inhibit the preparation "for the next peace stabilization and reconstruction challenge," is chilling. That these folks are still thinking about future interventions and invasions might be the most startling part of their entire report. (emphasis added).

And in a move that is guaranteed to stir up more discontent
On June 28, the Washington Post reported that "U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders."
WorkingForChange: https://www.workingforchange.com

BASIC FUND

WEST AUSTRALIAN STATE WEEKEND

SYDNEY CONSERVATIVE SPEAKERS' CLUB

The next gathering of the SCSC will take place on Thursday 31st July commencing at 7.30pm. The venue is the Lithuanian Club, 10 East Terrace, Bankstown and it is situated only 600 metres from the Bankstown Railway Station.
Guest speaker is Mr. David Hooper and his subject is: "Britain, the United States, the U.N. Org. and Palestine". As a previous speaker to the Club, members will appreciate another talk by this gifted speaker. Books will be available for sale and while the cost of attendance is $4, bring a friend for the first time and attendance is free.

Date for your diary: 28th August is the Annual General Meeting, followed by two brief talks. To celebrate the 30th year of the SCSC, Roy Gustard will present a short history of the Club followed by Maurice Shaya on Afghanistan.

UNITED SETTLERS ASSOCIATION (UKSA)

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