THE FIRST EASTER

by Jeremy Lee
The normal crowds of pilgrims are missing in Jerusalem this year, kept away by the violence and terror in that blood-soaked city. Stones rattle against armour-plate, and the hatred between oppressors and oppressed seethes. War throughout the Middle East looks the likely outcome, as any sort of mediation vanishes beneath the smog of hypocrisy and vested interests.

Similarly, hatred seethed in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, as Christ was scourged and led to execution by crucifixion on Golgotha. The last to stay with Him were three women; all the rest had fled in terror. Yet three days later the news that changed the world began to spread, and three words transformed the centuries since then - "He Is Risen!"

Bukharin, one of Lenin's henchmen in the Bolshevik Revolution, is reputed to have addressed a mass meeting in the USSR on "atheism" in the 'thirties. At the conclusion of his lecture he asked for questions. After a full minute of profound silence an elderly man approached the dais. Turning to the audience he waited a studied moment, and then exclaimed "He Is Risen!" The whole audience rose as one, thundering back, "He is Risen indeed!"

On June 2nd, 1979, Karol Wojtyla, recently-elected Pope, touched down at Okecie, Warsaw's airport, in his home country of Poland. Poland had attempted to obliterate all faith and belief since the communist takeover in 1945, almost 35 years earlier. As he led 200,000 Poles in worship that after-noon, the occasion culminated dramatically: "... a spirit of pandemonium began to surface, lapping outward from the centre to the furthest edges of the great crowd. A great chant - a kind of hunger cry on behalf of millions - rose up: "We want God! We want God! We want God!...." ("The Keys of This Blood" Malachi Martin.). The attendance at Mass on the day of his departure from Poland was over one million people.

We might ponder on the fact that the atheistic force of Money (Mammon) is now moving relentlessly for world dominion. But Truth is not mocked. Humanity has a soul, which struggles irresistibly towards the Light, no matter what barriers are placed in the way. The culmination of Easter is the Resurrection.

"GET BIG OR GET OUT"

The words coined by former Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the National Party Doug Anthony at the beginning of the 'seventies, which accelerated the destruction of rural Australia, have taken on a while new meaning. A special supplement in The Australian (12/4/01) on the subject of Mergers and Acquisitions, was headed PRESSURE TO GET BIG OR GET OUT.

It pointed out: " .... the number of M & A deals in Australia rose 46 per cent to a record 453 in calendar year 2000 .... A total of $24.9 billion in assets changed hands, a 123 percent increase over the year before. All eyes are now on the $10 billion bid by Royal Dutch Shell for Woodside Petroleum, a case that has provoked intense political debate and is still waiting approval by the Foreign Investment Review Board ...."

Already 2001 looks like creating another record. Australia's one-time icon - once called "The Big Australian" - has merged with the UK's Billiton, a disastrous move which Prime Minister Howard tried to paint white. The resulting multinational, with its head office overseas, will become the second biggest mining company in the world. The takeover was worth $57 billion.
Australia's Cable & Wireless Optus Wireless is set to merge with Singapore Telecommunications in a $17 billion deal.

Mathew Grounds, managing director of corporate finance at UBS Warburg said, in the same article: ".... We may find in a couple of years that the world market consists of only a few players, of which BHP-Billiton will be one. And a similar thing could apply to telcoes. So these sorts of deal add pressure for others in the sector to do similar deals in order to stay competitive .... So you've got this strange situation where companies are essentially foreign in terms of their major source of revenues, foreign in terms of their shareholder base and yet they are operating out of Sydney and Melbourne ..." Is all this simply because Bigger is Better, more efficient, with better service for consumers? Not a bit of it.

John Macleay, in an accompanying article, quoted KPMG's Global Research Report on Mergers & Acquisitions: " .... The report shows that although annual global merger and acquisition transactions are running at more than $US2.2 trillion ($4.5 trillion), 83 percent of mergers are unsuccessful when judged by whether they add shareholder value....." Then why do they do it? It's the religion of power, finance and monopoly, with ego added in. The combination of these is enough to destroy the world.

POOR NATIONS' DEBT STING

THAT WHICH IS INCOMPATIBLE

by Betty Luks
Readers were asked to send in their submissions to the Bracks' Victorian Government with comments on the proposed "Racial and Religious Tolerance" legislation. The League made its own submission and has received a response from Premier Bracks' Assistant Minister John Pandazopoulos in which he states: "In relation to your comments regarding freedom of speech the Victorian Government fully endorses the view that freedom of speech is central to democracy and in no way seeks to limit the freedom of Victorians to debate social, political or religious matters. The proposed legislation aims to allow Victorians to practise their faith and culture freely. It is not the intention of the legislation to stop people, including Christians, from celebrating their religion or to live their faith in the way they choose but rather to protect such rights. The proposed legislation will recognise freedom of speech and the responsibility carried by it. It will uphold the right of all people to express their opinions and engage in open public debate made in good faith but it will make unlawful serious and harmful abuse."

What we can expect to become politically 'unacceptable' and 'unlawful' will become clearer as the one-worlders push for further and further control over the lives, speech, thoughts and emotions of freedom-loving people everywhere. Look at what has happened in Canada as reported to us by the Canadian Intelligence Service.

The SwissAir plane crash in Nova Scotia Canada
The Canadian Federal Government arranged a Memorial at a point near to the crash, ministers of several religions were asked to take part... two Christians, a Rabbi, a Native Canadian and a Muslim. Orders came from the Canadian Prime Minister's Office that the name of Jesus was not to be used in the service and no New Testament readings would be allowed. No restrictions were imposed on the other religious representatives. The Rabbi read from the Torah, and the Muslim from the Koran. (Shame on the Christian Ministers for bowing to such demands!)

Gideon Bible people
A small group of Moslem parents demanded removal of the Gideon Bible people from the school grounds because they might influence their children against the parents' wishes. Their demands were granted, the Gideons were denied access to the Christian children as well as to others who might have been interested in receiving a Bible.

The punch line is
This same group of Moslem parents was then allowed to explain their religious practices to students. In another incident at the same school, an aboriginal spiritual leader was permitted to regale students with his version of native spirituality, which appeared to the person who relayed what was said as "a mixture of the real thing from their antiquity and Hollywood". Meanwhile, Christianity remains banned!

Truth is no Defence
The Supreme Court of Canada denied leave to appeal in the Zundel (Human Rights) case where the issue simply was whether truth should be a defence to a statement which exposes one to hatred, contempt, or ridicule on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation, etc. In other words, truth is irrelevant if a member of some protected group feels offended by a statement. The Supreme Court of Canada agrees.

Why this attack on Christianity? Why not attack the other religions as well? Part of the answer is contained in Sir David Kelly's summary of the nature of the attack on Western heritage (taken from "The Hungry Sheep"). "Humpty-Dumpty, a pioneer in mass-suggestion, said that 'if I say a thing three times, it is so.' Constant repetition has created the wide-spread acceptance of a picture of the world in which the spiritual East, pacific and tolerant, stands in noble contrast throughout history to the greedy, materialist, machine-minded, intolerant West." (Of course Sir David was writing fifty years ago!...ed)

He refers to the proponents of the different 'pacifist' religions he had observed, such as Gandhi: "Gandhi talked of Ruskin and offered a 'purified religion' including the Bible and the Koran ... but to his own people (he) preached acceptance of their own tradition received from Brahma, including the caste system, idolatry, the Sacred Cow, etc."

And then there was the Japanese Okakura who wrote, "Asia is nothing if not spiritual" whilst Sir David commented that the prisoners of war in his compatriots' camps and jungle roads did not share his opinion.

Universal 'tolerance' and amalgamated religion
He warned us, "Their gospel of universal tolerance and a universal amalgamated religion was essentially dishonest, as their propaganda could only have, and was meant to have, a dissolving influence on the utterly incompatible Christian system..."

The doctrine offered by the leading Indian propagandists and their Western fellow-travellers was a kind of modernised Hindu-Buddhism in a Western form. Referring to the high Indian religion, Sir David wrote, "...Its whole point is to eliminate the personality, which on the contrary is the mainspring of Christianity and the source of all its activity. Western man has wished to exist, ...to develop his personality in harmony with nature, he has gloried in precise thought and action based on it.

All Orientalists agree that the Western system of logic is unknown to them, ...The Western idea of Law does not exist any more than the idea of the free person and the corresponding ideas of a common good, of the permanent power of renewal." "The practical consequences of this profound Oriental pessimism and de-personalisation have been immense... passivity, stagnation and squalor...(and) if life is radically bad and the one goal is escape from personality, there can be no point in seeking justice and social reform..."

Utterly incompatible with Christianity
He went on to say, "None of the great religions keeps such a tenacious hold on the masses as Islam, ..." Therein lies another reason for the preference for other religions to Christianity. Whether it is the pessimism and escape from personality of the Orient or the tenacious hold on the masses of Islam, the 'one-worlders' use these people in the western world to act as a 'dissolving influence' on the utterly incompatible Christian system of religion.

THE FTAA AND THE WTO - THE META-PROGRAM FOR GLOBAL CORPORATE RULE (Continued)

(13) Any public or government intervention in the presupposition and implementation of any and all of principles (1) to (12) in any way is attacked as "an interference in the free market". Any prior cultural, historical, or democratic achievement or institution limiting the systematically life-destructive effects of their unrestricted operation is deplored as "a distortion" or "impediment to market competition", and targeted for elimination by transnational trade and investment instrument. This is a cumulative and always advancing line of demand by endless transnational regulatory "agreements", and it moves across national borders and domains of life like a sustained military campaign in its relentless uniformity of prescriptions to target populations, and its blanket denials of the destructive effects which follow wherever its occupying forces usurp evolved ways of life.

(14) No autonomy of domestic market in any good or service, strategic use of any natural resource or necessity, protected public utility or social sector, product-safety, quality or licensing standard, local procurement practice or grant is consistent with the defined principles of this transnational market regime. All have been and continuously are, therefore, slated for challenge and irreversible elimination by trade prescription or scheduled regulatory assimilation. This is a pattern everywhere documentable, but concealed by corporately financed politicians, the corporate media, and former corporate employees who negotiate the agreements. What remains constant through the cumulative momentum and volume of trade and investment decrees is that every article of tens of thousands is constructed to guarantee that dominantly transnational corporations can exploit and increasingly control domestic economies and public sectors across the world with no curtailing limit permissible in law.

(15) Local, national and global management of the money-demand drivewheels of this system is over 95% controlled by for-profit corporate financial and banking institutions which have covertly appropriated control over almost all government bond issues and investor and consumer lines of credit from government currency creations, national bank loans and state statutory reserves.
With no gold or other non-paper standard remaining to control it, corporate bank and financial leveraging has become effectively limitless, with central bank interest-rate raises in the new regime applied only to decrease workers' rising wages and social-sector spending. This is the always hidden underside of the system's propelling domestic and transnational force, why covert financial deregulation of money-demand supply is the secret to its every advance, and why no deep limit can be drawn against world occupation by corporate financial chicanery until the creation of money demand is constitutionally re-appropriated by public authority as its essential basis of sovereignty and investment in the common interest.

Together these underlying principles of the global market system constitute its fixed and largely unseen meta-structure of perception, understanding and judgement in accordance with which all its policy formation and enforced regulation of societies and economies across the world proceed. There is no principle of "the free market", "investment", "competition", "comparative advantage", "efficiency", "fiscal responsibility", "labour flexibility", "inflation control", "growth", "sustainability", "social welfare", "national prosperity", "justice", "civil society participation", "poverty reduction", or other old or new slogan promulgated by global market institutions and advocates that does not conform to all of (1) through (15) in doctrine and effect.
Whenever it is claimed otherwise, ask for the evidence from any "free trade agreement" on the planet. The response will always be silence, diversion to another topic, and, if the question is pursued publicly, surveillance by the police.

However well placed its hirelings, this mind-locked creed is corporately self-driven and self-referential, and threatens to usurp every level of social and ecological life condition still existing. Given its invasionary past and history, we should not be surprised. Like every Pharaoh of the past, it will topple - the more totalitarian, the more complete the collapse. But remember who advocates for this regime now, for they are agents of the corporate occupation of all of the world's societies and ecosystems by decreed financial and market mechanisms never electorally agreed to by any people on earth."

Note: Western Australia's Stop MAI Coalition sponsors a Yahoo discussion group on corporate globalisation. Join the WA Globalisation Forum (WAGF) by sending a blank email to: WAGF-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

GENERATION WHY??

Leah McLaren, the Globe and Mail's youthful authority on all things hip, writes an in-your-face column each Sunday called "Generation Why". The Sunday before Christmas, Leah attended mass at St. Michael's Roman Catholic Church in Cobourg, Ont., and then wrote about it. When Leah was 12 her paternal grandmother, whom she describes as "a thin-lipped Presbyterian temperance lady", on high holidays would sometimes mutter that it was "about time these children got some God into them", and then Leah and her younger sister would be dragged off to mass; but somehow "nothing ever came of it". What, precisely, her grandmother or Leah herself expected to "come of it", other than, perhaps, a broken heart or a contrite spirit, she does not tell us. But she never afterward went to worship in a church, thereby becoming a true representative of her generation.

Regular church attendance among Canadians aged 15 to 24 has fallen from 34% in 1978 to well below 25% today. On the Sunday before Christmas at St. Michael's, when the young priest ascended the pulpit, his first words were: "Would the owner of a Mazda 626, licence plate number 064 ZSJ, please go out to the parking lot. You've left your lights on." By Ms. McLaren's account that was pretty much the only light shining in or around St. Michael's that particular Sunday. When she got home from mass, her father inquired from behind his newspaper, "How was it?" "It was church," she replied.

What a contrast between the churches of today and the first church two millennia ago! The first church convened not in a building but on a Judaean field, where shepherds huddled together keeping watch over their flocks by night. Celestial light, not the headlights of a Mazda 626, suddenly illuminated them. They heard the voice of angels, not the pleasantries of a young priest! And what the angels said was not the stuff of Christian worship today, but earth-shattering, unforgettable words: "In the city of David a Saviour has been born - the Messiah, the Lord."

It is interesting that all the gospel accounts of that first Christmas are suffused in light; indeed, St. John begins his account with the contrasting images of light and darkness. "All that came to be was alive with his life, and that life was the light of men. ... The light shone in the darkness and the darkness has never been able to put it out." Well, perhaps not, but lately the church has had a fair try at stifling even the faintest light under pap, obscurantism, a rather ghastly bonhomie and trendy drivel.

After the light dawned on the shepherds, wise men (or, since the church now contrives at inclusive language, Maji) followed another light, this time of a star, to the town of Bethlehem in order to present gifts - gold and frankincense and myrrh - to the infant king. It was not, for them, a matter of pounding God into recalcitrant skulls; rather it was the unspeakable privilege of paying homage to the Creator of the universe, taken flesh and dwelling among us. The message of the first Christmas can be summed up in a single word: Emmanuel - God with us.

Poor Leah McLaren. She and her generation have been cheated by a church that has lost its message. A church that no longer much trusts in angel proclamations. When she does go to church, chances are she will hear jokes and badinage, and, if the minister or priest is greatly daring, perhaps a soupcon of moral uplift. Robbed of the transcendent, this generation must settle for the trite.

Nor will Bishop Michael Ingham's "rites for same-sex marriage" fill the void. No wonder three-quarters of Canada's young people stay home. They can hear the same twaddle at school, or from any Government of Canada TV ad ("We're all one. Play fair. Get a flu shot. Don't discriminate"); indeed, they can hear it on AM-radio, and, in only slightly more high-brow accents, on CBC-FM. Be open-minded. Stop smoking. Don't drink and drive. Be happy.

But what if Leah McLaren and her compatriots were to enter a Canadian church and hear proclaimed the first Christmas message? "Fear not, Good news. Great joy. A Saviour. Christ the Lord. God with us." Would the sound system go silent? Would the overhead projector flicker and expire? Would the roof fall in? Would anyone who heard and understood be the same again?

Unfortunately for this generation of young the church has forgotten its message. And most of the church has lost its nerve. It does not wish to give offence. It would rather be nice than prophetic. Leah McLaren concluded her column: "Christian recruiters who persist in trying to make church more accessible to the young by way of up-beat masses and Jesus-loving rock bands have got it all wrong. Young, children, unmarried, urbanites, don't need to start loving God, we need to start fearing God. We need to abandon our reiki sessions and yoga retreats in favour of hymns and hard benches. The church should appeal to our sense of duty, rather than our sense of fun."

How come Leah McLaren can figure that out, and our cardinals and bishops, our ministers and priests, cannot?

Taken from the Canadian Intelligence Service March 2001. The author is Ian Hunter, professor emeritus in the faculty of law at the University of Western Canada and the article first appeared in January 22nd The Report newsmagazine.

BRITAIN IN THE EU

by Antonia Feitz
Britain's traditional freedoms are being swept away like rubbish down a gutter after a storm. One such tradition is that no parliament can bind another one, but EU treaties are irrevocably binding. Yes, under the EU principle of 'acquis communautaire', once any legislation originating in the EU has passed into an individual nation's law it can't be revoked, even by a new government. (www.eurocritic.demon.co.uk/feedback.htm)

Bernard Connolly, who worked as an analyst of European monetary integration in Brussels until he was sacked for criticizing the EU, claims the aim of the Eurocrats in creating the monetary union is to produce a financial crisis in the smaller countries to effectively make them colonies of France and Germany. (www.eurocritic.demon.co.uk/bg-rsrc9.htm).

Referring to Connolly, the Advocate-General of the European Court of Justice recently said that criticism of the EU, its institutions or its chief bureaucrats was akin to blasphemy, and that punishing critics was not an infringement of their free speech. Criticizing the EU and its policies is not only blasphemy, it will eventually be unlawful under Article 51 of the proposed EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

These totalitarian turkeys have no concept of freedom. Our rights are grounded in our God-given human nature. Governments can only protect our rights; they can't grant them. The ultimate source of authority and power is the people themselves, not courts nor governments. Connolly is rightly contemptuous of "Tiny" Blair's delusions of grandeur and his "gutless" government's failure to protect British freedoms, so hard won. The European Commission wants to change Article 7 of the Amsterdam Treaty so as to be able to punish any country that elects to government a party that two-thirds of the EU countries consider a potential threat to European values and principles. So if a nation wants to get out of the EU down the track and elects a nationalist government committed to that cause, too bad. It will be punished.

ADELAIDE FORUM

SYDNEY CONSERVATIVE SPEAKERS' CLUB 2001

Tuesday Evening, April 24th, 2001. Guest speaker: Mr. Kerry Spencer-Salt, B.E., LL.B. (Hons). Subject: "Our Constitutional Legacy" Venue: The Estonian Club, 141 Campbell Street, Sydney. Meeting commences at 7.30pm. The usual excellent supper will be provided. Entrance is $4.00 per person. A wide selection of books will be available for purchase.

Dates for your diary - Sydney CSC: Tuesday, May 29th - Mrs. Betty Luks, National Director, Australian League of Rights. Subject: "Implications of the Racial Vilification Legislation" Tuesday, June 26th - Mr. Graeme Campbell, Founder of Australia First Party Inc. Subject - "Is There a Way Out for Australia?" Tuesday, July 31st - Mr. Ian Murphy. Subject: "The Question of Australia's Defence" Tuesday, August 28th - Annual General Meeting. Guest Speaker: Mr. Welf Herfurth Subject: "The Threat to Freedom and Democracy in Germany Today".

COMING DATES FOR YOUR DIARIES - STATE WEEKENDS

QUEENSLAND: May 26th-27th, 2001, to be held in Toowoomba

WEST AUSTRALIA: August 11th-12th, 2001, to be held in Perth

SOUTH AUSTRALIA: August 18th-19th, 2001, to be held in Adelaide

BOOK - "Quick Poison: Slow Poison" by Kate Short. This is research by an Australian for Australians. After six years Kate brings the results of her exhaustive research into the public view. Farmers take note: She argues that the risk to exports from poison residues could upset the livelihood of many in the rural sector. By letting those affected by pesticides have their say in "Quick Poison: Slow Poison" she presents the human face of the pesticide risk and reveals what has often been a litany of corporate deceit and government inaction. Price: $25.00, $28.00 posted.