Hear the shorter radio-version: here.
So, in case you haven’t heard a Calgary pastor kicked a bunch of Canadian armed do-gooders out of the church he pastors and it, like other high-profile run-ins between non-psychotic Canadian citizens and the Canadian government, has been causing people to wonder if maybe, perhaps, the Canadian government has too much power…
You can read about it here but the funny thing is that the kind and gentle journo ends on a slightly hopeful note:
”There’s got to be a better way. It needs to be said because it does feel that things are escalating there because this is the same pastor who has had conflict with police over him feeding the homeless in Calgary during this pandemic.
“I am trying to stop suicides and help people in despair,” said Pawlowski. “I just want to be left alone. I just want to be able to do my job to try to help people and save lives.”
The authorities just want him to follow the provincial laws.
Perhaps now that Easter is over, they can sit down together away from a place of worship and talk about it with no guns and no names called?”
Ahhh, the sweet, sweet naivete of the naïve. Mr. Joe Warmington of the Toronto Sun wants to know why the Calgary Police can’t just sit down and talk politely with the pastor? Because they don’t want to. Because they want to invade people’s homes and private businesses and houses of worship and display force.
Totalitarians love shows of force. Bullies and thugs LOVE shows of force. Secret Police love busting in and whisking people away. They love random surprise arrests because you’ve been denounced. Brothers and sisters, police – you know about police: men with guns and the right to use them and rob you of your civil liberties – police showed up prepared to arrest Pastor Powlowski because he was denounced by some good little fascist whose empty bitter little heart couldn’t stand that somewhere out there someone was doing something they didn’t like. And so the police showed up.
But, unlike the vast majority of people who are cowards and who just roll over like beaten-hounds, Pastor Powlowski didn’t just roll over. He told them to show up with a warrant. He told them to leave and he called them “Nazis”, “gestapo”, and Communists”. And he was right to – not because the Calgary police believe in the tenets of National Socialism, and not because of a moral equivalency between church shutdowns and the holocaust, but because they are acting how the German Secret Police did – they are enforcing arbitrary and evil laws as naked shows of force. They are controlling people’s lives for no other reason than to control them!
These are the O’Briens of the world. If you’ve never read 1984 or you don’t remember, this is the crucial part of the whole book — when O’Brien reveals the real motivation of the totalitarian:
“Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak,” he added as Winston remained silent.
‘You are ruling over us for our own good,” he said feebly, “You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore –”
He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O’Brien had pushed the the dial up to thirty-five.
“That was stupid, Winston, stupid!” he said. “You should know better than to say a thing like that.” He pulled the lever back and continued:
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. “What pure power means you will understand presently are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing- All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture, Tie object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
…
“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”
Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.
“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. D° begin to see, then, what kind of world, we are: creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined, world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward. More pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no employment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever.”
What Orwell saw and understood and tried to tell us through O’Brien in 1984 is that people who long for power don’t want to make your lives better – they may lie to themselves to hide their real passion from themselves, but the power-hungry want power because they want power. The power-hungry want to have power over others because they delight in having power over others. Power is not a means to an end it is the end in itself.
Humiliation, shaming, harassment, wreck, and ruin, these are not unfortunate side-effects of having power – these are the entire point of power for the Godless! The godless, when they get power, they get what they want. Again, they may deceive themselves into thinking that they want to make people’s lives better, or they want to order society. But they don’t – what they want is to control other people – to reduce them to cringing, subservient, objects because dominating another personality is the driving force behind the power-hungry.
God IS power. God doesn’t seek power, He IS power, and all power and authority come from Him. But God does not exercise power like Satan and his children do. God exercises power to make all creatures like Himself. He wants to eternally lift up and invite-in. God wants to expand the community of the Trinity. Satan does not wish to share power, or enjoy community. He doesn’t want fellowship. He wants slaves.
God wants to take slaves and make them sons; Satan wants to make his sons his slaves. God is eternally lifting-up; Satan is eternally stomping-down. And Orwell saw that – or at least he saw that in humanity. Orwell saw that what really, deep-down, underneath it all, what motivates the power-hungry is power-itself – the insatiable desire to dominate another person.
Not to kill. Killing is a domination that comes once and then is over. Forcing people to live in a world of constant, unceasing, known lies and humiliations – that’s domination. But making people believe lies – making people believe things that are patently, and obviously, and demonstrably false – that’s power, that can be exercised and exulted in every moment of every day.
The power-hungry in the Canadian government wish to rejoice in their own power by forcing people to wear a mask. And wearing a mask is a little thing. It’s just such a tiny little thing, and it MIGHT protect people, so why not just give in, right? That’s what everybody thinks.
Except here’s the problem – tell me why we shouldn’t wear a mask for all of cold and flu season? Why not wear it all the time? I mean, nobody KNOWS what communicable diseases they, themselves are carrying, and you surely have no clue what illnesses the people around you are spreading! Why not mask up every moment of every day? Why not make it a Federal Law? Why not? If you’re a pro-masker, if you think that forcing people to wear masks in public, is a legitimate exercise of government power, then you have no reason for it to stop now! There’s no rational or reasonable end-point.
If you advocated the school lock-downs, then you have no room to reject school lock-downs for the flu…more kids die of the flu than Covid, that’s irrefutable.
And while we’re giving these unelected and unaccountable health agencies plenary power over our social and economic lives, why not expand their powers – why are they limited to the ‘Rona? Why can’t they prevent us from doing anything they think is a risk to public health – I mean, we need to trust the science guys, because we believe science.
And why not have vaccine passports?! And why limit it to Covid vaccines? Why not passports on your voting record, because if you vote for the wrong kinds of people you’re a racist and racism is a public health crisis! Maybe you need a psych evaluation every 3 months and you can only get a psych-clearance passport if you show up at some bureaucrat’s office every 90 days…I mean we have to stop mass-shootings, and how else but to know people’s mental-health status – guys this is a public health emergency!
And maybe we should have a passport that gets stamped once a week after all your social-media posts, public and private are thoroughly reviewed by some government functionary who will determine if you hold any dangerous thoughts or beliefs.
Why not have people with dangerous thoughts and beliefs, why not have them sent to a camp where they can be re-educated? I mean, having people spreading dangerous views is unhealthy for society. So if we care about public health we can’t stop at flattening the cure, we have to slow the spread, and we have to wait for the cure, and now we have to wait…for what? I don’t know, but someday, if we’re good boys and girls, the High Priest of Science will tell us that Science has spoken and decreed that the great god Science has been appeased: our ablutions were pleasing, our supplications were heard, our oblations were accepted, and we may now go back to our lives…for now.
Why not? Where’s the logical end-point? There is none. We’ve been lied to over and over and over, and people have been frightened and cowed into submission, and all the pathetic gestapo wannabes are scurrying to curry favor with the Komisars by denouncing their neighbors so maybe they can earn a few more social-credits. The Covid panic is a lie. It’s a scam. Yes, Covid is a real disease. Yes, Covid is very dangerous for certain groups of people. Yes, the media and government ran a scare campaign for over a year and used it to seize power and condition people into compliance and create 10s of Trillions of dollars of debt. Yes, mask-mandates are unscientific, obtuse, abstruse, abstract, and absurd. Yes, the people in public health are ruling by whim and caprice.
I’ve said it many, many times, but I’ll say it again: Covid is real; Covid is deadly for certain kinds of people; but for a huge number of people it isn’t. And none of this makes any sense – why have the lockdowns? To protect the vulnerable! Well, why can’t the vulnerable just stay home if they want to and let other people do what they want? Because we can’t let hospitals get overrun – except hospitals aren’t overrun. All this was, from the people in power was either Governors being bullied into doing trampling civil rights because they were afraid of the press…and shame on them. OR it was a naked power-grab…and shame on them!
And yes, I’m mad. I’m mad because I have elderly members of my church who don’t come and worship and don’t receive the sacraments and don’t fellowship with believers because they’re afraid. I talked to one dear woman this morning. And I love this woman. But she won’t come to church because she’s scared. She’s had the vaccine! Both doses…weeks ago! I asked her what has to happen for her to not be scared – and she told me she didn’t know. She has been frightened into missing out on more than a year of worshipping God with her brothers and sisters because the power-hungry saw some power they wanted and they grabbed it.
Brothers and sisters, my dear Christian brothers and sisters. We need to stop living in fear. Let me let you in on a little secret and believe me when I say that I say this with all the love and compassion and grace I can muster. You’re going to die. You will die. And part of being a Christian – in fact, a thing Jesus COMMANDS us to do, is to consider how we’ll die. Will we die courageously or cowardly? Now look, I know that people are afraid. I know that some people’s fears have some justifications. But if a Covid will keep you out of church after you’ve been vaccinated, then the secret police will too. If anything that endangers our life is viewed as a legitimate reason to not worship, then worship in America isn’t dying it’s dead.
I know that there’s a difference between Covid and persecution. I also know that the Covid power-grab was all about conditioning people into cowardice. There not the same thing, but it WILL be the same method. When the government comes to shut down your church – like is happening in Canada – if you kowtowed and went against your conscience because of Covid, you’ll kowtow and betray your conscience when the coppers come.
And friends, believe me when I say I know how angry some of you are at me – nobody likes to be called a coward – I don’t particularly like calling people cowards because I’m a coward and I don’t want people to not like me. But I have to say what I believe to be true. I have to say that if we choose to love our lives and the things of this world more than serving God the Church in this country has no future.
In closing let me say that only you know whether you acted in good faith or if you were a coward or worse a power-hungry thug, or worse a cringing denouncer. Only you know. And maybe you don’t even know – maybe only God knows; the human heart is a mystery even to ourselves. Maybe you need to get on your knees and ask God to reveal your own heart to you.
I won’t be your conscience; I can’t! But I will tell you that you’ll have to give an account someday. As will I. And I seek, by God’s grace to quit myself in such a way that I will be rewarded as a conqueror and a good and faithful servant who’s laid up treasure in heaven and not as one saved as one out of a fire with no crowns to cast before the feet of my Lord – or even worse, as the man who buried his talent. Only you know whether you acted in good faith and sought to do what was right, or whether you were bullied into cowardice, or evilly sought power – and only you will have to answer for yourself. I pray that we all learn to grow a little more courageous, because the times that are coming are going to demand them.