I am starting today by quoting the author of the Jargon file, Eric Raymond, who is not a friend of the Christian. But he is accurate in his analysis of the current elite: they have become what Stalin would call useful idiots. We will get onto why the Cathedral they built will burn when we get to Malachi, but first a list of their false teaching, their false memes.

In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:

• There is no truth, only competing agendas.
• All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
• There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
• The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
• Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
• The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
• For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
• When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you’ll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom. (The last two items on the list, for example, came to us courtesy of Frantz Fanon. The fourth item is the Baran-Wallerstein “world system” thesis.) Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia.

Now to the prophet. For there is nothing new in all this: it has been said before. Including that God is obsolete. Malachi had to deal with this: his comments are as true then as now.

“Your words have been hard against me, says the LORD. But you say, ‘How have we spoken against you?’ You have said, ‘It is vain to serve God. What is the profit of our keeping his charge or of walking as in mourning before the LORD of hosts? And now we call the arrogant blessed. Evildoers not only prosper but they put God to the test and they escape.’”

Then those who feared the LORD spoke with one another. The LORD paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the LORD and esteemed his name. “They shall be mine, says the LORD of hosts, in the day when I make up my treasured possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him. Then once more you shall see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him.

“For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts.

“Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

(Malachi 3:13-4:6 ESV)

Yes, I am aware that there is a historical fulfilment of this. For John Came, and Christ, and within a generation Israel was no more: the remnant of the nationalist army was dying at Masada and the head priests were being strangled at the end of a Titus’ triumph. Israel was impoverished.

But the observant recovered, and grieve for the temple. For if we measure our success merely with prosperity, and see not truth but agendas there will be no vision. And without the vision the people perish. Here, again, the hatred of those who are named by the almighty is a sign.

Jew-hatred seems most virulent in countries where national extinction is a palpable presence on the horizon, and almost nonexistent in countries confident of their own futures. Anti-Semitism is relatively rare in the United States, India, and China. Hungary among the Western nations is the least likely to succeed, and correspondingly the least hospitable towards Jews. Last year a member of parliament for the Jobbik Party, Zsolt Baráth, revived the 1882 Tiszaeszlár blood libel against Hungary’s Jews — the allegation that Jews slaughtered a 14-year-old girl to obtain blood to make Passover matzos. The Jewish defendants were acquitted of the preposterous charges, but Baráth “claimed the judge had proof of the defendants’ guilt but succumbed to pressure to acquit them to avoid seeing Hungary bankrupted by international financiers,” as the AP reported on April 5, 2012. To the rest of the civilized world, it stamps you indelibly as evil clowns.

Some months before the incident I visited Budapest, a city that seems inhabited by more statues than people. It was built as an imperial capital to rule an area of 25 million people, but now serves a country of fewer than 10 million. It is more mausoleum than metropolis, filled with marble images of long-forgotten heroes of independence battles that soon will pass out of human memory. In some ways, that is a shame. The stuffed carp in aspic with a cherry-and-horseradish sauce served at one of the town’s two surviving kosher restaurants is a revelation to Jews who have suffered with the insipid paste claiming to be gefilte fish. Except for the stuffed carp, Budapest is one of the most depressing venues in the world, a reminder of generations of past suffering and obsession that have come to naught.

The latest Hungarian census shows that more than half of Hungarian families have no children (against a fifth in the United States). A quarter of families have just one child, and just 15% have two. The proportion of dependent elderly rose to 38% from 32.5%. And Hungary’s terrible slide into demographic extinction has just begun.

I have said this before: those who are of faith have kids. It is a good proxy measure for us of the faith as to if a congregation is faithful and the Spirit of God is there: look for children. If they are there, so is the spirit. Christ’s comments that we need to come to faith as if a little child has more levels of meaning as one thinks further about it.

It is our job to be faithful. Not to be rich, not to measure our nation by its GDP. And to not despair.