Jesus Christ Super-Socialist: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 338-341

 

The biggest hurdle atheist and secular groups face is establishing the kind of community that religions have because of their history. Everyone gathers at the place of worship because that’s what people have always done, whether the individuals gathering are really into it or not. It’s just the default practice and the non-religious organizations have to find a way to crack that. Webster begins this section with an attack on Weishaupt’s alleged claim that the Illuminati needed to appeal to those with a “hankering for religion.” This is precisely the problem, but that problem is largely addressed by the actual Illuminati when they adopted some of the practices of the Masons.

Webster is afraid that the people are going to abandon their religion for Socialism. She cites an unnamed “dignitary” of the Church of England who claimed that Jesus would be a Bolshevik had he returned to 1920s England.

If this person said it, I get what they mean. There is a problem that this entire page and a half raises for people like Webster as well as her modern conservative followers—Jesus, the guy from the Bible, didn’t hate poor people and immigrants. In fact, according to him, we should take care of those people, specifically. Jesus would be a Socialist because he was already one before we had the name for it. He fed the poor, had communal property with his followers, and welcomed the social castoffs (immigrants, prostitutes, tax collectors, etc.). That kind of solidarity which crossed class borders is the exact kind of thing that Socialists in the 1920s were preaching.

Modern conservatives don’t like Jesus the person, or Jesus the character; they like Jesus the abstract idea. The abstract idea is how people think of circus peanuts, the marshmallow-ish candy you find at gas stations—you like the idea of them, but no one really likes them. Conservatives hearing the “help the poor” and “shelter the homeless” messages of actual Christianity from the book have to do a very incredible job of ignoring all of the things their god literally said so that they can continue to hate gay people, immigrants, and then vote to remove social programs to help poor people. Webster is absolutely one of these people.

The brings up the trouble in Ireland as proof of the subversion of Christianity and how that has also infected the Catholic Church as well; but then she drops it after a sentence. I think she did this as an attempt to get some kind of Christian solidarity going but even she knew that this was pretty weak so she moved towards Catholicism in general.

Am important historical note: the Catholic church just has a default disapproval of any society that isn’t within their jurisdiction—whether it is the Illuminati of Freemasonry; the church does not approve. When Webster uses the Vatican’s opposition to the Illuminati in Bavaria as proof of something—it’s only proof of the Vatican being consistent. They approved of the suppression of the Templars, they approved of the suppression of the Illuminati, and technically if a Catholic joins a Masonic lodge they can be excommunicated (the most likely penalty is a temporary ban on their ability to receive sacraments). The reasons for these reactions, especially in the first two, are political; and at the former it’s a combination of politics with ideology as a garnish. The Catholic position does not prove what Webster thinks it will prove.

Voltaire once said that if someone can get you to believe the incredible, they can get you to commit the abominable. This statement describes the run that Webster is on right now. She’s set up that the two dominant religions in the UK (Anglicanism and Catholicism) are opposed to the “World Revolution.” She’s then pointed out that these religions are opposed to the “Seed” of the revolution—secret societies. Now she’s going to conclude with why: magic.

What we are made to understand is that not only was there an Illuminati in Bavaria in 1776 but there was also a “cult of Satan” which was probably connected to it and exists in England today (1920s). “The powers exercised by the modern Illuminati are occult powers and range from hypnotism to black magic, which, since the days of the magician Cagliostro, have always formed part of the stock-in-trade of the sect. It is therefore no fantastic theory but the literal truth to say that the present world crisis is a conflict between the powers of good and evil.”

This is just deus ex machina, it’s reversing the phase polarity; she has written herself into a corner that even her dubious sources cannot get her out of, so she uses magic to resolve the situation. The writer who does this is a bad writer; we all know it; she introduces late-stage magic into the story because even though she cannot link all of the different revolutionary actions she claims are the result of a single hand. Those that raised the alarm about the French Revolution being the first act in a larger play were doing so because, it wasn’t the first act, it was the second—the American Revolution was first. Monarchy had seen its day, and the spread of Enlightenment ideas had been proven in North America and then in France. There was no hidden hand spreading it, it just caught on.

The version I’ve been using has this underlined, “Christianity is a beleaguered citadel surrounded by the dark forces which have mustered for the supreme onslaught.”

She’s done this a couple of times: written a really good metaphor so I’m going to give her that credit.

Problematically though, this is all surface with zero substance. As I wrote above people like her prefer “Christianity” in the abstract. Because it serves as the default state for most of Europe and because most people don’t actively think about what it means; you can just say it’s under attack and people will come to your side for defense. My country’s annual “War on Christmas” panic is this—no one can present evidence that there is a war on Christmas, it’s always happening somewhere else. Never near you.

This move is pointless because she hasn’t done enough to link Christianity as an opposition to the “world revolution.” She has done some work talking about the anti-religious fervor of the French Revolutionaries and the Russian Revolutionaries; but that’s it. It may seem like a lot but she has spent way too much time warning about the coming Germans. Where is the anti-Christian movement in Germany? Where was it in the United States? We are to defend Christianity in the abstract but without specifics this is just a rhetorical trick.