Posts
Michael Moore’s new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story” is garnering a lot of media attention and plenty of media praise. In his interviews he reveals his strategy to destroy capitalism and insert socialism. He uses techniques right out of the pages of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. He takes the resentment of the corruption and failures related to Wall Street this past year as a platform to push for radical change.
As Alinsky wrote, the organizer
“must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.”
Moore takes this public anger at Wall Street corruption and jumps the shark to say that the culprit of this evil greed is capitalism itself. For Moore capitalism = greed. Here is one exchange he had on primetime television with Jay Leno:
LENO: Well, it’s interesting in the film. You say capitalism is evil. I think greed is evil, but I think capitalism is OK as long as you, I mean, moderation in all things. I mean, uh, explain.Michael Moore, like Alinsky taught, believes that the end goal is “the radicalization of the middle class”. To get to that goal the organizer must learn “to talk the language of those with whom one is trying to converse.” Use whatever language works and make sure it centers around morality. Moore has chosen two ways of doing that. Instead of calling for socialism by name, he calls for democracy. And to convince people of the morality of it, Moore manipulates the teachings of Jesus in a way that makes Jesus sound like a socialist (without using that word of course). So Moore’s plan of attack is to turn socialism into simply democracy and the values of Jesus.
MOORE: Yeah, well, capitalism, capitalism is actually legalized greed.
Instead of Christianity being the enemy of the left — Alinsky understood that would turn people off as we see with Bill Maher’s work — Moore decides to pervert Christianity as a tool for socialistic propaganda. It’s been tried many times before, but not so often with film.
Here is Moore on Larry King on Wednesday giving his not-so new economic theology:
In this clip notice how he calls capitalism a system that is both “anti-democracy” and also something Jesus would not approve of. Moore says we aren’t a democracy, because we can vote. We are only a democracy and a Judeo-Christian nation if “we come up with a new economic order that is fair”. Of course, all this is a coded and homogenized way of slipping in socialism.
Here is Moore on Countdown with Keith Olbermann:
Notice on left-wing Olbermann he drops almost all pretense that he cares so much about democracy or Christianity (because the regular middle-class that he wishes to radicalize doesn’t watch Olbermann). It’s all anti-Reagan, anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and anti-conservative courts. He even says at the end of the interview that the goal is to see the “people revolting”!
Back on Leno, Moore was talking about democracy and morality:
MOORE: No, not right. It’s wrong. Some things are just wrong. And this capitalist economic system that we have, it might have been right at one point, it’s not right now. And I don’t think we’re ever gonna put the genie back in the bottle. So we need to come up with something new to replace it. And I’m not talking about… This isn’t a debate between capitalism versus socialism.Leftist magazine The Nation (which has often been a proponent of communism) treats the interview on Leno as one of the greatest moments in television history. They claim if you missed that interview you “missed one of those rare moments when the vast wasteland gives way to an oasis of realism.”
LENO: Right.
MOORE: I’m actually suggesting go back to our roots of this country, democracy. What if we had an economy that you and I had a say in? Right now, we all don’t have much of a say in this economy. What if we applied our democratic principles and said, ‘We, the people, have a right to determine how this economy is run.’
Friday on The View, while talking to middle America once again, Michael Moore actually paraphrased the teachings of Jesus multiple times to help make his case for socialism by another name. He has relabeled an old (and false) economic system to look new. How did he come up with it? Does he have a degree in either economics or seminary? No, Moore was a college drop out with no experience with economics, and his only seminary experience was to join a Catholic Seminary after 8th grade. “He admired the Berrigan brothers [radical anti-Vietnam War Catholic priests Daniel Berrigan and Philip Berrigan] and thought that the priesthood was the way to effect social change,” wrote The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar in February 2004. “This resolve lasted only through his first year, though, after the Detroit Tigers made it to the World Series for the first time in Moore’s life and the seminary wouldn’t allow him to watch the games.”
Moore offers old wine in new wineskins. There is nothing new in his attack on capitalism and perversion of New Testament scripture to support socialism. It’s been done for decades. Leftists, communists, socialists, and radicals have attempted to use Jesus as a god of their own socialist image. The only thing new is that Moore is using film and popular television interview shows to push his drivel, and he is attaching it to a concept of “democracy” that sounds like good old fashioned socialism.
I would suggest anyone that starts to fall for Moore’s tactics read Poverty and Wealth: Why Socialism Doesn’t Work. In that book, philosophy and theology professor Ronald Nash breaks down all the false arguments of socialism being the economic system of Jesus and the New Testament. He writes,
“Unfortunately, many Christians act as though the only thing that counts is intention. But when good intentions are not wedded to sound theory, especially sound economic theory, good intentions can result in actions that produce consequences directly opposite to those we planned. This is precisely what has happened in the case of the social policies to help the poor adopted in the United States since 1965.”Nash reveals in his books that people attempting to use Christ for leftist economics have no understanding of basic economics and “use the Bible as a weapon against capitalism.” Some use it to push for a very liberal Democrat form of government, while others “use the Bible to show that God is a Marxist.” And the result has been that such policies meant to help the poor have actually kept them in poverty. Moore, for example, in his interviews uses the idea that our economy is a fixed pie. And the rich take 9 slices and only leave us one. He thinks that isn’t fair. He has a false understanding of free enterprise. In capitalism, that pie exists because of bold free marketeers. And the pie size is not fixed. In fact, the better the entrepreneurs do in creating wealth, the bigger the pie gets for everyone. Moore would rather the government steal the whole pie and then hand it out evenly until there is no more pie left.
Jesus did condemn making wealth your God. And many of the problems we saw in the economy this past year stem from that very problem. However, it is error to then make a jump that Jesus condemned all wealth. He never did. Jesus had great friends and followers who were wealthy (Luke 14:1). He stayed and ate with wealthy people (Luke 11:37). He even was buried in the tomb of a rich man.
Jesus also used parables that told his feelings on wealth. Many of them centered on the call for Christians to use their privately owned wealth as stewards for good things (Luke 12 and 16). He at no times suggests that we give our private wealth to the government, so that they can redistribute it. To make that conclusion from the New Testament is a misrepresentation at best, and in the case of Moore, plain old manipulation.
Moore, we know your strategy. We are calling you out. Instead of making movies trying to convince us all to be radicals like you, why don’t you just share that $50 million plus personal empire you have with the poor of our society. Set an example instead of shoving propaganda.
1 comment:
I'm glad you liked my blog and posted it here. - Paul Cooper
Post a Comment