Economy

As I ponder the state of the New Zealand economy, I cannot help but see trouble ahead.

• The central bank, realising that it had kept interest rates too low for too long, raised the official cash rate from 0.5% to 4.75% in less than a year, and warned it could as high as 5.5 percent. This is the sharpest increase in New Zealand history. I can’t see how this will not cause economic pain.

  When the interest payments on their mortgages are adjusted to the new level, many people will be shocked by the cost and will struggle to make ends meet.

  Economists assume that interest rises will reduce inflation, but when the rates that businesses pay on their overdrafts and other borrowings will rise sharply. The increased costs will prompt them to raise the prices of the things that they produce and sell, feeding into further inflation. I can’t see how this will not produce severe economic stress, especially in the construction industry.

• People are assuming that the Covid threat is over, but I can’t see how we can avoid another round, possibly with a mutation that is more virulent. (Why would the spiritual powers of evil not push on with such an effective weapon).

I realise that the people of New Zealand are not ready for future pain. They already feel like they have been through more than enough. The politicians are not prepared. They are making big claims in order to win the next election, but none of them have any idea about how to deal with what lies ahead.

The worst thing is that Christians are not prepared either. Christian prophetic leaders are prophesying good times, not preparing God’s people for hard times.

My first thought was that God would not let dark times come if his people are not ready.

But then I realised that he has been squeezed out of New Zealand. Our choices have given a place to the spiritual powers of evil. They have power to set the direction of events in our nation.

Empire of Violence (6) Conclusion

Several things stand out about the ugly truths described in Legacy of Violence.

• While its colonial officers and agents were engaging in evil practices, the British public believed they were engaged in a civilising mission, raising up the backward people of the world.

  Britain imagined herself a uniquely imperial nation, the standard-bearer among peers, the purveyor of the world’s greatest civilising mission, delivering Pan Britannica’s civilizing rule of law that would transform “native children” who were not ready to take their place in the modern world (p.585).

• The atrocities were not a mistake or limited to a few bad people gone rogue. The British government deliberately circulated its officers around from one hotspot to another. They would use the methods developed in one place more intensively in the next place they were sent to bring under control. Practices got worse as time progressed, because the most ruthless officers were sent to another colony where troubles had broken.

• News of the atrocities always leaked back to Britain. Complaints would lead to a formal inquiry of some type. The committee or commission would hear evidence of terrible incidents, but would always decide that the behaviour was reasonable given the circumstances. When it became obvious that the actions of those accused of crimes had been approved and encouraged by officials and ministers at the highest level, the violence and terror would be covered up. This happened again and again throughout the history of the empire.

• The senior colonial officers who were responsible for managing the worst atrocities and perpetrating the worst violence were often rewarded with honours when they returned to Britain.

Empire of Violence (5) Kenya

During the Second World War many Kenyans had helped support the British war effort. When they returned home at the end of the war, there was no land available for them, because the best land had been taken by British settlers, who grew coffee to earn US dollars for the empire.

Across Britain's imperial expanse, another kind of systematic destruction was unfolding in Kenya’s one hundred detention camps. A state of emergency had been declared in October 1952, the crisis had been five years in the making (p.543).

Kenya with its European settler population and policies of land appropriation as well as harsh labour and colour bar laws, was awash in inequities. The 1.5 million Kikuyu who comprised around 20 percent of the colony's population were the hardest hit. Europeans lived on much of their appropriated land. These settlers grew coffee and tea—lucrative cash crops that only white farmers could legally produce—while the Kikuyu toiled under harsh master and servants laws, a hangover from Britain's Victorian era domestic labour laws, which criminalised labour offences.

I can remember the local newspapers being horrified by the group that were referred to as the Mau Maus, but it was really just a freedom movement seeking independence and land reform.

It was the rational response of rural people seeking to understand the enormous socioeconomic and political changes taking place around them while attempting to respond collectively to new and unjust realities. Mau Mau’s overarching objective was land and freedom...

Mau Mau antipathy targeted not only the colony’s European population but also the colonial-appointed African chiefs and their followers who became known broadly as “loyalists”. In the context of the incipient war, the government defined a “loyalist” as someone who actively fought on its side against Mau Mau and who, in turn, received a “loyalist certificate” ensuring franchise rights in local elections as well as economic privileges like trading licenses and preferred access to land. Many loyalists accumulated wealth and power at the expense of the broader Kikuyi community.

The emergency descended into another of the empire’s reprisal and counter reprisal cycles (p.548).

White supremacy had long manifested itself in Kenya through various kinds of rough settler justice, which included public floggings, beating deaths and summary executions. Most whites in Kenya placed Africans at the very bottom of humanity’s hierarchy, but the emergence inflamed the empire’s racism. Settlers and colonial administrators described Mau Mau as “vermin”, “animals” and “barbarians” (p.548).

The political power of Kenya’s twenty-nine thousand European settlers had been institutionalised for decades. The colony’s constitution was orientated around their interests, which were further ensured through their disproportionate number of seats on Kenya’s legislative council (p.549).

The all-out civilian assault began with sweeping arrests and detentions without trial combined with forced removal of Kikuyus who remained in the White Highlands. Colonial officials packed thousands into railcars and lorries and shipped them back to the reserves. In the spring of 1953, the volume of internally displaced people was staggering. In a few months, the government moved over one hundred thousand Kikuyus via transit camps. Many languished with inadequate sanitation, clean water, and rations as officials figured out how to squeeze them back into the over-crowded reserves (p.552).

White and Black agents of empire perpetrated horrific crimes in defence of British rule in Kenya. They used electric shocks and hooked suspects up to car batteries. They tied suspects to vehicle bumpers with just enough rope to drag them to death. They employed burning cigarettes, fire and hot coals. They thrust bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, sticks, and hot eggs up men’s rectums and into women’s vaginas. They crushed bones and teeth; sliced off fingers or their tips; castrated men with specially designed instruments or by beating a suspect’s testicle “till the scrotum burst” according to Anglican Church officials. Some used a kiboko or rhino whip, for beating; others used clubs, fists, and truncheons.

“Bucket fatigue” was a routine practice, as were various forms of human excrement torture. Mau Mau suspects and detainees were forced to clean nightsoil buckets barehanded and run for hours around a compound holding a full night soil bucket aloft, which then spilled over, encrusting the person holding it with faeces and urine (p.556).

In May 1954, Kenya was well on its way to creating the largest archipelago of detention and prison camps in the history of Britain’s empire.

Some never made it to prison. Emergency courts sent 1090 Africans to the gallows, surpassing the number of state executions for any other single conflict in the empires history.

All male detainees officially entered the Pipeline through enormous holding camps. The camp populations quickly exceeded their combined capacity of twenty thousand. White officers shouted “Beat them” to camp guards, who liberally helped themselves to the detainees’ possessions. They forced each detainee to strip down and march through a cattle dip of disinfectant, where several drowned. To those who survived, colonial officials issued diaphanous schoolboy uniforms (p.559).

In June 1954, with the Pipeline pushed beyond capacity, the War council decided to introduce a resettlement policy. The Kikuyu population was subject to collective punishments and fines as well as forced labour and other ongoing detention camp policies and practices. The Kenya government called it villagisation. Its officials forced the Kikuyu, who traditionally lived in scattered homesteads, into 804 villages that consisted of 230,000 huts.

Villagisation took less than eighteen months. During that time, Kenyan officials forcibly relocated 1,040,899 Kikuyus within the reserves and corralled an unrecorded number of squatters into private detention centres, located on Europeans estates, where Kenya’s settlers and security forces surveilled, punished and exacted labour from Kikuyu squatters using methods similar to those being deployed in the new Kikuyu reservation villages. Whereas the labour lines war less tightly controlled, barbed wire, spiked trenches , and twenty-four-hour guards surrounded the “emergency villages” that saw little formal rehabilitation on offer (p.562).

The villages became detention camps in all but name. When their numbers were combined with the estimated 140,000 to 230,000 detainees who passed through Pipeline, the British government had managed by the end of 1955 to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population—a feat that was unprecedented in the empire save for the Chinese population in Malaya.

Life in the Kikuyu reserves became unbearable. One person remembered, “we had not been given any warning beforehand that our houses were going to be burned. No one in the whole ridge knew that we were to move. The police just came one day and drove everyone out of their homes, while the home guards burned the houses right behind us... Everything, even our clothes were burned down... During the move I got separated from my children, and I could not trace them. During the whole night I could hear a lot of shooting and screaming. I cried the whole night, knowing that my children were gone (p.564).

Empire of Violence (4) Malaya

Following the end of World War 2, problems emerged in the Federation of Malaya. I remember these troubles, but we were only told one side of the story, and we never heard about the terrible atrocities committed by the British government. Chinese people had migrated to Malay for more than a hundred years. When the Japanese overran Malaya many Chinese went into the jungle and fought a guerrilla war against them.

Legacy of Violence explains that when the war ended, the Chinese who had fought against the Japanese found there was no land available for them. The best land had been turned into rubber plantations. The British sold rubber grown in Malaya to the United States to earn desperately needed dollars. Then plantation owners wanted cheap labour, whereas the Chinese squatted on land near the edge of the jungle.

In 1948, while Britain suffered from an overall $1.8 billion deficit. Malaya bought in $170 million, followed by the Gold Coast at $47.5 million, the Gambia at $24.5 million and Ceylon at $23 million. Malaya was the empire’s cash cow, and worker protest and local communal violence threatened it (p.468).

The British changed citizenship rules to penalize the Chinese by setting the bar incredibly high for them.

A non-Malay had to have lived in the Federation for fifteen years, with both parents born in the Federation... The vast majority of those born in any of the nine Malay states were considered “aliens”. In contemporary terms, they were stateless (p.468).

At the start of the emergency, looking to arrest and detain the Federation’s Communist leadership and any local leader who defied Britain’s attempt to control the political economic future of the region, security forces launched Operation Frustration, a clamp-down on all forms of democratic activity. It effectively decapitated political organizations, except for the United Malays National Organisation...

The British government at home reckoned there were between 2,200 and 6,100 armed insurgents in the jungles. Britain’s mission was to destroy them and guarantee that “the economic life of the country continues.” Such a move, according to British external reports, “entails the protection of the rubber and tin industries, and the personnel employed by them... But with the police force grossly under strength and military reinforcements delayed, the situation deteriorated rapidly (p.472).

From the start of the emergency in June 1948, destroying Chinese villages was a go-to punitive measure. Paramilitary forces stepped up their work sending fifty or more to detention camps daily, quickly exceeding their six-thousand person capacity until the detainees were deported to China clearing the way for more. Entire villages were collectively arrested and detained for the smallest infractions (p.495).

The British government relentlessly tightened its coercive legislation.

Approximately 25 thousand people were deported. Transit camps soon overflowed from the mass purges (p.498).

At Ipoh Camp, among the worst, thirteen hundred detainers resorted to hunger strikes and rioting, demanding the release of all female detainees and better camp conditions. In some instances guards “lost their heads” and opened fire with live ammunition; in other cases, the situation, according to the deputy commissioner of Malaya’s criminal investigation department “was now worse than that experienced under the Jap regime.

Another repatriate told how interrogators tied ropes to one finger of each of his hands as well as to one toe on each of his feet. The British torturers then hoisted him to the ceiling, after which they let go the ropes. They then starved him for several days.

Another was sent to a dark cell where integrators “inserted 2 inch pins under his finger nails and burned these pins with fire”.

Guards “took off the clothes of female prisoners and pricked their breasts with pins” (p. 501).

They launched the British Empires’ largest forced migration since the era of trade in enslaved people. Five-hundred seventy three thousand people, nearly 90 percent of whom were Chinese, were relocated into 480 settlements it was not only the scale of the forced migration but also its speed that created massive bureaucratic challenges and hardships.

They created “labour lines”, which were effectively resettlement areas and a labour pool for the Federations’ dollar producing industries, much as the resettlement camps were sources of “casual labour” for the Federations’ estate owners. In total, officials displaced and relocated approximately 650,000 workers in the “labour lines” which brought the overall forced migration and resettlement of British subjects and alleged aliens to nearly 1.2 million (p.505).

The government did not warn villages of their impending removals. The first thing was suddenly at dawn, all of the police, all of the soldiers came in and surrounded the village. It was pretty terrifying. The rapid-paced operation meant villagers often fathered few possessions before they were loaded into trucks awaiting their transfer to resettlement camps. Families were separated in the confusion and villages dispersed (p.506).

After they departed the village would be burned to the ground.

Occasionally government barracks were hastily erected for habitation though temporary shelter often consisted of little more than a lean-to. Local officials expected refugees to build their own permanent dwellings with whatever materials they had bought with them, or with items they purchased using the government “upheaval allowance”.

The government had burned their crops and confiscated some of their livestock during the forced removals, yet in the resettlement areas, “the huts were squeezed tight together and there was no room for poultry runs, no room for pigsties, not room for vegetable plots. There were few clinics or schools during the early 1950s (p.507).

After they departed the village would be burned to the ground.

The government did find funds, however, to ensure a twenty-four hour regime of control, surveillance, and discipline. During the early months of the operation, officials needed 770 tons of barbed wire to secure the resettlement areas. This was hardly surprising since a seven-and a-half-foot double apron fence surrounded most villages. While electricity was often non-existent in the refugees’ makeshift dwellings, multiple watchtowers with spotlights eventually dotted the resettlement edges, fanning out from the police post located in the areas’ centre.

Federation officials painted a number on each household door and listed alongside it the names, ages and occupations of those who lived inside. The government strictly controlled the villager’s movements with dusk-to-dawn curfews within the settlements’ gates. Guards monitored these gates and lined up men and women in gender–divided queues for throrough searches every time villagers entered or exited the barbed-wire compound.

In some areas, colonial officials introduced twenty-two-hour house lockdowns as a form of collective punishment for “non-cooperation”. They also introduced food control. Rubber tappers who worked in the estates by day recalled the resettlement years as ones of semi starvation. The resettlement areas became one of the many sites for screening, or interrogation, further exacerbating a problem festering since the emergencies in the spring of 1948 (p.508).

Torturing of prisoners was common place in Malaya.

This was all happening, while the British were helping conduct war crimes trials against Germans who had worked in concentration camps in Europe. The hypocrisy is stark.

Empire of Violence (3) India

A revolt occurred in India in 1857. Some of the British Empire's actions are described in Legacy of Violence.

Large swathes of the region remained uncontrollable for over a year, and only suppression restored colonial order. British forces tied suspected Indian rebels to the mouths of canons, lit the fuse and blew them to pieces. They levelled villages and towns as their murderous campaigns against the local population spread (p.54).

When two local leaders were arrested in India in April 1919, mass protests occurred in Amritsar. British colonial troops opened fire and killed twenty-five people. Indian protesters retaliated by looting and burning shops and cutting telegraph and telephone wires and damaging railway tracks. When thousands of protesters gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, the British governor announced that all meetings and procession were forbidden. With two armored cars and fifty riflemen, he went to the park (with only one exit) where fifteen thousand unarmed civilians were gathered.

Without warning, he commanded his men to fire. Within ten minutes they discharged about 1650 rounds and left nearly four hundred dead. At least twelve hundred civilians lay wounded in the blood-soaked earth, where they remained as the soldiers retreated, making no attempt to assist those survived the massacre.

The violence was the start of several days of widespread British-led reprisals. With no recording of evidence and limited cross–examination, a martial law commission tried 852 suspects, convicted 581, sentenced to death 108, and sentenced to “transportation for life” or banishment to a remote penal facility, another 264. By the time massive public protest led to reintroduction of the right to appeal, eighteen men had already been publicly hanged.

Collective punishments unfolded through the region. Raj agents confiscated personal property for the troops, cut off electricity and water supplies, expelled students from schools via a quota system, and prevented peasants at gun point from harvesting their crops. Public floggings, a routine punishment in India, skyrocketed.

Raj forces flogged an entire wedding party for being part of an illegal gathering and throughout the region they physically and mentally coerced Indian eyewitnesses into giving false evidence that exonerate European repression.

Security forces compelled men and women to skip, touch their noses to the ground, and recite poetry; they literally whitewashed local peasants; and they made men undertake the work of untouchables, which according to the Hindu population considered a religious pollution… Security forces made persons who failed to salute lick their officers’ boots as punishment (p. 132).

This behaviour cannot be justified as by saying it was a different age. These events happened at the same time as the British government was introducing humanitarian social reforms in England. So they did know better.

Empire of Violence (2) Boer War

During the South African war (1899 to 1902),

The British introduced a new blockhouse strategy that combined with barbed-wire fences, divided the massive interior into smaller areas. A scorched earthy policy systemically burned crops and dumped salt to prevent future cultivation. Thirty thousand prisoners of war were deported to remote corners of the empire. British troops also razed homesteads, poisoned wells, and corralled into concentration camps Afrikaner women and children as well as African labourers.

British forces herded into camps more than one hundred thousand Afrikaners who died at alarming rates. Malnutrition, starvation, and outbreaks of endemic diseases wiped out approximately thirty thousand, the disproportionate number of whom were children… The establishment of British concentration camps in South Africa represent the first time a single ethnic group had been targeted en masse for detention and deportation (p.86).

The conditions in the sixty-four black concentration camps were worse than in those of the Afrikaners. Emaciated and disease-ridden Blacks undertook forced labour for reduced rations, and their death rates climbed to over ten percent of camp populations (p.90).

Empire of Violence (1)

I have just read Legacy of Violence: a History of the British Empire by Harvard professor Caroline Elkins. I think that it is one of the most disturbing books that I have ever read.

When I was in primary school during the 1950s, we had a picture of the queen on the wall and here were taught about the glories of the British Empire, which had more recently become the British Commonwealth. In our school atlases the parts of the world which had been controlled by Britain were coloured red. We marvelled at the scope of its influence.

We were taught the narrative that the British were the best colonizers, because they had brought civilization, freedom from superstition, true religion, Christianity, education and economic development to the nations they conquered. We were taught that we were privileged to be part of this great endeavour.

I have read enough history since those days to realize that this narrative was not true. I came to realise many British leaders were morally flawed and many of their practices were harmful, but I had not realized the fall extent of the harm done to the people colonised. Elkins uses information from various archives to demonstrate the full horror of the way that the British treated the people in the colonies that it controlled.

The worst feature of what happened is that throughout the era, the British trumpeted the goodness of what they were doing in their colonies. Unlike other imperial countries that did terrible things, they claimed that they were bringing education and civilization to people that were not ready for it. They claimed to be ruling "children", so they needed to use violence to establish “moral force” from time to time.

The British government loves to stand in judgment on the human rights records of other nations, particularly those that they do not like. Once you understand their own history, it is clear that they have no moral ground to stand on. What they did, and what they continued to do right up into the 1960s, was far worse than anything done in the countries like Iran and China that the British grandstand against today. This is a bad case of the pot calling the kettle black.

If the British people understood what their leaders had done down through the years (and covered up) they would be hugely embarrassed. They would want their leaders to hide, rather than judge other nations. The following posts will give examples from the book.

The well-known philosopher John Stuart Mill argued in 1861 advocated for a narrative of human development that was intimately bound with Britain’s civilizing mission.

Britain, having already climbed the arduous civilizing scale, sat secure in their position atop the hierarchy of civilisations and in their role as self appointed shepherds of reform. In contrast, he endowed the non-Europeans of the empire with child-like qualities and juxtaposed them with the progressive images of the British. Like children, non western populations were not yet ready for liberty (p.50).

Before Mill wrote these words, Britain had declared martial war in Ireland (1798 and 1848) Barbados (1805 and 1816) Ceylon (1817 and 1848) Demerara (1823) Jamaica (1823-1824) Cape Colony7 1835, 1846 1850-53) And Canada (1837-38). This legalised extraordinary acts of coercion and suspension of due process (p.51).

Jamaica is just one small example of the violent legacy. Disputes about justice caused clashes between blacks and whites in Jamaica in 1864. According to the official report,

439 Blacks died, many summarily executed, one thousand dwellings were burned, no fewer than six hundred Blacks were flogged. At first an ordinary cat was used for flogging, but afterwards, for the punishment of men, wires were twisted around the cords, and the different tails so contracted were knotted (p.58).

How Did the Fall Happen?

Adam and Eve did not wake up one day and say, “Let’s disobey God today, because I am tired of obeying his stupid rules.” Something more was going on. To understand our situation, we need to understand what happened to Adam and Eve.

The Genesis account begins with the bad behaviour of the serpent (Gen 3:1), not with human disobedience. It does not fully explain what was happening, but clearly, it was something important. The key to understanding this event is realising that the Old Testament provides a two-agent view of reality. It mostly records the actions of two agents in the world: God and humans. The New Testament explains that we live in a three-agent universe. The main actors are God, humans and the spiritual powers of evil. To understand any event, we need to take cognisance of what each of these three actors is doing.

Apart from a few glimpses into the spiritual realms by Job, David and Daniel, the Old Testament writers mostly ignore the activities of the spiritual powers of evil. They took this approach because the Holy Spirit did not want to give unnecessary glory to these evil powers. God preferred to be blamed for evil at times over bolstering the credibility of the spiritual forces that are always at work in the world doing evil. To fully understand the Old Testament, we need to read it through a New-Testament, three-agent-lens. Therefore, to understand the Genesis account of the fall, we need to take into account the reality that the spiritual powers of evil were actively working to undermine the authority and freedom of the first humans.

Genesis 3:1 does not explain why the serpent was so cunning, or why it had become an instrument for undermining evil, but given their objectives, it is reasonable to assume that spiritual powers of evil were working through him. The Revelation of John explains that the serpent was being used by the devil/satan (Rev 12:9; 20;2).

The scriptures do not explain how or when, but a massive spiritual rebellion had occurred in the spiritual realms. I presume that this occurred before the human failure recorded in Genesis 3. The scriptures never claim that Adam’s sin caused the powers of evil to rebel against God. On its own, such an event on earth would not have such a serious effect in the spiritual realms, whereas a rebellion in the spiritual realms could be expected to have a significant impact on the earth.

God had given authority over the earth to humans. By getting control of humans, the spiritual powers of evil could gain authority on earth and establish a domain where they were free to operate. Once they had rebelled, they had a strong incentive to persuade humans to rebel. I presume that this is the order that the rebellions happened: the spiritual powers of evil rebelled first, followed by human rebellion.

Following the rebellion of the spiritual powers of evil, Adam and Eve got caught up in a terrible spiritual battle in which the serpent was an unwitting participant. By giving humans authority on earth (Gen 1:28), God had taken an enormous risk, because it allowed humans to constrain his actions (this was real grace). The spiritual powers of evil understood the risk that God was taking, and they realised that if they could steal the authority that God had given to humans, they could constrain his activity on earth. The stakes were high, but God knew that humans would mess things up with terrible consequences, but he had a plan to put things right.

Large numbers of spiritual beings had rebelled against God. Naturally, they attacked Adam and Eve with a vengeance. They did not have much chance against such a powerful onslaught. They had no children when they lapsed, so they can’t have been in existence very long when the attack occurred. They were still learning their role, as the Holy Spirit taught them how to care for the world that had been entrusted to them. They had access to all the resources of the Holy Spirit, but they probably had not learnt how to draw on them under intense battle conditions. They would not have been prepared to handle such a massive spiritual assault.

We tend to assume that Adam and Eve disobeyed God because they were rebellious. That is a distorted view of what happened. They came under such an intense spiritual attack that few humans would have been able to resist it. Paul records that Eve was deceived.

Eve was deceived by the serpent’s craftiness (2 Corinthians 11:3).

The serpent lied to Eve. He said that the humans needed to eat the fruit of the tree to be like God, when they were already created in the image of God, and as like to God as humans can be.

Of course, it was not just the serpent at work, but the spiritual powers working through him. Their attack was so intense that Eve believed something that was not true. That kind of deception does not just happen, without spiritual interference. Obviously, Adam was pushed towards disobedience too.

Given the intensity of the battle (because authority over the earth was at stake), Adam and Eve succumbed to the attack. Could they have remained strong despite the pressure? Maybe? But it is easy to understand why they didn’t. Rather than calling it “The Fall”, we should describe it as a massive spiritual defeat. Perhaps we should call it “The Rout” because it gave the spiritual powers of evil authority over the earth. They would use this stolen authority to do terrible things to humans and the rest of God’s creation.

This understanding of what happened changes the nature of the solution that is required. The cross does not just cover our sins, as is usually taught. We did not need the cross to stop God hating us. We needed the cross to rescue us from the authority of the spiritual powers of evil. Jesus' death is the ransom that rescues us from the control of the spiritual powers of evil, who gained control over us when Adam and Eve were defeated and manipulated into disobedience.

This understanding also shifts some of the responsibility. Adam and Eve’s disobedience was not a totally free choice. They were provoked and manipulated without being aware of the power that they were up against. They don’t fully deserve the condemnation that is heaped on them by Christians. They are still responsible for their actions, but it was harder for them than we realise, so they also deserve more sympathy.

There is a bit of blame passing going on here. If the fall was Adam and Eve's fault, it gives us an excuse for our disobedience. We can say, “It's all their fault, not ours”. A more productive response would be to acknowledge the difficult struggle they faced. That would help us to understand the spiritual battle that we are engaged in.

Regenesis

I have just read a book called Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet by George Monbiot. I dont agree with all of his proposals, but I did glean some interesting information about agriculture, and particularly about the costs of meat production.

Four companies—Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus—control, on one estimate, 90 percent of the global grain trade. They are consolidating vertically as well as horizontally, buying into seed, fertilizer, processing, packing, distribution and retail businesses. They continue to snap up their smaller competitors.

Another four companies—ChemChina, Corteva, Bayer and BASF—control 66 percent of the world's agricultural chemicals market, while a similar cluster (with BASF replaced by Limagrain) owns 53 percent of the global seed market. Three corporations—Deere, CNH and Kubota—sell almost half of the world's farm machinery. Another four companies control 99 percent of the global chicken-breeding market... (pp.35-36).

In Europe, maize farming is probably the greatest danger to soil health. The plants are slow to develop in the spring, and are generally harvested too late to follow with a winter group. The stubble is widely spaced and sparse. As a result, the soil in these fields tends to be exposed to the elements at the time of year when rain and wind are most likely to strip it from the land. Most maize is grown in Europe to feed dairy cattle (p.52).

Soy is a key ingredient in chicken feed. One report estimates that it takes 109 grammes of chicken breast. Over three-quarters of the world's soy is fed to farm animals. Much of the rest is used by industry or to make cheap vegetable oil. Only 7 percent is turned into substitutes for meat and milk (p.69).

As farming has intensified, the amount of land used for grazing has slightly but steadily shrunk. But the expansion of grazing land remains the world's greatest cause of habitat loss. It's responsible for 40 percent of the deforestation caused by the food industry, making it almost three times more destructive than palm oil. .. Because 92 percent of the world's natural grasslands have already been occupied by livestock or crops, most of this expansion destroys tropical forests (p. 81).

In 2018, Brazil became the world's largest beef exporter. Large volumes of beef are imported from places where the rainforest was illegally cleared by ranchers (p.82)

Another paper calculates that if a magic switch were thrown, causing the entire world to shift to a plant-based diet, and the land now occupied by livestock were rewilded, the carbon drawn down from the atmosphere by recovering ecosystems would be equivalent to all the world's fossil fuel emissions from the previous sixteen years (p.83).

Kernza is a perennial intermediate wheat grass. Although it is still being developed, the breeders hope to match wheat yields within thirty years. Kernza is at least halfway to success.

At Yunnan University in China, they have crossed an annual Chinese rice variety with a wild African plant of the same genus to produce a perennial crop. Already yields match, and in some cases exceed, those of modern annual rice breeds. The cultivar goes by the name of PR23, and has now been planted across 70000 hectares of China, as a fully-fledged commercial crop (p.183).

As 63 percent of beef demand in the US is for ground meat (the kind that goes into hamburgers and most ready beef meals, the proportion of the carcass that gets minced has risen to match it (p.196).

Monbiot does not see organic farming as a practical solution, because it always seems to produce low yields, usually thirty percent less than conventional farming.

The systems we should favour are those that deliver high yields with low environmental impacts. The systems we should reject are those that deliver high yields but with high environmental impacts, or low yields. Low yields necessarily mean high impacts, because of the area of land they need to produce a given volume of foods (p.228).

More on the Pharisees

A reader commented of my previous post about Scot McKnight’s talk on the Pharisees that "Jesus did call the Pharisees hypocrites". His right. Jesus did call the Pharisees “hupokrites” (only in Matthew, I think), but Scot McKnight mentions in passing that the Greek word has a much broader meaning than the English word “hypocrite”. However, he does not elaborate further in his talk, so you will have to go to his book to fully understand what he meant.

A quick look at Strongs indicates that the word “hupokrites” also means “actor” and “interpreter”. These meanings are linked. Actors interpret the world to the people who watch their plays. The Pharisees did see themselves as interpreters of the Torah for the Jewish people, so I guess that is what Scot meant.

Jesus confronted the Pharisees. He did accuse them of not practising what they preached. “They say and do not do” (Matt 23:3). However, his critique goes much further than that. He said that many of their interpretations of the Torah were wrong and made the faith extremely difficult for new disciples. Their interpretations also pushed the Jewish people away from the Kingdom of God.

Interestingly, Scot suggests that the modern equivalent of the Pharisees in the United States are the evangelicals. They believe that their interpretation of the gospel is the correct one, and they come down hard on anyone who disagrees with their interpretation. They believe that their nation needs their interpretation of the gospel to become strong again.

Scot says that he would not call evangelical hypocrites, because although some of their beliefs are wrong, they are sincere in their beliefs.

I presume that any religious group that sets a high standard for themselves will inevitably fail to meet that standard at times, soi will be open to the charge of hypocrisy. The higher your standards, the more likely it is that you will fail. It is better to aim high and miss occasionally than to set easy goals.

Pharisees

Scot McKnight has an interesting talk about the Pharisees. They are not quite what many Christians assume. He says we should not accuse any religious group of being hypocrites. It is not fair, and never true of everyone in the group.

Scot translates the word Greek word for Pharisees as “The Observants”.

• The Dead Sea Scrolls called the Pharisees “Seekers of Smooth Stones”. They were looking for interpretations that made the law easier to follow.

• The Essenes were conservatives. They thought the Pharisees were too liberal.

• The Sadducees were also conservative. They were the “sons of Zadok”, so they were the true priestly families. They also held political power in Jerusalem.

• The Pharisees were a reformed movement reacting to encroaching hellenisation (Greek influence through Jews in the Greed Diaspora).

• The Pharisees were trying to help the ordinary people obey the law. They believed their nation must go back to obedience to the law, and they expected the people to accept their interpretations. Religious groups have a tendency to claim that they have got things right and that if the people follow their guidance, they will be right with God.

• The Pharisees sometimes added to the law. For example, they suggested fines instead of stoning. For the Sabbath, they made rules that would help the people know what they could and could not do on the Sabbath. They were trying to make the law practical for ordinary people to understand and apply.

• The Pharisees were a populist movement. They had pastoral and social skills, because their teaching was popular with the people (until Jesus came along with better interpretation and greater authority).

Aurelien (5) Weak Economy

The nations of the West are facing many political challenges at a time when they are economically weak. Aurelien has not written about this issue so much, but he makes some pertinent comments.

In the last thirty to forty years, the Global West has largely offshored its productive capacity, and so its way of life now depends overwhelmingly on imported goods. Such industry as still exists is itself greatly dependent on raw materials and components supplied by countries with which it is not necessarily on good terms.

This is a huge problem because the Western nations have created a dangerously vulnerable financial system. Artificially low interest rates have created a massive financial superstructure that looks good in GDP statistics, but produces nothing of value, while it sucks wealth out of the economy and feeds it up to the already wealthy.

Aurelien (4) Weak Military

Political weakness is compounded in the West by military weakness. The West has invested too much in the wrong weapons. It has also over-extended its attempts to control other nations at a time when the fragility of its weapon's choices is being exposed.

Given that they worked in World War 2, the United States has focused its defense on aircraft carriers and attack aircraft and helicopters. This has worked reasonably well because all its wars since World War 2, have been expeditionary attacks against weaker nations and rebellions in other parts of the world. Actually it did not work that well in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.

In the current world, missile technology makes aircraft carriers and airplanes vulnerable, and this is an area where the US has underinvested.

In spite of spending a collective fortune on defence capabilities, the West is only capable of operating successfully in a limited number of scenarios, and it is not obvious how this can change. We can list some of the principal ones. (Nuclear forces exist in a different conceptual category, and I’m not going to say any more about them here.) Western aircraft could successfully gain and hold air superiority against, say Russia or China, provided the enemy agreed to limit the engagements strictly to air-to-air combat out of the range of anti-aircraft missiles. Western submarines, surface ships and carriers could probably prevail against, say the Chinese Navy, provided the latter agreed to fight outside the range of land-based missiles. Reasonable amounts of force could be projected by sea and air into permissive environments where air superiority could be guaranteed. This could include combat operations with mechanised forces and artillery, provided that operations did not last for more than a few weeks. And peacekeeping missions could still be undertaken, though probably not on a large scale. There are, of course, very important differences and nuances among western nations, but all of them, at different levels, are trapped in a process of smaller and smaller forces with smaller and smaller numbers of increasingly expensive and sophisticated equipment which is more and more expensive to maintain, and impossible to replace once a conflict has begun. The latter point has political consequences that are often ignored: under what circumstances are you going to risk your entire fleet of perhaps 100 front-line combat aircraft in a war which could leave you disarmed in a few days, and unable to rebuild your forces in less than a decade?

These force structures today did not develop by accident: they reflected beliefs about the missions that military forces would be likely to undertake. Essentially, western forces have a lot of super-sophisticated capabilities, and a fair amount of low-intensity and counter-insurgency capabilities, but not a lot in between. But they cannot fight a major conventional land/air war, or even a limited one that goes on for more than a few weeks. They also face the twin problems of the widespread proliferation of relatively cheap and accurate cruise and ballistic missiles capable of overwhelming defences and destroying highly expensive and complex weapons systems on the one hand, and their own lack of investment in sustainability, on the other. There is nothing magical about the technology involved in the new missiles; it is just that the West saw no virtue in developing that technology itself. Likewise, the West saw no virtue in large and expensive stocks of ammunition. As a result, from now on, the West will simply not be able to rely on automatic air superiority in any serious conflict, nor will its navies be able to operate safely anywhere near an enemy coast, or within the range of air-launched stand-off missiles, nor will it be able to conduct sustained operations on land...

To repeat, none of the above would necessarily have been a problem, provided the overall security policies of western nations had been consistent with these limitations. But they weren’t, and in essence they have provoked a situation where military problems are starting to arise to which the West has no adequate response.

So the existing force-structures of western states are going to have problems coping with the likely domestic security threats of the near future. Most western militaries are simply too small, too highly specialised and too technological to deal with situations where the basic tool of military force is required: large numbers of trained and disciplined personnel, able to provide and maintain a secure environment, and enforce the monopoly of legitimate violence.

This decline in influence will also apply to the United States. Its most powerful and expensive weapons—nuclear missiles, nuclear submarines, carrier battle groups, high performance air-superiority fighters — are either not usable, or simply not relevant, to most of the security problems of today. We do not know the precise numbers and effectiveness of Chinese land-based anti-shipping missiles for example, but it’s clear that sending US surface ships anywhere within their range is going to be too great a risk for any US government to take. And since the Chinese know this, the subtle nuances of power relations between the two countries are altered. Again, the US has found itself unable to actually influence the outcome of a major war in Europe, because it does not have the forces to intervene directly, and the weapons it has been able to send are too few and in many cases of the wrong kind.

More at https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-west-is-weak-where-it-matters

Aurelien (3) Nihilistic Political Philosophy

Aurelien warns that western political philosophy has become increasingly nihilistic, and consequently incapable.

We are dealing with the immense and still poorly understood psychological and spiritual consequences of forty years of Liberal Nihilism. (Yes, that’s a concept I just invented, I think.) What I mean by that phrase, is that the uncontrolled growth, and universal application, of Liberal social and political ideas in the last forty-odd years have produced the expected result: we are degenerating into isolated, alienated individuals, with no relations except economic ones, no society, no common points of reference, no hope and no future.

This is the natural result of the thorough-going application of an ideology which has no moral compass except short-term financial efficiency and total personal autonomy, and so as a result, we have lost not only the ability to manage and plan at the level of the community and the state, but even the awareness that such a thing might be necessary. It is also the natural result of an ideology which is fundamentally negative, which is always fighting against things, and so cannot express the positive except as the destruction of a negative: as a consequence we have lost our ability to act collectively, since each of us is a suspicious, hostile, monad, seeing others as a threat; an island entire of itself, as John Donne put it. But now, of course, the bell tolls for all of us.

All of this was entirely predictable, and was predicted, from the tenets of a political ideology of selfishness, that puts individual needs and wants before collective ones, and where the more power and money you have, the more your private needs will be fulfilled. China builds railroads while we build electronic currency markets. Russia does real mining while we do Bitcoin mining. Nobody forced our leaders to banish manufacturing industry abroad, to eviscerate public services in the name of management efficiency or to turn all activities, even education, even social life itself, into machines for generating money for those who have too much already. And now all we do have is money, or the luckiest of us, anyway, who mostly have other peoples’...

There was nothing inevitable to the change which eventually led to Liberal Nihilism: it depended on a series of decisions made by particular individuals at particular times and under specific circumstances. For all that real issues (competition from Japan, oil-price driven inflation, the need to modernise the Trades Unions) were prayed in aid, the actual process was one of deliberate, if incoherent, attempts to impose abstruse, unworkable and even dangerous economic theories, which nonetheless were strongly supported by certain groups, notably the rich.

This wasn’t a conspiracy though, much as some would be comforted to think it was. Nor were the pointy-headed economists behind it consciously evil : they were mostly just misguided and divorced from reality. And even the politicians who adopted these ideas do generally seem to have thought, in their confused and ignorant fashion, that they would be good for the economy, rather than injecting a potentially-lethal poison into it. Beyond a few nutcases, none of them would actually have wished to bring about the situation we have now. But then evil is always easier to deal with than incompetence...

This is why the current situation is so dangerous and so apparently hopeless: elites have so internalised “technical” solutions which are “effective” by the most banal of criteria, that they are literally incapable of thinking any other way even as disaster approaches. Failure to them simply means that the ideology has not been tried hard enough, and they continue to self-inflict pain, as did the Xhosa tribes who famously killed all their cattle in the 1850s, after a prophecy that it would restore their former greatness as a nation.

The worship of “technique” of course, is the opposite of “vision,” even in the debased sense in which that word appears on company PowerPoint slides. Our current leaderships have been trained in technique to the exclusion of everything else, and are obsessed with “technical” solutions to problems, the more complex the better. Ask them what the actual purpose of politics is, and they stammer incoherently. Its hard to believe that the Sunaks and Macrons of the world, with their mere smattering of genuine education, have really thought deeply about the policies they are trying to thrust on their populations: they are as much intellectual prisoners as everyone else. That Macron could possibly believe, at a time like this, that forcing French people to work longer for smaller pensions should be the highest priority for his government, may seem to defy belief. But the fact is that, when all you know is how to build Lego models, every problem looks like a Lego model needing to be built.

And so we live in a kind of Hell where nothing changes, or ever can change, except for the worse. CS Lewis observed once that the only people in Hell are the ones who want to be there, by which he meant that they were incapable of understanding and learning, and incapable of changing their minds. Escape from our current problems is thus dependent on the only thing that is excluded in principle: a change of mind...

We are more used these days to revolts and revolutions that have an eye towards the future, but for this you have to believe that a different future is in fact possible, and at least some vague idea what it may look like. For a long time, religion supplied a possible conceptual framework, as it still does with some fringe movements in Islam, but in the West its place has been taken by the secular apocalyptic cult I described a few weeks ago, whose ideology is precisely the absolute triumph of Liberal Nihilism. With the abandonment of Marxism, and even of reformist Socialism, and their effective suppression from political discourse in the West, there are no shared alternative frameworks within which a different and better future could even be imagined.

More at https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-years-midnight

Aurelien (2) Elitist Political Systems

Political systems right across the western world have become fragile and ineffective, while becoming more and more elitist.

Elections have become a party game in which different members of the elite group take turns at governing. The courts and news media that are supposed to keep them accountable and the security services that are supposed to protect the overall system both come from the same professional, fairly prosperous, political class that lives in the capital and attended the same schools and universities. The problem is that this elite group has become more and more detached from the people that they govern.

People tend to vote for parties that represent, or at least acknowledge, their interests, and if a party no longer does that, they will stop voting for the party, or stop voting altogether. This was an entirely foreseeable consequence of the move towards elite Professional and Managerial Class (PMC)-based political parties.

In the past, for as long as there were genuine differences between parties, and parties themselves had mass memberships, the problem was containable. Most people were prepared to go along with the system, believing that their vote could change things, if only at the margins. That’s no longer true, and not only do people increasingly not vote, which is awkward in a democracy, but when they do vote, it might be essentially a vote of protest against the system, out of a desire to demonstrate a lack of faith in it. So other methods have been required as well...

In most western countries there is now a professional political class, with links of family and education to similar classes in the media, professional and intellectual worlds, who mostly think alike, and who believe, and tell each other, that they know what’s best, and so should be allowed to rule. This political class itself is drawn from a far narrower and far more homogeneous group than at any point in modern history.

So this professional political class, narrowly based and insulated from much of real life, but with close and overlapping contacts with other parts of the establishment, naturally thinks that it knows best...

But this class is only part of a larger PMC, which also includes the traditional establishment professions: law, education, banking, the media, the public service and so forth. Structurally, we can look at much of the rhetoric around the functioning of today’s political system as different expressions of the class power of the PMC, and to some extent a reflection of the competition for power and influence within it...

After all, the elites move between the various spheres, and sometimes occupy them simultaneously: a politician may go on to a lucrative media career, a lawyer may also advise and work for NGOs. If one part of the ecosystem seems to be getting a little out of control, other parts can step in to restore order. Above all, the system is multiply redundant in obstructing attempts from any quarter to challenge its power, or to advance the interests of ordinary people.

Liberalism, the dominant political force in modern western societies, has been elitist since its conception: it’s just that we are more conscious of that now, as the gap between the interests and preoccupations of ordinary people and the PMC continues to grow all over the world.

The sociologist Robert Michels developed what he called the Iron Law of Oligarchy, based partly on his experiences in the German Social Democratic Party before the First World War. All organisations, he argued, even the most faultlessly democratic, ultimately wind up being run by a “leadership class” which takes decisions and renews itself. Anyone who has observed, or participated in, organisations large or small, is likely to find this argument persuasive, but it’s clear that, beyond a certain level of complexity, it applies to nations as well. Perhaps the PMC is, in part, a natural consequence of a complex society.

The problem is the rest of us, and especially those whose only relationship to the PMC will be that of a servant class.

More at https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/lets-all-be-accountable-

Aurelien (1) Weak Leadership

After reading most of the substack articles written by Aurelien, I discern that he sees five big weaknesses that are affecting the leading nations of the western world.

1. Lame Leadership
The greatest weakness of the modern West is its weak political leadership.

Yet the West as a whole faces a fundamental problem that no institutional Lego manipulation can cure: the quality of western politicians, intellectually, morally and politically, is lower than it has been at any time in modern history. Oh, history is full of politicians who have not been very bright, and politicians who have been morally dubious. But the dumb were generally kept at the appropriate level, and overt corruption was frowned upon. In general, though, even the worst actually understand something about, you know, politics. As it is, we’re stuck with the equivalent of people who have elbowed their way into the finals of a talent competition through personal contacts, but can’t actually sing.

This is important, because in the end it’s people in systems who make systems work. Good systems can, and do, bring on mediocre people, but through the activities of their members, not through some kind of magic. If you’ve worked in large organisations, you know that good people can make even poor systems work better, but bad people will eventually bring even the best system down...

But bear in mind one thing: all of these people and their “advisers” were there because they wanted to be. They fancied their own abilities enough to thrust themselves forward for positions of real power at a time of crisis, and to tell people to trust them. So they deserve to be held to a very high standard of personal competence, honesty and intelligence: this isn’t a widget factory or a hedge-fund we’re talking about here...

For these and many other reasons, the typical parliamentarian in many countries is now a relatively young and inexperienced figure, parachuted in from outside, who has no particular contact with any community or area, no interests or experience outside politics, and no personal qualities except ambition. They do not, and cannot, claim to represent the community, although some formal deference may be paid to local issues and personalities. The basis of their power is not local, but in the national or regional organisation of the political party they want to represent. Inevitably, they are faithful exponents of whatever their party’s ideology may be for the time being...

If aspirant politicians no longer come from a defined community, no longer represent defined interests, no longer have local ties and loyalties, no longer have previous experience to draw upon and no longer have to appeal to an electorate which expects a modicum of intelligence, capability and character; and if besides all that they are driven exclusively by personal ambition, ready to compromise any idea and abandon any ally for a sniff at power, then you get something like the present mess in Britain...

But it’s worth pointing out that the worst political class in modern history is having to confront an unprecedented series of crises, any one of which would have strained the capabilities of a much better class of politician. Something is going to give, and soon.

Aurelien

Some of the most thoughtful articles that I have read in rececent times are published by a person writing under the name Aurelien on Substack (Aurelien was emperor at a time when the Roman Empire was disintegrating). He writes that he has had a long professional career in government, before and after the Cold War, and in many parts of the world. He claims to have been to enough places, met enough people and done enough things, to have some idea about how stuff works in real life (Given his age, I am presuming he is “he”). I agree with his basic premise that we are at a turning point in world history, and I believe that he has something useful to say about it.

The following quote describes the changes he is concerned about.

As you get older, you become more and more distrustful of people who tell you that, “we are living today in a tme of unprecedented change.” Normally, that’s just an excuse to make life worse for you, get money from you, or force you to do things you don’t want to do. Ironically, though, we are now at a point of major change that hardly any of the usual suspects are prepared to recognise, because, for once, it’s their version of the world which is being upended.

Put simply, we are one of those periods in history where things move extremely rapidly, and after which nothing is ever really the same again. It’s accepted that 1914, 1945 and 1989 were like that. It is pretty clear that we are now living in such a period, for all that the political classes of the West are desperately trying to avoid seeing it, and to discourage the rest of us from doing so.

Like most seemingly violent changes, this one has been building up for some time. The roots of it lie in a whole series of progressive, unconnected, but cumulatively catastrophic errors made at the end of the Cold War, essentially by people who wanted the illusion of change without the hard work of actually deciding and implementing it. True to the short-term benefit-maximising culture that has dominated the last thirty years, the future was expected to be much like the present only more so, and anyway capable of looking after itself, so we only needed to think about the next few years at any one time. Liberal political and economic ideas would spread without limit or resistance, it was thought. NATO and the EU would expand forever, without resistance or consequences. Western domination of the world economy, of international trade and international institutions, would continue forever, without resistance and ever more intensively. At some vague, indeterminate, point in the future, it was thought, the whole world would come to resemble a brown-bag lunch at a progressive American think-tank. The fact that if something can’t go on literally forever there must be a point at which it stops, was somehow overlooked. Indeed, if there is a single phrase that encapsulates the intellectual lethargy of the last thirty years, it’s “we’ll worry about that when it happens.“ Well, it’s happening now, and western elites have absolutely no idea how to deal with it (Politics is like Engineering).

Two Years Before the Mast

Last year I read Two Years Before the Mast by RH Dana. The following is a synopsis of the book prepared for me by ChatGPT.

Two Years Before the Mast is a memoir by Richard Henry Dana Jr. about his experiences on a two-year voyage from Boston to California on a merchant ship, the Pilgrim. The book covers his experiences on the ship, including the harsh living and working conditions, the camaraderie among sailors, and the dangers of the sea. He also describes the various ports they visited and the people they met, including a brief stay in California during the Mexican-American War.

Dana, a Harvard student, left his studies to go to sea in 1834 to recover from an eye injury. The book provides a detailed and accurate portrayal of the life of a sailors at sea in the mid-19th century, with descriptions of the daily routine, the weather, and the relations between the sailors. He also writes about the ports they visited and the different cultures they encountered.

The book is considered an important historical document as it provides a rare first-hand account of the conditions of American sailors at the time, and the challenges they faced. It is also notable for its descriptions of the California coast, which was still a remote and little-known part of the world at the time.

The thing that struck me from the book is the ability of humans to cope with intensely difficult circumstances. The desperate conditions that the sailors coped with during frequent storms were almost unbelievable.

I have read several accounts of British sailing ships during the Napoleonic wars. They always had a large number of sailors. I presume they needed a big crew so that sails could be changed quickly during the manoeuvring of a battle with the enemy. They had sufficient sailors to change the sails on all the masts at the same time.

The merchant ships Pilgrim and the Alert on which RH Dana sailed had very small crews; only about twelve men, which meant about six in each watch. When one was sick, they often had only five sailors on a watch. When the sails need to be changed, they often had to do one mast, before moving on to do the other two.

When they sailed around Cape Horn, on both the way out and the way back, they experienced terrible storms. The temperature dropped below freezing, and icebergs in the sea had to be avoided. The sailors were constantly sent up the mast to change the sails in stormy conditions. While on the decks, they wore gloves to keep their hands warm, but they had to take them off before they went up the mast, because it was two hard to grip the rigging while wearing gloves. After being on the masts for several hours, their hands got so cold, they had to bang them repeatedly against the sails to thaw them sufficiently that they could grip the sail they were furling or reefing.

I was also amazed by the engineering of these ships. The crew could remove the top half of a mast if a storm was coming, or replace a mast or spar that got broken while at sea. All this was done with blocks and tackle and some men straining on a capstan to raise and lower the heavy mast with ropes. I am amazed that they even attempted to do such a complex task.

I was intrigued by the way the captain and officers constantly kept the men working. Once the basic work was done each day, they would be set to work cleaning the decks and repairing ropes and sails. I presume that the officers felt they needed to keep the men busy so that would not get troublesome. The officers would often find a reason why they had to work on Sunday, which was supposed to be a day off.

Fun with 666

In his revelation, John says that the number 666 is a key to the identification of the Terrible Beast that dominates much of the vision. The usual approach is to identify a political leader whose name adds up to 666.

In Greek and Hebrew each letter of the alphabet doubles as a number. Gematria is the practice of calculating the numeric equivalent of words and phrases by adding up the numbers associated with each letter. Technically, Gematria refers to calculation in Hebrew while Isopsephy is the Greek equivalent.

The English alphabet doesn't normally carry numeric values but this practice has been carried into English using numbering systems similar to the ancient languages. This has become known as English Gematria. When I was a child, we sometimes wrote messages in code by using numbers instead of letters.

Many political leaders have been suggested by interpreters of Revelation. Early scholars attempted to identify the number 666 with Nero, but for various reasons, this did not work. In more recent times, people tried to link the number to Hitler and Stalin, but all these attempts have eventually failed.

The usual approach is to identify a dangerous political leader and check if his name adds up to 666. However, checking thousands of potential names is rather tiresome, so I decided to work the other way around by looking at the Greek alphabet and determining what sets of characters would add up to 666. I was surprised by how few options there are.

The difference in scale of the three components of 666 (600, 60, and 6) means that each one has to be made up of a different set of Greek characters. This also means that the characters for six, sixty or six hundred and above cannot be used. These are shaded in blue in the table.

Only three combinations of numbers add up to six. These are
    α,ε       1+5 =6
    β,δ       2+4 =6
    α,β,γ     1+2+3 = 6

Three combinations of numbers add up to 60
    μ,κ       20+40 =6
    ι,ν       10+50 =60
    ι,κ,λ     10+20+30 = 60

Three combinations of numbers add up to 600.
    υ,σ       200+400
    ρ,ϕ       100+500
    ρ,σ,τ     100+200+300 = 600

There are a few other combinations that will work, but they need a lot more letters, which indicates a very large and complex name.

The result surprised me. The easiest way to get 600 is with the letters υ,σ. These add up to 600 and their English equivalent is “US”. Wow.

My first options for 6 and 60 were α,ε and μ,κ. The English equivalent of these letters is AMEK. That rung a bell, but needs an R to be clear. Surprisingly, the third option for 600 has is ρ ,σ ,τ. When I took the ρ to get AMERK. I was left with σ,τ, which in English is ST, an abbreviation for “States”.

I am not sure it is legitimate to use vowels a and e twice, but doing so gives α μ ε ρ ε κ α     σ τ. The English equivalent is AMEREKA ST.

I guess you can say that John should have been more accurate than that, but it is not bad.

This result might be significant, or might just indicate that you can get what ever result you want if you put in a little effort.

Isolation and Coercion

I am not sure where I got the following quote, but I copied it down because it seems to be pertinent to our current situation.

Modern society tends to be made up of lonely, isolated people. They will often feel like they are surrounded by people they don’t know, don’t like, and don’t trust. They can easily slip into assuming that people who don’t believe what they believe and don’t want what they want are a threat to them.

These feelings of vulnerability often develop into demands for political coercion with the aim of making people think and behave like us. If politicians stoke these fears, it can easily lead to bloodshed.

The problem is that we don’t know how to live with people who are different, so we want to force them to become like us. The Old Testament had rules that required foreigners living in the land to be treated with empathy and kindness. We need more of that empathy and kindness today.