Lux Lucet

A policeman inspects a burned out vehicle following the riots in Rinkeby, Stockholm.

Some things seem to naturally go together. Peanut butter and jelly come to mind as a natural pairing. Baseball and summertime? I’m in. Even the terms “blowhard” and “politician” evoke a certain warmth of familiarity within me.

But riots and Sweden??!! Surely, you jest! Nevertheless, as they say, truth is stranger than fiction…

Stockholm Syndrome

Stockholm Syndrome is a term that was coined to describe the rather odd situation in which a captive comes to identify with his captor, supporting his efforts instead of trying to escape.

But as bizarre as it is for a captive to assist his captor, what can we say when a whole nation, a whole civilization falls prey to it?

Splashed all over the front pages of the world’s newspapers this past week were stunning stories about the Rinkeby riots.

Many people, at least those who haven’t paid much attention to news from Europe over the past few years, were probably shocked to hear about rioting Swedes. The French, well, we expect a good riot or two from them every so often. British soccer hooligans had a nice run about 20 years back. And here in States, when we put our minds to it we Americans can do civil unrest with the best of ’em.

But the land if Ikea and rioting, those two ideas just don’t process.

Only a closer look soon reveals that it really wasn’t the Swedes who were rioting at all. It was the Muslim immigrants / migrants / refugees who decided to go all South Central one fine day this past week. The
New York Times
was quick to link the rioting to remarks by Donald Trump over the weekend, as if an off-hand remark by Trump, rather than years of irresponsible governance by Sweden’s leadership, is to blame for the unrest. When it doubt, whack the Donald! That’s the Gray Lady’s motto.

And just to show how eager some Swedes are to welcome their new Muslim overlords, Sweden’s official Twitter account went after Trump, tweeting “Hey Don, this is @Sweden speaking! It’s nice of you to care, really, but don’t fall for the hype. Facts: We’re OK!”

Alrighty then. If it’s facts @Sweden wants, here are a few:

• As the Daily Mail
  notes, sex attacks by Muslim migrants have gotten so bad in the Swedish town of Österlund that police “say they have never seen anything like this” and add that the surge in attacks “seem unreal.’ ”
  
• According to a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Islam is now Sweden’s second largest religion. That same article states that in the nation’s third largest city, the most common name for baby boys is Mohamed.
  
• According to a 2015 report, “up to 40” Swedes have been killed fighting for ISIS. What are the odds any of them were named Bjorn or Sven?
  
• Swedish police have issued warnings that Stockholm’s main train station is now overrun by migrant teen gangs ‘stealing and groping girls’
  
• As this report notes, the Swedish news media has been complicit in politically correct cover ups to hide the scale of the migrant crime wave.
  
• The Daily Caller
  reports that the Swedish government “has issued notice to a family living in public housing that they must vacate the premises in August to make room for migrants.”
  
• Documentary film maker Ami Horowitz reports that he was beaten in a Muslim controlled no-go zone in Stockholm.
  

Perhaps if the writers at Time and the folks who man Sweden’s Twitter handle
spent less
effort virtue signaling and more time learning about what the Bible teaches about economics and politics, they would realize that when governments import huge numbers of foreigners and stick their own citizens with the bill, they are violating at least the Fifth, the Sixth and the Eighth Commandments. And given the fact that governments almost always lie to their people about the negative effects of mass, taxpayer-subsidized immigrant / refugee / asylee programs, you can throw in the Ninth Commandment as well.

But as poorly as the Swedish people have been served by their own elected representatives, there are at least two parliamentarians in the nation who have sense enough to come in out of the rain. In a Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, Jimmie Akesson and Mattias Karlsson wrote, “Mr. Trump did not exaggerate Sweden’s current problems. If anything, he understated them.”

There’s No Such Thing As Islamic Terrorism, So Says Pope Francis

To paraphrase a famous TV ad from way back in the day, “When Antichrist talks, people listen.” And this past week, his Antichristness decided to talk about Islamic terrorism. According to the Bishop of Rome, there’s simply no such thing.

“Christian terrorism does not exist, Jewish terrorism does not exist, and Muslim terrorism does not exist. They do not exist.” Here, the pope plays clever words games, putting two false religions, Judaism and Islam, on the same level as the that founded by Jesus Christ. And what he says is nonsense.

Islam has been a violent religion since its inception. Unknown to many people, there were active Zionist terrorists in the days leading up to the founding of the modern state of Israel. One by the name of Eliyahu Bet-Zuri suggested assassinating Winston Churchill to force the British out of Palestine.

As John Robbins pointed out in The Religious Wars of the 21st Century, Romanists, Catholics and the Jews fight because their kingdom is of this world. The followers of Christ, as Jesus himself taught, do not fight, for their kingdom is not of this world.

Or show me, if you can, where Christians are ever commanded to kill the infidels (unbelievers) who reject the gospel. There may be some who name the name of Christ who are of this spirit, but they have rejected the teachings of the Prince of Peace and are none of his.

The Masetro Speaks

Despite the awesome power they wield over the lives of billions of people, central bankers are a pretty boring lot. If you don’t believe me, just watch a speech by Janet Yellen or any of the other Federal Reserve lackeys who pop up from time to time to hold forth on some obscure topic or another. Trust me, it’s a yawn fest.

But there’s one central banker who’s an exception to this rule, Alan “The Maestro” Greenspan. Greenspan is a pretty interesting fellow. Born in 1926, he studied clarinet at Julliard in the 1940s, was a Ayn Rand groupie in the 1960s, took his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia in 1977 at the age of 51, and went on to usher in the modern age of activist central bankers throughout his tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 – 2006.

It was almost comical the way the financial press hung on his every word back in the heyday of the 1990s stock market bubble. To them, his every utterance was the voice of a god and not of a man. More than anyone else in the popular mind, he was the man most responsible for the remarkable stock market run in the 1990s. And it was during this period he was dubbed “the maestro” for his seemingly uncanny ability to steer the economic ship of state.

But while Greenspan’s words and actions were held in high esteem, his money printing – what is euphemistically termed in the financial press “accommodative monetary policy” – was what laid the groundwork for the stock market crash of 2000, the subsequent housing bubble that burst in 2004, and a second stock market bubble that exploded in 2008. Further, Greenspan’s money printing provided justification for his successors at the Fed to engage in experimental monetary policy that is now so extreme as to prompt one former member of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee to declare, “We injected cocaine and heroin into the [financial] system. Now we are maintaining it with Ritalin.”

But what makes Greenspan interesting to me is not his money printing, or the booms and busts it created, or the mystique that surrounds his persona, but the fact that ultimately he understands and has articulated very clearly the Biblical principle of sound money.

Back in his Ayn Rand days, Greenspan wrote what has become a cult classic among Gold Bugs, an essay titled Gold And Economic Freedom, which first appeared in Rand’s newsletter The Objectivist in 1966.

Wrote Greenspan,

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense – perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire – that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.

How a man who could write such a paragraph could go on to a career as money-printer-in-chief is a remarkable testament to sinful man’s ability to rationalize nearly anything.

But now that Greenspan is long retired from the central banking mafia, he is back to telling the truth.

Just this past week he commented,

Today, going back on the gold standard would be perceived as an act of desperation. But if the gold standard were in place today, we would not have reached the situation in which we now find ourselves.

We would never have reached this position of extreme indebtedness were we on the gold standard, because the gold standard is a way of ensuring that fiscal policy never gets out of line.

There is a widespread view that the 19th Century gold standard didn’t work. I think that’s like wearing the wrong size shoes and saying the shoes are uncomfortable! It wasn’t the gold standard that failed; it was politics.

This is an excellent statement. The only thing that could have improved it would have been for Greenspan to point out that governments have no business imposing any sort of monetary standard on society, for manufacturing money is not one of the functions of government outlined in the New Testament.

Gold is honest money. And that alone is enough to recommend a gold standard to Christians. But a monetary standard, even a gold standard, is not properly a function of government, but of the market.

As Genesis recounts for us, Abraham purchased the field with the cave in which he buried Sarah for “four hundred shekels of silver, the currency of the merchant.” It was the shekel of the merchant, a market-based silver standard, that served as a medium of exchange for Abraham and Ephron the Hittite.

In closing, while it’s easy to ridicule Alan Greenspan for his intellectual and practical inconsistency, what he said recently – and back in 1966 – is monetary truth.

And given the ocean of financial lies we are all forced to swim in, I’ll take the truth any day, even if it comes from the inconsistent lips of the Maestro.