by
Paul Craig Roberts

Recently
by Paul Craig Roberts: The
Obama Regime Has No Constitutional Scruples

Christmas is
a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush before
Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new
tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the
beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put
up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark
of the season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light
a national Christmas tree on the White House lawn.

Gifts are another
shared custom. This tradition comes from the wise men or three kings
who brought gifts to baby Jesus. When I was a kid, gifts were more
modest than they are now, but even then people were complaining
about the commercialization of Christmas. We have grown accustomed
to the commercialization. Christmas sales are the backbone of many
businesses. Gift giving causes us to remember others and to take
time from our harried lives to give them thought.

The decorations
and gifts of Christmas are one of our connections to a Christian
culture that has held Western civilization together for 2,000 years.

In our culture
the individual counts. This permits an individual person to put
his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle, to become a
reformer and to take on injustice.

This empowerment
of the individual is unique to Western civilization. It has made
the individual a citizen equal in rights to all other citizens,
protected from tyrannical government by the rule of law and free
speech. These achievements are the products of centuries of struggle,
but they all flow from the teaching that God so values the individual’s
soul that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so elevating
the individual, Christianity gave him a voice.

Formerly only
those with power had a voice. But in Western civilization people
with integrity have a voice. So do people with a sense of justice,
of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform, investors
can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial enterprises,
new products and new occupations.

The result
was a land of opportunity. The United States attracted immigrants
who shared our values and reflected them in their own lives. Our
culture was absorbed by a diverse people who became one.

In recent decades
we have begun losing sight of the historic achievement that empowered
the individual. The religious, legal and political roots of this
great achievement are no longer reverently taught in high schools,
colleges and universities or respected by our government. The voices
that reach us through the millennia and connect us to our culture
are being silenced by “political correctness” and “the war
on terror.” Prayer has been driven from schools and Christian
religious symbols from public life. Constitutional protections have
been diminished by hegemonic political ambitions.

Diversity at
home and hegemony abroad are consuming values and are dismantling
the culture. There is plenty of room for cultural diversity in the
world, but not within a single country. A Tower of Babel has no
culture. A person cannot be a Christian one day, a pagan the next
and a Muslim the day after. A hodgepodge of cultural and religious
values provides no basis for law – except the raw power oof the
pre-Christian past.

All Americans
have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we are individually
believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral doctrine
that has curbed power and protected the weak. Power is the horse
ridden by evil. In the 20th century the horse was ridden hard. Millions
of people were exterminated by National Socialists in Germany and
by Soviet and Chinese communists simply because they were members
of a race or class that had been demonized by intellectuals and
political authority.

Power
that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is not
limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin made this clear
when he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as “unlimited power,
resting directly on force, not limited by anything.” Our government’s
drive for hegemony is resurrecting unaccountable power.

Christianity’s
emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such power as Lenin
claimed unthinkable. Be we religious or be we not, our celebration
of Christ’s birthday celebrates a religion that made us masters
of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion
as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.

December
24, 2011

Paul
Craig Roberts [send
him mail], a
former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases
of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book,

The
Tyranny of Good Intentions,
co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how
Americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random
House.

Copyright
© 2011 Paul
Craig Roberts

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