America’s Self-Inflicted Race Wound

Did you know that Iranians held a candlelight vigil for George Floyd? Did you know that murals of Floyd with the words “I can’t breathe” were painted on the Berlin Wall and on a landmark in the Idlib province of Syria? Did you know that English Premier League soccer players took a knee at midfield, and soccer stars in Germany marked goals scored by displaying the message “Justice for George Floyd”?

A single act of police brutality in the United States sparked large protests in Paris, Toronto, Copenhagen, Dublin, Rio de Janiero, Milan, Mexico City and countless other cities. Streets in Vancouver, Canada, had to close to accommodate thousands of demonstrators. Black Lives Matter activists in London shouted “Hands up, don’t shoot” at British police—who don’t carry guns. Eight thousand miles from the Minneapolis street where the tragedy took place, tens of thousands turned out to protest in Auckland, New Zealand.

Why the unprecedented outrage over an incident in Midwestern America?

Newspapers and media outlets worldwide headlined the mayhem sweeping through America’s cities. Argentina’s largest newspaper: “Protests and Looting Throughout the U.S.” Mexico’s Diario 24 Horas: “Anti-Racist Anger at the Gates of the White House.” Italy’s La Stampa: “Looting, Fighting and Curfew: the U.S. at War.” The West Australian: “U.S.A. at War With Itself.” Germany’s Bild: “This Killer-Cop Set America Ablaze.”

They are marveling at the messy spectacle of America tearing itself apart. It is captivating entertainment—like an epic reality tv show of celebrity humiliation and self-destruction.

The United States is being battered from within and without. And in truth, those who hate it and all it stands for smell blood and are on the attack.

Lectures From Authoritarians

Who seemed to enjoy the chaos within America most? Authoritarian governments like Iran and China—those America has criticized for trampling human rights, muzzling the press, blocking protests and stifling free speech. Suddenly these nations are posing as high-minded defenders of justice and freedom, castigating “oppressive” America.

Mohammed Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, tweeted: “Some don’t think #BlackLivesMatter. To those of us who do: it is long overdue for the entire world to wage war against racism. Time for a #WorldAgainstRacism.” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Abbas Mousavi published a rare English-language statement “to the American people,” saying Iran stands with them against “state oppression.” Does anyone feel like taking lessons from the Islamic Republic of Iran on how to combat state oppression?

When a U.S. State Department spokesperson tweeted criticism of Communist China’s crackdown on Hong Kong, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson tweeted a three-word response: “I can’t breathe.” She then wrote, “All lives matter. We stand firmly with our African friends. We strongly oppose all forms of racial discrimination and inflammatory expressions of racism and hatred.” This is awfully high-minded, coming from a nation that just expelled hundreds of African migrants from their homes into the streets of Guangzhou in April, the latest example of decades of racial hostility toward Africans in their country.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan bemoaned the “racist and fascist approach” of U.S. police and “the unjust order we stand against around the world.” This from a man who has used Turkey’s military to punish and purge dissenters and transform his nation from a parliamentary democracy into an authoritarian state.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry publicly spoke out against America’s history of “unjustified violence” by police and condemned officers for detaining Russian journalists. This came just days after several Russian journalists were jailed for supporting an activist who was imprisoned after criticizing Russian law enforcement. The irony gets worse: How many journalists have been murdered in Russia since Vladimir Putin first came to power in 2000? About 150.

What does it tell you that the protesters on America’s streets, and their cheerleaders in media and the political class, are being encouraged and egged on by foreign totalitarian states?

Does Communist China really care about George Floyd? Does Islamist Iran have sincere concern about racism? Does dictatorial Russia actually care about freedom of the press?

No. They want to destroy America. And as America bleeds and burns, they see an opportunity. You can read about it in last month’s Trumpet cover story: “The Global Ambition to Destroy America and Its President” (theTrumpet.com/22352).

And the real tragedy is, many people in America have the same goal! And in their effort to destroy this country, they are dragging a lot of terribly foolish people along with them.

As you watch Americans fighting other Americans, looting and burning American businesses, trashing American cities and neighborhoods, making despicable accusations about other Americans—you need to see just as clearly as the nation’s adversaries do that we are ruining ourselves.

We are inflicting upon ourselves a nation-killing wound.

The Left’s Shock Troops

A lot of the unrest in America today is being supported and organized by radical leftists who, whether gradually or suddenly, openly or secretly, want to destroy this country.

These individuals are deliberately stoking protests and mutating them into violent riots through coordinated command-and-control and supply chains of weapons and projectiles. Law enforcement officials and police intelligence units across the country say these efforts are “more organized, better coordinated and supplied than any militants seen in civil discord in years,” report Christine Dolan and John Solomon for Just the News (June 3). They quote U.S. Park Police Acting Chief Gregory T. Monahan as saying, “Intelligence had revealed calls for violence against the police, and officers found caches of glass bottles, baseball bats and metal poles hidden along the street.” “In other cities, stacks of bricks have been discovered in staging areas that end up being slammed against store windows by looters,” they write.

Among the active supporters of these protests and riots is the Democratic Socialists of America. Its National Political Committee stated that Floyd’s death was a “public execution,” part of “the deeply entrenched pattern of violence, anti-blackness, and oppression upheld by policing in this country.” It wrote: “This is white supremacy. … Racist police violence is not incidental to the capitalist system; it is necessary to maintain its operation.” This group works closely with Antifa groups, and some of its branches are raising funds for “George Floyd Uprisings Nationwide.”

Working for the Epoch Times, journalist Trevor Loudon has documented similar support coming from a whole range of Communist-aligned groups in America. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is referring to this chaos as an “absolutely critical period” for imposing its vision of a Communist revolution. It stated, “The police will always fulfill their role of being shock troops for white supremacy and capitalism as long as it exists in this racist state.” The Workers World Party, which supports China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Russia, loves the protests. One of its members published an article on May 28 titled “Against police violence and capitalism, to rebel is justified,” describing “police terror” and scorning “disgusting bourgeois praise for nonviolence.” The Revolutionary Communist Party is using the death of George Floyd to call for “a movement for an actual revolution.”

There are other small Communist groups such as Communist Party usa, Liberation Road, Socialist Alternative, and Socialist Unity Party. Together with the 66,000 Democratic Socialists of America and their allies in Black Lives Matter and Antifa, they can mobilize tens of thousands of people on short notice to splash gasoline on any spark of societal friction.

Radical socialists are also getting ample help from the press. Hollywood celebrities are paying rioters’ bail money. Big corporations have fallen all over each other to make statements and release ads trying to align their brands and business practices with the protesters and rioters. A Nike ad said, “For Once, Don’t Do It”—“Don’t turn your back on racism. Don’t accept innocent lives being taken from us.” Nickelodeon broadcasted a black screen with “I can’t breathe” for 9 minutes. Netflix tweeted a sentiment similar to many protest placards: “To be silent is to be complicit. Black lives matter.” YouTube is donating $1 million for police reform. Intel is donating $1 million, and Verizon $10 million, to “social justice” organizations.

These mainstream voices have made explicit accusations of “systemic racism,” “white supremacy,” the genocide of blackness and the violence of whiteness. They’re saying that the looting, burning and violence is understandable, even right and just. They applaud the violence.

By doing so, whether knowingly or in ignorance, they are aligning themselves with America’s worst enemies.

Love Letter to America

In 1984, a Russian intelligence agent who defected to the United States, Yuri Bezmenov, wrote a book, Love Letter to America. He really did love America, and had the unique perspective of someone who knew how the Communists were working to destroy it.

This man, like so many millions of outsiders, chose to make America his home. He wrote, “For what other reason have thousands risked their lives, gone to unimaginable troubles, left behind their families, their motherland and traditional ways of life to come to America? Have you ever heard of ‘illegal aliens’ risking their lives crossing the border at midnight into Socialist ussr? Or the ‘boat people’ swimming oceans and drowning by the thousands just to reach the shores of Communist China? Or defectors like me, leaving behind relative affluence and risking bullets in the back in order to join the ‘progressive workers paradise’ in Russia? No, we all come here to America, obviously willing to be ‘exploited by capitalists’ and enjoy ‘oppression’ together with you. Because we believe and know—America is a better place.”

That is something many Americans no longer believe! They really have come to see this country as the most oppressive, most racist country in the world. They want to see it suffer and burn.

Bezmenov’s book exposes the Communists’ plan: Get people who live in the freest, most just, most affluent racially integrated country, with the greatest opportunity for people of all races and types and cultures—to believe the opposite. The method is “ideological subversion—the process of changing the perception of reality in the minds of millions of peoples.”

Does that sound familiar?

It doesn’t just match this afternoon’s latest headlines about the riots. It matches an ancient prophecy in Isaiah 5:20-21. God knew that we would call evil good and good evil—putting darkness for light and light for darkness. Look at the news: Powerful people are calling obviously wicked looters and arsonists “just,” and they are calling efforts to stop the violence “unjust.”

“The art of duping the masses into doing things to their own disadvantage and making them believe it is ‘the will of people’ is as ancient as mankind itself,” Bezmenov wrote. “The essence of subversion is best expressed in the famous Marxist slogan (if you substitute ‘proletarians’ for a more appropriate word): ‘Useful idiots of the world—unite!’ To achieve the desired effect, the subverter must first make idiots out of normal people, and divide them ….” Recent events suggest we are in that final stage now: America has witnessed unprecedented mass idiocy, homogenized mob derangement.

Bezmenov listed the tactics, which include:

Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial issues of no importance.

Destroy people’s faith in their national leaders by holding the latter up for contempt, ridicule and disgrace.

Always preach democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.

Encourage civil disorders and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of the government toward such disorders.

“The main principle of ideological subversion is turning a stronger force against itself,” Bezmenov wrote. “Just like in the Japanese martial arts: you do not stop the blow of a heavier more powerful enemy with an equally forceful blow. You may simply hurt your hand. Instead you catch the striking fist with your hand and pull the enemy in the direction of his own blow until he crashes into a wall or any other heavy object in his way.”

He likened it to a building containing explosive materials. The enemy starts the fire next door and focuses on keeping the occupants of the building distracted, arguing and doing anything except noticing the approaching flames. “Smart people would notice the fire and remove the inflammable objects and material before the house catches the fire. Useful idiots will keep arguing about whether it is constitutional or not to pay firefighters, or the equality of husband and wife in domestic chores (who should remove the combustibles), until the actual explosion blows their enfeebled brains all over the neighborhood.” Americans are screaming at each other over relative non-issues while ignoring the flames engulfing our house!

Bezmenov describes the effectiveness of discrediting law enforcement, and of buying people off with socialist programs that make them loyal to the welfare state but not the nation. “[I]n the area of social life, by encouraging you to put your individual rights over your obligations (and obligations private, financial, moral, patriotic, etc) the subverter achieves the desired effect: a society composed of irresponsible individuals, each one ‘doing his own thing,’ and acting according to the ‘law of the jungle.’ Such subversion of society is the first step to tyranny.”

This book makes for chilling reading—especially when you see the U.S. tearing itself apart as it is now. He even wrote, “Racial and ethnic interrelations is one of the most vulnerable areas for demoralization.” He exposes the danger in remaining ignorant of history, in eliminating religion and morality, in forsaking the ideals that founded this nation, in failing to build loyalty in our people, in turning education over to radicals, in embracing socialist thinking.

Though perhaps initiated and encouraged by kgb masterminds, these dangerous actions are all things Americans have done to ourselves.

A Self-Inflicted Wound

“Why are people—especially in the United States and Britain—so blind? Why so naive?” Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in a March 1969 Plain Truth article. “Why are our people unable to recognize the Communist line—the Communist plan and conspiracy—in college and university riots, in propaganda accusing ‘police brutality,’ in ‘black power,’ ‘black panther’ and other slogans, even in ‘civil disobedience’ and ‘nonviolent’ movements of protest which lead to violence? …

“The guiding hand in student revolt is the Communist Party,” he continued. “Many students, their emotions stirred and enraged to violence, do not themselves realize this. Yet, actually, these young leaders of the ‘new left’ movement are going beyond the Communist Party. Their plan is to stir up college-age students to revolt first, and the teen-age high school adolescents. If they can corrupt and/or win over tomorrow’s students, they will gain control.”

There isn’t much concern over communism in America today. But there is little doubt that significant numbers of “tomorrow’s students” have been corrupted and won over—and that Communist-aligned thinkers have gained a breathtaking level of control.

As America’s streets are burning, some Americans are stridently insisting that this evil is a good thing. They say such protest is healthy. In truth, what is happening in America is a sign of terrible, terminal sickness! (Isaiah 1:5-7). The more these nihilistic tendencies are encouraged, the weaker America becomes, and the easier prey for the nation’s enemies.

America’s enemies are enjoying and taking advantage of the spectacle, but we are doing this to ourselves. The fact that it is a self-inflicted wound makes it all the more tragic.

Bible prophecy said it would happen. Our editor in chief, Gerald Flurry, has been highlighting these prophecies of race riots practically since the beginning of the Trumpet magazine 30 years ago.

And this is going to be far more disastrous than a sea of broken windows and charred rubble, more disastrous than a major economic disaster. American dominance and leadership are being decimated.

Consider this assessment from Aris Roussinos, a British journalist: “It is surely impossible to view the U.S. at this point as anything other than a cautionary tale, a burning city on a hill, which evokes only the desire for our own society to avoid its fate.” Can anyone argue? Countries the world over do see America as “a cautionary tale.”

This too points to Bible prophecies! God warned that if the descendants of the ancient Israelites, which includes America, did not believe and obey Him, “[T]hou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among all nations …” (Deuteronomy 28:37; see also 1 Kings 9:7; 2 Chronicles 7:20; Psalm 44:14).

‘You Have Destroyed Yourself’

Civilizations do die. And great civilizations don’t gently decline: They tend to die violently.

You are witnessing the death of a great nation. And what will the world become when its “last best hope” for human freedom burns itself within and gets destroyed from without?

The prophecies of the Bible address that too. It will be horrific for Americans and then for the whole world. Read The United States and Britain in Prophecy, by Herbert W. Armstrong (theTrumpet.com/go/usbp).

But God also prophesies that He will intervene!

These problems cannot be solved by man. Do you really think the solution is written in a politician’s campaign speech notes, or on some celebrity’s shirt, or in an e-mail from a billionaire ceo about “having a national conversation,” or on a foreign leader’s Twitter page, or on a smashed liquor store in spray-paint?

The Bible prophesied that too: “The way of peace they know not; and there is no judgment in their goings: they have made them crooked paths …” (Isaiah 59:8).

“O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself,” God laments in Hosea 13. God loves America, too—and mourns to see what we are doing to ourselves!

“But in me is thine help. I will be your king,” He continues—a beautiful promise—followed by a piercing question: “Where is ANY OTHER that may save thee in all thy cities?” (verses 9-10). Yes, how could anyone but God save us? Where is there any man to solve these problems? Do you really think the solution is written in a politician’s campaign speech notes, or in an e-mail from a billionaire ceo about “having a national conversation,” or on some celebrity’s shirt, or on a smashed liquor store in spray-paint?

Yet God is reaching out! He would help us, He would solve our problems, He would unite us—He would be our King—if only we would embrace His law and submit to His rule! God loves America. He wants to prevent our destruction if He can. But He will only do so if we allow Him to.

God will allow our self-inflicted failures to reach the point of desperation. What will stop it? Us finally acknowledging the truth: that we are incapable of successfully ruling ourselves! We need God.

That is when the only viable model of governance will finally and abruptly appear. It will be administered by the Creator of human beings!

If you are tired of looking at photos and videos of your country dying, I suggest you click over to read The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like. Even as the nation you love dies and its enemies salivate, you can have hope.