Rome and The World Empire
All the arguments that the EU is the revived Roman empire, and that the Antichrist can't come from the US because we are not the revived Roman Empire, remind me again of the Pharisees. Remember they searched the scriptures, but they searched to justify their positions and themselves. They were not searching for Truth. One of the problems that the Pharisees had in recognizing Jesus was because they thought that "Elias" (Elijah) the prophet must first come. He was right under their nose, but they didn't see him because he didn't fit into their scheme of things, and they were too busy persecuting him. Mt:11:14: "And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, (speaking of John the Baptist) which was for to come." He was not the actual reincarnation of Elias, nor had he come back from Heaven (he never died), but he was of the "Spirit of Elias". This is why Jesus said "If you can receive it".
Maybe it will help if we look at just what the spirit of the Roman empire is.
If we look back in the Book of Daniel, we see in Chap 2:31: Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible.32: This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass,33: His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.34: Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces.35: Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.
Just as numbers have significance so do the metals. As we read on in the chapter, he interprets the image as kingdoms that were there then and that were to come. The Image ultimately speaks of the kingdoms of this world and their makeup. The head was of gold; this was Babylon. Gold is significant of divinity. In this case it was man's representation of god, idolatry. Babylon was the seat of idol worship and false religion. The next empire to arise was inferior. The shoulders and arms were of silver. Silver speaks of salvation and government; In this case mans effort to have unity without the truth of God. "The government shall be upon His shoulders". The Head rests on the shoulders. This empire was the Medo-Persian. Many scholars would trace back the origins of the concept of "Democracy" to the Medo-Persian empire. Next was the belly of brass. This was Alexander's Greece. Brass was of less value than silver but still considered of value and used in exchange. These three metals were all used in the tabernacle of the congregation where the Arc of the Covenant sat. Brass represents culture.
It was Greece that was the origin of our modern day culture; theatre, art, philosophy and medicine (serpent on a stick symbol). This metal is less valuable just as we don't consider our culture as important as our religion or our government. Each empire that came along built upon the preceding empires taking their gods and their governmental form.
Then this figure was set upon legs of Iron, Imperial Rome. Iron is stronger than any of the other metals, but not considered valuable. Iron is about force. It is the Law. Rv:2:27:" And he shall rule them with a rod of iron" Ruling by law just or unjust. This was Rome. They took the religions of Babylon, ( the Greek gods were the same ), the government of Medo-Persia, the culture of Greece, and built it all on a foundation of law backed up with brute force. It all worked very well for a long time. But.... the problem was it was all built on feet that were of iron and clay. Clay is significant of the flesh of man. Iron does not mix with clay, just as we are incapable of keeping the law. That is why we needed a savior, because we have all broken God's law. Now we see a stone that was cut out without hands ( Christ), which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and broke them to pieces... Then the whole thing comes tumbling down, and is burned up like chaff. Then the wind carries it away The breath of God the Holy Spirit....and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, (the Kingdom of God) and filled the whole earth.
Now let's think about it. America is the revival of the Roman Empire. It is of the same spirit. Its ways have filled the whole earth. Even if Europe were to somehow get a stronger army, it is still this same empire. Everything that is Europe today is of America. Not just Europe but the whole world is under its influence. They have our form (with some variations) of government, our culture with music and trade and sports etc. English is the international language, the dollar is the standard bearer. At the head of it all is that head of Gold. They all worship the gods of false religion and the god of mammon and the corporate deities.
Rv:9:2: And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. Could this be Oil ? It comes from a seemingly bottomless pit, and it has filled the whole earth with its smoke ( air pollution). What a coincidence that God has put all that oil under Islam. Watch what is happening now. The Antichrist has started a war in Babylon ( modern day Iraq ) .
Now he is laying the plans to attack Medo-Persia (Iran, Syria). Is Greece next? or is it his attacks against homosexuals (Greece known for its homosexual culture) that are going to go from just legal bans against equality to escalate into a slaughter. Jerry Falwell has blamed them for 9/11 and the Tsunami that hit endeavoring to villify them thereby justifying a massacre. This President is blood thirsty, greedy, and arrogant as befitting the Antichrist.
3 comments:
When Democracy Failed - 2005
The Warnings of History
by Thom Hartmann
This weekend - February 27th - is the 72nd
anniversary, but the corporate media most likely won't
cover it. The generation that experienced this history
firsthand is now largely dead, and only a few of us
dare hear their ghosts.
It started when the government, in the midst of an
economic crisis, received reports of an imminent
terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched
feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the
media largely ignored his relatively small efforts.
The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds
were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are
still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the
intelligence service helped the terrorist. Some, like
Sefton Delmer - a London Daily Express reporter on the
scene - say they certainly did not, while others, like
William Shirer, suggest they did.)
But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the
highest levels, in part because the government was
distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's
leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the
majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the
powers he coveted.
He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of
a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and
didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties
of running a nation in a complex and internationalist
world.
His coarse use of language - reflecting his political
roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and
often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the
aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated
elite in the government and media. And, as a young
man, he'd joined a secret society with an
occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals
that involved skulls and human bones.
Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike
(although he didn't know where or when), and he had
already considered his response. When an aide brought
him word that the nation's most prestigious building
was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had
struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press
conference.
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch
in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the
burned-out building, surrounded by national media.
"This fire," he said, his voice trembling with
emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a
sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out
war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a
people, he said, who traced their origins to the
Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds
in their religion.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for
terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first
suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a
national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was
everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable
for window display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the
nation's now-popular leader had pushed through
legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and
fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that
suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech,
privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept
mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be
imprisoned without specific charges and without access
to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's
homes without warrants if the cases involved
terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of
People and State" passed over the objections of
concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he
agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the
national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack
was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be
returned to the people, and the police agencies would
be re-restrained. Legislators would later say they
hadn't had time to read the bill before voting on it.
Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act,
his federal police agencies stepped up their program
of arresting suspicious persons and holding them
without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year
only a few hundred were interred, and those who
objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press,
which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a
leader with such high popularity ratings. Citizens who
protested the leader in public - and there were many -
quickly found themselves confronting the newly
empowered police's batons, gas, and jail cells, or
fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of
the leader's public speeches. (In the meantime, he was
taking almost daily lessons in public speaking,
learning to control his tonality, gestures, and facial
expressions. He became a very competent orator.)
Within the first months after that terrorist attack,
at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a
formerly obscure word into common usage. He wanted to
stir a "racial pride" among his countrymen, so,
instead of referring to the nation by its name, he
began to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase
publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech
recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie
"Triumph Of The Will." As hoped, people's hearts
swelled with pride, and the beginning of an
us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the"
homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply
foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested,
the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs
fall on others, or human rights are violated in other
nations and it makes our lives better, it's of little
concern to us.
Playing on this new implicitly racial nationalism, and
exploiting a disagreement with the French over his
increasing militarism, he argued that any
international body that didn't act first and foremost
in the best interest of his own nation was neither
relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from
the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then
negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with
Anthony Eden of The United Kingdom to create a
worldwide military ruling elite.
His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to
ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man
and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity.
He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the
Christian faith across his nation, what he called a
"New Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing
army wore a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" -
God Is With Us - and most of them fervently believed
it was true.
Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's
leader determined that the various local police and
federal agencies around the nation were lacking the
clear communication and overall coordinated
administration necessary to deal with the terrorist
threat facing the nation, particularly those citizens
who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably
terrorist and communist sympathizers, and various
troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals." He
proposed a single new national agency to protect the
security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of
dozens of previously independent police, border, and
investigative agencies under a single leader.
He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be
leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office
for the homeland, and gave it a role in the government
equal to the other major departments.
His assistant who dealt with the press noted that,
since the terrorist attack, "Radio and press are at
out disposal." Those voices questioning the legitimacy
of their nation's leader, or raising questions about
his checkered past, had by now faded from the public's
recollection as his central security office began
advertising a program encouraging people to phone in
tips about suspicious neighbors. This program was so
successful that the names of some of the people
"denounced" were soon being broadcast on radio
stations. Those denounced often included opposition
politicians and news reporters who dared speak out - a
favorite target of his regime and the media he now
controlled through intimidation and ownership by
corporate allies.
To consolidate his power, he concluded that government
alone wasn't enough. He reached out to industry and
forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the
nation's largest corporations into high government
positions. A flood of government money poured into
corporate coffers to fight the war against the Middle
Eastern ancestry terrorists lurking within the
homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas. He
encouraged large corporations friendly to him to
acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns
across the nation, particularly those previously owned
by suspicious people of Middle Eastern ancestry. He
built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate
ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to
build the first large-scale detention center for
enemies of the state. Soon more would follow. Industry
flourished.
He also reached out to the churches, declaring that
the nation had clear Christian roots, that any nation
that didn't openly support religion was morally
bankrupt, and that his administration would openly and
proudly provide both moral and financial support to
initiatives based on faith to provide social services.
In this, he was reaching back to his own embrace of
Christianity, which he noted in an April 12, 1922
speech:
"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord
and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who
once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers
... was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.
"In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I
read through the passage which tells us how the Lord
at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to
drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and
adders...
"As a Christian ... I have the duty to be a
fighter for truth and justice..."
When he later survived an assassination attempt, he
said, "Now I am completely content. The fact that I
left the Burgerbraukeller earlier than usual is a
corroboration of Providence's intention to let me
reach my goal."
Many government functions started with prayer. Every
school day started with prayer and every child heard
the wonders of Christianity and - especially - the Ten
Commandments in school. The leader even ended many of
his speeches with a prayer, as he did in a February
20, 1938 speech before Parliament:
"In this hour I would ask of the Lord God only
this: that, as in the past, so in the years to come He
would give His blessing to our work and our action, to
our judgment and our resolution, that He will
safeguard us from all false pride and from all
cowardly servility, that He may grant us to find the
straight path which His Providence has ordained for
the German people, and that He may ever give us the
courage to do the right, never to falter, never to
yield before any violence, before any danger."
But after an interval of peace following the terrorist
attack, voices of dissent again arose within and
without the government. Students had started an active
program opposing him (later known as the White Rose
Society), and leaders of nearby nations were speaking
out against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed a
diversion, something to direct people away from the
corporate cronyism being exposed in his own
government, questions of his possibly illegitimate
rise to power, his corruption of religious leaders,
and the oft-voiced concerns of civil libertarians
about the people being held in detention without due
process or access to attorneys or family.
With his number two man - a master at manipulating the
media - he began a campaign to convince the people of
the nation that a small, limited war was necessary.
Another nation was harboring many of the suspicious
Middle Eastern people, and even though its connection
with the terrorist who had set afire the nation's most
important building was tenuous at best, it held
resources their nation badly needed if they were to
have room to live and maintain their prosperity.
He called a press conference and publicly delivered an
ultimatum to the leader of the other nation, provoking
an international uproar. He claimed the right to
strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations
across Europe - at first - denounced him for it,
pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in
the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like
Caesar's Rome or Alexander's Greece.
It took a few months, and intense international debate
and lobbying with European nations, but, after he
personally met with the leader of the United Kingdom,
finally a deal was struck. After the military action
began, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the
nervous British people that giving in to this leader's
new first-strike doctrine would bring "peace for our
time." Thus Hitler annexed Austria in a lightning
move, riding a wave of popular support as leaders so
often do in times of war. The Austrian government was
unseated and replaced by a new leadership friendly to
Germany, and German corporations began to take over
Austrian resources.
In a speech responding to critics of the invasion,
Hitler said, "Certain foreign newspapers have said
that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can
only say; even in death they cannot stop lying. I have
in the course of my political struggle won much love
from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier
[into Austria] there met me such a stream of love as I
have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come,
but as liberators."
To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at
the advice of his politically savvy advisors, he and
his handmaidens in the press began a campaign to
equate him and his policies with patriotism and the
nation itself. National unity was essential, they
said, to ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors
didn't think they'd succeeded in splitting the nation
or weakening its will.
Rather than the government being run by multiple
parties in a pluralistic, democratic fashion, one
single party sought total control. Emulating a
technique also used by Stalin, but as ancient as Rome,
the Party used the power of its influence on the
government to take over all government functions, hand
out government favors, and reward Party contributors
with government positions and contracts.
In times of war, they said, there could be only "one
people, one nation, and one commander-in-chief" ("Ein
Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and so his advocates in
the media began a nationwide campaign charging that
critics of his policies were attacking the nation
itself. You were either with us, or you were with the
terrorists.
It was a simplistic perspective, but that was what
would work, he was told by his Propaganda Minister,
Joseph Goebbels: "The most brilliant propagandist
technique will yield no success unless one fundamental
principle is borne in mind constantly - it must
confine itself to a few points and repeat them over
and over."
Those questioning him were labeled "anti-German" or
"not good Germans," and it was suggested they were
aiding the enemies of the state by failing in the
patriotic necessity of supporting the nation's valiant
men in uniform. It was one of his most effective ways
to stifle dissent and pit wage-earning people (from
whom most of the army came) against the "intellectuals
and liberals" who were critical of his policies.
Another technique was to "manufacture news," through
the use of paid shills posing as reporters, seducing
real reporters with promises of access to the leader
in exchange for favorable coverage, and thinly veiled
threats to those who exposed his lies. As his
Propaganda Minister said, "It is the absolute right of
the State to supervise the formation of public
opinion."
Nonetheless, once the "small war" annexation of
Austria was successfully and quickly completed, and
peace returned, voices of opposition were again raised
in the Homeland. The almost-daily release of news
bulletins about the dangers of terrorist communist
cells wasn't enough to rouse the populace and totally
suppress dissent. A full-out war was necessary to
divert public attention from the growing rumbles
within the country about disappearing dissidents;
violence against liberals, Jews, and union leaders;
and the epidemic of crony capitalism that was
producing empires of wealth in the corporate sector
but threatening the middle class's way of life.
A year later, to the week, Hitler invaded
Czechoslovakia.
In the months after that, he claimed that Poland had
weapons of mass destruction (poison gas) and was
supporting terrorists against Germany. Those who
doubted that Poland represented a threat were shouted
down or branded as ignorant. Elections were rigged,
run by party hacks. Only loyal Party members were
given passes for admission to public events with the
leader, so there would never be a single newsreel of a
heckler, and no doubt in the minds of the people that
the leader enjoyed vast support.
And his support did grow, as Propaganda Minister
Goebbels' dictum bore fruit:
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating
it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie
can be maintained only for such time as the State can
shield the people from the political, economic and/or
military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes
vitally important for the State to use all of its
powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal
enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is
the greatest enemy of the State."
Within a few months Poland, too, was invaded in a
"defensive, pre-emptive" action. The nation was now
fully at war, and all internal dissent was suppressed
in the name of national security; it was the end of
Germany's first experiment with democracy.
As we conclude this review of history, there are a few
milestones worth remembering.
February 27, 2005, is the 72nd anniversary of Dutch
terrorist Marinus van der Lubbe's successful
firebombing of the German Parliament (Reichstag)
building, the terrorist act that catapulted Hitler to
legitimacy and reshaped the German constitution. By
the time of his successful and brief action to seize
Austria, in which almost no German blood was shed,
Hitler was the most beloved and popular leader in the
history of his nation. Hailed around the world, he was
later Time magazine's "Man Of The Year."
Most Americans remember his office for the security of
the homeland, known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt
and its SchutzStaffel, simply by its most famous
agency's initials: the SS.
We also remember that the Germans developed a new form
of highly violent warfare they named "lightning war"
or blitzkrieg, which, while generating devastating
civilian losses, also produced a highly desirable
"shock and awe" among the nation's leadership
according to the authors of the 1996 book "Shock And
Awe" published by the National Defense University
Press.
Reflecting on that time, The American Heritage
Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983) left us
this definition of the form of government the German
democracy had become through Hitler's close alliance
with the largest German corporations and his policy of
using religion and war as tools to keep power:
"fas-cism (fâsh'iz'em) n. A system of government that
exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right,
typically through the merging of state and business
leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Today, as we face financial and political crises, it's
useful to remember that the ravages of the Great
Depression hit Germany and the United States alike.
Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose
very different courses to bring their nations back to
power and prosperity.
Germany's response was to use government to empower
corporations and reward the society's richest
individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle
dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, bust
up unions, and create an illusion of prosperity
through government debt and continual and
ever-expanding war spending.
America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle
class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power
of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and
the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security,
and became the employer of last resort through
programs to build national infrastructure, promote the
arts, and replant forests.
To the extent that our Constitution is still intact,
the choice is again ours.
Thom Hartmann (www.thomhartmann.com) lived and worked
in Germany during the 1980s, is the Project Censored
Award-winning, best-selling author of over a dozen
books, and is the host of a nationally syndicated
daily progressive talk radio program. This article, in
slightly altered form, was first published in 2003 by
CommonDreams.org and is now also a chapter in Thom's
book What Would Jefferson Do?, published in 2004 by
Random House/Harmony.
I wish I would have read this earlier because I doubt you will read this comment. I agree completly with what you said except for one thing. FDR basically scrapted our constitution with his social security . FDR is the reason we are in the state we are in today so he had the same plan as Hitler It just took longer for this to happen in America because we had always been a free people and the Hitler did it would not have worked then because 1. the people were to well armed back then virtually every one had a gun in them days. And 2. it was going to take a lot longer to brainwash the people but they have eventually succeded of course they tell you it is a two party system it really is one party with very little difference and no one seems to notice because they are to busy pointing the finger at every one else. I have an interesting post on another web site telling all about this on http://isbushantichrist.blogspot.com/ under the comments for Bush Accelorates His Attack On The Poor
You should read it.
As for peterz I really like your site I notice you don't get as many hits as Stephen but you should. Keep up the good work
Um, whatever.
I am confused on the interpretation of the time of the apocolypse in Revelations. The bushisantichrist.com interpretations are really insightful, but without the scholarship of someone like Hanchet, I can't make heads or tails of the 'King of the North' or of the south. Any ideas?
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