THE EMMAUS WALK PRESENTS:

"Feeding the Dragon," A View of China and U.S. Relations Since World War II

Parts I-III, by Ronald Ginther

Why should I write this article about China and America? What is so significant about China anyway? And what does "feeding the dragon mean?"

Unlike Ruth Bell-Graham, I do not have any meaningful family connection with China (alas!) which might have taught me a lot about that most fascinating country and its age-old civilization. I had to learn most of what little I know from scattered sources--and the amount of what I know is not anything to be proud of. Just read an encyclopedia's account of Chinese culture and history some time, and you will soon realize this country has gone through everything a nation can possibly go through--a dozen times over!

As a youth I read the writings of the world-famous missionary daughter (missionary daughter but missionary hating) Pearl S. Buck and her masterful, evocative depictions of life in traditional China slowly (ever so slowly) evolving toward the modern world, which for me I found chiefly in her classic, Nobel-prize winning novel, "The Good Earth." I found it surprising that when I was teaching composition and using a video of this novel that the class did not appreciate her work, nor were they interesting in China. This was in a Midwestern college, but I take it that American culture has no real interest in Chinese culture, past or present. At least the book affords (to me anyway) a poignant glimpse into mysterious China and its unique, ancient ways and centuries-old problems--but that wasn't even imagined valuable by my class. I think they would have been surprised in turn to learn that ramshackle, tradition-mired, old China, during the mid 19th century, when it was still ruled by the decrepit and largely ceremonial Imperial Manchu dynasty, sent flood aid to stricken, homeless Americans in the flood-ravaged Mississipi valley! Vast areas of China had known catastrophes of earthquakes, but water has been the main source of China's grief, the sorrows of being flooded repeatedly, losing innumerable lives and people's villages, homes, and precious possessions, to the uncontrollable rivers that crisscross practically all the highly populated land. It is as if China was destined for such trouble--a land of many waters producing a people of many tears. It was this much afflicted China, among all the nations on earth, that identified most keenly with America's flood victims and did something to alleviate their suffering.

Who else cared and sent aid? France? Spain? Britain? The Netherlands--they knew what floods could do, did they care? I have no information, except I listened to some Dutch experts tut-tut on a BBC radio program about the inadequate levees of New Orleans which they had recently studied. I just suspect that China was about the only nation that responded to our need of help and volunteered it, graciously, without strings attached.

Yet how had we treated China up to that time--and since? Very poorly, indeed! Tens of thousands of Chinese were "imported" like Mexicans are welcomed (legal or illegal, it does not matter to the government) to fill untaken, menial jobs. Back then the Chinese were shipped in or allowed to immigrate to fill such as logging and road building and cooks and building railroad lines--the most dirty, dangerous jobs went to them, and the fatalities and injuries were probably staggering, if statistics were kept on them. You might not see any "Chinamen" in the interior, but they abounded in bustling ports such as San Francisco, and various seaside or waterfront towns like Seattle and Tacoma, and Portland, Oregon. Mining camps were also full of them. They were the people who worked for a pittance in conditions animals could not bear--such was their strength, endurance, and desperate need.

Years pass, and we arrive at the 20th century. The Chinese have not been allowed to assimilate into American society, except to form ghetto-like "Chinatowns" in major coast cities--New York, and California's main cities. It used to be nobody wanted them in the mainstream of American life, except that their Chinese restaurants and laundries are popular and, therefore, tolerated. Now the math and science skills of Asian immigrants (second generation mostly) are eagerly sought in top firms and in the universities, for America has a shortage in these fields. Does that mean Asians are appreciated--hardly! They have just saved America's goose, intellectually, during a time when America's public schools continue their disastrous academic decline. As for Chinese literature, history, art, culture, and people, nobody takes any interest (other than the museums that collect great art). It is strange. America is a great Pacific Rim power, sharing the same ocean with China. In the early days America, in colonial times and after the Revolution, benefited greatly from the fur trade, exchanging Canadian and Alaskan furs in China for its fine goods--reaping a a huge profit for every dollar spent on the fur and its transit to China. One ship, making it back home to Boston or New York or even Astoria, was enough to make the owner a millionaire!

John Jacob Astor, once America's richest man, built his forture on this fur trade with China. Yet, except for a certain amount of highly lucrative trade, America was not interested in real intellectual exchange with this great country, whose civilization goes back continously in time about three thousand years (making it much older and longer-lived than Rome or Greece). You would think that fact alone would cause us to be a little curious to want to know something about China--this most amazing survival of a people and a nation since the time of the Pharoahs of Ancient Egypt.

Our relative recent appearance as a sovereign nation on the world scene (compared to China's history, we are an upstart Jack in the Box) may explain our blindness and self-centeredness, but not wholly. We had always had missionaries and mission boards that were world-conscious in their scope. Christ had commanded his followers to take the Gospel to the whole world. Colonial America thought nothing of sending whalers to the Arctic and Antarctic, and every point in between. We always had the fleets of ugly but imminently seaworthy whalers and the gorgeous-sailed, wave-skipping clippers to make contact with every seacoasted nation on earth. Yet our country remained consistently uninterested, even cavalierly indifferent to China! Explain this, if you would! The earth's greatest, oldest nation--and we were never really interested in her and her epic struggles to wrest a better life for her teeming millions from the immense, virtually ungoverable, undependable terrain of her riverine landscape!

Really, the greatest contact came though a courageous but always slender stream of missionaries, sent out by Christian missions and churches. Chinese society was almost completely moon-like, inhospitable, and alien to these Westerners (and Chinese zenophobia did not help them to break through the high cultural barriers of strange food, strange dress, strange language, and uncomprehensible taboos, not to mention the frequent plagues of killer diseases, the generally poor or non-existent public hygiene, the huge difficulty of travel, the widespread lack of law and order, with the ever present danger of bandits and bandit chiefs laying in wait for the unwary.

Then there were the "minor inconveniences": the dirt, flies, congestion, the rank smells of unwashed crowds, the reeking stench of animal dung and human sewage running from the houses directly into the streets, the deafening noise and clamor of city life, the rotting corpses of bodies left unburied in the open to decay or to float down the rivers, the ever-present mud, knee or axle-deep, to struggle through as best anyone could, the cheating landlord, the cheating pedi-cab man, the cheating shop-keeper, the cheating bargeman, the extortions of the local policeman or the bandit collecting "tolls" on the free public road...and so on and on, all the rest of the million annoyances of the typical Chinese city, town, village, and rural areas.

Faced with all this and much more that I cannot catalogue, missionaries clutched their faith in God all the harder, buckled more Bibles in their suitcases, and went anyway, endured all manner of hardships and dangers and spread the Gospel, often losing their lives.

Leaving Britain in the 19th century, the intrepid Hudson Taylor, who founded the China Inland Mission (CIM), was perhaps the most famous of them, but the mass of these heroes and heroines of the Lord remain unknown to his day--annonymous, but just as great for being so unsung and forgotten.

Eric Liddell, the famous Scot runner in the film, "Chariots of Fire," went to China as a missionary and died there in a Japanese internment camp--that too is virtually unknown despite the film's phenomenal success. Some U.S. public school textbooks might mention the 19th century Boxer Rebellion, in which many missionaries and their children were executed by Chinese secret society members rebelling against foreign influence and trying to turn the clock back.

They might even give some details about China's revolution in the early 1900s, led by Sun Yat-Sen, with some comments on Japan's barbarous invasion in the 1930's, followed by some disparaging remarks about Chaing Kaishek's National Government, with a final view of his "corrupt" administration and its "deserved" collapse and eventual flight from the "brave and patriotic" communist insurgents of Mao Tse-Tung to the island of Taiwan.

I read here and there about Japan's atrocities, inflicted on China, and a famous Chinese writer, Lin Yutang, who protested what Japanese soldiers did in China--including the account of the rape and massacre of untold thousands of citizens in the highly civilized, southern capital city, Nanking. Other things they did there are unprintable, I might add.

Going through the same, America-centric, mainstream educational system as most everyone else (up to the ninth grade, that is), I learned scarcely nothing about earth's most populated nation except what I picked up on my own reading missionary biographies. But I do recall one still sharp memory of an old, tattered account my family had of a bombing of a Chinese village by Japanese planes. Was it a history or a coloring book?--I cannot say. I knew nothing about the pre-World War II attacks on Manchuria and China by the Imperial Japanese, but the terror of the poor villagers, trying to flee for their lives from the dive-bombing planes, the blow-up of houses, the craters, the people trapped in the ruins--it introduced my childish mind to a nightmare world where evil could and did flourish. Yet wasn't this taken care of by the Allied Victory in World War II, when both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were defeated? I did not have the resources to find out at that time, and so I had to learn on my own at a later day what was "the rest of the story."

I continued to progress through grade school and junior high, and sometime during that period came the Korean War. Though it started out as a conflict of the aggressor North Korea vs. the U.S. and UN, China later became involved on the aggressor's side, almost as a major player, as the South Koreans and the United Nations forces (in which the American armies were the chief element) pushed back against the aggressors, the communist North Koreans, until they reached the Yalu River that bordered China. This broad, wild, untamable Asiatic river proved to be one with the fateful Rubicon in northern Italy that Julius Caesar long ago crossed to master a Rome that opposed him, as President Truman decided America's forces would not be permitted to cross the Yalu with nuclear weapons clearing the way before them.

The courageous military genius, General MacArthur, in charge of the combined forces, had been spectacularly victorious to that point, seeming saving and liberating all Korea from communism for democracy. Except for President Truman's decision to "cut and run," it might have been that--of course, with the loss of millions of Chinese soldiers' lives (aggressors against liberty, we might add), who had joined forces with the original aggressors, the North Koreans.

Yet the usually ebullient President Truman, who had previously used nuclear bombs on Japan, breaking Japanese leaders' will to resist and kill perhaps a million more more of our invading troops, refused to deal with China's overwhelming fighting manpower in the same way.

Perhaps fearing a long, casualty-filled world war with Russia, a fully-armed force with millions of troops near the border of China, he threw away MacArthur's resounding victory.

I heard only later, as the details became known to me and others in America of my young and ignorant age, that the war was not, for the U.S. an unqualified success, though it was not ever called a "defeat", which it was. I learned only that China had entered on the side of the North Koreans, and used human wave attacks which overwhelmed our forces and sent them reeling back toward the 38th Parallel, where the war had started when North Korea crossed it, invading the south.

[Along this line, there is a most amazing testimony of a former American POW, which I have heard twice on Daystar and TBN, of an American soldier who was miraculously delivered many times from certain death and a Bataan-like Death March north into Siberia after being captured by the Communists and being turned over to the Russians--and he testified that no one at the Yalu line told them that the armies facing them just beyond their positions were Red Chinese--the fact was being kept from them, and then the next thing that happened was that they were overrun and captured and on their way under guard to prison camps or worse!]

When the UN and U.S. forces were pushed all the way back to the 38th Parallel in the middle part of Korea, an armistice was called and a treaty signed, though the war was never officially ended and is still going on as a kind of Cold War instead of a hot one. Why had we not used the Atom Bomb, our only clear advantage against the millions of attacking Chinese soldiers thrown at us back at the Yalu River? Communist China had clearly attacked the U.S. and UN forces, going to the aid of Communist North Korea! General MacArthur, as any history will tell us, advocated this to President Truman, but he responded by firing the great general and the rest is retreat and stalemate and official silence. We had not completely won, but we had not completely lost--which is to say, we wasted America's whole effort and gained a dubious peace, granting China a victory in its first war against the democracies, against the West, and against the U.S.

This lack of fight in Amerca for its own ideals showed the Chinese they could win a war against us--even in their relatively inferior military state, merely by using sheer masses of human flesh.

But a "peace" on this basis left a highly beligerant, heavily-armed communist North Korea camped just a few miles from South Korea's northern border, with artillery aimed at Seoul, South Korea's capital, and its big brother, Communist China, backing it with its hordes. Was this advantageous to the U.S. or South Korea? South Korea, which has a defeatest policy of appeasement and letting North Korea get away with every kind of brutal aggression short of actual invasion, is merely feeding the voracious "not so little dragon" of North Korea and may soon pay a terrible price. North Korea has a superb army of 1 million, I have heard, and now that North Korea's nuclear program has apparently succeeded in producing a bomb to be loaded on its missles, this rogue state can inflict heavy damage and destruction of nearby countries such as South Korea, Japan, and possibly, with the long-range missle, the U.S.'s West Coast!

The U.S. already has paid a huge price for Truman's firing of General MacArthur and the subsequent fall-back to the 38th Parallel. For fifty and more years America has had to maintain a huge (tens of thousands) standing army in South Korea to keep it from being invaded and crushed and enslaved, and we are still there, with no end in sight. Yet despite this much contact with China, we still did not learn anything substantial about this increasingly dangerous and formidable antagonist--not until Viet Nam and the war there in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.

The Korean War was sufficiently savage, with hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Korean lives lost along with tens of thousands of American lives, but the Viet Nam war cost us over 50,000 American lives in a real defeat--one of the first, if you don't count the retreat and stalemate in Korea. Both were also politically-created defeats--our foes did not do this to us--we brought it on ourselves, thanks to the political interventions of our presidents and their advisers. Our military did not lose either war. President Truman's example was followed by President Nixon, who refused to fight on to victory, buckling to the anti-war movement's demand for an immediate end of the war. The infamous Tet Offensive by the North Viet Cong? It was said to be a victory by the anti-war U.S. press, though it was actually a U.S. and South Vietnamese victory. Thanks to the world press coverage, which was poor to misleading, it was perceived to be a defeat by Americans, and politically at home in the U.S., the war was no longer salable--and so we sued for peace though we could and should have won the war. Within a short time, resistance crumbled, and it truly became a rout. That scene of the U.S. Ambassador running to his helicopter, fleing the Viet Cong-besieged U.S. embassy, with the U.S. flag tucked under his arm, is branded on the memory of thousnds even today.

With no real interest in East Asia, with virtually no knowledge of those countries, Americans just wanted to get our troops out and go on with their comfortable, insulated, America-centric lives. This ignores the fact we and our country are vitally engaged in the world at large, whether we like it or not. Seeing our influence everywhere impact their world, the nations expects a leader in the world to lead--we cannot back out once we reach that position, yet we repeatedly backed out--and the consequences of that have plagued us ever since, to this very day.

All this is documented by thousands of books, white papers, movies, documentary films, newscasts, speeches, and whatever else has been said or written or documented on the subject--it only is mentioned here because we need to keep China in mind, and set China in the context of a string of disastrous political and diplomatic defeats of the U.S. in the East.

Being a regular church attender (my family did not miss a Sunday from the time I was two weeks old until I was in my teens), with relatives who were missionaries, I suppose that made me more conscious of China than most Americans of my age--though I was largely ignorant most all of my life until now. I had heard vague mention of the communist takeover and the communists' brutal expulsion of all Western missionaries from China in 1949. The Hudson Taylor CIM was forced out, of course, and it reformed as a mission to Chinese "overseas"--meaning the millions of Chinese living in other countries of the Far and South East of Asia--Singapore, Malaysia, and so on. But China--from 1949--became a mysterious "Forbidden Kingdom"--a sort of mountain-ringed, inaccessible Tibet, or Hermit Kingdom--from that time on. It was "closed." That was the end of it for us. Up went the Bamboo Curtain around the most populated nation on earth, containing over 700 million peopole! They were Red Chinese, we were free and democratic Americans--"never the twain shall meet."

Not so! President Nixon, after negotiating the American defeat and humiliating pull-out of Viet Nam (I cannot recall the particular euphemism they used for the process), at the Paris peace conference, soon announced his opening of U.S. relations with China as his greatest diplomatic achievement. He himself went to China, and was well received by its communist overlords, and everyone in the West seemed to think he was right in boldly re-introducting America to China and that the formerly frozen relations of the two nations had thawed. A new era of reopened communication and trade with China seemed to be inaugurated, but he abruptly left the Oval Office, resigning in disgrace with the Watergate scandal. As for China, it was not until later decades that a real and intense engagement with the us commenced.

Nixon's legacy in China? Along with the trade and a lot of Chinese coming to the U.S. for their education in American colleges and universities, a nightmare was birthed! Thanks to increasing exposure to our country, the freedom-deprived Chinese young people got a taste of what Americans take for granted, and wanted it for themselves in their own country! The world will never forget the spectacle of a million or more Chinese students and young people massed in the massive Tiannanmen Square in the heart of Bejing (formerly Peking), all crying for democracy and liberty.

The anonymous, young patriot who faced a tank bristling with guns, defying it with just his courage and his slim body dressed in slacks and a white shirt, is unforgettable, and we have to wonder if he was not one of the many run over by tanks. Increasingly, during the demonstrations, the government brought in its forces. The Chinese army troops came in buses, masses of them, and then came the tanks. The world held its breath? Surely not a massacre! What did those tanks mean? What threat could the students pose that tanks were necessary? We soon learned what the tanks meant. Our newsmen were on the scene, and they could not contain their horror as the massacre began, with tanks rolling over the massed ranks of the protestors. It was so terrible and cynical a bloodbath, that the footage was denied us by our own government, apparently, or all the Western newsmen were deported by by the Chinese authorities and their film taken and destroyed, while they sent squads of soldiers to clean up the piles of bones and the human remains where the tanks had finished their task. Soon, shockingly soon, the huge public square that was the centerpiece of a Communist Society, was returned to the way it had been before the uprising.

Yet enough gory details leaked out, via FAX machines, to the whole world about what China's ageing communist leaders had committed against the freedom-seeking Chinese people. The Dragon, despite its extreme old age and white hairs, still could bite in the most savage way! The Dragon still had its teeth! Who knows how many thousands lost their lives and how many thousands were thrown into prison, after trials by thousands of communist kangeroo courts?

Yet, in terms of numbers of the slain, the student uprising death toll was probably not very significant--it just received greater press coverage than the preceding massacres perpetrated by the Communists in China. The Communist takeover of 1949 had resulted in the deaths of thirty or forty millions-- from mass executions of anyone suspected of defying the communists--and then came the Cultural Revolution--a brief turning back to more primitive ways that killed millions more--and then came a thaw and finally the return to brutal dictatorship in the massacre and crushing of the democracy movement in Bejing's main square.

Evenso, we ought not to forget the brave resistance of the students, and the sacrifice for democracy they made with the loss of their lives? And we must not forget the many others who suffered, and were tortured, in Chinese prisons. What to do with China, now that the Old Guard had successfully defeated and eradicated the brave dissenters of the student democracy movement? Who has kept figures of the numbers imprisoned, tortured, and killed? The prisons must have filled with them, and then they were made to work in prison factories as virtual slaves, producing goods to sell to the affluent West--as prison is not a place in the East where anyone receives free room and board! Only the West can afford that luxury!

We must continually reiterate, that America's policy-makers had not learned anything, even to this point. No doubt the State Department had its highly paid, highly-credentialed "China-watchers" and China consultants by the score to draw on, but you could never tell by American policy that it proved any good whatsoever. I am always bemused by programs on radio or television, where China experts installed in various think tanks and universities in the U.S. go to work on the problems of Asian nations--as if they knew everything essential about them, and they were the experts holding the golden keys! Not so! These same people have proven themselves repeatedly bankrupt, in making the slightest impact for the good in U.S. relations with Asia. Even with a huge number of these experts available to our government and the State Department, we had virtually thrown away three countries--Korea, China, and Viet Nam (if you don't count Cambodia and Laos), due largely to sheer ignorance. The loss of these countries is sufficent to prove that we had a badly failing state policy toward the Far East--even without identifying our mistakes. It also points out the fact our experts have no solution, and they are as blind in their way as our government leaders. Japan was a success, but something of a lone exception--I would think most people would agree. And I would like to add, Japan also represents the greatest opportunity in history given a "Christian nation" such as America, and this opportunity was thrown away!

First, before I explain about Japan, though this does not seem to involve China, in a way it does--since China is still a nation where only a small minority are followers of Christ. General MacArthur, appointed the supreme post-war commander over Japan while the parliamentary and democratic system was being set up, called for the churches of America to send thousands of missionaries, calling this the greatest opportunity for the Gospel--and what was the response? His resounding call and challenge landed at his feet, with the proverbial thud. We in the American churches completely disregarded the greatest opportunity in the history of Christianity since the evangelization of the Roman Empire. I am sure the general was mystified by the lack of response to his summons--and died mystified. Was he a Christian? God certainly used this good, valiant man. Even if he was something of a uniformed popinjay, a strutting martinet, he had the most decorations of any army commander in history, and they were all earned too! No one can deny he was a military genius in warfare, saving Korea for democracy when all seemed doomed, and earlier he led the U.S. forces to victory over Japan, even as he was but one of other great generals and commanders who could have eclipsed him except that his leadership qualities and image could not be cast in any man's shadow. He could be fired by his commander, President Truman, but he could not be eclipsed, and his glory was such no one could take it away. When he retired from public life, he remained one of the most respected, and loved, American military leaders. He was, in a word, a hero. But he was more than a military man. For a time he served our country and Japan as the supreme leader, a kind of intermin emperor, of Japan, until the country could take over self-government on a new, democratic basis. He knew just how to treat the extremely dignified, highly literate, highly civilized culture and people of Japan. I have heard Japan experts, so called, on the radio referring constantly to the "peasant culture" of modern Japanese--and I wonder who they are talking about. Japan was civilized a thousand years ago--and continued to be so up to our so-called Modern Era and Post-Modern Era. This just shows the extreme condescension and ignorance of our university intelligentsia in America today--all liberals. Will they ever change? Will they ever discard their out of date, colonial atitudes? They treat the American people as they treat Japanese "peasants,' obviously. Only they are educated and know what is really going on!

I am now able to say why this is the case--why we kept losing in Asia. It is a spiritual problem, not necessarily a political or diplomatic (and least of all a military) lack on our part. Our absurd "State Department" can be told what to do--if we have a strong president and a Congress with the spine to back him. So it is not the fault of the State Department. It is a failure of a spiritual kind. Our presidents and congresses, administration after administration, were losing touch with God. Without God's wisdom, they were increasingly choosing to do the expedient thing, without vision, with a real plan, and stumbling from pillar to post, reacting instead of leading, in the monumental, even colossal developments in the East. We did not want to be involved there, but we were deeply involved there--yet we would not seek God's wisdom and do things as they should have been done--so we paid an increasingly high price, in war after war, in retreat after retreat.

It must be noted again that we lost the whole of mainland China, not in war, but in one of our political defeats. Having no spiritual wisdom, no spiritual vision to fall back upon in the times of need, because we did not know what better to do, we turned our backs on Chinese democracy and gave China and its uncountable millions to communist enslavement. We are still turning our backs on Chinese communist enslavement while being heavily engaged in in a hugely unbalanced trade by which China's growth to near superpower status as a missile and nuclear-armed power has been given great impetus--"feeding the dragon," in a nutshell.

What nation before us ever supplied its deadly enemy with the means to conquer and crush it? It is hard to think of one. Imperial Rome, perhaps, may be one case, in its welcome given to barbarian tribes to cross the borders to settle on depopulated Roman lands. Yet Rome's emperors, toward the very end, continued to fight hard and well for Rome, winning victories even with largely barbarian troops serving under Rome's banners. It really took Rome to destroy Rome--and that is what happened. It was envy and fear of their own comanding generals, that they might become too successful and snatch the emperor's crown, that led to the Rome's own downfall when they assassinated such able, valliant defenders and commanders as Stilicho.

True, we are not following Rome precisely--for even in the throes of extreme decadence and economic decline, Rome continued to fight back. Unlike old Imperial Rome, we rather snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, with a stroke of the pen--in that way, we differ significantly from ancient Rome.

A most interesting development has occurred, I might add, since Gordon Lindsay wrote "Red China in Prophecy." Against all odds, China has become home to perhaps the greatest number of Christians, vibrant believers in Jesus Christ, of any nation in the world. Is the number 70 to 80 million, as a man who worked with Brother Andrew has estimated? Clearly, for some years now, China has gained more Christians now than exist in Europe--formerly the cradle of Christianity after Greece. At the phenomenal rate Christianity is growing in China, it will become the dominate faith in China in a generation, perhaps--unless the Lord comes before that date.

It is not likely Christianity will be given that much time, however, as world events are set at Fast Forward to the disastrous conclusion predicted in John's Book of Revelation. For decades, we in the U.S. have been given a false, Chinese government view of Christians in that country. The communists naturally want us to think Christianity is a dead movement there, except for a few state-approved churches trotted out to show Western observers and visitors.

The truth is just the opposite. Christianity was largely forced underground, with all the hospitals, schools, seminaries, Bible schools, orphanages, and other Christian insitutitions taken over by the Chinese goverment authorities, but the real life of the Church exploded without all those outward manifestations. The former husk or shell looks utterly empty and forlorn-- certain listed churches were either given official state approval to exist (with government supervision added, naturally, determining what they could and could do within their walls)--but the butterfly had flown from its chrysalis, and was alive and well in hiding! Meanwhile, a mostly secret government persecution was waged against this "butterfly church movement" with all the powers of state and the instruments of prison and torture. When caught meeting, congregations were arrested, tortured, imprisoned, and "re-educated," and even executed. The state-approved and state-supervised churches that remained operating were few, and attended only by elderly Chinese (the youth were kept away, no doubt). These fake churches were regularly shown Western church dignitaries as prime evidence that freedom of worship was respected and upheld in China! The naive and easily duped Western dignitaries almost always went away with the impression Christianity did not mean much to the Chinese, and that Christianity was a dying faith in that country.

What a lie! Christianity was actually never more alive! As an underground movement, persecuted bitterly and brutally by the communist secret service, the army, and the local authorities of cities, towns, and adminstrative districts, Christian churches spread home to home--for home churches were the only way the church members could meet in a relatively safe refuge.

Virtual silence concerning this Underground Church in China prevailed--even to this day we heard little of it. Yet since the watershed year of 1949 Bible smugglers knew better than the U.S. government and mainline church leaders and continued to penetrate the Bamboo Curtain of China any way they could, taking in thousands of contraband Bibles--which were forbidden for the most part, though some organizations from the West, such as Billy Graham's organization, were authorized by the government to print Bibles for Chinese consumption--perhaps as a cunning state policy to make Chinese communism seem religiously tolerant in the eyes of the West.

If the Chinese government had been able to stop and eradicate Christianity, as it had in a matter of hours stamped out the student leadership of the democracy movement in the 1980s, it would have done it back in 1949 during the bloodbaths and massacres perpetrated by the new communist masters of China. They failed, resoundingly, and Christianity continues to spread all the more due to the furious persecution--just as Christianity contined to spread long ago in the Roman Empire despite wave after wave of persecution.

Part II

Now Gordon Lindsay has this to say about China, from the chapter, "Lest We Forget--The Tragic Story of the Communist Takeover": "How did communism get control of China? Communism was a political, economic, and atheistic system, set up to attack and defeat Christian civilization with its pillars of capitalism and Christ's teachings, and its positive side (if it could be called that) was its fully expressed goal to found and promote a Utopian State where all shared equally in the products of cooperative production. It was centered on the Working Class, ignoring the other classes, which which were considered decadent or bourgeois, and enemies of the Working Class's socialistic state. To alchieve this "noble society" of equality the end justified the means. Going head to head with Christianity and its values, communism employed global warfare against the capitalistic, Christian, "bourgeois" or middle class systems and nations, aiming to destroy and subject the entire world to communism. To fight, communists waged their war with ideology, propaganda, brutal force, assassination, and deception. Karl Marx the philosopher created the philosophy, set forth in the Communist Manifesto, but the Russian intellectual and revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, provided the working out of those ideas into a totalitarian, atheistic state with Marxism as its official religion or creed.

"The story of Lenin's role on the world stage really begins at the time of the overthrow of the czarist regime in Russia. After the revolution had succeeded, it was subverted from semi-democracy under moderates such as Kerensky (who was forced out of power and immigrated to a university position in the U.S.) to a throrough-going communist dictatorlship (euphemistically called the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Despite the elaborate pretense set up by Lenin and later taken over by Stalin, the government by people's "soviets" and courts and local governing councils, all headed by the Communist Party, the control was centralized early on, resting in a single man--a man such as Lenin, and then any number of "Chairmen" of the Communist Party and Government Politburo apparatus of the Soviet State.

The whole system is extremely Byzantine, intricate to the point of madness, but power really was retained in an inner circle, who were Commmunist Party bosses. They decided who held what office and even what business they were allowed to handle. We all know some of the names of these Soviet power bosses-- Lenin, Trotsky (forced out, axed to death in Mexico), Stalin, then Krushchev his successor, and a gaggle of others such as Brezhnev, Kalganin, Molotov, arriving at Gorbachev, who presided at the breaking up and dissolution of the Soviet Empire. We have said this much (sketchy as it is) for the reason we need to see the preparation of the stage for a Communist China was first set up in Russia.

China's history is soon directly involved here, even at the inception of Soviet Empire back at the turn of the 20th century, when the revolution had raised hopes of freedom in Russia with the overthrow of the Romanov Czar in 1917 and his abdication, only to see all such hopes dashed by the brutal extermination programs and forced collectivation of Lenin and Stalin in which tens of millions of kulaks (landed peasants) perished as a deliberate policy of state and tens of millions more died from stavation to the state-produced collapse of agriculture and the distribution system.

Lenin was the West's "Greek gift" to Russia--a strange kind of gift that was meant to be a modern Trojan horse by which the whole nation could be brought to its knees and then dismembered at the convenience of Britain and Germany. Few Westerners know that the Western Countries invaded Russia at various ports East and West, stationing troops in places like Archangel in the northernmost populated part of Russia on the Arctic Ocean coast, giving aid to the anti-communist White Russian armies that Lenin's armies ultimately defeated.

Vast, resource-rich Russia was not carved up as leaders in the West had hoped, and with the defeat of the White Russians, mostly due to incompetent leaders, Lenin had full rein. Now this has been a Christian country for many centuries--yet supposedly Christian Western nations had done all this to a people steeped in the Orthodox Greek church--it was a sort of repeat of what the Crusaders from the so-called Christian Europe of the Middle Ages did to Christian, Eastern Orthodox Byzantium! Is history anything but a repeat? We see the same sad events, over and over, only replayed by different people and different nations.

Perhaps the greedy, "Christian" West had not counted on Lenin being such a success at leadership. He was given financial backing from Germany and Britain, who sent the ideologue and later the mass murderer and dictator to Russia on a secret train all the way from Switzerland to Germany. Once communist, Lenin and his fellow architects of the first Communist State in Russia turned their eyes toward China. The possibility that the great land masses of Europe and Asia might be united under one authority was a dazzling prospect. If this could be achieved, the whole world would be helpless before communism.

The idea of communism with its rosy promises [its Utopian Socialist State, with all men supplied equally, no classes such as rich and poor, and Calvinistic Christian capitalism and its propertied class eliminated] possessed tremendous appeal to the dissatisfied elements of China. There always exists an affinity between communism and the rebellious elements of society. The success of the Russian revolution encouraged these elements in China to think that their utopia, their socialist paradise on earth, with its center on man and his desires, lay in the same direction.

At first the communists met in secret, awaiting a propitious moment to strike the existing government a shattering blow. Then they would seize power.

Gordon Lindsay goes on to describe the Chinse revolutionary period in the 1920's in China, which resulted in a government called the Koumintang, founded by Sun Yat-sen. Of that leader, he says, he "was a Christian who was a real friend of the missionaries," and his party was rapidly bringing the nation into unity. Sadly, then began the career of the monster and Chinese counterpart to Lenin known as Mao Tse-Tung, like Lenin an intellectual, but Mao was much more. Mao was a poet of tremendous charismatic gifts, wedded to a will and cunning of devious ruthlessnes, who knew exactly when to fight and when to lay low to wait for a better time to spring upon his chosen victim.

The great leader after Sun Yat-sen was Chiang Kai-shek, an increasingly religious man who was married to a devout Christian lady. Lindsay: "Chiang Kai-shek clearly understood Mao's designs and was unremitting in his efforts to extirpate the communists. He probably would have succeeded but for the outbreak of the full scale war with the Japanese in 1937 [here begins the great tragedies and sorrows that engulfed China, through no fault of her own!].

As a matter of history the Japanese succeeded in overrunning about half of China [bombing the defenceless villages just as I saw them pictured to me as a child in an old coverless book].

"During this war the shrewd, charismatic, poet-propagandist and army leader, Mao, did very little fighting, but instead spread every kind of propaganda against Chiang Kai-shek [this leads me to think that the demonic spirit of lying was incorporated and operating freely in the communist movement from the very inception of it in London and over in Moscow's communist cabals headed by Lenin and Trotsky].

"What fighting the communists did was not against Japan but against nationalist troops [led by Chiang Kai-shek and his generals]. When the war was over Chiang's soldiers, weary with fighting on two fronts, were exhausted. The communists used the opportunity to make an all-out attempt to overthrow the nationalists. During the war Mao had been recruiting and training an immense peasant army [do we see his subtle political genius and his ability to know when to strike when prepared and at the right momoment?].

These Red Communist soldiers of Mao's now spread like dragon's teeth sown in the furrows of fields all over China, cutting railway lines, attacking towns and storming cities.

Gordon Lindsay: "As we have noted General Marshall, a man who in World War II did signal service for the U.S. was sent to China to seek a solution to its troubles [he had no plan, or one that was based on Biblical wisdom or spiritual understanding]. He made a decision based on expediency, but it evidenced a monumental failure to understand the deadly character of communism. He proposed a coalition government. Chiang was horrified. He knew that accepting this solution would mean the end of a free China, and an end to missionary work. Marshall's willingness to put atheistic communism in the saddle in China was without excuse, and it marked him as the man guilty of one of the most horrible blunders America ever made. The dead of Korea and Vietnam are the witnesses of the ghastly mistake."

"The fall of China into the hands of the Reds caused a great wave of enthusiasm in Moscow. It was a windfall indeed, an unbelievable stroke of good luck. The Russians believed with reason that the Americans were fools. and it encouraged the to undertake new adventures."

Gordon Lindsay, in a masterful way, goes on to describe Russian "adventures," as they fomented communist movements through Asia and the Pacific. We leave his book here, and encourage everyone to read it cover to cover, if is still available. Please write for this book by contacting Christ for the Nations.

Thanks to the failure of the U.S. government's policy toward China in particular, untold millions of innocent Chinese lost their lives. According to Linsay, Senator James O. Eastland's forty-six page study by his Internal Security Committee "blames Mao Tse-tung and his comrades for the deaths of anywhere from 34,300,000 to 63,784,000 Chinese since 1927."

Yet this is only a beginning of the tally of the Death Angel. About sixty four million people were killed by his forces in the civil war, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Korean War, the 1949-1952 "land reform" or forced collectivization program, the 1958-1961 "Great Leap Forward" industrialization of rural areas, the 1966-69 Cultural Revolutions, the Red Army's suppression of free Tibet, in forced labor camps, and in various political liquidation campaigns from 1949-1958, and campaigns to exterminate Christianity--which continue to this very day, as Chinese themselves report.

Lindsay observes about these gigantic, incomprehensible death figures: "What a terrible record even if these figures were halved!"

Truly, Mao and his followers were worse than Genghis Khan or Tamerlane ever dreamed of being, yet he is not considered a monster by many people today. Yet he covered China with a sea of blood from his victims. Itt is as if he had invaded Japan with its present population of 120 or more million people and executed everyone, leaving not one person alive.

This is the Dragon we are presently feeding, as if peaceful trade will render it harmless and less a threat to our own country. What a foolish idea! Take away a tiger's stripes if you can, but it remains a tiger. If international Muslim terrorism does not finish us off first, China will--as she must--if she is to achieve her age-old imperialistic dream of world dominion bequeathed to Chinese communism.

Is this far-fetched? Old dreams never really die unless the culture that spawned them dies. China's culture has not died. China has always seen herself as the "Celestial Empire," the Centre of the Universe. All other nations were considered barbarian lands, fit only to be tributaries, or tribute-payers. Has China give up this dream? I can not be so naive and foolish as to believe it, without the evidence to the contrary.

Along with Western technology and finance, China has been given the best and most workable means to achieve it--and success is clearly coming within reach very soon now. When America seems weak and distracted, or appears to be faltering in its resolve to defend itself, just as it is appearing now as the world watches its glaring failure of resolve to battle the terrorists that declared total, unconditional war against us, China may launch its treacherous, preemptive attack. It has economically moved to encircle us and take control of strategic resources of all kinds, it is only a matter of time before the giant of the East swallows the upstart America that is presently strutting on the world's stage as the world's lone superpower.

Without having to declare war (as Japan did on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor), China's war planners will press buttons, using the very laser-guided nuclear missiles that our own technology, either sold or stolen, enabled them to use against us at a chosen time.

A divided nation such as America is an easy prey. America has never been more divided than it is now. Our many deadly enemies among the communists and the Muslims have observed this, how even top U.S. congressional leaders can safely defy the President during a declared war on terror, and then, in an election at midterm in his last term, overthrow the very party in control of Congress that supported him and his war on terror.

Is this how we handle a national emergency, when our very survival as a nation and a people is at stake? Apparently so!

Why is America crumbling from within and destroying itself? It is not hard to tell, though some people (mainly the secular humanists) will call it simplistic simply because the reason is given a spiritual context. To wit: we, as a falling, once Christian nation, at the very highest levels and on down to the local communities, have thrown out God, have thrown out divine wisdom, and with the killing for profit of about forty-six million unborn babies in the mass genocide and infanticide called "abortion," we are now a fatted ox, prepared, tied, and waiting dumbly for the slaughterer's ax to fall. I have watched the decline all my life. Society is collapsing in every category--crime (organized and unorganized), gangs, corruption, mental disorders of an increasing number and incurable types, endemic sexually transmitted diseases, the loss of patriotism, the collapse of the family, the collapse of marriage, the breakdown of human character creating sociopaths and unviable individuals who cannot work or sustain themselves even with welfare systems intact--the list goes on and on.

Social order breaks down, disorder reigns, and the jungle has taken over. Except for a "thin blue line" of understaffed police departments, the jungle has all but taken over--with vast areas of large cities, the glittering skyscraper-studded metroplexes, already ruled by vicious, drive-by-shooting gangs and the mafioso syndicates of organized crime that control entire cities like New York.

The only thing that is still operating fairly well is the U.S. economy--and the business world of high finance and investment--but that can all vanish in a few days time, when the debt of the U.S. falls due, with our main creditors outside our borders demanding payment, but leaving us with only a valueless money to pay for it.

If we are fighting for our lives at the same time--if, for instance, we are struck simultaneously with nuclear strikes from within and without the country (as Muslims terrorists have promised to do to us), how much more is the chaos and the incomprehensible extent of the disaster, over which no man, no post-America leader with whatever amount of IQ and leadership qualities, will be able to exert the slightest control as he issues absurd commands from a hidden base or bunker.

We have seen the collapse of empires before. I have lived through the collapse of three, and may well witness a fourth--America's. The Soviet Empire's is the latest. Before that we witnessed two in World War II--Nazi Germany's and Imperial Japan's. Before my time, though not before my mother's, more peaceably, was the British Empire's.

No matter how great or mighty they appeared one day, they can fall and vanish in a matter of hours, the pieces so broken that no one can put Humpty Dumpty back together. Dust covers the mounds of what once were the great cities of the Assyrian empire. The same happened to Babylonia. The same happened to Rome and Greece and the Hellenistic kingdoms. The same happened to Chinese kingdoms, Korean kings, South East and Indiann kingdoms and empires. The same happened to the Incas, the Aztecs, and the American Indians--yes, the Indians, who at once time built great cities in Middle America, up on the Ohio and Mississippi--but which are mere mounds, or farmer's fields growing corn today. I could name many more lost civiizations that are now in the dusbin of history. We too will go the same way--soon--unless we truly repent, and choose humility as James Robison pleads for us to do.

Without national repentance, without national revival of the Bible-based churches, we have no hope whatsoever of escaping total, indescribable destruction. We may even have to do a great deal of stiff, hard fighting, house to house, in this country, and in other nations--just to survive as a nation. Chinese armies may be sent here, and other enemies, such as Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua, may invade to help "Big Brother" carve up the downed ox of America. Mexico may even turn on us, once we are weak, broken, and made a prey.

If our Federal system and U.S. Government are knocked out, our major cities destroyed by suitcase nuclear or chemological weapons or the combined nuclear missile strikes of North Korea, China, and Iran--we will have only the countryside left to fight over, since the cities will be ash heaps.

I see the point of certain evangelical prophecy pundits is rather well taken, considering the deadly foes-- North Korea, Iran, Al Qaeda, and Communist China, and we cannot rule out Putin's nuclear-armed Russia and its Muslim allies--we presently have gathering their Doomsday weapons to strike us, Israel's friend, a death blow. As the pundits say, I agree there may a good reason why America is seemingly not mentioned in the prophecies of Revelation concerning the last days--whereas Europe and the Middle East and even the Northern powers are clearly identified.

The reason they give? We are either reduced somehow to subservience to Europe, or may even be dissabled as a world power, so that the power center has shifted to Europe and the East.

Nuclear srikes against us, I believe, will give us too much to deal with for us to take any further role in the politics and affairs of the world and the nations. I believe it will go beyond that. We will be completely knocked to our knees, by devastating nuclear strikes, dealt us perhaps first by the Red Dragon--and that will not be the end of it, as Muslim terrorists inside our shattered borders continue to destroy whatever may be left after the mushroom clouds clear away from the radioactive ruins of the main cities.

But this "worst case scenario" does not have to go this way. God is waiting to push away the sword of the Death Angel! Yes, He is! His Word says that He is ever merciful, full of lovingkindness, and is ever mindful of His covenant. Well, our Pilgrim forefathers (whom we can name, but with blushes for our disobedience and the way we have dishonored them) made a solemn Compact, a Covenant, or series of Covenants and Charters, with Almighty God, and for His sake, for His government and kingdom on earth, for the express purpose of glorifying God and propagating the Gospel of His kingdom. We know all this is true, because of the documents, charters, writings, they left to us to bear winess of those agreements with God and the signatories for the people of the Christian colonies and the Christian United States. Anyone who can name this grand and glorious Covenanting God as a true child of the Pilgrims' and Puritans' and Colonialists and Founding Father's Covenants on this American soil has some real, solid grounds, I firmly believe, to beseech God for yet another extension of His amazing grace and mercy toward our erring hearts and deeds.

I am going to hope in this fact, that our faithful, devout forefathers made these great covenants with God through sacrifice and in sincere faith in Him alone as their Savior, Lord, God, and Protector--how can I do anything different but follow in the steps of these moral and spiritual giants? I praise the Lord God, God of my fathers and my God-fearing mother who is soon to be a centenarian. Praise the glorious God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with me. He truly is a good God! He pities the orphan, the fatherless child, and bears with the defenceless widow. He has compassion on the oppressed. He hates the one who does wickedly, who commits violence against the innocent ones. He will not allow them free rein forever, to do evil on this old earth. He will hear from heaven and forgive us, if we truly seek His face. I am praying night and day that Grace will bend down to us and sweep our enemies aside and foil all their horrible, unspeakably devilish plans for us. I am praying we will, even at the last minute of the last hour before judgment falls, we will choose humility and escape humiliation. Will you pray with me, and will we join with others to pray--that we may escape this end and still seek God while he is yet near?

PART III

If you think the above portion about China is harsh, think again about their past actions. This is a most brutal communist power, ruled by autocrats who hold human life cheap, very cheap. I have watched Daystar TV's Joni Lamb interview an American POW who was miraculously delivered from captivity by the Red Chinese during the Korean War. This man tells it like it really was. I forget his name and ministry, but I have seen him twice on TV and cannot forget his epic struggle for life.

The Red Chinese armies, massed on the Yalu River, attacked the UN -US forces, capturing him and other Americans. They were then marched north of the Yalu River (the dividing border between North Korea and Manchuria/China). It was in winter, with Siberian winds and sub-zero temperatures, and they had no food and were wounded and freezing. One man kept falling down. He was helped up each time, until a guard struck the man (who was the survivor I heard speak on Joni Lamb's program) with his rifle. He then saw the Chinese run a vehicle over the man on the ground, crushing him to death. Realizing they were all doomed, the survivor jumped over the cliff, and as he tumbled down, all the other POWS jumped too. The Red Chinese soldiers emptied their magazines of their rifles on them. The survivor lay beneath a huge pile of dead and dying POWS. He climbed out later and slowly made his way back toward American lines. He reached the Yalu River and looked at it, lying down on the crest of high mountains. It was impossible for him to get across that river. But God was with him, to give him a stupendous miracle do divine transportation. He found himself across it, without any effort his! Then he walked on and found American lines, and got shot (though not seriously), before the American soldiers believed it was an American, not a Chinese soldier, coming out of the snowy wastes. Since then the survivor has gone around the nation telling his story of God's great power and grace. As for the Red Chinese, they have not changed one degree. Remember the tanks running across the Chinese students who were demonstrating for freedom in China? This happened in the heart of the Chinese capital, Beijing, supposedly a civilized city! Imagine tanks running across the bodies of hundreds of demonstrators in Washington? Just imagine it! This happened in the Chinese capital Beijing (formerly Peking), a NYC-sized city of millions of people, in full sight of the world they dared to do this, then quickly cleaned up the scene of the world's most atrocious bloodbath and went on as before, sending well-groomed, smiling ambassadors of the "New China" to the UN and the U.S. and the world!

This atrocity and cover-up of theirs shows the absolute difference between China and the U.S. The liberals who think America is evil would be the first to be run over by the tanks of China, should China take over Washington, D.C. [and that is not too far-fetched a possibility! and a book on it would make a bestseller no doubt!]. The U.S.'s China-appeasing leadership really needs a reality check. Replaying the events of Tiannenmen Square and the Korean war (not to mention the war support they gave Ho Chi Minh of North Viet Nam) intervention ought to provide some objectivity. Red China is still very much red with innocent, human blood, despite their policy of a capitalistic enonomy at the present time to build up their war machine with American dollars and take over U.S. and European markets and vital resources. The Red Dragon will not change until the Christians become a significant percentage of this nation of well over 1 billion people. Since it time after time acts like a dragon, has claws and teeth like a dragon, and violently attacks the innocent and unwary like a dragon--isn't it a dragon? Yet, starting with President Nixon, and continuing with Gerald Ford, and Clinton, and both Bushes, you would think China is equivalent to any Western nation and democracy.

Engaging China with "peaceful" trade is the way they chose to tame the beast and bring it into the community of civilized nations. They are all dead wrong. You cannot tame such a beast, such a Dragon, as Red China. Throughout its 3,000 or more year history, it has gone through countless metamorphoses, revolutions, upheavals, and regime changes--and it never learned one thing about democracy or the democratic process.

This beast now thinks it can keep its communist (autocratic and tyrannous rule from the top) head while it is attached to a capitalistic belly. That is like welding oil to water--it is impossible. China is going to blow up one of these days in an upheaval that will involve the whole world--and it will be worse than any Krakatoa, since China is nuclear-armed. President Truman was too pig-headed to deal with an attacking Red Chinese army in the Korean War with our nuclear weapons as General MacArthur advised him, and he dumped the whole problem on succeeding administrations. They have until this day, continued to deny there was and is a problem, so that we now face a global-sized threat of a totalitarian China with a huge economy and a nuclear arsenal that, in conflict with us, will dwarf anything Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had to attack and fight us with. Imagine that army alone--able to send human waves of millions and millions of trained soldiers! Imagine the nuclear missiles speeding ahead of the armies! Imagine the panic in Washington, faced with having to stop this juggernaut.

America will never survive such a conflict. China can lose hundreds of millions of people and still survive relatively intact. We cannot lose fifty million, a far less number than China's casualties, and survive. I apologise for these seemingly unspiritual and cold geopolitics, but sometimes there needs to be a basic reality check even for Christians. We must see the world as it truly is--not with the rose-colored glasses and blinders given us by mal-administrations in Washington which have so badly misled the American people, precisely because the White House has become a Witch-House--where the occult and the deceptions of demons has concocted and spun out a kind of fantasy world where wishes and whimsy reign in the Oval Office and in Congress instead of sober reason and common sense. Fantasy is nice, when it comes to Walt Disney productions, but in politics it is generally fatal. Red China has long called the U.S. a ridiculous "paper tiger." Why don't we take that seriously? They mean "paper tiger"! That shows their contempt for us, not their respect. Do you think Red China's view of us has changed just because of trade? China really does not change--change is not in the Chinese vocabulary or mindset; that is how it has survived and endured for 3,000 years, how this ox-cart contemporary of Ancient Rome and Greece has continued on, in an unbroken chronology, to the 21st Century.

Naive Westerners (I have read the books--Pearl Buck, Ruth Graham's, etc.,) are profoundly charmed by the age-old culture of China, but that culture of aesthetic tea ceremonies, silk garments, bamboo fans, pools with koi, bird soup and Peking Duck cuisine, lyric poetry, elaborate bows, obsequious manners, and all those sweet smiles of its innumerable courtesans (as a businessman reported just the other day on the radio, go to any hotel in China and it has a brigade of prostitutes!) cannot disprove the fact that the wonderful culture and ancient civilization of China contain, like a beautifully lacquered box, a very real, hateful, fire-breathing, winged Dragon. The box cannot hold it forever. It is straining to fly to the attack.

Millions of Chinese Christians are presently bearing the brunt of the Dragon's ire right now--a fact denied by mainline Christian denominations in the U.S., who are some of the most naive people on earth--but that ire will next be turned upon us as a nation. It is just a matter of the best timing--when Beijing, the head of the Dragon, decides it is time to burn the absurd paper tiger and get on with the business of ruling the world. China has called itself this name since time immemorial: "The Celestial Empire." It is the center of the earth, China believes. The Western World, for all its glitzy technology, is barbarian, in its view. Imperial Japan, which inherited much Chinese culture, tried to rule the world a generation back--and was beaten back. But China, now nuclear-armed, and nearly ready, will write a different page to our history, and you can be certain it won't be "Victory in Asia.

Remember Imperial Rome? The Romans could not imagine a world without Rome as its ruler. But Rome fell! Cato was a Roman senator, in the time when Rome was struggling with an arch-rival, Carthage, a Phoenician power centered on the African coast in the present nation of Tunisia. Despite Roman victories over Carthage, Carthage always paid off the enormous fines Rome levied and grew stronger than before. Seeing this, Cato ended every (every!) speech he made in the Roman Senate with the same words: "Carthage must be destroyed!" He did this until the Roman Senate finally woke up to the dire threat of Carthage. They finally saw Carthage as Cato saw her--as the single most dangerous threat to Rome's existence in the world. He was absolutely right about Carthage. There could not be co-existence, with Rome and Carthage sharing the same pond of the Mediterranean. One had to go--and Rome decided just in the knick of time that it was going to be Carthage. Their policy became: all-out war with Carthage and complete destruction. It worked. Rome wiped out Carthage and then, without any serious threat for a very long time, ruled the world.

It should be clear to even the most positive-thinking student of history, that we face a greater power than Rome ever faced in a mercantile, wealthy Carthage. We have no Catos today, Congressmen with the spine to stand up and call a dragon a dragon. We are expecting to share a world composed of two and even three giant superpowers--the U.S., China, and the European Union (and what about a nuclear-armed Russia aspiring to become a major player once again, with Arab backing?). It will not work. Red China will not share the throne of the world with us, though we are more than willing to share it with them! When the time comes for the Dragon to make its move, we will receive ultimatums from Beijing. What will we do then? It will be too late. Ignore the Catos (and we have none anyway), and Rome is lost, the battle is over before it begins. That is our present situation.

Imagine a 21st century high school or junior high history book, taught in some American school, but it is not in English--it is filled with Chinese characters! The coming war is not necessarily going to be officially declared, but it will come--and then the victors in Beijing will write the epitaph for American freedom and sovereignty as a nation. This is the fate to which the grand experiment in secular humanism and immorality and materialism in America will bring us, inevitably. We are fast crumbling from within. We can scarcely find one in five young men able and willing and physically fit enough to fight for our freedom--whereas Red China has tens of millions more soldiers than she needs (soliders who can never marry, since there aren't women enough in China for them, thanks to their abortion policy that favors males over female births).

The Clintons, the Fords, the Nixons, the Bushes--this will be the outcome of their leadership and occultic global politiking. Where was God and His wisdom in what they decided and carried out? Some, I hear, pray to God. Really? But are they listening and hearing what God says is best for America? It is clear from their disastrous policies that they listened far more to fallible men than to an infallible God. They had Billy Graham, they had even Mother Teresa, tell them to their faces what God wanted in this country--and they ignored them, while loading them with the nation's highest honors. No greater farce can be imagined. While they shoared up their administrations and prestige with the cachet of the likes of Billy Graham and Mother Teresa, they rejected the clear, outspoken counsel of God and adamantly led us toward the ditch and the cliff edge.

Our barbarous, merciless enemies will surely write the last chapter to our history--be they Red Chinese, or Iranian, or Muslim terrorists, or Russian, or any combination of these arch-foes; the only escape from this most horrible and evil fate is to turn back to God now, in true, humble repentance and prayer and self-honesty--exactly as James Robison, a Cato who should speak to Congress and the President and the Supreme Court, has spread it out before our hostile gaze in his most solemn warning to his fellow Americans, "We Have a Choice."

No one will come to our aid, when we fall. Only God will come to our aid--if we call to Him now. If we wait until we are attacked, it may well be an inescapable judgment of God--and then He will a deaf ear to our cries. Why should we want to wait until it is too late and our prayers will not be heard? He is listening still--and ready to answer our cries for forgiveness. Will we cry out to him now, in the day of salvatin and grace?

I wish I could detect a clear note of positivism in James Robison's message and warning. I must have missed it, for I did not really sense there was one. We were being offered a last time to choose God--and turn 180 degrees around and go God's way instead of our own. That is all I could tell in reading his warning. Is there hope for America? I asked my pastor this, and he said he didn't think so. He has since died, so he did not live to see what he dreaded. That was nice for him--but I am still here, having to face reality. Now I am wondering, is there anyone out there, anyone who wants God back in America? Is there anyone? Soon it will be clear from what happens if there is anyone or not. All it would have taken to save Sodom was for there to have been ten righteous people. But there were not even five righteous people--just Lot, his two daughters, and wife (and she failed to get out of it alive). God weighs the nations, the Bible says. Do we have ten righteous people, in God's reckoning? I cannot be sure we have more righteous people than Sodom, since Sodom did not have the Gospel as America has had for over two hundred years. How much more responsible we of America are than Sodom or Tyre or Babylon or Nineveh or Rome or any other judged wicked and apostate nations! Put that fact on the scales, along with the number of righteous people--and maybe twenty million righteous people would not be enough to avert God's judgment. God sees things so differently than people see them. I only know we have a clear choice set before us by God, His Word, and His faithful preachers and prophets, and it is high time to choose God or destruction. All the sparkling Crystal Cathedrals of America, with the grand services and wonderful programs and messages, will soon be shattered, made a smoking ruin shaken by the tramp of countless booted heels. As the Prophet Hosea warned and lamented, calling to an apostate Jewish nation to turn back to God on the eve of destruction, so we are being warned today, this very hour and minute. All our fine churches and upbeat services will avail us nothing when missiles rain down upon us, and nuclear suitcase bombs detonate. We are a stench to God, as we wallow in our sins, individual and national--a hooker who has lain with her customer or "trick," then declared, "I have done nothing." That is what apostate Israel protested when Hosea related God's judgment on her.

I have nothing more to add, let us return to the Lord, for He has abundant mercy and forgiveness for sinners. Come, fellow Americans, let us return to the Lord. He is calling one last time. We may well not be given another opportunity.

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