The Antiwar Mentality

DW1A

World War II

We moved into the Pacific, and that magnificent First Marine Division moved into Guadalcanal. The enemy had gradually encroached upon our defenses from the Pacific following the attack on Pearl Harbor. We moved from there through the Solomons; through the Marianas; back to Guam; and, back to Iwo Jima where on Mount Suribachi the flag was raised. There happened to be a photographer, and he got that magnificent picture of the raising by the Marine Corps of the flag on Mount Suribachi which is now a monument in Washington D.C. On that monument was a very appropriate summary of the spirit that was characteristic of World War II. The Marines on the Iwo Jima were described by the phrase, "where an uncommon valor became a common virtue."

These men died, and we moved finally into those desperate hours on Okinawa in those final months in August when the invasion plans were set, and we were told about Operation Olympic. We were prepared for the landing on the beaches of Japan, which never took place because the United States, having conquered Nazi Germany, and in the process beat them to the most awesome weapon that the world has ever seen. Without hesitation, the weapon was used; the enemy was destroyed; his will to fight was destroyed; his material was destroyed; his personnel were destroyed; and, complete and unconditional surrender was signed on the decks of the Missouri in Tokyo Bay as had been signed in Germany. That's a whole different picture. It's an alien picture to a young person who has been born since, who has never lived through those dark days when nothing but England stood in those final days before Hitler was ready to overrun all the rest of civilization that yet existed.

Warfare

For example, one of our men was recently at work and said, "We're going to begin the study of the doctrine of war at our church." And, one person said, "I don't think you should talk about that. That's mixing politics with church." He was obviously a very doctrinally uninformed disoriented person. I know he was because I know what kind of a church group he belongs to. So that may be your attitude, that this is a political issue. It may be your attitude that you go negative by questioning the reliability of the biblical text as information on a subject like warfare. If the Bible is unreliable on this subject, it's unreliable on salvation too. You may say that we don't have any of the original biblical manuscripts. All that we have are copies. How do we know what God really thinks about this?

Or, you may challenge and go negative by pointing out the large dissenting opinion of other religious leaders. That doesn't faze me much because most preachers are very disoriented when it comes to Bible doctrine. They're very disoriented in what they're even called to do. They spend their time running around shaking hands; patting people on the back; grease-palming them; and, visiting them in their homes. One fellow I used to have here at church once said, "I'm very unhappy. You don't come over to my house to listen to my records." That's what he thought was my calling--to come around and listen to his crummy records when I have better records at home to listen to. So, what preachers think doesn't faze me too much. They are about the most confused group that there are. The National Council of Churches has just voted a vast sum of money to advance social causes in communist Poland. That's the group which speaks for the majority of Protestants in this country today. So, how you view Scripture does make a difference as to what you're going to say as a preacher.

Or, you may go negative by rejecting the possibility of accurately interpreting the Word of God. By this you are suggesting that God is unable to transmit His thoughts to us in written words in such fashion and in such words that we can take those words and understand them. That's a cop-out of all cop-outs because the magnificent thing about the Greek language since the days of Alexander the Great was that it's a crystallized language which has specific meanings and which was advanced in its grammatical structures in such a way that it conveys very specific nuances of the words and implications as no language has ever done. God knew what he was doing when he picked the language and when he gave us a written record. The same is true of the Hebrew.

Communism

Now, avowed communist sympathizers and dupes are deeply involved in the leadership of the antiwar movements of our day. Let's begin with the former Attorney General under President Johnson, Ramsey Clark. He has been in the news recently in discussions with J. Edgar Hoover. One of the things in this article called Turbulent Times by Ramsey Clark, who unfortunately is a Texan, says that Solomon was wrong. There are new things under the sun. Then he tells about all the problems of the world, and these are all new. But here's the part that was significant in this article by Ramsey Clark.

"It was the young people in America who first doubted that we should be in Vietnam. They opposed the violence, the inhumanity, and the killing." Now, are any of you adults in favor of violence, inhumanity, and killing? Have you ever been opposed to that? Well, it's wonderful that the young people were the first to be opposed to that. "They descended in protests of the war. We let them speak, and because we let them speak, we finally began to hear. As we began to hear, even institutions of government itself came to know that there must be peace." Have any of you ever been opposed to peace, until you heard some kid tell you that peace is a nice thing and that we ought to have it? Does anybody believe that violence is no longer permissible as an international problem solver? Do you believe that war is far too dangerous? Do you think that we cannot go on like this? Are there any of you adults, over the age of 30, who have ever been so disoriented that you thought war was a good way to settle international things, or had any doubts about how dangerous it is? You know, a person can get hurt in a war. Did you ever have any doubts about that?

This same Ramsey Clark castigated J. Edgar Hoover as an incompetent arrogant character, and Mr. Hoover had some appropriate remarks to say back to Mr. Clark about what kind of an Attorney General he was. (We won't quote him here since we're addressing things from a biblical perspective.) But, as Paul Harvey, on the news comment in reporting on it said, "That's what you get for going after a lion with a peashooter." Ramsey Clark has summarized a certain point of view that has permeated the mindset of this nation concerning war. It's inhuman; it's dangerous; it's bad; it's a stupid way to deal with international events; and, who disagrees with that? But all of this great insight has come from our radical youth. One of their spokespersons is Jane Fonda. You've been seeing lot about her in the news recently on TV. Here's a little quote from Jane in the Atlanta Constitution, "I totally support the Black Panther Party."

We have given you a summary sheet in preparation for the service study called "The Subversives," which has been put out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and that same J. Edgar Hoover that Ramsey Clark took to task. On this you have a thorough rundown of the Black Panther Party. This is very essential to read through these and orient yourself to the radical student groups so that you understand what they are when you hear these terms: the SDS is the Students for a Democratic Society; the YSA is the Young Students Alliance; "The Mobe" is the National Mobilization Committee; and, the BPP is the Black Panther Party. You need to understand what these groups are. These are all communist-dominated, communist-oriented, student radical groups. It was the SDS that was the instigator, as communists had the ability to do, to create the riot on the campus of Kent State University which ended up with the four students being killed. There's a beautiful picture that one of the publications put out where they had five or six of the leading communist students, with the Students for a Democratic Society, all gathered together walking away from the riot situation.

Jane says, "'I'm in favor of the Black Panther Party, and I'm not just talking about the civil libertarian point of view, but the political and ideological angles.' A crowd of near 1,500 heard Miss Fonda acknowledge her goal of a socialist state. 'Angela Davis should be free,' Miss Fonda said." Angela Davis was a teacher at the University of San Diego. She was a student of Herbert Marcuse who is the father of the new left and the philosophical father of the new left group, and who is himself a communist in viewpoint, a Marxist. "Miss Fonda described what she termed a close personal association with the accused black communist. The actress, who has been in the news during the past year for activities of her activist fights, stood tall at the church pulpit, her chin jutting, and her eyes sparkling with intensity. She is slated to address the Southern Baptists at Mercer University in November. This Marxist also praised what she described as a growing revolution within the United States Army and among the South Vietnamese civilians. When asked how to settle the war, Jane Fonda said, 'It is so simple to end this war too. Oust the leaders; adopt the provincial revolutionary government program to form a coalition government; and, set a specific date for the withdrawal of American troops.'"

Now whether it's McGovern, Fulbright, Hatfield, or any of the rest, the theme is the same: set a date; get the United States out of South Vietnam; war is immoral; this war is immoral; we are responsible for this war; and, what we should do is let a coalition government come in. Of course, you have now been oriented to understanding communist doctrine, so you will not be ignorant when you read a remark like this. You will immediately be able to go back into your thinking capacity and say. "Yes, the communist technique is first a coalition such as is now taking place in Chile, and gradually securing the control of the state powers, particularly the police powers and the army powers, and then the gradual elimination of all the opposition until you have created a prison system where all the people are prisoners, and a small group is in command as the guards." No coalition government has ever failed to go communist in time. If this happens in South Vietnam, and the United States comes home and finally yields under public pressure to people like Fonda and Ramsey Clark, and say, "Get out, and get a coalition government," South Vietnam and all of Indochina will fall to the Communists. And you may be certain of that.

Some of you receive Dr. Fred Schwartz's newsletter from the Kristanna Communist Crusade. I want to remind you that Dr. Schwartz is an analyst. He very seldom has anything to say about what to do about the situation. He is an analyst of what communists believe; what they teach; and, what they are doing. It's a factual information center. You can draw your own conclusion on what the situation is. He is often misrepresented. The very same man that one of our men was talking to who said we shouldn't talk about the subject of war in church also attacked Schwartz as being a right-wing radical. He is nothing of the sort. However, I've seen him on TV, and it is interesting how the television program conveys him in that light because of the way he is presented. He has debates with radical students. He had one recently at the University of Texas. I thought you might be interested, since it's near home and you think we're talking about what's going on with those kooks in Berkeley or those freaks up at Madison, Wisconsin or someplace else. We're talking about right here in the empire state of Texas.

In this letter, Dr. Schwartz says that, "The University of Texas, believe it or not (hang onto your hats), is a strong contender for the title of the most radical campus in the country. The president of the student body is an avowed Trotskyite communist, and Trotskyite communists organized in the Young Socialist Alliance dominate the campus." Now go to your subversive sheet, and right there at the top, the second from the top, you find the Young Socialist Alliance. This is what he's talking about. The FBI says it is the youth group of the Trotskyite Socialist Party. Trotsky was one of the original communists who got eliminated in the process of the takeover in Russia. He was more of a constitutional type of leader, and communism could not exist except under a dictatorship type. So his group was eliminated. This group, the YSA, which is sympathetic to his point of view, controls the Student Mobilization Committee. These are the ones who were marching in behalf of the peace movements and naming over caskets the names of men who have been killed in combat for this war, and so on. The Student Mobilization Committee is one of the major organizing groups behind antiwar demonstrations. Every national office of the Student Mobilization Committee is communist-controlled by SWP or YSA (Young Socialist Alliance) members. They have widespread representation on college campuses.

Now you tell me how, on the magnificent, great, powerful, notorious, and famous University of Texas, how could a student body leader who is an avowed communist be elected? It shows the deterioration in the thinking of the student body to the extent that such a person could be put in authority. You may be sure that anybody who attends Texas University or any university of similar ilk, unless he's got a great degree of Bible doctrine orientation in his soul, is going to start getting disoriented in his mind. You will start listening carefully; you'll pick up expressions; you'll pick up phrases; and, you'll pick up ideas that are conveyed and expressed that show the deterioration from the biblical point of view to humanistic human viewpoint, to that which is anti-God, and to that which is contrary to the mind of God. You cannot exist in a climate like that and survive unless you are strongly oriented to God's mind. You delude yourself if you think you can.

Dr. Schwartz continues: "During my message at the University of Texas, I stated that the working class has never sought to destroy the institution of private property in any country." That's very important. I hope you'll remember that. No working class has ever tried to destroy the institution of private property. It is not and never has been revolutionary. It is not the working class that becomes the revolutionists. As we've learned, it is the college and university students with their deluded idealism.

"I pointed out that the slogan with which the Bolsheviks rallied workers support during the coup d'état in which they seized control in Russia was 'bread, peace, and land' (emphasizing land). The workers of Russia were enticed by the promise of individual ownership of land. To the extent that they participated in the revolution, they were revolting for capitalism. The same situation prevailed in China. Mao Zedong was an agrarian reformer. He had to be in order to get support from those who wanted to own land in China. That's what the people wanted. This angered active Trotskyite communists in the student body who then delivered a tirade affirming the revolutionary character of the working class. He sought to sustain this thesis by pointing to the role of the workers during the revolt in France in 1967. I pointed out that the workers in France were revolting for better wages and working conditions, and that when these were granted, they would return to work. If the working class really desired the overthrow of the present system in the United States, they could achieve this very easily. It is the arrogant intellectuals who are actively seeking the destruction of this society. So, it is imperative that the program of deception of the totalitarians on the campuses has become constantly exposed. We're striving to do this, and we need your help."

The Antiwar Mentality

It was interesting that Billy Graham pointed out the hypocrisy of young people who are against the war. He pointed out the hypocrisy of youth today. That's their word--hypocrisy. He's pointing out area after area of the real hypocrisy in youth today. One of them was their antagonisms toward the brutality of war, but he pointed out that you never stand up and speak against the people who caused the wars in the first place. It was like Dean Rusk, when he was Secretary of State under President Johnson, said, "Our goals in Vietnam are very simple. When we look down the road and we see another battalion of North Vietnamese coming down to South Vietnam, we have a moral obligation to the people of South Vietnam, to whose requests for defense we responded, to meet them on the road, and to stop the North Vietnamese. When we see no more North Vietnamese coming down the road, no more battalions marching down the road from North Vietnam, we will go home. That's all we're here for." The peace groups and the antiwar groups are always against the United States, as if we were the ones who created this in the first place.

We have one more quote to share, getting down a little closer to the thing we're concerned with today. This is from a man named Dr. Robert Bratcher, who was one of the translators for a translation of the Bible called Good News for Modern Man, which translation has something less than perfection about it. He was quoted in The Greenville News in an address to Furman University. He defended the use of the common English language in the translation. He denied the substitution of a new set of theological terms, and agreed that the Bible contains fallacies, and sub-Christian sections, and that the prophecies do not apply to today's culture and technology. "The Bible is not a safe guide," said this American Bible Society translator at this Southern Baptist University. A student asked, "Are there historical sections of the Bible that are sub-Christian?" "Certainly," answered Dr. Bratcher. "Wishing that God would destroy one's enemies. You call that Christian?" A student asked, "You admit that the Bible has fallacies. Then how is it valuable?" Dr. Bratcher replied, "If we build our faith wholly on the Bible then we're building our faith on shifting sand. We must follow the facts so there is nothing to believe. We cannot literally follow Jesus, only go in His direction. Under the guise of academic freedom, and academic freedom means following truth wherever it goes, we have this kind of speaking even on religious campuses that ought to know better than to give a hearing to something of that nature."

Conscientious Objectors

The problem lays in the minds of people. They are disoriented by a human viewpoint which contradicts divine viewpoint. Sincere people like objectivity. Beware of the sincere person. When I encounter a sincere person, I move in the opposite direction as fast as I can. It is the sincere person who is operating on emotion and not on facts, who is bestirring thinking that is usually deluded. When you run into a sincere person, the first thing you want to do is to get away from him. At least watch yourself when you're in his presence. The United States today is a free land because of our military establishment that Jane Fonda would like to see destroyed. Don't you make any mistake about it. You sit there in freedom because of the military establishment of this country, and for no other reason. If you lived through World War II, you know how true that is. It is because brave men have suffered and died and won battles in behalf of this country, and under our flag, that we have been kept free.

So, you sit there today, and you can hold your own views on any subject, and you can sound off about your own views. You try doing that in a communist country. You are ensured privacy because of those men. You try finding that in a communist country. You are ensured private property. You try finding that under communism. You can do business, and you can have a social life to please yourself. You try doing that in a communist country. And on and on the freedoms go. Why do you have it? You couldn't even sit here and listen to the Word of God preached. You might be a parent who learned something in this study today. You might say, "Now I want to be sure that my kids understand this so they grow up oriented to the Word of God, and not fouled up with this human viewpoint." So you sit down and explain this to your children and ask them a few questions to quiz them to see if they understood this and got the drift of what was going on. If you lived in a communist country and this was brought to the attention of the authorities, you'd be in for a prison term. Your kids would be taken away from you. Under communism, that's viewed as denying the freedom of a child to grow up as an atheist.

Today the flag is burned. The ROTC is ridiculed. ROTC buildings are burned down. I don't know how you look upon that, but I view that as treason. When I was a kid in ROTC in high school we used to be called the "Rotten Old Tin Cans" for ROTC. That didn't set too well with me then. I've discovered now they call it "rot-c," and that doesn't set too well with me either. Most of the officer corps between the wars, whether you know it or not, has come from men who have been in ROTC, which happens to be Reserve Officer Training Corps. Anybody in these antiwar movements who oppose ROTC is either communist, a communist sympathizer, or has been deluded by communist manipulation into thinking that if they could destroy our potential to create officer leadership and a military establishment, the world would have peace. That's the idea of a unilateral disarmament. If the United States would just get rid of its weapons, Russia would sit back and be nice, and wouldn't be afraid of us, and wouldn't have to be making all of these monstrous outlays that it does for military matters.

We have protests against American military action. Protests for what? In restraining the imperialism and the aggression of communist countries. That's what's happening in Vietnam. I call those protests treason. The draft dodgers in Canada and the draft card burners have a defect in their mind, and that's what I'm want to show you. I think if you keep an open mind, and you've got some intimidation because of the brainwashing through the news media of our country, and if you happen to be in college and you've got some disorientation because of the surroundings of your college, if you keep your ears and your mind open, I think we can get you straightened out. The Word of God is in line with what took place in World War II--not in line with what's taking place today.

National destruction begins when a majority of the citizens have a defect in their mind. The mind has two sides to it. One side is for thinking. The other side is values and standards. We call this conscience. This is the problem. It is when the conscience side of the mind becomes disoriented that people begin thinking and acting in reference to war as they are today. When the majority of the citizens of the nation are defective in this way, then a nation goes to destruction. When values and standards are wiped out, you become an animal. It is what distinguishes you from the animals. You have a set of values and you have a set of standards. When this happens you become an animal, and a perverted conscience then becomes evident in society. How? We have the evidences today. We have communal living where people get together and they live in a kind of a beehive and exchange each other sexually. Communal living is anti-biblical. It is a direct outcome and expression of a perverted conscience where the person's mind has consequently become animal. It is evidenced in effeminate hairstyles down to the shoulders, and effeminate dress where the unisex attitude is promoted. So a poor kid grows up and he can't tell the difference between the looks of his father and mother because they both look the same in the way they dress. They both have the same kind of hair down around their shoulders and the whole bit. This perversion is indicated homosexuality.

By the way, the University of Texas campus has a communist for student body president placed there as a result of the values and standards in the mentality of the student body of the University of Texas. That's the only way you could get there. That campus, the university through its agents, has now authorized the gay liberation movement, a homosexual organization. This is going to be accepted as a standard official university activity. I won't go into what's involved in homosexuality. You should be able to view this without the cute word "gay." The word "gay" shouldn't cover up anything to you. That's a euphemism to cover up the most bestial, perverted, debased, obscene crude relationships between two human beings you could imagine. On the Texas University campus this becomes an accepted pattern of activity. What can that contribute to the student life? When you wipe out this side of the mentality, you become an animal. When you get a group of people who have wiped out that side of their mentality, you've got a group of animals. They begin moving as animals. You have communal living. You have men looking like women. You have women trying to take the role of men to be aggressors instead of receptors. You have drugs. You have the sexual promiscuity. You have on the scene of leadership (and we will look at leaders in reference to this business of warfare too), leaders become expedient oriented. They do what's expedient.

The TV commentary Howard K. Smith observed something about all this furor against the war in South Vietnam. There is one group of people who, overnight, could stop it. Guess who. The Congress of the United States. The war in Vietnam could not go on one day if it were not for the Congress of the United States supplying funds. Mr. Smith commented upon all these voices we have in Congress, and all the sashaying around on the subject of the war in Vietnam. Should we be there, or should we not be there? Should we have a deadline to get out or not get out? Nobody among them is ready to rise up and get a majority and cut the funds off. Congress will not do it. So, Mr. Smith asked, "Why not? Why won't Congress do this?" He said the reason they won't is because down deep inside, someplace over here on the thinking side of their mentality, it's eating away at most members of Congress that everything MacArthur has told us, anything our military geniuses have told us, might just be right. If South Vietnam goes, the domino theory will hit us all the way across the Pacific and all of Southeast Asia goes. Communism is one more step closer to the shores of the United States, and one less area of the world where it has to fight for control before it can give its attention to us.

He said that because this eats at the heart of the Congress, they will not rise to cut off the money. Should they cut out the money, and should the communists move in as they certainly would, people would bring retribution at the next election. So you tell me what the noble legislators' decisions are being motivated by. Expediency. There are few legislators in Congress who are courageous enough to get up and say that there is something immoral about the war in Vietnam. It's not because we are there (as we are going to show you biblically incidentally), but the immorality lies in the fact that 50,000 men have died, and many times that number have suffered injury, and we have refused to win. We have refused to march into the North and take the country. We have refused even when we were bombing, to bomb the place where the supplies were really coming in, at Haiphong harbor. We could have cut them off overnight, practically, had we bombed it where it hurt.

The antiwar crowd says, "Oh, you're going to start World War III." That is the biggest bit of baloney that the communists have yet fed us, sliced thick, and we have swallowed it. If there's anything the communists don't want, it's World War III. We could have salvaged North Korea. We could have salvaged all of China. Our Seventh Army was at the peak of proficiency beyond anything in World War II, when military men in tears were restrained by the Truman administration from going in and following a biblical principle that we're going to show you.

When minds turn to animals on the conscience side, leaders deal in expediency. Liberalism is the word of the day. Anti-nationalism prevails. Promiscuity is encouraged. The age of apostasy that we have been studying about in prediction in Jude has come about, and we have reared a disoriented body of young people who are ready to surrender for peace and safety to the communists. Brave Americans have faced the awfulness of war to preserve our national entity, and they will have to face it again. We've got the confused youth, with their effeminate styles, with their perverted sex, with their drug practices, staying at home, and talking about their rights to object to fighting for this national defense in Vietnam. While they stay at home and talk, courageous Americans go to their death so we can sit here and be free.

This is installment number one. We shall continue from here. Think through and get a feel for the climate in which you live, because your minds are being effected by an insidious poison that, as we get into the Word of God, you're going to see how far we have been disoriented, and especially in view of how far we have come from the position that we held in World War II--our model that was mounted with such force, that salvaged the world from another dark age, under the tyranny of the West and the East combined.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1970

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