Ron Paul “Sounds like Bin Laden”: Does Glenn Beck Think the Golden Rule is a Terrorist Tenet?

Ron Paul "Sounds like Bin Laden": Does Glenn Beck Think the Golden Rule is a Terrorist Tenet?
Posted on 19 January 2012 by William Grigg

Insisting that "Ron Paul needs to shhhhh on foreign policy," Glenn Beck told Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly that the Republican presidential candidate sounded "a little like Osama Bin Laden at times" when he offered a Golden Rule-based critique of U.S. foreign policy.

During the January 16 GOP presidential debate in South Carolina, Dr. Paul provoked a chorus of booing from the audience – most of whom are proudly pious Christian church-goers – for insisting that the United States government was bound by the Golden Rule in its treatment of other countries.

The Glenn Beck Radio Program's website offered this artlessly dishonest summary of the incident:  "Ron Paul got a strong whiff of reality today when real conservative voters in South Carolina booed him while Paul blamed America for terrorism. To Paul's credit, he didn't back down from his left of Obama foreign policy and tried to explain his America creates terrorism logic to the audience."

Beck, who has appointed himself a leader of what he calls a spiritual "revival" of American culture, either didn't recognize the central moral tenet of the Christian faith he professes to share, doesn't believe that it applies to the conduct of government, or doesn't think it's a sin to bear false witness where political matters are concerned. Dr. Paul's non-interventionist foreign policy does differ dramatically from that of any of the other Republican contenders and the Democratic incumbent – all of whom have embraced a doctrine of perpetual foreign intervention that is an outgrowth of the same Marxist "Progressivism" Glenn Beck claims to despise.

Beck, who affects a professorial mien (despite being a college drop-out) and likes to offer reading assignments to his audience, should read an indispensable book by Richard Gambale entitled The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. Gambale's book demonstrates that at the turn of the 20^th Century, theologically and political conservative Christians opposed foreign wars and other imperial entanglements. It was the "Progressive" clergy, who mingled scripture with the teachings of Hegel, Kant, Darwin, and Marx, who promoted militarism. This appetite for war was of a piece with the "Progressive" belief that the Christian Church had to justify its existence by playing a "positive" role in the expansion of the State as an instrument of redemption in human affairs – and for them, nothing was as redemptive as bloodshed.

Rather than playing the biblically mandated role of peacemakers, the progressive clergy eagerly supported World War I "as transforming event in the life of the church," observes Gambale. Many of them applauded the Wilson administration's war aims as a form of Christian "altruism," one that promised temporal redemption "at the sacrifice, if need be, of five millions of men and billions of wealth," as an effusive Literary Digest editorial put it.

This righteous campaign to re-make the world through state coercion would continue even after the altruistic mass murder came to an end. Writes Gambale: "The progressives longed for, and expected, the war for righteousness to continue after the guns in Europe fell silent."

The "Progressive" gospel of the Total State, as translated into the idiom of American Christianity, has rarely if ever been stated as bluntly as it was by William P. Merrill in this couplet published in the April 26, 1917 issue of Christian Century (just weeks after war was declared on Germany):

The strength of the State we'll lavish on more, Than making of wealth and making of war; We are learning at last, though the lesson comes late, That the making of man is the task of the State.

Beck routinely execrates Woodrow Wilson, who richly deserves such treatment. He likewise castigates the Wilson-era Progressive Movement, another eminently worthy target. Yet he embraces militarism without qualification, and he promotes an idolatrous vision of the U.S. government as blameless in its foreign policy – thereby revealing himself to be squarely in the Progressive camp in his views of discretionary killing by the State. Also of a piece with Progressivism is Beck's reflexive insistence that the U.S. Government and the American people are indistinguishable.

During his appearance on Bill O'Reilly's program, Beck insisted that terrorism is "not America's fault, and I don't think Ron Paul gets that." Dr. Paul has been careful to draw a distinction between the criminal acts of the U.S. Government and the people in whose name those crimes are committed. His view is that the American people suffer the inevitable terrorist "blowback" generated by the Government's criminal policies.

Rather than allowing the same Government to steal what remains of our liberty and prosperity on the pretext of protecting us from the consequences of its actions, Dr. Paul maintains, we should change our foreign policy to bring it into alignment with the non-interventionist principles of Washington and Jefferson, as well as the foundational moral law of human society, the Golden Rule.  There is one sense in which the American people are to blame for this: The anti-American terrorist backlash is a predictable consequence of allowing ourselves to be ruled by a government that promiscuously breaks the Golden Rule.

Beck's claim that this position "sounds like Bin Laden" means that he's either handicapped with an incurable tin ear, or has carefully cultivated a lying tongue.

Read more here: http://www.republicmagazine.com/news/ron-paul-sounds-like-bin-laden-does-glenn-beck-think-the-golden-rule-is-a-terrorist-tenet.html

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