If criminals commit crimes and no earthly authorities are willing to identify and punish the acts and actors, are they still crimes and criminals?
If criminals commit crimes and no earthly authorities are willing to identify and punish the acts and actors, are they still crimes and criminals?
Yes.
Ann Barnhardt has written several essays that include quotes from Chapter 7 of John Senior’s 1978 book The Death of Christian Culture.
The one about how the total absence of justice can only lead to the total absence of freedom - Sept. 21, 2011, repost Dec. 6, 2013:
The Death Penalty Is Essential To A Christian Society and Is Willed By God - Repost Sept. 2, 2022.
The one about capital punishment - July 17, 2014, repost Sept. 6, 2022
Following are excerpts from Barnhardt’s 2011 essay, which is aimed at Barack Obama but applies equally to all the other criminals who have occupied the Presidency and Congress and the federal courts; actively worked for a century to build the illegitimate biomedical police state that now enslaves the American people to the criminal international bankers; and have not yet been brought to justice.
AB: We are now firmly in the domain of the Stalin Principle. Josef Stalin famously said, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” Obama, and the entire political class in Washington, and really, our entire culture collectively, now obviously determine the moral licitness of an activity solely by its scale.
Once a crime surpasses a certain level in terms of scale, it ceases to be constrained by ANY moral matrix.
What’s that, you say? A non-state, non-uniformed enemy belligerent has overthrown the Executive branch and is systematically dismantling our Constitutional Republic? Well, there’s really nothing we can do about that until November of 2012. What, what? A cadre of Marxists is actively debasing the U.S. dollar and consciously imploding the economy via suicidal spending, money printing and outright looting of the United States Treasury? Well, we’ll just have to wait it out and hope that everything turns out for the best…
This apathy and moral impotence is why our nation is crumbling before our very eyes. This is why Western Civilization is imploding. There is no justice, or even a THIRST for justice…
I am currently reading a book that should be read by every person now reading this essay. It is called “The Death of Christian Culture” by Dr. John Senior. Penned in 1978, it reads like an exegesis of current events…
JS: Justice is simply the social good, and it must therefore be done. It is defined as “giving each his due” – cuique sum, “to each his own.” A man is due his life because he is a living thing; it is his nature to have life; and, since it is also his nature to be moral, if a man commits a crime, he must be punished because punishment is retributive – punishment is the penalty due the criminal in justice to him. Proportioned punishment is due him, too, and you cannot deny him that right without yourself committing an injustice against him deserving punishment in turn.
The judge who fails the criminal in punishment himself incurs a greater guilt…
AB: Because we as a nation and as a culture have failed for over 50 years to properly apply justice to the criminals among us, we have committed crimes against the criminals themselves, our neighbors, ourselves and God. And for that, we are now being collectively punished. Justice will be done. When Ted Kennedy was permitted to murder Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969 with no punishment whatsoever, Kopechne’s blood was spread from the hands of Kennedy alone to the hands of the entire nation. The same can be said for the blood of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.
The same can be said for the crimes of Bill Clinton. In failing to punish Clinton, the matter simply didn’t “go away.” The entire nation is now reaping the whirlwind of allowing Bill Clinton to lie under oath without consequence, and fifty solid years of similar failures in millions of cases, not the least of which are the trillions of dollars stolen by “banksters” and other white-collar criminals to date and the 45 million victims (and counting) of the American abortion holocaust.
No justice, no civilization.
JS: There is another justification for punishment besides retribution. Pain and deprivation are medicinal. They hurt so much that the criminal can learn that crime does not pay – or at least that the victims pay back. If you want to teach the prisoner a trade or put him to useful work, well and good; but those things are secondary and must never interfere with the first and proper use of punishment, which is the restoration of the equality of justice not only in society but in the person of the criminal.
A person who commits a crime has indulged his will against reason; a disequilibrium has been established in his soul, as Plato says, which can only be righted by retributive exercise of reason against his will.
The greatest evil in the world is to do wrong without being punished.
AB: Let us make the assumption for a moment that Ted Kennedy is in hell. It is impossible to know as Christ’s Mercy is infinite and Kennedy MAY have repented of his life of grave sin before his death. If Kennedy is in fact in heaven, he will not mind us using him as an instructive hypothetical example. In fact, he will delight and rejoice in it. If Ted Kennedy is in hell, a massive contributive dynamic to his failure to repent will have been the fact that we, his neighbors, his brothers, failed to punish him and see justice done upon him. Because Kennedy was never made to feel any pain or retributive justice for murdering Mary Jo Kopechne, he was never deeply confronted with his sin, or the fear of what the consequences would be for his immortal soul in the next life – because there were zero consequences in THIS life. In fact, it made him bolder in his sin. If Ted Kennedy is in hell, we are partially complicit in his being there, and justice will be meted out upon US for our failure in charity towards him.
Exactly the same dynamic is in play for Barack Obama. If we surrender Obama to a life of ill-gotten luxury and continued depravity, we will not only be clearing the path and scattering the rose petals for the next arch-criminal, we will also be failing Obama PERSONALLY.
This is the truth of Christian Charity, which has exactly nothing to do with being “nice.”
Real Charity is ferocious, fecund and awesome in its vigor and persistence.
Real Charity does not impotently shrug its shoulders and turn its back and walk away.
Ever.
Real Charity never says, “Ah, screw him.”
Real Charity says, “Let justice be done upon him.”
JS: …They object to punishment itself; and that is because they deny the existence of justice; and that is because they deny that man is free, that man is responsible for his acts. Crime, they say, is sickness. It must be cured, or better, prevented by prophylaxis of the spirit, by the extermination of free will altogether so that men will react like Pavlov’s dogs to sensitivity training and even to psychosurgery and drugs…
They say crime is illness. Now if that were true, there could be no moral act whatsoever. If man is not free to choose evil, he is not free to choose good…
Everyone must remember the story of the murderer who said in court: “You can’t blame me, it was my heredity and environment that caused me to kill” and the judge who replied, “It is my heredity and environment that sentences you to hang by the neck until dead.”
AB: Those words were written by John Senior in ARSH 1978.
As we watch the arch-criminal, Barack Obama bait a race war, with himself as the poster child in order to retain and advance his own power, and to evade the justice that is due him, remember that the total absence of justice can only lead to the total absence of freedom.
Barack Obama and all of those those complicit in his myriad crimes against the United States and humanity must be arrested, tried and punished as criminals in proper proportion to the enormous scale of their crimes. This isn’t about vengeance. It is about justice.
It is a reckoning.
The two key points are that “the greatest evil in the world is to do wrong without being punished” and that it is an act of Christian charity to pursue justice for those who do wrong, not just for the sake of obtaining relief for the victims of the crimes and preventing more crimes from being committed against more victims in the future, but even more so for the sake of the souls of the criminals and those who hold them to account for their willful, freely-chosen acts of evil.
I struggle with these issues.
I struggle to keep them close at hand when the scale of the evil and the depth of the perpetrators’ depravity and their hubristic ooze of entitlement and untouchable impunity overwhelm me.
I struggle with how to apply the principle of bystander witness culpability in the crimes of the criminals — attributed to the general “we” who have failed to bring the criminals to justice — to the acts of free will that so many of “us” have undertaken, in a world in which all the paths to justice appear to be blocked and our work appears to be fruitless.
But I agree with Barnhardt:
Real Charity is ferocious, fecund and awesome in its vigor and persistence.
Real Charity does not impotently shrug its shoulders and turn its back and walk away.
Ever.
Real Charity never says, “Ah, screw him.”
Real Charity says, “Let justice be done upon him.”
Covid is not an epidemiological story. Covid is a crime story. If you view this whole 'pandemic' situation through the lens of health, safety, science and saving lives, then most of it makes little sense. If you view it through the lens of money, power, control, and wealth transfer, then all of it makes perfect sense.
Katherine, thank you for this post.
I have read Ann for years, she really is quite amazing.