08-11-13 TEC Flyer

This flyer is being distributed to make known to parishioners of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral that your church has contributed to activities that are reprehensible.

In small part from money coming from Trinity Episcopal Cathedral and its parishioners, the political activities of the homeless-connected organizations Loaves & Fishes, SHOC and Safe Ground have been funded.  And likely through SafeGround/SHOC members’ attendance at rallies and confabs, money has been funneled to support a political organization that can easily be described as Absolute Evil to the Core.

Some of what I am about to make known to you sounds wildly absurd if you’re completely ignorant of the situation, but in the space of this flyer I will set out the facts and provide internet links that you may use of to verify the content of this document. 

The political organization that Loaves & Fishes; Safe Ground and SHOC are connected with is called The League of Revolutionaries for a New America [formerly, The California Communist League]. Entryway to its website is here:  www.lrna.org .  It has two publications, both of which are online:  People’s Tribune [ peoplestribune.org ] and Rally!, Comrades [ http://rallycomrades.lrna.org/ ]

This is the opening frame that SafeGround chose for its movie

about a party that was held in San Francisco, featuring America's

most-famous communist, Jack Hirshman. a prolific writer.

The San Francisco event for radicals was a series of events to

protest the Obama Administration.

This League of Revolutionaries is not a fanciful bunch of Progressives.  They are the hardest and hardiest of hardcore America-based Communists.  Their founder; long-time leader; and now, in old age, member of the Board of Directors, Nelson Peery, is an impressive intellectual who uses his smarts to defend the Great Terror, among his other dubious activities.  The Great Terror was Joseph Stalin’s campaign to ruthlessly re-order Soviet society as a totalitarian dictatorship. Text of a speech of Peery’s lauding Stalin’s efforts recently came online, from the archives/intranet of the University of Utah’s Economics Department. It is titled "Nelson Peery on Stalin and Revolution." Estimates of how many people were killed by Stalin vary from 15 million to 20 million (in the book Stalin’s Genocides) to 61 million (according to a database in Russia of those killed).

Questions that come up for me include this:  How do the Stalinist Communists of today [that is, the hundred or so insiders in the League of Revolutionaries for a New America] think? These are intelligent people. How can they not seem to know that the 20th Century acted as a proving ground, showing without doubt that Communism always fails, miserably. 

The answer I find is that they think they can do it better; they can succeed where others have failed. Marxists believe [citing György Lukács] the highest duty in communist ethics is to accept the necessity of acting immorally -- knowing however that the evil that will result will be made glorious through the dialectics of historical development.  Like Christians (and like ME, a Buddhist), the extreme Communists believe that "Good is the goal of history."  For Communists [citing Lukács, again] the end vindicates all actions.  This is very much Machiavelli's earlier "The end justifies the means."  I would say that only by way of the good can a Great Good be achieved, otherwise the stench of evil would undermine the effort. Besides, we don't live at any "end." Our existence is a journey. Most Christians believe that the course of the future is set with great evil expected and accepted, but on a journey to an assured heavenly future for the few, the believers.

The Stalinist Communists are the extreme case because, while Lukács and other communists at least see that much of what they do is immoral, the Stalinists are steely, nonchalant about the horror and suffering they invoke. Quoting Getty and Naumov in The Road to Terror:  "No awareness [of immorality] comes into play among the Central Committee under Stalin, for whom historical progress overshadowed all moral considerations. Then, again, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that historical progress was their sole moral consideration. Some followers believed so strongly in this ideal that they even accepted it as necessary when they themselves fell victim to the most egregious injustices."  The individual was meaningless; it was all about the collective being carried, somehow, through the purifying sewer of murder and torture and mayhem, upward to glory and splendor and happiness.  Utopia achieved!  All doubters eliminated. Everyone conforming without having a negative thought or questioning a directive.

Another question for me is: How well do the homeless leaders with SafeGround or SHOC understand what it is they are contributing to? In Homeward Street Journal, Lomazzi gets into economics that can sound Keynesian, but then speaking of the rich or about capitalists, it can sound dismissive of a class of people, and that is where things get weird. If Lomazzi were 'on top of' the horrible roots of the organization behind People's Tribune, she would fully avoid this kind of blather.

At SHOC’s Homeless Power Forum, keynote speaker, the League of Revolutionaries' Ethel Long-Scot said "We the People should run the resources!"  People of all races and backgrounds, indigents and undocumented immigrants, should band together, she said.  We mustn't allow the rich and corporations to continue to set us apart. Cathleen Williams of SHOC wrote on a clean, huge sheet of paper: "Nationwide Movement." We must coalesce around "new values, new priorities, new tactics," said Ms. Long-Scott.  "This must be a united poor people's economic-rights campaign." Cathleen Williams wrote on her sheet: "economics 4 social justice." Ms. Long-Scott told us, "We've got to link-up the causes: from safe ground to healthcare for everybody.  We must get private gain out of public need," and bring about a "quiet coup."

Since that forum at Loaves & Fishes, nearly four years ago, Sacramento homeless leaders affiliated with LRNA went to a big USSF [United States Social Forum] meeting in Detroit, which was a gathering of American Communists -- and perhaps, centrally, Soviet-leaning ones, since USSF was obviously used as its name because it is so similar to USSR.

My questions to YOU Trinity Episcopal parishioners is this:  Is it your intention to continue providing succor and support to the most evil group in America?  SafeGround and SHOC, knowingly or unwittingly, contribute to the acceptance and growth of the most-vile political group in America.  And currently YOU aid them in doing that.

If you do a google advance search [ www.google.com/advance ] of the People’s Tribune website, you will find that SHOC leaders have contributed seventy articles, poems, photos, and statements in support of League of Revolutionaries for a New America. Parishioners: You think you’re good because you see yourself helping the homeless and seeking gays’ rights?  Stalin had homeless and gay people eliminated [ie, killed] from Soviet society for being “asocial.”  He saw himself as not being impacted by morality, as is the case, too, with today's Stalinist Communists.

Clean up your act, Trinity Episcopal!  In our wonderfully diverse metropolis, there are people of Ukrainian, Polish, Bosnian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Soviet Jew, Finnish, Chechen extraction who can inform you of the absurdity of your church, today.  I am hopeful that it can be arranged such that you will be seeing them soon.

Tom Armstrong    unbound@gmail.com

Sacramento Homeless blog

sacramentohomeless.blogspot.com