The Least You Should Know to Be Not a “Protestant Donkey”
By Julio
Severo
“O
Mínimo Que Você Precisa Saber Para Não Ser Um Idiota” (The Least You Should
Know to Be Not an Idiot) is a book written by Brazilian immigrant Olavo de
Carvalho, published by the Brazilian publisher Record in 2013. “Protestant
donkey” is a term he uses against Protestants.
Carvalho
seems to ignore that communists lie and they are not intelligent, even when
they seem to be.
If Carvalho read the classical book
“The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” written by German
economist Max Weber and published in English in 1930, he did not understand
anything or he understood only what pleased him. Or he is so opposed to
Protestantism that he prefers communists’ word as Gramsci’s. Does he prefer to
put his faith in each word of Gramsci and doubt Weber and everyone recognizing
that capitalism greatly prospered only under Protestant values?
The
only hindrance Gramsci saw for the Marxist advance was the Catholic Church,
because he lived in Italy, where Catholic Church and State had a promiscuous
relationship.
There
was no other influent church in Italy. Only the Catholic Church. From this
limited experience Gramsci deduced that Catholicism is the only influence.
It
was not only communists who faced hindrances to advance. Evangelicals did too. Nothing
opposing the Catholic Church’s interests could advance in Italy. The Catholic
Church gave no freedom to anyone.
The
reach of Gramsci’s vision then was not different from the vision reach of a
poor farmer in the Brazilian countryside in 1944 who would see local threats as
more important than Nazism in the broad World War 2. The farmer’s vision only
reached his immediate reality, disregarding, by ignorance and a lack of access
to media, the larger far-away international reality.
If
Gramsci lived in the U.S., his “rustic” vision would be enlarged and prevailed
by the reality that the U.S., with its overwhelming Protestant majority and
Protestant values, was by far the greatest hindrance to communism.
Yet,
in Gramsci’s limited Italian universe, there was only the Catholic Church’s
political power. He completely ignored the U.S. Protestantism’s political
power, including that the most prominent opponent of Marxist esoteric Margaret
Sanger was a Protestant called Anthony Comstock, the first pro-life
activist in the modern history.
Sanger,
from Catholic Irish extraction, founded IPPF, the largest abortion,
contraception and sex education organization in the world.
So to
believe in Gramsci’s naïve and rustic vision is to be too much idiot.
Carvalho
has no excuse to have such naïve and rustic vision. He lives as a self-exiled
immigrant in the U.S., the largest Protestant nation in the world, because he
recognizes in this nation the characteristic of resistance to Marxism that
ultra-Catholic Brazil or Gramsci’s Italy never demonstrated.
Yet, Carvalho’s book seeks to make
a fool of the readers when it dissociates U.S. Protestant values from
capitalism. It is no coincidence that the largest Protestant nation in the
world is also the most capitalist nation in the world. By far, the worst kind
of anti-Americanism is the one denying that the fundamental values of the U.S.
society are Protestant values.
Carvalho’s
book is replete with omissions, which can be called censorship, about the role
of the U.S. Protestantism in capitalism. The only closest reference between
capitalism and Protestantism in his book was entirely negative, where he said:
“Therefore, the
financial (and even, by contamination, the industrial) capital, if it had some
Christian element, continued to suffer a false guilty conscience. It could find
relief from it only by adhering to the cunning Protestant ideology of ‘ascetism
from the world.’”
In
contrast, there are abundant positive mentions of the Catholic Church. The less
idiotic reader will notice the inconsistency in his intents when he presents
the Catholic Church as the enemy of capitalism in the U.S. and England. He
said:
“The [Catholic]
Church seeks even today to see a solution against the supposed evils of
capitalism, which where it came to existence — England and the United States —,
never harmed it and only helped it, including in the dark times of persecution
and martyrdom it suffered from communist and other nationalizing progressives,
as the revolutionaries in Mexico who began in the American continent an open
season against priests.”
By
saying “even today,” he recognized the
persistent opposition, in the past and today, from the Catholic Church to the
U.S. capitalism — a stance that clearly fits in anti-Americanism. So his
attitude of censoring the essentially Protestant capitalism and clinging to
Gramsci’s naïve and rustic vision was an essentially idiotic and anti-American
attitude.
To deny the Protestant soul in the
U.S. capitalism is akin to denying the Jewish soul of Israel’s land. This
anti-American denial is abundant in “O Mínimo Que Você Precisa Saber Para Não
Ser Um Idiota” (The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot).
To
those who praise the U.S. capitalism, the omission, or censorship, of its
Protestant soul is dishonest.
As
Max Weber showed in his classical book, capitalism, defined as mercantile
operations, always existed in several forms in Babylon, ancient Egypt, China, India
and medieval Catholic Europe. But he highlighted that only in the West, where
there was the Protestant ethic, especially Netherlands, England and the United
States, capitalism prospered freely their societies.
Not
satisfied in dissociating the U.S. capitalism from Protestantism, in his
article “Herança de confusões” (Legacy of Confusions), Carvalho said,
“One of the
favorite myths of the American culture is that the Protestant Reformation was
one of the main sources of religious freedom, individual rights and protections
against abuses from a central government. Add to it the Weberian (or
semi-Weberian) false belief that the ‘Protestant ethic’ created capitalism, and
the only possible conclusion is that today’s citizen is indebted to Luther and
Calvin, after all, for virtually all the legal, political and economic benefits
of living in a modern democracy. But all of this is propaganda, not History.”
Carvalho’s
accusation of Protestantism as a source of religious freedom in America being a
“myth” is as preposterous as his
vice of calling the Inquisition a “myth.” He has no degree in
history and related matters.
There
are several American authors who have specific books dispelling such
accusation, including:
* William J. Federer, America’s God
and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations (Fame Publishing, Inc., 1996).
* Michael Farris, History of
Religious Liberty: From Tyndale to Madison (Master Books, 2015).
* Jerry Newcombe, The Book That
Made America: How the Bible Formed Our Nation (Nordskog Publishing, Inc.,
2009).
Newcombe’s
book shows how the Bible, which had absolute primacy in the Protestant
Reformation and in the early America, which was 98 percent Protestant, molded
everything in America, including religious freedom.
So Carvalho’s accusation makes
sense only, in the realm of ideological fantasy, if he used Marxist and
Illuminist sources to understand the American reality.
Far away from recognizing
capitalism with Protestantism and religious freedom, Carvalho leads his readers
to misinterpret the reality by being taught that Protestantism brought greater
dictatorship than the dictatorship of the Catholic Church in the medieval
Europe.
Even
though I am not a Calvinist, I do not understand Carvalho’s insistent rage
against Calvinism, always portraying in Portuguese Protestantism, especially
Calvinism, as a dictatorship never seen before. A sample, as shown in his
article “Herança
de confusões”:
“Even in the most praiseworthy democracies,
the State is today the mediator and sovereign judge of all human actions and
affairs, even the most private and intimate, with a controlling rage and an
invasive dominance unknown in all previous societies — with one exception, the
dictatorship of John Calvin in Geneva, which is by no means a coincidence.”
In the Soviet Union, no one could
choose to be a non-communist. In the medieval Europe, no one could choose to be
a non-Catholic. How does Carvalho think that Protestantism was able to make
Europe worse than it was under Catholic dominance? While in the Soviet Union the
people was not banned from reading Marx’s and Lenin’s communist books, in the
Catholic Europe the people was banned from reading the Bible and using it to
guide their lives. How was Protestantism worse if it ended the ban?
Next, Carvalho said that the
fearsome Marxist dangers threatening Catholics and Protestants today only came
to exist because of Luther’s and Calvin’s “kind assistance,” as if before
Luther and Calvin Europe, under the popes, had sheer democracy with no
dictatorship, persecution and Inquisition. Essentially, he blamed Luther and
Calvin for all modern evils, including Marxism. He said,
“By a quite understandable irony, Protestant
churches suffer the consequences of this as much as or more than the Catholic
Church, and today both have to join a common front to face fearsome dangers
that would never have come to exist without the help of Luther and Calvin.”
In a sense, he is right. In an
absolute Catholic dictatorship with the Inquisition (such was the medieval
Europe), no Marxist ideology would apparently have freedom to expand, because
the Catholic dictatorship would not want no competition. There would be no
freedom also to people wanting to read the Bible in their own languages!
But, as Carvalho implies, if
Catholicism is so hostile to fearsome Marxist dangers, why is the most Catholic
region in the world — Latin America — so prone to Marxism? If Carvalho’s theory
were correct, the biggest propagandist of Liberation Theology in the world would
be the Protestant United States, not the Catholic Brazil. Why did Carvalho left
Latin America and Brazil to live as an immigrant in the largest Protestant
nation in the world?
This is not his only blatant
inconsistency or hypocrisy.
Carvalho
minimizes the horrors of the Inquisition, including by saying the absurdity
that it was a advocate of human rights, and he amplifies the failings and sins
of Luther and Calvin, giving them a cosmic dimension as if they were the authors
of dictatorships similar to the Soviet Union.
Traditionally,
the Catholic Church walks freely with socialism and Protestant churches,
especially Pentecostal and charismatic churches, walk freely with capitalism.
A clear example of that reality is
that in the 1960s and 1970s, in the conflict between capitalism and socialism
in (overwhelmingly Catholic) Latin America, the KGB, the largest communist spy
service in the world, supported sectors in the Catholic Church, while the CIA,
the largest capitalist spy service in the world, supported Pentecostal and
charismatic sectors of the evangelical churches.
Even today, evangelical churches
offer the best resistance to Marxism. The far-left-wing Brazilian activist
Marilena Chaui recognized
that the top threat to Marxism in Brazil is the Prosperity Gospel, which was born
in U.S. Pentecostal churches.
Even
Gramsci would be able to see this reality, if he lived in Brazil or the U.S.
But Italy, where he lived, was actually a too small universe, fatally limiting
his vision.
The basic reality in the Americas
is: where Protestantism thrived, capitalism prospered. Where Catholicism
thrived, Liberation Theology, which is a radical enemy of the Prosperity
Gospel, thrived. Is it a wonder that the largest Protestant nation in the
Americas is also the most capitalist nation in the world? Is it a wonder that
the largest Catholic nation in the Americas is also the nation most adherent of
Liberation Theology in the world? Is it a wonder that the Prosperity Gospel,
which is biblical capitalism, was born in the U.S.?
For
Carvalho, to recognize that the Prosperity Gospel of Pentecostal churches
influenced by the U.S. is the top threat to Marxism conflicts with his esoteric
vision, because the overwhelming Catholic Brazil is syncretic, so syncretic
that other esotericists, as Paulo Coelho, may at ease identify themselves as
“Catholics” or “mystic Catholics.”
But
both would never be able to identify themselves as Pentecostals or
charismatics, because sooner or later they would come across the ministry of
spiritual deliverance, which is common in this kind of churches.
Similarly,
the less idiotic reader will notice that the usage Carvalho does of Catholic
Church is as contradictory as his attempt to omit and dissociate the U.S.
Protestantism from capitalism.
In
the actual Catholicism, the pope is the head and supreme authority in the
Catholic Church. In Carvalho’s Catholicism, he, not the pope, is the actual
authority. In Carvalho’s movement, his authority is above the pope’s authority.
In “O Mínimo Que Você Precisa Saber
Para Não Ser Um Idiota” (The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot) there
are nine positive mentions of the Inquisition, exalting fanciful “benefits,”
belittling its horrors confirmed by historians and trampling on the innocent
blood of Jews and Protestants who were the main victims.
A less
attentive reader will never realize that the advocacy of the revisionism of the
Inquisition that Carvalho makes collides with the largest capitalist nation in
the world, the U.S., which has always championed propaganda against the
Inquisition. In the United States, Protestants and capitalist Jews joined
forces in systematic campaigns to show the world the horrors of the
Inquisition.
The U.S. that has always been a
barrier to communism was also an obstacle to the Inquisition. Is not opposition
to this U.S. leadership in awareness also a form of anti-Americanism?
In Carvalho’s case, it is a
contradictory anti-Americanism because he lives as a self-exiled immigrant in
the very country whose Protestant values he despises. He achieved the
unprecedented feat of exalting an American capitalism without Protestantism and
an Inquisition without horrors! That is, he amputated the Protestant ethic
where it always existed — in American capitalism — and he introduced an ethic
where it never existed — in the Inquisition.
The
less idiotic reader will easily identify in his revisionist effort the same
dishonest tactics used by the Jew-killing Holocaust revisionists.
However,
even supposing the reader does not notice that capitalism and Protestantism have
always gone very well together (the U.S. being the ultimate example), the
minimally intelligent reader will notice other phenomenal discrepancies if he
compares the book to other Carvalho’s writings.
“I am not
aligned to any right, but I have not changed my conviction that in a healthy
country there should be left and right, both entitled to an equal share of
radicalism.”
A
genuine conservative categorically rejects any coexistence with the left.
Carvalho does not. While a genuine evangelical conservative believes that in a
healthy country there is no coexistence with the left, Carvalho thinks exactly
the opposite.
Perhaps
this explains why, although Carvalho attacks the left, the left’s major
Brazilian media outlets, such as Folha de S. Paulo and O Globo, interview him
in a respectful way.
He has a smooth talk, eloquence and
seduction that is typical of astrologers. By the way, he can be called an
“astrologer,” not by the way of cursing, but because he founded the first
school of astrologers in Brazil. His involvement was not merely of an innocent
man who studied astrology and esotericism. He really took students, who paid
their classes, to study astrology and esotericism. He became a
master-astrologer consulted by major magazines and television channels. He was
a master in this and other occult capacities.
The
same seduction present in his old school and astrology course is present in his
current course of “philosophy.”
On
July 7, 2017, a Protestant said:
“I am a
Protestant Christian and a student of Olavo de Carvalho. What is Olavo de
Carvalho’s problem? Because he’s a Catholic? Being a Catholic, he does more for
humankind and defense of general Christianity than thousands of Protestants who
do not even know the difference of socialism and capitalism.”
If
this Protestant donkey (a term used by the astrologer who labels as “donkeys”
Protestants who do not pay his classes) thinks that anti-Marxist speech makes
the astrologer better than thousands of Protestants, so considering that Jesus
Christ never directly and nominally attacked Marxism, does this mean that the
astrologer is greater than the Savior?
With a stridently anti-Marxist
speech, Hitler achieved the status of “savior of Germany.” With a stridently
anti-Marxist speech, Carvalho is achieving the status of “Brazil’s savior”
among the adherents of his political esoteric cult in Brazil.
I do
not know what’s worse: An astrologer pretending to be conservative, one of his
adherents pretending to be Protestant, or an idiot pretending to be smart just
because he’s taking classes from an astrologer.
Hypnosis,
like astrology, is part of the occult. Only hypnosis explains the tremendous
blindness of Protestant donkeys.
By
Protestant donkey I mean Protestant adherents of Carvalho who blindly follow
him. All his Protestant adherents are Protestant donkeys. They are Protestant
very suggestible to the eloquence of the astrologer.
I once
asked an Protestant if he believed in everything the astrologer said about God
and the Bible. He replied no and the reason given was that he had enough
biblical knowledge to know that the astrologer was wrong, but he assured that
in politics and geopolitics the astrologer was quite right.
When
I asked him why he thought the “astrologer is right,” his motive was
uncultured: As he did not know enough and the astrologer read a lot, the
Protestant donkey concluded that the astrologer should know much more than he
does.
His
certainty was wholly based on his own lack of knowledge. Worse than the
ignorant who trusts in his own ignorance is the ignorant who trusts in the
ignorance or malice of others.
I
asked him then, “Is the astrologer honest in biblical matters and the
Inquisition?”
The
Protestant donkey replied, “No.”
I
concluded, “If he is not honest in some important matters, how can you trust
him to be honest in other matters?”
The
astrologer pays back the generous blindness of Protestants with public
statements that he will continue to curse them, as if both of them were in an
adulterous and immoral affair where it is common for the lover to be cursed and
to be hit by the man married to another woman. In the case, Carvalho, who is
already married to esotericism, said in 2016:
“Luther and
Calvin were hatred-filled souls. The former was guilty of genocide, the latter
the creator of a totalitarian government. Their followers are on the way of
Hell, and if it is necessary to revile them using all the curse words to take
them from this mess, I will do it pitilessly.”
However,
a Protestant donkey never minds to be treated and cursed as if he were a
communist. Evidently, Protestant donkeys like to be cursed by the astrologer as
if they were mere prostitutes. They lost all capacity to be shamed.
Some
were shocked by Congressman Marco Feliciano at the same time recommending
esoteric Paulo Coelho and Olavo de Carvalho. See: http://bit.ly/2sOM12h
Feliciano
was even mentioned by the BBC as the greatest politic supporting the
astrologer, because in the Brazilian Congress he praised Carvalho “as a true
prophet” — the same man who extols the murderous machine of the Inquisition
that killed men and women of God.
Usually Feliciano condemns torture
and genocide. In 2015, from the floor of the Brazilian Congress he
condemned the genocide of Armenian Christians by Turkish Muslims,
not allowing himself to be deceived by the campaign of Islamic revisionism
against the massacre of Christians. However, he was unable to escape the
astrologer’s revisionism against Jews and Protestants.
In a bewildering contrast, instead
of using the floor of the Congress to condemn the Inquisition (which has
already been
condemned even by the legislators of the Brazilian State of Pernambuco, which
today has an official date in memory of the victims of the Inquisition),
Feliciano has shamelessly exalted in the Brazilian Congress the greatest
Brazilian advocate of the revisionism of the Inquisition.
How
did not Feliciano, who is an Assemblies of God minister, become an idiot of the
revisionism of Muslims, but became an idiot of the revisionism of a Brazilian
astrologer? Seduction? Hypnosis?
What
is the difference of Feliciano crying out against the revisionism of Muslims,
but silencing before the revisionism of the astrologer? If he could accept one,
why not the other? What accounts for this “prejudice” and “discrimination”?
And
it is not only Feliciano who was seduced by the smooth talk and eloquence of
the astrologer. There are even traditional Protestant ministers. Last year, I
reported on a traditional pastor and his wife who converted to syncretic
Catholicism after taking classes from the astrologer. See: http://bit.ly/1Q1cmTA
Last
week, I reported on Fábio Blanco, a writer who eventually left his Baptist
church after taking classes from the astrologer. Now he is defending
esotericism. See: http://bit.ly/2ukNyhP
All
of them are unable to see the astrologer’s inconsistencies. They do not see
even his most blatant and lying offenses against their former faith, in one of
which he said recently:
“Protestantism
was born from hatred and blood thirst. Its Christian inspiration is ZERO.”
Protestant
donkeys, or idiots, have their minds so cauterized that they are unable to feel
offended by the astrologer’s offenses. But as is typical among them, if you
point out that the astrologer’s statements are offensive, the Protestant donkey
or idiot is offended — with you!
Who
seems to have made the most accurate comment was the Brazilian singer Lobão,
who said: “Offense is the jerk’s
expediency.” If he is right, the astrologer is one of the biggest jerks in
Brazil. He spares no offense to anyone.
If
you, even being a physician, say that cigarette is harmful, the astrologer
throws out a bucket of offenses upon you.
If
you, even being a Jew or a Protestant, say that the Inquisition tortured and killed
thousands of innocents,
the astrologer throws out a bucket of offenses upon you.
If
you, even if you are a Catholic, challenge his shallow, superficial and
syncretic Catholicism, the astrologer throws out a bucket of offenses upon you.
On the subject of the Inquisition,
I know from experience. In the very year that he published his book “The Least
You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot” in 2013, Carvalho began to throw bucket
after bucket of offenses upon me. I say “he began” because he never stopped. To
this day he continues to throw offenses against me — exclusively because I,
like every good American evangelical and every Jew, cannot and will never
accept the revisionism of the Inquisition, just as I will never accept the
Holocaust’s revisionism or the Islamic revisionism of the Genocide of Armenian
Christians.
I am
not stupid, much less a Protestant donkey, to accept this revisionism and his
dishonest effort, widely documented in his book, to divorce American
Protestantism from capitalism. I will never accept this kind of idiotic and
anti-evangelical anti-Americanism.
The
title “The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot” is too pretentious,
because instead of ridding readers of idiocy, it leads them, under hypnosis or
seduction, to complex idiocies, especially Protestant readers who, instead of
the genuine American Protestant capitalist conservatism, end up giving their
attention and soul to an esoteric conservatism that values the Inquisition and
a false American capitalism mutilated from its essential and original
Protestant values.
Carvalho
became a powerful philosophical-esoteric illusionist, manipulating and twisting
seductively the reality of capitalism, Inquisition, Protestantism,
homosexuality, and other important matters.
His
illusionism should be totally unnecessary and rejected among Protestants.
Decades before Carvalho, the anti-Marxist conscience of the
Brazilian Protestants had already been formed with American help, and nothing the astrologer did
added anything to it.
His illusionism is the fruit of his
history. Carvalho’s alleged “anticommunism” came from what he learned from the
Traditionalist School, which mixed anti-Marxist conservatism with New Age
ideas. The Traditionalist School was founded by the esoteric Muslim René
Guénon, and Carvalho was one of the chief introducers of this sorcerer and his
New Age ideas in Brazil. In addition, he translated one of Guénon’s books into
Portuguese.
The
film itself, “The Garden of Afflictions,” a cult of the astrologer’s
personality, is a New Age work with various esoteric features, which can be
checked here: “The Garden of Afflictions,” a New Age
Movie.
With
such experience and history, Carvalho became the biggest and perhaps
the first neocon in Brazil.
Since
when do Protestants need esoteric inspiration and advice from a neocon to fight
against Marxism? Before Carvalho, they already had great inspiration from
American evangelical leaders. And their fight is very well recorded in the
History of Brazil.
If
what Lobão said (“Offense is the jerk’s expediency.”) is correct, then Carvalho
is, with former Brazilian president Lula and his socialist adherents who love
to offend, one of the biggest jerks in Brazil.
Only
an equally stupid, or idiot reader, does not see it.
The
typical cynical propaganda of Carvalho’s adherents is to claim that the
astrologer’s offenses are misinterpreted comments and that to understand the
astrologer’s esoteric mind, the victim must immerse fully into Carvalho’s cult,
buying his books and taking his classes. For the astrologer’s pockets, this is
excellent. But in the end, the victim ends up, in addition to his emptied
pockets, with his mind emptied, becoming idiotized by a false and mutilated
reality and conspiracy theories.
Only
an imbecile, or idiot reader, and above all bewitched, does not see the
eloquent mutilations and counterfeits of American capitalism and the
Inquisition in “The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot.”
Jesus
said that the truth sets you free.
The Bible, not the book of an
astrologer, is “The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot.”
Jesus’s words, not the words of an
astrologer, are “The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot.”
Now,
knowing this, you’re only going to be a jerk, idiot, Protestant donkey, and bewitched
if you want.
Portuguese
version of this article: O
mínimo que você precisa saber para não ser um “evanjegue”
Source: Last Days Watchman
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