Perloff: The American Revolution Part II: Who Wrote the Declaration of Independence? | Was the Revolution a “Christian” War?

A highly abbreviated version of this article appears on Dr. Henry Makow’s website. (The use of the word “Satanist” in the title of the condensed version was the editor’s choice.)

I consider it prudent to begin this post by duplicating the first paragraphs of the foreword to Part I:

FOREWORD: I do not expect this two-part article to be very popular among American patriots, many of whom are my dear friends. They are among the core of America’s best citizens; men and women who fight to protect constitutional liberties from the police state, and to preserve U.S. national sovereignty from the tyranny of world government.

The following article raises questions about the American Revolution, which many patriots regard as the foundation of their beliefs. It can be dangerous to shake a good man’s foundation – even if the foundation is flawed – because it might cause him to question his worldview, and weaken his resolve. However, no historical event should be held so sacred as to be immune to examination. Our country is in too much trouble to make truth secondary.

“Everyone knows” Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but not “everyone knew” it in early America. Jefferson was on the drafting committee at the Second Continental Congress. However, he made no claim to authorship until 1821, when he was an old man, and even then did so ambiguously.

For a long time, it has been understood outside the box of orthodox historiography that the Declaration’s real author was Thomas Paine. The case was made, for example, in Junius Unmasked: Or, Thomas Paine, the Author of the Letters of Junius, and the Declaration of Independence, by Joel Moody (1872); in this article published by Walton Williams in 1906; and in Thomas Paine: Author of the Declaration of Independence by Joseph Lewis (1947).

Paine (1737-1809) was a British author of anonymous pamphlets. In England he met Freemasonic Grand Master-at-large Benjamin Franklin (who served not only as Grand Master of Pennsylvania, but Grand Master of the Nine Sisters Lodge in Paris, as well as attending Britain’s satanic Hellfire Club). When Paine traveled to America, Franklin gave him a letter of introduction. He arrived on November 30, 1774, greeted by Franklin’s physician. This was less than five months before the orchestrated Battle of Lexington, flashpoint of the Revolutionary War.

Paine wasted little time fulfilling a mission is his new-found land. In 1775 he wrote the lengthy pamphlet Common Sense, which called for America’s independence from Britain. Widely distributed, it became the single most influential document inspiring the revolution. Inscribed at Paine’s gravesite is John Adams’s famous rhyme: “Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.”

The Declaration of Independence fulfilled the objective of Common Sense. Paine was residing in Philadelphia when the Second Continental Congress met there. As Franklin’s choice to write Common Sense (which he authored anonymously), would he not also be the logical choice to anonymously write the Declaration? As we will soon elaborate, there were several reasons why this could never be publicly disclosed.

The Case for Paine

First, though, let’s review some of the evidence that Paine authored the Declaration. A blog post can only examine a sampling; for thorough analysis, I recommend consulting the sources named above.

There is, of course, a copy of the Declaration in Jefferson’s handwriting. However, there is also one in John Adams’s handwriting. These are evidently copies of Paine’s original. Both content and style are markedly like Paine, not Jefferson, who had never written any paper calling for American independence.

• The original, unedited version contained an anti-slavery clause:

He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce . . . .

It is commonly said that Jefferson wrote this passionate clause, and slave owners at the Congress demanded its deletion. However, this makes no sense. Jefferson was himself a slave owner; he owned over 600 during his lifetime. And in his writings up to the time of the Declaration, he had never composed even a mild denunciation of slavery.

Paine, on the other hand, had published a 1775 essay called African Slavery in America, writing, e.g.:

That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising. . . .

Our Traders in MEN (an unnatural commodity!) must know the wickedness of the SLAVE-TRADE, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their own hearts: and such as shun and stiffle all these, wilfully sacrifice Conscience, and the character of integrity to that golden idol. . . .¹

Note the capitalization of “MEN” in both Paine’s tract and the Declaration’s anti-slavery clause!

• The Declaration exhibited undisguised disdain for King George III:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Such scorn was characteristic of Paine, who called him “the Royal Brute of Great Britain” in Common Sense, which also contained remarks such as these:

I rejected the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England forever, and disdain the wretch, that with the pretended title of FATHER OF HIS people can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, and composedly sleep with their blood upon his soul.²

the naked and untutored Indian, is less savage than the King of Britain.³

Compare that to Jefferson’s tract A Summary View of the Rights of British America, in which he consistently referred to King George by the respectful title “his Majesty.” Extract:

to propose to the said Congress that an humble and dutiful address be presented to his Majesty, begging leave to lay before him, as Chief Magistrate of the British empire, the united complaints of his Majesty’s subjects in America . . . . which would persuade his Majesty that we are asking favors, and not rights, shall obtain from his Majesty a respectful acceptance; and this his Majesty will think we have reason to expect, when he reflects that he is no more than the chief officer of the people. . . .⁴ [Italics added]

• The Declaration, including the original draft, uses the word “hath”:

all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Why is this significant? Because in all his individual writings, Jefferson never once used the archaic word “hath,” preferring “has.” Paine, however, used it frequently—in Common Sense, for example, he used “hath” 87 times.

• The Declaration’s original draft condemned the use of “Scotch and foreign mercenaries.” In the final version, the words “Scotch and” were stricken out by the Congress. Why would Jefferson have denounced the Scotch? He traced his own ancestry partly to Scotland, had Scottish teachers during his education, and was affectionate toward Scotsmen. But Paine’s s writings in England had expressed bitter disdain for them.⁵

Many other examples can be found in the above-cited works: frequent use of capitals in the Declaration—habitual for Paine, but not Jefferson; the correlation of parts of the Declaration with passages in Common Sense; etc.

The Silence Explained

Much of the American republic’s history is surprisingly shrouded in secrecy. All the men who took part in the Boston Tea Party swore a 50-year oath of silence.⁶ This is why no participant published a description of it until George Hewes’s memoir in 1834.

In my post The Secrets Buried at Lexington Green, we explored the fact that Americans firing shots at Lexington was also kept publicly secret until 50 years after the event.

Was there also, then, a 50-year oath of silence regarding the Declaration? Thomas Jefferson dropped no hint of authorship for 45 years. Finally, in 1821 he recalled:

The committee were J. Adams, Dr. Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston & myself. Committees were also appointed at the same time to prepare a plan of confederation for the colonies, and to state the terms proper to be proposed for foreign alliance. The committee for drawing the declaration of Independence desired me to do it. It was accordingly done, and being approved by them, I reported it to the house on Friday the 28th of June when it was read and ordered to lie on the table.⁷

“It was accordingly done” is not a very emphatic claim to authorship. If there was a 50-year oath of silence associated with the Declaration, it might be noteworthy that that both Jefferson and John Adams died on the exact day it would have expired: July 4, 1826. I have always romanticized that coincidence, and perhaps it should just stay romanticized. In any event, Jefferson said nothing about writing the Declaration until after Paine’s death.

But why couldn’t Paine be acknowledged as the Declaration’s author? Three reasons stand out:

• The Declaration was supposed to be written by elected delegates, something Paine was not.
• Since Paine hadn’t lived in the colonies before November 30, 1774, it was debatable if he could even be described as an “American.” Although his allegiance to the revolutionary cause might certainly have merited that characterization, most Americans would have been surprised to learn their Declaration was penned by someone who had resided so briefly on their continent. (Paine later returned to Europe, living there from 1787 until 1802.)
• But the most important reason Paine couldn’t be acknowledged was that he later wrote The Age of Reason, in which he bitterly denounced Christianity.

Extracts:

It is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend.⁸

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity.⁹

I have shown in all the foregoing parts of this work, that the Bible and Testament are impositions and forgeries.¹⁰

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church.¹¹

Since America was predominantly Christian, it couldn’t be admitted that someone of such views had penned the nation’s birth certificate. It would have caused what we now call “cognitive dissonance.”

The “Christian” Revolution

I once heard a pastor preach a sermon on the Fourth of July. He quoted the beginning of the Declaration, laying emphasis on certain words in an effort to authenticate that America’s Founding Fathers were Christians:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . .

As the phrases “Nature’s God” and “Creator” were quoted, congregation members were oohing and aahing in a sort of mental swoon. But I knew the writer was Paine, a self-proclaimed enemy of Christianity. Here are Paine quotes that demonstrate what he really meant by “Nature’s God” and “Creator”:

When, therefore, we look through nature up to nature’s God, we are in the right road of happiness, but when we trust to books as the Word of God, and confide in them as revealed religion, we are afloat on the ocean of uncertainty, and shatter into contending factions.¹²

But when I see throughout the greatest part of this book [the Bible] scarcely anything but a history of the grossest vices, and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales, I cannot dishonour my Creator by calling it by his name.¹³

As the pastor continued his “patriot” sermon, I heard such a litany of misrepresentations about America that rage built incrementally within me, until I finally walked out the door. I knew the pastor meant well, but Jesus Christ said he came to tell us the truth, and my tolerance for falsehood has a low breaking point.

Unfortunately, what this pastor was saying is very common in American evangelical churches, who subscribe to what might be called the “David Barton” view of the Founding Fathers. (Barton has made a career out of portraying them as Christians.)

“Free Pass” Theology

Even if Thomas Jefferson had written the Declaration of Independence, he was certainly not a Christian in the sense evangelicals mean. Jefferson created what he called the “Jefferson Bible.” This might sound “religious” at first glance, but what Jefferson did was to take the New Testament, and using a razor, cut out virtually all references to miracles, the supernatural, the Resurrection, and the divinity of Christ.

Now if I did that in an evangelical church, I would be quickly shown the exit, called a blasphemer, and the following verse would be quoted to me:

And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. (Revelation 22:19)

Jefferson, however, is given a “free pass” on this. This is what I call “free pass theology”: one standard for modern Christians, another for the Founding Fathers.

Let’s take taxation, which was the chief dispute between the American colonists and Britain. When pressed by the Pharisees in their attempt to entrap Him, Jesus was clear enough on taxation: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” More than once, I’ve heard pastors preach on this principle, saying something like, “I certainly hope you’re all paying your taxes, and not taking deductions you don’t deserve!” casting their winnowing eyes about the congregation for any guilty looks.

Yet if you ask these very same pastors if the Founding Fathers had to pay taxes, most will typically give them a “free pass,” saying something such as, “Well, no, because that was taxation without representation.” But Jesus made no such distinction. He didn’t say, “You don’t have to pay because you don’t have representation in the Roman senate.”

Likewise, many modern clergymen preach obedience to government, quoting Romans 13:1-2:

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

Yet if you ask these pastors if this principle applied to the Founding Fathers, you will almost always hear a resounding “No!” I asked one pastor why this was so, given that payment of taxes is not unbiblical. He replied: “The colonists had other grievances.”

This requires examining just what those grievances were, and Thomas Paine’s role in enumerating them.

The Tax Issue

Many Americans, myself included, were taught to believe that British taxes had “enslaved” the colonists. Rarely was it mentioned why those taxes were laid in the first place. During the French and Indian War (1754-63), colonists and British troops had fought on the same side. Britain’s national debt had nearly doubled by the long war’s end, and Parliament felt the burden of paying it off should not be borne by Britain’s taxpayers alone, but by the colonists as well, especially since they were the main beneficiaries of the war’s victorious outcome.

The result was the Sugar Act of 1764, which placed a tax on molasses of three pennies per gallon. This was vigorously protested in the colonies, and Parliament repealed it. In 1765 it tried the Stamp Act (which would have placed a tax stamp on contracts, diplomas, and other documents). Although this revenue measure had succeeded in Britain, it was protested in the colonies so violently that Britain never collected one penny from it, and it was repealed also.

In 1766, a frustrated Parliament, still seeking some practical means of raising revenues from the colonies, summoned Benjamin Franklin, the leading representative of American interests in Britain, and asked him what sort of revenue measure Americans would accept. Franklin informed them: “I never heard an objection to the right of laying duties to regulate commerce . . . I know that whenever the subject has occurred in conversation where I have been present, it has appeared to be the opinion of every one that we could not be taxed by a Parliament wherein we were not represented. But the payment of duties laid by an act of Parliament as regulations of commerce was never disputed.”¹⁴

With such assurances from Franklin, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, assigning duties on various British goods sold in America. These, however, were also violently protested and repealed. Although it would come as a shock to many modern Americans, by 1773 there remained no British taxes on America whatsoever, with one exception: a nominal customs duty on tea of three cents per pound. Furthermore, the tea, which was surplus tea of the East India Company, was offered to colonists at half the price Englishmen paid for it. Nevertheless, Sam Adams’s Sons of Liberty were unwilling to tolerate this insult to their sacred rights. After getting suitably liquored up, they destroyed 340 chests of tea in the Boston Tea Party. The vandalism sparked outrage in Parliament, which felt it had tolerated just about enough from the colony of Massachusetts. This led to passage of the Coercive Acts, measures which included closing the port of Boston until the damage should be paid for.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, Sam Adams, who also orchestrated the Boston Massacre and Battle of Lexington, was simply seeking to goad Britain into such retaliation, in order to create a pretext for war and revolution.

Ask one of today’s “patriot pastors” if he would have participated in the Boston Tea Party, and he will assure you: “OF COURSE!” Yet these same pastors almost never dispute the taxes laid by today’s American government: federal income tax, state income tax, social security tax, Medicare tax, real estate tax, sales tax, excise tax, utilities tax, etc. Even though these taxes easily consume more than a hundredfold of one’s income compared to King George’s three-penny duty on a pound of tea, the pastors waggle their fingers at their congregations, reminding them to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

Again, if cornered about this double standard, the Bartonized pastor will tell you the colonists were exempt from taxation because they “didn’t have representation.” So let’s address this point, even though I also covered it in The Secrets Buried at Lexington Green.

The Representation Issue

First, the colonists did have degrees of representation—they had their own legislatures, which could present grievances to the royal governors. The colonies also had agents in England to lobby Parliament. Benjamin Franklin was the most famous.

So the dispute boiled down to the colonies not having voting representatives in Parliament. But how practical would that be? Let’s say the colonial assemblies selected representatives to serve in Parliament. In those days of sailing ships, a transatlantic trip could easily take two months or more. Now suppose, after arriving in Parliament, the American representatives were confronted with a tax proposal. If they wished to sound out their constituencies, they would have to return to America by ship (or send a messenger or letter), consuming another two months—of course, no phones or email back then. The colonial legislatures would then have to reconvene to consider the proposal. Then the representative would have to sail back to Britain—another two months. With representatives arriving from different colonies at different times, one begins to sense what an impractical way to conduct Parliamentary business this would have been.

Furthermore, Britain then being far more populous than the colonies, America would presumably have been outvoted on tax measures anyway—making the representation issue rather moot in its practical outcome.

Paine’s List of Grievances

The Declaration of Independence states that “Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” As a three-cent customs duty on a pound of tea clearly was a “light and transient cause,” it was necessary for Paine to erect a list of 27 grievances, of which “taxation without representation” was but one. Since Paine had lived in America only briefly, and since many of the grievances were specific to Massachusetts, it appears likely that Paine spent time closeted with Boston’s Sam Adams, “Father of the Revolution,” who was also in Philadelphia when the Second Congress met. While we can’t review every grievance in the Declaration, let’s examine a few. The first one is:

He [the king] has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

If you were in court, and the judge accused you of “breaking the law,” wouldn’t you want to know which law, and when? Paine’s complaint names no laws that King George refused his assent to, because there were none. The only significant colonial laws overridden by Parliament during George III’s reign were ones pertaining to the Americans printing their own money. This was probably a mistake by Parliament, but was not, in any event, attributable to the king.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

This refers strictly to Massachusetts. In 1768, after Boston had become a bedlam of violence due to Sam Adams’s waterfront mobs, Britain sent troops to restore order to the city. Because the Massachusetts House of Representatives protested the troops’ presence, the royal governor had it temporarily reconvene across the river in Cambridge at Harvard University, where the House had often met before. This was just four miles from Boston, and Harvard was quite comfortable by the standards of the day. This was a fleeting, trivial matter, of no interest to the king and long forgotten by 1776 (except, apparently, by Sam Adams).

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners

This refers to the fact that when foreigners immigrated to the colonies, there was a seven-year waiting period before they could become naturalized citizens. This is not unlike our current American laws, which require foreigners to live in the United States for five years before they can apply for citizenship. This was a neutral matter so far as King George III was concerned.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

In some colonies, judges were appointed by England, but this practice long pre-dated King George III, and payment of their salaries by the crown had ordinarily been regarded as a favor by the colonies. The judges’ salaries were fixed and in no way contingent on servility toward the king.

[HERE’S EVERYONE’S FAVORITE TO QUOTE] He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

Patriotic Americans like to quote this because our own government has become a vastly overgrown bureaucracy. However, only one office was ever established in America under George III, not “multitudes”: that was the Customs office—which, as we have seen, was only created because the colonies refused taxation, and Ben Franklin told Parliament that Americans would respect customs duties. As to “swarms” of officers, it should be noted that any government agency (e.g., the Post Office) requires some employees. How many did the Customs office have? There were five customs commissioners, and perhaps some forty officers and clerks under them. All told, with 13 colonies, this would have worked out to less than five employees per colony, making the only “swarms” Paine’s own words of hyperbole.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

The colonies had their own militias which were answerable to them. However, the British army acted on the authority of the king and Parliament, which was entirely appropriate—just as the United States Army today is answerable to the President and Congress, not (for example) the local legislatures of territories like Puerto Rico.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

This grievance is predicated on the false claim in the previous one: that the British army was somehow under the colonial legislatures’ authority. I wish to mention that such specious argumentation did not speak well for the Declaration’s author.

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.

Although Britain was empowered to do this for treason, in point of fact no American colonists of that era were brought to England to stand trial.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

Although petitions were sent regarding the 1774 Coercive Acts (provoked by the Boston Tea Party), petitions were certainly not received by King George for “every stage” of Paine’s enumerated complaints.

If you would like to see a refutation of the entire grievance list, I encourage you to read Strictures upon the Declaration of Independence (1776) by Thomas Hutchinson, the Massachusetts-born former governor of that colony. When the Declaration was received in England, people were dumbfounded by it, having no clue as to what most of the grievances referred to.

The Revolution’s Meaning

The Revolution was clearly not based on Paine’s list of grievances. As Hutchinson noted:

But there were men in each of the principal Colonies, who had independence in view, before any of those Taxes were laid, or proposed . . . . A concession has only produced a further demand, and I verily believe if every thing had been granted short of absolute Independence, they would not have been contented; for this [was] the object from the beginning.¹⁵

With the Declaration’s 240th anniversary upon us, I believe the time has come to reevaluate America’s founding. An excellent starting place for many people would be Chris Pinto’s series of documentaries Secret Mysteries of America’s Beginnings, which may be bought on Amazon or viewed on YouTube. A good Pinto film to begin with is The Hidden Faith of the Founding Fathers. While I don’t agree with his views 100 percent, that documentary was a huge wake-up call for me. If you have not already read it, I also recommend my post The Secrets Buried at Lexington Green, the only vetting of the 1775 Battle of Lexington, Massachusetts (the town I grew up in) as a false flag. I also discussed this event on The Corbett Report:

It is increasingly clear that, while many of the first Europeans to settle America were upright Christians, the discovery of the continent was regarded in Europe’s anti-Christian netherworld as what Francis Bacon called “the New Atlantis”: America was to become the re-birthing of the world that God had wiped out with the Biblical Flood. It was to be the engine of the Masonic Novus ordo seclorum, “the new order of the ages.”

While the European governments, such as Spain, France and England were needed to settle the Western Hemisphere through colonization, they were then to be kicked out one by one. The British helped the colonists expel the French during the French and Indian War (1754-63). But when the war ended, the British themselves were immediately converted from “good guys” to “bad guys” and targeted for expulsion. This kind of label-flipping is SOP for the New World Order; witness Saddam Hussein being flipped from “ally” to “enemy”; likewise the Russians went from “good” (World War II) to “bad” (Cold War) to “good” (Gorbachev era) to “bad” (Putin era).

In their new independent nation, Americans were conceded many rights, which gave other countries the illusion that if they followed through with their own revolutions, the outcome would be another America. But as the French learned from the Reign of Terror, and the Russians learned from Bolshevism, and the Chinese learned from Mao Tse-tung’s slaughters, the American Revolution was like the first hand dealt to a rube in a crooked poker game. Having received four aces from the bottom of the deck, he thinks “This must be my lucky day” and fully commits his wallet to the game. But by night’s end, he has lost everything, for he is never dealt another winning hand.

Answers to Questions

As I’m well aware this article is unlikely to earn me a Medal of Honor nomination from the Daughters of the American Revolution, I need to clarify a few things some may accuse me of.

Am I an “Anglophile” who wants America returned to British rule?

No. I have never visited the UK, and no British blood flows in my veins. I have no motive except seeking truth. Other than enjoying old comedies with Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness, I am not an Anglophile, and I’m not seeking to bring America back under British dominion. In point of fact, an Anglo-American political alliance, nurtured by banks and multinationals, has been in effect for over a century, and anyone familiar with my other writings knows how bitterly I have criticized those interests.

Am I “against liberty”?

No. I regard the Bill of Rights as one of the greatest barriers to the New World Order. However, contrary to popular belief, most of those freedoms were not denied to 18th century colonists by King George. There was an ocean between us and England, and no “police state” existed in America. Freedom of speech? Colonists said whatever they liked. No redcoats sat in homes or taverns, telling people at gunpoint what they could or couldn’t say. Freedom of religion? We had many denominations, and King George forced no one to attend a particular church. The right to bear arms? Americans already enjoyed this right; it had been included in the English Bill of Rights of 1689. The right to trial by jury? This was also encoded in British law. It is true that customs-duty violators didn’t get jury trials. But this was for an obvious reason: the British knew that if every time an American broke custom laws, he went before a jury of 12 Americans, Britain would never collect a penny of revenue. So customs violators went before Admiralty courts, just as today, if you dispute a speeding ticket, you go to traffic court—you don’t get a jury trial. But for major offenses like murder or robbery, Americans had the right to trial by jury. In sum, as my friend Paul Noble has pointed out, Americans already had the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” before those words were penned.

Am I against a “just war”?

No. If some modern Attila the Hun brings an army of invaders to your borders, you had better prepare to defend your country. But like so many of America’s wars, the Revolution was fought under contrived justifications.

Do I oppose rebellion of any kind?

No. Although the Bible commends obedience to authority in Romans 13, it also lays out criteria for rejecting authority in Acts 5:29, where the Apostles disobeyed the Sanhedrin: “Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.” If government directs you to do something contrary to God’s own laws (e.g., commit murder), you can and must disobey.

Who Was the Christian?

Was, then, King George III demanding anything in violation of God’s commandments? Neither his three-penny customs duty on a pound of tea, nor the contrived/provoked grievances enumerated by Paine, fit the Biblical criteria for disobedience. So it is with hypocrisy that David Barton adherents call the revolution “Christian,” and even more ironic since the Declaration’s author proclaimed himself an avowed enemy of Christianity.

On that note, I’ll quote excerpts from the description of George III by American historian William H. Hallahan:

He was extraordinarily hardworking, diligent, religious, frugal and moral. . . . To those around him, including his ministers, he was a generous, kindly man with a gentle sense of teasing humor. . . The young monarch had grown up dreading the prospect of being king. Yet, accepting it as a sacred trust and duty, he vowed to reign with all his might and main even if it killed him. . . . As head of the Anglican church, and deeply religious, George dutifully said his prayers from the official Anglican Bible—but with a significant change in the text. In his personal copy of the Bible, he ordered every reference to “our most religious and gracious king” to be deleted and overprinted with “a most miserable sinner.” . . . The king believed in fresh air, exercise, and an almost vegetarian diet. . . . Between breakfast and dinner, he allowed himself one slice of bread, buttered, and a dish of black tea. . . . He set a proper example for his family and country at all times. He was a devoted husband and father, rising at 6 A.M. to spend two hours every day with his wife and fifteen children.¹⁶

Quite incongruous with Paine’s description of him as “wretch,” “brute,” and “hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England.” Are we to think the author of the Declaration of Independence, who called Christianity “repugnant to reason” and the Bible “impositions and forgeries,” was more Christian than George? You can read more about the king here and here.

The Meaning of Paine’s Career

I consider it a mistake to define Thomas Paine as an “American patriot.” The Battle of Lexington occurred less than five months after he first set foot on American soil. And two years before the U.S. Constitution went into effect, he had already returned to his native England where he wrote The Rights of Man. Having inspired Americans to throw off King George, he hoped to incite Britons to do the same. When his efforts failed, he was forced to flee to France.

While in France, Paine wrote the Age of Reason. He participated in the French Revolution, was made an honorary citizen and elected to the National Convention. Paine advocated the destruction of all monarchies, making no exception for King Louis XVI, even though the American Revolution would have very likely failed without the latter’s assistance. In 1781, Paine had traveled to France as part of an American fundraising mission. The king treated Paine lavishly, and sent him and the mission back to America with a gift of more than two million silver livres.

Due to the fickleness of the French Revolution, where you could be switched from pedestal to guillotine overnight, Paine fell temporarily out of favor and was even imprisoned. But clearly, he was not a patriotic nationalist; he was a global anti-monarchist whose aspirations took him to whatever country would embrace his ideology.

Paine in Light of the New World Order

As a tireless advocate of destroying kings, Paine is to this day acclaimed by many as a champion of human rights. I see him differently.

Monarchies were always a barrier to the Rothschild ambition of global domination and one-world government (except for those monarchies they could thoroughly control, such as Britain’s current one).

No matter how rich the Rothschilds grew, one thing they could not do was: enter a hereditary monarchy’s bloodline. Therefore, to gain power over nations, it was necessary for them to overthrow monarchies and replace them with other forms of government:

(1) republics, whose presidents and prime ministers would be Rothschild agents, even though “elected” through illusional democracy; for when one owns most of the press, getting 51 percent of the vote is easy.
(2) communist dictatorships, whose Rothschild rulers, such as Lenin and Trotsky, would reign without even bothering with the trappings of elections.

In either scenario, it was first necessary to eliminate the hereditary monarchies. This required revolutions: financed by the Rothschilds, organized in the secrecy of Freemasonic lodges, and agreed to by the people through literature stirring them to discontent, portraying their monarchs as tyrants in the most repulsive light (e.g., equating Marie Antoinette with “Let them eat cake”). Thomas Paine fit into this latter role with Common Sense and The Rights of Man. Revolution also necessitated attacks on religious faith, so that restraints on violence would dissolve, a likely root of Paine’s Age of Reason.

I’m sure many of my readers are familiar with John Robison’s 1798 classic Proofs of a Conspiracy. Here is the title page:

Note that the conspiracy was against governments and religion. To those who allege that Robison was merely the “conspiracy kook of his day,” I reply: his book has proven prophetic. The European governments then existing—the monarchies—are either gone now or rendered impotent. And Christian faith, which nearly personified Europe, has been shattered—huge cathedrals, that once held thousands of believers, draw only a handful on Sundays.

As the French Revolutionist Mirabeau declared:

We must overthrow all order, suppress all laws, annul all power, and leave the people in anarchy. The laws we establish will not perhaps be in force at once, but at any rate, having given back power to the people, they will resist for the sake of their liberty which they will believe they are preserving. We must caress their vanity, flatter their hopes, promise them happiness . . . . we must necessarily use them as a support, and render hateful to them everything we wish to destroy and sow illusions in their path; we must also buy all the mercenary pens [E.G., PAINE] which propagate our methods and which will instruct the people concerning their enemies whom we attack. The clergy, being the most powerful through public opinion, can only be destroyed by ridiculing religion, rendering its ministers odious, and only representing them as hypocritical monsters . . . . To exaggerate their riches, to make the sins of an individual appear to be common to all, to attribute to them all vices; calumny, murder, irreligion, sacrilege, all is permitted in times of revolution.¹⁷

As Robison explained more than two centuries ago, Continental Freemasons answered to the Illuminati, who were in turn controlled by Adam Weishaupt. And Weishaupt answered to the man with the money, Mayer Amschel Rothschild.

To comprehend the Rothschild mindset, we can learn much from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Contrary to the widely propagated myth, the Protocols are not a mere “forgery,” as I discuss in Chapter 18 of Truth Is a Lonely Warrior. Here are two excerpts from the Protocols I consider relevant to this post:

In the times when the peoples looked upon kings on their thrones as on a pure manifestation of the will of God, they submitted without a murmur to the despotic power of kings: but from the day when we insinuated into their minds the conception of their own rights they began to regard the occupants of thrones as mere ordinary mortals. The holy unction of the Lord’s Anointed has fallen from the heads of kings in the eyes of the people, and when we also robbed them of their faith in God the might of power was flung upon the streets . . . . (Protocol 5:3)

In all corners of the earth the words “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” brought to our ranks, thanks to our blind agents, whole legions who bore our banners with enthusiasm. And all the time these words were canker-worms at work boring into the well-being of the goyim, putting an end everywhere to peace, quiet, solidarity and destroying all the foundations of the goya states. As you will see later, this helped us to our triumph: it gave us the possibility, among other things, of getting into our hands the master card – the destruction of the privileges, or in other words of the very existence of the aristocracy of the goyim, that class which was the only defense peoples and countries had against us. (Protocol 1:26)

America’s “Christian” Revolution

Why is the Revolutionary War portrayed as “Christian,” despite its roots in Freemasonry and anti-Christians like Paine? And despite the fact that Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, said “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and taught a message of love and forgiveness, even toward one’s enemies? Much of the answer lies in current events.

For fifteen years, the United States has been exhausting is finances and military manpower on war after war in the Middle East, conflicts that had already been planned in 2001. This has been mainly on behalf of the Rothschild scheme of Greater Israel, as well as secondary motives such as oil and the Federal Reserve’s desire to prop up the petrodollar and the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

The biggest dupes in all of this have been Christian Zionists, about whom I am preparing a major blog post. The insane wars would probably have been impossible without Christian support. Many American pastors have been persuaded to endorse constant war from the pulpit because they’ve been indoctrinated into the concept of “Christian nationalism”: America was founded by a “Christian war” fought by “Christians Founding Fathers.” Of course, the number-one promoter of this is David Barton, who is also undeniably a Christian Zionist:

See also Barton’s comments on Israel here (scroll down) and by WallBuilders (which Barton founded) here.

Conflating Christianity with war suits the Rothschild agenda well. It is noteworthy that the main public pretext for the Middle East wars (“to defend our liberties”) is identical to the Revolutionary War’s public pretext: “to defend our liberties.” But whether it was Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Thomas Paine, all grasped at straws to make a case for bloodshed.

NOTES

1. Thomas Paine, African Slave Trade in America, https://constitution.org/tp/afri.txt.
2. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1775; reprint, Girard Kansas: Haldeman-Julius Co.), 49. https://archive.org/details/commonsense00painrich.
3. Daniel Edwin Wheeler, ed., Life and Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Vincent Patke and Co., 1908), 79.
4. Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), https://www.history.org/almanack/life/politics/sumview.cfm.
5. Joseph Lewis, Thomas Paine: Author of the Declaration of Independence (New York: Freethought Press, 1947), 284-87.
6. Thom Hartmann, What Would Jefferson Do? A Return to Democracy (New York: Three River Press, 2004), 44.
7. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball, ed., Jefferson: Political Writings (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 95.
8. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794-95; reprint, London: Freethought Publishing, 1880), 115. https://archive.org/details/ageofreason00painiala.
9. Ibid., 147.
10. Ibid., 152.
11. Ibid., 2.
12. Thomas Paine, “Of the Word Religion,” The Theological Works of Thomas Paine (New York: William Carver, 1830), 337.
13. Paine, Age of Reason, 16.
14. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 1 (London: British and Foreign Public Library, 1818), xxxv-xxxvi.
15. Thomas Hutchinson, Strictures upon the Declaration of Independence (1776), https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1776-hutchinson-strictures-upon-the-declaration-of-independence.
16. William H. Hallahan, The Day the American Revolution Began: 19 April 1775 (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 254.
17. Nesta H. Webster, Secret Societies & Subversive Movements (1924; reprint. Brooklyn, N.Y.: A & B Publishers Group, 1998), 241-42.
    

    ---