OCR Text |
Show r THE ROAD TO GOLGOTHA DESERET NEWS SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH Ve Jesus' Sard For The Constitution Of The United Stages As Ho. Been D'neh,' insoi-e- d 12 A EDITORIAL PAGE SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1969 ,"v s f v?'! 0 CG'eat j ns"' ar s2.ra'&' si Tome f Teoreir a o - Loire: u' rexjoa it r'Cvs1' 9 r-- f - By GEUF.GE W. CORNELL Who's Winning That1 Fight Under The Rug? Watching the struggle for power in the Kremlin has been likened to watching a wrestling match under the lhing room rug: Theres a lot of action, but its hard to tell whos doing what to whom. Outsiders get a tantalizing but inadequate view of that struggle Sunday when the Soviet Union observes the birthday annivei-sarof Joseph Stalin. Since this is the first time in five years that Russia has formally observed the dead dictator's birthday and is a step toward restoring what he stood strugfor to official respectability, the direction of the but little else. gle in the Kremlin seems clear A somewhat clearer view should come next March when . the 24th Communist Party Congress meets not only to decide economic plan, but also to .the course of the next which usually necessitates choose a new Central Committee Soviet government, and the in the party Secretariat, changes Politburo. the party The struggle within the Kremlin carries serious risks for the outside world, since ambitious men might play politics with intercontinental missiles to advance a personal drive for absolute power. Among observers of the Kremlin there are two schools of n rule, as in thought. One sees a return to undisputed the time of Stalin. The argument here is that after a period of lethargy and adherence to the status quo, the absence of a single authority begins to grate. The other school of thought is that, for purely practical reasons, the clique in the Kremlin will gradually evolve toward a more democratic form of government over a long period of time. But there is no basic tradition of democracy in Russia. Since the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the military has gained a more influential voice in the Kremlin. Communist Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, a hardliner, has gained the upper hand over Premier Alexei Kosygin, who is considered more moderate. Moreover, the present collective leadership has been marked by failure of new agricultural policies, the loss of the space race, and a decline in industrial growth. Although a ren rule is not inevitable, the weight of events turn to seems to be in that direction. If so, it is an unhappy development. Their sufferings under Stalin are proof enough that a ruthless, leader is not in the Russians or anyone elses best interests. er pc-v- five-ye- ar . one-ma- one-ma- A Disappointing Delay The Utah Air Conservation Committee's decision to extend from January' 1 to April 1 the deadline for prohibiting the open air burning of junked cars coir as a distinct disappointment. Although the auto wreckers still cannot burn without permit, the decision means that open air burning of cars will continue d wing the winter months when Utahs air pollution problems are at their worst. The decision seems strange because there's a private closed incinerator in Salt Lake County that is ready for use in disposing of junked cars. If operated around the clock five days a week, this incinerator is said to be capable of handling all the junked cars in the entire state. Because there are logistical difficulties in transporting old care from throughout the state to the Salt Lake County incinerator and in adequately storing them there before incinextenh eration, the committee decided to grant a sion on open burning. But the extension solves no problems and only delays the uay of reckoning. Other closed incinerators are being developed in Provo and Ogden but may not be ready for a year. That being the case, why not use the one incinerator that is now available to dispose of just those care in the Salt Lake Valley, where the most population is concentrated and the problem is the most serious? Let's not make a habit of extending deadlines in the fight against air pollution. The public expects full effort to be exerted to get the earliest possible end to open air car burnings. three-mont- Peril At The Party Now is the time when hundreds of offices and industries are holding or planning their annua! Christmas celebration. The National Safety Council is right on the ball in issuing a warning against the hazards of office parties. Some hazards, like the loosened tongue telling off the boss, have their humorous aspects. But there is nothing funny about a man or woman leaving a Christmas party loaded to the gills and stepping into an auto to drive home. The record shows that 53 per cent of the drivere involved in fatal accidents were drinking just before the accident. Then, too. the Christmas season is more hazardous than any other time of the year. Pedestrians, loaded with bundles, have loor visibility. It gets darker earlier. Traffic is heavier. There are more children out after dark with their parents. Some offices that used to have a big liquor bill for every Christmas party are eliminating the booze and sending the money that would have been spent on it to some worthy charity. Why doesn't your office do so. too? Ask The Bees What kind of winter is it going to be after the calendar turns to the shortest day of the year on Sunday? According to popular lore, it will be a hard winter if bees have deposited large supplies of honey in their hives if raccoons are especially fat . . . if lots of skunks came looking for shelter in farm buildings if the goldenrod was an unif red sumac retained its color the usually deep yellow if usual moths laid their eggs 011 than longer gypsy extremely high tree branches ... if wild geese flew south earlier than usual. On the other hand, it's supposed to be a mild winter if punch-berr- y bushes have little fruit if hornets build their if birch bark doesn't peel soon. nests close to the ground e With those old standbys on forecasting the Farmers Almanac and the American Farm and Home Almadivided among themselves on whether this winter will nac be atrocious" or just average. you're on your own in determining whats ahead. But this much is certain: From now on the nights are going to get shorter and the hours of daylight longer and longer, with a resulting improvement in a lot of dispositions just as soon as the fog lifts. ... $j ... ... ... .... ... long-rang- Ah Religion Writer Ron. an and Judea patriots tro-sc- s lined the roads of Galilee 2.000 of them on which Jewish w ritiied m agony and died. It was a harrowing but common bcni.uod of Jera-- . sight during the From tiie start, he lhed in the midst of violence, strugg'e and peril. Yet he grew up with an undaunted assurance Take lieai t . . , Have no fear . . . Blessed are those that are persecuted for i lghteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven I 1 Biought Lack from Egypt on the death Great, who had sought to slay him among the children in Bethlehem, his upbringing in Nazareth remained in the shadow of tiie Herodians and the Roman Empii e. of Kuig Herod the Three sons of Herod, suivivors of family purges that had done away with five other sons, now ruled his divided realm, Arehe-lau- s in southern Judea, Herod Antipas in Galilee to the north, and Philip in the mostly pagan region east of there. Flames of revolt broke out across the country in Jesus childhood, and turned it into a powderkeg of insurrection and fierce reprisals throughout his earthly years among men. Not only he, but lus brother. James, and Ins staunch advocate, John the Baptist, eventually were slain in the onslaughts of imperially dominated rule, which later made martyrs of his apostles and thousands of his early followers. But it was a grimly familiar situation to Crucifying was Jesus from the very first, from that earliest flight into Egypt to elude the slaughter of Roman legionnaires, and through his maturing days in Galilee, swept by uprisings and scourging troops. Near 6 A. D., when he was approaching 12, two Roman legions augmented oy horsemen and auxiliaries, under command of Rome's Syrian legate, Varus, stormed through Galilee. Samaria and Judea, razing towns in bloody punishment for uprisings. Along this march, nothing escaped them, but all places were full of fire and historian slaughter." writes Flavius Josephus. Numerous towns, including Sepphoris, just across a valley from Nazareth, were left in smoking ruins, with 30.000 Jews sold into slavery, and 2,000 ringleaders hunted down and crucified along the roadsides the Roman penalty for rebellion. But the bitter upheavals, spurred by alien oppression and attachments of Herod's successors, Jo pagan Rome, began even before the scorched-eartinarch of Varus, and continued afterward. Now at this time there were 10.000 other disorders in Judea which were like tumults because a great number put themselves into a warlike posture. Josephus relates. Tims did a great and wild fury spread itself over the nation." At the time Jesus family returned from Egypt te Nazareth, deciding against going back to Bethlehem because of the turbulence in Judea following Herod the Great's death in 4 B. C.. his son. Archelaus, already was involved in retaliations there. When Temple crowds, lamenting the late king's burning to death of their learned, defiant leaders, Judas and Matthias, stoned a detachment of 1.000 troops sent to disperse them. Archelaus unleashed his entire army to crush the melee. Foot soldiers and horsemen, laying on in merciless abandon, killed 3.000 Jerusalem !eople. sending hundieds of others fleeing to the hills to form bands to strike back at the foreign predators. For a time, the whole nation was in revolution, a swelling tide of resistance deploying in three companies to attack Roman forces at the Temple, at the hippodrome outside the walls, and at Herod's palace in the upper city. Legionnaires finally beat them off, at first-centur- y a common form of death sentence in the Holy Land, even as Joseph and Mary re turned to Nazareth with their child Jesus. one point setting fire to the Temple cloisters to dislodge rebels on tiie roof, most of whom tumbled to their deaths in flames. writings: how about this time one from their country should become governor of the habitable earth. Dui ing this rampage, Archelaus, Herod Antipas and Philip were in Rome, getting their jurisdictions none equal to their father's kingship-confirm- ed by Caesar Augustus, who overruled appeals from Jewish delegations to end the rule of Herod's line. Returning to the territories, Archelaus pursued his harsh crashing of dissent, replacing the Temple priesthood, overriding It was a smoldering time of wrath, hostilities and underground movements, of factions, secret cabals and flaring violence, followed by pursuits and savage repres- Judaism's moral precepts, imposing extortionate taxes and arousing a wave of revolt that brought Varus troops flailing across the land. Archelaus then was deposed and banished to Gaul, succeeded by Coptonius, the first of a line of 16 Roman procurators, including Pontius Pilate, to hold Judea in submission, wliile Philip and Herod Antipas retained their restive tetrarchies in liege to Rome. h It was Herod Antipas who impressed n features on Galilee, further the rural area where Jesus grew up and began his ministry, w here he himself defied direct threats of the tetrarch, who had beheaded John the Baptist for denouncing his profligacy. When Jesus was warned by sympathetic Pharisees to get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you, Jesus told them, Go tell that fox I must finish my I must go my way today and course tomorrow and the day following. In the years before then, Antipas rebuilt Sepphoris as a walled city, the Romearmed bastion of Galilee, just south of Nazareth. He also walled Betharamptha, -naming it for Julia, the wife of Augustus Caesar. On the south end of tiie Sea of Galilee, he built a new city named for Augustus successor. Tiberius, with elaborate Roman baths over natural warm springs. Earlier, however, in Jesus vouth, native rule broke resistance to out like scattered brush fires, and it continued sporadically for more than half a cen-tuiuntil Rome annihilated the nation in 70 A.D. Writes Josephus: What did most elevate them (the Jews) in undertaking this war was an ambiguous oracle that was found also in their sacred Greco-Roma- ... ... foreign-dominate- d y. sions. Time and again, Roman cavalry pounded across the countryside, leaving fields of gore, clapping natives into chains, driving rebels into mountain hideaways. In the hovels of Jerusalems lower city. Zealot daggermen w hispered their vow: No ruler but God, and sealed it with assassinations of Roman collaborators. In Jesus developing vears in Galilee, numerous rebel chieftains arose, leading guerilla bands in lightning assaults against Roman power. Judah, son of the rebel Hezekias slain by Herod the Great, rallied a new Galilean uprising, overrunning the palace at Sepphoris, seizing weapons and funds. Another Zealot. Simeon who once had .been a slave to Herod the Great, donned the diadem of a holy king, and led an attack on the palace at Jericho and at Betharamptha, putting them to tiie torch and carrying off spoils. A shepherd named Athrouges and his four brothers, known for their herculean physiques and great strength, organized assaults on Roman infantry, once waylaying supply troops at Emma us, killing 40 Roman soldiers and their commander. Some rebel leaders, including Simeon and Athronges, soon were captured and slain but others arose, and Judah, in partnership with a Rabbi Zaddok, kept up the struggle for years, filing a militant new party, the Zealots. They have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that God is to be their only ruler and Lord, Josephus recounts. They do not fear dying ary kind of death . . . nor can any such fear make them call any man had to crush uprisings, once disguising soldiers as citizens to put tiie sword to hundreds in the Temple square, slaughtering a mass gathering in Samaria, sending Jesus to the cross. He finally was removed by Rome for his brutality in 36 A. D., but the next year, in 37 A. D., the death of Tiberius brought to power a new, more grossly cruel empeior, Caligula. He banL-heHerod Antipas to France in 39 A D., and with Philip having died in 34 A D., the last of Herod the Great's line was gone, except a grandson, Herod Agrip-pthe son of Aristobulus. one of Herod the Greats sons whom he had had slain. A protege of Caligula, the bribing, embezzling Agrippa briefly ruled his fathers old kingdom from 41 to 44 A. D.t and subsequently ingratiated himself with the brute emperor, Nero, and joined with his Roman generals, Vespasian and Titus, in devastating Jerusalem in fire and blood in a, 70 A. D. That was the end of Israel's life for 1.878 years until 1948. And it was the final touch of the spawn of Herod the Great. Secular historians, in those years, say little of Jesus, but w hat they say is revealing. Tacitus tells of a great multitude being Christians, deriving their name from one Christus, who was executed in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate." Jmsepbus mentions the stoning of James, the brother of Jesus, called tiie Christ Suetonius tells of an expulsion of Jews from Rome for disorders instigated because of Christus. A later emperor, Diocletian, after 10 rears of killing Christians, had this inscription put on the Roman Coliseum: The Christians are no more. It was the savage, etroneous postscript which Herod's masters in Rome wrote to a Christinas saga that the Judean king commenced with the same kind of atrocities in Lord. Bethlehem, but which surpassed all the The lion, Tiberius, became emperor in 14 A D. on the death of Augustus, and fury of his baleful descent to raise the h image of a true kingdom that grows on in under influence of his bitterly adviser, Sejanus. Tiberius named Pontius the face of tiials and trouble. Pilate in 26 A. D. as the fifth procurator in The light shines in tiie darkness, Judea. wrote the apostle John, and the darkness In his 10 years there, Pilate repeatedly has not overcome it anti-Jewis- The Creeping Coercion Of School Desegregation The end of the neighborhood school in America is proceeding apace as a result of a series of directives and ukases being issued by federal courts and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. JENKIN LLOYD JONES only have no substance in law but are in clear defiance of it. Indeed, said the bill managers, cutting off funds for such a reason would violate the law. As one of tiie dissenting Fifth U.S. CirBut not any more. In U.S. vs. Jefferson cuit Court judges said in U.S. vs. Jefferson County Board of Education the court boldly County Board of Education, 1967 : These are not laws. It is to the advantage of school The freedom of the Negro child to stated: Thov have not emaattend any public school without regard to boards throughout the country to know the il a t e d from any criteria the commissioner uses in deterhis race or color, first secured in the Brown elected legislative are These bodies. cases, is again lost to him after a short life mining whether a school meets the requirements for eligibility to receive financial asof less than 13 years. decrees, imposed sistance. nation the Miss.. by been. In And so it has Natchez. upon And the court quoted the Civil Rights men, many of whom lecently HEW ordered neighborhood school districts swept away and new dishave never been Commission: tricts drawn that would provide a satisfacelected to anything, who aie utterly conWith funds of such magnitude at stake, fident that their ideas are best for the tory racial mix. As a result, according to most school systems would be placed at a subto the Natchez school superintendent. Dr. D. nation, but who are not disposed serious disadvantage by termination of FedG. McLaurin, seven schools now have more mit these ideas to any public referendum. eral Assistance." than a thousand vacant places while five Most interesting is the adoption by this All this has come about, not only without others have 800 mere students than they group of the doctrine of interpretation as a were built to accommodate. HEW has orlegislative sanction, but in contempt of substitute for law. clear legislative language. school to close altodered one In the original Thus tiie 1964 Civil Rights Act stated: desegregation case gether. over the protests of most of its (Brown vs. Board of Education. 1934) the patrons. 'Desegregation' shall not mean the asU.S. Supreme Court bused its decision on U.S . District Court Judge Luther Bahan-no- n signment of students to public schools in the words from the 14th Amendment: No has demanded a long range integraorder to overcome racial imbalance . . . state shall . . . deny to any person within tion plan for Oklahoma City in which stu- .Nothing herein shall empower any official its jurisdiction the equal protection of the dents would attend only basic classes in or Court of the United States to issue any On that theoiy it ordered that no law. their neighborhood schools on the basis of order seeking to achieve a racial balance in child shall be directed to a specific school race, again a complete reversal of the any school by requiring the transportation of because of its race. students from one school to another. original Brown decision. There has been another interesting Today, as a result of subsequent court The fact that these plain words haven't decisions and HEW orders, the same words turn. When federal aid to comeven slowed down those who are determined ot the same amendment are being cited as mon education was first proposed in the to make over America s schools according the reason why children can be directed to Civil Rights Act of 1964 some doubters exto their own wishes recalls the words of a specific school because of their race. pressed fear that federal funds might be Daniel Webster: The principle of integration has gradually withheld from schools that failed to follow It is hardly too strong to sav that the HEW edicts. turned into a principle of forced racial mix-;-Constitution was made to guard the people Tliis was denied on a stack of according to shifting formulae that itoj against the dangers of good inter.tjiiis. And former Supreme Court Justice Louis Braudels said: Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect koerty when the government s purposes are beneficent . . . The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, but without understanding." g. GUEST CARTOON o S v i "Actually, I wish the silent majority would moke some noise." f Eiljs. gfc )JI . Ch.c a tMaV |