The Day of Deliverance
While I have often criticized Wesley Swift for some of the fantastic tales that he spun, or because in his sermons he had often cited dubious and even nefarious sources as if they were authorities and fountains of truth, frequently Swift was on target and quite accurate in certain important areas. One of those areas was his early awareness of the descent of our nation into a state of tyranny and communism. Swift understood that as an ongoing process, and he also understood that many of the people would volunteer themselves into tyranny in exchange for a false sense of security.
But this is not a new phenomenon. The vaunted democracy of ancient Athens, which certain “combinations”, or special-interest parties had always sought to undermine, was subverted several times during the Peloponnesian War, where Thucydides explained in Book 8 of his history of the war that after an oligarchy of certain wealthy Athenians was imposed, “The people, hearing of the oligarchy, took it very heinously at first, but when Pisander had proved evidently that there was no other way of safety, in the end, partly for fear and partly because they hoped again to change the government they yielded thereunto.” When the oligarchy failed a couple of years later, Pisander, whose proofs were evidently only propaganda for the elites of his time, had been attacked by the poets for corruption and cowardice and he was also ridiculed for being fat. So he fled to the enemy, to Sparta, and was convicted of treason in absentia.
The Athenians were able to recover their democracy, but it was in a modified form, and ultimately they were defeated by the Macedonians in 338 BC and a short time later had, in effect, lost it forever. However when tyrannical laws are imposed on Americans in the name of security, the process never seems to be reversed, the culprits are never punished, and the government grows more and more powerful. Now, with the Coronavirus scare and the accompanying fear-porn that has paralyzed the nation, the lemmings who readily sell their freedom for security may finally end up completely enslaved. But Wesley Swift already saw that as an ongoing process in 1965, when he gave this sermon.