Mhall46184@aol.com
26 June 2019
Is Your Bible Communist?
The Washington Post, not everyone’s favorite news source, is suffering Aunt Pittypat vapours over the possibility that bibles in this country may soon be unaffordable. And they suggest that this is President Trump’s fault:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/06/21/bible-tax-christian-publishers-warn-that-china-tariffs-could-lead-costly-bibles/?utm_term=.937a3bcb329e&wpisrc=nl_faith&wpmm=1
According to the Post, mega-publisher HarperCollins (sic), a Borg that has absorbed many old and famous American publishers into its continuum, also owns Thomas Nelson and Zondervan, said to be the largest publishers of bibles. HarperCollins (sic), under its Thomas Nelson and Zondervan labels, has many or most of its bibles printed in that garden of freedom and brotherhood, Communist China.
Given the proposed tariffs, according to the Post, the prices of our Communist-made bibles could rise 25%.
Christianity Today (https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/october/bible-made-in-china.html) and Publishers’ Weekly (https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/80555-bible-tax-threatens-christian-publishers.html) concur.
Two ironies come to mind. The first is the matter that Communist China, a persecutor of Christians (but, to be fair, Communists persecute everyone, especially other Communists), is a significant printer of Christian books.
China is a Communist nation. Communism is an obscene evil. Communism denies the dignity of the human individual and his freedom to live, think, study, speak, write, sing, compose, believe, play, pray, create, travel, or enjoy the work of his own hands without the permission of the state. As T. H. White says of the collective state in his allegorical Book of Merlyn (sic), everything not forbidden is compulsory; everything not compulsory is forbidden.
Communism, which is also the source of Nazism and Fascism, is the ideology which in one century pretty much halted some 10,000 years of human progress. Communism has destroyed many great and ancient nations with the attendant deaths of millions of human beings, the displacement of millions more, and the catastrophic loss of languages, literature, art, music, architecture, monuments, history, and faith. In sum, Communism is the ultimate expression of genocide.
And Communists print our bibles for us.
The second irony is that the publishers who deprive American craftsman of jobs by outsourcing the printing of books to a Communist collective seem to suggest that this is somehow Mr. Trump’s fault.
Look, President Trump is not my main man. I don’t like him. But I don’t like him because of what he himself says and does, not because of what someone else (The Washington Post comes to mind) says about him. Certain American publishers, not Mr. Trump, shifted American jobs to a terrorist state long before he was elected.
I don’t know if Mr. Yuge Deal would have outsourced printing work to China; the idea of Trump Enterprises printing bibles seems unlikely. But then, the idea of Communists printing bibles seems even more unlikely.
So where was your bible printed? “Published in…” means nothing more than where the head offices are. “Printed in…” – now that is what tells you where the book was printed.
And it is important.
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