America can’t be a democracy since I did not vote (nor did my representatives) vote to pull out of Afghanistan or to open our southern border to decent, hard-working people looking for a better life and for sure, not for terrorists, deadbeats, child molesters, thieves, muggers, and other lowlifes. I did not vote to pretend two men or two women living together can make up a family; nor that children have a right to decide their gender; nor that a man can pretend to be a woman by changing his plumbing; nor to permit males to compete with females in athletic events; nor to permit boys to declare themselves female and gain rightful entrance into female restrooms and locker rooms.

Nor did I vote to permit our Empire to be run by egotistical health officials who have never treated anyone for anything at any time. Nor did I vote to force toddlers to wear a face mask; nor for businesses to be closed and church services to be shut down.

No, the American Empire, like Rome, is crumbling as I write.

I’ve even heard that some big-city mayors, all Democrats, will give a guaranteed weekly wage, but that can’t be true. Even Democrats can’t be that stupid.

The world has been fighting the Communist Chinese coronavirus for many months, and with “new variants” appearing, we may be losing the battle. Businesses are closing, hospitals are full, people are angry, experts are vacillating, politicians are lying as they take control, the innocent are dying, and vaccine makers are crying all the way to the bank carrying buckets full of money.

However, it has happened before with more tragic results.

Bubonic Plague lashed the face of Europe in the Middle Ages, killing half the population in some cities, more in others. Now the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that bubonic plague (Black Death) is spreading in many parts of Madagascar (island nation just east of southern Africa), and a “weak health care system means it may spread farther.” WHO reported that there have been 40 deaths from the plague, with 119 people infected. Plague is spread by fleas carried by rats.

WHO also ominously reported, “There is now a risk of a rapid spread of the disease due to the city’s high population density and the weakness of the healthcare system.”

Well, add one more threat to life from all the exotic diseases (pestilences) from Africa and China—earthquakes, famines, wars, and rumors of war to warn world citizens of the end of the world as we know it. No, I’m not a pessimist; that thought was Matthew, chapter 24. We have experienced all this before, but not with such frequency and intensity. Nations could be destroyed as in the past.

American physician, bacteriologist, and prolific author Hans Zinsser, among others, believe that the Plague of Justinian was partly responsible for the demise of the Roman Empire. He declared the plague was “perhaps the most potent single influence” which gave the coup de grâce to the ancient Empire. Bugs, not bullets, knocked off an empire! This pandemic lasted about seventy years and caused havoc in the Roman Empire, already bruised, broken, and bleeding. Justinian was desperately trying to restore the ancient Empire to its former glory–like trying to breathe life into a corpse.

Seventy years of pandemic!

During Emperor Justinian’s reign, the worldwide plague began in A.D. 541 at Pelusium, Egypt (at the mouth of the Nile). He was known as “the emperor that never sleeps.” In sixty years, the plague spread to all parts of the known world. The dead lay unburied in the streets, and ten thousand persons died each day at Constantinople. The people of Constantinople became desperate with all the deaths as they placed bodies anywhere they could. Some bodies were left in houses to rot. It got worse as the black horse of famine galloped through the city because mills stopped grinding corn due to workers’ deaths.

They experienced a major food shortage because of many business failures. And those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

V. Seibel tells us that the plague was preceded by many earthquakes, volcanic eruptions—Vesuvius, in 513, was one—and famines that dropped a blanket of terror and death over Europe, the Near East, and Asia. The worst natural occurrence was the earthquake and fire that destroyed Antioch in A.D. 526, killing almost 300,000 people.

The Roman Empire was in a state of confusion because of the added pressure, problems, and panic produced by the plague. Gibbon wrote, “No facts have been preserved to sustain an account or even a conjecture of the numbers that perished in this extraordinary mortality. I only find that, during three months, five and at length ten thousand persons died each day at Constantinople; and many cities of the East were left vacant, and that in several districts of Italy the harvest and the vintage withered on the ground.”

When the plague snuck into Constantinople in A.D. 542, it stayed for four months, killing so many people that it was impossible for the living to bury the dead. By A.D. 565, half of the citizens of the Byzantine Empire had died! Gibbon suggested that perhaps 100 million people in Europe alone died of this plague!

Well, we aren’t there yet.

Justinian’s armies were fighting with Persia, Africa, and the Goths in Italy, but those crude, unsophisticated barbarians had learned the art of making war from former warlords. Barbarians had learned how to organize, analyze, and cooperate. It was ever more difficult for the emperor to sustain armies on far-flung battlefields, especially when there were threats at home and treachery and thievery in his palace. Justinian needed, least of all, a major epidemic to compound his problems.

This Plague of Justinian emptied the cities, turned the country into a desert, and made the habitations of men the haunts of wild beasts. The snakes slithered and hissed, the hyenas crouched and laughed, and wild beasts pawed and growled where proud, pompous, and productive men once walked.

However, when men face the inscrutable, they tend to lose their arrogance, sinking into a hapless and helpless, and hopeless life.

Gibbon recorded: “The triple scourges of war, pestilence, and famine afflicted the subjects of Justinian, and his reign is disgraced by a visible decrease of the human species which has never been regained in some of the fairest countries of the globe.” Can anyone read that statement and doubt that disease has changed our world far more than wars? Furthermore, will irresponsible Muslim terrorists or the Communist Chinese coronavirus change our present world forever? Or maybe it will be the bubonic plague.

The plague of Justinian ended about 590, but most of Italy was controlled by the Lombards by that time. The barbarians were no longer at the gates of Rome but inside the gates. The mighty Empire had crumbled, and when the Muslim zealots swarmed out of Arabia in 634, the Roman and Persian forces gave only token resistance.

As uncultured, uncivilized, uneducated, and uncontrolled Muslim zealots swarm into America carrying hostile plans and harmful pestilences, will the once-great American Empire fall like Rome?

Even Emperor Justinian contracted the plague but survived; however, his Empire did not. The question: how will ancient plagues and other pestilences impact and change America?

Some of us will live long enough to see that answer.

(Dr. Don Boys is a former member of the Indiana House of Representatives who ran a large Christian school in Indianapolis and wrote columns for USA Today for 8 years. Boys authored 20 books, the most recent, Reflections of a Lifetime Fundamentalist: No Reserves, No Retreats, No Regrets! The eBook is available at Amazon.com for $4.99. Other titles at www.cstnews.com. Follow him on Facebook at Don Boys, Ph.D., and visit his blog. Send a request to DBoysphd@aol.com for a free subscription to his articles and click here to support his work with a donation.)

What is not known by most people is that China is the source of the three most deadly plagues that smacked the face of our planet in the last 2,000 years. Now, over vociferous denials and charges of xenophobia and racism must be added the Chinese coronavirus.

Running smack dab into the solid wall of facts, China is vehemently trying to distance itself from the Chinese coronavirus that is now smacking down people in over 200 nations and territories with about 600,000 deaths and counting.

China lied about the coronavirus originating in China; they have been lying about the number dead; now, China is charging that it did not start in China. USA Today reported that Chinese officials circulated a false claim that the coronavirus “originated in the United States and was passed along to China.”

The truth is if there were an Olympics for Deadly Pestilences, China dictator Xi would have gold medals draped all over him.

Correcting many historical reports, Galina Eroshenko and associates reveal in their scientific study that the Y. pestis triggered three world pandemics. Y. pestis, (the Black Death) lashed mankind starting with the sixth century Plague of Justinian (killed up to 100 million) to the Black Death in the fourteenth century to the third wave in the nineteenth century.

The study reveals, “Y. pestis has originated in China, and that the strains, which caused three historical plague pandemics also had their origin in China, from where they were regularly brought into Europe by Chinese merchants and military commands.”

The Plague of Justinian raised its ugly head in 541 and 542 A.D. and lasted until 750! It was named for the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, who ruled from 527 to 565 A.D. It affected about half the population of Europe, and was responsible for the highest number of deaths during any epidemic in history. Estimates believe “100 million people died during this time, which was half the world population.”

This plague spread so quickly because it was carried by lice-infected rats. Those rats “traveled all over the world on trading ships and helped spread the infection from China to Northern Africa and all over the Mediterranean.”

Even the emperor was infected but survived, although his empire disintegrated.

That was the first pandemic from China.

The Black Death that decimated Europe in the Middle Ages was used as a weapon by China, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. The Chinese were fighting the Genoese trading port of Kafa, now Feodosiya in Crimea. It was 1347. The Chinese catapulted plague-infested bodies into the town as a weapon against their enemies. It worked as Genoese ships returning home spread the plague to Sicily, North Africa, Italy, Spain, and France. From there, it raced into England, Scotland, and the Baltic countries. Four or five years after arriving in Europe in 1347, the pandemic surged through the continent in waves that killed millions.

That “second pandemic” raced across the globe, taking down millions of helpless people and was stamped, “Made in China.” It was an effective killer that caused the depopulation or total disappearance of about 1,000 European villages in the early 1400s.

Even the wealthy and royalty did not escape the pestilence by running and hiding. They ran but couldn’t hide.

The “third pandemic” of Black Death erupted in 1855 in the Chinese province of Yunnan. Over the next few decades, this plague prowled the planet taking it to all inhabited continents. Most of the devastation took place in China and India, but there were also scattered cases from South Africa to San Francisco. The worldwide outbreak eventually killed about 15 million people, and the World Health Organization considered it active until 1960.

By this time, the world was far more interconnected than it had ever been. People traveled more frequently; the world’s military was “on the go,” and trade had exploded with the invention of the steamship. The ships carried grain and other foodstuffs to all occupied continents, and grain means the presence of rats and rats mean fleas. Ships sitting at anchorage with vessels from other nations had a constant exchange of rats, thereby quickly spreading the rats and plague worldwide.

Media propaganda suggests that we may see a similar killing with the Chinese coronavirus. It is raging in over 200 nations of the earth with unknown prospects of slowing.

Wait until it really hits the 55 nations of Africa! A few days ago, after I wrote this, the virus jumped 47% that week!

(Dr. Don Boys is a former member of the Indiana House of Representatives who ran a large Christian school in Indianapolis and wrote columns for USA Today for 8 years. Boys authored 18 books, the most recent Muslim Invasion: The Fuse is Burning! eBook is available here with the printed edition (and other titles) at www.cstnews.com. Follow him on Facebook at Don Boys, Ph.D.; and visit his blog. Send a request to DBoysphd@aol.com for a free subscription to his articles, and click here to support his work with a donation.)

During the London plague in 1665, city officials took control of most aspects of the peoples’ lives. They did so based on previously passed laws that were still available to them. Daniel Defoe, wrote in A Journal of the Plague Year, “This shutting up of the houses was a method first taken, as I understand, in the plague which happened in 1603, at the coming of King James I to the crown; and the power of shutting people up in their own houses was granted by act of Parliament, entitled An Act for the Charitable Relief and Ordering of Persons Infected with Plague. On which act of Parliament the lord mayor and aldermen of the city of London founded the order they made at this time, and which took place the 1st of July, 1665, when the numbers of infected within the city were but few.”

Similarly, laws (many oppressive and intrusive) were passed all over the world to deal with the Chinese coronavirus, and some of those laws will stay on the books for many years. Concerned citizens must be vigilant that any oppressive laws be temporary—not permanent.

During the 1665 plague, all funerals had to be held before or after sunset, and no friends or other mourners could attend. There was to be no eating at taverns, and the unspent money was to be given to the poor. I have found no indication if or how that was enforced.

While the Black Death was raging, London officials appointed examiners, “to continue in that office for the space of two months at least: and if any fit person so appointed shall refuse to undertake the same, the said parties so refusing to be committed to prison until they shall conform themselves accordingly.” The examiners were to visit homes and to discover any sickness and to ascertain if possible what diseases were present.

Wait a minute! What if the appointed people had other responsibilities? What if they were afraid of being around dead people? What if they were terrified of being infected and putting their families in danger? Too bad, they would be imprisoned.

During this time, female “searchers” were appointed to make sure the dead had died of the plague and report the deaths to town officials. Also, chirurgeons (ancient for surgeons) were appointed whether they wanted to serve or not.

The home of every infected person was “marked with a red cross of a foot long, in the middle of the door, evident to be seen, and with these usual printed words, that is to say, ‘Lord have mercy upon us,’ to be set close over the same cross, there to continue until lawful opening of the same house.” All letters were required to be in upper case.

What if an atheist refused to pay tribute to the Lord with the painted petition on his door? Too bad, no exceptions. And the ACLU was not yet doing their thing.

The searchers, chirurgeons, keepers, and buriers were not to be on the streets “without holding a red rod or wand of three foot in length in their hands, open and evident to be seen.” What if a person did not want to be identified as such? No option.

It was ordered, “every householder do cause the street to be daily prepared before his door, and so to keep it clean swept all the week long.” It was the city’s responsibility to keep the streets clean; however, it was now a homeowner’s job.

Laws were passed that prohibited “hogs, dogs, or cats, or tame pigeons, or conies,” to be kept within any part of the city, “or any swine to be or stray in the streets or lanes, but that such swine be impounded by the beadle [a parish constable of the Anglican Church, often charged with duties of charity] or any other officer, and the owner punished according to the act of common council; and that the dogs be killed by the dog killers appointed for that purpose.” Sorry, but all creatures were forbidden.

An order was published by the lord mayor, and by the magistrates, according to the advice of the physicians, that “all the dogs and cats should be immediately killed, and an officer was appointed for the execution.”

Defoe reveals that 40,000 dogs were killed and “five times as many cats.”

Town officials declared, “all plays, bear baitings, games, singing of ballads, buckler play, or such like causes of assemblies of people, be utterly prohibited.” Anyone defying the order was to be “severely punished.”

Markets were closed, but the lord mayor permitted “the country people who brought provisions to be stopped in the streets leading into the town, and to sit down there with their goods, where they sold what they brought, and went immediately away.” But, no chit-chatting.

Denmark has passed an emergency law that allows the government to force people to get a vaccination, although one is not available for the coronavirus. Also, citizens who refuse to be tested for the coronavirus will face fines and potential prison time and will be prevented from entering shops, grocery stores, public institutions, and hospitals while also being restricted from using public transport.

Rahm Emanuel declared in 2008, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” When citizens are fearful, politicians get afraid of appearing not to be in control. Their first fear is the fear of losing the next election. So, be careful when congress is in session. They will usually solve any problem before us with welfare or warfare.

Both can be deadly to personal freedom.

(Dr. Don Boys is a former member of the Indiana House of Representatives who ran a large Christian school in Indianapolis and wrote columns for USA Today for 8 years. Boys authored 18 books, the most recent Muslim Invasion: The Fuse is Burning! eBook is available here with the printed edition (and other titles) at www.cstnews.com. Follow him on Facebook at Don Boys, Ph.D.; and visit his blog. Send a request to DBoysphd@aol.com for a free subscription to his articles, and click here to support his work with a donation.)

Fanatics in India “actually believe and are taking cow dung baths to prevent or cure themselves from sustaining the deadly virus.” And the Evening Standard reported, “a Hindu group in India was hosting a cow urine drinking party as a means to immunize themselves from the coronavirus.”

Of course, Americans have their fools as well. One famous televangelist (worth $760 million) “would like people to believe that coronavirus can be cured through their TV sets, so long as those televisions are tuned into his show.” The Evangelical preacher Kenneth Copeland urged viewers to “put their hands on their screens and be cured of the coronavirus.” Copeland, who occasionally stumbles on the truth destroys any credibility with the “name it and claim it” teaching and his emphasis on money. While people have a right to give to whomever, it is usually the poor who keep the likes of Copeland in expensive suits, living in mansions, and flying around the world in plush private jets.

The above reactions are old news for old plagues. Men have not changed and they react the same way under similar circumstances during all ages.

When bubonic plague reached Paris in 1348, Philip VI called in his top medical people from the University of Paris to give him some answers relating to the origin of the pestilence that was ravaging the city. His learned academicians decided that the answer was astrology! Their explanation was so reasonable that anyone would accept it–anyone, that is, whose I.Q. equaled, but did not exceed his hat size.

The esteemed professors informed his Majesty that there had been a conjunction of Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter in the house of Aquarius on March 20, 1345–at 1:00 P.M. However, they did not indicate if that was Eastern Standard Time or Central Time. They told the king that the conjunction of Saturn and Mars meant death and destruction, and the conjunction of Mars and Jupiter released pestilence into the air. This was a Royal Con Job, and the king should have had a―You‘ve got to be pulling my royal leg look—but they assured him that the warm and humid Jupiter sucked up the water and nefarious vapors from the earth. Then, naturally, Mars, known to be hot and dry, ignited a fire.

Of course.

Those professionals were certified experts! The big surprise is that the king and his court did not fall down to the floor holding their sides with hysterical laughter; however, we must remember that it was an age of superstition and ignorance. At least the king got the message that Paris was not the place to spend that spring and summer. The Paris Medical Association had decided on the origins of the plague, so they could now give expert advice about how to escape being cut down like grass before the scythe.

The experts told the king, not to eat fat meats, poultry, and olive oil. The learned doctors told their patients not to sleep past dawn, don‘t bathe, and forego sexual intercourse since it could be fatal! During those days, quackery was part and parcel of most of the disciplines. The quacks wore academic gowns and were a part of the intellectual brotherhood—just like today. Moreover, as today, no one dared say, “But that‘s quackery.” After all, one might be accused of being an independent thinker! Horrors!

The people spent their hard-earned money for pills, potions, and preservatives, and in a later plague, infected folk sought a cure by bathing in urine collected from people who had eaten cabbage!

When it was decided that the Black Death was airborne, they were told to visit, even live in foul-smelling sewers among the rats that carried the disease! Victims would often bathe in urine several times a day and drank a glass of urine. Others cut open their sores and applied a paste made from tree resins, flower roots, and human feces. I don’t think their medical plans covered such an alternative treatment.

Dr. Thomas Vicary, the surgeon to Henry VIII, invented the very popular treatment called the Vicary Method. With a live chicken, he would shave its butt and strap it to their swollen lymph nodes. Then, when the chicken got sick, they would wash it and repeat the process until only the chicken or victim was dead or alive.

During most plagues, it was commonly believed that a lucky charm would keep the plague away. Dr. George Thomson, a famous physician, wore a dead toad around his neck.

I assume Dr. Thomson was board certified.

Pope Clement VI declared that all people who died of the plague were forgiven of all their sins so they could enter Heaven. Since no man on the face of the earth has such ability, the Pope gave the plague victims false hope. Admittance to Heaven comes only through faith in Christ.

Recently, the Catholic Church granted forgiveness of sins to the faithful who died of the Chinese coronavirus. The decree also covers healthcare workers and relatives who care for their sick family members. To qualify for forgiveness, one must read the Bible “for at least half an hour.” Pope Francis, like Pope Clement VI, assumed authority he does not have and gave dying people and relatives a false hope.

I don’t know if Clement and Francis were fools, frauds, or fanatics, but I do know their statements were false, and the coronavirus races on.

(Dr. Don Boys is a former member of the Indiana House of Representatives who ran a large Christian school in Indianapolis and wrote columns for USA Today for 8 years. Boys authored 18 books, the most recent Muslim Invasion: The Fuse is Burning! eBook is available here with the printed edition (and other titles) at www.cstnews.com. Follow him on Facebook at Don Boys, Ph.D.; and visit his blog. Send a request to DBoysphd@aol.com for a free subscription to his articles, and click here to support his work with a donation.)

Citizens of many persuasions embraced the occasion by rushing to the churches until one could not get near the church doors. The people were saying, “There’s a time to play and a time to pray, and this is the time to pray.” While many Christians got serious about godly living and became cautious in daily activities, Muslims were relatively unconcerned. Their rigid predestination (some would call fatalism) led them to not take any unusual health precautions, so they put themselves in danger by exposing themselves to plague carriers.

Just this month, the media reported Muslims in Iran licking their shrines showing no fear of the coronavirus.

When fearful, fanatical and faithful citizens arrived at church, the parish minister was often absent. He had, well, felt “called” to the safe countryside where the prosperous and powerful had fled. The preacher in the pulpit was often a Dissenter (Independent Bible preacher) who had been outlawed a few years earlier! To be sure, some of the establishment preachers (Church of England) stayed on the job and died of plague, but many fled to safety. The people flocked to packed churches to hear the preachers preach the Word of God to a confused, concerned, and convicted congregation. Many people professed faith in Christ, and great crowds attended church; but, when the plague took control, the churches emptied because it was not safe to be near any person who might be infected.

Daniel Defoe, author of A Journal of the Plague Year, wrote that many consciences were awakened: “Many hard hearts melted into tears; many a penitent confession was made of crimes long concealed….Many a robbery, many a murder, was then confessed aloud, and nobody surviving [in the home] to record the accounts of it. People might be heard, even into the streets as we passed along, calling upon God for mercy, through Jesus Christ, and saying, ‘I have been a thief,’ ‘I have been an adulterer,’ ‘I have been a murderer,’ and the like, and none durst stop to make the least inquiry into such things or to administer comfort to the poor creatures….Some of the ministers did visit the sick at first and for a little while, but it was not to be done. It would have been present death to have gone into some houses.”

The constant atmosphere of death and constant terror drove men to look honestly at their lives and at their religious experience. This resulted in thousands becoming more sincere and placing more emphasis on their personal relationship with Christ. It also led them away from the established churches in various countries.

Printing had been invented in 1440, and people were now reading the Bible and doing their own thinking for the first time in over a thousand years. They realized that church membership and church attendance did not produce personal satisfaction or personal salvation, contrary to what they had been taught. Following personal conversion, those new converts (but old church members) lived and died as Christians.

Christians believed they had a responsibility to help others as a Christian duty, so during times of famine they shared their food; in times of sorrow they wept with the bereaved; and, in times of pestilence, they nursed the sick and dying. The non-Christians and the pagans took notice of such kindness, and at a time when other institutions were discredited and often dissolved, the Christian churches were more desirable. William McNeill wrote, “Pagans fled from the sick and heartlessly abandoned them.” Christians stayed and served–and died.

After so much despair and death, a dullness set in. It seemed that people lost their fear of death and had really resigned themselves to death. Defoe wrote: “Towards the latter end men’s hearts were hardened, and death was so always before their eyes, that they did not so much concern themselves for the loss of their friends, expecting that themselves should be summoned the next hour.”

They no longer asked people on the street (with whom they had to do business) how they were nor did they feel a need to inform others that they were not infected. The general attitude was: all were going to die. So now, they went back to church and sat in hot, crowded pews without fear of the next person. It didn’t matter. They were all among the walking dead.

Defoe, an outspoken Christian, made a cogent comment in this regard: “Indeed, the zeal which they showed in coming [to church], and the earnestness and affection they showed in their attention to what they heard, made it manifest what a value people would all put upon the worship of God if they thought every day they attended at the church that it would be their last.”

When plague ravaged a city, it was natural for people to think God was visiting them for their sins. We have not seen that reaction to the coronavirus.

Yet.

(Dr. Don Boys is a former member of the Indiana House of Representatives who ran a large Christian school in Indianapolis and wrote columns for USA Today for 8 years. Boys authored 18 books, the most recent Muslim Invasion: The Fuse is Burning! eBook is available here with the printed edition (and other titles) at www.cstnews.com. Follow him on Facebook at Don Boys, Ph.D.; and visit his blog. Send request to DBoysphd@aol.com for a free subscription to his articles, and click here to support his work with a donation.)