Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, May 12

By Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch 

WEEKLY BRIEF
 HATRED FOR TRUMP MAKES NEEDED OPPOSITION HARDER
The pathological hatred of Donald Trump is the culminating manifestation of the fifty year  man hating, father dishonoring, baby killing public psychosis known as feminism. The frenzied outpouring of grief and rage at the unforeseen demise of the Witch from the West has not yet abated. She was buried by the ranches of Montana, the steel towns of Pennsylvania and those always reliable   farmhouses from Kansas. But while the Munchkins cheered and danced, the swamp cosmopolitans went berserk. A man-that man- had triumphed.  The Intelligence agencies planned a coup, the media had a meltdown, and respectable female teachers and nurses all over America went out in public with hats simulating their private parts. This spontaneous disintegration of public order came in the name of protecting democracy and respecting women. No males on the left could rise to steady the ship for they had all been trained that male initiative was white privilege. The well-funded, well-placed "resistance" couldn't unseat the new alpha male because he surrounded himself with military men and corporate executives while getting his sea legs. The feminist mob then ate their own males under the weird slogan of "me too".
  The atheistic revolt against religious order known as the Enlightenment has had multiple fronts and eras.  Ideological atheism appeared as Darwinist racism(think Nazis) and Marxist materialism(think Soviets and Mao). Its last iteration has been under the banners of  global corporate capitalism and feminist gender ideology. We are experiencing its death rattle. That is all for the good.
However their weeping and gnashing of teeth is getting in the way of a necessary life and death public debate about war and peace for the nation.  Paradoxically their hysteria is drowning out a reasoned argument against the war strategy of President Trump.
  The President is vigorous in his endorsement of the Saudi/Israel alliance against Iranian allies in Yemen and Syria soon to be followed by targeting their allies in Lebanon and Iraq. Saudi Arabia has already cut all relations with a longtime Sunni (and former fellow Wahhabi) ally in Qatar. This because they maintained economic ties with Iran. Our nationalist president is backing an alliance with an Israeli leader prepared to violate the national boundaries of multiple mideast states.  He has made an alliance with a young prince, Muhammed bin Salman,  who has alienated most of his country's  ruling family while financing the most virulent anti nationalist form of Islam in the world today. Israel as a nation with her capitol in Jerusalem is our religious ally to be protected. Israel in this doomed death duet is our drunken friend to be restrained. The Wahhabi brand of salafist and Hanbali Islam is the strategic source of the twin tower attack in America and worldwide terrorism around the world. President Trump is a true patriot who like the many American war dead of the last decade is following the generals and "our allies" into a wrongly configured battlefield, doomed to catastrophe by spiritual blindness.  
    International Diplomacy is organizing protection by assembling the largest possible retinue of friends while  recognizing the reality of necessary enemies. The most important ally we need for peacemaking in Korea is China and in Syria is Russia. In Afghanistan we need Iran, Pakistan, Russia, China and India to help bring an end to the killing.  The Cold War against Marxism is over.  Our old allies from World War Two are eager to establish a new era of international peace and regional respect in which the blood we shed together against the racial empires will not be forgotten. Russia and China  are the allies who gave the most lives to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  We need them again to stabilize their own regions and help stop the Mideast war between Iran and Israel. We are Israel's protector not their muscleman. They are our ally not our State Department. Benjamin Netanyahu has been a formidable and overpowering personality when dealing with Marco Rubio, Chuck Schummer, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and George Bush. He is one more strong man defending his own country when dealing with President Trump. The Israelis have treated the rise of salafism as a welcome conflict destabilizing strong states and preventing  pan-Muslim accord. They are biased and unreliable advisors in formulating American national strategy.   Russia and China are the allies we need to fight the salafist jihadists. We need an alliance of the big powers not the little people encirclements of the Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton schools of perpetual warfare.  To build agreement among the religions, civilizations, and nations we need the masculine memory of military history and the map shaped wisdom of geography. President Trump needs our loyalty as well as our resolute and reasoned arguments against his strategy. Hatred and Hysteria won't do.

I. POPE FRANCS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

POPE FRANCIS TELLS GERMAN BISHOPS TO COME TO AGREEMENT ON INTER-COMMUNION: The German bishops are seriously divided and deeply corrupted. The most important issue that divides them however is not about Protestant spouses at the communion rail. The bishops definitely need to have a talk.  They need an honest behind doors debate to reveal their much more fundamental fissures. There is a large segment of German bishops who accept homosexuality as a form of love and a significant number of priests and bishops who engage in homosexual relations themselves (not pedophilia.) There is a large group who do not believe in angels in general and Satan in particular. Isn't their continued celebration of the Mass a much greater desecration of the Eucharist than someone's Lutheran wife approaching the altar? The Pope is absolutely right not to "make a ruling."  Giving communion to family members of registered Catholics (like consensual clerical sodomy) are widespread practices already in the well heeled German Church. A papal ruling would not stop either. These smokescreen peripheral mercy issues are exactly the issues the "depravity caucus " want to fight on. The German bishops need a much deeper conversation to reveal the corruption desacralizing the German priesthood and episcopacy. Enough with papal pronouncements. Let the German bishops speak to one another as men, face to face and behind close doors, about the heart of the gospel and the apostolic brotherhood which is so fractured in the country of Boniface.  We won't get all the bishops to agree but maybe we will get one Bishop Boniface to name their real differences. Problems cannot be solved if they are not first accurately named.

A welcome nuanced understanding from Crisis magazine - the German bishops must face each other. From the Catholic Thing, a terrific article by Fr. Vavereck that it is the bishops who have been the sources of error for decades and it is the bishops who must clarify and contest each other for the truth. No need for papal proclamations; time for apostolic bishops.

ARCHBISHOP APURON OF GUAM SHOWS UP IN ROME. POPE FRANCIS BLAMED. CARDINAL BURKE NOT MENTIONED: Is this a fair story?  Apuron should have ben barred from saying Mass or presenting himself in any way as a Catholic priest. The failure to give him a just punishment falls on the Judge sent to preside over the case. That is Cardinal Ray Burke, not Pope Francis. Why attack the father instead of the real culprit?  It goes against the "conservative narrative" to find their lavishly bedecked heroine at fault when the black shoed grandfather Pope is at hand for more patriarchy smashing.

THE MASS WILL SAVE THE CULTURE: The power of the ancient rite among young people. Christianity is a culture of life because it is a culture of praise and cultivation - a brilliant article by a Yale graduate student. This young man is swimming deep. It is Christianity expressed in the forms of religious worship, national fatherlands, and families that will cultivate and protect life. Catholic culture has always tried to incorporate these loyalties where they are found when baptizing the different tribes and peoples. Well done!

II. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST

AFGHANISTAN: A soldiers tale. One of the great costs of the war against Trump is he can't really build the big power coalitions (especially with Russia) needed to get us out of Afghanistan and Syria. ...and getting out of those two countries is what we need to do and one major reason he was elected. Taliban and Iran are making agreements. Why?

THE SAUDI-ISRAELI ALLIANCE - A FEW TAKES: From Stratford and from al Jazeera.

THE WAR ON YEMEN: Uncomfortable necessary reports.

IRAN, ISRAEL, AND THE US: Pat Buchanan explains the situation. Bolton, Bibi and Impending War. War with Iran - Can Russia save us from disaster?

REGIME CHANGE FOR IRAN AND A GROUP CALLED MEK: Iranians for Regime Change. Wikipedia description of some crucial history. This group is often cited favorably by anti-Iran politicians. This group favored Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). The idea that they are the liberal hope for democracy to follow a war against Iran which yearns to be free since "a dictatorship took over the country in 1979." Don't tell anyone but the Iranian religious revolution against the westernized Persian emperor (the Shah of Iran) was a pretty popular movement. From Wikipedia:

Mojahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MEK) was founded on 5 September 1965 by six Muslim students who were affiliated with the Freedom Movement of Iran; however in a coup-style ideological transformation, leftist members hijacked the Muslim group and adopted a Marxist platform in 1975.[48] The organization engaged in armed conflict with the Pahlavi dynasty in the 1970s and played an active role in the downfall of the Shah in 1979. They hailed "His Highness Ayatollah Khomeini as a glorious fighter (Mojahed)" and urged all to remain united behind him against plots by royalists and imperialists.

Following the revolution, they participated in March 1979 referendum and strongly supported the Iran hostage crisis, but boycotted the Islamic Republic constitutional referendum in December 1979, being forced to withdraw their candidate for the Iranian presidential election in January 1980 as a result. Furthermore, despite the fact that the organization's top candidate received as much as 531,943 votes in Tehran electoral district and had a few candidates in the run-offs, it was unable to win a single seat in the 1980 Iranian legislative election. Allied with President Abolhassan Banisadr, the group clashed with the ruling Islamic Republican Party while avoiding direct and open criticism of Khomeini until June 1981, when they declared war against the Government of Islamic Republic of Iran and initiated a number of bombings and assassinations targeting the clerical leadership.

The organization gained a new life in exile, founding the National Council of Resistance of Iran and continuing to conduct violent attacks in Iran. In 1983, they sided with Saddam Hussein against the Iranian Armed Forces in the Iran–Iraq War, a decision that was viewed as treason by the vast majority of Iranians and which destroyed the MEK's appeal in its homeland. In 1988, a fatwa by Khomeini led to the executions of political prisoners, including MEK members.

The group says it renounced violence in 2001. However, the MEK has been accused by numerous commentators of being financed, trained, and armed by Israel to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists and educators.

III. RUSSIA - PAST AND PRESENT

MARXISM - A WESTERN PROJECT THAT FAILED: From Rusty Reno in First Things quoting John Gray’s little book Liberalism:

“The Soviet collapse and the Chinese project of market reform do not, as contemporary classical liberal thinkers and I myself once supposed, augur the global spread of Western-style civil societies: they exemplify the global reach of market institutions—a very different matter.” Far from the triumph of liberalism, the end of communism suggests its relative decline. “The ruin of Soviet Marxism was, after all, the failure of a universalist Western ideology, of a species of the Enlightenment project; it was not the end, but the resumption of history, in forms as little likely to be liberal as they are to be ever again Marxist.” The liberalism that participates in end-of-history, deliverance-of-reason, and state-of-nature universalism is a close cousin of Marxism. John Rawls, like Karl Marx, dreamed of the end of politics, which is another way of saying the end of history. Karl Marx, of course, envisioned an implausible withering away of the state in a socialist utopia, but Rawls and other liberal theorists live in the same mental world. In the Rawlsian scheme, we will come up with the procedural rules of justice that will be final and complete, a liberal utopia that keeps at bay the public contestations of religious and other substantive views of human fulfillment. Gray is right. The failure of communism does not mean the triumph of the modern, secular West. Marxism itself is a pure product of the West, an entirely modern secular project, which is why the terrible crimes of communism leave most Western intellectuals untroubled, and Marxism retains its allure. Marxism’s failure—which is very real—is a failure of secular modernity in the West.

Mr. Reno is today's most dynamic voice at First Things. There is no religious political understanding so urgent as understanding that the tradition we seek to defend is not the Modern West but Christianity and the nations. It is the key to making sense of Pope Francis, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and President Trump. Many prominent writers at First Things seem to resent these nationalist male leaders. May Mr. Reno move beyond the Republican party neocon stable to find many more voices representing the civilizations, religions and nations which constitute the international order.

DID ANY GOOD COME FROM COMMUNISM? The Communist ideology was more successful than Catholic "social teaching" in organizing states capable of militarily defeating the two great racial empires of Nazi Germany and Shinto Japan in WWII. The Communist role in those military victories protecting the national homelands of Russia, China, Korea, and Vietnam allowed the murderous ideology another fifty years of cultural hegemony over religion and nationalism. Marxism was not an opponent of the West. It is an opponent of religion, patria, and familia. But it allowed the defense of patria and thus survived long past its expiration date. It is the epitome of the Enlightenment, materialist Science and the godless West. It was a formidable foe and it defeated some formidable foes.

ANGELA STENT SPEECH ON RUSSIA: She is a serious student of Russia. She is a liberal, secular, Western apologist but she knows history. A woman we should learn from. She is the wife of the most important scholar on energy in America - Daniel Yergin. This audio is from an important national security scholarly initiative at the University of Texas.

ARMENIA HAS A VELVET REVOLUTION: Their Russian neighbors don't intervene.

VE DAY - MAY 9 IN RUSSIA. NETANYAHU IS THERE FOR THE CELEBRATION: World War Two is not fake news. It really happened and it was in all the newspapers. The greatest ally for the US in the defeat of Nazi Germany was the Soviet Union. They lost over 20 million people in the war. Three of every four German soldiers killed in the war were killed by the Red Army. The war in Russia came to be known as the Great Patriotic War as love for the homeland more than working class solidarity was the banner under which the country fought. Benjamin Netanyahu is historically literate enough to share this day with President Putin. National statesmen represent their nation to other nations in changing seas of accord and conflict. The great task of religious statesmen is to interpret the world's map of religions, civilizations, and countries informed by a historical memory aware of God's Providence and the ultimate fraternal destiny of the nations. Mr Netanyahu is an honest secularized leader representing Israel. That will not be enough to solve the present crisis. Russia's Putin may be the man to bring a larger more theocentric understanding which will include Shiite Persian Iran as a nation deserving respect and a promise of mutual peace.

IV. CULTURE OF LIFE, CULTURE OF PROTECTION

IN GOD WE TRUST IN MINNESOTA: We strongly favor efforts to reintroduce acts of prayer and piety toward God and nation in our public life. This bill has it just right and thus the opposition from the usual subjects.

CHILDREN MERCY AND G.K. CHESTERTON: “For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”

TOXIC RESTRICTIVE MASCULINITY: Texan academics have a plan to rescue us.

MYANMAR KILLING FIELDS: A PBS Frontline documentary A better religious-historical explanation - AOA Map on Monday: Burma

V. AMERICAN POLITICS

REST IN PEACE OR EXIT IN BITTERNESS: John McCain has fired one last salvo at President Trump in his disturbingly pathological war against the President. The public hatred for Donald Trump who broke up the bipartisan ruling elite should never be described as extreme partisanship. This is quite beyond party allegiances and the role of McCain in giving wings to the "Russian dossier" is proof that something more sinister was at play here.  John McCain has been among the worse of creatures  in the Life of the Swamp.  Hatred knows no party. He has been an organizer of hate masquerading as patriotism for three decades. He had a peculiar role with the Clintons and Ted Kennedy in the old establishment.  McCain played the warrior statesman, Kennedy was the Lion of the Senate and Hillary Clinton was to become the most qualified candidate ever to run for Presidency. Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump put an end to that charade as outsider presidents. The curtain falls on the post Cold war baby boomer era of decadence. We will see if McCain's burial has any hint of the religious reflections which should accompany the passing of a human soul. At this time it is being organized as a sequel to recent PBS specials which lionized Mr. McCain as a saintly maverick and trivialized Mr. Trump as a graceless loudmouth.

THE CHRISTIAN CASE AGAINST GINA HASPEL AS HEAD OF THE CIA: John Kiriakou spent twenty months in prison for revealing the CIA waterboard interrogation policy. His argument here is more than a brief against Haspel. It is formulating a realistic real world scenario that confronts a Christian with drawing lines or refusing to participate in the world of terrorists, torture and interrogation.

SCIENCE, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND EPA CHIEF SCOTT PRUITT: Pruitt is fighting the big war. If he is pulled down for personal excesses it will delay the much needed national debate about the nature of science, creation, man, and the environment.