by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch
THE WEEKLY BRIEF
GOD AND GUNS. COWARDICE AND COURAGE, MALE SOCIALIZATION AND A WELL REGULATED MILITIA
One brand of terrorist yells "God is great" and kills as many Americans as possible. Another more homegrown killer hasn't thought of God for years. He is not inflamed by the volcanic mountain of Islam but strikes from a colder more desolate place. They are two faces of the Evil One who has been a Murderer and a Liar from the beginning. The liar wears many disguises but the murder of innocents has always been his signature DNA. He will not be gone until the final expulsion. Until then we must organize ourselves in the spiritual and social formations which foil his deluded hitmen and best protect those we love from his evil.
As our Christian nation returns to protection, prayer, and God, we will order the public life of men once again by patriotic love. Our young people will begin their school day with the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord's Prayer. Not every individual is a Christian or a patriot but the communal acts of Christian and American piety are essential to fostering our social identity as Americans. Young males especially need to know which protective group they belong to and what it is that they are protecting. A renewed America will provide multiple paths of socialization for young men to work as brothers and fellow citizens. The Christian civic tradition was shaped by fraternities of men at work and prayer. The monks baptized the warrior tribes of Europe. We must enact a similar social approach to modernity's barbarians--rootless young males. In practical life this face to face integration occurs in young male associations organized by a local congregation, parish, police department or city. The Christian pattern of male love is as brothers under a common Father. It is the foundational pattern of the apostles, the knights of the roundtable, the founding fathers taking their sacred oath and State militias organizing gun adept local citizens. This form of brotherly love has been actively negated in American culture because it "excludes females" and cannot tolerate incest. The disappearance of the all male group has been a social disaster for our schools, our police forces, our military and our young men. It was a most naive idea that females could enter all male structures of authority like the priesthood, military officer schools, fire stations and combat units without fundamentally altering their social character. Something profound was lost and noone batted an eye. Those shattering policies in fact were early instances of the confused transgender thinking that each day reveals itself as more and more ludicrous. The shared male duty and identity of social protectors is the social glue of a democratic culture and the original meaning of being political or being a citizen. To the modern mind, cross wired by the feminist implant, it seems a strange notion that "politics" and "militia" are positive words signifying communal protective duty and matured masculine identity. Look back at the gender of soldier and police deaths in the US for the last 200 years. Fortunately for all of us, that masculine notion seemed not so strange to them.
The socialization and maturation of young males is not possible if there are no courageous adult male models to socialize them. If the adult males become too soft, too domesticated and too feminized then in times of danger they will not perform. They will be losers when winning means saving lives. Training programs for police and soldiers which aggressively integrate females and emphasize more and more female conciliation skills will produce officers that cannot and will not lethally confront the enemy in times of danger. It is good to have a few policewomen. It is a disaster to integrate their necessary peculiar roles into the fabric of the protective force. A police force built on individual personalities whose prime directive is a desire to end the day safely at home and end one's "career" safely inside a pension plan will not do well in times of danger. Their tendency toward disruptive young males will be to turn away from engagement. In the face of armed shooters, they will take cover and wait for help.
The purpose of regulatory gun laws should be to take guns out of the hands of predators and the emotionally unbalanced while training the protectors to become more adept. Every law or social custom that enhances that distinction is to be encouraged. Our goal is to arm as many communal protectors as possible. The goal is not to maximize the shooting power of atomized individuals. Gun regulation which arms the protectors must include mechanisms to disarm those men who for moral or psychological reasons should not own arms. If younger males(18-25) are required to meet more stringent requirements to carry early--great. Training them is a good way for younger men to be integrated in the social bond of protective citizenship. The right to keep and bear arms is deeply entwined with the duty to know how to use arms well. The life of the group depends on the competence and number of social protectors. That is why state militia duty was required of all adult male citizens. What if all male gun owners reported for militia training one evening or day every six months to a city or county center? The purpose would be to meet and bond as fellow citizens, practice some firearm or martial art skill, introduce opportunities for further training, and provide a mechanism to continually evaluate the psychological maturity of brother gun owners. You don't have to register your guns--you have to report for citizen duty. A secondary benefit for countries with universal male conscription is the preventive information learned by psychological screening of all male citizens. Local gun owner/militia programs would serve a similar function. They would also help remedy the recently discovered problem that we don't have enough firearm trained teachers to act as school protectors.
I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
The Pope and China
GEORGE WEIGEL ON THE FAILURE OF OSTPOLITIK THEN AND NOW: At AOA some agree with his harsh evaluation of Pope Francis. Our paragraph below is harsh on Weigel.
Here is Weigel argument at Foreign Policy.
ONE AOA VIEW: The long military, religious and diplomatic battle against the bloody scientific atheism of the Soviet Union, Communist China and Communist revolutions around the world cannot be reduced to a cartoon story of brave conservatives "standing up" to the Commies while weak liberals were caving at every front and would have lost both country and church had their appeasement prevailed. There was treason and treachery for sure. A lot of Cold War history found atheist Communists posing as good-hearted Church or government liberals. There were real spies and traitors(as many in "resisting" Poland as the "compliant" Vatican!) Millions were killed. But there was also effective and honest diplomacy as both Communists and Christians saw nuclear clouds that might obscure their arguments on spaceship earth. Conservatives opposed detente with Russia and the opening to China by Nixon and Kissinger. It was "weak Jimmy Carter" who opened up the Muslim underbelly of the Soviets where the Red Army was finally defeated on a field of battle. The truth is if there had been no Carter or Nixon, there could be no Reagan. The Vatican diplomatic corps played their role as well. And if the truth be told so did the the Polish military/communist government. Pope John Paul kept Cardinal Casoroli as his chief diplomat with very good effect and for very good reasons. He was not being duplicitous. Mr Weigel treats that reality as a clever ploy because it doesn't fit his own idea of the heroes who defeated Communism: American arms and Ronald Reagan, Free enterprise and Margaret Thatcher, individual rights and the Polish Pope. All played a role for sure but the role of communal religious and national identities and armed Muslims were much more essential than the ideologues of "liberal Western democracy" seem to understand. Mr Weigel (like his Jewish neoconservative counterpart William Kristol) has become a cranky (and still insufferably pompous) caricature of "the public intellectual." The American Catholic Republican fantasy world of global capitalism, democracy and western values has come crashing down in a radically reconfigured world. "Realities are more important than ideas," says Bergoglio. Which man is dealing with the world as it really is and which is lost in an inadequate past paradigm? Two civilizational nations are emerging from the failure of atheist communism: Orthodox Russia and Confucian China. These new realities are being newly engaged by two elected actors whom Mr. Weigel has never understood-President Donald Trump of the American nation and Pope Jorge Bergoglio of the global Catholic Church.
CHINA LOOKS FOR A NEW NATIONAL PURPOSE: From China and the Vatican -
The times they are a changing by Francesco Sisci.
"This last principle (ed:of Pope Francis) resembles Confucianism as recovered by President Hu Jintao with his harmonious society (hexie shehui). The idea of harmonious society, in fact, in China is a fundamental step to overcome the Marxist principle of class struggle. It seeks a social peace to eliminate or minimize social conflicts and clashes. Class struggle was not really the instrument by which the Communist Party had come to power, stirring the hatred of the oppressed against the oppressors as the philosopher of Trier postulated. The Communist Party came to power on nationalist positions: spreading the narrative of itself as the true anti-Japanese and anti-imperialist fighter in the civil war against Tokyo, which had been invading China since 1937. Class struggle became Mao’s governing tool once the party came to power after 1949."
The Harmonious Society proposed by President Hu Jintao (2002-2012) was marked by his
8 Honors and 8 Shames. He published these in 2006 as a "new moral yardstick to measure the work, conduct and attitude of Communist Party officials." The XINHUA NEWS AGENCY English translation:
- Love the country; do it no harm. 以热爱祖国为荣 以危害祖国为耻
- Serve the people; never betray them. 以服务人民为荣 以背离人民为耻
- Follow science; discard ignorance. 以崇尚科学为荣 以愚昧无知为耻
- Be diligent; not indolent. 以辛勤劳动为荣 以好逸恶劳为耻
- Be united, help each other; make no gains at others' expense. 以团结互助为荣 以损人利己为耻
- Be honest and trustworthy; do not sacrifice ethics for profit. 以诚实守信为荣 以见利忘义为耻
- Be disciplined and law-abiding; not chaotic and lawless. 以遵纪守法为荣 以违法乱纪为耻
- Live plainly, work hard; do not wallow in luxuries and pleasures. 以艰苦奋斗为荣 以骄奢淫逸为耻
ROBERT MOYNIHAN ON THE POPE AND HIS CHINA DREAM: ...an insightful Vatican correspondent recounts an experience in Rome:
"A few months ago, I was standing by La Vittoria restaurant on the via delle Fornaci in Rome following a dinner with friends. It was a quiet, warm summer evening, about 10 p.m., already dark. An Italian man whom I knew came walking briskly down the street. He is an internationally respected writer on geopolitical affairs. I stopped him, greeted him, and asked him what he was working on at the moment. "China!" he said. His hair was disheveled and standing almost on end in different places.
"China?" I said. "Yes! The Pope and his advisors would like to make a breakthrough in China! It's their #1 priority. Nothing else is even remotely as important to them." "Ah!" I replied, mentally rifling though a series of other matters of concern in mid-2017: the Church's liturgy, the dubia... the bloody conflicts in Libya and Syria and the consequent massive immigration into Europe... the Vatican's opaque finances... the tragic conflict in Ukraine... the post-Christian West's seemingly Gnostic longing for, and embrace of, what will transcend man and perhaps dominate man, the "transhuman," the "superhuman"... "Ok," I said. "Interesting. So, what is the vision?"
"Simple!" my friend replied. "The people of China, so hard-working, so oriented toward becoming successful, in their hundreds of millions, are nevertheless, of course, souls, souls with a hunger for the divine, for the eternal, for God..." He stopped and pointed toward the Apostolic Palace in the distance, above the colonnade. "And that is something about which the Church..." (he shook his finger at the Vatican palaces) "knows very much, for two millennia now. And the Chinese government, despite its best efforts, does not, and cannot, fully understand this hunger. "And so we have these two great powers, one secular, one spiritual. And the Pope is persuaded that if the Chinese government gives the Church an opening to function in China, something extraordinary will happen." "Like what?" I asked.
"Mass conversions," the excited writer said to me. "By the millions. When the Church presents Jesus Christ to the Chinese people, when the sacraments are celebrated in churches in every part of the country, the people will respond because they are spiritually thirsty, spiritually starving. What the Church offers has been systematically excluded from every aspect of Chinese life, which was traditionally rooted in a reverent Confucianism, which respected elders and nature's laws. All that was uprooted in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. But the desire for something more remains, for it is a human desire, intrinsic to our nature. And for this reason, the Pope thinks the Chinese people will be fascinated by the Church and the Christian message, and ultimately, by Jesus Christ. And he believes there may well be, if there is an opening, perhaps 100 million Catholics in China in 10 years, perhaps 200 million in 20 years. Making China the largest Catholic country by number of believers in the world. And that would have extraordinary consequences."
"But the Chinese government..." I said. "Would the government ever allow such a thing?" "Good question," he said. "No one knows the answer. But the bet is that the situation will become uncontrollable. The longing for the faith, for the transcendent, will become a cultural phenomenon, an explosion of spiritual force. And the government will be unable to take repressive measures because the longing will be too widespread, and open repression too negative for the country's global image. So the conversions will come, and they will be massive." And he summed up: "But one thing is quite clear: this Pope is the first 'post-Western' Pope. He sees far beyond the old boundaries of what we called Christendom." We talked a while longer, and then parted. But I did not forget the conversation.
HOMOSEXUALITY IN VATICAN INCREASING: The explosion occurred under Pope Benedict who could not stop it. The impure priesthood is the most important internal moral problem in the Catholic Church. Desacralization, careerism and the perversion of masculine character fed and covered up the sexual abuse epidemic. Pope Francis is temperamentally more suited to deal with this than Pope Benedict. But he hasn't yet. After the Synod on Youth the Church would benefit from a Synod on Patriarchy, Fraternity, and the Priesthood. The German and French bishops need to be schooled by the Poles and Africans. That might give the straight American bishops the courage to call out and punish the huge homosexual subculture in their midst. From
Lifesite and Edward Pentin reporting.
SAINT JOSEPH:
Terror of demons, the father-protector, icon of the fatherhood of God.
II. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST
PBS (THEIR BEST ARGUMENT FOR FUNDING) ON IRAN AND SAUDI ARABIA:
An incredibly well done history of the Saudi Arabia-Iran conflict takes religion very seriously. A series of excellent interviews helps us all understand the people and area better. Hopefully Fox and CNN "journalists" will watch and learn as well. Frontline is not quite making the same argument we do at AOA --that the Wahhabi salafists of Saudi Arabia are the real enemy in the war on Terror. They explain the history though much better than we have. We would say their historical reporting leads to
our conclusions about strategy.
RUSSIA, IRAN, AND TURKEY:
Is the US uniting them in Syria?
HOW MUHAMMED BIN SALMAN KEEPS THE WAHHABI CLERICS HAPPY AT HOME: By killing Shiites abroad.
Bruce Reidel. This is not simply "sectarian violence". This is the murderous ideology of Salafist Sunnis who rule Mecca and Medina. The
Hanbali law tradition of the salafists does not rule most of the Islamic umma. The continued authority of the Saudi royal family has come from the guns and oil alliance with the US now being extended to Israel as well. Calling the war between Salafist Sunnis and Shiite Muslims "sectarian conflict" is like calling the war of the KKK against blacks "interracial violence". There are two sides in the fight but one side really is a lot worse than the other.
PAKISTAN GUARD COMES TO SAUDI ARABIA: They say they wish no role in Yemen (Shiites in Pakistan remain very opposed to that religious cleansing against Shiite Houthis). Pakistan made assurances to Qatar and Iran that troops would not be used in any way against their countries.
This is simply more protection for Muhammed bin Salman. He needs it.
SAUDI ARABIA AND UAE LEFT IN SHRINKING GULF ALLIANCE AFTER TAKE OVER OF QATAR FAILS: Anyone notice that
Saudi Arabia and UAE were 2 of only 3 countries in world who recognized the Taliban just before 9/11? They are the lynchpins of the shrinking Sunni Wahhabi alliance that President Trump celebrated in his May 2017 visit. The only other country who recognized the Taliban was Pakistan. They shielded Osama bin Ladin after the destruction of the Taliban base in Afghanistan months after 911. They made our task in Afghanistan impossible. Pakistan is no longer being treated as an ally. That was a long needed correction initiated by President Obama which President Trump accelerated.
The very similar change needed in the Mideast is for the US to acknowledge the Saudis have played our country through the Bushes, the Clintons, the John McCains and the John Brennans for two decades. That would be a true nationalist insight. It would be a real discovery of how foreign influences dictated a foreign policy which was not in our national interest. It would be a swamp drainer. It would be a new beginning in an America First strategy in foreign policy to expose and eliminate the epicenter of the Salafist ideology that gave us 9/11, al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram and the ongoing disaster in Somalia. Muhammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is more and more isolated as he moves closer to the throne. This is no time to allow his anti-Iranian, anti-Shiite ideology to govern our strategy. Even his last Muslim ally--the UAE is shaky.
The UAE are not as Salafist as the Saudis. They are a collection of Emirates with very different individual cultures. The UAE and Saudis are now backing different military leaders in Yemen.
YEMEN:
Yemen, starving Yemen. The support of the US for this blatant religious purging just might be more serious than Russians confusing us on Facebook. If you want confusion, ask if Americans should really believe that every Shiite call to arms is an Iranian takeover of the Mideast. Pakistan and Qatar are very dedicated Sunni Muslim countries. But they refuse to support the population bombing of Shiite Houthis. Why does the US?
HOW IRANIANS LOOK AT US-IRAN HISTORY:
A history primer by Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a Middle East security and nuclear policy specialist at Princeton University and a former spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiators. Someone may object. But you are presenting the Iranian viewpoint! Yes indeed. That's the point.
III. CULTURE OF LIFE, CULTURE OF PROTECTION
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN - YOU CANT HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER:
By Douglas Johnson.
REPENTANCE AND REPARATION - AMNESTY AND ABORTION:
The language and actions of a religious nation.
MASS MURDER MOTIVES AND MORAL DISINTEGRATION:
By Pat Buchanan. The fruit of secular liberalism is the autonomous individual. He can be a monster. Return to God and meaning
by John Horvat.
PROTECT OUR SCHOOLS LIKE WE PROTECT JEWELRY STORES:
The Hispanic coordinator for the Trump campaign hits it on the head. Fox News should have more Americans like Steve Cortes instead of white conservatives from Canada and Australia (what we used to call the white Dominions of the English speaking world).
ABORTION IN THE US: A man slaps a woman; A woman destroys a man's reputation; A woman kills her child. Where do these events register on your moral outrage scale? In 2014, 652,639 legally induced abortions were reported to CDC from 49 reporting areas. The abortion rate for 2014 was 12.1 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years, and the abortion ratio was 186 abortions per 1,000 live births [CDC]. Every sixth pregnancy is TERMINATED.
PRESIDENT TRUMP ON THE FLORIDA HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTING:
In these moments of heartache and darkness, we hold on to God’s word in Scripture, I have heard your prayer and seen your tears, I will heal you. We trust in that promise and we hold fast to our fellow Americans in their time of sorrow. I want to speak now directly to America’s children, especially those who feel lost, alone, confused or even scared. I want you to know that you are never alone and you never will be. You have people who care about you, who love you and who will do anything at all to protect you. If you need help, turn to a teacher, a family member, a local police officer or a faith leader. Answer hate with love. Answer cruelty with kindness. We must also work together to create a culture in our country that embraces the dignity of life that creates deep and meaningful human connections and that turns classmates and colleagues into friends and neighbors. ...In times of tragedy, the bonds that sustain us are those of family, faith, community and country. These bonds are stronger than the forces of hatred and evil. And these bonds grow even stronger in the hours of our greatest need, and so always, but especially today, let us hold our loved ones close. Let us pray for healing and for peace and let us come together as one nation to wipe away the tears and strive for a much better tomorrow. Thank you and God bless you all.
PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION: WHY THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION IS GOING TO BE OVERTURNED SOONER NOT LATER: "The idea of
preference falsification was put forth by the social scientist Timur Kuran in his book
Private Truth, Public Lies as part of his theory of how people's stated preferences are responsive to social influences. It laid the foundation for his theory of why unanticipated revolutions can occur" (WIKIPEDIA). What seems to be everyone's accepted norm is suddenly overthrown--- like the fall from within of Communism.
This is an important notion in understanding how to combat the increasingly bizarre demands of the Sexual Left. Most people really do think there are two sexes; that mothers should protect their children not kill them; and that conjugal love is intended for a monogamous heterosexual couple not two brothers. They believe God's name should be praised not taken in vain. Thy believe we should salute the flag not burn it. They believe prayer and fasting is the path to the Spiritual, not drugs. They believe many protective and work groups should be like a pro-football locker room - for men only. They believe the female body should be covered in public not stripped for viewing pleasures. Many people have sinned against these norms and too many have sinned often. Yet even the violators recognize the norms.
America will return to these norms because the consensus against them is now held together only by fear of transgressing social opinion. The sexual revolution is over; the wages of sin have come due. One voice, then two, then an avalanche. False ideas like Communism and Feminism which were once the socially required
preferred falsehood fall very fast when they finally lose the protection of social shaming. It took 50 years to get some very weird practices sanctioned. It won't take that long for a massive return to order, common sense, and traditional norms. Sexual inversion rituals are meant as party themes for an evening of Mardi Gras not a half century of cultural practice. Just as the madness of the
Chinese Cultural Revolution was suddenly and definitively reversed, the American sexual revolution will be annulled by grownups of several generations who have suffered its ravages.
WHY JUDAISM AND THEN CHRISTIANITY REJECTED HOMOSEXUALITY:
By Dennis Prager.
FROM THE SIN THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME TO THE VICE THAT CANNOT SHUT ITS MOUTH:
"There are always going to be people out there who won’t like you or will be resistant to you speaking your mind or being true to you are. But they really don’t matter. It’s about whether you like yourself. If you like yourself, nobody else matters. If you love yourself you are living your very best life. And baby, right now I am living my very best life.”
Adam Rippon, American Olympian figure skater explaining his "openly gay" identity, his rejection of the elected Vice President Pence as a representative of the US, and his overall philosophy of life.
IV. AROUND THE WORLD R&G ROUND UP
TWO REFLECTIONS ON DAWSON BY BRAD BIRZER AT IMAGINATIVE CONSERVATIVE: On the Age of Gods, Natural Law:
CHRISTOPHER DAWSON ON THE AGE OF THE GODS: In the earliest awareness men had of their world, they worshipped the divine—whatever that divine might be. These various forms of worship, Dawson believed, served as the basis of all human culture(s). No Lockean, Dawson argued that men came together because of their mutual interest in defending what they each agreed was sacred, rather than as a compact in which each man sought to protect his own interests against the community. As Dawson viewed it, man’s first step in development was the formation of community based on the interests of the community and the community’s divine, not some recognition of individualism. As the title of Dawson’s first book, The Age of the Gods, suggests, this was an age of the divine. From the worship of the divine, each people developed their own distinctive way of life.
CHRISTOPHER DAWSON ON 500 BC -THE HUMANIST NATURAL LAW REVOLUTION: The second greatest moment in human history, Dawson argued, arrived around 500 BC throughout the entire civilized world—in the Mediterranean, in India, and in China. If the first great movement was the Age of the Gods, the second great movement was an age of the “humane” or of “humanism,” as Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Greek embraced a vision of what would become a common humanity that transcends nations, races, and religions. Heraclitus, ...in seeking an answer to the cycles of nature and the human person, he came to believe that all things found themselves rooted in a divine (if very pantheistic) element, Fire, or, in Greek, Logos. The Logos, while not quite god, represented the mind of the universe, and it endowed all persons, everywhere, with Reason...
NEEDED FOR VENEZUELA: A Christian nationalist to restore order. The Christian nations of South and Central America have suffered under decades of different leaders and parties dedicated to imported forms of Marxism and feminist careerism. It is time to return to the Christian roots of their culture. A Christian Bolivar must emerge.
WHY THE POLES WANT THE HOLOCAUST TOLD TRUTHFULLY: From Crisis
by John Hittinger. "Contempt for law, for man, and for God" led to WWII according to the Polish Pope John Paul II. The new law forbidding the assignment of blame for death camps to "the Polish nation or Polish State" in Poland was a source of great criticism by Western individualists. The American Secretary of State saw the issue as an assault on free speech. The Poles saw it as a defense of national honor. We had the same debate in America before NFL football games when the national anthem was played. The President did not see that as a free speech issue.
POLISH CHURCH AND HER CRITICS:
A report.
WHO IS CHRISTOPHER STEELE - IS IT FOREIGN MEDDLING WHEN ITS A BRIT? Looking at the Dossier as an American. The huge role of John McCain and his foundation's paid staff in the anti Trump movement becomes clearer as
his aide David Kramer takes the fifth. The movement against the elected President had many centers: 1) Career intelligence and FBI government officials who believed Trump was a deranged threat to the Republic. 2) Media corporations and journalists sincerely sharing the same hysterical worldview, 3) Democratic Party operatives trying to win an election and 4) the Republican/neoconservative foreign policy establishment
who had already lost their status in a humiliating upheaval and soon would lose their foreign policy strategy if President Trump did not pursue the anti Syria, anti Russian narrative they favored.
THE COMPETING POWERS ARGUMENT OF WHY AMERICA SHOULD FEAR CHINA:
Hal Brands of SAIS at Johns Hopkins makes an argument why the US should fear the China Century. His underlying model is the Social Darwinism of foreign policy "realism." There is no doubt China is becoming the dominant power in Asia. Should the US fight that or accept the reality of regional civilization dominant powers? What if China's great national purpose was to unite with Christianity and bring harmony to Asia and the globe? That is the
Pope Francis' gamble. At AOA, we do not believe war is inevitable with the Middle Kingdom unless we accept the Darwinian type of foreign policy realism that leads to perpetual war and endless encirclements of large regional powers. We propose a different kind of Christian Realism:
A new paradigm with China.
