Map on Monday: PHILIPPINES

A Map of the Philippines and an image of the nation's president, Rodrigo Duterte

Colonized and evangelized by the Spanish Empire, the Philippines declared independence from Spain on June 12, 1898. Spain, at war with the United States at the time, did not recognize its independence and ceded the Philippines to the United States the following spring. Almost one year to the day it declared independence from Spain, the Philippine Republic declared war on the United States. Ironically it was the anniversary of America's declaration of independence in 1902 that the war officially ended in a Philippine defeat. The brown-colored Catholic population, which lost around 200,000 men, women, and children in the war, faced harsh treatment by Protestant-majority, white America. Following the Japanese occupation of the country during World War II, the United States recognized the independence of the Philippines in 1946.

Today with a population of one hundred million people across seven thousand islands, the Philippines is the seventh most-populous nation in Asia and the twelfth most-populous nation in the world. Of its one hundred million citizens, around 80% are Catholic, 9% are Protestant, and 11% are Sunni Muslim. The green areas in the map to the right represents the majority Muslim regions of Mindanao, Palawan, and the Sulu Archipelago. Called the Moro (from the Spanish for Moors), Sunni Muslims in the Philippines seek to establish an independent province called Bangsamoro (roughly translated as the Nation of the Moors).

The scattered islands which comprise the nation make for a diversity of ethnic groups and languages. While Filipino and English are the nation's two official languages, the Philippines recognizes nineteen regional languages. Of its many ethnic groups, 75% of the nation's population are either Tagalog (28.1%), Cebuano (13.1%), Ilocano (9%), Bisaya (7.6%), Ilonggo (7.5%), Bicolano (6 %), or Waray (3.4%).

Situated along the Ring of Fire, the Philippines must contend with volcanic and seismic activity. Around twenty earthquakes - most too weak to feel - occur in the Philippines daily. The activity resulting from the Ring of Fire, however, has left the Philippines with gold deposits second in the world only to those of South Africa. The island nation is also rich in copper, nickel, chromite, and zinc. In addition to this, the Philippines is the second largest producer of geo-thermal power in the world, supplying 18% of the country's energy.

 Crops grown by terrace farming in the steep mountainous regions of northern Philippines

In 2016, Rodrigo Duterte, the law-and-order mayor of Davao City, was elected president of the Philippines on the campaign promise of fighting drug dealing.

Duterte is a tough-talking, no-nonsense nationalist who fits in well with the rise of strong male leaders across much of the globe.

Duterte was sexually abused by the Jesuit, Fr. Mark Falvey (who with his brother raped boys in California during the 60s and 70s. Between the two, the Church in Los Angeles and Sacramento has paid millions in settlement claims). He has had a stormy relationship with the Philippine hierarchy and advocates a much more punitive approach to justice than the bishops.

Since his election as president, Duterte has cracked down on drug dealing and reoriented itself away from the United States, seeking closer ties with China and a peaceful resolution to their territorial dispute in the South China Sea.


Stratfor Video on the Geographic Challenges for the Philippines

Stratfor - short for Strategic Forecasting, Inc. - is a private global intelligence company that offers geopolitical insight into the interplay of nations. Stratfor has developed an excellent series of short (~2-4 minute) videos which provide the viewer with a specific nation, along with its basic history, geography, culture, and geopolitical allies and adversaries. In the following video, they present the geographic challenges facing the Philippines. Pope Francis' January 2014 trip to the Philippines drew together a record-setting estimated 6-7 million Catholics for Mass.

This article originally appeared on Anthropology of Accord on January 19, 2015.

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, October 29

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 

THE POPE’S NEW CARDINALS - AN ANALYSIS: From Fr. de Souza at NCRegister.

ANTHONY ESOLEN ON THE PERSONALITIES WITHIN THE CHURCH IN A TIME OF BATTLE: Four types.

II. PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

HYPERVENTILATING ABOUT TRUMP: Buchanan on the fake outrage of Hillary et al:

Mr Trump’s refusal to “accept the results of the election” until he sees how the process is conducted “horrified” Mrs Clinton and a host of journalists from networks of every stripe. This was historical amnesia posing as moral outrage. Is not accepting the results of an election really a threat to our proud tradition of “the peaceful transition of power.”  Mr Trump is historically quite similar to Andrew Jackson as an outside candidate. Jackson never accepted the "stolen election of 1824” which brought John Adams to office in a deal with Henry Clay. More recent history is the Bush Gore election in which the “results were not accepted" but contested in court. Was that lawsuit a threat to our institutions?

Maybe everyone so incensed at the audacity of Donald Trump to run for President should “get a grip.” This should start with FOX news moderator Chris Wallace who certainly did the best job of all debate moderators this year. Yet in the end he carried plenty of water for the “community of journalists” in accepting their parameters of appropriate questions for the debate.  It was his follow up question which cast Trump’s answer as a threat to the Republic which set the fire blazing. Wallace’s  major goal was to win acceptance for Fox News as part of the media club. Mission Accomplished.

TRUMP VS. CLINTON: Betting on a long shot. The sexual revolution is the most modern in a long line of revolutions running from the French bloodbath through the Haiti race war and the Soviet slaughter. The Clinton syndicate who started the baby-boomer ascendance in the presidency now hopes to finish off the American sexual cultural revolution. We hope we can learn from the Chinese who eventually put an end to their own national psychosis. A man who knows of revolutions says he would wish no revolution on any nation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn honors the peasants of the Vendee who resisted the French cosmopolitan intellectuals.

A FAVORITE LOCAL WRITER ARGUES THE TRUMP CASE ON THE HILL:
Cain Pence on the flawed but deserving Donald Trump.

The best arguments  for Trump.

Michael Moore tells why Trump will win. [language alert]

III. AROUND THE WORLD R&G ROUND UP

PUTIN, RUSSIA, CHRISTIANITY: From soulless Soviets to Orthodox Russia.

RUSSIA, UKRAINE, AND THE GERMAN EMPIRE: The founder of 20th-century Poland, Roman Dmowski, wrote about the Ukraine after the Treaty of Versailles allowed Poland back on the map as a free nation. His very different perspective seems to validate the Putin policies and question the national independence of Ukraine. All this from a Polish patriot who knows history.

THE PHILIPPINES NATIONALIST PRESIDENT PIVOTS TO CHINA: New characters emerge in Asia who will recognize the dominant power in the South China Sea. President Duterte will not be the last. Duterte’s Flip flop. On the flight home from Japan, God commands Duterte to stop swearing.

CHINA GROUP-THINK: Missing from foreign policy discussions about China, the "nine dashed line," and the Spratley's. Empathy, Curiosity, and Humility.

NATIONALISM EMERGES: An excellent historical excursion of the triumph of nations in the last 100 years by Michael Lind at National Interest.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE - THE REAL 1000-YEAR REICH: A review of a new book by Peter Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire.

Friday BookReview: Conan Doyle's superb depiction of medieval chivalry

[first published June 17, 2014]


                                               

Men such as Dwight Eisenhower and John Wayne were huge fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's pair of novels set in the Hundred Years' War.

The White Company tale of English knights seeking battlefield glory in France is good -- but Sir Nigel is better, covering Nigel Loring's early career as a squire who sets out to perform three heroic labors to win the hand of his fair lady.
                                       

The tales are chock-full of reverence for Mother Church and her holy mysteries... but coupled with a healthy contempt for the stink and corruption of too many of her shepherds.
                           

The bloody fights began in 1337 and ended in 1453: "Locked in one long deadly grapple, great England and gallant France with iron hearts and souls of fire strove and strove for mastery."

The Hundred Years' War should call to mind such things as:

• the use of the 6-foot 'longbow' by the English armies, carrying them to great victories at Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt; 
• the Black Death of the mid-14th century which may have killed more than half of Europe; 
• and the maiden warrior whom Mark Twain considered the greatest creature whom God ever breathed life into, Joan of Arc (she who accomplished the miraculous feat of restoring esprit de corps to the men of France).                             

One reason that Sir Nigel is such a fascinating figure is his humility.

He has a fondness for invoking the Apostle who faced 'dangers in the cities, dangers in the wilderness, and dangers at sea.' For example, Nigel will say: "But by Saint Paul! you have spoken like a man this day." 




UPDATE: This video describes the most common medieval weapons.

CHRISTIAN REALISM: Russell Hittinger on what Dawson would do

[first published April 7, 2016]


by Dr. David Pence


Professor Russell Hittinger writes at The Imaginative Conservative how Christopher Dawson would address the political confusion of our day. He begins by showing how Dawson, more than any other modern Christian thinker, has taken a historical Augustinian approach to explain Christian revelation.  He contrasts this with natural law, metaphysical and philosophical approaches to evangelization. He began by showing the historical approach as the most effective strategy of modern anti-Christians. This was the approach of the great historian of Rome, Edward Gibbon (1737-1794). David Hume (1711-1776) was anti-Christian as well, but he was more a naturalist philosopher.

"David Hume, for example, understood very clearly that historical apologetics can prove to be a more effective weapon than ordinary philosophical discourse. Hume devoted much of his philosophical career to polemics against Christian natural theology—against the possibility of miracles, against the proofs for the existence of God, and against metaphysics in general. Yet, as he read the galleys of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall on his deathbed in 1776, Hume conceded that Gibbon would do more to undermine Christianity than would any of his own work. He saw that there is no better way to turn men’s minds against Christianity than to suggest that it has played either an insignificant or a harmful role in history and culture. Most men care little for metaphysical debate, but they are willing to entertain a new story."

Christian apologetics clung to the mighty guns of philosophical discourse with a few exceptions.

"Cardinal Newman, perhaps, was an exception; he understood that modern debate over religion had shifted from natural theology to historical claims and ideologies, and that with the secularization of Christianity history tends to replace metaphysics as the central paradigm.
Relatively few intellectuals appreciated the fact that "modernism" is something more than a set of heterodox philosophical or theological theses; that the real power of “modernism” consists in its invitation to take a novel view of history; and that it does not so much ask for a consent to carefully worked-out philosophical premises, but calls for a conversion of perspective. Liberation theology, for instance, need not attack directly the traditional (i.e., Augustinian and Thomistic) understanding of the nature of man and society; rather, it employs historical arguments which are intended to demonstrate the historical, cultural, and spiritual obsolescence of the tradition."

  ...there was one Catholic thinker who in this century made a significant contribution to answering the modernist historical polemic—Christopher Dawson. Although there is somewhat of a Dawsonian revival taking place in America these past few years, Dawson is not well-known; he certainly has never enjoyed the notoriety of Chesterton or Maritain.

Born on Columbus Day, 1889, at Hay in Wales, Christopher Dawson was educated at Winchester and at Trinity College, Oxford. After studying economics under Gustave Cassel in Sweden, Dawson returned to Oxford to do post-graduate work in history and sociology. He converted to Catholicism in 1914. His first major work, Progress and Religion (1929), involved “an historical enquiry into the causes and the development of the idea of progress and its relationship to religion.” Dawson’s subsequent work was devoted to two facets of this theme. First, he investigated the general problem of the relationship between religion and culture, focusing upon sociological laws of development. Second, he was interested in the specific relationship between the Christian religion and Western culture. Although Christopher Dawson was recognized by many as the pre-eminent Catholic historian of his time, it should be mentioned that his work was better received outside of Catholic schools. In 1947-1948, he was invited to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh. Then, in 1958, he became the first incumbent of the Stillman Chair of Catholic Studies at Harvard. He was regarded with some suspicion by Catholic educators because he emphasized the paramount importance of historical and cultural studies and warned that a myopic focus upon scholastic philosophy tended to reduce Christianity to a mere set of "ideational products" shorn of historical and cultural flesh. Dawson suggested that unless the curriculum in Catholic schools was expanded to include these other studies, students would be vulnerable to historical apologetics. In The Crisis of Western Education (1961), he outlined the problem and recommended ways to rectify it. Christopher Dawson was viewed as a dangerous innovator. Though, in retrospect, it is ironic that many of the Catholic educators who regarded him in this light in 1960 were later the ones who insisted upon jettisoning scholastic philosophy altogether from the curriculum, later Dawson was often viewed as dangerously "conservative." (How Dawson and other Catholic thinkers prior to Vatican II—like Maritain and Danielou—were "innovators" one year and "reactionaries" the next is a story still to be written.)"

Hittinger has shown how Dawson employed the Augustinian pattern of the Two Cities in explaining historical events and progress. This is the essential necessity for an accurate telling of European history and, indeed, world history. It is not the "West" that underlies the successes of Europe, but Christianity. Most narratives of the "Modern West" are attempts to give a materialist account of the world without the Second City that underlies the civic orders by providing a transcendent culture. Scientism, Marxism, and Social Darwinism were, to Dawson, all attempts to replace Christianity as an organizing synthetic force larger than nations. These failed ideologies have now been appropriated in different ways by nations of the East. Dawson rejected the idea that "Western history died at Stalingrad." Restoring the Christian roots of European historiography would provide the supranational spiritual backdrop needed to formulate a true world history of the nations in dynamic interplay with the City of God.

"It would be a mistake, [Dawson] warned, to “kick away the ladder” of European historiography because nearly the entire world now lives under the influence of European culture and its ideologies. If it is true, as Dawson contended, that these ideologies represent efforts to retain the unity of Christendom on secular terms, then it can be said that Europe has given to the world a broken image of its own Christendom. Europe’s own cultural and historical amnesia is an international problem. The ambition of Western intellectuals to use history, in the first place, to occlude the West’s dependence on its own religious heritage and, in the second place, to hide the fact that the extra-European world now lives under ideologies generated by the West’s own amnesia, is at the very nerve of the problem of world order.
The recovery, therefore, of a sense of Christendom is not some esoteric religious issue. The struggles of international order today are not essentially between Oriental and Occidental, or between First and Third Worlds, but between forces internal to Christendom itself. That two men from the East, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Karol Wojtyla, should grasp this reality more clearly than Western intellectuals would both please and distress Christopher Dawson."

The Hittinger article contains a much larger argument than our selections here.

In our series on Catholic Sociobiology, we highlight the work of Professor Hittinger in formulating a Christian understanding of the polity.

Here is Hittinger on St John XXIII and how the concepts of Order and Law inform his encyclical Pacem in Terris. 

Betting on a long-shot: Fortune favors the bold!

This is no time to run away from an American nationalist who has upended the Republican Party globalists, and now faces the exhausted queen bee of the Democratic Party’s dying hive. The polls have always underestimated his strength and the media (including Fox News) have always undermined him. Mr Trump’s culture of protection really is the best way toward a culture of life. His desire to make allies with Russia, China, and India is the best policy to defeat ISIS and face the real centers of the jihad in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. His policy of a return to a more physically productive economy is the working man’s way out of our massive debt and trade imbalances. His nationalism as a community under God is an antidote to the racial and class divisions stoked by the elderly white lady at the top of Diversity Inc. There is no mistaking Mr Trump for a Ted Cruz moralist-in-chief. But his opposition to political correctness will erect a speaking platform for preachers of the  true Gospel. Let us pray for our country that the Spirit may inspire a new Great Awakening in America to restore our sacral and sexual order.

                                       The best arguments for Mr Trump as President

Michael Moore on Trump -- they love him because of who hates him. Not pretty language, but truth.

CATHOLIC SOCIOBIOLOGY: Religion and Natural History -- a Catholic narrative

[first published April 26, 2016]


by Dr. David Pence



Francis Fukuyama (shown here), in the first of his two-volume work on Political Order, began by weaving the evolutionary history of primates to the development of political states.
                   

E.O. Wilson, the world’s leading 'myrmecologist' (student of ants), is also the father of sociobiology. He, too, has sought  to base the social sciences of history and sociology in the natural sciences of evolutionary biology.

Neither man believes in God. Both are intellectually dismissive of Divine Providence WHO reveals the bond of nature and history.  Both came from backgrounds deeply entwined in Christian belief. Both men are conversationally approachable as teachers and stunning intellectuals in their fields. They are honest prodigious thinkers. But they have lost the transcendent horizon. We attempt their task informed by religion: Natural Selection and Reproductive success: Catholic Culture as the Strategy for Life.

Map on Monday: Ten Most Populous Christian Nations

The above map (click to enlarge) displays the ten most populous Christian nations in the world. Although Hilaire Belloc once quipped that “Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe,” Italy is the only western European nation on this map. Rather, the great majority of the ten most populous Christian nations in the world are found in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Christianity in Ethiopia, for example, has ancient roots that predate the conversion of much of Europe.

What the second map reveals may come as a surprise to many. The purple areas display the nations of the world whose populations are majority Christian. The pink-colored nations are nations with a significant Christian minority. Despite the world's vast cultural diversity, Christianity appears as faith that can be lived equally by Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. Christianity, like mankind, can live and grow in all parts of the world.

Today's maps reaffirm the fact that Christianity is a world religion for all humanity. The Kingdom of God is being established in the interplay of the Universal Church with all its local eucharistic manifestations and the diversity of the nations with all their many tongues. The church cannot be captured by a passing age (the Modern)  nor a fleeting direction (the West). It is the whole human species that the new Adam has come to reincorporate in his Father's Kingdom so we can once again be about our original mission.

This article originally appeared on Anthropology of Accord on October 6, 2014.

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, October 22

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

THE POPE AND THE CARDINALS: It sometimes seems that Pope Francis misreads the cardinals in America, but his flanking actions in racing the hegemony of the West with cardinals from other parts of the world are much more encouraging.

HUNGARY MAKES A STATEMENT: Christian immigrants favored.

THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION AND ITS LEGACY AMONG THE NATIONS: A review by Eamon Duffey of Reformations: The Early Modern World 1450-1650 by Carlos Eire.

II. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST

FIGHTING THE SALAFISTS: The cost in Nigeria - when war produces famine.

DEBUNKING THE SYRIAN NARRATIVE: Assad’s wife is Sunni and much of his army is as well. The opposition is the most "sectarian" force in this war of "the people" against an established state. The "rebels" have been supported by Turkey, the Saudis, and salafist jihadists. The goal is to disestablish a pluralistic government led by an Alawite Shiite. Is there any real doubt what kind of government would replace Assad and what the fate of Christians, Shiites and cooperative Sunnis would be after the rebels’ victory?

III. PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

IF ONLY MEN VOTED: A Trump landslide.

DEMOCRATS AND CATHOLICS:  John Zmirak looks at weird Catholics on the Right and doesn’t like what he sees. An Austin Ruse column. The anti-Catholics and elitist bigots in Democratic Party emails. Archbishop Chaput at Notre Dame delivers a hard-hitting speech to his fellow bishops on Catholic identity and public life. It was heavily laced with his evaluation of Democrats from John Kennedy to Tim Kaine.

TRUMP - HIS WORST SIN AND HIS MOST IMPORTANT INSIGHTS:  In cataloging the sins of Donald Trump, the most grievous of his sins is committing adultery. He has admitted this and bragged about it in public long before he ran for president. Blowing up touching events as "sexual assault," while dismissing adultery as non-consequential if between consenting adults, is a sign of the sexual chaos we live in. Mr Trump should repent; and until the media is given the powers of absolution he is under no obligation to confess to them. If he were ever shot by an aggrieved husband and I was on a jury, I would vote to acquit since it was Trump who committed a capital crime. At the same time I would vote for Trump as president because he is the one public figure among Democrats and Republicans who would build foreign policy on an alliance with Christian Russia. Some Russian experts say we have not been closer to war with Russia since the Cuban missile crisis. This incredible turn of affairs with a country who should be our most effective ally in the war against the demonic jihadists could only happen to a country turned from God. To return to God and realign a Christian national response to jihadists is the most important public issue in the federal election. Reconstituting a Supreme Court respectful of the laws of nature and the limits of the Constitution is a serious second consideration. Mr. Trump is clearly the only candidate who will do either action. All of this with unrepentant crimes of adultery burdening him. See The Playboy and the Feminist.

COURSE CORRECTION IN AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY: The National Interest has been the one foreign policy think tank that has allowed a fair hearing for Mr. Trump’s approach to American nationalism and foreign policy. Here is their editors' overview of the correction needed no matter who is president.

A WAR WITH RUSSIA - HOW CLOSE? Stephen Cohen at Nation magazine has been one of the most consistent critics of the "New Cold War." He sees things getting worse.

IV. R&G ROUND UP

FROM MOSAIC MAGAZINE - A BIBLICAL DEFENSE OF THE NATION:  A brilliant historical article by Yoram Hazony showing the Jewish appreciation for the practicality of nations and the link of personal liberties and national self-determination. He contrasts this with a tendency in Christianity to universalize. This was a criticism of Japanese nationalist intellectuals as well who, in studying Western thought, saw the Catholic Church as a spiritual force which downplayed loyalty to the polity. There certainly has been this tendency among many Christians in the defense of pacifism and several popes in the name of Papal States to argue against the rising nations. Christianity, though, is a maker and defender of nations. The apostles were told to baptize the nations, not eliminate them. There is a Christian response by R.R. Reno on the linked page. Some of our writing on the nation as a biblical and Christian form of love. On America as a Biblical brotherhood. On Calvin: The city and nation as covenants. Yoram Hazony responds to Walter Russell Mead and R.R. Reno who wrote responses to him.

THE DEATH OF A KING: Thailand.

NOBEL PRIZE AND DRUGS: Colombian President and peace prize - an unfavorable review.

DAVID GELERNTER ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: From the Wall Street Journal: "Since when has the American public endorsed affirmative action? Yet it’s a major factor in the lives of every student and many workers. Since when did we decide that men and women are interchangeable in hand-to-hand combat on the front lines? Why do we insist on women in combat but not in the NFL? Because we take football seriously. That’s no joke; it’s the sad truth."

Friday BookReview: HARRY JAFFA

                             

Professor Jaffa with William Buckley in 1984

The towering Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa, who died last year at the age of 96, compared the Lincoln/Douglas debates to an earlier philosophical wrangle:

"After awhile," Jaffa says, "I realized that the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was identical to the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato's Republic. Not similar to it. Identical. It is a question of whether the people make the moral order or the moral order makes the people."

Justice, Thrasymachus argued, possesses no independent or objective standing, finding its only definition in the wishes of the powerful. "Justice," Thrasymachus asserts in the Republic, "is the advantage of the stronger." Socrates objects, insisting that reason can indeed apprehend objective standards of justice.

Socrates believed in objective truth -- unlike Karl Marx who thundered against morality as the great enemy of human well-being! Mr. Jaffa was part of that dwindling band of modern professors who fight back against the fog of relativism.

Stephen Douglas believed we should completely trust popular sovereignty: if the citizens of Kansas or Nebraska vote to accept slavery, so be it. Nonsense! says Jaffa: "Lincoln thought slavery was wrong, and he did not think a vote of the people could make it right."

"Washington spoke of 'an indissoluble union of virtue and happiness,' " Jaffa says. "Aristotle couldn't have put it any better. And when Washington said that, he was telling us that 'the pursuit of happiness' in the Declaration of Independence didn’t mean radical individualism. It meant the pursuit of virtue."


From a 'First Things' tribute to Professor Jaffa's classic volume of 1959:

Harry V. Jaffa has few peers as a student of the American Founding and none as the expositor of the Declaration of Independence and the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln. He first established these credentials with the publication of Crisis of the House Divided ... 

Dismissed by the left as irredeemably unenlightened, and criticized by many on the right as suspiciously egalitarian, Jaffa has responded to both by arguing that the case for constitutional government cannot be understood or sustained without affirming the truths set forth in the preamble to the Declaration ... 

The immediate purpose of Crisis was to refute diverse revisionists who asserted that Lincoln led the nation into an unnecessary civil war. Jaffa identified these scholars’ unexamined historicist premises, by virtue of which they either refused to take seriously Lincoln’s arguments concerning the Declaration’s principles or rejected outright the truths it proclaimed. Jaffa countered with an elegant philosophical and historical exegesis of Lincoln’s thought, beginning with the Lyceum Speech of 1838 and culminating in the celebrated debates with Stephen A. Douglas during the Illinois senatorial campaign of 1858. 

A negotiated settlement of the slavery controversy, Jaffa argued, was no longer possible in the 1850s, not because Lincoln’s rhetoric had removed the ground of compromise, but because proslavery advocates had begun to insist on the rightness of slavery, whence it would follow that Congress had not only the right but the duty to protect their interests. Chief Justice Taney’s error in Dred Scott, Jaffa contended, lay not in recognizing that the Constitution had made certain practical compromises with slavery, which it certainly had, but in insisting that blacks possessed no rights that the white man was bound to respect. Once that proposition got itself embedded in constitutional understanding, the principles of the Declaration would become a nullity, marking the end of the American experiment in self-government. Lincoln merely articulated what was already implicit in the logic of the 1850s: the American people would have to affirm or deny the truth that all men are created equal, but they could not affirm that truth and at the same time agree with Douglas that majority will was the summum bonum of the Constitution. 

By refocusing attention on the importance of natural rights in Lincoln’s thought, Jaffa at once corrected the historical record and sought to reestablish the centrality of the Declaration in the American constitutional order. The Declaration, in Jaffa’s view, is neither an abstract philosophical treatise nor a rhetorical set piece designed to mask or elevate baser motives. It is rather a living testament of political faith, one that in articulating the moral ground for government by consent also limited the powers of governments thereby created. It ratified not only the prescriptive rights of English subjects, but the sovereign right of all men everywhere to secure through government their divinely endowed rights. The Declaration was the summary document par excellence of the Founders' political teaching, but was hardly unique in its sentiment; its antecedents and echoes are to be found in numerous contemporaneous American charters, pamphlets, sermons, and legal commentaries. Redolent of biblical understanding as well as natural theology, the Declaration provides the ordering principle by which the American people became "We the People" of the Constitution. 

In Crisis and in a series of books and articles written in the years since its publication, Jaffa has argued that the crisis of late twentieth-century America, although lacking the immediate intensity of the slavery controversy, is morally analogous to it. Common to both is the rejection of natural rights. Douglas’ statement that he didn’t care whether slavery was voted up or down in the territories, but only whether the sense of the majority was free to work its will, is philosophically indistinguishable, says Jaffa, from arguments advanced today on both the right (e.g., by Robert Bork, William Rehnquist, and Antonin Scalia) and the left (e.g., by defenders of abortion). Jaffa rejects the jurisprudence of the so called "living Constitution," but he understands, in ways that Bork, Rehnquist, and Scalia apparently do not, that simple majoritarianism is no cure for the vice of judicial usurpation. 

In this, he stands as one with John Paul II, who has affirmed that the principles of the Declaration, rightly understood, embody the distilled wisdom of both reason and Revelation on the moral rationale for human government. Once positive law is separated from the moral argument of the Declaration, both men have said, one not only invites tyranny but severs the connection to the divine. 

UPDATE: Every year on the Fourth of July, radio host Hugh Hewitt replays his lengthy interview with Professor Jaffa. 

The Strategic Dilemma for American Foreign Policy: Religious Nations or the Atheist West

[first published March 20, 2014]


by Dr. David Pence

Throughout the world there is an awakening of nations aligning themselves in terms of their religious and cultural heritages into communal bodies.

The Muslims have nations in Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, and the "-stans" of central Asia. The Muslim Arabs have a nation in Egypt, but still flounder elsewhere as the impossible dream of a micro-state of Palestine obfuscates a strategy to form the larger Muslim Arabic State needed to function as a serious nation in the Levant.

Later this spring, India will likely elect a Hindu nationalist as its next Prime Minister.
[Ed note: May 2014 Narendra Modi won a landslide victory]  He is going to stand for parliamentary election in a holy city to show this is no longer the secular Left of the Gandhi clan. Mr Modi is also a strong supporter of Israel].
                                                                 
This cultural nationalist revival has already been experienced in Japan (especially under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe) as well as China. Religion, nations, ethnic ties and men who will fight for them have not been eliminated by entering some new time-zone called 'modernity' or the twentieth-first century.

Mr Abe, pictured in center, during his visit to India earlier this year

                                   
America is not, in her deepest soul, part of any atheist crusade for modernity. We are the continent of territorial religious nations. We are white, brown, black, and yellow; and our soldiers need not defend a European death cult whose men will not fight and whose women will not bear children. In the war of the atheist European superstate against the Christian governments of Nigeria and Uganda, should we support the white atheists in their economic threats against black Christian men who stigmatize rather than sacralize sodomy? We are tied much more deeply to our American brothers through the continent, and the Christians East and South, who fight the nagging hectoring godless Witch of the West. Americans must decide if we are trying to make the nations safe for public worship and private family life, or if we are strengthening international courts to diminish national authorities to elevate individual autonomy for abortion and sodomy. Each strategy would push a different "re-start" button in our relations with Orthodox Russia and Persian Shiite Iran.

Russia, Crimea, and Ukraine

The Russian nation has a Christian soul, baptized by water and confirmed in blood. Both the waters of baptism and the blood of martyrs have sacralized Crimea in the Russian motherland. Crimea is a different communal body than both eastern and western Ukraine. Crimea has returned to Russia. Most American news commentators and senators seem to have no sense of either the historical timelines, nor maps nor religious history, that belie the fable of Crimea and Ukraine as a national community. Liberal scholars who have studied Russian history (e.g., here and here) and conservative journalists (here and here) who respect ethnicity, religion, and nationalism are the voices of reason in this debate as Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly and Democratic Lady-in-Waiting Hillary Clinton emote from the shallow end of the strategic foreign policy pool.    

Crimean citizens overwhelmingly and freely voted to rejoin Russia and assume the older citizenship their grandparents knew. A Russian Christian military won the peninsula 250 years ago from the Crimean Khanate (Turkish-speaking Islamic Tatars who were military superiors to both Moscow and Kiev for several centuries). Sevastopol is a city rich in Russian history and drenched in the blood of Russian soldiers. It is a key port for their naval fleet and legally could house 25,000 Russian troops -- which is why the Russians said they never "invaded Crimea."

The Ukraine has much deeper fraternal ties to Russia than Poland or Hungary -- but unlike Crimea, it is known as a distinct nation. A common Slavic Orthodox Christianity, which was baptized in Kiev, ties the Ukraine and Russia together as fraternal nations.

                                         

Kiev's Monastery of the Caves, founded in the 11th century

Ukraine cannot become what it is meant to be unless both America and Russia play their roles in allowing this nation to live. It will be just as crucial that serious Christian thinkers in America develop a more mature and comprehensive narrative of the Church amidst the nations in contemporary international relations.

The religious split of the Latin Catholics and Kievan Orthodox (major religions of Western Ukraine) from the Moscow patriarchate Orthodox (religion of the East) could fracture the Ukraine. This would be a tragic failure for the nation whose destiny as a state is to bridge the rupture of Christian believers. That Great Schism led to the loss of Christian Mideast lands to Islam in the first millennium, and Christian Eurasia to the militarized atheist states at the end of the second. Re-joining the two lungs of Christianity animated the world historical visions of Pope John XXIII, John Paul II, and the Second Vatican Council. Ukraine is a pivotal natural meeting place for that union, but it could just as easily split East and West if a larger religious vision is not brought to bear on the crisis.


The Emergence of Russia

The Soviet Union and the USA split peoples all over the globe in the blood-drenched Cold War. That may have been necessary then; it is madness today. The Russian nation is not the new Soviet Union -- they are the Christian nation emerging from the atheist Gulag. Orthodox Russia is not the heir of the Soviets -- she was its bloodiest victim. She doesn't look pretty emerging from the rubble, but can't we rejoice that she still lives?

The Russians are our Christian brothers. What irony that the materialist atheism of "the West" now aligns the European Union and NATO against the Christian nations of Africa and the Eastern Orthodox nations of Eurasia. America's men must reclaim our national foreign policy from the "drone and bomb" sexual Left and the bellicose neo-con Right. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union we have lacked a strategic foreign policy driven by a deep understanding of geography, history, and a Biblical sense of the role our Christian country plays amidst all the earth's nations (the grandsons of Noah in our tradition).

It was the case, once, that to study the Soviet Union, we had to know Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Now we must know the Orthodox patriarchates, the Catholic Eastern Rite, Turko-Islamic traditions, and Eurasian relations of Russia, Japan, and China. The Russian patriarch Kirill has written: "What we are referring to is the Russian world, the great Russian civilization that came from the Kievan baptismal font and spread across the huge expanse of Eurasia."
                                             

The Russian president and the Orthodox patriarch see the Russian nation as having a religious destiny of securing states through Eurasia that respect Christians' ability to worship freely and live securely. They know they must also ensure the liberty of Islamic worship and the life of ethnic groups like the Tatars. (In President Putin’s address on the integration of Crimea he made sure to say that the languages of Crimea would include that of the Tatars, for they too were returning to their ancestral home.) Putin is acting as the leader of an armed Christian nation, but he understands he must govern in a region of many languages and religions. He is not of the West, for his largest emptiest land mass has borders with China and Japan -- and he needs a more capacious bridging identity to relate to them. He respects communal identities including his own; that is why he seems so foreign and frightening to television newscasters of the individualistic libertarian Right and the obsessed sexual Left.

The Orthodox have not reduced the political commentary of the Church to "War Never Again!" or "Stop Capital Punishment" or "Put away the Sword of the State." They see homosexuals and feminists as the deformed personalities of the comfortable atheists who speak of the "West" and the "twenty-first century," as if these abstractions can replace the bonds of history and place which link men to God and their fathers through the ages.The Orthodox have a realistic view of the necessity of the state's sword for the life of the church and nation. At times this has corrupted some of their churchmen. At other times it has lent sacral blessing to the sacrifice of patriots defending their homeland. Should not such heroic sacrifice be blessed? Christians had to be armed as a State to face Mongol horse warriors from the East, Islamic jihadists from the South, and German Nazis from the West. Mother Russia armed them. American Christians should not be too quick to dismiss the Orthodox tradition as "being chaplain for the Czars" given our own Catholic hierarchy’s current penchant for pacifism, and blindness toward the necessity of punishment to guarantee justice in exercising either civic or ecclesial authority. Maybe a subset of our theologians have been too obsessed with the sexual practices of intimacy while ignoring our deficient Christian public anthropology of the male fraternal relations needed to protect and baptize the nations.


Christian Realism as Foreign Policy                               

The abysmal ignorance of national senators and journalists (forget the man on the street) regarding the Crimean affair should  motivate Christian thinkers to fish deeper to grasp the fractured human and religious bonds behind the rumors of war.
American men -- especially our senators, soldiers, journalists, and scholars -- must be intellectually disciplined enough to bring as much historical knowledge and research to this unfolding of events as we do to bracket analysis for the NCAA basketball tourney.
The Christian nation strategy must first integrate our immigrants as fellow citizen-protectors and producers. It would model Catholic and Evangelical national statesmen for South America where the Marxist card has frayed, but the Christian leader card has not been played. It would seek fraternal relations among the Asian nations, and not play their border feuds off one another.
We need less venom about 'weak' Obama and 'bully' Putin. Maybe we could take time to read our forgotten hero Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the godless cowardly West as well as the Ukraine, Orthodoxy, and the Russian nation.

Thank God that President Obama has not led us into the wrong war. Let us arm our next national candidates with a pointer and a series of maps and timelines. Let us have one of the television debates as a short lecture format, with each candidate explaining the world and our particular role in it. A realistic foreign policy will be clear-eyed in assessing the present alignment of forces, and utterly Christian in proposing that nations can live together fraternally under God. We are condemned to fratricide without Him.

Mr. Trump is far from vanquished

by David Pence

In cataloging the sins of Donald Trump, the most grievous of his sins is adultery. He has publicly bragged about his relations with married women long before he ran for president. The moral guardians of the media insist on hyperventilating about all touching initiatives as "sexual assault," while passing on the moral turpitude of adultery since it is between consenting adults. Mr. Trump should recognize the gravity of his sins in terms of basic loyalties. He should repent and reform. But until the media is given the powers of absolution, he is under no obligation to confess to them.

If he were ever shot by an aggrieved husband, an honorable man would vote to acquit the assailant since Trump committed a capital crime against the man and the social order. At the same time, an honorable American man is pressed to vote for Trump as president because he is the one public figure among Democrats and Republicans who will stop treating Russia as America's enemy and build an alliance with them. Christian Russia is our most logical ally  against the demonic jihadists who are killing both Shia Muslims and Christians. Some Russian experts say we are as close to war with Russia as we were during the Cuban missile crisis. This incredible turn of affairs with a country who should be our ally could only happen to a country fleeing from God.

To realign a Christian-led alliance of many nations including India, Iran, and Israel against the real centers of jihad in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is the most important public issue in the federal election. Reconstituting a Supreme Court respectful of the laws of nature and the limits of the Constitution is the second. Mr. Trump is the only candidate who will accomplish both of these goals. Like King David, he is burdened by his crimes of adultery. He should repent so he can better lead our country. 

Here are the best arguments for his election.

Map on Monday: YEMEN

This post originally appeared on Anthropology of Accord on January 26, 2015. Click here to read our Map on Monday: YEMEN post.

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, October 15

by Dr. David Pence

I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

NEW CARDINALS APPOINTED BY POPE FRANCIS: Cardinal means hinge. The new cardinals. John Allen at Crux calls the American part of this group the "McCarrick Caucus." McCarrick is the former cardinal of Washington DC; personal ally of Teddy Kennedy; and a well-known homosexual predator. He is not a pedophile and probably thinks they are disgusting. His prey has always been older adolescents and young males in the age groups of college seminaries. To call him the centrist wing of the church tells us a good deal about John Allen and the corruption of the cardinals selection process in America under Pope Francis and his American advisers Cardinal O’Malley of Boston and Wuerl of Washington. If what Allen says is true, then the homosexual (not moderate) wing of the American episcopacy has the pope’s ear - they don’t have his back. Pope Francis is not in any way part of the homosexual lobby in the priesthood, but like both his predecessors he has put his trust in men with nefarious designs. American bishops need to face the bishops and priests within their ranks whom they have never been willing to face. The beginning might be for some group to start with Theodore (Uncle Teddy) McCarrick and ask that he stop performing the Mass publicly and be committed to an ecclesial institution where he is under guard and forced to do penance and restitution. The reform of the Catholic Church will entail much more direct accusations and remedies aimed at the homosexual cartels so entwined in the Catholic priesthood and episcopacy. This is the other half of the Catholics-Democratic Party story associated with the leaked emails to John Podesta (chairman of Hillary Clinton campaign).

The teaching of the Catholic Church is committed to patriarchy, fraternity, and heterosexual marriage but the priesthood and major orders of sisters are deeply infiltrated by homosexuals and feminists who have sabotaged that teaching for forty years. Tim Kaine and Nancy Pelosi are creatures of this hypocritical culture. Thousands of victims of sexual abuse (80 percent adolescent males) still scream for justice and reform.

II. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST

IN DEARBORN, THE ANTI-ISIS RALLY OF MUSLIMS IS ON HOLY DAY OF ASHURA: On this day of the year, Sunni Muslims commemorate the freeing of the Jews from Egypt. It is a much more significant feast for the Shia - the followers of Ali. They remember the slaying of Husain - the third Shia Imam (they don’t use the term caliph). This is a significant Holy Day for the Shia in terms of organizing opposition to the murderous Salafist and Wahhabi ideology which treats them as non-Muslims worthy of death. Here we see an openly anti-ISIS and anti-Saudi rally by American Muslims. Are we listening? In Dearborn, Michigan the feast has taken on this modern understanding of the continued persecution of Shia Muslims by Wahhabists.

ALEPPO - MUCH OF MEDIA MISSES THAT IT IS AL NUSRA THAT RUSSIANS AND SYRIANS ARE TRYING TO REMOVE: Al Nusra is an Al Qaeda-type Salafist group that all agree is an enemy to the US as well as to Assad and the Syrian government. That is the group the Russians and Syrians are trying to dislodge from Aleppo. They are hiding in a city - it is hard to kill them in that cover. The linked article reports the UN asking al Nusra to stop holding the city hostage. Taking back Aleppo is a huge setback for the Syrian rebels but displacing an entrenched force from a city comes at a great human cost. It is not a war crime; it is war. We will see the same problem when we take back the major cities of ISIS. Cities still held by ISIS.

SAUDIS ESCALATE IN YEMEN - MAY CAUSE NEW ENEMIES: The wedding bombing which may draw northern tribes into the fight. The New York Times turns their eyes to Yemen - US moral duty to stop the Saudis.

III. PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

TRUMP VS. CLINTON - THE ELDERS OF THE BABY BOOMERS - TWO FACES OF THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION: Heather McDonald at City Journal on the "Trumped up outrage" of the sexual revolutionaries. Summing up Trump - Seven articles making his case. And, finally, our response to the bizarre TV drama of CNN’s Anderson Cooper becoming America’s expert on good touch/ bad touch. Only in TV studios could Gloria Vanderbilt’s pampered boy pose as the defender of American womanhood against the big heterosexual bully daring to run for president. We examine the two faces of the sexual revolution:  The Playboy and The Feminist: Lessons from the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

TRUMP SAYS RUSSIA, IRAN, AND SYRIA ARE ALL FIGHTING ISIS - THE FOREIGN POLICY DEBATE PITS TRUMP VS. HILLARY DEMOCRATS AND BUSH REPUBLICANS: One reason it is hard for Trump to really explain his foreign policy views is that it will pit him first and foremost against Republican hawks. This was the striking reality of the VP debate in which Mike Pence vigorously argued the Republican line on Russia that Mr. Trump has opposed throughout the primaries. Donald Trump represents the first significant challenge to the bipartisan disaster of our post-Cold War foreign policy. The parties will not sort this out during an election. All the more reason we need good journalism to clarify the strange alignments emerging. After the election, a serous antiwar movement in the Democratic party will emerge to debate these issues. That will happen no matter who wins.
 Who should be our allies? Who are our real enemies? This is what the Senate should be debating, and the presidential election should be addressing.

Friday BookReview: "Aristotle's Children"

[first published November 11, 2011]



"St. Thomas called art 'reason in making.' This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, this is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth."
                                                          (Flannery O'Connor)



For the tale of the great Sundering, grab a copy of Richard Rubenstein's 2003 book, Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages.

Aristotle's writings had been lost to the West for almost a thousand years. How did medieval universities and the leading churchmen react to their re-discovery in the 12th century? To Rubenstein's surprise, it turns out they "tried to modernize the Church by reconciling faith and reason" -- refusing to settle, as we moderns have, for a "split between the cultures of the heart and the head."

There will always be tension between reason and faith, but history shows us it can be a creative tension. Today's world of 'value-free' science and 'reason-free' religion is a house dangerously divided.

It is high time to restore the Aristotelian consensus. Faith and reason were not implacable enemies in the medieval era, and they need not be in our day.

There is no justification for the modern world settling for "a coldly objectivist science and a passionately subjectivist religion."

Professor Rubenstein writes of the malign influence of William of Ockham with his philosophy of Nominalism. It's a shame that someone such as Peter Kreeft hasn't written a book on the English Franciscan who died in the mid-14th century during the Black Death -- and of the deep influence he had on the thought of the Reformation. (Luther was trained at the University of Erfurt in nominalist theology.)

                                   

Hobbes

                                                                   
Who does Rubenstein say were the two leading Aristotle-haters of the early modern period? Martin Luther ("no one can become a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle") and Thomas Hobbes (contra Aristotle's notion that politics is a branch of ethics, he asserted that the law of the state is the law). Rubenstein calls Hobbes "the most brilliant spokesman of the new ruling class," those elites who wanted to be free of all restraints on their power -- thus they wanted no truck with the ideas of Aristotle or Aquinas about reason and morality. Hobbes carried the new day with his glorification of will and power.

Aristotle

                                                                 

"Medieval students did not have to agree with him on every point -- in fact, on some points, Christians were expected to disagree -- but for four centuries, one could not begin a discussion of metaphysics, natural science, logic, theology, ethics, aesthetics, or politics without referring to Aristotle's views and dealing respectfully with them."

Catholic publisher Mark Brumley has written:

"The irony is profound. The Reformation sought to recover 'genuine Christianity' by hacking through what it regarded as the vast overgrowth of medieval theology. Yet to do so, the Reformers wielded swords forged in the fires of the worst of medieval theology – the decadent scholasticism of Nominalism."

UPDATE -- From another review of Professor Rubenstein's book:

"For, unlike those 17th-century Inquisitors who forced Galileo to recant, 12th-century Archbishop Raymund I of Toledo was one of the unrecognized heroes of Western culture, who 'did more than any man to make the treasures of Greek philosophy and science available to the Latin world... and opened the door to advanced Arab and Jewish ideas,' Rubenstein writes. Establishing a translation center in Toledo, he recruited 'the best scholars available... whether Christian, Jew, Muslim, Latin, Greek, or Slav.' "
                                       

Toledo is less than 50 miles from Madrid. It was the first great city of Al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) to be conquered by a Christian kingdom:

"When Castilian king Alfonso IV conquered the city in 1085, he found out that there were plenty of original works in the libraries of Toledo, including the remaining works from the library of the caliph of Cordoba, which had managed to gather up to 400,000 volumes."

Christian Realism: Christianity and Civilization, NOT the West against the Rest

Mankind is engaged in a continual struggle to live in ordered communities under God. The spread of Christianity nourished the 18th and 19th century epiphany of nations leading to Woodrow Wilson’s 20th century advocacy for the self-determination of all peoples and nations against empire, tyranny, and the disorder of statelessness. History has a direction and a Director. There are certain forms which manifest the deepest communal order of the Trinity and build toward the culminating communal order of humanity as the Body of Christ. Every people and nation has some role to play in this unfolding of Providence. We have argued that Christian intellectuals and American foreign policy must free themselves from the lifeless paradigm of the West as a larger entity that we should defend. We don’t accept the temporal scheme that names the century which crowned Reason the sovereign over religion as an age of "Enlightenment." Nor do we advocate the spatial shrinking of worldwide Christendom and the erasure of particular nations in some entity called "the West." One of our favorite critiques of the "Grand Narrative of the West" was Plato to Nato by David Gress published in 1998. He critiques the post-WWII narrative of the West as distorting the earlier narrative (what he calls the 'Old West') which synthesized the Christian religion and the free tradition of German warriors. The university professors who crafted the post-WWII narrative of the West had little time for serious religion. and no time for Germanic warriors in their new tale. Greek philosophers and intellectuals replaced the priest/warrior archetypes of the old synthesis. Andrew Lynch reviews the book here. A few excerpts:

Gress writes: “The liberal Grand Narrative produced a Western identity that was modern, secular, and liberal and that rested on an imaginary direct line connecting the modern West to the ancient Greeks, an imaginary line from Plato to NATO, in which everything in between formed an orderly sequence culminating in liberal modernity.” 

Gress laments the derivative way in which the Grand Narrative treated religion, valuable only insofar as it spoke in favor of human dignity, rights, and equality. If Christianity were given any positive treatment, it would only be insofar as it supported the soft virtues of kindness and generosity and defending the rights of individuals. Proponents of the Grand Narrative generally treated religion as a hindrance to progress and therefore could not see Christianity’s contribution to the work of the Greeks and Romans.

If Christianity was overlooked in the Grand Narrative, the Germanic contribution to the “Old Western Synthesis” has been forgotten altogether. For Gress, “the West” is “truly defined” by “the ancient philosopher, the Christian priest, and the Germanic warrior.” The Germanic contribution to “the West” was popular for many years, especially among the WASPs. It was even held by some that the Germano-Aryan-Caucasian warrior must have comprised the majority of Greeks and Romans and that marriages with “lesser races” brought about a loss of martial vigor and decline. The early Grand Narrative also cited Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote that the German chief and his warriors would gather in grand assemblies to discuss and vote on important matters. Thus from the Germans came both the strong warrior and the democratic statesman.

The Playboy and the Feminist: A lesson from the Chinese cultural revolution

by David Pence


Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy Enterprises, was always for the feminist revolution. He saw women’s liberation as an ally in the battle to divorce sexual relations from the covenant of marriage. He saw abortion as an important antidote to the natural consequences of heterosexual coitus. He was liberating men from the outdoor magazines of 'Field and Stream' so they might cultivate a more indoor lifestyle of cocktails, conversation, comfortable dress, voluptuous women and sumptuous surroundings. He wanted to be James Bond without assuming the risk of a warrior’s death or the burden of a patriot’s duty. JFK was more the James Bond patriot.  Hugh Hefner was something else.

                                   

Hefner was the male side of the sexual revolution until the promiscuity of homosexuals and the vulgarity of  'Hustler' magazine made him obsolete. However, a lot of wealthy heterosexual men got the memo and were liberated in thought, word, and action to live the dream. Donald Trump is their poster boy.

This does not mean he should resign from his elected role as the leader of a nationalist movement to reform American political life. Better to follow King David—he should repent and turn his heart to the Lord for the good of his nation. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, he should speak as a repentant and converted man. He should encourage his Christian brothers to sermonize on how promiscuity and the sexual revolution break down intimate permanency as well as social protection. Running for president forces a man to  become more deeply aware of the bonds that tie us together. He is running because he loves his country. He saw a nation of lions being led by a herd of donkeys and it angered and inspired him. But coming to grips with the nature of civc life and the bonds that tie us together has ben a real school in the importance of God and sexual decorum in restoring our shattered American civic life. He is being schooled in the interrelated loves of religion, patriotism and marriage and he is finding himself not as terrific as he once thought.  Nothing makes us more aware of our bad behavior than seeing it played back in our lives by video, or even worse in the imitative acts of our offspring. But these are opportunities to repent and come to realize how much both men and nations depend on God to love well and do our duties.  It is not just Donald Trump who needs to learn this lesson. Maybe the shaming of Donald Trump will awaken black comedians, white shock jock radio hosts, and American college men that the ubiquitous mainstreaming of pornography and the cultural flight from God has diminished us all. The sexual, drug, and conspicuous-consumption revolutions have turned us away from the religious and civic duties that tie men together as fellow citizens. Those revolutions have made men less potent to live with one woman as a  faithful spouse. Let us repent!

Both candidates in the presidential election are in the elder years of the baby-boomer cohort. They are each creatures of their age and generation. One however is seeking repentance while the other awaits her coronation. Mrs. Clinton is an unapologetic feminist seeking to command the overwhelmingly male protective covenant of our armed forces. Her approach to female protective duty has been to poison a generation of American women by painting abortion as a rite of passage to modern womanhood. Her almost ritualistic devotion recalls the Aztec cult of human sacrifice. Then and now, the collaboration of the civic order in such unnatural killing places the nation in great spiritual danger. This rejection of maternity in the name of choice has been the signature of her career. She has modeled coarsened careerism as the highest female status especially if the career was once restricted to males.  She asserted the dominance of the will over the duties of the womb and so destroyed a mother’s heart.  She has tolerated, defended, and promoted a selfish male predator as her political and business partner while discouraging the emergence of younger masculine public protectors as national leaders in her urban-based party. She will seal the cultural revolution of her generation if she takes the Oval Office to preside over public life, while her partner employs the White House pursuing more private affairs.

There is a man in her way. For most of his life, he played the playboy and like many a spoiled prince has a hundred bad tales to tell and a thousand who will tell tales on him. But now it is he who is called to slay a dragon for the nation. To slay the dragon, he must call the men of our nation into protective attention and brotherhood. He must build the strongest alliances with the strongest nations possible to isolate and defeat our civilizational enemy. Dark-skinned Christians are being beheaded and our nation is being summoned to defend them. He is the one candidate who has not been saddened by these deaths, but angered. He has proposed an alliance of great powers -- a concert of nations to eliminate ISIS. The Salafist jihadists seek to turn a billion Muslims into our enemies. Islam is not our enemy, but our enemy takes the name of Islam. This election is about choosing the best protector for our nation. Who will build the strongest alliances and who will define, isolate, and destroy our foe? Unlike all the chief candidates of both parties including his own running mate, this man does not seek a war with the main regional powers of Eurasia, East Asia, and the Mideast. Mr. Trump would quit trying to fight the whole world because they are not feminist westerners. He would ally with the big guys (in Syria that is Russia, China, Syria, and Iran) to eliminate ISIS in the Mideast. He would ally with our policemen and galvanize the male citizens of our inner cities to join as city fathers and brother protectors across the color line to socialize our young men in a new culture of city life. Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall bring law and order.

The American sexual revolution, like the Chinese cultural revolution (1966-1976), was a disaster for both countries. The American cultural revolution of atheistic sexual confusion and fiscal irresponsibility was supported by both parties and the coastal media elites. Our nation is 20 trillion dollars in debt. Even worse, we are morally bankrupt -- having turned our national soul to other gods. As always when the sacred is lost, sexual chaos ensues. The public masculine bond of military protection and the private male/female bond of marriage are frayed and shaken. Abominations are celebrated. We are poised for war with Russia, China, and Iran by a series of outdated entangling alliances. Politicians outdo themselves in exacerbating these conflicts to show how tough they are. We insult strong male national  leaders as bullies or religious fanatics. Meanwhile, we subsidize the population bombing by Saudi Arabia against the Shia Houthi tribes in Yemen. Mrs. Clinton  particularly has been at the heart of  our failed foreign policy. She advocated the destabilization of both Libya and Syria and failed to diplomatically build an alliance with Russia in our common war against the jihadists. Now she has  announced to ISIS that she will send no ground troops to destroy the Christian killers. The American cultural revolution of sacrificing social protection to promote female careerism continues.

For China there was a different story. In the late 1970s a group of adult men in China put an end to their terrible bloody farce, and set China on the road to a great moral and economic recovery. The last group of ruling cultural revolutionaries were called "the gang of four." They included the wildly ambitious last wife of Mao Zedong—Jiang Qing. She was imprisoned in 1976. The three males were executed.

Jiang and Mao (1945)

In China, after a decade of the destructive Cultural Revolution, the grown-up men came back and saved their land from the crazed frenzy of the student mobs. There is a violent American frenzy as well: police assassinations in our inner cities, flag burnings against Trump at political rallies, and thought Gestapo on our campuses suppressing the speech of religious traditionalists and allies of Israel.

Americans have our own Jiang Qing of "unbridled ambition." The media are in their own frenzy to push us to complete our cultural revolution by electing her. They press us to embrace the wide smiling heavily-caked face of a debilitated grandmother. They agree she has the resume. Donald Trump is to be humiliated. Men will see what happens when one "gets off the reservation." The feminists and gays will take care of politics and the military -- that should stop the harassment of women. Small infractions will be expanded as great sins go unconfessed.

But in this maze of disproportion and misdirection the most over inflated image is the balloon doll figure of Hillary Clinton as "the strong and competent woman." Her image is floated across media screens as the culmination of all social revolutions. But her story is really about a well connected white woman reaching for the top step of the status ladder.  Recall the female President Coin of Hunger Games -- no woman of the people but a woman for herself. Americans now face the same problem of the citizens of the outer districts in that great fable. How can we cast off the bizarre personalities of the Capitol and restore just government for working people? The Chinese ended the cultural revolution by jailing Mao’s ambitious spouse. Better that we American gentlemen send our Dowager Empress home to bake cookies. She really is physically failing and it was our own negligence that allowed that super sized balloon such altitude.

This is the baby boomers' last chance at political leadership. The failure of our generation to build on the peace of Reagan-Gorbachev can still be redeemed. Let us repent and turn our nation’s soul back to God. Let us restore the bond of protective brotherhood across the generations and color lines. It will take all of us in rightly ordered formation to fight the religious war in which we now engage. So it always was with the Israelites. When they abandoned God, they were weakened from within by immorality and overrun from without by their enemies. When they returned to God, the men could "fight like one man”  and their foes were vanquished. Let us repent and return to God... and let us vanquish our foes.