Saturday, December 2, 2017

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, December 2

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

THE WEEKLY BRIEF
                               A POST COLD WAR NATIONALIST FOREIGN POLICY:                                                         BANDWAGON REGIONAL POWERS; DON'T ENCIRCLE THEM WITH NEIGHBORS
The elitist rebellion against the legitimacy of the Trump presidency has poisoned our ability
 to focus our national attention on America at the brink of war with nations in Asia and the Mideast. If love is blind, hatred is both blind and drunk. President Trump's policy of an emerging nationalism against the atheist globalism of a decaying western elite is very much a work in progress. He needs Democrats and Republicans acting as American statesmen as well as religious men with a sense of world history to help him see anew the post Cold War landscape. There is a lot to sort out and a lot of well entrenched hatreds that must not be allowed to substitute for strategy in foreign policy.
The two nations in the Mideast who most need their borders and governments to be secure from foreign attack are Shiite Iran and Jewish Israel. Unlike the Palestinian fantasy, they are both real nations who won their boundaries the old fashioned way-they fought for them. It was the singular achievement of the Obama-Kerry Diplomacy initiative to pull back from US foreign policy of incoherent support for Saudi Arabia: the spiritual home of  anti Shiite salafists. Their attempt to reintegrate Iran as a sovereign nation in the diplomacy of the region was a realistic necessary move in sorting out the real religious sources of 9/11 and worldwide salafist terrorism. President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry carried out a policy that none of their presidential opponents could have imagined-not Hillary Clinton, not John McCain and not George Bush. Foreign governments came to the halls of Congress to undermine them. None dared whisper collusion. The Democratic leadership is so busy hating Donald Trump that they are not mounting a defense of the singular greatest act of Democratic Party diplomacy since the end of the Cold War. Just when our country needs the eloquent public policy criticism of Minnesota's Eugene McCarthy, we look to that venerable Senate seat and find a coarse pornographic comedian doing his thing.  Articulate non hating anti war Democrats are needed to prevent our country from being drawn into war by a 32 year old Saudi Prince. President Trump has a blind spot toward one of the great nations of history. This is fed by his military advisors and the Prime Minister of Israel. He and his advisors need their fellow countrymen to remind them that a nationalist foreign policy includes respect for the civilizational bulwark that is Persian Iran.
In Asia the antidote to war with North Korea will pass through China and South Korea. We must accept that region is going to dominated by China.  This of course is anathema to "China hawks" one of whom is Steve Bannon. The US cannot expect China to play its stabilizing regional role with North Korea if our overall strategic policy is to organize an alliance of India, Australia, and Japan to contain China. Our foreign policy is still trapped by the three great encirclements of the post Cold War era. We have organized alliances against Russia, against China and against Iran. We actually need all three of those major regional powers to build world peace--one region at a time. But we will have to accept that they too are nations with their own spheres of influence and relations. We must bandwagon with the regional powers not organize the little guys in a balance of power encirclement. This is the difference between a big man  policy made by executives Donald Trump and  Rex Tillerson and a recipe for perpetual war stirred up by the likes of little Marco Rubio and wee Willie Kristol.             


I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

POPE SAYS GENDER IDEOLOGY IS IDEOLOGICAL COLONIZATION: Preaching on the Maccabean defense of the sacred against colonizers, Pope Francis treats gender ideology and abortion as a foreign oppression imposed on the traditional communities of the globe. The Jews were mistreated in the same way two centuries before Christ by the desacralizing oppression of the Greeks. This is the brilliant reformulation by which the Pope opposes the sexual revolution. The conservative Catholic press should take his lead and treat the sexual left as white rich kids oppressing the Southern poor. The Maccabeean tale of fathers and sons defending the sacred is a model for our times. This is a very different strategy than building battle ramparts against contraception and abortion. The sexual left in the Catholic universities, chanceries and religious orders will not oppose the Pope's analysis. They will bury his arguments with deliberate neglect. Sooner or later he will say a sentence they can clip out and hoist as a flag to wave for the whole world to see he is "their pope."

BISHOP BARRON - MUST THE NEW EVANGELIZATION BE NEUTER? In a new book interview with Bishop Barron and John Allen, Bishop Barron says the sexual culture war is like the WWI British attack at Gallipoli. It is a battle already lost which has consumed too many resources with no gain.  Thus we should mobilize our troops and attack  on different fronts. From the review:
In a similar way, Barron claims that the Church has been fruitlessly pouring resources into promoting the Church’s teaching on sexuality in the past generation. The campaign, no matter how well-intentioned, has not yielded the hoped-for results and it is time to deploy our resources elsewhere. This diversion of resources does not amount to abandoning the Church’s demanding sexual ethic, he said. Rather, it involves employing a new strategy in evangelization and trying to find more favorable terrain on which to engage in the evangelical enterprise. It is better to divert our resources into more winnable battles. After all, says Barron, who in the world would put down the Gospel of Saint Matthew after having read it and conclude that the first thing that he needs to do is get his sexual life in order?
At AOA we have argued for a deeper engagement with the sexual anarchy of the modern West with the Catholic Symphony of Fatherhood, Brotherhood Marriage and the Virgin Mother. Bishop Barron was formed in one of the most homosexually besot diocese in America--Chicago. In the face of such deep perversion and confusion, many orthodox good-hearted men became neutered proponents of orthodoxy. That really will not do. A culture of life is a culture of protection and the Christian strategy of protection has a;ways ben based on sex roles.  Gallipoli could have been won says Churchill if larger resources would have been applied. The way Churchill describes Gallipoli it was a failure of nerve by his superiors to commit the full resources needed to win on the new front.  The culture war has never seen the full Catholic arsenal of patriarchy(the rule of the Father), the male priesthood as a fraternity of fathers, male-female monogamy as a sign of sacral unity (not modernist equality)  and virginity and motherhood as the highest expressions of feminine maturity. Bishop Barron is a true son of cowardly Chicago clerics. His failure to find a way to capture Gallipoli is like the spies who came back to Moses and said we are grasshoppers and our foes are giants. We cannot take the city. For their lack of trust in God, the Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years.

PROVIDENCE AND THANKSGIVING: John Horvat II is a clear thinker and eloquent pen arguing for a return to order needed in this era of chaos. He never omits the author of all order in his reflections and prescriptions.


II. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST

FIRST THEY KILLED THE SHIITES, THEN THEY KILL THE SUFIS: THE ONGOING TAKFIR: This is a religious war. The Salafist Sunni jihadists are state-based in the Wahabbi clerics of Saudi Arabia. They have control of Mecca and Medina. When 235 Sufi Muslims were killed in the Sinai, was Iran a suspect? Of course not! The Cromwellian Muslims who wish to return to the ancestors and purify Islam are trying first to eliminate the homegrown apostates (Accusing a fellow Muslim of not really being a Muslim is called takfir). The group to be condemned and slaughtered is first and foremost Shiites, especially Shiites who form states to protect themselves. This is why the new Saudi strategy aimed at Shiites in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen was willing to make an alliance with Jews (Israel) and Christians (America) to purify the region. We must think clearly. We must think religiously or we will continue to be played by those who swim in deeper waters.

KILLING SHIITES IN YEMEN: It is not enough to call this a humanitarian disaster - though it certainly is. To face what is happening in Yemen, we will have to pull out of the war against Iran. We will have to unhook our arsenal and support from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

DEOBANDIS MEET IN VIRGINIA: The Deobandi of South Asia are a faction in Sunni Islam like the Wahabbis of the Mideast, They are the Salafist brand of Islam in Pakistan as the Wahabbis are in Saudi Arabia. A report on a meeting.

TILLERSON, KUSHNER, AND THE SAUDIS: Interesting speculations.

THE TARGET OF SAUDIS AND ISRAELIS IN LEBANON IS HEZBOLLAH BUT THE VICTIMS WILL BE CHRISTIANS: and the traditional Lebanese solution of a multi confessional state.


III. R&G ROUND UP

JONATHAN HAIDT ON OUTRAGE: Powerline's Scott Johnson recommends a video of Haidt talk.

CHARLES MANSON AND THE CHICAGO LEFTISTS WHO LIONIZED HIM: by Paul Kengor.

CHINA AND RELIGION: Worship God but don't threaten national security. China needs a spiritual core but it can never allow another Taiping Rebellion. Religion in China must present itself in the name of a proper communal duty, not individual autonomy. Getting this right will be measured in thousands of lives - millions of souls.

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