Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, April 9

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

ON MALE GROUPS - THE CATHOLIC PRIESTHOOD: In 2012 there were 414,000 priests across the earth. That is five thousand less than 1970. There were 650 million Catholics in 1970, 1.2 billion in 2012. Catholic Priesthood and Masculinity - why the shortage.

THE EASTER MASSACRE IN PAKISTAN AND THE KILLING OF THE SISTERS IN YEMEN: The killing on Easter Sunday in Lahore, Pakistan was Salafists against Christians. Muslims were killed too, but that does not change the religious motivation of the attacks. Ripple effects of the Salafist purges in Thailand.

A harrowing eyewitness account of killing the Daughters of Charity in Yemen reported at National Catholic Register. The new freedom of the Salafist Sunnis in Yemen is a direct consequence of the Saudi bombing of Shiite Houthis. The Saudis are not trying to control the ISIS or AQAP groups (both Salafist Sunni) in Yemen who target Shiites, Christians, Jews, and pagans. The sisters needed protectors -- this is why men form nations and governments. We are on the wrong side of this war, and the nuns have paid for our religious blindness and political ineptitude. This cannot be solved by the Pope, but by Christian nations in a new alliance who must stop supporting the regimes trying to eliminate Christians, Jews, and Shiites from the Mideast. Secretary Kerry has broken ranks from previous formulations by describing the religious purges as genocide. If he follows with action, this could be a very important step forward.

II. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST

SAUDIS MAKE THE NEWS: IS THE REAL STORY BEGINNING TO BE TOLD? PBS on Uncovering Saudi Arabia. Senator John McCain foundation gets a million from the Kingdom.

CAN THERE BE PEACE OR VICTORY IN THE MIDEAST WITHOUT IRAN? A former Bush advisor explains the failure and the need to negotiate with Iran.

AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE KORAN WITH COMMENTARIES: The authors are not trying to make Islam coincide with modern liberalism nor the Salafist disruption.

III. PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

SEXUAL POLITICS AND MR TRUMP: The two most damning columns have been: this David Brooks column is hard to refute; and Foer on Trump  with lots of quotes.

Mr. Trump's interview with Chris Matthews on abortion, however,  was not as damning as anti-Trump pro-life professionals made it out to be. Mr. Trump is like the Pope in that the only real way to find out what he said is to get a transcript or a video, because reporters and analysts treat both men as convenient mountains from which to proclaim their own gospels. Watch the video from about 9:40 to see the full discussion of abortion. Mr. Trump, unlike any other candidate I have seen, was able to turn the tables on Catholic Chris Matthews and ask him many questions about the Catholic Church and her opposition to abortion. None of this was reported. Trump tells Mathews he is not living according to the Catholic Church. Watch the whole exchange. The idea that Mr. Trump shouldn't talk about abortion because he hasn't adopted the woman-as-victim narrative of the professional pro-life experts is more arrogance from the consultant class. Our article here: The Woman Caught in Abortion.

Robert George says Trump isn't one of us. National Catholic Register columnist asks Trump to stop talking about abortion.

RULE 40 AND REPUBLICAN CONVENTION: Cruz says keep Rule 40. Kasich says it can be changed by the Rules Committee. Here is what Pat Buchanan says:

"And if they (Donald Trump and Ted Cruz) set aside grievances, and act together, they can block any establishment favorite from being imposed on the party, as was one-worlder Wendell Willkie, “the barefoot boy of Wall Street,” in 1940.

All Trump and Cruz need do is instruct their delegates to vote to retain Rule 40 from the 2012 convention. Rule 40 declares that no candidate can be placed in nomination who has failed to win a majority of the delegates in eight states. Trump has already hit that mark. Cruz almost surely will. But no establishment favorite has a chance of reaching it. With Cruz and Trump delegates voting to retain Rule 40, they can guarantee no Beltway favorite walks out of Cleveland as the nominee—and that Ted Cruz or Donald Trump does."

IV. RELIGION & GEOPOLITICS REVIEW ROUND-UP

THE US AND MEXICO - HOT PURSUIT SINCE PANCHO VILLA: A good short history of some of the US cross-the-border law enforcement pursuits in Mexico. Why money is being given, but victory over the drug cartels isn't happening.

ISRAEL IS A JEWISH STATE, THE U.S. IS A CHRISTIAN NATION: In Israel there is a Sorrow on the Left as it becomes demographically clear there will not be a two-state solution and Israel is a Jewish state, not a secular democracy.

ON RACE: Profile of Reverend Al Sharpton. You won't fall in love - but cords of sympathy may be pulled.

ARMENIA AND AZERBAIJAN NEAR RENEWED WAR: Fighting has resumed between Armenia and Azerbaijan over an Armenian-populated enclave of Azerbaijan called Nagorno-Karabak. A civilizational fault line runs through Caucasus region as a whole, dividing Christian Armenia, Georgia, and Russia from the Islamic middle east. Resumption of hostilities will likely bring Russia in on Armenia's side, and the Turks supporting Azerbaijan. A good historical review of Russian-Turkish relations.

Friday BookReview: Doctor Zhivago

Excerpts from a 1958 review by Irving Howe:



Doctor Zhivago, the novel which climaxes the career of the Russian poet Boris Pasternak [died in 1960], is a major work of fiction; but it is also—and for the moment, perhaps more important—a historic utterance...

The book comes to us in extraordinary circumstances. A great Russian poet who maintains silence through years of terror and somehow, for reasons no one quite understands, survives the purges that destroy his most gifted colleagues; a manuscript sent by him to an Italian Communist publisher who decides to issue it despite strong pressures from his comrades; the dictatorship meanwhile refusing to permit this book, surely the most distinguished Russian novel of our time, to appear in print—all this comprises the very stuff of history, a reenactment of those rhythms of brutality and resistance which form the substance of the novel itself.

Doctor Zhivago opens in the first years of the century, spans the revolution, civil war and terror of the thirties, and ends with an epilogue in the mid-1940s. On a level far deeper than politics and with a strength and purity that must remove all doubts, it persuades us that the yearning for freedom remains indestructible. Quietly and resolutely Pasternak speaks for the sanctity of human life, turning to those "eternal questions" which made the 19th Century Russian novel so magnificent...

[Pasternak] has turned back to the old-fashioned leisurely Tolstoyan novel. His aim is not to mimic its external amplitude, as do most Soviet writers, but to recapture its spirit of freedom and then bring this spirit to bear upon contemporary Russian life...
                             

Yuri Zhivago [is] the central figure of the novel and in some ways Pasternak's alter ego... As he is driven from the battlefields of the First World War to revolutionary Moscow to partisan fighting in Siberia, and then back again to Moscow, Zhivago tries to keep hold of a few realities: nature, art, the life of contemplation. No matter how desperate the moment may be, he feels that the preservation of his inner identity is still possible if he can watch a cow grazing in the fields, read Pushkin's poems and speak freely to himself in the journal he intermittently keeps.

It is this effort to preserve the personal basis of reality which forms the main stress of Zhivago's experience—an effort always secured in a radiantly intense feeling for nature. One of the loveliest episodes in the novel occurs when Zhivago and his family, to avoid starvation during the civil war, decide to leave Moscow. They take a long journey eastward, and at one point their train becomes stalled in drifts of snow. For three days the passengers work in the open, helping to clear the tracks. A light of joy comes over them, a feeling of gratification for this gift: "The days were dear and frosty, and the shifts were short because there were not enough shovels. It was sheer pleasure."

Somewhat earlier in the book Zhivago reflects upon his life while traveling homeward from the First World War:

'Three years of changes, moves, uncertainties, upheavals; the war, the revolution; scenes of destruction, scenes of death, shelling, blown-up bridges, fires, ruins—all this suddenly turned into a huge, empty, meaningless space. The first real event since the long interruption was this trip . . . the fact that he was approaching his home, which was intact, which still existed, and in which every stone was dear to him. This was real life, meaningful experience, the actual goal of all guests, this was what art aimed at—homecoming, return to one's family, to oneself, to true existence.'

... Zhivago's opinions reflect the direction of Pasternak's yearning, the long-suppressed bias of his mind; but there is, in the novel itself, more than enough counter-weight of objective presentation. Pasternak is extremely skillful at making us aware of vast historical forces rumbling behind the lives of his central figures. The Bolshevik revolution is never pictured frontally, but a series of incidents, some of them no more than a page or two in length, keep the sense of catastrophe and upheaval constantly before us—Zhivago fumbling to light an old stove during an icy Moscow winter while in the nearby streets men are shooting at each other, a callow young Menshevik "heartening" Russian troops with democratic rhetoric and meeting an ungainly death as his reward, a veteran Social Revolutionary pouring bile over the Communist leaders, a partisan commander in Siberia fighting desperately against the White armies. And as Zhivago finds himself caught up by social currents too strong for any man to resist, we remember once again Tolstoy's concern with the relationship between historical event and personal life.

Once Pasternak reaches the revolutionary period, the novel becomes a kind of spiritual biography, still rich in social references but primarily the record of a mind struggling for survival. What now matters most is the personal fate of Zhivago and his relationships with two other characters, Lara, the woman who is to be the love of his life, and Strelnikov, a partisan leader who exemplifies all of the ruthless revolutionary will that Zhivago lacks.

Zhivago himself may be seen as representative of those Russian intellectuals who accepted the revolution but were never absorbed into the Communist apparatus. That he is both a skillful doctor and a sensitive poet strengthens one's impression that Pasternak means him to be something more than an individual figure. He speaks for those writers, artists and scientists who have been consigned to a state of permanent inferiority because they do not belong to the “vanguard” party. His sufferings are their sufferings, and his gradual estrangement from the regime, an estrangement that has little to do with politics, may well be shared by at least some of them. Zhivago embodies that which, in Pasternak’s view, man is forbidden to give to the state...

Lara (Julie Christie) with Zhivago (Omar Sharif)

The novel reaches a climax of exaltation with a section of some twenty pages that seem to me one of the greatest pieces of imaginative prose written in our time. Zhivago and Lara, who have been living in a Siberian town during the period of War Communism, begin to sense that their arrest is imminent: not because they speak any words of sedition (Zhivago has, in fact, recently returned from a period of enforced service as doctor to a band of Red partisans) but simply because they ignore the slogans of the moment and choose their own path in life. They decide to run off to Varykino, an abandoned farm, where they may find a few moments of freedom and peace. Zhivago speaks:

'But about Varykino. To go to that wilderness in winter, without food, without strength or hope—it's utter madness. But why not, my love! Let's be mad, if there is nothing but madness left to us. . . . 

'Our days are really numbered. So at least let us take advantage of them in our own way. Let us use them up saying goodbye to life. . . . We'll say goodbye to everything we hold dear, to the way we look at things, to the way we've dreamed of living and to what our conscience has taught us. . . .We'll speak to one another once again the secret words we speak at night, great and pacific like the name of the Asian ocean.'

From this point on, the prose soars to a severe and tragic gravity; every detail of life takes on the tokens of sanctity; and while reading these pages, one feels that one is witnessing a terrible apocalypse.  Begun as a portrait of Russia, the novel ends as a love story told with the force and purity of the greatest Russian fiction; yet its dependence upon the sense of history remains decisive to the very last page.

Through a ruse Zhivago persuades Lara to escape, and then he returns to Moscow. He falls into shabbiness, illness and long periods of lassitude; he dies obscurely, from a heart attack on the streets of Moscow. Lara's fate is given in a fierce, laconic paragraph:

'One day [she] went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women's concentration camps in the north.'

Like the best contemporary writers in the West, Pasternak rests his final hope on the idea that a good life constitutes a decisive example. People remember Zhivago. His half-brother, a mysterious power in the regime who ends as a general in the war, has always helped Zhivago in the past; now he gathers up Zhivago's poems and prints them; apparently he is meant to suggest a hope that there remain a few men at the top of the Russian hierarchy who are accessible to moral claims. Other old friends, meeting at a time when "the relief and freedom expected at the end of the war" had not come but when "the portents of freedom filled the air," find that "this freedom of the soul was already there, as if that very evening the future had tangibly moved into the streets below them."

So the book ends—a book of truth and courage and beauty, a work of art toward which one's final response is nothing less than a feeling of reverence.

UPDATE: The 1965 production, directed by David Lean, is one of the great films of all time.

One of the reasons was the supporting actors such as Tom Courtenay (above), who played Strelnikov; and Rod Steiger as the evil Komarovsky, a well-connected Moscow lawyer.

Take a few minutes to ponder these words of Fulton Sheen as you listen to some Russian liturgical chant:

"The lesson is not to be forgotten: in a not too distant day when Russia, like the prodigal son, will return to the father’s house, let not Western civilization refuse to accept it back or absent itself from the feast celebrating the salvation of what was lost."

Pro-life Professionals Jump on Trump: Why He Had to be Punished

by David Pence, M.D.


Like the clever scribe in the Gospels, MSNBC host Chris Matthews set out to trap the man stirring up the city. He put before him a woman caught in abortion. "What shall her punishment be?" he asked again and again. Mr. Trump, again and again, said, “I do not know.” Finally, Mr. Matthews said, “Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no, as a principle?” Mr. Trump said, “The answer is yes -- there has to be some form of punishment.” Matthews had his headline. In the subsequent exchange, Mr. Trump then pressed him about his pro-abortion Catholicism in a way we have never seen from a Republican candidate in the past. (Video.  Transcript.)

 TRUMP: What is the punishment under the Catholic Church?
 MATTHEWS: Let me give something from the New Testament: "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s." Don’t ask me about my religion.

Mr. Trump was asking an honest question. He didn’t know the answer. What Mr. Matthews knew about his church or human life isn’t clear. If he thinks that human life is a thing of Caesar, it is understandable that he didn’t want to be queried about his religion.

One might think pro-life Catholics would have a field day with Matthews on the ropes, but their ire was saved for Mr. Trump. The official Catholic Republican public intellectuals and pro-life professionals heaped thundering shame on the amateur newcomer to their club. Princeton’s Robert George said, "We know that we don't need to punish mothers to save babies. What Mr. Trump has succeeded in showing pro-life Americans is that he is not one of us."

Matthew Archbold of the National Catholic Register wrote: "Mr. Trump, please stop talking about abortion, at least until you've talked to experts and done some research." He then showed the amateur pro-lifer how a "pro" answers such questions:

Here's how a pro like Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the national pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List, handles it: 

'Mattie Brinkerhoff, a leader of the women’s suffrage movement, said that when a woman undergoes an abortion it is evidence she has been "greatly wronged." The Revolution, the newspaper owned and operated by Susan B. Anthony published an op-ed asserting that, on abortion, 'thrice guilty is he who, for selfish gratification, heedless of her prayers, indifferent to her fate, drove her to the desperation which impels her to the crime.' 

Ms. Dannenfelser spoke for all the pros in reminding us amateur pro-lifers that women who procure abortions are victims. Mr. Trump didn’t get the memo: "Never blame the victim."

There had not been such unanimity in the consultant class since 100 Republican foreign policy specialists disavowed Mr. Trump’s fitness for the presidency. His sin in that arena was suggesting the US should ally with nuclear-armed Christian Russia,and focus on salafist Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan as the true enemies of America and Mideast Christians.

Let us remember, his transgression on the abortion issue is answering "philosophically" that some form of punishment should follow a woman aborting her child.

How right he was. Certainly it is the truth that a great punishment follows every abortion. Her child is dead. Anyone who does not warn a woman before, or understand her guilt after, fails the woman both as a mother and a moral agent. It is the great horror of abortion that the most sacred place of protection becomes a killing field at the consent of the protector. If Christ turned a tomb into a birthplace, abortion turns a sanctuary into a tomb. It is the ultimate act of domestic violence. But because it is more like a suicide than a holocaust, states have legislated more to prevent than to punish.

When sanctity-of-life professional Ms. D quoted the 1869 newspaper blaming the "thrice guilty" men involved in abortion, she left out the line which preceded it: "... the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death..." The old feminists knew what the modern feminists cannot face: for the woman there would be a terrible punishment, and it would last a lifetime.

                         

Mr. Trump asked the Catholic, Mr. Matthews, quite sincerely about the Church punishment for abortion. Mr. Matthews was silent; while Bethany Goodman of the largely Catholic March for Life titled her anti-Trump article: "No Pro-life American Advocates Punishment for Abortion." She and Mr. Matthews might want to call a local bishop on that one, since the Catholic Church reserves its most severe punishment for abortion: excommunication. This ban from participation in the life of the Church can only be lifted by a bishop in the Church -- not your local parish priest. During the Year of Mercy, Pope Francis has extended the power to lift the excommunication ban to all parish priests. The penalty (yes, that is a punishment) for abortion has not been waived. The doors to forgiveness have been multiplied. Would all the pro-life feminists and professors contend that the Catholic Church is not part of their official club because the Church explicitly has a punishment directed at any woman who procures an abortion?

The official pro-life establishment -- along with Fox News journalists and most of the GOP -- have been cowed for years by the feminist ideology that has given us abortion for a fifth of all American pregnancies. They have been silent as the masculine protective culture of our military and State Department have been feminized. The talking heads have never been able to say that a woman seeking an abortion is like a soldier deserting his post. It is a shameful act springing from the two great perversions of the sexual revolution. The sexual act was torn out of marriage; and the adult protective duties of men as soldiers, and women as mothers, were divorced from sexual identities.

A culture of life is a culture of protection. The Republican consultant class has missed this for several decades. Mr. Trump, in personality and program, is assembling a brotherhood of nationalists to fight our real enemies. He practices the ancient politics of protection. He sounds no demand for individual rights. His gatherings are public manifestations of shared loyalties shaped by common duties.  New masculine personalities are coming to the front. They are moved more by love of country than career. They act in large groups, not power couples. Mothers will come to recognize this and support the adult movement to protect. The protective movement will include fighting our enemies abroad and shielding our babies at home. Mr. Trump’s boisterous assembling of the nation doesn’t look like the pinched consultant world of 'metro males' and feminist careerists -- he had to be punished.

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, April 2

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

I. POPE FRANCIS AND CATHOLIC CHURCH

THE HOLIEST WEEK OF THE YEAR: Pope Francis - his real message.
 
POPE AS DIPLOMAT: A summary of how Pope Francis is trying to bring Christ into the center of international relations.

MOTHER ANGELICA PASSES ON EASTER: Her passing remembered by John Allen. Mother's half-hour video response to the deliberate "abomination" of a woman mime, playing Jesus in a Stations of the Cross performance during Pope John Paul II's 1993 visit for Denver World Youth Day. The response of certain bishops to her eloquence was vitriolic, especially from the homosexual Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland. This historical rebellion of American episcopal leaders (Mahony, Bernardin, Weakland, and McCarrick) against the papacy of John Paul II was illuminated in the biography of Mother Angelica by Raymond Arroyo. Here is a brief article on the episode and the book.

CHURCH MILITANT OR CHURCH BELLIGERENT: By Fr. Paul Scalia.

II. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY ON THREAT OF ISIS AND SYRIAN CIVIL WAR TO EUROPE: From Atlantic interview of J. Goldberg and President Obama; note how the breakout of nationalism and fascism are equated:

Recently, when I asked the secretary of state a general question—is the Middle East still important to the U.S.?—he answered by talking exclusively about ISIS. “This is a threat to everybody in the world,” he said, a group “overtly committed to destroying people in the West and in the Middle East. Imagine what would happen if we don’t stand and fight them, if we don’t lead a coalition—as we are doing, by the way. If we didn’t do that, you could have allies and friends of ours fall. You could have a massive migration into Europe that destroys Europe, leads to the pure destruction of Europe, ends the European project, and everyone runs for cover and you’ve got the 1930s all over again, with nationalism and fascism and other things breaking out. Of course we have an interest in this, a huge interest in this.”

LONDON'S MAYOR APPLAUDS SYRIA'S ASSAD AND RUSSIA'S PUTIN FOR SAVING PALMYRA: Boris Johnson is a rising political force in English politics. He favors Britain leaving the EU and here talks sense about the real allies needed to defeat ISIS.

BOMBING THE VILLAGE TO SAVE IT: Thinking about how to decapitate ISIS without killing the captives.

THE REAL WORLD - THE GERMAN SS MAN WHO WORKED FOR MOSSAD: Before Iran's centrifuges there were Egypt's rockets. Here is how Israel dealt with that project.

GEORGE W BUSH ON THE SAUDIS AND EGYPT'S MUBARAK: As much as one might respect Mr. Bush as a sincere and good man, this NRO interview shows such a disinterest in the religious ideology of Saudi Arabia that it is jolting. Mr. Bush's "freedom agenda," with the added twist of setting up women-to-women networking, reveal the same baby-boomer inadequacies that President Obama showed in his recent foreign policy interview. The feminist chip that has rewired the thinking of a whole generation of American leaders has made us particularly inept in understanding the religious patriarchies and brotherhoods of the Mideast. Some excerpts:

I say to Bush, “There is a lot of nose-holding in foreign policy. In geopolitics. You have to deal with unsavory regimes, out of national interest. If you can join hands with Josef Stalin to win a world war, you can do anything.” He knows what I’m talking about, of course. And he knows — because I signaled this before coming to Dallas — that I want to hear about Saudi Arabia.

He says,“Let me talk about the Saudi government, at least when I was there, and I’m not there now, obviously. But King Abdullah and I became friends.” (Abdullah was king of Saudi Arabia from 2005 until his death in 2015.) “The first thing you gotta do, working with anybody, is understand their problems. One of my favorite questions was, ‘What keeps you up at night?’ And then I would tell them, what kept me up at night was a terrorist attack. “But His Majesty understood the need for liberating his society. He was just at a pace that others just didn’t agree with. Nevertheless, I’ll never forget sitting and listening to him talk about the opening of a university where men and women study side by side. He was very proud of that. But he also gave me an in-depth description of how he had to navigate the power centers in Saudi. “To me, there was no holding my nose when I was dealing with Saudi because I understood the difficulties.” A pivot: “Some of the leaders were disdainful of the freedom agenda. He wasn’t. [Meaning, Abdullah.] Just so long as one didn’t make public extraordinary demands. And I never did that, because I didn’t like it when people made public extraordinary demands on me, which was quite frequent. “You know, President Mubarak never came to see me in my second term. I think that’s true, and I think if we researched that, one would view that as an oddity.”

It’s true. Mubarak did not visit Washington in Bush’s second term. He returned to Washington in the summer of ’09, President Obama’s first year. Why did Mubarak stay away during those Bush years? “Because he didn’t like the freedom agenda,” says Bush, “and there’s a reason he didn’t like the freedom agenda, because he liked power. And it cost him.” In Egypt, “there was no viable opposition except for one group: the Muslim Brotherhood. Therefore, when there was an election, I wasn’t surprised that the only organized opposition won, because these young people who had helped overthrow Mubarak had no understanding. They’re smart, they’re capable, they handled the negative [i.e., the toppling of the strongman], they just couldn’t figure out the positive, which is, What do we do?”

So, "this caused Laura and me to think about how we can help."

They came up with the Women’s Initiative Fellowship, aimed at building woman-to-woman networks in the Arab world. “I believe that women will lead the democracy movement in the Middle East if given a chance,” says Bush. “So part of what we’re doing here is to enable women. One of the real challenges is, How do you make an impact as a former president? How can you impact things in a way that is beyond holding a meeting?”

From National Review Online interview with George W Bush by Jay Nordlinger in 2016.

III. PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

ON RACE: CAN WE TALK? Divisive Rhetoric by Heather McDonald.

FREE SPEECH AND VIOLENCE - TELL THE STORY STRAIGHT: Mr Trump and the Left.

MORMONS' ANTIPATHY TO TRUMP - THE WIVES' CHRONICLE: Mormons and Trump - Losing Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. The shellacking Trump received in these states was not from voter love for Ted Cruz. A highly effective media campaign, including pictures of Mr. Trump's wife (posing nude but mostly covered), was presented as our future first lady - "...or you could vote for Ted Cruz on Tuesday." This elicited from Trump a threat "to spill the beans" on Cruz's wife. (This later turned out to be biographical notes about her work for Goldman Sachs, NAFTA, and other elitist organizations that make the Cruz twosome look more like a Clinton power-couple than 'Little House on the Prairie comes to DC').

TRUMP'S FOREIGN POLICY ADVISORS AND A REVEALING NY TIMES INTERVIEW: Here is an excellent talk by Trump advisor Walid Phares. He understands and names Salafists, Wahhabis, and the Deobandi school. He says these groups became deeply embedded in Washington think tanks, American universities, and government agencies decades ago when we were allies in the war against Communism. (This is mindful of the many Communist spies and sympathizers in the US government during the Cold War who had their roots in our previous WWII alliance with the USSR.)  Mr. Phares suggests that CAIR should be investigated because they are already named by the UAE as a terrorist organization. He also says the first step of radicalizing terrorists is to be indoctrinated -- and he specifically says the indoctrination is about SALAFISM. Mr. Trump will approach Russia and ISIS in a dramatically different manner than previous Republican and Democratic regimes. The NY Times interview with Mr Trump shows an America First policy very different than current Republican paradigm.

DAVID BROOKS' PARADIGM CHANGE AND THE REAL MEANING OF TRUMP: A perceptive NY Times essay on The Post-Trump Era by David Brooks who has always been better at describing than prescribing. It's hard to prescribe when you don't believe in God! Probably the best essay David Brooks ever wrote was in the Atlantic: Kicking the secularist habit.

ANDREW JACKSON AND HIS BELOVED RACHEL: Mr. Trump did not quite measure up to an Andrew Jackson response when his wife was defamed. Old Hickory would defend his wife Rachel by dueling with men, but never attacking their women folk. In the all-out war against an Andrew Jackson presidency, besmirching the reputation of his wife "by telling the truth" was a major theme of his opponents as well. Rachel died of a heart attack before Jackson assumed the White House. He forever blamed her attackers for her death.

NEOCONS AND FOREIGN POLICY - A HISTORY AND AN ALTERNATIVE: Conservative Foreign Policy - what would it be? An essay on Reclaiming a Conservative Foreign Policy. An excellent history of neocons who have almost no stake in the traditional religious and sexual obligations which define a moral conservative. Their utilitarian and atheistic roots are hardly conservative. Their interest is a militarized foreign policy in general, and support of Israel in particular. One of the earliest and very effective essays in 1993 which helped shape the contours of the movement was The Arabists: the Romance of an American Elite by Robert D. Kaplan. He wrote a book of the same name as well as many excellent field reporting books on the Balkans. Mr. Kaplan was Stratfor's chief geopolitical analyst from 2012-2014. His more recent books are Asia's Cauldron  and The Revenge of Geography.

IV. THE STATE OF EUROPE

HUNGARY PRESIDENT VIKTOR ORBAN: His State of the Nation February 2016 Speech. President Orban has been called a fascist and enemy of Europe. Here he explains his opposition to "open immigration" in his own words. He has a distinctly Christian view of the nations of Europe. He came from one of the "captive nations" of the USSR. Those nations are increasingly depicting the EU as another atheistic superstate imposing a cultural imprisonment upon free nations. The financial  hand of Mrs. Merkel has replaced the steel fist of Stalin.

EUROPE AND THE BURQA: To cover one's face is to prevent social bonding. That is the argument of the European Human Rights Commission that rules both abortion and sodomy as basic human rights, while the ritual covering of the feminine is an assault on "European values."

BRUSSELS SOCCER CLUB HOOLIGANS JOIN EASTER MOURNING TO SAY "THIS IS OUR COUNTRY": Are they racists? Are they fascists? Is every male arm raised in defiance a Nazi salute? "Hooligan" is their own term for themselves. The 500 Belgium men who marched on Easter Sunday and were doused with high-power hoses came from many of the athletic clubs that still serve as a site of male bonding throughout European cities. They objected to teddy bears and flowers as the only public display after the Brussels killings. They felt it was not enough to weep, while intoning "stop the killing." Among these men are certainly ethnic racists. Are there also Christian patriots who believe a nation of protectors must rise to define a circle of protection, not another crowd of graveside mourners? The young men know they are supposed to be doing something besides crying. Their instincts are exactly right. Now older men should lead them with wisdom, not disperse them with hoses. Violent Salafists and emasculated Europeans are not the only actors in this drama.

OPEN EUROPE -- BRUSSELS NOT A CITY BUT A BAZAAR EXCEPT THE MUSLIM NEIGHBORHOOD WHERE DEEPER BONDS ARE FORGED: NY Times on Brussels, a city of 177,000 in a country of 11 million. Belgium is mostly Catholic, with the next largest religion Islam; and about one third modernist atheism. The modern West dominates the official culture - it is the headquarters of NATO and the European Union. The country of Belgium has three major language groups: French, German and Dutch. About 25% of Brussels is Muslim. The Islamic neighborhood of Molenbeek comprises Muslims, mostly from Morocco, but its mosque was financed by Saudi Arabia.

THE IRISH NATION REMEMBERS THE EASTER UPRISING 100 YEARS AGO: Some book reviews are about the reviewer much more than the book. This is especially true of this review about the revolutionary generation of the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland. The reviewer Denis Donoghue is poetic in his defense of the Catholic nationalists (especially Thomas Pearse) who died or were executed in the aftermath of the uprising. W.B. Yeats' poem, 'Easter 1916,'  is beautifully integrated as he criticizes the revisionist historians who try to dispel the "mystique" of sacrifice required to free a nation. Read the review, skip the book.

The proclamation of the Uprising of Irish nationalists against their British occupiers began:

"In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom."

The reviewer on Yeats and the changing Irish sentiments caused by the Uprising:

Yeats goes on to meditate on the transformation of these ordinary men and one distinguished woman, each of them “changed in his turn,/Transformed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born.” I read “A terrible beauty” as Yeats’s phrase for the sublime, that experience of astonishment, terror, dread, and ultimate pleasure that Edmund Burke described in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757): “Whatever is qualified to cause terror is a foundation capable of the sublime.” Many of the ordinary people of Ireland, I judge, felt a sense of the sublime, even if they never heard of the word, when they thought of the “sixteen dead men,” to refer to another of Yeats’s poems of 1916.

Botched as the Rising was, it had a dramatic effect on the attitudes of the ordinary people of Ireland—or the executions had. Something like Pearse’s vision came about: the sacrifice of the holy few transformed the lazy many. Within a short time, even those who were indifferent or hostile to the Rising in April gave their sympathy to the insurgent party Sinn Fein (Ourselves) and turned against the constitutionalists, the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), which advocated that Ireland continue as part of Great Britain, represented in the British Parliament with the aim of being granted Home Rule by the British government. The British threat to impose military conscription on Ireland in early 1918 also did much to turn Irish people against the Empire. In the election of 1918 the IPP was virtually wiped out. Sinn Fein won 73 of the 105 seats. A mystique began to suffuse the memory of the executed leaders of 1916, especially Pearse, which has not disappeared. Yeats wrote in “Sixteen Dead Men”:

You say that we should still the land 
Till Germany’s overcome;
But who is there to argue that
Now Pearse is deaf and dumb?

In poems and prose, Pearse, several years before 1916, invoked Christ’s blood sacrifice, his death on the cross, and his resurrection. He was not ashamed to associate those supernatural images with his own love of Ireland and the Irish language...  The mystique to which I have referred still surrounds Pearse, Connolly, Mac Diarmada, and the other martyrs, despite many efforts by revisionist historians—the School of Irony, as I think of them—to dispel it."

Friday BookReview: 'Papa H' and Mailer on HUCK FINN

(first published October 31, 2014)




From Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa --

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

                                                                                         

                           

                                                                                                 
Norman Mailer gave his appraisal (including the irony of an anachronistic tribute) on the novel's centennial anniversary:

"I suppose I am the 10-millionth reader to say that 'Huckleberry Finn' is an extraordinary work... Flawed, quirky, uneven... -- all the same, what a book we have here!  

"[Twain] had managed to give us a circus of fictional virtuosities. In nearly every chapter new and remarkable characters bounded out from the printed page as if it were a tarmac on which they could perform their leaps. The author's confidence seemed so complete that he could deal with every kind of man or woman God ever gave to the middle of America. Jail-house drunks like Huck Finn's father take their bow, full of the raunchy violence that even gets into the smell of clothing. Gentlemen and river rats, young, attractive girls full of grit and ''sand,'' and strong old ladies with aphorisms clicking like knitting needles, fools and confidence men - what a cornucopia of rabble and gentry inhabit the author's river banks. 

"Who can declare to a certainty that a large part of the prose in 'Huckleberry Finn' is not lifted directly from Hemingway? We know that we are not reading Ernest only because the author, obviously fearful that his tone is getting too near, is careful to sprinkle his text with 'a-clutterings' and 'warn'ts' and 'anywheres' and 't'others.' But we have read Hemingway -- and so we see through it -- we know we are reading pure Hemingway disguised: 

''We cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim . . . then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee-deep and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres . . . the first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line - that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn't black anymore . . . by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water and the east reddens up and the river.'' 

                                                     

                                                           

"In 'Huckleberry Finn' we are presented... with the best river ever to flow through a novel, our own Mississippi, and in the voyage down those waters of Huck Finn and a runaway slave on their raft, we are held in the thrall of the river. Larger than a character, the river is a manifest presence, a demiurge to support the man and the boy, a deity to betray them, feed them, all but drown them, fling them apart, float them back together. The river winds like a fugue through the marrow of the true narrative which is nothing less than the ongoing relation between Huck and the runaway slave, this Nigger Jim whose name embodies the very stuff of the slave system itself -- his name is not Jim but Nigger Jim. The growth of love and knowledge between the runaway white and the runaway black is a relation equal to the relation of the men to the river for it is also full of betrayal and nourishment, separation and return... 

"Reading 'Huckleberry Finn' one comes to realize all over again that the near-burned-out, throttled, hate-filled dying affair between whites and blacks is still our great national love affair, and woe to us if it ends in detestation and mutual misery."