Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, January 2

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

I. A SHORT NEW YEAR'S R&G ROUNDUP

DAWSON ON CULTURE:  The best model for how we (at AOA) are trying to tell both the story of the natural world and the unfolding of political history is found in the cultural work of Christopher Dawson. The Imaginative Conservative keeps his project alive.

EUROPE DISSOLVING: US TO FOLLOW? Pat Buchanan asks a question. He understands the essential nature of ethnic and national loyalties in defining political life. What he seems to miss is how Christianity was able to make nations more than ethnic brotherhoods, just as Christ transformed those men of Galilee from a fishing-district fraternity to the foundational brotherhood of a whole species.

ISIS -TURKISH CONNECTION: The death of an ISIS commander just north of Baghdad reveals a cell phone with ties to the Turkish intelligence agency. Meanwhile, Turkey continues to keep troops in northern Iraq, and Iraq threatens war. Turkish duplicity has also led Germans, seeking to join the air campaign against ISIS, to keep intelligence out of Turkish hands. All this has led another writer to warn against repeating the Unholy Alliance of 1855 and the Crimean War.

STAR WARS: THE FEMINISTS AWAKEN? The opening crawl of 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' begins with: "Luke Skywalker is missing." But so, it seems, are many of the male protagonists in this film. In their place are the heroines Rey and General (no longer Princess) Leah. Has the feminist implant grabbed another icon? At the same time, the movie's antagonist appears to be an unsocialized male. The caveat to these criticisms may be in the unused scenes and plot threads dropped during the film's editing -- with many suspecting they will be brought into the following sequels. If this is true, we may yet find that Leah is more responsible than the movie leads us to believe; and that Luke may be the messianic figure whose return will mean the destruction of the new Empire and the rebuilding of civic life. We'll have to wait until May 2017 to find out what direction Disney takes in Episode VIII. In the meantime, a stand-alone 'Star Wars' film is being released next Christmas... seemingly about a team of men being led by a woman.

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, December 26

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

THE SYNOD ON THE FAMILY --  ENGLISH TRANSLATION: Read the article; read the document. Over 250 Bishops from all over the world agreed to this summation. The beautiful reflection is from a brotherhood of fathers united in prayer to the Father of all mercies, and listening to what He has revealed through His Son. The more the brotherhood can come together in person, engaging one another as a whole church, the more the errors of certain wealthy national episcopacies can be confronted. The cabals flourish in the dark. Light begets courage. This is the Pope Francis Synod strategy.

Some quotes from the final document --

On restoring man and woman to primal unity (from the Introduction):

Pope Francis recalled this in opening the final phase of this synodal journey dedicated to the family: "God did not create us to live in sorrow or to be alone. He made men and women for happiness, to share their journey with someone who complements them [...]. It is the same plan which Jesus presents [...] summarized with these words: ‘From the beginning of creation [God] made them male and female; for this reason a man will leave his father and his mother, and cleave to his wife and they become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh’ (Mk 10:6-8; cf. Gen 1:27; 2:24)."  God "joins the hearts of two people who love one another, he who joins them in unity and indissolubility. This shows us that the goal of conjugal life is not simply to live together for life, but to love one another for life! In this way Jesus re-establishes the order which was present from the beginning [...] only in the light of the folly of the gratuitousness of Jesus’ paschal love will the folly of the gratuitousness of an exclusive and life-long conjugal love make sense" (Homily at the Opening Mass of the Synod, 4 October 2015).

An apostolic event of prayer - the spiritual reality of synod:

The Holy Father called the Synod of Bishops to reflect on the reality of the family. "The convenire in unum around the Bishop of Rome is indeed an event of grace, in which episcopal collegiality is made manifest in a path of spiritual and pastoral discernment." (Francis, Address at the Prayer Vigil in preparation for the Extraordinary Synod on the Family, 3 October 2014).

God made us male and female so we could participate in the unique form of love which is Marriage -- let us give thanks:

God consecrates the love of a husband and a wife and confirms the indissoluble character of their love, offering them the grace to live in faithfulness, mutual integration, and openness to life. Let us thank God for marriage because, through the community of life and love, Christian spouses know happiness and experience that God loves them personally, with feelings of warmth and tenderness. The man and the woman, individually and as a couple — recalls Pope Francis — "are the image of God." Their difference "is not meant to stand in opposition, or to subordinate, but is for the sake of communion and generation, always in the image and likeness of God."

Is this clear enough on the demonic oxymoron of gay marriage?:

Regarding proposals to place unions of homosexual persons on the same level as marriage, "there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God's plan for marriage and family"(ibid). In every way, the Synod maintains as completely unacceptable that local Churches be subjected to pressure in this matter. and that international bodies link financial aid to poor countries to the introduction of laws to establish "marriage" between people of the same sex.

What Really Happened at Synod by Weigel

At First Things magazine, this article by George Weigel shows how tone-deaf conservative intellectuals are in understanding events of spiritual fraternity. Mr. Weigel had details of inside baseball (less about what really happened) with his happy news that an Eastern European (Cardinal Erdo of Hungary) beat the Western European (Cardinal Kasper of Germany) in theological arguments. He gave a very good summary of Erdo's address with quotations. If the article was called Opening Machinations and a Cardinal's Response, it would be good reporting. There was no quoting from the final document, which probably had not yet been translated into English. That seems a revealing deficit, as if Mr. Weigel's analysis rather than the bishops' document is "what really happened" amidst the Church Fathers. It is also peculiar that the dynamics of different episcopal cultures were not appreciated, whether it be the sumptuous extravagance of German entertaining or the role of language in fostering meetings of bishops of different countries. Certain kinds of men rise to leadership in forums such as these. Other kinds of men, who are magnified beyond their true proportion by their access to media outlets, are shrunken by face to face, man to man encounters. (Walter Kasper and Raymond Burke are two such men).

Unbelievably, the twin demons of the Apocalypse intervention by Cardinal Sarah is not mentioned. In fact, the southern-hemisphere Catholics are lectured: "The American experience of the past four decades is still not sufficiently 'in play' in the deliberations of the world church." Mr. Weigel apparently feels the American propensity for "theology of the body" talks has been an antidote to the still deeply compromised, unexposed, and unrepentant homosexual clergy who preen as moral authorities in American public life.

The great deficiency in Catholic teaching on sexuality is not in understanding male-female marriage. This synod shows we have that, quite universally and beautifully, in hand. It is the theology of the corporate body of men in patriarchal fraternity that we haven't reformed or even explained. The Americans and Mr. Weigel and the conservative intellectuals at First Things would do well to listen to Pope Francis and Cardinal Sarah to better appreciate the spiritual fruit that is coming from these apostolic gatherings called Synods.

CATHOLICS AND JEWS: On the 50th anniversary of Nostra Aetate the Vatican released a commemorative document. The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. It is not dogma the authors are quick to say, but a reflection. We must hold two truths together: 1) the Covenant with Abraham as the sealing of Israel on Sinai still stands; and 2) Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the Covenant - in nature and in history.

The death of a great Jewish theologian. He rejected secular American intellectual Jews who were more interested in "Manhattan salons" than Judaism. He said Israel was the favored Son as was Joseph -- who, loving his father, reconciled with all his brothers. Election and universal brotherhood, more than philosophical treatises, were the motifs of the great Michael Wyschogrod.

II. LATIN AMERICA

CATHOLIC CARDINALS AND US GAY AMBASSADOR: This South American cardinal apparently is not too awestruck by the gay gringo from the North. The American fad of appointing homosexual ambassadors is considered an insult against most nations who retain ancient traditions of national honor.

American cardinals are not so straight-forward in dealing with the demonic death cult of sodomy. The primary practical reason the American and European priesthood has not yet repented for the abuse scandal is the continuing presence of a significant homosexual cohort among bishops and chanceries. Until this cult desecrating our purity codes of brotherhood is exposed and punished, the milieu of deceit and depravity will keep producing bizarre tales like those from New York.

SOUTH AMERICA: AFTER THE LEFTISTS, WILL CATHOLIC NATIONS EMERGE? We have seen the leftists. We have seen the feminist careerists. We have not yet seen Christian men leading their nations in a new drive for "land, labor, and lodging" as the Latin bishops and the pope have put it. The Parliament ousts the Chavismo. But what happens next? A new President - the end of the Kirchner power couple. The death of the Latin Left presents a great opportunity for Christianity and the nations to untie the atheistic knot of capitalism vs communism, and propose a true Christian public program.

III. RELIGION & GEOPOLITICS ROUND UP

RUMBLINGS WITHIN US MILITARY: ALLY WITH RUSSIA, CHINA AND SYRIA -- FIGHT ISIS: EXPOSE TURKEY: This excellent reportage by Seymour Hersh concerning US military-to-military relations with Russia which led many US military men to advocate our joining the Russians with Syria's Assad to fight ISIS. He also shows the interests of China in supporting the Syrian government and opposing the pan-Turkish Islamic designs of Erdogan of Turkey. China's western province of Xinjiang (population 22 million) has 45 percent Islamic Turkish language Ughyers.

See our 'Monday Map' on the lands of the Turkic people to understand how the communal bonds of language and religion inspire Erdogan's peculiar Ottoman empire/caliphate dreams. In China the Hui Muslims are ethnically Han, and have much more religious liberty than the Uyghurs who are often suspected of separatism based on their Turkish ethnicity as much as their Islamic religion.

VIOLENCE AND GUNS: A look at other nations and mass shootings.

'It is the night of the dear Saviour's birth'

"Let us, then, joyfully celebrate the coming of our salvation and redemption. Let us celebrate the festive day on which he who is the great and eternal day came from the great and endless day of eternity into our own short day of time."   

                          (from Saint Augustine on the feast of Christmas)

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, December 19

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

I. PRESIDENT OBAMA, POLICY, AND PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

PRESIDENT OBAMA TO THE NATION: President Obama's speech. The President asks Congress to have a debate on a war strategy. Mr Trump says stop all Muslim immigration "until our country's representatives can figure out what's going on." That is not so outlandish as it sounds. What is outlandish is that our deliberative institutions -- the Senate and the House of Representatives -- have not put together a clear strategic definition of who we are fighting and why. They owe this to our nation and our military. President Obama is right not to make some major military strategic change because of a single terror attack in California. He is right to say that we cannot be in a "war between Islam and America," He has also said: "It is the responsibility of all Americans - of every faith - to reject discrimination... It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It's our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim-Americans should somehow be treated differently."

But the way not to fight all of Islam is to delineate the particular Muslims we are fighting. You might call that an act of discrimination, which is exactly what we have not had enough of in this conflict. He could not be more mistaken in saying we cannot discriminate against Muslims. Mr Trump is exactly right when he says: "Where this hatred comes from and why, we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life." Trump is saying, quite correctly, that fifteen years after the Twin Towers, we don't understand the danger facing us. Like the president, he calls on Congress to debate and figure this out.

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S RELIGION: Reading this interview with his favorite female theologian-novelist, Marilynne Robinson and the President is a good way to understand President Obama's approach to Christianity. There are no public claims about Christ, history and the Church but there is an abiding sense of the dignity of every human soul (when the soul begins is not addressed). In a strange way, it is an anthropology for libertarians.


THE MASCULINE PROTECTIVE BOND - OUR HISTORIC NATIONAL STRATEGY UNDER ATTACK: Reducing the Civil Rights Movement to an effort to end all discrimination has broken down the fundamental anthropological bonds which rest on sexual distinctions and bind the human species into families and nations. The male-female bond of marriage and the all-male bond of territorial protection are bonds which are fatally undermined by losing their sexual character.

This Marine study on unit performance sees the male-female integration plan as an historic mistake.

When Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that the Pentagon was opening up combat jobs to women, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford was not present. When Dunford was the Marine commandant, he requested exemption for the Marines from the Secretary of the Navy's ruling to open all combat positions to women. President Obama understands the fidelity of soldiers to the military chain of command will help him use this warrior's integrity for the policy of sexual disruption.

The Defense Department seeks an opinion from Justice department to reevaluate the male-only draft registration policy. This setting aside of all American men, ages 18-26, is the remnant of our traditional protective sex roles. We have argued at AOA that the male territorial protective group is as fundamental a communal unit as the male-female character of marriage. Most men in special ops seem to agree.


OBAMA'S STRATEGY: An unfolding strategy is better than a hasty attack. This is the plus side to the president's overall temperament which will allow a true change in alliances in the future.

PARIS CONFERENCE: THE END OF FOSSIL FUELS OR ANOTHER GLOBAL BUREAUCRACY:
The Paris agreement on fossil fuels: hype as hope. How to measure and regulate climate costs -- India asks for justice in an already murky field of study.

WHY THE MEDIA HATES MR. TRUMP: Pat Buchanan on the Fourth Estate and the long battle of the silent majority with the elite media.

II. PUTIN'S RUSSIAN ALTERNATIVE: MEN AND RELIGION

MEN AND MAPS: A look inside Putin's War Room. This is how men learn about the world, from the viewpoint of their own nation.

RUSSIA'S CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE: After the downing of a Russian plane by Turkish forces for a minor violation of airspace, the Russians propose a goodwill gesture: Return the Hagia Sophia.

III. ISLAM, THE MIDDLE EAST, AND TERRORISM

RELIGIOUS WAR IN YEMEN: The US is aiding the purge of Shiites by air attack. Mindful of the British strategy toward the Boers: "If you can't beat their men, make them homeless." One way to see the world through the eyes of Shia is to look at SHIAPAC. A large Shia protest in Washington D.C. shows a voice we have not heard from. We should not ban all Muslims from the US. We must ban some Muslims, however, and we will best learn who they are and how to fight them from other Muslims who are our allies in fighting our common enemies.

TERRORISM IN PAKISTAN: Forty-four Muslims killed on a bus in Pakistan - no provocation. The headline names an ethnic group as victims but guess who shot and who got shot if you distinguish Sunni and Shiite? From the 'Times of India,' in three paragraphs, we are told about the shooters and the war we are in. It is a war that India has been waging for decades. See this good primer from West Point on Deobandi Islam (south Asia's form of Wahhabi Islam). In Naming the Enemy, 'American Conservative' offers the clearest take yet on the enemy within Islam -- not Shia, but Salafist Sunnis. The 'NY Times' offers a good profile of the San Bernardino female shooter: a Saudi girl in Pakistan.

MIDDLE EAST INSTITUTE - DANIEL PIPES: This site has a lot of good information. It very much takes the Likud position on all things Israeli, and then assumes this must be best for America. America owes to our ally Israel that we do not become entwined in their deadly embrace with Saudi Arabia. Their fixation with Iran is part of this party line approach, which I think some day will change very suddenly. Then all the neoconservative Mideast experts will suddenly see Iran in a longer perspective, and look again into the deadly eyes of the Saudi royal kingdom and the real nuclear danger in the area: Pakistan.

TERRORISM IN CHINA: A four-part series on the nature of the terrorist threat facing China.

Map on Monday: PERSIA AND SHIA ISLAM

LINGUISTIC AND COMMUNAL LOYALTIES OF THE MIDEAST AND CENTRAL ASIA: A THREE PART SERIES ON THE ARABS, PERSIANS, AND TURKS

PART II: PERSIA, SHIA ISLAM AND THE PRESENT CONFLICT

by A. Joseph Lynch

The map, above, roughly depicts the areas of Shiite Muslim predominance in the Mideast and Central Asia. By tying this to a map of Persian languages (see map below), we come to appreciate Iran's place in the Islamic world. Recent events have proven that what concerns Saudi Arabia (and many US foreign policy experts) more than ISIS or Al Qaeda is Shia Islam. Despite the fact that Shiites make up only 10-15% of Islam, ten Sunni Arab states (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and the former Yemeni government in exile) with US support have begun battling Shiites in Yemen, while Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula takes hold of the eastern half of the nation. Meanwhile, Iraq and Syria continue to be overrun by the Islamic State; and General Petraeus has declared: "I would argue that the foremost threat to Iraq's long-term stability and the broader regional equilibrium is not the Islamic State; rather, it is Shiite militias." 

The Saudi-led attack on the Shiites of Yemen is better understood, given the map above. Saudi Arabia fears a Shiite-controlled region inYemen. No one seriously thinks the Houthi could control all of Yemen which appears now to be permanently fractured like Syria and Iraq. The idea that the Houthi as Houthi or as an agent of Iran are a threat to Saudi Arabia's sovereignty is a smokescreen. The House of Saud sees them correctly as one of many enemies: Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria to the north; Iran across the Persian Gulf to its east and Bahrain on its own side of the Persian Gulf.  Saudi Arabia, with its low population and heavy Shia majority in its own oil-rich eastern Gulf coast, is certainly insecure.  Shiite Iran (and other Shiite governments in Iraq and Syria) are well aware of Sunni designs to topple their governments. They also know Israel and America favor regime change in Syria and Iran. That Saudi Arabia was able to gather a quick league of nations to assault the poorest Shiites in the region. The bombings and blockades smell of religious violence more than a restoration of political authority for the discredited ex-President Hadi. The Saudi-escalated involvement against the Shia government of Syria -- and the lack of Sunni Arab vigor in combating the Islamic State and Al Qaeda (both Sunni terror groups) -- are further signs that the Arab Spring has now morphed into the Salafist-Shia religious war.

While Sunni Arab states run generally westward from the Arabian peninsula throughout north Africa, Shia Iran and its Persian language is oriented eastward from the borders of Iraq, across Iran, and into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. Each of these nations -- along with the Kurds -- speak a Persian-derived tongue. It is estimated that 150-200 million people speak one of 86 Iranian languages (e.g., Persian, Kurdish, and Pashto). Although Pakistan's dominant Sunni Islam puts it into the Arab Sunni camp in its relations to Iran, around 20% of Pakistan is Shiite, thus making it the second largest Shiite nation in the world after Iran with upwards of 30 million Shiites. (The Shiites of India have about the same number). Afghanistan is around 10%-15% Shiite, and Iran helped them and the US in toppling the Sunni-extremist Taliban government in 2001-2002.

Shia Iran is a gateway to central Asia and to its eastern Islamic neighbors. Given that Iran alone has access to the energy resources around both the Caspian and Persian Gulf -- as well as the fact that it could become an export hub for resources in landlocked Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan -- Iran should be cultivated as an ally in the region.

In the seventh century, the Christian Byzantines and Zoroastrian Sasanian Persian dynasty fought a long series of wars that left both exhausted and vulnerable. The two depleted cultures fell to Arab Islamic conquest. As we recall the Arab-Sunni-Wahhabi faction that struck us on 9/11 (which Iran condemned), let us not repeat that seventh-century foreign policy mistake in our own era.

In our third and final part we turn  to the Turkic people of the steppe lands stretching across Anatolia to western China. Use the following link to read part one of this series.

This article first appeared on Anthropology of Accord on May 4, 2015.