Any non-Catholic who presumes to judge the Catholic Church stands a considerable risk of sticking his nose where it does not belong.  I am not a Catholic, so I have no standing to criticize the Church’s internal decisions, or beliefs, or anything else internally Catholic.  (Of course this does not really apply to bloggers, or any other media opinionators, but I like to try to follow it anyway.)

However, the actions of the Church in the world, and especially of its pope, reach far beyond the Church’s Magisterium.   And the past few popes have cast giant shadows on us all.

John Paul II was a great voice, one may even say fighter, for human freedom and dignity.   He had positive impacts in many areas, but nowhere more than in the struggle against totalitarian dictatorship.  With his personal experience of both Nazism and Communism, he seemed immune to the modern disease of moral equivalency.  Nor was he inclined to speak in the soothing voice of a diplomat from a neutral state trying to coax the great powers to play nice.  He was a moral leader, and he knew that the fight against totalitarianism was first and foremost a moral fight.

In his trips to Poland, he insisted on meeting with the dissident anti-communists of the Solidarity movement.  He consistently stood with them, and refused communist offers for the Church to function as the in-house opposition.  The Polish regime refused to allow the meetings, of course, but JPII insisted…and prevailed.  His visit played  a crucial role in strengthening the real opposition, and in destroying communism in Europe.

With that as the background, we come to Benedict XVI’s recent visit to Cuba.  Many in and outside the Church had urged Benedict to visit with the Cuban opposition forces, personified at the moment by the Ladies in White, a persecuted group of brave Catholic women whose husbands, sons and fathers are political prisoners of the brutal Castro regime.   Benedict did not do so.  There is no evidence that he ever tried.

The full story, and theories for his failure, are laid out in an excellent essay by George Weigel in National Review.  Weigel is a Catholic, and well fitted to speculate on the reasons.  I urge you to read it and decide for yourself whether this qualifies as appeasement.

It must be said that Benedict has displayed both courage and wisdom in many other contexts, including his engagement with Islam.  Unlike other inter-faith outreach efforts that focus on Kumbayah evasiveness, his speech at Regensburg confronted the structural problem of modern Islam.  Benedict took some nasty shots from the left for his temerity in speaking an unpleasant truth about Islam.

Benedict pointed out that in orthodox Islam, the Koran is read as prohibiting reasoned investigation or philosophical questioning of the meaning of scripture.  This has been the case since the ninth century triumph of literalist Ash’arites over the rationalist Mu’tazalite school. (See the excellent book by Robert Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind; How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis.)

Where the Ash’arite mentality sometimes seems to have a foothold in some extreme Protestant Christian sects, the Catholic Church is a bulwark of the belief that both faith and reason are necessary for the righteous life.  In fact, John Paul II’s 1988 encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) is a good read on this point.

Condoleezza Rice is one of the most accomplished non-politician people in America today.  Former Secretary of State, former National Security Adviser, author, concert pianist, professor and Provost of Stanford, etc., etc.

Politically, the election will likely come down to a referendum on an incumbent, as these things usually do.  And the true partisans among us always want the other party to field the weakest, lamest candidates possible.  That is what separates partisans from plain, non-political citizens, who want to see the best possible candidates square off.  Partisans don’t worry about how bad things will be for the country and world if the US elects a fool; the only risk is that it might not be their fool.  If the other party wins, it means the end of the world anyway.

But for us non-political types, I can’t imagine a better Republican team than Romney-Rice.   Of course I don’t know if she would accept.  She flatly rejected an attempted draft in 2008.

by Ben Finiti 

Over the recent years, I have developed an interesting new hobby. (Well, I find it interesting.)  I prowl through thrift stores in search of forgotten books by forgotten authors.  And then I liberate them (usually for a dollar) and read them.

I pass quickly over certain types of books.  For instance, I have never bought a 20th or 21^st century work of fiction. In my humble opinion as an accomplished literary snob, the last great writer of fiction was Anthony Trollope.  (I do not classify Orwell, Huxley, Waugh, or Koestler’s works as quite fiction.)

I do pick up curious books on subjects in which I have neither interest nor background.  For instance, I just finished a book called Let’s Talk About Port, by J.C. Valente-Perfeito, published in Portugal in 1948.  The author explains the varieties of port, sings (gushes, actually) its praises, and complains of how little his fellow citizens drink of it.   He offers eloquent warnings about the modern scourge of cocktail-drinking, and effectively rebuts those medical cranks who claim that alcoholism is a bad thing.  I had great fun reading it, and I may even try some of the stuff one of these days.

But the real goal of my pursuit is a category of books which was invented and flourished in the dreadful 20^th century:  the survivor’s tale of witness to the inhuman atrocities that reached such a peak (so far) in the recent past.

Some books of witness were instant hits and remained so, despite their crushing intensity.  Elie Wiesel’s Night describes Auschwitz and his father’s death there.  The Diary of Anne Frank is rightly famous, though I myself have never been able to read more than a few opening pages before dissolving in tears.  (I think this is because I have a daughter, and the words always come into my head in my daughter’s voice.)

In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Alexander Solzhenitsyn used a thin veil of fiction to recount a part of his experience in the prison camps of history’s most earnest experiment in “building a better world.”   His later massive Gulag Archipelago removed the veil and included more detail that most readers can stand.

In the mid-range stand works which once were read and discussed, and now dot the dustbins.  Whittaker Chambers’ aptly named Witness tells  of a man whose soul was driven by his embrace of communism into the vicious underworld of espionage against his country.  It becomes a story of redemption, as he rejects his past infatuation and attempts, at enormous personal cost, to warn his countrymen of the ugly reality facing them.

Primo Levi’s If This is a Man tells his tale of Auschwitz survival in clinical terms that reflect his scientific background.

Many a bookshelf could be filled with tales from heroic survivors from the dark side of the soul.  And most of them would be unknown, unread, unstudied, and out-of-print, available only through Amazon’s used-book network, or (for the lucky treasure hunter) the bins of a Goodwill store.

Who now reads Victor Kravchenko?  Peter Deriabin?  Jan Valtin?  Earl Weinstock?

Viktor Kravchenko’s is an interesting story. He was a Soviet engineer and factory manager, a coddled member of Stalin’s New Class.  His book is filled with the chilling details that lay bare the soul-destroying communist system.  During WW2 he defected to the US from a trade mission and wrote his story.  When it was finally published (I Chose Freedom, 1946) he was blasted by Communists worldwide as a liar and defamer of the Soviet Union.  Kravchenko responded by suing a prominent French communist leader for libel.  He won, and wrote a second book, I Chose Truth (1950) about the case.

With unimpeachable credibility, Kravchenko exposed the nightmare that it was to live under the Chekists’ never-blinking eye, even for top managers who were never arrested or imprisoned.  This book should be the primary text for any serious study of the reality of Soviet life under Stalin.In his second book he unmasked the puppetry whereby supposedly indigenous communist parties existed primarily to serve the demands of one man in the Kremlin.

Peter Deriabin was a KGB bureaucrat, agent, and finally a spy in Austria.  He, too, enjoyed the material luxuries the Soviets lavished on the New Class.  And he, too, ran for the US at the first opportunity.  His book, The Secret World (1959), unveils the State Security apparatus from the agent’s side, and it dovetails with Solzhenitsyn’s victim-view.   He gives fascinating insights into the power struggle after Stalin’s death, and dashes the naive hope that the system would then change.

An intriguing tale from another perspective is Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night (1940).  He was a German communist organizer and spy; like Chambers, he was a true believer who thought he was empowering the working class and eradicating poverty, only to discover that he was just eradicating the Leader’s enemies and empowering a new class of party functionaries.  His description of the tactics used to eliminate non-communist labor leaders is a unique eye-opener by itself.

Earl Weinstock’s case is perhaps saddest of all.  A young Rumanian Jew, Weinstock only dreamed of escaping Rumania’s poverty and anti-Semitism by getting out, going anywhere.  While he looked to France or Palestine, his mother had one unchanging dream: America.   In 1942 Weinstock, his mother and two brothers were sent to German concentration camps, where he survived after seeing his older brother shot, and being forced to shovel in dirt on the open mass grave where he fell.  After the war, Rumania went through another hell, this time under their Soviet “liberators.”  Weinstock contemplated the difference between the two tyrannies.

“In Transnistria [the German camp] I was a prisoner.  I was clothed in rags.  I slept on the dirt and potato peels in a barrack of filth and stink.  I was given little to eat and I stole food from garbage cans, for which I could have been shot. I saw and heard of murders and atrocities.  But my life and my captors made it plain to me that I was a prisoner. Nobody tried to convince me in the middle of all this that I was really free. That made a difference that I could not know then but that I knew now in Iasi [his hometown in Rumania]. I had made up my mind in Transnistria that I could outlast them if they did not shoot me.  It wasn’t easy, but filth and hunger and confinement were environments I could adapt to.   For those who shared my lot in my barracks would share everything. Our minds were free.  We could confide in each other, trust each other…But in Iasi, in 1947…what could I hope for?  To whom could I talk and feel safe in so doing? …What and who was I to be?  And I was not in a prison and I could not point to anyone who was my captor, but they talked to me of freedom and I was a prisoner.”

He and his aged mother escaped to America in 1949.  She died within a year, and he tried to forget the past, but too many ghosts pushed him to tell his story.  So he wrote a book, The Seven Years (his life from 1942 to 1949). E.P Dutton published it.  It was never re-printed.  Amazon lists a single used copy.

I found mine in a Goodwill bin.

Do these books matter?  True, many of them had considerable success in opening Western eyes and forcing them to recognize the truth.  But many people were able to dismiss all these eye witnesses and their stories as mere propaganda.

After reading Kravchenko no one could seriously doubt the real hell that was life in the Soviet Union, or the truly criminal nature of the worldwide movement that supported it.  Yet millions in the West continued to believe that this hell was heaven.

Deriabin demonstrated the intense hyperparanoid terror that was essential to the system’s survival.  Yet millions continued to believe that the police state was an aberration of the system, caused by one man’s suspicious nature.

Valtin makes it clear that the Nazis and Communists were history’s ugliest fraternal twins; differing mainly in the effectiveness of the former and the puppet-leadership of the latter.  Yet millions continue to believe that while the Nazis were uniquely evil, the communists were well-intentioned reformers who made unfortunate “mistakes”.

And the fashionable deniers of “American exceptionalism” have to figure out a way to debunk the iron determination of Earl Weinstock’s mother, pursuing a lifelong vision of freedom under the Statue of Liberty.

The truth is always worth telling, even if it never finds an audience.  And there is value in seeking out these lost truths.  Otherwise, too many lives, too much heroism ends up down the Memory Hole.

_____________________________________________________________________

If you want to read any of these books, your best bet is a university or big-city library, but keep your handkerchief ready for the layer of dust that will cover it.  Another source is the Inter-Library Loan system.  And, of course, Amazon.  And Goodwill.

Let me know what you think of any of these writers, or any other witnesses you come across.

Our initial reaction was that, if at all possible, the philosophical question should be considered separately.

This got me thinking about a question I often ask myself:  how can someone who does A also do B?  Specifically on the question of Israel and Zionism.

How can one preach democracy and hate the most democratic state ever to exist in the region?

How can one value freedom and yet hate the freest, arguably the only free state in the region?

How can one espouse peace and yet hate the only state in the region willing to establish peace with all its neighbors?

And finally, the most perplexing of all: How can one love God and hate Israel?

I know, I know.  Anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel is not the same as anti-semitism.  Supposedly, not every anti-Zionist advocate of return to the indefensible pre-1967 borders hates Jews.  Not every pious critic who screams “Apartheid” and “Imperialism” at Israel’s every measure of self-defense is an anti-Semite.  Not every college professor demanding disinvestment from all Israeli companies would be happy to see Hamas achieve its bloodthirsty dreams.  Not every anti-Zionist wants to see Israel swept off the map, or even the more moderate proposal of allowing Hamas missiles to be positioned 11 miles from Tel Aviv.

But still…

When I hear someone say “I am not anti-Semitic; I am just anti-Israel” I wonder.  Isn’t that like saying “I don’t hate Americans, just America”?  One hears that kind of thing on the Left on occasion, and I think for the same reason.  Leftist anti-Americans believe the US is responsible for most or all of the ills in the world.  They blame US aggressive capitalism and arrogant neo-imperialism for every problem, at home or abroad (including global warming).  Anti-Zionists blame Israel for every problem, from Islamic Jihad to insane tyrants to the Muslim oppression of women.  Of course, anti-Zionism is considerably more bi-partisan: from Walt and Mearsheimer to Noam Chomsky to Pat Buchanan to Jeremiah Wright to Dennis Kucinich to Ron Paul to…  Well, you can add to the list at your leisure.

Anti-semitism is a poison which has proved useful to every despot, fully infected Islam, for too long distorted Christianity, undermined our faith in our own values, and now weakens the West’s resolve to face the internal and external threats we face.

And anyone who is comfortable with it should be confronted.  Not shunned or avoided, but confronted.

Anyway, I stumbled across the following passage in Gulliver’s Travels, which I think sums it up.

When Gulliver visited Laputa, the land of the philosophers, he complained of “cholick”.  He was introduced to “a great physician who was famous for curing that disease by contrary operations of the same instrument, a pair of bellows with a slender muzzle of ivory; this he conveyed 8 inches up the anus, and drawing in the wind, he affirmed he could make the guts as lank as a dried bladder.  But when the disease was more stubborn and violent, he let in the muzzle while the bellows was full of wind, which he discharged into the body of the patient…

“I saw him try both experiments upon a dog; but could not discern any effect from the former.  After the latter, the animal was ready to burst, and made so violent a discharge as was very offensive to me and my companions.  The dog died on the spot, and we left the doctor trying to recover him by the same operation.”

Thus Dean Swift’s eighteenth century view of stimulus and other remedies for financial cholick.

I have traveled a long road from my Methodist childhood, into my atheist, Marxist radical youth, and into the world.  There I battled through a lifetime of real-world practicality decreasingly comforted and cushioned by the shreds of an ideology that no longer worked or made real sense of anything.  And I end up here.

I now find myself on the doorstep of a return to the truths of my childhood belief, still unable to cross the threshold.  (Of course, I wonder just how fully I ever really believed back then.  Tolstoy wrote somewhere about his religious beliefs evaporating in an instant when his older brother, seeing him kneeling by his bed, asked “You don’t still pray, do you?”)

Anyway, here I am.  Like Chesterton, I wanted always to be in the vanguard of new thought, always ahead of my time, only to discover that I was 20 centuries behind the truth.

I now find that there are only two consistent philosophical standpoints that are not in serious conflict with the facts of human nature.  Two tenable views.

Either God made us with souls, with a purpose.  Or we exist as accidental results of random materialistic evolution.

If we have souls and a purpose, then morality is a possibility, a choice that our souls can make to be in conformity with our purpose.  If we are evolutionary accidents, then we have no souls, no real purpose, and morality is whatever works.  So real morality, with legitimate authority, becomes impossible.  Moral anarchy is the only possible outcome.

There is of course another, much cheerier world view, one which believes that People Are Basically Good (hence “PABGoo”).  PABGoos believe that all our problems are caused by bad political or economic systems, or not enough social science grants or psychotherapy or public education or whatever.  The fact that it is publicly refuted countless times a day in every city on the globe has not stopped PABGoo from becoming the default feel-good philosophy of our age.  (Every time you hear John Lennon singing “Imagine” on a store Muzak system, you are being PABGooed. By now you probably don’t even notice.)

PABGoos typify what Niebuhr called “the easy conscience of modern man.”  ”The optimism of this culture makes the central message of the gospel, dealing with sin, grace, forgiveness and justification, seem totally irrelevant.” 

Indeed.

So, the penultimate obstacle to Iran’s holocaust plan has been removed. The world’s powers have now informed Israel that she is on her own. The 6 million Jews living in the Iranian crosshairs must now decide if they have any alternative to “learning to live with an Iranian bomb” as one realist advises (See the “Conversation on Iran with Frankie Sturm” below). They may decide that “sending Iran’s nuclear program further underground” is not a bad idea, if you keep doing it.

This may turn out to represent as dark a day for freedom as the Munich pact, when “silent, mournful, abandoned, broken Czechoslovakia receded into the darkness” as Churchill put it. But Israel is unlikely to recede quite so quietly. A people whose cherished shrines include Masada will not go down without a fight.

America has suffered a humiliating defeat without a shot fired. As commenter Lester puts it, “America can’t afford to have a foreign policy anymore.” But money isn’t the problem; the will to defend freedom is our real deficit. Recently, Obama spoke the all-too-easy words: “Never Again.” Now he has retracted the words.

This is a tragic day for free peoples everywhere.

NATO ships, helicopters hunt down 7 pirates

The story, dated 19 April, 2009, describes an unsuccessful pirate attack, a pursuit by 2 NATO ships, and then:

“Both ships deployed helicopters, and naval officers hailed the pirates over loudspeakers and finally fired warning shots to stop them, Fernandes said, but not before the pirates had dumped most of their weapons overboard. NATO forces boarded the skiff, where they found a rocket-propelled grenade, and interrogated, disarmed and released the pirates.

“The pirates cannot be prosecuted under Canadian law because they did not attack Canadian citizens or interests and the crime was not committed on Canadian territory.

“When a ship is part of NATO, the detention of person is a matter for the national authorities,” Fernandes said. “It stops being a NATO issue and starts being a national issue.”

 Here’s another one, same day:

NATO ship foils pirates, frees hostages in Gulf of Aden

By Helen Kennedy
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Sunday, April 19th 2009, 4:00 AM

NATO

“Hostages and pirates stand with arms raised before Dutch NATO commandos chased pirates back to their ‘mother ship.’”

“Pirates trying to hijack a tanker in the Gulf of Aden on Saturday were foiled by Dutch commandos who chased them to their “mother ship” and freed 20 fishermen the brigands were holding captive.

“In another day of dramatic pirate battles off the coast of Somalia, thugs firing small arms and rockets began attacking Greek tanker Handytankers Magic just after dawn.

“Special forces from NATO-flagged Dutch Navy frigate The Seven Provinces swooped in to defend the tanker and pursued the fleeing pirates to a large Yemeni fishing boat.

“The Dutch commandos found 20 fishermen, all believed to be Yemeni, captive in the hold.

“The boat had been hijacked a week ago and was being used by the Somali pirates as a base to launch attacks on cargo ships.

“The commandos freed the fishermen, seized seven AK-47 assault rifles and one rocket-propelled grenade launcher and briefly detained seven pirates. The pirates had to be set free because NATO has no power to detain maritime suspects.”

 Bottom line:  Europe (and possibly now America) are now truly committed to a legalistic, constitutional-rights-protected, police response to every attack, from terrorism to piracy to direct military attacks on our soil.   We would do well to recall Supreme Court Justice Jackson’s (dissenting) comment in the 1930′s Terminiello case, that “the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.”  War cannot be waged by policemen armed with Miranda cards;  the UN has tried that many times, from watching genocide in Rwanda to watching rocket attacks on the Lebanon-Israel border.

 Obama got off to a good start on confronting pirates, using the right kind of diplomatic negotiations (“Saying ‘Nice doggie’, while looking around for a rock.”)  Now he needs to step up to the big question: Who polices the seas?  In the past, the answer was simple, whether it was piracy or the slave trade: the dominant navy.

 We all learned the clever line from the Vietnam War that “we can’t be the cops of the world.”  What we haven’t yet learned is the true nature of a world without cops, with only Dutch and Canadian crossing guards.

 Or am I wrong?  Comment me your comment.

There was a story about a delegation of British MP’s visiting Gaza to inspect the humanitarian crisis. The MPs were already on record as condemning Israel for the crisis and the war, so their comments were unsurprising. They called on Israel to relieve the suffering it had caused by closing off the Israeli-Gaza border crossings.

As I say, no surprises there. But then my mind drifted off to a trivia question I had heard recently. “Name three nations that each border only a single other country.” I came up with San Marino. Then I remembered Portugal.

I couldn’t get the others.  But, I realized, the Terrorist Republic of Gaza (or whatever they call themselves) is not a correct answer. For Gaza has two borders – one with “The Zionist Entity”, and one with Egypt. Yet the media routinely treat Gaza as if it were as isolated as San Marino.

So why does the BBC (and NPR and NBC and NYT and…) treat the Egyptian-Gaza border as non-existent? Why don’t diplomats and traveling parliamentarians demand that Egypt open the crossing to massive shipments of humanitarian aid?

Because Egypt is not run by Jews, that’s why.

Egypt closed its Gaza border for the same reason Israel did; for security reasons, because Hamas is not a responsible political body, but a maniacal death cult masquerading as a government. Israel and Egypt and everyone else who has to deal with Hamas face-to-face all know this. But only Israel is condemned by the self-hating Western Left.

Oh, now I remember the third one: Vatican City!