The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: Ripping Off the Red Mask!

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat occasionally receives queries from readers on subjects that have piqued their interest. While habitually ignoring such queries, Pascal now and then deigns to respond. Just don’t expect it of him too often.}

“Dear Mister Pascal the Cat,

“How are you? Fine, I hope, and I am too, thank you for asking. Recently I heard Charlie Kirk say that ‘Kamala Harris wants to see the elimination of the United States of America.’ Kirk insists Harris and the Democrats are ‘communists who hate America and are going to do things to destroy the country.’ Is Kamala Harris really a communist? Where does Charlie Kirk get his information? (signed) A Very Concerned Swing Voter.”

Is Kamala (pronounced “Ka-ma-blah”) a Communist? She is a member of the Democrat Party, QED, she is a Communist. Why are we even discussing this? Every Democrat since 1932 has been a Communist. Democrat policies—Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, daycare, school lunch programs, Obamaphones—were all designed and endorsed by Karl Marx, the Fiend himself. For confirmation, let us turn to a Trusted Source—in this case, the once and future POTUS, Sir Trump. “Biden,” Sir Trump has explained, “together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits, and Marxists, tried to destroy American democracy. If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me.” ¹

They’re all Communists, Swing Voter. As Stephen Miller observes of Tim Walz, the Democrats’ pick for Vice-President, “This man—they call him Tampon Tim -- is a full-blown, radical left communist. He is left of Bernie Sanders. He is left of Rachel Maddow. He is left of Ilhan Omar. He is left of AOC.” Walz, says Miller, will introduce “socialist communist economic policies,” as he has already done in Minnesota (new state motto: Property Is Theft!). ²

Chiming in on the unmasking of Tim Walz is Rob Schmitt of Newsmax:

“Tim Walz is a communist who doesn't know anything about history. Tim Walz, the former high school history teacher, is the snake that turns your 15-year-old into a communist.” ³

Pierre Polievre is the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, and he, too, knows a Communist when he sees on, such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:

The latest image shared by Poilievre depicts a cycle with a series of arrows in a circle, starting with “rob or kill the successful,” followed by “force the rest to work for free,” then “run out of food,” “starve to death,” “say it wasn’t ‘real’ communism,” and finally, “establish a new communist utopia.” ⁴

There are, of course, those who disagree. “Invoking Marx in relation to [liberals] is silly to say the least. It betrays a conservative childishness and a simplistic understanding of both liberalism and communism.” But they would say that, wouldn’t they? The first rule of Marxism is, we do not talk about Marxism. But that subterfuge no longer fools anyone. As the experts on communism at Hillsdale College point out, “Cultural Marxism is destroying American society. It has led to the rise of racial tensions, radical feminism, transgender ideology, open borders, fiscal irresponsibility, the unequal protection of the laws, and the loss of our basic rights. The effects of Marx’s ideas have already been seen in the histories of the Soviet Union and China. Yet Marxism remains popular among those who shape our cultural, academic, and political lives and in the popular movements pushing equity and diversity.”

Speaking of equity and diversity, let us return to Concerned Swing Voter’s question: is Kamala Harris a Communist? Is “DEI” an anagram for “Die”? Well, Elon Musk seems to think so: “Kamala Harris is quite literally a communist,” he recently X-ed. “She wants not merely equal opportunity, but equal outcomes.” ⁶ Elon, of course, is one of the world’s wealthiest men, and he therefore cannot afford to be mistaken about who is and who is not a communist, because communists will kill him (and eat him!) at the first opportunity.

Kamala Harris has actually said, in public, these remarkable words: “We have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make the possible actually happen”. How much clearer could she be about her desire to fundamentally transform America, i.e., to turn it into an American Gulag? James Lindsay, who has selflessly made a career of exposing cultural Marxism, has plainly stated, “Kamala is a low-level Communist functionary, and I’m tired of being told we have to pretend she’s not.” ⁷

Make no mistake, Concerned Swing Voter: all these people who accuse Kamala and Tim Walz of being Communists cannot be lying, mistaken, deluded, or living in some bizarre right-wing thought bubble where anyone to the ideological left of Herbert Hoover is a Bolshevik—can they?

------------------------------------------------------------------------

¹ Retread scare: Trump and other Republicans evoke another era by calling Democrats ‘communists’ | PBS News

² On Newsmax, Stephen Miller says "Tim Walz's job is to be the Jack Kevorkian for America" | Media Matters for America

³ Newsmax host: "Tim Walz is the white guy with a white wife and white kids who hates white people" | Media Matters for America

⁴ Stop the Nonsense: Justin Trudeau Is No Marxist (jacobin.com)

⁵ Marxism, Socialism, and Communism | Hillsdale College Online Courses

⁶ Elon Musk on X: "Kamala is quite literally a communist. She wants not merely equal opportunity, but equal outcomes." / X

⁷ Harris says 'everybody needs to be woke' in unearthed clip spreading like wildfire on social media | Fox News

Sunday Sermon: "Goin' Back"

Goin’ Back (Carole King & Gerry Goffin)

I think I'm goin' back
To the things I learned so well in my youth
I think I'm returning to
The days when I was young enough to know the truth

Now there are no games to only pass the time
No more electric trains, no more trees to climb
Thinking young and growing older is no sin
And I can play the game of life to win

I can recall a time
When I wasn't ashamed to reach out to a friend
Now I think I've got
A lot more than just my toys to lend

Now there's more to do than watch my sailboat glide
And every day can be my magic carpet ride
A little bit of freedom is all we lack
So catch me if you can, I'm goin' back

A little bit of courage is all we lack
So catch me if you can, I'm goin' back
Goin' back

-------------------------------------------------------

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Carole King / Gerry Goffin

Goin’ Back lyrics © Screen Gems-emi Music Inc.

Let it not be forgotten that, of all the great songwriters from the Sixties, Carole King was as good as any of them and better than most.

Carole King - Wikipedia

Take your pick:

Goin' Back - Carole King (youtube.com)

The Byrds - Going Back (youtube.com)

Echo In The Canyon (Jakob Dylan and Beck) - Goin' Back (youtube.com)

Nils Lofgren - Goin' Back (Night After Night - 1977) (youtube.com)

(24) Chrissie Hynde ''Goin' Back'' - YouTube

Dusty Springfield - Goin' Back. (youtube.com)

Saturday Lecture: The Void Disguised as a Man

{Why read about Adolf Hitler? As Hillary Clinton might say, ‘What difference, at this point, does it make?’ However, Konrad Heiden’s 1944 biography (The Fuhrer) is fascinating, not least because of the quality of Heiden’s prose. The following excerpt portrays Hitler circa the early 1920s, after the Great War but before the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Oddly, it turned out that, in 1920s Germany, it was against the law to attempt to overthrow the government!}

“His eyes at night were chilling, and his words were oh so thrilling, and someday soon I fear they’ll sing that song again.” (Elliott Murphy, “Eva Braun”)

Konrad Heiden, from The Fuhrer:

A broken people, broken army, broken men. The [Nazi] movement rose out of the wreckage of the Great War. Ideals had to fall into the mire, destinies to be shattered, characters to sicken, before something new could be born. For this thing was new, and from the very beginning it was frightful.

The spirit of history, in its fantastic mockery, could not have drawn an apter figure. A human nothing, a gray personality even among soldiers, ‘modest and for that very reason inconspicuous,’ as a superior characterized him; not even a German, but a homeless derelict from the Viennese melting-pot. In the army, he descended to the most dubious level, that of agent provocateur; even in that field he was no leader, but an unsavory tool of counterespionage, entrusted with necessary but loathsome tasks; happy when he could obey and, by his own admission, knowing no higher goal than to follow his superior blindly and to contradict no one.

His exterior was without distinguishing marks, his face without radiance; there was nothing unusual in his bearing. He was one of those men without qualities, normal and colorless to the point of invisibility. ¹ In this case, the void, it might be said, had disguised itself as a man.

The leadership of this movement was given over to this human object. They wanted a tool. They sent him through the country on speaking tours, used him in their press bureau to write releases, sent him into political meetings to hear what he could hear. At length, as orator-propagandist for the German Workers’ Party, he seemed to have found his niche in the world. He was a man of the people, at home amid the most sordid poverty, familiar with the heart of the poor. To speak in the language of his employers: That trap of his will come in handy.

For in this unlikely looking creature dwelt a miracle: his voice. It was something unexpected. Between those modest, narrow shoulders, the man had lungs. His voice was the very epitome of power, firmness, command, and will. Even when calm, it was a guttural thunder; when agitated, it howled like a siren betokening inexorable danger. It was the roar of inanimate nature, yet accompanied by flexible human overtones of friendliness, rage, or scorn.

The contradiction between the lamentable appearance and the mighty voice characterizes the man. He is a torn personality; long reaches of his soul are insignificant colored by no noteworthy qualities of intellect or will; but there are corners supercharged with strength. It is this association of inferiority and strength that makes the personality so strange and fascinating.

Adolf Hitler is portrayed here as most of his contemporaries and many of his own supporters saw him in his beginnings; and the picture is basically true. As a human figure, lamentable; as a political mind, one of the most tremendous phenomena of all world history—this is a contradiction which occurs in every man of genius, from stuttering Moses to the strange, unglamorous artillery captain Bonaparte; but few of these historic figures united so many contradictions, such lack of distinction, and such superhuman strength.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

¹ “One of those men without qualities”: Heiden was here implicitly referencing Robert Musil’s classic novel, The Man Without Qualities, published in 1930.

Friday Thoughts: Where Have All the Babies Gone?

Inquiring minds want to know: why aren’t Americans having more babies?

3,591,328: that is all the babies Americans produced in 2023, barely enough to replace the 3 million+ Americans who died last year. It’s not just J.D. Vance who is worried about the increasing number of childless cat ladies; entire books are being written on the subject.

For instance, Catherine Pakaluk has written Hannah’s Children, about “the women quietly defying this trend.” Reviewing Pakaluk’s book for the Acton Review, Anne Bradley notes that, “Relying on sociologists’ work, the book explores the influence of “expressive individualism,” where individuals increasingly reject the idea of fitting themselves into traditional roles in marriage. Part of that narrative is that children hold women back from fulfilling their career goals.” “Expressive individualism” is all well and good for men, who have always been encouraged to make something of themselves; for women, however, it is a siren song seducing them away from the joys of motherhood.

Fortunately, says Bradley, “The women of Hannah’s Children see children as gifts to the world, part of an eternal story that begins in marriage. These mothers defy simple caricatures and are from across the country; some come from big families, while some have no siblings. The most important common underlying variable is their faith: they are Mormon, Catholic, evangelical, and Jewish. They know what they are doing is different and even countercultural, but they don’t view themselves as revolutionaries and ask for no public praise. In their faith communities, they find solidarity and support in their decisions. It is no accident that there are no atheists interviewed in the book. The astounding faith of these women carries them through the high costs of their decisions.”

Not to pick nits, but the fact that Hannah’s heroic women are consciously making their own “countercultural” decisions seems to be a form of “expressive individualism,” not that there's anything wrong with that.

Children Are Their Future, and Ours – Religion & Liberty Online (acton.org)

At the Atlantic, Christine Emba explores the same territory, including both Hannah’s Children and Anastasia Berg’s and Rachel Wiseman’s What Are Children For? Emba’s conclusion is not dissimilar from Anne Bradley’s (above), though it does not emphasize religious faith per se; she concludes that we suffer from an absence of meaning, which absence leaves people conflicted about the value of having, and raising, children.

In trying to solve the fertility puzzle, thinkers have cited people’s concerns over finances, climate change, political instability, or even potential war. But in listening closely to people’s stories, I’ve detected a broader thread of uncertainty—about the value of life and a reason for being. Many in the current generation of young adults don’t seem totally convinced of their own purpose or the purpose of humanity at large, let alone that of a child. It may be that for many people, absent a clear sense of meaning, the perceived challenges of having children outweigh any subsidy the government might offer.

Younger Americans, says Emba, have experienced “a loss of stabilizing self-confidence” which she attributes to “the lack of an overarching framework (religious or otherwise) that might help guide people toward a ‘good’ life. ‘The old frameworks, whatever they were, no longer seem to apply,’ Berg and Wiseman write. ‘And the new ones provide us with hardly any answers at all.’”

Or maybe sperm counts are just lower than they used to be? 

The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids (msn.com)

Of course, we don’t do a good job of educating the kids we have, so why should we be in a hurry to have more? According to Paul du Quenoy (at City Journal, the magazine where Woke goes to die), “Earlier this month, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) released a report based on a data-point survey administered in May and June measuring over 3,000 college students’ responses to 35 multiple-choice questions on civics, related historical topics, and opinion questions pertaining to citizenship.”

“The results,” writes Quenoy, “are nauseating. Among the study’s 28 civics and history questions that had definite right and wrong answers, only two had a correct response rate of over 70 percent, while correct answers to 15 questions registered at 40 percent or below.” The nauseating ignorance included:

Only 32 percent of respondents know that the writ of habeas corpus protects citizens from illegal imprisonment. Just 29 percent could identify 1971 as the year the voting age was lowered to eighteen. Despite massive public and institutional emphasis on the legacy of slavery, only 28 percent of college students know that it was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment. At the same time, 53 percent of respondents to a subjective question asking what forms of speech the government should be “allowed to censor and punish” named unspecified “hate speech,” while 47 percent approved of government action against “racial slurs,” despite robust legal precedents forbidding such action under the First Amendment’s free speech provision.

Is our children learning? Apparently not. Do we have a solution? Apparently not.

A Republic, If You Can Remember It | City Journal (city-journal.org)

In closing, allow me to point out that the last time America had a Baby Boom, it did not necessarily turn out all that well. More is not necessarily better; perhaps, instead of fretting over birth rates, we should focus on improving the quality of life (including education) for the children we have.

Where have all the babies gone?

 

 

Wednesday with Pascal: Sweet Mystery of Life

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has been immersed of late in Konrad Heiden’s biography of Hitler (‘The Fuhrer’). For today’s post, he has dragged this piece out of the archives and refreshed it a bit. Contemporary conservatives, after all, have not changed their tune in the last decade; they just sing it louder and toss in more epithets.}

In a 2018 article (for The Gospel Coalition), Joe Carter and Collin Hansen recalled how, having been named to the Supreme Court in 1988 by Ronald Reagan, the putatively conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, a mere four years later, “joined Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Justice David Souter in writing the court’s plurality opinion in the 1992 Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.” 

Carter and Hansen disagreed with the Court’s ruling, of course, but their deeper complaint was with Kennedy’s assertion that “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This passage has become notorious in right-wing circles, with the late Justice Antonin Scalia once mocking it as “the famed ‘sweet mystery of life’ passage.”  

It was with palpable indignation that Carter and Hansen accused Kennedy, “more than anyone else,” of having “moved to the wrong side of the law all who recognize authority in the divine lawgiver or even in our nation’s own legal history.” In this new legal atmosphere, God cannot violate the sovereign self. Tradition may not bound the sovereign self. Whatever the self determines is right; whatever the self determines must be acknowledged and accepted by every other self.”

Thirty years after Kennedy’s opinion, Joe Carter and Collin Hansen today remain free to “recognize authority in the divine lawgiver,” just as I remain free not to do so. Carter and Hansen, as sovereign Selves, can define for themselves the meaning of existence, which means, for instance, that they can accept the Bible as an authoritative guide; I, on the other hand, prefer Philip K. Dick’s VALIS. I am baffled by Carter’s and Hansen’s allegation that they have somehow been “moved to the wrong side of the law”; they retain the same legal standing as everyone else, within the same limits as everyone else (i.e., believe what you want, but don’t impose your religious beliefs on other people). 

You would think Anthony Kennedy had written "God is dead" or something equally blasphemous:

You’d search in vain to find a more apt description of our secular age. It’s not as though Kennedy invented our culture of expressive individualism. No one would fault him for introducing our “age of authenticity,” to borrow a phrase from philosopher Charles Taylor. But Kennedy gave language to this age’s turn to self as ultimate authority. And then he codified that authority at the nation’s highest legal level through his interpretation of the Constitution.

Despite their disapproval of “this age’s turn to self,” Messrs. Hansen and Carter are expressive individuals themselves. Joe Carter authored a book called “The Life and Faith Field Guide for Parents,” which not only expressed his values but, one assumes, attempted to persuade others to adopt them. As for Collin Hansen, “He has published with the New York Times and the Washington Post and offered commentary for CNN, Fox News, NPR, BBC, ABC News, and PBS NewsHour,” which suggests he has not been shy about airing his opinions on the sweet mystery of life. 

It is all well and good, then, for Carter and Hansen to have, and to voice, opinions about what Paul Tillich called “matters of ultimate concern,” but what if everyone got in on the act? Chaos would ensue:

Sovereign selves across the political spectrum now regard their political enemies as existential threats to their “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” And society cannot long endure when every Self wields this right as a bludgeon against every other Self that reaches different conclusions on the meaning of the universe and its very own life. We need a society that recognizes the self is a cruel taskmaster and incompetent peacemaker.

The author is certainly correct that society suffers when rights are wielded as bludgeons against others. Justice Kennedy, of course, did not advocate such wielding of the right to self-definition; in fact, he spoke for quite the opposite view, i.e., the view that we ought to respect each other’s “sovereign Self” so long as the Self does not oppress or suppress the self-expression of others. In other words, Kennedy did not object to those who choose, as sovereign selves, to follow what they believe is God’s command; he only objected to those persons attempting, through legalistic bludgeoning, to force others to follow the same command.

“The genius of America,” Carter and Hansen solemnly remind us, “is the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In a misguided effort to expand liberty, Kennedy thwarted the pursuit of happiness by saddling the self with impossible demands. The self cannot possibly carry this burden.” ¹ There is a kernel of truth in this critique: modernity indeed makes unprecedented (albeit not impossible) demands on the individual, simply by allowing for choices—choices of values, of religion, of career, of relationships, of lifestyle, of sexual partners and sexual orientation, of geographic location, etc. Constantly having to choose, and to be responsible for one's choice, can be exhausting. Of course, what some people experience as demands, others perceive as opportunities; burdens are in the eye of the beholder. 

In any case, no one is prohibited from following tradition or from preferring the ‘old ways’; no one is obligated to adopt “Make it new” as a credo. Disdain modern art, modern music, modern literature, modern media, DEI, CRT, and ESL all you like; condemn the latest fashion styles, lament the decline of religion, rue the very existence of transgender persons, and rage at the presence of plus-size women on the cover of Sports Illustrated. You are free to do all that, and others are free to ridicule you for it.

Carter’s and Hansen’s real complaint is that (a) too many people are making choices of which Carter and Hansen disapprove, and (b) when Carter and Hansen vilify those people, they are in turn frequently and sometimes publicly rebuked for their rudeness.

Which is exactly how it should be.      

_____________________________________________________

Anthony Kennedy’s ‘Sweet Mystery of Life’ and the Self’s Impossible Demands (thegospelcoalition.org)

¹ You would think that these two prominent figures at The Gospel Coalition would know an impossible demand when they hear one: after all, "Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect."

What? You want me to think for myself?

The Russo-German Century

History is endlessly fascinating; if you dig deep enough, it is filled with surprises. For instance, I have just learned that one of Adolph Hitler’s most prominent (and most virulent) ideologists was inspired by a book he found while living and studying in Moscow during the Russian Revolution, a book which would provide, in many ways, a road map to fascism.

In the summer of 1917, writes Konrad Heiden (in The Fuhrer), “The globe was afire. The Tsar’s empire was crumbling. The German-Russian phase of the First World War was drawing to an end in bloody trenches; in the streets of Moscow, the Russian Revolution was ebbing and flowing. Alfred Rosenberg was then twenty-four years old. The son of a shoemaker, he was of German descent, but, as an Estonian, he was a subject of the Russian tsar. He had been raised in the German and Russian languages. He had been studying engineering and architecture at Riga, on the Baltic; when the German army occupied Riga, he had fled. Now he was studying in Moscow.”

Who was Alfred Rosenberg, and why was he important? Wikipedia to the rescue: “The author of a seminal work of Nazi ideology, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), Alfred Rosenberg is considered one of the main authors of key Nazi ideological creeds, including its racial theory, its hatred of the Jewish people, the need for ‘Lebensraum,’ abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and opposition to what was considered ‘degenerate’ modern art.”

Alfred Rosenberg would be hanged as a war criminal in 1946 after being convicted at the postwar Nuremberg trials. According to Konrad Heiden, it was during Rosenberg’s time in Moscow in 1917 that he first stumbled upon a book which immediately seized his imagination and never let go. The book was a blueprint for world domination, an astonishingly explicit threat to existing governments everywhere: “We shall so wear down the nations,” the authors of the book declared, “that they will be forced to offer us world domination. We shall stretch out our arms like pincers in all directions and introduce an order of such violence that all people will bow to us.”

The book that opened Alfred Rosenberg’s eyes to the looming worldwide danger was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; it originated, so Rosenberg learned, with “a group of old Jews who met together in a back room in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.”  The book laid out in detail the “accursed wisdom” and “diabolical plans” of Jewish conspirators “aiming to devour the world.” These ‘protocols’ not only alerted Rosenberg to the menace of Jewry; they provided him with insights as to “how to establish dictatorship with the help (and abuse) of democratic methods,” insights he would put to use as a Nazi ideologist and advisor to Adolf Hitler. Konrad Heiden calls this the “true content” of the Protocols: “Democracy, if followed to its logical conclusion, provides a usurper with his best weapons.”

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were, of course, a hoax. The book had been composed and distributed by agents of the Russian Okhrana, the tsar’s secret police force, who had cobbled it together around the turn of the century. It was based on obscure writings from the French author Maurice Joly (1864) and Hermann Godsche, a German writer (1868); the former’s work was a disguised diatribe directed against Napoleon III of France, and the latter’s was a nightmarish anti-Semitic novel. What was the Okhrana’s motive in forging the Protocols? Writes Heiden, “They wanted to frighten the Tsar and drive him to bloodshed by persuading him that the Jews of the whole world had devised a secret conspiracy to achieve domination, first over Russia, then over the whole world.” Russia’s tsar at the time was Nicholas II, the inept and ill-fated ruler who would be driven from his throne in 1917 and murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918. But his regime had been threatened almost from its beginning (1894) by reformists and radicals of various stripes—liberals, socialists, anarchists, and Marxists. The insecure Nicholas was easy prey for the machinations of the Okhrana.

Konrad Heiden traces the events: once tsarist agents had come upon the older manuscripts, “General Oryevsky of the Okhrana had a pamphlet prepared which served as a frame in which Joly’s and Godsche’s ideas were embroidered in glowing colors.” Oryevsky was aided by General Ratchkovsky of the French division of the Okhrana; “Ratchkovsky,” continues Heiden, “saw the explosive power inherent in these time-worn and seemingly harmless works. The Okhrana men saw the pamphlet as material they could make good use of.”  The Okhrana men, as it happened, were everywhere; the tsar’s intelligence had a global reach. “Everywhere, the Okhrana tracked down the activities of Russian, and not only Russian, revolutionaries. It was a kind of world conspiracy: a net of spies, intriguers, bribe-givers, and political agitators, which Tsarist Russia had cast over the world.”

The fraudulent Protocols would eventually come to have global impact, but their influence was first felt in Russia, as intended: “The Okhrana’s plan was the first great attempt at a mighty counter-revolution against the democratic and social revolutions of the nineteenth century.” At the turn of the century, “Society in Russia was farther advanced in its spiritual disintegration and more prepared for revolution than anywhere else in the world; at the same time, the State power was stronger than anywhere else.” Social conflict was unavoidable, and the Okhrana wanted to force Tsar Nicholas’ hand. “The plan was to fuse the passion of the people and the cold power of the State into a counter-revolutionary force that would shake society to its foundations.” While the Okhrana’s plan did not entirely succeed (though it prompted spasms of violence against Russian Jews by right-wing squads known as “the Black Hundreds”), it at least gave Russia the distinction of being “the spiritual mother country of modern fascism, as it later became the world center of Communism.”   

Notably, the German government, during the Great War, provided financial support to anti-tsarist groups in and out of Russia in an attempt to destabilize Nicholas' regime. In 1917, the Germans arranged for Lenin’s return to Russia; they continued supporting the Bolsheviks until they seized power that November. Within a year, however, despite Russia's surrender, Germany had lost the larger war. Meanwhile, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion had fallen into the hands of Alfred Rosenberg, who, after the war, would be instrumental in helping create the agenda for Hitler’s National Socialist Party. ¹ Later, less than a decade after taking power, Germany’s Hitler would sign a pact with Russia’s Joseph Stalin, a pact (which Hitler predictably broke) that cleared the way for Germany to launch World War II.  

Bolshevism and Nazism were intertwined from the beginning. The most cursory look at the 20^th century shows that Russia and Germany were at the forefront of the single bloodiest era in history. ² The Bolsheviks and the Nazis, both of them on the political fringe of their respective countries, came to power at least in part due to the intrigues and machinations of their country’s governments. In attempting to arrange the world to their designs, those governments set the world ablaze. ³

It seems to be the case that “History,” as Edward Gibbon wrote, “is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Aldous Huxley sadly observed, “The most important of all the lessons of history is that men do not learn very much from the lessons of history.” And Ambrose Bierce put his cynical spin on the subject: “History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.”  

To paraphrase the Roman writer Tacitus, "They make a desert and call it history." God save us from the schemers who believe the world is clay to be molded to their will.

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Konrad Heiden, The Fuhrer (1944) I can’t vouch for the accuracy of Heiden’s narrative, but whatever the book’s merit as history, it boasts literary flair and provides fascinating character studies of the Nazi inner circle—Hitler, Hess, Goering, Rosenberg, et al.

¹ The Protocols would also fall into the hands of Henry Ford, who would then launch scurrilous anti-Semitic attacks in his newspaper. Ford was much admired both in Nazi Germany and in Soviet Russia.   

² Honorable mention goes to Great Britain. In fairness, Konrad Heiden himself suggests that German's Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) may have taken a higher toll, proportionate to the population, than 20th-century mass slaughter. 

³ Honorable mention goes to Great Britain.

Sunday Sermon: "5D"

5D (by The Byrds)

Oh, how is it that I could come out to here
And be still floatin'
And never hit bottom and keep falling through
Just relaxed and paying attention?

All my two-dimensional boundaries were gone
I had lost to them badly
I saw that world crumble and thought I was dead
But I found my senses still working

And as I continued to drop through the hole
I found all surrounding
To show me that joy innocently is
Just be quiet and feel it around you

And I opened my heart to the whole universe
And I found it was lovin'
And I saw the great blunder my teachers had made
Scientific delirium madness

I will keep falling as long as I live
Ah, without ending
And I will remember the place that is now
That has ended before the beginning

Oh, how is it that I could come out to here
And be still floatin'
And never hit bottom and keep falling through
Just relaxed and paying attention?

-------------------------------------

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Roger James McGuinn

5D (Fifth Dimension) lyrics © Reservoir 416, Mcguinn Music, Mc Guinn Music

The Byrds - 5D (Fifth Dimension) (Audio) (youtube.com)

Roger McGuinn live version: 5D (Fifth Dimension) (Live) (youtube.com)

Saturday Lecture: On the Nature of Demons

{Demonology and angelology are sadly neglected subjects in our modern woke universities. It’s no wonder that, as Richard Weaver pointed out, it has been all downhill since the 14^th century.}

"I saw Satan fall like lightning from heavens." (Luke 10:18)

Norman Cohn, from Europe’s Inner Demons:

Throughout the history of the early church, Satan and the lesser demons continued to be imagined very much as they were in the New Testament; with the elaboration of a Christian theology, however, their theological significance became more clearly defined. Gradually they were integrated into the central doctrines of Christianity, the fall of man, original sin, and man’s redemption through the crucifixion of Christ.

In the first century before Christ, the Book of Enoch hinted that it was one of a number of “Satans,” conceived as followers of the chief Satan, who had led Eve astray. In the first century after Christ, Satan was at last brought explicitly into relation with the serpent in the Garden of Eden; either the serpent was Satan disguised, or Satan acted through the serpent. The Books of Adam and Eve, composed late in the first century, elaborated on the part played by Satan in the fall of man. To deceive Eve, Satan hung himself on the walls of Paradise, looking like an angel and singing hymns like an angel. ¹ He persuaded the serpent to let him speak through its mouth. ²

This same Satan had once been one of the angels of God, but he disobeyed God’s commands and led other angels to disobey, with the result that he and his followers were cast out of heaven. In the main, this view of the fall of Satan and the fall of man was adopted by the Fathers of the Church, from the second-century apologist Justin Martyr onwards. The only point of dispute concerned the fall, not of Satan himself, but of the lesser angels. Earlier sources held that these angels had fallen because they desired the daughters of men; it followed that, unlike Satan, they had not fallen until well after the fall of man. This difficulty was circumvented by the third-century theologian Origen, who proclaimed that the passage in Genesis about the sons of God and the daughters of men must be taken allegorically; the true fall of the angels had taken place before the creation of the world. ³

By the end of the fourth century, it was generally accepted in East and West alike that the fall of man was part of a prodigious cosmic struggle which had begun when some of the heavenly host had revolted against God and had been cast out of heaven. As for the habitat of the demons, there was never, in those centuries, any doubt about that. Whereas the angels dwelt in the highest heaven, near the throne of God, the demons were confined to the dark air immediately above the earth. This is the meaning of Paul’s famous phrase about ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’  The Fathers shared his views. Augustine, for example, maintained that ‘the Devil was expelled, along with his angels, from the lofty abode of heaven, and was cast into darkness, that is to say, into our atmosphere, as into a prison.’

It was also agreed that, since angels possessed ethereal bodies, composed of air and light, demons must be similarly equipped. According to Augustine, these ethereal bodies give demons extraordinary powers of perception and enable them to transport themselves through the air with extraordinary speed. From their airy habitat, Satan and his demons wage incessant war upon the Christians; for the Devil, who never knows peace, cannot leave men in peace. Together with his demons he causes both the sickness of individuals and collective disasters such as drought, bad harvests, epidemics among men and beasts. They also seduce Christians to abandon the true faith, to fall into schism and heresy. St. Cyprian even held that, save for the activity of devils, there would be no heresies or schisms at all. ⁴

Not for a moment do demons cease from their plaguing and tempting of mortals. Demons are filled with such hostility towards mankind that it is a miracle that any human being survives. 

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¹ Paradise had walls? Apparently so.

² Ventriloquism having been, in the day, one of Satan’s many talents.

³ The creation stories in Genesis do not mention either Satan or angels. It is only after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden that we are told “On the east side of Eden, God placed cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.” The cherubim, whatever their original function(s), were quite literally deployed as guardian angels.

⁴ Norman Cohn notes that “In the days of the Fathers, the church was still full of optimism, still sure of its faith and of the triumph of that faith. Satan might be strong, but it was within the power of any Christian to resist him.” However, he adds, “Gradually, over the centuries, new and terrible anxieties began to make themselves felt in Christian minds; by the later Middle Ages, Satan and his demons had become far more powerful and menacing.”

Bluster & Bravado 2024

{This commentary is belated, and the presidential race has changed, but what difference, at this point, does it make? I foolishly ventured into the CNN transcript of the Biden v. Trump debate; I warn you, do not go there. It should be labeled ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter.’ I know this is a painfully long read but imagine how painful it was for me to write it.}

“I never knew a man could tell so many lies.” (Neil Young, “Ambulance Blues”)

Consider this a Public Service Announcement: adjectives are not facts, bluster and bravado are not evidence. ¹

I make this announcement because a substantial number of Americans are enthralled, it seems, by the alleged accomplishments of a man whose actual accomplishments are all but nil. This man—let us call him “Klump”—praises himself to the skies while heaping abuse on his opponents. That in itself is neither novel nor noteworthy, but what is striking about Klump is that his self-praise is a litany, not of facts, but of adjectives. If you removed descriptors from his statements—words like “best,” “worst,” “greatest,” “beautiful,” “powerful,” “strong,” “weak,” etc.—you would find no evidence, no statistics, nary a fact in sight: nothing but a thesaurus’s worth of meaningless adjectives attached to unproven assertions. “I have all the best words.”

How did the American economy do under President Klump? “We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. We had never done so well. Every – everybody was amazed by it. Other countries were copying us. We did a great job. We got a lot of credit for the economy, a lot of credit for the military, and no wars and so many other things. Everything was rocking good. It was the greatest economy that we’ve ever seen.”

Foreign policy? “What’s happened to our country in the last four years is not to be believed. Foreign countries – I’m friends with a lot of people. They cannot believe what happened to the United States of America. We’re no longer respected. They don’t like us. We give them everything they want, and they – they think we’re stupid. They think we’re very stupid people. What we’re doing for other countries, and they do nothing for us. What this man has done is absolutely criminal.”

Border security? “We had the safest border in the history of our country. Now we have the worst border in history. There’s never been anything like it. And people are dying all over the place, including the people that are coming up in caravans.”

Since Klump belittles, mocks, and lies about anyone who stands against him, his “successes” seem that much greater. Under Obama, for instance, America was a “disaster,” struggling through the “weakest economic recovery” in its history. Crime was rampant, the border was porous, terrorists were everywhere (including on the roof of a building in New Jersey on 9/11), America’s infrastructure was crumbling, the airports were at a third-world level, and the military was out of ammunition (“Sir, we have no bullets.”).

Magically, Klump turned it all around. He secured the border (“the safest border in our history”), he rebuilt the military (“I made our military the strongest in history”), he cowed our enemies (and, when necessary, our friends)—"If we had a real president, a president that was respected by Putin, he would have never – he would have never invaded Ukraine. Russia would’ve never attacked if I were president.” Imagine the very stable genius required to undo the disaster that was Obama’s America and to restore the nation to greatness—in three years! “The country was going like never before.” Alas, now “we’re like a third world nation,” just as we were under Obama. Apparently, Klump’s successes, impressive as they were, were not sturdy enough to withstand the assaults of the Biden regime.

Klump is and always has been a publicist, inflating his net worth (except when it’s time to pay taxes) and exaggerating the grandeur of his properties, while wiping the public slate clean of his many failures (Klump University, Klump Steaks, several bankruptcies, failed marriages, etc.). “I’ve been a success at everything I’ve ever done,” insists the man who managed to lose money running a casino in Atlantic City. The key to understanding Klump is the “Principle of Persistent Prevarication”: if you just keep lying, repeating the same lies over and over again while adding new lies on top of the old, many people will come up to you and say, with tears in their eyes, “Sir, you are the only politician who tells us the truth.”  

His mentality is Manichaean: black and white. He is the best; his opponents are the worst. His policies are the greatest; their policies are taking us down the drain. America is either great (again) like it’s never been before (again) or it’s a disaster, a third-world country (“We’re literally an uncivilized country now”). There is no middle ground, no shades of gray in his rhetoric. Nuance is beyond him. He speaks exclusively in world-historic terms: there’s never been anything like it, no one’s ever seen anything like it, people are amazed we could do it, people can’t believe how bad it’s gotten, best in our history, worst in our history, worst in the history of the world. “Nobody’s been worse than him. I had the highest approval rating. The secretary general of NATO said I did the most incredible job he had ever seen.”

Capable of reasoned criticism? “Biden’s presidency, his – without question, the worst president, the worst presidency in the history of our country. He’s become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one…He is the worst president. He’s the worst president in the history of our country. He’s destroyed our country. If he wins this election, our country doesn’t have a chance. Not even a chance of coming out of this rut. We probably won’t have a country left anymore. That’s how bad it is. He is the worst in history by far.”

Able to engage in serious policy analysis? “Biden caused the inflation and it’s killing black families and Hispanic families and just about everybody. It’s killing people. They can’t buy groceries anymore. They can’t. You look at the cost of food where it’s doubled and tripled and quadrupled. They can’t live. They’re not living anymore. He caused this inflation. I gave him a country with no, essentially no inflation. It was perfect. It was so good. All he had to do is leave it alone. He destroyed it with his green new scam and all of the other – all this money that’s being thrown out the window. He caused inflation. As sure as you’re sitting there, the fact is that his big kill on the black people is the millions of people that he’s allowed to come in through the border. They’re taking black jobs now and it could be 18. It could be 19 and even 20 million people. They’re taking black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.”

A friend of the environment? “I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it. We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever. And we did – we were using all forms of energy, all forms, everything. And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever. And my top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage, actually.” ²

A truly decent, admirable human being? “I am the least racist person you have ever met.” “I have the biggest heart on the stage.” “There’s my African-American!” “I prefer heroes who don’t get captured.”

Self-awareness? “I’ve never seen anybody lie like this guy. He lies – I’ve never seen it. He could look you in the face. So – and about so many other things, too. And we mentioned the laptop, we mentioned “Russia, Russia, Russia,” “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.” And everything he does is a lie. It’s misinformation and disinformation. It’s a disgrace.”

Coherence? “We’re doing very well at addiction until the COVID came along. We had the two-and-a-half, almost three years of like nobody’s ever had before, any country in every way. And then we had to get tough. And it was – the drugs pouring across the border, we’re – it started to increase. We got great equipment. We bought the certain dog. That’s the most incredible thing that you’ve ever seen, the way they can spot it. We did a lot. And we had – we were getting very low numbers. Very, very low numbers.

Closing statement, sir? “The only reason I’m here is he’s so bad as a president that I’m going to make America great again. We’re going to make America great again. We’re a failing nation right now. We’re a seriously failing nation. And we’re a failing nation because of him. His policies are so bad. His military policies are insane. They’re insane. These are wars that will never end with him. He will drive us into World War Three and we’re closer to World War Three than anybody can imagine. We are very, very close to World War Three, and he’s driving us there.

For three-and-a-half years, we’re living in hell. We have the Palestinians and we have everybody else rioting all over the place. You talk about Charlottesville. This is 100 times Charlottesville, 1,000 times. The whole country is exploding because of you, because they don’t respect you. And they have to respect their president and they don’t respect you throughout the world. What we did was incredible. We re – rebuilt the military. We got the largest tax cut in history, the largest regulation cut in history. All of the things that we’ve done, nobody’s ever – never seen anything like – even from a medical standpoint. Right to Try, where we can try Space Age materials instead of going to Asia or going to Europe and trying to get when you’re terminally ill.

Postscript:

Best exchange of the debate: Klump: Let’s not act like children. Biden: You are a child. ³ Lincoln-Douglas this was not.

Most memorable line ever in a presidential debate: “I didn’t have sex with a porn star, number one.” As Bill Clinton might have said, it depends on what the meaning of ‘star’ is.

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Most of the above quotes are taken verbatim from the CNN debate transcript: READ: Biden-Trump debate transcript | CNN Politics I have here and there spliced together separate transcript quotes; in a few instances, I have recycled Trump quotes from the past.

¹ “Bluster and Bravado”: band name or law firm?

² Technically, claiming to have “the best numbers” is not itself “a statistic”.

³ Neil Young shouts at his TV screen, “I am a child!”

Biden's America: Cities on Fire with DEI

Wednesday with Pascal: The Wolves Are Coming!

{I have no idea how Pascal the existential Russian blue cat managed to find a copy of ‘Pagan America’. He certainly didn’t get it from me. Regardless, he does seem to have had some fun with it, and what more can you ask from a book published by Regnery Publishing (motto: Losing the Culture War Since 1947)?}

Not everyone seems to have internalized the message of the classic fairy tale about the boy who cried wolf.

For instance: John Daniel Davidson, who writes for The Federalist, apparently spends a good deal of time pondering the approaching wolfpack. He shares his wolf-related thoughts in his book Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Davidson's alarum is so far off the charts that he believes Rod Dreher is "too optimistic." Dreher, of course, now resides in Viktor Orban’s Hungary; maybe Davidson should consider relocating. ¹

Davidson’s three-hundred-page manifesto is predicated on his belief that “Today, a new pagan empire is rising up amid a once-Christian people—an empire born of a betrayal of the faith, centuries in the making, which will take a century or more to defeat.” When Davidson says “pagan,” he doesn’t mean spiritually eclectic New Age types like Marianne Williamson; he means spawns of Satan. As he notes, the early Christians believed in the existence of demons, devils, fallen angels, powers of darkness—call them what you will, but they were the entities whom pagans worshiped as gods. From Biblical times, these evil spirits had brought, according to the Church Father Irenaeus, “teachings of wickedness” to women: “They brought them the knowledge of roots and herbs, dyeing in colors and cosmetics, the discovery of rare substances, love potions, aversions, amours, concupiscence, constraints of love, spells of bewitchment, and all sorcery and idolatry.” ² It was not only women who were bedeviled and corrupted; the demons left no one untouched. Davidson recites, in gruesome detail, the horrors in which typical pagans engaged at the incitement of their demonic overlords: human sacrifice, bestiality, infanticide, progressive taxation, and other crimes against humanity. 

Such atrocities are not only happening again, says Davidson; they are on the rise. In fact, they are the new normal. The chapter headings of Pagan America indicate the pagan threats ranged against Christian America: “Abortion and Euthanasia”; “Transgenderism and Pedophilia”; “The Pagan State”; and, most ominously, “AI and the Pagan Future”. The final chapter is “The Boniface Option,” which amounts to a direct challenge to Rod Dreher’s best-selling The Benedict Option. Inspired by the foundational Christian monk St. Benedict (and by Alasdair Mac Intyre), Dreher counseled a discreet withdrawal by beleaguered (white, conservative) Christians from the wicked pagan culture, sort of like creating gated Christian communities inside Sodom and Gomorrah.

Davidson prefers to follow St. Boniface, martyred missionary of yore; he wants to go down fighting, and he is not afraid to be melodramatic about it. “We are called to fight,” he writes, “and die if we must.” He quotes St. Boniface, who said, before being “cut down by a pagan raider”:

“Let us continue the fight on the day of the Lord. The days of anguish and of tribulation have overtaken us; if God so wills, let us die for the holy laws of our fathers, so that we may deserve to obtain an eternal inheritance with them. Let us be neither dogs that do not bark nor silent onlookers nor paid servants who run away before the wolf. Instead, let us be careful shepherds watching over Christ’s flock.” ³

To which Davidson adds, striking a Dreher-like tone, “We need barking dogs and shepherds now more than ever. The wolves are coming.” The wolves are coming to America’s workplaces in the form of DEI trainers under whom (white) employees “will be forced to confess their own racism and to perform penances”; they are coming to universities which, “long a hostile environment for even mild conservatives, will simply refuse to hire Christians.” They are coming to the public schools, which “teach gender ideology and Critical Race Theory as normative and factual,” and in which “discrimination against teachers who are Christians is an existing threat.” The neo-pagan wolves are creating “a future in which Christians who send their kids to public schools will have those kids taken from them for opposing gender ideology or for refusing to affirm white guilt.” The neo-pagan state “will have no qualms jailing dissidents who refuse to perform the requisites of pagan public morality.” It will establish “an apparatus of censorship and control that will criminalize opinions that challenge or refute the reigning pagan orthodoxies.”

John Daniel Davidson solemnly pronounces, “The primary task of American Christians in the generations to come will be the preservation and propagation of the faith at all costs. This will require being prepared to be poorer and more marginalized, but it will also require being prepared to be arrested, and imprisoned, and martyred. Christians in America should teach their children about martyrdom.”  

“Absent a miracle from God,” Davidson concludes glumly, “things are going to get worse before they get better.” Spoken like a man who doesn't believe in miracles from God! To paraphrase the Rolling Stones, what can a poor boy do except cry "wolf!" at the top of his lungs? The odds are that, sooner or later, a wolf is bound to show up somewhere; I wonder what the wolf situation is in Hungary.    

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¹ Rod Dreher, for the uninitiated, is an American Conservative writer whose columns have for years warned that, if you happen to be white, conservative, and Christian in 21^st-century America, “They’re coming for you.” Which, one assumes, is why Dreher moved to Hungary.

² By way of burnishing Irenaeus’ credentials, Davidson notes that the second-century Bishop of Lyon was a disciple of Polycarp, who had been a disciple of John the Apostle, who was one of Jesus’ original twelve apostles: Six Degrees of Jesus!

³ Saint Boniface - Wikipedia

Moloch the God
(not to be confused with Moloch the Entertainer)