Why Communism Dominates in the West

"Red Herrings" is a brilliant historical article by Andrew C. McCarthy that explains one of the most important reasons of the current dominance of the Left in the West (and more than that).

It's a review and a defence of Diana West's book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , which was published last year and provoked much controversy, as you can gauge from the review itself.

The way Joe McCarthy has been treated in America reminds me a bit of the way Enoch Powell has been treated in Britain: both were fundamentally right and both were vilified. But Farage wouldn't say that - especially about the latter - in a million years.

The only misconceived thing of the article is when it quotes Diana West's favourable view of "Enlightenment logic".

The Enlightenment has brought to Europe the first sparkles of totalitarian thought. Marx was an intellectual heir to the Enlightenment.

The problem is that we ourselves have been indoctrinated by intentional "disinformation" - possibly of Soviet origin -, and it takes us time to get through the fog.

Here's part of the very long article:

Stumbling into a barroom brawl was the last thing I’d intended. Lined up on one side: sculptors of a hagiography that is now conventional wisdom crow about a noble conquest over totalitarian dictators. The other side bellows: “Nonsense! In defeating one monster, your heroes merely helped create another, sullying us with their atrocities and burdening us for decades with a global security nightmare.” The first side spews that its critics are deranged, defamatory conspiracy-mongers. The critics fire back that these “court historians” are in denial; their heroes did not really “win” the war, they just helped a different set of anti-American savages win—in the process striking a deal with the devil that blurred the lines between good and evil, rendering the world more dangerous and our nation more vulnerable.


To readers of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, this heated debate will sound familiar. American Betrayal is the bestselling author and syndicated columnist Diana West’s cri de coeur against Anglo-American collusion with Stalin’s hideous Soviet Union in the war that vanquished Hitler’s hideous Nazi Germany. The controversy swirling around the book exposes a chasm on the political Right: on one side, admirers of Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II leadership; on the other, detractors who blame FDR’s indifference to Communism (and, particularly, Communist infiltration of the U.S. government) for the rise of what Ronald Reagan dubbed “the evil empire.” The resulting acrimony is what put me in the mind of the aforementioned brawl I wandered into twenty years ago, involving a different, albeit related, episode: the Central Intelligence Agency’s collusion with the Afghan mujahideen, which hastened the Soviet death throes.

I was a federal prosecutor in 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed. We indicted the offending jihadist cell for levying a terrorist war against the United States. Several of the terrorists had been major mujahideen figures. Their lawyers thus thought it exculpatory to claim that they could not have conspired to wage jihad against America; after all, they had actually been allied with America in the jihad against the Soviets. The provocative claim was implausible as a defense, the Soviets having left Afghanistan (and the USSR having collapsed) years before the Twin Towers bombing. Still, it is standard procedure to investigate even dubious defense claims. Hence, my unwitting stumble into a heated controversy.

The cia and Reagan administration veterans passionately proclaimed that the $3 billion in aid and armaments funneled to the mujahideen—matched dollar-for-dollar by Saudi Arabia, with Pakistani intelligence as our “cut-out” for deniability purposes—was an unvarnished triumph. The war became the Soviets’ Vietnam, bleeding the Red Army to death even as a humiliated Kremlin buckled under the pressure of Reagan’s arms build-up. In sum, I was told, “Look, we liberated half the world from Communist tyranny. Case closed.”

Yet, it wasn’t that simple. The mujahideen begot al Qaeda. A fifth of the U.S. aid, plus most of the Saudi contribution (real money in those days), was channeled to virulently anti-American terrorists. They proceeded to take their jihad global . . . eventually to Manhattan. The rest is history—the history we’ve been struggling with for two decades.

Giambattista Vico's Importance for the Anti-Establishment Movement

Saturday 27th September I attended a meeting of the London Forum, which organises conferences with various international authors and thinkers of the New Right or - in the words of one of Saturday's speakers, Mark Weber - the "anti-Establishment" movement. The latter is actually my favourite name, as it does away with the anachronistic distinction between Left and Right. Our opponents he calls the "Establishment".

Four speeches were delivered.

The first was by Mark Weber, historian, lecturer, current affairs analyst, writer, and director of the Institute for Historical Review. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he was educated in the US and Europe. The IHR has been attacked as a "hate group" and a "Holocaust denial" organisation, but we know that this kind of accusations mean nothing in our politically correct world.

I want to find out for myself. The organisation's website explains:

In fact, the IHR steadfastly opposes bigotry of all kinds. We are proud of the support we have earned from people of the most diverse political views, and racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds.

The IHR does not “deny” the Holocaust. Indeed, the IHR as such has no “position” on any specific event or chapter of history, except to promote greater awareness and understanding, and to encourage more objective investigation...

One prominent American journalist and author who has looked into the critical claims made about the IHR is John Sack, who is Jewish. He reported on a three-day IHR conference in an article published in the Feb. 2001 issue of Esquire magazine. He rejected as unfounded the often-repeated lie that the IHR and its supporters are "haters" or bigots. He described those who spoke at and attended the IHR conference as "affable, open-minded, intelligent [and] intellectual."

The London Forum says that Weber "has appeared countless times as a guest on US and overseas television and radio. He has produced many podcasts, and his many writings have appeared in newspapers, periodicals and websites around the world, and in a range of languages."

Weber's speech was "The End of the American Century: The Accelerating Crisis of the West, and Prospects for the Future". He talked about the impending extinction of Europeans as an ethnic group in both Europe and North America, and the end of the hegemony imposed at the end of the Second World War.

He introduced a 2010 book available only in German: Deutschland schafft sich ab ("Germany Is Eliminating Itself"), by Thilo Sarrazin, a German Social Democratic Party politician, former member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank and former senator of finance for the State of Berlin.

In short, the book's author is as much Establishment as you can get. The book itself is described by Wikipedia as

the most popular book on politics by a German-language author in a decade, [and in it] he denounces the failure of Germany's post-war immigration policy, sparking a nation-wide controversy about the costs and benefits of the idea of multiculturalism.

Pretty good for a social democrat.

The second speaker was Bain Dewitt, described as "a rising star" and the young blogger of The Identity Forum . His speech, "The God of the Whites", was an examination of religion as an expression of racial unity. Bain attempted to see if religion can be the spiritual dimension of nationalist and traditionalist movements.

He was followed by another American writer, Greg Johnson, editor of the website Counter-Currents Publishing. His was a particularly interesting speech for me, partly because I'm Italian and partly for its philosophical nature: "Giambattista Vico and Modern Anti-Liberalism".

Vico is a 17th-18th century philosopher from Naples. Most Italians know of him and his theory of the "corsi e ricorsi storici", or the cyclical nature of history. But he's little known in the Anglo-Saxon world, despite having had some influence, especially on James Joyce's books. Vico's Scienza nuova ("New Science") is the basis for Finnegans Wake.

The idea of history going through the same stages over and over again is very far from the contemporary view of history as progress. Vico, according to Johnson, was exceptional, in that he was the first anti-Enlightenment thinker and the only one of his time, despite being himself an Enlightenment thinker in some ways.

Vico postulated a fundamental law of historical development, that follows the same pattern by evolving through three phases: the age of gods, "during which gentile [meaning "pagan"] men believed that they were living under divine rule"; the age of heroes, when aristocratic republics were established; and the age of men, or what we may call "democracy", "when all were recognised as equal in human nature". Here Vico is a son of his "Enlightened" times, when he talks of the necessity to respect "natural reason" and of "the human rights dictated by human reason when fully explored".

At that point man’s increased powers of reasoning result in a state of anarchy, when everybody considers himself his own ruler and only looks after his own pleasure and short-term interest. Sounds familiar? It must do, because it's a fairly accurate description of what we are going through now, a description which will become even more faithful as decades, nay years, nay months go by.

Then men get tired of that anarchy and “turn again to the primitive simplicity of the early world of peoples”, and to religion. Thus the cycle starts again.

The beauty of it all, said Johnson, is that Vico's view of history enables us to stop trying to mend the present state of affairs, which is beyond repair, and instead look forward to - even accelerate - its end, which will usher a new era.

Or I would put it as "the darkest hour is just before the dawn".

Johnson concluded his speech by saying that, whereas Giorgio Almirante, the leader of the Right-wing Italian party Movemento Sociale Italiano, said, "Julius Evola is our Marcuse, only better", we can say that Vico is our Karl Marx, only better.

Finally, barrister and contributor to Heritage & Destiny magazine Adrian Davies concluded the conference with his speech "Two World Wars and One World Cup: Myths and Realities of the Anglo-German Relationship in the Twentieth Century".

In this year, which marks the hundredth anniversary of what historians have called the first "Western civil war" and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the second, Davies narrated German history until 1914, arguing that the Great War not not caused uniquely by Germany, as the myth goes, but also that Germany was not a perpetual victim either.

It's early days yet. I consider my newly-found London Forum very stimulating. I'd like to see more of it, and in particular what the role of Christianity is in the various ideas represented.

The Fate of the West

Published on FrontPage Magazine

By Enza Ferreri



Either the West Will Become Christian Again or It Will Become Muslim


It's all very simple. We can't fight Islam in the West without fighting the enablers of Islam in the West, namely the Leftists.

And, since the Left has many different and separate aspects, we have to fight against each one of them. Secularism, environmentalism, global warming alarmism, homosexualism, militant feminism, sexual relativism, multiculturalism, anti-Christianity, Islamophilia, post-nationalism, internationalism are just as important targets to attack as Marxist economics, the expropriation of the capitalist class (or, in its modern reincarnation, high taxation and welfare state, aka redistribution of wealth), and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Neglecting any of these fronts is like fighting a war leaving a battleground to the enemy, like fighting on the Western front and leaving totally undefended the Eastern one.

Secularism and atheism are certainly the first lines of important wars.

A secularist West will always lose to Islam, because it will have enough compassion, tolerance and self-restraint from violence that are the remnants of its Christian heritage, but it will have lost the ideals, the passion and certainty of fighting for a just cause that were once part of Christianity and have disappeared with its erosion.

Two quotes here serve as epigrams. Robert Spencer wrote in his great work Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't: “People who are ashamed of their own culture will not defend it.” And Dennis Prager said during one of his radio broadcasts: “Only good religion can counter bad religion.”

Some people claim that there won't be a religious revival in Europe because we are past believing in God. That this is not true can be seen by the high - and increasing – number of Westerners who convert to Islam. Many of them give as a reason for their conversion the need for absolutes, boundaries and well-defined status.

A journalist writing for The Spectator on this subject explained why she is Catholic:

But above all, I like the moral certainties. I don’t mind the dogma one bit. I would rather dogma and impossible ideals than confusion and compromise. In that sense, I do identify with those who choose Islam over the way of no faith, or a seemingly uncertain faith, like the woolly old C of E.

William Kilpatrick, in Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West – a book I thoroughly recommend reading -, writes:

Brian Young's friends said he was troubled by the decadence of Western society. David Courtrailler's lawyer said, “For David, Islam ordered his life.” These are the sorts of reasons ordinary converts to Islam give. A common refrain from converts is that Islam provides a complete plan for life in contrast to the ruleless and clueless life offered by secular society. As Mary Fallot, a young French convert, explains, “Islam demands a closeness to God. Islam is simpler, more rigorous, and it's easier because it is explicit. I was looking for a framework; man needs rules and behavior to follow. Christianity did not give me the same reference points.” If you look at the convert testimonials on Muslim websites, they echo this refrain: Islam brings “peace”, “order”, “discipline”, and a way of life that Christianity and other religions fail to offer.

Human beings will never be past the need for believing in something bigger than themselves, because that need is part of the human mind.

Today the Christian religion is being replaced by the worship of the Goddess earth, New Age beliefs, the cult of celebrities (not coincidentally sometimes called "idols"), a blind faith in science, in chance as the creator and motor of the universe and in the absence of God.

And, last but not least, by Islam, which is increasingly filling the vacuum left by Christianity.

It is not surprising that Western people who feel a spiritual need may embrace Islam more easily than Christianity, when the latter has been the butt of constant attacks, denigrations and ridicule for a very long time, increasing since the 1960s, while the former is continually - albeit seriously mistakenly - praised as a religion of peace, tolerance and great wisdom.

Christian clergy is often criticized, sometimes rightly and sometimes not. But we tend to forget that clergymen are human beings, with all their imperfections. They too have been subjected to many decades of Leftist indoctrination and brainwashing. Even they, by the mere fact of living in this society, have been influenced by its insanity.

This applies to admitting homosexuals to priesthood and letting them work with young boys in the misguided hope of helping them overcome their pathology, as well as to displaying an extreme naivety towards Islam and its supremacist, violent nature.

We can expect guidance from our leaders, yes, but rather than castigating them we should make the first steps.

A clear direction was given by Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, Archbishop of Bologna, Italy.

As early as 30 September 2000, before 9/11, when very few in the West even thought of worrying about Islam, he delivered a very forward-looking speech, which included this premonition:

In an interview ten years ago, I was asked with great candor and with enviable optimism: “Are You among those who believe that Europe will either be Christian or cease to exist?”. I think my answer then may well serve to conclude my speech today.

I think – I said – that either Europe will become Christian again or it will become Muslim. What I see without future is the “culture of nothing”, of freedom without limits and without content, of skepticism boasted as intellectual achievement, which seems to be the attitude largely dominant among European peoples, all more or less rich of means and poor of truths. This “culture of nothingness” (sustained by hedonism and libertarian insatiability) will not be able to withstand the ideological onslaught of Islam, which will not be missing: only the rediscovery of the Christian event as the only salvation for man – and therefore only a strong resurrection of the ancient soul of Europe – will offer a different outcome to this inevitable confrontation.

Unfortunately, neither “secularists” nor “Catholics” seem to have so far realized the tragedy that is looming. “Secularists”, opposing the Church in every way, do not realize that they are fighting against the strongest inspiration and the most effective defense of Western civilization and its values of rationality and freedom: they might realize it too late.

An effect of the decline of Christian faith in Europe has been the strong decrease in birth rates, that are now below the population replacement level (for the indigenous, as the replacing – and then some - is done by Muslims). Why have babies when you feel that you don’t have anything valuable to pass on to them?

I remember a time when my friends and contemporaries of child-bearing age - but childless - were saying to me things to the effect that there was no point – indeed it was a crime to engage - in bringing people into this terrible world. This is the talk of faithless despair, no hope in this or another world, lack of belief.

Militant atheists à la Richard Dawkins have not really given enough thought to the long-term consequences of their ideas, which we are beginning to see.

And of which we are reminded whenever, for example, we read in the news of doctors and missionaries who die of Ebola while assisting affected patients for Christian charities. Not many atheist charities are involved in that work.

Let's Never Become Blind to Burkhas

If a woman in a burkha, looking like a black spectre, walks by in Sheperds Bush or Oxford Street, people ignore her, pretend not to see her, probably try to believe that it's perfectly OK and normal to be dressed like that.

They have been almost thoroughly desensitised, they are like robots, automata who don't recognise the significance of what they see, who don't think.

Some people say to me things like: "I don't know why you're surprised, we see it all the time. It's just a traditional dress. Would you react in the same way if you saw a nun?"

I usually reply that being used to something shouldn't lead to its blind acceptance. If I had lived in Nazi Germany I probably would have got used to seeing arms risen in the Heil Hitler salute, but I would have resisted considering it right.

The burkha is a symbol, just like a nun's habit is a symbol. But the former symbolises a doctrine - Islam - that brings out the very worst in people, while the latter symbolises a doctrine - Christianity - that, by making them altruistic and considerate, brings out the best in people.

Fred and Ginger

Today the film "The Gay Divorce" with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers was on the TV.

Watching it - even the little bit I did - is like experiencing a cultural time travel through the development in mores between then and now.

The term "gay" could still be used in its proper sense, then, before being highjacked by the homosexualist movement that made it impossible to use it except in their own chosen meaning, as in any other way it would give rise to misinterpretations.

Psychoanalysis - with its corollary of word association - was still fashionable, as was elephant hunting.

Two step forward and one step back, but it's a huge step back in its implications.

Historically Distorted Perceptions of Islamic Violence

Towards the end of the last millennium, when the year 2000 was near, many people were asked what was in their view the most important invention of those thousand years. The majority gave answers like the television, or the computer, or the internet.

The Italian philosopher Umberto Eco answered: the cultivation of the bean, whose introduction in the Middle Ages freed the European peoples from the spectre of hunger. In an essay translated and published in the English newspaper The Guardian, he argued in favour of the "humble bean", this highly-proteic, wholesomely-nutritious vegetable.

He explained how it's easy to focus only on the most recent inventions, for the same distortion or optical illusion which is at the root of perspective in art.

I agree with him on that: closeness in time causes events near to us to appear bigger than they objectively are in relation to other events, in much the same way as closeness in space makes near things appear bigger.

Faced with the increasing threat of Islamic terrorism, people in the West have tried to understand it in terms which are near to us and our modern views of the world: Third World poverty, the so-much repeated mantra of the "widening gap between rich and poor nations", the Palestinian cause, the perceived injustice of Arab and Muslim humiliation, and similar.

Very rarely one hears or reads a commentator capable of placing this modern phenomenon into a wider temporal context, of putting it into historical perspective.

And yet it would be sufficient to listen to what some leaders of that terrorism are saying. Osama bin Laden openly referred to the West as Crusaders (as well as Zionist).

This is exactly the way the Muslim world sees us: descendants not only of the Crusaders, but also of those European states who defeated the Ottoman Empire when it was about to conquer Vienna in the 17th century. That was the moment when their seemingly never-ending expansion was put to a halt. It happened only three centuries ago: after all, it's not such a long time in the three-thousand years of history of the Western civilization. Especially, it's not such a long time for people like the Muslims. Again, time is perceived differently according to what is being done or happens during that time. Many things have happened to us, Europe in 1647 was hugely different from now; but not so many changes have happened in the Islamic world.


Photo by Nagesh Kamath (Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0).

Paternal Uncertainty in a Godless Society

When I work until late at night, just about the only TV programme left to watch afterwards is often The Jeremy Kyle Show. At first I watched it for its comic value, as dysfunctional couples and families shout at each other over non-existing problems before turning to the namesake presenter of the show for guidance and, more importantly, to solve their real problems with DNA paternity and lie detector tests.

But then I realised that this broadcast is much more useful than an average comedy show. It has exposed at least two things.

The first is how in the lives of the people appearing in Kyles' studio - who are British reprentatives of what American sociologist Charles Murray and others call the "underclass" - Christianity has totally disappeared.

The underclass is a new social class, it is no longer the working class. It is not characterised by its economic status so much as by its behaviour, mores and ethos.

It has a disproportionately high illegitimacy rate, school drop-out rate, unemployment rate and crime rate. It is anti-social in its outlook, attitudes, rules and codes.

In the US the underclass is disproportionately black - which is why the American version of the JK Show has mostly black guests - but in Britain it is mainly formed by indigenous Britons.

The complete abandonment of Christian values and principles, particularly those of self-discipline in every area of life - ranging from what psychologists today call "anger management", and was once the fight against the sin of wrath, to sexual self-restraint -, seems more than a mere coincidence in the type of problems that Kyle guests face.

The second thing that this TV show evidences is how in today's society the pendulum has gone too far in favouring women over men, in many different fields but specifically here in the case of paternity issues.

Gerd Gigerenzer's book on risk and its statistical aspects, Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK), explains how human males are exceptional in the animal kingdom in being expected to contribute to the rearing of a child without certainty of fatherhood. Paternity uncertainty coupled with parental responsibility is a very heavy burden that society forces men to bear:

Why is there wife battering all around the world? And why do many more men than women kill their partners? Although there are many contributing variables, such as alcoholism, the classic explanation is paternal uncertainty. Unlike in the majority of mammalian species, in which males contribute nothing to the upbringing of their offspring, in the human species males and females cooperate in providing parental care. Fathers face a problem that mothers do not, and which according to evolutionary theory is so serious that most mammalian fathers opt out of paternal investment entirely. This problem is cuckoldry. That is, a man has to accept some degree of uncertainty about whether he actually is the father of his children. A woman, in contrast, can be certain that she is the mother of her children (barring an accidental exchange of babies in the hospital). Paternal uncertainty can be reduced by many means, one of which is for a man to control his partner physically to ensure that she is not consorting with other men. According to this argument, the cost of male parental investment brings with it male sexual jealousy, which leads men to use methods ranging from vigilance to violence to controlling sexual access to their mates.

How certain should human fathers be about their paternity? Probably not as certain as is conceivably possible since the mid-1980s, when DNA fingerprinting became available as a highly reliable method for paternity testing. Using DNA fingerprinting, researchers found that 5 to 10 percent of children in Western countries who had been studied have a different biological father from the one they thought they had. [Emphases added]

Or, as the Romans put it in their lapidary, succinct way: Mater semper certa est, pater numquam (the mother is always certain, the father never).

At least since the advent of feminism, it's always been considered sexist (in the direction of misogyny) to stigmatise female adulterous and promiscuous behaviours in a way that male corresponding behaviours are not.

In fact, in light of the serious repercussions on paternal uncertainty, what is sexist (in the direction of misandry) is not to stigmatise women more than men for sexually promiscuous habits.

It has to be noted that Gerd Gigerenzer is not a political writer. He is a psychology academic, former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and currently director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

The book from which I quoted deals with statistics, calculation and assessment of risk in human and medical sciences. It is a scientific work, with hardly any political implication.

His political views on this matter are unlikely to be similar to mine, i.e. right-wing or anti-feminist, firstly because he would by now have been sacked from his academic position, secondly because his work is highly recommended by openly Leftist, Guardian columnist and author of Bad Science (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK), Ben Goldacre, and thirdly because the application of DNA paternity tests that he mostly advocates is for catching fathers trying to avoid their responsibilities.

He writes, for instance:

Before DNA testing, court proceedings were often colored by the public humiliation of unmarried mothers...

DNA testing has helped to dispense with the humiliating [for the mother] character that court hearings had in the past. Now that DNA evidence for paternity exists, courts rarely subject mothers to cross-examinations about their sex lives...

My point is that the mere possibility of DNA fingerprinting can be sufficient to end denial, to spare the mother an inquisition into her sex life, and to oblige the father to pay child support.

I don't see anything wrong with public humiliation and stigma for unmarried mothers. It's because Western societies have abandoned this stigma that illegitimacy rates have been steadily rising in all EU countries, North America and Australia.

In 2009, 41% of children born in the US were illegitimate, from 5% a half century ago. As for the European Union:

In 2011, 39.5% of all births in the 27 EU countries were extramarital. In that year, births outside marriage represented a majority in Iceland (65.0%), Estonia (59.7%), Slovenia (56.8%), Bulgaria (56.1%), France (55.8%), Norway (55.0%), Sweden (54.3%), and Belgium (50%). The proportion of extramarital births is also approaching half in Denmark (49%), the United Kingdom (47.3%) and the Netherlands (45.3%)...

In the EU, the average percentage of extramarital births has risen steadily in recent years, from 27.4% in 2000 to 39.5% in 2011.

In the UK most children will be born out of wedlock by 2016.

While people were too concerned about sexual liberation and women's rights, children and society at large were paying the price. I cannot cover in this post all the consequences of fatherlessness - and they are all negative -, although I will in future articles.

But I'll say that the price is astronomical in terms of children's psychological wellbeing, children's poverty, crime levels, antisocial behavior, unemployment, and finally the welfare state bills for taxpayers.

Also, observe the double standard. Whereas hormonal and other biological factors are often utilised in women's favour, as excuses even for murders allegedly due to Pre-Menstrual Tension (PMT) or postpartum psychosis, similar factors are never employed to excuse men in cases of rape, for example, or, as in this case, paternity uncertainty is never recognised as an intense stressor for a man and used to justify his jealous, controlling or violent behaviour.

Men are expected to provide for and in other ways contribute to a child's upbringing, no questions asked.

Not many consider this immense factor of stress for men, in the same way as in public discourse it's very rare for someone to examine things from a man's perspective. It is politically incorrect. It's only from a woman's viewpoint that we are supposed to look at everything.

Whereas oceans of ink and light years of film have been devoted to all the various problems associated with the woman's role in reproduction, hardly anybody has paid even the scantest attention to those related to the man's role.


Photo by toledo clubber (Creative Commons CC BY-ND 2.0).

Christianity and Animal Welfare

After Support for Christianity Should Not Alienate People, How Christian Charity Developed Western Ethics, Hospitals, Schools and Slavery, Colonialism and Christianity, I've arrived at the fourth (not the last) instalment of my replies to common contemporary criticisms of Christianity.

The issue of how animals are considered is of particular ethical importance so, if I really believed that Christianity debases the moral status of animals, I would not support it.

About the issue of treatment of animals, my reader Tony says:

I cannot see how you, as a vegan, can support the Bible: the treatment of animals in the Bible is appalling, and I say this even though I am not vegan. Burnt offerings of animals is a fundamental aspect of worship in the Old Testament, God is pleased with the smell of burning animal flesh, cutting animals in half is considered 'good' in the eyes of Yahweh, e.g. Exodus 29:16-18 "16 Slaughter it and take the blood and sprinkle it against the altar on all sides. 17 Cut the ram into pieces and wash the inner parts and the legs, putting them with the head and the other pieces. 18 Then burn the entire ram on the altar. It is a burnt offering to the LORD, a pleasing aroma, an offering made to the LORD by fire." It's wrong and primitive Enza.

Here Tony makes the same mistake I've already briefly discussed before: confusing and conflating the Old Testament into Christian doctrines.

This is especially true regarding the subject on which he dwells, offerings of animals, since these two religions, Judaism and Christianity, are on it entirely different, so much so that we cannot even talk of a Judaeo-Christian tradition. There are two distinct traditions, going in opposite directions. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then it is highly significant that the Old Testament and the New on animal sacrifices have led to antithetical practices.

Judaism here presents, alas, similarities with Islam. Modern ritual slaughter to produce kosher meat in the former and halal meat in the latter is closely related to animal sacrifice.

That is why Rabbi David Wolpe felt the need to write an article In Defense of Animal Sacrifice, fortunately rebuked by the people who commented on it. His arguments are falsely against animal cruelty, in that he doesn't take into any consideration that the stunning of animals before slaughter, which Jewish ritual slaughter does not do, is a humane way to spare them at least some of the agony and anguish.

Christianity, on the other hand, is and has always been one of the very few religions and cultures not to standardly practice animal sacrifices.

Here again, Christianity has produced momentous cultural consequences. Christians claimed that, since Jesus had shed his own blood and offered a perfect sacrifice, there was no more need of animal sacrifice, because the door was now open to access God. In ancient times - and still today in many non-Western cultures -, people believed that the death of a sacrificial (in some cases human) animal was necessary in order to approach God or the gods. After Jesus' sacrifice, Christians rejected animal sacrifices, and this has created in the Christian West a culture averse to them.

As with slavery, the fact that the New Testament does not explicitly condemns the practice of animal sacrifice is much less important - in terms of the effects and the way of thinking that it has generated - than the entirety of its message.

It is so strange how Eastern religions are always praised for their consideration, even reverence, for animals, when Hinduism carries out animal sacrifices on a vast scale. What has been dubbed "the world's goriest mass killing of animals" is a Hindu festival involving the sacrifice of 250,000 animals in the village of Bariyapur, in Nepal.

If we - or some of us - don't associate the ending of animal sacrifices with Christianity, in the other parts of the globe they do:

The practice [of ritual slaughter of animals] is now far less universal than it was once, and in Christian countries it is generally looked upon as one of the basest expressions of primitive superstition. There is, for instance, hardly a book written to defend the “civilizing” role of the white man in India, which does not give publicity to that gruesome side of Hindu religion, through some bloodcurdling description of the sacrifices regularly performed in the temple of the goddess Kali, at Kalighat, Calcutta.

This, once more, gives away where these constant attacks on Christianity originate: from the politically correct, the multiculturalists of today, heirs to the communists of yesterday, who only blame whatever is connected with the Western world for the speck in its eye and never dream of noticing, let alone criticising, the log in the eye of the rest of the world.

I wish that our atheist friends realised that, every time they attack Christianity, they attack the West, our culture, our world, our countries.

Going back to Tony's Biblical quotations, the Old Testament (the several canonical editions of which are largely based on the Tanakh, the "Hebrew Bible") is a collection of Jewish texts, and Judaism is a different religion from Christianity.

The Old Testament pre-dates the birth of Jesus Christ. How can what's written in it be attributed to the teachings of a man who was not alive when it was composed?

In addition, what matters is not so much counting the references to not harming animals in the New Testament, even less in the Old Testament, but looking at the meaning of the whole message.

The animal welfare and rights movements were born out of the compassion that Christianity has inspired throughout its vast influence on Western thought.

Does Tony really think it’s a coincidence that the animal rights movement only started and developed in the part of the world which is historically Christian, the West?

In the moral philosopher Peter Singer's theory of the “expanding circle”, which I think is correct, the moral development of a society goes through stages: first people allow into the sphere of moral consideration only close relatives, then clans, then tribes, then populations, then nations, then the same ethnic group, then the whole human species, and then – and this is the phase which we are entering now in the West – all sentient beings.

Expanding the circle to include all humans was done in the deepest sense, in the most effective and lasting way by Jesus Christ, at a time when that was unthinkable for most people.

Still today, the moral equality of all men is not embraced in every part of the world.

Islam, for example, does not consider all the human species as equal. Islam condones racism, against blacks for instance, and slavery, which still exists in the Muslim world. For Mohammedanism non-Muslims do not have equal status with Muslims, the community of believers, called the “Ummah”. Non-Muslims are not treated with equal consideration and respect as Muslims, nor do they have equal political rights in Islamic countries.

Hinduism incorporates the caste system, a form of inequality which is part of the religion.

It's very difficult, if not impossible, for a culture that has not fully accepted human rights and the equality of all men to develop the idea of animals' moral equality and rights.

That's why only the West, thanks to Christianity, has been able to do so.

In short, there is no comparison.

Without our Christian roots animals would have been in much greater trouble, as well as humans.

To be continued.

Slavery, Colonialism and Christianity

My analysis of my reader Tony's attacks on Christianity, after Support for Christianity Should Not Alienate People and How Christian Charity Developed Western Ethics, Hospitals, Schools, continues. On the subject of slavery he writes:

The Bible actually condones slavery Enza. I can send you verse after verse from the Old Testament where God tells his people how to treat slaves, how they should be sold etc. Never once does the OT teach that slavery is wrong. In the New Testament neither Jesus nor Paul call for slavery to be abolished. On the contrary they provide teaching on how to treat slaves. The Bible was used as justification for slavery in the early colonies of America. Furthermore slavery was spread around the world as Christian Western powers built their Empires. One Pope, Nicholas V, actually issued a papal bull in 1452 authorising slavery of captured Muslims.

Here we find again the problem that I briefly mentioned in a previous article: Tony's failure to recognise the break between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

The Christian part of the Bible is the New Testament.

Although we can talk of a Judaeo-Christian tradition, we cannot talk of a Judaeo-Christian religion. These are two separate and different religions.

St Paul compared the condition of the world (including the Old Testament) before the advent of the religion of Jesus to a child-like, immature state.

Christ said: “The law and the prophets were until John [the Baptist]: from that time the gospel of the kingdom of God is preached” (Luke 16:16).

In addition, just about everything that Tony says about slavery comes to nothing for one simple reason: you cannot discuss a historical subject abstracting it from a historical context.

When we talk about slavery, we may forget that we are looking with modern eyes at an institution that has been part of human history in virtually all cultures.

No culture on the globe has ever questioned the morality of slavery, no culture has ever effectively abolished it. Only in relatively recent times this has been done - and it was Christians who did it.

If Tony, and all of us, reject slavery it is because we were born in the Christian West, regardless of whether we consider ourselves Christian individually or not. Or, as the great Oriana Fallaci, who was among the first to alert the West to the dangers of Islam after 9/11 and who called herself a "Christian atheist", said: "We are all Christian".

Very early the Church baptised slaves and treated them as human beings equal to all others in dignity. They were allowed to marry, be ordained, and some became saints.

St. Isidore of Seville (born about 560 AD) said: "God has made no difference between the soul of the slave and that of the freedman."

His teaching has its roots in St. Paul's First Epistle to Timothy (1 Timothy 1:10), which condemns slave traders and places them among the sinful and lawbreakers, and Epistle to Philemon. In the latter, Paul writes that he is returning fugitive slave Onesimus to his master Philemon, but he urges Philemon to regard Onesimus as a beloved brother.

Historian Rodney Stark writes in The Victory of Reason:

Slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition. [Emphasis added]

This was during the "Dark Ages".

Later, when the Spanish Conquistadores were enslaving South American Indians and importing African black slaves, their main adversary was the Catholic bishop and missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas, "Protector of the Indians", who devoted 50 years of his life actively fighting slavery and the abuse of native populations.

His efforts led to a greater focus on the ethics of colonialism and to many improvements in the legal status of indigenous peoples, including a 1542 Spanish law prohibiting the enslavement of Indians. Las Casas is considered as one of the first advocates for universal human rights.

In 1537 Pope Paul III issued the papal bull Sublimus Dei against the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the continent of America, who were non-Christian. A papal bull is a document of rare importance and significance, formal and profoundly authoritative. Sublimus Dei shows in an exceptionally meaningful way the Christian approach to slavery as early as in the Renaissance:

We define and declare by these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ.

Yes, slavery persisted, and sometimes received ecclesiastical permission. Yes, supporters of slavery before the American Civil War used the Bible as justification for it. But abolitionists could easily point out that slavery was against the whole Christian message of love for your brother and neighbour like for yourself and equality of all men before God.

If we are too attached to and fixated on the letter of the Scriptures, we risk losing the most important part, their spirit, the whole picture, namely the message that Jesus conveyed with all His entire life, His words and His actions.

He was not a slave owner, like Muhammad 600 years after Him.

So, anti-slavery views were present in Christian thought and practice since the 6th century AD.

Modern abolitionism, the anti-slavery movement, started in Britain in 1787 with the foundation of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The people behind it were Christians, including William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, who wrote:

We cannot suppose therefore that God has made an order of beings, with such mental qualities and powers, for the sole purpose of being used as beasts, or instruments of labour.

The strong, prolonged opposition to slavery that followed - a unique example in the whole history of mankind - was a formidable effort, with nothing to gain and everything to lose economically by ending this enormously profitable business. Only an exceptional moral force could have achieved it: and that force was the profound Christian conviction of the abolitionist leaders that slavery was wrong.

There were ecclesiastical figures supporting slavery, as there were in every other category of people. But, with rare exceptions, only devout, committed Christians - priests, monks, Christian laymen - opposed slavery. Atheist, secular, non-Christian opposition was unheard of for generations.

If we used the same yardstick employed by anti-Christians, we should say: what have atheists done to condemn or resist slavery when it was difficult to do so, when it was not yet politically correct and orthodox to be abolitionist?

American abolition crusader William Lloyd Garrison declared:

Abolitionism, what is it? Liberty. What is liberty? Abolitionism. What are they both? Politically, one is the Declaration of Independence; religiously, the other is the Golden Rule of our Savior. [Emphasis added]

When Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and then slavery in 1834, it had to fight against African tribal leaders who wanted to continue their profitable trade in African slaves. These chieftains were also virulently hostile to Christian missionaries because of their opposition to slavery, and not due to their desire to convert.

The current, politically correct orthodoxy about slavery that Tony espouses demonstrates for the umpteenth time how the enemies of Christianity and the enemies of the West use - not coincidentally - similar, false arguments to attack both, showing once again how the fate of the West is intrinsecally tied to that of Christianity.

Not only were black Africans and Arab Muslims deeply involved in slave trafficking - and in Islam slavery is still practised today -, but whites were also enslaved by Muslims in great  numbers. But, while we never cease to hear about the nasty, racist whites making slaves, we never start hearing about other ethnic and religious groups doing the same, including to whites.

In the same way as Christianity is wrongly and unjustly castigated for slavery - when only Christians abolished it permanently -, so the West is uniquely berated for it. If you hear or read "liberal" thinkers, commentators and all the vast numbers of people that they managed to brainwash, you must be forvigen for thinking that slavery, as well as colonialism, are wicked Western, white, European, Christian inventions. All other populations of the earth are just the innocent victims, and they never harmed a hair on anybody's head.

What has been used to whip white Westerners has been used to whip Christians.

Look at what Westerners and Christians have in common and see if it can be a coincidence: they are both disproportionately attacked for two phenomena - slavery and harmful colonialism - that have existed throughout history and geographical locations, and they are both those who in fact saw the immorality of them and put an end to them.

Rather than going through the long history of how Western colonialism is not what it has been portrayed, of how it was often economically disadvantageous for the European powers involved but on many occasions motivated by the desire to help underdeveloped populations - aim that was often achieved -, I'll point you below to well-researched posts on the subject.

The Islamic world never abolished slavery, and still practises it today.

And remember that it was the European imperial powers which put an end to both the frequent raids and piracy by Muslims that for centuries tormented the Southern European coasts, and to the payment of the extortionate jizya tax demanded from the subjugated Christians living in Muslim lands.

The latter was for those unfortunate brothers and sisters a short-lived respite until multiculturalism, producing Islamophilia on one hand and anti-Christianity on the other, strengthened the Muslim world.

To be continued.

Further reading on slavery, European colonialism and Islam:

http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/north-african-predation-upon-europeans.html

http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/did-europe-grow-rich-from-slavery-and.html

http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/shocking-display-of-dhimmitude-in.html

http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slavery-around-world-today.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrxmdjaK7Cs


Photo by Elliott Brown (Creative Commons CC BY 2.0).

Christian Values Erosion Opens the Way to Muslim Polygamy

A typical example of how the erosion of our Christian values has left us without defence against the encroachment of Islam is that of polygamy.

Multiple divorces and remarriages in the West have created a situation which is similar to polygamy with a man or a woman having more than one family. The only difference with Muslim polygamy is that men and women in the Western variant of polygamy are on an equal footing or rather, if there is a discrimination, it is against men.

In these circumstances, Muslim polygamy has been a much more easily accepted practice, with authorities and police in Western countries turning a blind eye to it, than it would have been the case in the past, when people knew what the word 'family' meant, before the time of constant redefinitions of the term to include homosexuals, threesomes, incestuous couples and all the ever-expanding circle of relationships that the concepts of marriage and family must now apply to.

As it is, it's not clear what the ethical basis for the rejection of Muslim polygamy should be, since we have allowed things that have similar consequences for the children, for instance, left in many cases without a clear father figure or even without a father at all, as in the case of single-mother 'families'.

In many ways, there are a lot of similarities between Muhammed and Henry VIII: they both formed religious principles around their physical needs and personal desires.

A Highly Accurate Prediction about Islam

Westerners "have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past. ...It has always see seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent."

These words were written by Hilaire Belloc in The Great Heresies in 1938.

It's remarkable how they can predict current events, even to the point of "our sons or our grandsons" which indeed we are.

The capability of making accurate predictions is considered as a sign, as in science, of having a correct hypothesis to explain the phenomena or the events, which obviously Belloc had.

Today we also have people with a deep knowledge and correct understanding of Islam who are making the right predictions derived from their true theories about Islam. What these authors say, for instance, is that the so-called "Arab Spring " will be playing in the hands of the Islamists, which they said from its inception and they are already being proven right, while the mainstream media and prevailing politically-correct opinion sees it as a triumph for democracy, which we can already see that it's not.

So, who makes the most accurate predictions and therefore best understands Islam?

The West and Russia

I have found a way to write and send a post with my mobile phone. It's the first time so bear with me.

The West has a strange, almost schizophrenic attitude towards Russia.

Russia is a country which has spontaneously rejected communism and set to a path to democracy.

It's not perfect but the West should support it. Instead it seems to prefer to attack it at the first opportunity.

On the other hand, Western countries are mesmerized by the "Arab Spring" and believe that it is driven by pro-democracy fighters, whereas in reality the countries involved, be they Egypt, Lybia, Tunisia, Syria or Yemen, are going further away from democracy into the hands of radical Islamists.

The West also has as allies countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia , fully Sharia-compliant, and Turkey, another nation that is increasingly becoming Islamist.

It's true that the most unlikely and unholy alliances can be made for tactical reasons, but the West here is guilty of really bad double standards.

Romney, at the Republican National Convention, where he delivered an overall good speech , said that Russia and Putin should be shown some muscle.

I think that the West is doing exactly the opposite of what it should do.

Between the principles on which the West is based and the principles of Islam there is a logical contradiction. Logical contradictions cannot be solved any more than a circle can be squared. So there is no point in our attempts to find a dialogue with Islamic countries and in our being overoptimistic and excessively enthusiastic about developments there.

But, unlike logical contradictions, conflicts of interest can be solved with negotiation and compromise.

I think that there is a lot of prejudice and stereotyping about Russia in the West, where it's seen as the old enemy, the Soviet Union which is not any more.

The Pussy Riot case was immediately viewed as an attack on free speech by an oppressive regime, whereas it was nothing of the sort.

Russia and the West have a lot in common. Russia is a Christian nation, and it faces more Muslim threats than we do in the West. There are Islamic terrorists in the North Caucasus and in other parts of the country.

Illegal Immigration is a Crime

In all the debate about immigration, one thing often forgotten is that violation of national borders, i.e. illegal immigration, is in most countries an offense, and even more a criminal offense.

There are two types of offences: civil and criminal. The difference between them is that the former is a wrong perpetrated against a private, be it an individual, company, organization or party, so it is the victim's responsibility to seek redress for the wrong done to them. It usually, but not necessarily, concerns money.

The latter is a wrong perpetrated against society as a whole, and therefore criminal offences are prosecuted by the state or government, rather than by individuals.

Although there is overlapping in the sense that the same behaviours can give rise to both a criminal and a civil offence, and sometimes both kinds of legal actions can be pursued, this is an important distinction.

In Western countries generally, illegal immigration is a criminal offense.

Illegal immigrants violate the immigration laws and sovereignty of a country.

The fact that the punishment for illegal immigration is not enforced does not make it any less serious; it just makes its non-enforcers more irresponsible towards the society and the people they are supposed to protect against this crime.

In fact, giving amnesty to those who have violated immigration laws, as the UK Liberal Democrats had put in their manifesto before the 2010 General Election, would reward criminal behaviour and violate a fundamental principle of civil justice, i.e. that no-one should be allowed to profit from wrongdoing, a case of which is entering a country illegally.

In addition, it would obviously send the wrong message to all the would-be immigrants and act as a magnet for even more of them.